Black cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

• We provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available

• Note: This book carries a £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list.
• Now a scarce original revised Second Edition in good condition. This book became volume 2 in Oxford University Press ‘Oxford History of England’ series. It Discusses the development of English society, from the growth of royal power to the establishment of feudalism after the Norman Conquest, this book focuses on the emergence of the earliest English kingdoms and the Anglo-Norman monarchy in 1087. It also describes the chief phases in the history of the Anglo-Saxon church, drawing on many diverse examples; the result is a fascinating insight into this period of English history.

Sir Frank Merry Stenton FBA (17 May 1880 – 15 September 1967) was an English historian of Anglo-Saxon England, a professor of history at the University of Reading (1926–1946), president of the Royal Historical Society (1937–1945), Reading University’s vice-chancellor (1946–1950).

The son of Henry Stenton of Southwell, Nottinghamshire, he was educated at Keble College, Oxford, and was elected an Honorary Fellow in 1947.

With Allen Mawer, Stenton wrote the second English Place-Name Society volume, The Place-Names of Buckinghamshire, published in 1925. He delivered the Ford Lectures at Oxford University in 1929. He went on to write Anglo-Saxon England, a volume of the Oxford History of England, first published in 1943 and described by Simon Keynes as “magisterial and massively authoritative”. In the view of Nicholas Higham writing in 1992 it “remains the most complete study of Anglo-Saxon history that has ever appeared. He was himself a historian of the first rank, an eminent place-name scholar and in addition well versed in archaeological literature.”

Stenton was a professor of history at the University of Reading (1926 – 1946), and subsequently the university’s vice-chancellor (1946–1950). During his period as vice-chancellor at Reading, he presided over the university’s purchase of Whiteknights Park, creating the new campus that allowed for the expansion of the university in later decades. In November 2008, it was announced that a new hall of residence to be constructed on that campus would be named Stenton Hall, in his honour. The annual Stenton Lecture, given by an eminent historian, was inaugurated at Reading University in 1967.

He was knighted in the 1948 New Year Honours, and received the accolade from King George VI at Buckingham Palace on 10 February 1948.

His wife, Doris Mary Stenton, wrote a preface to the third edition of Anglo-Saxon England, published after his death, and edited Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England: Being the Collected Papers of Frank Merry Stenton, published in 1970. She was a historian in her own right, producing English Society in the Early Middle Ages for the Pelican History of England, and The English Woman in History (1957).

Stenton’s papers, together with those of his wife Doris, Lady Stenton, their library and his coin collection are part of the Special Collections in the University of Reading.