The cataclysmic conquests of the eleventh century are here set together for the first time. Eleventh-century England suffered two devastating conquests, each bringing the rule of a foreign king and the imposition of a new regime. Yet only the second event, the Norman Conquest of 1066, has been credited with the impact and influence of a permanent transformation. Half a century earlier, the Danish conquest of 1016 had nonetheless marked the painful culmination of decades of raiding and invasion - and more importantly, of centuries of England's conflict and cooperation with the Scandinavian world - and the Normans themselves were a part of that world. Without 1016, the conquest of 1066 could never have happened as it did: and yet disciplinary fragmentation in the study of eleventh-century England has ensured that a gulf separates the conquests in modern scholarship. The essays in this volume offer multidisciplinary perspectives on a century of conquest: in politics, law, governance, and religion; in art, literature, economics, and culture; and in the lives and experiences of peoples in a changing, febrile, and hybrid society. Crucially, it moves beyond an insular perspective, placing England within its British, Scandinavian, and European contexts; and in reaching across conquests connects the tenth century and earlier with the twelfth century and beyond, seeing the continuities in England's Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Norman, and Angevin elite cultureand rulership. The chapters break new ground in the documentary evidence and give fresh insights into the whole historical landscape, whilst fully engaging with the importance, influence, and effects of England's eleventh-centuryconquests, both separately and together. LAURA ASHE is Professor of English Literature and Fellow and Tutor in English, Worcester College, Oxford; EMILY JOAN WARD is Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow, Darwin College, Cambridge. Contributors: Timothy Bolton, Stephanie Mooers Christelow, Julia Crick, Sarah Foot, John Gillingham, Charles Insley, Catherine Karkov, Lois Lane, Benjamin Savill, Peter Sigurdson Lunga, Niels Lund, Rory Naismith, Bruce O'Brien, Rebecca Thomas, Elizabeth M. Tyler, Elisabeth van Houts, Emily Joan Ward.

England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages: Papal Privileges in European Perspective, c. 680-1073 provides the first dedicated, book-length study of interactions between England and the papacy throughout the early middle ages. It takes as its lens the extant English record of papal privileges: legal diplomas drawn-up on metres-long scrolls of Egyptian papyrus, acquired by pilgrim-petitioners within the city of Rome, and then brought back to Britain to negotiate local claims and conflicts. How, why, and when did English petitioners choose to invoke the distant authority of Rome in this way, and how did this compare to what was taking place elsewhere in Europe? How successful were these efforts, and how were they remembered in later centuries? By using these still-understudied papal documents to reassess what we know of the worlds of Bede, the Mercian Supremacy, the West Saxon 'Kingdom of the English', and the Norman Conquest—locating them in the process within a comparative, Europe-wide setting—this book offers important new contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies, legal and documentary history, papal history, and the study of early medieval Europe more widely. It also includes an annotated handlist of the corpus of English papal privileges up to 1073—a critical reference work for future research in the field.