England was a rich country in the eleventh century, far richer than most neighbouring parts of the continent, and this explains the many raids and attempts at conquest which the English suffered in that century. It was the wealth of England, not the inadequacy of the English defences, that tempted so many continental adventurers to come here in search of loot and tribute.

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Scandinavian historians. His annotated list of Anglo-Saxon charters, now revised by Susan Kelly, available online and happily known as 'the electronic Sawyer', remains a standard work of reference whilst his publications on the Vikings in both Scandinavia and Western Europe have substantially added to our understanding of the impact of these raiders and traders in the ninth, tenth and 11th centuries. Yet historians tend to be remembered for one piece of work, for good or ill, and in Sawyer's case it is for his important article on 'The wealth of England in the eleventh century', first published in The Transactions of the Royal Historical Society in 1965. In it he gives what can only be called a glowing account of the Anglo-Saxon economy on the eve of the Conquest, an economy with sufficient wealth in silver from the German mines in the Harz mountains, earned from the profits from an expanding wool trade with Frisia and Flanders, to support the circulation of an ample coinage of high quality that stimulated the growth of exchange and therefore of towns and trade. To misuse Eileen Power's later quotation, it was the sheep that paid for all. The influence and importance of this article should not be underestimated. It has been cited in almost every subsequent publication on the Anglo-Saxon economy and in 1993 Professor Sawyer was honoured for this and for his other work by one of the most prestigious of all historical accolades, an invitation to deliver the Ford Lectures at Oxford. Now, 20 years later, and delayed by reasons with which we can all sympathise, he has finally published the revised version of these lectures in a short volume containing only 114 pages of text, along with a valuable appendix on the mechanics of estimating the circulating volume of the Anglo-Saxon coinage and a useful bibliography. Its purpose is 'to explain how, on the eve of the Norman Conquest,

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