From the first raid at Portland in 789 to Alfred's victory at Edington in 878, a year-by-year account of how Wessex survived the Viking Age.

A plain-English walk through four centuries of West Saxon kings, from the shadowy Cerdic to Alfred, with the family ties and turning points that shaped England.

Wessex and Mercia shaped Anglo-Saxon England in different ways — one coastal, patient and legal; the other landlocked, dominant and heavily armed.