This wonderfully alive tapestry of Saxon England and Celtic Britain written in A.D. 731 still has the power to transport us back to the forests, fens, and mountains, and to the problems which men faced during these crucially formative years when faced during these crucially formative years when this land had still to be wrought into one entity. Leo Sherley-Price has well succeeded in his aim of producing an accurate and readable version of Bede’s work in modern English and, as he remarks in his introduction, ‘we realize even more clearly that the past is not dead and done with, but a force to be reckoned with, silently moulding the present and the future’.