'THE VENERABLE' BEDE, Northumbrian monk and polymath, is England's first great historian. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed c. AD 731, he traced the history of England from the first Roman invasion in 55 BC, through the shadowy post-Roman period, the coming of the Anglo-Saxons and the arrival and growth of Christianity, to the events of his own day. In Beda, the distinguished medievalist Henrietta Leyser travels through the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that mattered most to Bede - those of Kent, Northumbria, Mercia, the East Angles, the East Saxons, the South Saxons and the West Saxons. She explores the locations within each of these kingdoms that Bede identified in his History, and recounts the stories associated with them. Opening a revelatory window on an English world before the Conquest, Beda will appeal to anyone with a curiosity about the England of Sutton Hoo, of Beowulf and the Staffordshire hoard - and about how Christian conversion shaped the development of our country, its landscape and its legends.