I am very grateful to the many friends and colleagues who have given me help and guidance in various ways. My especial thanks are due to Steve Ashby and Tom Pickles, who generously read through the book in draft form, and suggested many improvements. I am also grateful to Alan Avery of the Blackthorn Press, for inviting me to write this book in the first place, and for his patience and support while I have been writing it. Finally, and above all, I wish to thank my family: my wife, Natasha Glaisyer, and our two sons, Robin and Kit, to whom this book is dedicated with gratitude and love.
A number of conventions employed in this book should be noted:
(1) Places within the county of Yorkshire are normally identified by their pre-1974 riding, as follows:
ER = East Riding
NR = North Riding
WR = West Riding
(2) Personal names are cited in a variety of forms. There is no simple, consistent means of modernizing or regularizing Anglo-Saxon and Norse personal names, and on the whole I have used the forms which are most frequent in modern scholarship; occasionally, in the treatment of Norse names in particular, I have decided simply to use an un-modernized Old Norse form.
(3) In quoting from primary sources, I have normally used published translations where they are available, though occasionally I have preferred to use my own, or to adapt published versions slightly. I have, however, silently changed the forms of personal names (and, occasionally, place-names) used in the translations I quote from, in order to bring them in line with my usage elsewhere in the book.
(4) The referencing system used is normally author-date (with full publication details provided in the Bibliography), but for a small number of works that are cited with high frequency I have employed abbreviations as follows:
ASC = Whitelock 1961
EHD = Whitelock 1955
PNERY = Smith 1937
PNNRY = Smith 1928
PNWRY = Smith 1961-63