It is ever important when studying history to not impose onto the past modern perceptions regarding stages of life. For example, scholars regularly underline Alfred the Great's youth when discussing his accession to the throne at the age of 22, but this is very easily overstated. Military training began for Anglo-Saxon aristocrats at the age of seven or eight. It could be conducted at home, but it seems more often a boy would leave his parents to go live with a group of peers while under the supervision of a tutor, usually a maternal uncle or grandfather.

The sword is the most iconic of weapons, so having received the lion's share of attention in studies of medieval arms. For that reason we shall in this thread sheathe ours and talk instead of the spear in Anglo-Saxon England, giving an overview of both its various forms and uses. From the earliest times, as Todd noted in The Early Germans, the spear dominated the kit of Germanic warriors, over and above that of other peoples for how common a weapon it is, such to where, as once my friend @wylfcen suggested, we might invent for them the ethnonym "Gārmenn".

One deeply ahistorical aspect of most films and shows set during the Middle Ages is their extreme sanitization of combat which reduces it to child's play and thus fails to approximate anywhere near reality. To illustrate this we will here take an example from early medieval Kent. The particular skeleton we are looking at comes from the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Eccles. Labelled by Manchester as "P171" and by Wenham as "II", this was a male who at the time of death was aged between 20-25 years old. His manner of death has confidently been ascribed to combat.

Although the Anglo-Saxons most often fought on middan felda the assumption that they only fought field battles is incorrect for siege warfare of two kinds, "heroic" and "traditional", was also practiced.
In this thread we will give a brief overview of the former, "heroic" sieges. While sieges of both types for long occurred concurrently we may yet, if only in broad terms, say that after the advent of the Viking Age traditional sieges, which better conform to modern conceptions of siege warfare, were the more common whereas before AD ~800 heroic ones were.

The St. Brice's Day massacre of 13 November 1002 during which King Æthelred ordered "a most just extermination" of those Danes living in England is one of the widest known yet most misunderstood events in English history. One key of import is to be found in the Gospel of Matthew. In chapter 13, verses 24-30 St Matthew relays Christ's parable of the tares/weeds. At the heart of this parable lies the problem of evil for the tares represent sin which is allowed to be sown by the devil amongst either a people or a person on account of a lapse in watchfulness.

From man's earliest days warriors have undertaken missions which lay beyond the bounds of regular warfare, setting broad precedents for the special operations of modern militaries.
In this thread we will discuss one such mission executed by the Anglo-Saxons, a raid into Normandy. In the 980s, after a long lull in hostilities, the Vikings once again descended upon England's shores. Meanwhile across the Channel, the Duke of Normandy granted those raiders terrorizing England the use and shelter of local ports, also permitting them to sell their stolen goods.