London 800-1216: The Shaping of a City takes its place in the eight-volume History of London series, but is designed also to be a self-contained enquiry into the place of ninth- to twelfth-century London in the history of the City and of the urban renaissance. In their Preface Professor Brooke and Mrs Keir write: 'In the early Middle Ages, though never defunct, "London" was the shadow of a town. In the centuries of this book it became in the fullest sense of the word a great city again, and in some sense the political capital of a large area of north-western Europe. Here is an exciting subject; for while some of the story has been told and retold, for the rest the material is unequal and often baffling and demands a long detective enterprise to make sense of it.'

No general history of London before 1200 on a comparable scale has been attempted for fifty years, but the authors have made extensive use of numerous recent studies, especially work on London's constitutional and social history, and have aimed to produce a wide-ranging book which takes stock of both current insights and current problems. With this aim in view, a structure in four parts has been devised: the first declares the themes, the approach, the setting and the materials; the second part reconstructs the physical nature of London, tracing the pattern from a unique and vivid contemporary description and from the maze of parishes and wards and streets, since topography is the main key to the forces that shape a city; the third deals with the social strata of the city, with the personalities and nature of the city's government and its place in the larger commercial world of the age, focusing especially on the origins of the crucial offices of sheriff and mayor; the fourth part outlines the ecclesiastical history of London, This last is important, for materials are relatively copious, and churches large and small reflect the aspirations of the citizens and a creative age. For both reasons the church plays a larger part in this volume than in others in the series. The surviving archaeological evidence recovered from church sites illuminates every aspect of social and political history, from welfare for the poor to the rarefied levels of high politics and commerce.

The authors have seized the opportunity offered by the pioneering research currently in progress to study London in the setting of the urban renaissance, and have used the results of techniques new and old to portray the mood and character of a city emerging from its Roman past and shaping its new identity as a European capital.