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The turn of the century, or to be more precise, the two decades preceeding and following it, marks a great change in the history of early English scholarship.

At the bottom of this change were great strides forward in the technical equipment and technical standards of the historian.

In archaeology, for example, the contributions of Frederick Haverfield and Reginald Smith to the various volumes of the Victoria County Histories raised the discipline from the status of an antiquarian pastime to that of the most valuable single tool of the early English historian.

And with the publication of E. T. Leeds' Archaeology Of The Anglo-Saxon Settlements the student was presented with an organized synthesis of the archaeological data then known.