The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century is the only modern study devoted to the question of how the English kingdom was formed. It is clear that a kingdom approximating the territory that we know as England existed in the eleventh century, and that there had been no remotely comparable political unit at the start of the tenth, but little attention has been paid to the intervening transformation.The volume argues that the eleventh-century English kingdom was defined not by any earlier vision of English unity, but by a series of administrative reforms that appear to have been implemented in the mid- to late tenth century. These served to mark the land between the Channel and the Tees as a single political unit, and to undermine the earlier idea of a kingdom encompassing the entire island.