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This book introduces a wide-ranging new approach to medieval England and its societies. Charles Phythian-Adams has mapped the natural cultural physical divisions of England (which in medieval times coincided to a startling degree). For the first time for a generation a new framework for understanding the networks of local societies is available to historians. The book concentrates on the level of hierarchy immediately above individual local societies; Professor Phythian-Adams uses detailed case studies of networks of linked communities in the East Midlands, the South and East Anglia to underwrite his grand theory. The societies studies are respectively on the periphery of a "cultural capital", central to a "cultural province", and linked closely to a major urban centre. The book as a whole is an exciting synthesis of modern continental historical scholarship, social anthropological and geographical techniques, and English medieval history. It will be a major contribution to historical debate. Professor Charles Phythian-Adams is Head of the Department of English Local History at the University of Leicester. He is the author of "Rethinking English Local History" (LUP, 1989), and "Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages" (CUP, 1979).