Any English historian might well be brimming with objections tothe model of social change in the last chapter. The question that will no doubt occur is the one as to whether pre-Conquest England had welldefined and hierarchical social ranks. And it would seem at first sight that we find for once in England not just a different situation, but a radically different situation. Not only were there recognised social groups, but at least one early eleventh-century commentator arranged them in a deliberate hierarchy of status: this was Archbishop Wulfstan of York (1002-1023). Wulfstan compiled and composed a series of texts relating to status during (or possibly after) the social upheavals which accompanied the Scandinavian assaults on England during the reign of Æthelred II (c.979-1014). Wulfstan collected a series of old texts, apparently going back in part to the ninth century, relating to wergeld, payments made to the families of murder victims and men maimed in violence, which were fixed according to the status of the deceased.