This is, in part, because these connections are clearly political and thus fit into even the simplest approach to the medieval world. In this perspective, Germany has been seen as markedly removed from the Anglo-Norman world, and, indeed, even from the mainstream of Western European development. As Huffman says, we tend to place German development in the later Middle Ages and to see it in connection with the Hanse. Because of these, Cologne formed a gateway for the English in their relations with the German lands as a whole. These connections, he suggests, extended from the merely economic to a much wider range of human activity.
Political connections are explored, and they form an essential part of the context.
Because this book covers a specific period, an appendix with a time chart of the major political events might have helped the reader by providing points of reference. This is, however, a very minor criticism, because Huffman has produced a well-written and carefully constructed book. A wide range of activity is discussed and a very broad variety of source material used. Most medievalists know that Cologne was a major nexus of Anglo-German relations in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but the very detailed consideration in part one demonstrates this fully and goes on to sketch its eventual supersession by the North German Hanse in the later thirteenth century. But the book is at its most original in part two.