Injuries caused by knives and bullets frequently produce life-threatening and life-changing injuries, often in urban environments and associated with the abuse of alcohol and drugs. The development of pre-hospital care includes introducing critical care paramedics and critical care response teams, and enhanced assessment techniques. Its success is driven by the concept of scoop and play that is intended to deliver the right patient, with the right treatment, utilising the right transport modality, to the right hospital. Bespoke trauma networks and systems help to meet these objectives. The war in Afghanistan has driven rapid innovation and clinical advances embracing resuscitation, life-saving surgery, and new techniques in trauma reconstruction. These advances have now been introduced into civilian practice and are the backbone of the management of critically injured patients with knife and bullet injuries. Where and when possible, these advances are underpinned by research and delivered by inclusive trauma training.

The peasant economy depended on some purchases of essentials like querns and whetstones yet the numismatic record does not support the idea of a widely available currency of a low denomination low enough to have been used in every transaction. Cash circulated through waged work and small-scale marketing but Anglo-Saxon coins were of too high a denomination to have been used for petty sales and purchases. Thinking only in terms of an officially sanctioned currency may be a barrier to understanding early medieval attitudes to money. Real life practice may have been more flexible. All that trading partners need is a trusted medium of exchange and in the countryside marketing may have been much less regulated than the laws prescribe. Other units of value, reckoned in monetary terms, could do the work that coinage did.