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Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070 Paperback – May 1, 2011
Review
About the Author
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin UK
- Publication dateMay 1, 2011
- Dimensions5 x 0.5 x 7.75 inches
- ISBN-10014014823X
- ISBN-13978-0140148237
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Product details
- Publisher : Penguin UK (May 1, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 014014823X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0140148237
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 5 x 0.5 x 7.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #776,536 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,327 in Ancient Roman History (Books)
- #3,861 in Great Britain History (Books)
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Overall this is an insightful, honest and comprehensive work. This is not, however, as at least reviewer points out, a narrative history. If you're looking for a "big history" narrative style of kings, queens, dates, battles and vikings this is not the book for you. The reader may note some surprise at this state of affairs given that this work comprises the 2nd volume of Penguin's History of Britain. Obviously when a reader sees a publisher's "History" of such-and-such notions of streamlined narratives and grandeur fill the head. And editor David Cannadine's penultimate volume certainly fit that bill, at least within the confines of what's acceptable in post-modern historiography!
The simple fact of the matter is: the paucity of documented (and incontrovertibly reliable) sources from the time of the departure of Rome's legions to the Normal Conquest is so severe that any narrative style history must necessarily founder on the twin rocks of factually-unwarranted overgeneralization and hubristic misinterpretation (those are some big rocks!). Instead our author reverts to the archaeological record as the original source of truth. In this she has a masterly command of the subject matter and comes across as eminently well qualified to such an extent that when she does make a generalization it carries with it the weight of fact. Most of what she discusses though is (and must be) caveated with the probabilistic language of incomplete inquiry. Which is to say that sometimes it can seem there is very little we can be certain about during this period.
Here are some key takeaways I was left with:
-The Anglo-Saxon "invasion" of the British Isles is misnamed as the evidence doesn't suggest a uniform migration of Germanic peoples to the Isles using violence and rapine to achieve settlement. Instead the evidence suggests extended family groups travelling in small boats (plus ca change?) to forge small settlements (often in marginal, unpopulated areas) over a period of many decades. Here the archaeological evidence is very convincing. No stone is unturned (pardon the pun) in extracting and inferring information from burials and settlement sites.
-The amount that can be discerned about material culture by excavating said sites shames anyone who believes that narrative history is the end-all and be-all of historiography. We learn vast amounts about intercultural European trade; who had which luxury goods and who broke their backs for a living; fashion and styles of a variety of socio-economically placed individuals; and the rise of towns and agriculture. The student of modern day inequality could learn much from how resources and surpluses appeared to be divided in such times.
-The notion of "Dark" ages must be continually revisited. Sometimes they were, sometimes they weren't. We find silks from Byzantium and garnets from India as well as countless goods from the Rhine and France. While these goods were no doubt few and limited it was not as if Britain reverted to some Stone Age after Rome.
-The immediate post Roman world included many features that I was previously unaware of. While Roman cities were mostly abandoned, many towns were not and settlement patterns indicate that Brittons were not immediately struck with poverty and ruin - in fact an argument could be fashioned that the century following Rome's retreat life was quite idyllic for many. However in the absence of the sustained capital investment the Roman military occupation provided (along with collateral trade benefits - traders routinely used extra storage space aboard military transports for moving civilian goods) British material culture declined with increasing rapidity... though the evidence of an anarchistic break-down of law and order is only limited.
-This book does not attempt to draw any conclusions about the nature of the human political condition and how it may have given rise to Feudalism and the social structures thereof. This may have been deemed outside the author's scope but it does allow the reader to form their own opinions - how nice! It does provide many facts (based on the excavatory evidence) based on the evolution of material culture that the informed reader may add to their arsenal and deploy in concluding how society in post Roman Britain transformed from Imperial "freedom" to Feudal submission (or however one feels inclined to characterize it).
-While there is scant evidence of prosperity in the 6th and 7th century, the 8th and 9th centuries were ones in which those with surplus producing property become ever wealthier, deployed their surpluses in ways that resulted in increased trade and town formation and resulted in agricultural intensification and settlement clustering (that had the effect of reducing the lifespans and health of the surplus producing population). This was not a period devoid of prosperous people.
Overall one comes away from this book armed with much evidence about how lives where shaped economically and socially, an awareness of what's still missing from the record, a healthy skepticism of whatever contemporary sources are extant and a sense of what many aspects of life must have been like. One does not come away with much knowledge of which rulers did what (if indeed they did) or the strategy of the viking Great Army or Alfred the Great (who's sobriquet was invented by 19th century historians) or what lead to the end of Anglo-Saxon control of Britain. But the emphasis on material culture archaeology does leave me convinced more than ever that so-called trends and movements in history, articulated in narrative history, are not necessarily wrong as much as they must be integrated into existing societal/economic/cultural trends of those times. If I may savage the analogy: we don't so much get an answer to the hoary chicken-egg paradox but we get plenty of compelling evidence about individual chickens and eggs, to the extent that we cannot help but be irreversibly informed.
1. Genetics. About 35% of the present male population of southeast England descends from Germanic stock (See Bryan Sykes, "Saxons, Vikings & Celts"), twice that of the Germanic input into the present South English female population. This points to a moderate "Genghis Khan" effect -- male conquerors killing or displacing the indigenous male population and impregnating the local females. As Sykes put it:
"The gory chronicles of Gildas do contain a grain of truth. The roughly twofold excess of Saxon/Danish Y-chromosomes compared to their maternal counterparts hints at a partially male-driven settlement with some elimination or displacement of the indigenous males." (at 286)
Since there has been considerable "internal migration" within Great Britain since the dark ages, the percentage of Anglo-Saxon male genetic input in the fifth and sixth centuries was probably even greater at that time. Fleming hardly mentions genetics and as far as I can tell does not even acknowledge Sykes and his DNA studies on English ancestry. Trying to do archeology without considering genetic input is like doing paleontology without mentioning DNA -- the needle is often more convincing than the spade. What Fleming needs are Saxon graveyards with a number of high-status burials of men with Celtic Y-chromosomes, and British cemeteries with some burials of low-status men with Germanic Y-chromosomes. To date, she does not have theses.
2. Linguistics. Old English contains very little Celtic input, but is almost mutually comprehensible with, e.g., Old Frisian, the language of many Germanic settlers. If the Celtic and Germanic populations melded, rather than the latter assimilating the former, we would expect a more "Creole" type language, or at least heavier linguistic input, such as Norman French provided to Middle English.
3. Literature. Gildas records the incursions of the "gallows crew" of Saxons in a manner consistent with the "fire and sword" narrative, noting that their conquests stopped about fifty years before at Mt. Badon. Gildas may have been alive at that earlier date, and certainly many of his parishioners were. It is hard to distort a history which substantially contradicts the living memory of one's contemporaries.
4. History. Already by the fourth century the Romans had fortified the "Saxon shore" against Germanic invaders. It is hard to believe that Saxon pirates, who may have already settled in Southeastern Britain during Roman times, spawned harmless farmers in the fifth century. And it is difficult to imagine such a Saxon farmer saying to a Celtic indigene something like "Hi! I'm your new neighbor. I'll be taking over the fifty acres next to your homestead," nor that Celtic neighbor saying, "Glad to meet you." And why did the Western Celts (the proto-Welsh) uniformly consider the invaders to be Saxons rather than invaders of mixed pedigree?
5. Demographics. For Fleming's thesis to work, the population of Southeast England in the fifth and sixth centuries must have been low relative time the periods before and after so that there was a lot of available land. Was it? And if so, why?
There is a great deal to like about Fleming's account, however. First, her observations about the small size and disparate origins of many of the early Germanic settlements rings true. Second, she is certainly right that the Germanic and Celtic elements often did form alliances and fight with their own ethnic group almost as much as against each other. Third, her accounts of British history after about 600 A.D. (when the English were Christianized and written records became more numerous) is plausible, even convincing. Fourth, her concentration on what British history and life were like for the ordinary people is both refreshing and ground-breaking. And her last chapter on what the bones tell us about health, lifespan, and ordinary living is revelatory.
I give this book a "5" even though I disagree with its central thesis -- or perhaps because I do. I would not have been nearly so stimulated if that thesis had been less problematical.
Top reviews from other countries
The book covers subjects such as burial goods, farming and fashion. Those looking for evidence for King Arthur or Anglo-Saxon invasions will be disappointed.
What you get are reasonable conclusions based on archaeological evidence only. These conclusions may be unpalatable to some, hence the bad reviews, but certainly more persuasive than some other books on the subject.
Strongly recommended.
To make clear again, this is a fine, highly informative book of five star quality, it just didn't happen to be the book I was hoping for when I bought it.