Review : The Anglo-Saxons

Let's follow-up immediately on the last history post (about James Hawes The Shortest History of England) with a review of Marc Morris' The Anglo-Saxons.

Morris is one of my favourite history writers, and he's definitely on fine form with this one. For starters, I'm going to give him enormous brownie points for the absolutely superb, common-bloody-sense structure of the physical book itself. There are figures within the main text as well as photographic plates. Colour figures on the plates are cited in the text by number, instead of just throwing in a random assortment of related pictures like practically everyone else does. Maps are included at the start of each chapter, not randomly scattered without rhyme or reason (again, which is what everyone else does). And though the notes at the back do have some additional commentary as well as just pure references, these are few enough that there's no need to keep flicking back and forth. All this instantly makes the reading experience ten times more pleasant than most popular history books, which don't do any of this. Well done Marc, well done.

Personally, I would love to get Marc Morris and Francis Pryor to have a beer together. Their views are similar but different enough, and they're both just generally entertaining people, that there's no way it couldn't be an interesting conversation. Throughout the book, I kept wanting to re-read Pryor's Britain B.C. and Britain A.D. to examine their contrasting views properly. Unfortunately I don't have my copies of those here, so any comparisons I make will have to be done from memory.

Morris' biggest difference from Pryor is probably his views on the end of Roman Britain. Morris views this in traditionally cataclysmic style, not for nothing entitling the first chapter, "The Ruin of Britain" :

The archaeological record, previously so abundant, becomes almost undetectably thin.... within a generation the villas and towns of Roman Britain had been almost completely abandoned. The implication of this data is unavoidable : society had collapsed... huge numbers of people must have been on the move in search of food and shelter. People must have perished in huge numbers, through famine, disease and violence.

Pryor disagrees completely, pointing to the construction of large wooden buildings replacing the new-fangled stone monstrosities of Rome, as well as actual improvements in written Latin in some places. True, there was a seismic shift - a collapse, even - in government. But overall, the coming of the Romans didn't change things nearly as much as is popularly portrayed, with Britons having roads and sewers all of their own long before Rome did. And presumably some sort of national-scale "government", at least at times, as evidenced by Stonehenge. Celtic society was very different to Roman, but it would be an over-simplification to view it as necessarily less sophisticated. Rome hadn't introduced all that much that the Celts actually wanted or couldn't sustain for themselves if they did, so its departure, though sudden, needn't have been that much of a shock.

It would surely be a step too far to proclaim the departure of the legions as nothing of any import, still less that it might have been an actual good thing. The international reach of Rome, its efficient administration and record-keeping, was never imitated anywhere in the Celtic world. Still, perhaps it's not so outlandish for Pryor to hold to a view of the time as one more of unpleasant transition than true apocalypse.

Beyond this Pryor and Morris are in better agreement. Pryor argues that the Anglo-Saxon invasion flat-out never happened, with at most at handful of soldiers of raiders coming across from the continent. He, an archaeologist, views the historical record as prone to wild exaggeration by over-imaginative monks, with no archaeological evidence indicating any substantial change in the way that is seen with the Roman invasion. 

Morris, a historian, has a more compromising view. He doesn't subscribe to the wholesale replacement theory*, but thinks this may have happened in some areas, while in others there was a much more modest "elite transfer" - much more in line with Pryor's view that the transfer was primarily one of culture, not people. Overall, says Morris, the numbers of immigrants was indeed substantial, but it took decades and they never outnumbered, let alone replaced, the native Britons.

* And unlike Hawes, definitely doesn't think the sea is what enabled mass migration, thankfully.

So there we have a broad agreement between historian and archaeologist, but another disagreement arises immediately. Accepting that the Britons remained numerically superior, why was their culture replaced ? Pryor's answer is that their deepest values did endure and continue to this very day, but these are not the sort of bricks-and-mortar aspects of hard culture, which did indeed change. Morris' view is that the Romano-British culture was, frankly, shite (or at the very least in state of total disarray), so the Anglo-Saxons saw nothing worth keeping (Pryor would probably spin this as the wise native Britons deciding that they liked these new ideas and cunningly adopted them voluntarily). And whereas Pryor views Christianity as having survived the fall - sorry, end - of Roman Britain in a generally healthy state, Morris says it was confined, ironically enough, to the Celtic margins of Wales and Cornwall. It's a romantic, captivating view of a doomed society clinging to its last vestiges of its culture, set against the backdrops of Tintagel with a horde of hairy barbarians pounding at the gates, slowing fading into history, then legend, and finally myth.

Blimey ! But this seems rather extreme. I wouldn't like to venture if and how Pryor and Morris could reconcile their views, but it's difficult to believe it could be as dramatic as that.

From this point on though I believe Pryor and Morris would probably get along very well. In fact, they'd probably join forces to tackle James Hawes' North-South divide theory. This is never explicit in Morris' book and barely evident at all (even if one is looking) in the first few chapters, at the very most. Actually if anything Morris has quite the opposite view to Hawes in a couple of ways. First, for at least the early period of Anglo-Saxon Britain, it was Northumbria that was the dominant power, not the lowly southerners. Secondly, the rise of Wessex emerges as a story dependent in no small part on sheer blind luck.

This raises a bigger, more philosophical disagreement with Hawes. Whereas Hawes is looking for the big-picture reasons why history happened in the way it did, Morris is seemingly happier to ascribe the outcomes to pure happenstance. But actually, I think Morris has thought about this more deeply than Hawes. Rather than looking only for materialistic reasons driving history (which are important), he also considers the nature of different political structures. During the early phase dominated by rival warlords :

Power such as this, based on personal charisma and continuous military success, would always be volatile, and liable to challenge.

And later, after the heroic successes of Alfred and the stunning achievements (unfairly forgotten) of Athelstan :

War was avoided by a great council... but this development was clearly a blow to the notion that there was a single "kingdom of the English", and raised the prospect that Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria might once again go their separate ways.

For all their many successes, the dark age kings of Britain had failed to form a unified state in the way that Rome did. The problem of how to get disparate peoples to agree on such a system was one that wouldn't really be solved until the Norman Conquest. Until then it was largely - by no means entirely - a case of power based on strength and common consent in who the ruler was, not in any deeper, more ideological notion defining kingship.

Yet this failure should not disguise the enormously significant progress which did happen throughout this era. Morris may be a historian but he doesn't neglect the archaeology, noting that the two are contradictory when it comes to the development of early kings - the former claiming a much earlier development than the latter attests. We do see an early egalitarianism as Pryor claims, but there is also a rapid development of an elite in the late sixth century. 

We should also remember that enormous amounts of information have been lost, with even the colossal construction of Offa's Dyke now being something which is at best poorly understood. Morris favours an interesting conclusion : it was partly military, being too large to be against small-scale raiders, partly a sheer symbol of political power, and perhaps most interestingly it was partly racial. The grand narrative in Morris' work is one of the development of the concept of Englishness, being largely about a people, not a place. Hence the Dyke is built not against the Northumbrians or the peoples of Wessex, but a group who were much more distinctly foreign - the Welsh.

This development was slow and gradual. The early kingdoms didn't exactly see eye to eye, so proclaiming the notion of "Englishness" was not about fellowship and brotherhood, but more about a power-grab from Wessex. Of course, it was eventually successful - today the idea of Wessex as a regional power in its own right has completely vanished. It's the English who have power, and yes within that there is a north-south divide, but it's the whole of England which is set against the other nations of Britain, not individual segments.

The book is a large and enthralling read, and I will skip over the details. There is a subtle, ineffable change as the book progresses. It's hard to describe, but the early period of mead halls and Viking raids feels like a different world from the later period of monasteries and pan-national kingship. Without trying to describe the differences (or their causes) explicitly, they nonetheless come across. Full marks to Morris on that score.

Sometimes he is more explicit about cultural developments. For example, he notes how ideas about divine retribution developed in monasteries and only later spread into secular culture - they were not an inherent factor in the Christian faith. Likewise the development of Alfred's fortified burghs only later and accidentally led to technological progress and the spread of villages. And though he notes that the importance of the famous Wittans (that could in principle meritocratically dictate who was king, but in practise invariably selected the same family over and over again) was exaggerated, he does chart how restrictions came to be placed on royal power.

The final section of the book is perhaps its weakest, though to be fair this is covered much more in-depth in his other book The Norman Conquest. His chapters on Alfred and Athelstan are outstanding. He is careful to describe which of Alfred's achievements have been exaggerated or wrongly ascribed, but he nevertheless emerges as a figure truly deserving of his epithet . Here is a book both critical and engaging, not sacrificing narrative for the same of rigorous skepticism not the other way around :

The important and incontrovertible point remains that the scheme to turn Latin works into English was Alfred's own initiative. He selected the texts he thought were "most necessary for all men to know" and discussed their contents with the scholars... Without Alfred directing their labours, none of this would have happened.

Not all of Alfred's schemes were so successful... [his] ships were vaingloriously large affairs, and hence less effective than they might otherwise have been. When they were sent out to confront a small Danish fleet that same summer, all the king's new vessels ran aground.

He was clearly not the the superhero of Georgian and Victorian myth, [not] the founder of the Royal Navy, let alone "the most perfect character in history", as one nineteenth-century scholar hyperbolically insisted. But he was courageous, clever, innovative, pious, resolute, and far-sighted : qualities which, taken together, more than justify the later decision to honour him with the word "great".

As for Athelstan, I shall leave that for another post when I review Sarah Foot's Athelstan, which is to be honest pretty awful. Instead I shall close with another lengthy quote from Morris - I would have liked a longer, more general conclusion, but his summary is still excellent (I note also that he again agrees with Pryor in that feudalism, serfdom and slavery pre-date the Conquest). Factoring in the brownie points for a well-organised text, I'm giving this one 9/10.

Much of that England is now gone forever. The Anglo-Saxons never truly believed, as the Romans did, that they were building for eternity. Their timber halls and hunting lodges burned long ago, as their owners anticipated... With one or two notable exceptions, the physical legacy of the Anglo-Saxons in thin, their surviving monuments few.

A lot of what is often touted as the enduing legacy of the Anglo-Saxons proves on closer inspection to be mythological. The claim that they invented representative government because their kings held large assemblies ignores the fact that other rulers in contemporary Europe did the same. The belief that they were pioneering in their love of freedom requires us to forget that their nearest continental neighbours called themselves the Franks - that is, the free people. Their laws and legal concepts were mostly gone by the twelfth centuries, replaced with newly-drafter Norman ones. The notion that they considered themselves to be uniquely favoured by God has lately been discredited on the grounds that no surviving document actually claims that distinction on their behalf.

And yet, though their buildings are mostly gone, and their myths have been dispelled, a great deal of the Anglo-Saxon inheritance remains. The head of the English Church is still based at Canterbury... Westminster is [still] the political heart of the kingdom... The shires of England, though tinkered with, are essentially the same as they were at the time of their creation more than 1,000 years ago. Most English villages can boast that they are first mentioned in the Domesday book, but their names often indicate a history that began centuries earlier. The fact that so much remains is remarkable. Roman Britannia, despite the grandeur of its ruins, lasted barely 400 years, and was over by the mid-fifth century. England is still a work in progress.