Review : Lost Realms (1)

Some books stick in my head more than others. Some age well, maturing in memory to have a lasting impact, while others fester and gnaw to leave a bitter aftertaste. Francis Pryor's Britain AD is definitely in the former category, while James Hawes' The Shortest History of England belongs to the latter.

I've mentioned Britain AD before, in comparison to Marc Morris' excellent (but not, it must be said, quite so impactful) The Anglo-Saxons*. The thing about Pryor's book was that he made the radical claim that the Anglo-Saxon invasion essentially never happened, that Roman Britain didn't so much fall as it did revert to an earlier and preferable state of existence. Some of his claims were extremely credible, such as the presence of monumental wooden buildings and the continued use of high Latin demonstrating that the natives hadn't descended into primitive savagery; likewise the archaeological evidence pointing to nothing at all comparable with the Roman invasion seems clear. Some claims I found rather less convincing, such as the idea that the Britons were just not ready for urban life and were downright glad to be rid of the invaders. That the high Latin had been rather badly-scrawled on crude-looking stones didn't help his case either.

* I'll be making references to both of those posts throughout, but it shouldn't be necessary to read either of them beforehand.

But if Marc Morris at least partially supported Pryor's conclusions, then Thomas Williams' Lost Realms offers stronger and more full-throated endorsement. What's more, he offers a very simple solution to how Britain can be both be said to have fallen into ruin, almost apocalyptically so (in agreement with the traditional narrative which Morris largely supports) and, at the same time, that things weren't quite so bad as all that after all.

This is a superb book and I couldn't bring myself to limit this to a single post. So in this first part, I'll give the standard here's-what-it's-like-to-read review and then an overview of what happened to post-Roman Britain : did it fail or did it prosper ? In the concluding post, I'll look at how cultural change occurred and whether this points in favour or against the prospect of the infamous Anglo-Saxon invasion.

0) The Review Bit

In short, as far as I'm concerned this book catapults Williams to the front ranks of popular history authors, with text easily beautiful enough to compete with that of Tom Holland – praise I don't give out lightly. Consider the opening :

What happens when the rug is pulled, when all the certainties melt away and what had yesterday felt permanent, unchanging, unchangeable, collapses at breakneck speed ? And what comes after ?

All ages of the past are dark because the past is a grave. It is a void that historians and archaeologists seek to fill with knowledge – with things made by long-dead hands and the ghosts of buildings long demolished, the uncanny traces of people and their lost lives, poignant in their mundanity : a used bowl, a broken glass, a clay pipe, a worn shoe, the pieces of a game scattered and abandoned. It whispers with the words captured on the skins of animals... lines breathed by poets in fire-lit halls, frozen in ink, repeating again and again across the generations, as the bones of their authors crumble in the cold, dark earth.

It's not always like this, of course (and it must be said the effect doesn't always work), though the start and end of each chapter are usually in this style. Much of the main text is written more conventionally, often with some surprisingly silly and relatable humour that has me thinking, "yep, that's how I'd like to write a history book". It's a brilliant work of truly liminal history, tackling the hardest possible topics where the evidence is thin indeed, with lashings of rigorous critical thinking, gloriously eloquent and evocative rhetoric and laugh-out-loud jokes. A truly excellent mix, of which I simply have to give it 9/10.

I've been doing that a lot lately. I strongly suspect my current read won't fare as well, but we'll see.

The text of this book is beset by legions of qualifiers : words like 'probably', 'conceivably', 'might'... advance over the page with alarming frequency. As do multiple frank admissions of total ignorance. If you prefer certainty in historical writing... then this is not the book you're looking for.

That said, it does lack a couple of things. First, more illustrations and some colour plates would be nice : no description can compete with a good photograph. Second, a conclusions chapter ! This is a strange omission. It wouldn't need to be very long, but a synthesis of how the various little kingdoms all fell and why they were forgotten would definitely add something. To be honest I was actually expecting more of this from the blurb, more of an overview of why some states fail and others survive, but this is largely only implicit here. Still, if you want to know about all those places, people and events often mentioned in a single sentence in history documentaries, this is an absolutely outstanding place to start*.

* I made the mistake of seeing what the internet has to say about it. Goodreads is divided, as usual, but so far as I can tell the nay-sayers are idiots who must've read a completely different book by mistake. Giving this one an overall less than 4/5 just makes me think this is why we can't have nice things. Come on. What the hell more do you people want ?

Since Williams himself neglects to summarise his main themes and conclusions, I guess it's up to me.

1) Fall or Transformation ?

The simple trick that William's uses to reconcile how Britain could both decline and prosper at the same time is that it shattered. It did more than splinter or fragment, more than dissolve into the standard "seven kingdoms" : it burst into an unknown and unknowable myriad of petty kingdoms. Ironically, even more then cities, kingdoms are easily lost, being largely constructs of the mind more than of rock and stone. A kingdom only exists because its inhabitants believe they reside in it. And memories, without being captured in the written word, are all too quickly corrupted and destroyed. 

This book does not tell 'a story', because there is no one story that can be told. It does not follow the progress of a single phenomenon as it irrupted into Britain... the chronology is everywhere muddled and confused by invention and reinvention... sometimes there are no answers to be found.

There simply is no one single narrative of the end of Roman Britain to tell. As it broke, each region was affected differently. Places which were heavily dependent on the urban elites and city living would have experienced something like a cataclysm, or certainly an event easily mythologised as such. But those which were less reliant on Empire-wide infrastructure would not necessarily have noticed very much of anything, at least at first. All regions, of course, ultimately transmuted into early medieval Britain, but they did so with pronounced inhomogeneity. Some adopted Christianity sooner, some later; some experienced economic catastrophe, some kept importing expensive Roman goods for much longer. 

By his own admission, Williams wasn't exactly sure from the outset how to approach this book. I have a sneaking suspicion he initially wanted to tell a simpler story of the apocalypse, of the end of civilisation and the struggle to rebuild (the prologue, which paints this broad picture quite vividly, was adapted from a piece published in 2020, while the book itself came out in 2023). Only on writing it did he realise that this is just too simple, that nothing other than a collection of answers would suffice. This may, perhaps, be the reason for the lack of a final set of conclusions.

Each chapter in the book follows a standard arrangement : an introduction with context and anecdotes, the archaeological evidence, the historical documentation, and a brief look at how the kingdom was lost. Williams is careful to note that the nine selected kingdoms aren't the whole story, deliberately avoiding the bigger, more-well known examples of Wessex and the like. This is a perfectly sensible approach, though I think it's a bit questionable to call the survivors "bullies" : to justify that, you'd have to demonstrate the the ones which were absorbed wouldn't have become the oppressors themselves if given half the chance.

2) Decline

Some of the little kingdoms did experience undeniable and extreme hardship : "the formal end of Empire appears to have rolled in like a thunderhead of doom." Roman Cirencester, for example, was prospering right up until the final decades of the 300s, but after the official end of Roman Britain in 410, it soon fell into ruin. Archaeological evidence shows villas abandoned entirely or repurposed as farm buildings, amphitheatres hastily converted into crude defensive buildings, the ancient hill forts re-occupied. It has a distinct whiff of Francis Pryor's claim that the British were simply not ready at the time of the occupation for urban living, and naturally reverted to their earlier mode of existence. 

This, I have to say, rather surprised me. The idea always felt a bit forced, so I wasn't expecting to see this hypothesis given such serious independent consideration : Williams doesn't cite Pryor at all as far as I can tell.

There are differences though. What Pryor interprets as a more-or-less uniformly good thing (finally the invaders left !), Williams certainly does not. He views the collapse, where it happened, as leading to a pretty bleak existence. Instead of the supporting network of a pan-European Empire, the survivors – and they could fairly be called so in this description – had to scrape by for their very and very meagre existence. They didn't leave their plush, fresco-adorned villas voluntarily, there was no return to a more 'natural' lifestyle in the bountiful and beautiful forest : they did so only because they had no other choice.

A further nuance is that not everywhere went into decline at all (as we'll see next), but even more subtle than this, some places began failing long before Rome did. While Cirencester kept going until the very end, London began its descent a full century before the Roman departure, with various monumental buildings destroyed decade by decade from 300 onwards. This of course makes a mockery of Hawes' claim that the south of Britain was geographically destined for greatness !

The decline and decay was real, then, but it wasn't uniform and it wasn't solely the result of the fall of Empire. Williams also makes a very interesting analogy to what this would have felt like. Rather than the quasi-mystical apocalyptic tones of Gildas or Bede, he describes it thus :

It is perhaps more helpful to think of places like Corinium [Cirencester] as the rust-belt towns of Roman Britain : places where capital flight, the collapse of industry and the absence of functioning markets had led to a fatal downward turn in the economy, leaving behind abandonment, poverty, decay, and ruin.

If you're sufficiently anti-capitalist, this can even be reconciled with Pryor's more positive view : Williams says it was really the rich elite who suffered the most, with life little changed anywhere for the peasant farmers. That's not something to which I would subscribe though.

3) Success

Not everywhere failed. In Dumnonia (Cornwall) the elite Roman lifestyle endured well beyond the loss of the legions : changed, yes, but doing more than merely surviving. At Tintagel, no less, not only was there a castle here far older than the medieval ruins which grace the site today (which were little more than a romantic folly), but it was a spectacular one : "one of the largest defended enclosures of its time in Britain." Archaeology reveals that for two centuries after the Empire that there were people here "who continued to dine from fancy Roman dishes, to quaff wine from delicate Iberian glassware, to drizzle olive oil upon their oysters."

What's more, the connection to Rome even remained somewhat political, not just material. As the Empire temporarily revived under Justinian, Christian missions to the former colonies made trade both economically and symbolically valuable. The Empire could almost certainly have never regained its former strength, but that it was even attempting to do so, that it was looking far beyond its heavily truncated borders, has a wonderfully romantic sense of doom about it. It reminds me very strongly indeed of Marc Morris' assertion of late-surviving Romano-British lifestyles persisting in the midst of their more Celtic, pagan neighbours, something I previously dismissed as just too much of the stuff of poetry, not history.

The story of Dumnonia is the story of how a dream of civilisation was manifested at the farthest fringes of a fading Empire : a determined effort to reach towards the fading light in a place that had barely felt the sun. And seen from a distance, in that haze of light and spray, there appeared the phantoms of Britain's oldest and most potent legends : shining indistinct, immaterial as the rainbow.

And Cornwall is not the only site of Arthurian tales to have long-persisting Roman lifestyles. In the north, the kingdom of Rheged may not have existed at all as a political entity, but clearer archaeological evidence shows that the lifestyles of the soldiers stationed at Hadrian's Wall may have taken decades to substantially change. The majority of those present would have been of British stock and therefore not recalled to defend the faltering Empire, and large timber buildings (if not much like the previous Roman versions) continued in construction and use beyond the year 500. It took "perhaps a century and a half" here for things to fully shift. This was helped because the soldier's pay by 410 was already only about a quarter in coin, making it much easier for the locals to continue to solicit their services without using currency.

Wales too has evidence of the change being one more of transformation than of failure. Viroconium, today in Shropshire which would then have been Welsh, is a veritable lost city. Its archaeological assessment has waxed and waned. Early antiquarians viewed it as a traditional haunted ruin left to rot after the Romans left, but discoveries in the 1960s suggested massive timber buildings constructed afterwards, "staggering evidence for a type of urban life and economy without parallel in Britain in the sixth and seventh centuries". The current assessment is more sober, but that still there was substantial occupation and economic activity here long after Rome.

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So Britain didn't fall. Nor did it flourish : it did both, at different times and in different places. Francis Pryor asked whether the lights of civilisation went out with the dying Empire, concluding that actually they got brighter. But William's view is more nuanced and distinctly more plausible, that they probably did both – or sometimes a better analogy might be that they changed colour (Dark Age Britain or Disco Britain ? Take your pick !). Things were a mixture, with some places collapsing disastrously, others continuing to thrive in their old ways, while still others did neither, experiencing a transformation not to something necessarily better or worse but simply different. And that cultural change, and whether it came about due to the enthusiastic adoption of new ideas or was forced at the point of a sword, is what I'll look at in part two.