Review : The First Kingdom

I keep seeing Max Adams' books in bookshops and thinking, "hmmm...... naaah." I don't know why. Something just puts me off every time.

Well, at last, I decided to give The First Kingdom : Britain In The Age Of Arthur a go. Overall, I'm glad I did : this covers a lot of topics I'm interested in a thorough, nuanced and thoughtful way. I'd read more of the author for sure, but there were a lot of things about this book that made it a sometimes irritating read.

Fortunately he does get some of the basics of a popular book right in dividing up the footnotes (at the bottom of the page) and references (at the back of the book) correctly. For this I give no small credit, despite having all the maps at the front of the book. 

But the quality of the text is rather variable. By far the bulk of it is good, solid stuff, not exactly a racy or racing page-turner, but a good, meaty, satisfying read. Unfortunately, on occasion Adams seems to lose focus and can degenerate for a few pages at a time into lengthy, tedious, and largely irrelevant technical detail. He also uses some extremely strange terminology without explanation : "render" when he means taxes; "transhumant" – urghh – when he means "nomad"; "centripetal" when he means.... well I'm not sure what he means with this one; all Latin place names are italicised for no reason; "insular" is always capitalised, and "elite" is given a weird accent. It's all a bit teeth-grinding.

And perhaps the biggest flaw is the the goal of the book is never set forth anywhere. This makes it feel perhaps more unstructured than it is, as well as making it hard to judge if it's been successful in its objectives. The lack of self-description applies to every single chapter, and while they're all broadly chronological, it would have been nice to have a clearer idea of what the themes were supposed to be.

These are not major flaws, however. While Adams does sometimes get a little hung-up on uncertainties, he generally manages to avoid being rendered impotent as a result (quite unlike Ronald Hutton, who needs a good course of historical Viagra). Moreover, he presents much interesting content in a sensible way. In fact, the more I reflect on Adams and Hutton, the more I don't want to read any more of Hutton's works and the more I'm curious about the rest of Adams catalogue. So I'm gonna give this one a respectable 7/10.

Right then, what's the interesting stuff here that makes it worth reading ?

(For background, see for example Lost Realms, The Anglo-Saxons, and The Real Middle Earth)

1) Was there an Arthur ?

No. Next question.

Oh, very well, I suppose we can spend a bit longer on this one. If Adams has an overall goal, it seems to be to chart the rise of monarchy in Britain. He covers the non-linear process by which we went from being an Imperial province to a patchwork of primordial kingdoms. From governors appointed by a distant emperor (who would occasionally be raised to the purple in Britain itself, something I think we don't appreciate enough – we seem to prefer the notion that we were on the extreme, other-worldly fringe), to local strongmen, the path to the sacred idea of dynastic kingship didn't run smoothly.

By charting the specifics of this process as carefully as possible, Adams gently shows how the idea of a true King Arthur – a sort of early Athelstan – just isn't tenable. True, the record is hugely incomplete, and the process was highly stochastic, with proto-kingdoms just as likely to fragment and disappear entirely as to be absorbed into their more successful neighbours. But the prospect of a single ruler lording it over a significant number of others just doesn't fit with any of the records at all. Nothing even comes close.

(I very much appreciate that Adams does this very gently, always saying "if he existed" and suchlike rather than rubbing the reader's nose in it. I'd like to think I'm not too attached to historical legends these days, but younger me would definitely have bridled at having his ideas callously dismissed, so kudos for that.)

But Adams also implicitly shows how the idea of Arthur could arise. If Arthur wasn't a real person, then he wasn't a total fabrication either, but rather – as is fairly obvious really – an amalgamation of several different real figures. There was Ambrosius Aurelinas, a post-Roman commander who beat off the Saxons for a while (strangely Adams points out several times that this isn't Arthur), Riothamus, a late Roman governor who was active in Brittany, and elsewhere it's been suggested that the Welsh fixation on Arthur in Greece arose from the exploits of late Western Emperor Magnus Maximus and his entourage. 

Couple all this with some late-surviving Roman culture in Britain, with its confused mass of Christianity and paganism, and the idea of King Arthur on a series of magical adventures become easy to explain. The Dark Ages are a perfect era for birthing myths, which is of course what makes the period so interesting. It may not really have been a world of demons and dragons, but that's how the age appeared to those living through it.

2) From villas to mead halls

The process of cultural change is excellently covered in Lost Realms, but Adams adds some important points. Throughout, I found myself wondering along the lines of, "Okay, the Roman Empire fell. What exactly stopped the British from continuing to live the same lifestyle regardless ? Did they lack material imports ? Did they now prefer the culture of the Anglo Saxons ? Why ? What made Roman Britain work, and what stopped it ?"

I have to admit to a bias here, possibly coloured by Roman propaganda. But I look at an empire of solid stone houses, vast infrastructure, running water and central heating, reclined discussions on Cicero over a glass of wine... and I have a hard time understanding why anyone would switch to quaffing mead in wooden, dangerously flammable halls and waging seemingly endless, pointless warfare with their every neighbour. If I have to choose between the periods, I wouldn't find it difficult to pick one to live in.

Adams provides at least a few very plausible reasons why the shift occurred. It probably wasn't much to do with material resources : Tintagel is the most prominent example, but there were other places where trade with Rome and beyond continued well after the official end of Roman occupation*. The organisation of such resources might be a bigger factor, since this became a much more ad hoc process without any central coordination to ensure that local needs were adequately met. Arrival likely became less scheduled and less reliable everywhere, even though the supply itself didn't stop. 

* Interestingly, Adams several times notes a strong connection with France. East Anglia may even have been ruled by Frankish kings, or at least Frankish lords may have had estates there. Most histories of Britain rely on a tiny selection of British sources, but Adams has really done his homework and considered what our neighbours had to say about us as well.

Brian Bates suggested a spiritual dimension in that the Roman approach to local religions was only partly one of tolerance. Sure, they incorporated the local deities into their own pantheon easily enough, but they also massacred the druids, destroyed the sacred groves, ran roads straight through monuments, and built houses out of dead stone instead of organic wood. All this is true, and maybe there was some preference to moving back to earlier practises after the Romans left. But this was three centuries and more after the invasion happened, so one would have expected a bigger cultural change by this point.

Indeed there was, says Adams. Whereas Hutton describes the impact of Christianity as essentially negligible in Roman Britain, Adams shows convincingly that this is nonsense : there's tonnes of evidence for the new religion, including material associated with churches even if no actual such structure has yet been found. By no means was Christianity dominant, but it certainly made its presence felt. So Roman culture did change local beliefs, with an emphasis on "local" : remembering the lessons of Thomas Williams that Roman Britain actually means a collection of many different places rather than a homogenous block.

And it's this Roman success which might have been its undoing. When Rome fell, the appeal of the Empire went with it. Except for a few gloriously romantic holdouts (including some evidence of isolated villas as well as towns after the departure of the legions*), mimicking the foreigners no longer served much social purpose. People looked for something to replace it rather than reinventing it, especially given the lack of cohesive, centralised planning that made Rome work. Ironically, but much as in our present predicament, they looked to the past for solutions. Crucially, Roman sophistication was also hugely unequal in a way that early Anglo-Saxon culture wasn't. Sure, reclining on a divan while talking philosophy with some well-proportioned slave may seem appealing**, but this was the lifestyle of the few, not the many.

* Adams goes into some depth on whether the traditional "look to your own defences" moment of 410 AD really constitutes a hard break. It did not mean all the legions were withdrawn then, but rather that most of them had already left and there were no more available to replace them. Interestingly, even in the final decades of the fourth century the Empire was successfully able to intervene to solve British problems. So 410 does mark a good end point for Roman Britain, or at least the point at which it began a rapid and terminal decline.

** Or not.

It's also worth remembering the similarity of early pagan beliefs. Though the worlds of Homer and even Virgil are not much like those of Beowulf, they are not entirely different either : the high tax, ineffectual, corrupt and decadent lifestyle of late Roman nevertheless had similar gods to the early Saxons. In that sense, the switch was towards a lifestyle promising promising personal freedom and liberties (under local strongmen) and rejecting an earlier politics without radically shifting their whole world view. Which feels rather chillingly familiar.

3) Genocidal or genial ?

This raises the obvious question of what this transformation was like to those experiencing it. Was it all the fire and sword of Gildas and Bede ? A more prolonged but still thorough Great Replacement of the natives ? Or did no invasion happen at all ? 

Adams favours something in between the last two. Clearly there was a profound cultural change after Rome left, but there's little or no evidence of large-scale warfare, let alone genocide*. Genetics does indicate the arrival of a significant population from the continent, but nowhere near a dominant one. Rather than taking the few British sources at their word, Adams attributes their apocalyptic descriptions – which are totally incompatible with ground truth – to their author's agenda. As later Britons did in India, they rewrote history to suit their politics. In this case, the barbarians were a punishment for their ancestor's heathen ways. The idea that they could have had a successful pagan past was not socially acceptable; the change of culture had to be a calamity sent by divine wrath.

* The only evidence of this to which Adams gives any credence is linguistic : there was a sharp change in language. But he also points out that this is culture, not the people themselves, and culture can and does change without the movement of large numbers of people. It's also possible that early pronunciations were very different to how we read them so the change may actually not be as stark as it first appears.

There was, however, a significant population decline in the generation after Rome. Things were not nice. They may even have been disastrous... but they were not apocalyptic. There are no signs at all of sudden departures. What instead seems to have happened is that those who could do so upped-shop and left. They didn't flee in terror, they migrated in search of a better life. 

Those who stayed faced an uncertain future. Some succeeded, maintaining a quasi-Roman lifestyle for decades or even longer after Rome. Some failed. Old hill-forts and other prehistoric sites were reoccupied. Many towns were abandoned, but some, it seems, were not entirely neglected but repurposed : Adams points out that soil deposits in the towns could only have been put there by people. Rather than seeing them as the haunts of ghosts and monsters as Bates suggested, the explanation may be more prosaic : they were still using some of them, just not for their original purpose.

As for violence, Adams looks to the much-neglected Roman villages rather than the towns. Not a single one, he says, shows any signs of fortification. Yes, there were hillforts, but there were also a great many villages with not so much as a palisade wall to keep out bandits. They did construct earthen dykes to block Roman roads, possibly for tariff barriers. By no means was this a pleasant time to live, with Adams frequently describing the local strongmen and early kings as thugs. For certain, violence happened. But the wide-scale warfare of the chronicles appears to be total nonsense. Local, small-scale battles ? Sure. Something akin to a zombie apocalypse ? Not a bit of it.

4) The first kingdom

It would have been nice to end with the first securely-known British kingdom, but sadly Adams doesn't do this. He does at least note that kingship gets going pretty rapidly around 550 AD and thereafter, about a century later than in Frankia. Its rise was thoroughly organic, and the interplay between kings and kingdoms is complex. It may be that local strongmen glorified themselves by expanding their territory (the king raising his kingdom) or it may be that a sufficiently large territory gave its ruler an added mystique (the kingdom raising its king).

And the structure of such kingdoms is not at all straightforward. The modern ideas of what a king and a kingdom were were both yet to be defined, for all that Adams says they weren't making it up as they went along. In fact they were, but they were reacting naturally to a series of different events. So the structure of Rheged appears to have been nothing like a modern kingdom. If it even existed at all, it may have had some disparate core lands but no kind of clear boundary whatever.

If the fall of Roman Britain was hardly the extirpation described in Gildas, then the rise of the early kings was nevertheless one of violence. Every single one of them appears to have gained and risen in power by clobbering their neighbours : not necessarily in wars of outright conquest (their military forces were too weak for that, with the maximum strength of the early Mercian army being about 3,000 men), but in forcing them to submit. 

Christianity, says Adams, allowed these early strongmen (little more than cattle barons) to imbue themselves with a mystical aura. Not just Christianity, to be sure, with a conscious attempt to appeal to their still-pagan subjects; I've already noted ad nauseum how Christianity is more compatible with paganism than the modern-day Church would ever admit. But the overwhelming thrust of Adams's book in this regard is the theme of privatisation. The Roman state had failed. In its loss the locals were forced to do things for themselves, and the long road back to statehood was indeed a dark and difficult one. Adams notes, rather amusingly, that such great halls as feature in Beowulf may originally have been little more than barn conversions, the mysticism (though not not-existent) perhaps not as important a factor at the time as it was to later myth-makers*.

* Though it what seems a quite clear case of overthinking, Adams asserts that Grendel may represent feuding or disease. Come on dude, a scary monster outside a safe hall is symbolic enough already ! 

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If the state didn't exist then it would be necessary to (re)invent it. So it proved; ultimately, Britain recovered. Central administrations returned, a well-worn system by which people could live their lives was remade, a chaotic, ad hoc framework replaced with a new normal. But if there was no wholesale slaughter in which the island sank into the sea and cats and dogs were living together in mass hysteria... then it was no picnic either. Britain's involuntary experiment in seceding from Europe and every village having to fend for itself in compulsory privatisation was a disaster. It didn't work then and it won't work now.

The Dark Ages are a time of sudden, massive, fragmentary change. For generations afterwards there were Christians and pagans living alongside one another, sometimes in conflict but sometimes in perfect accord (Adams points to cemeteries of mixed burial practises without segregation). There were foreign invaders both cultural and military : some of the locals resisted both of these, some adopted them wholeheartedly. Just for good measure there was also the climate disaster of 536 AD, which Neil Price calls the fimbulwinter, a real-life inspiration for the Norse Ragnarok. It was the time of Britain's greatest myths, but to actually experience it would likely have been, shall we say... character building. You might come out of it all the better but the process itself would have felt like agony.

One final thought to end on. If there was cultural and linguistic change, there wasn't much genetic alteration, and no new towns were built anywhere. Instead old sites were reoccupied. Francis Pryor points out that this isn't typical of the pattern of invasion. Yet we know that there was a population decline, likely through emigration, but also at least some measure of arrivals from the continent. Might it not be that some of those were returning natives, educated and raised in Anglo Saxon cultures abroad ? Could Britain have, in a sense, invaded itself ? Answers on a postcard...