Max Adams > Quotes

“One might just as well try to reconstruct the idea of a tree from its leaves, or an ocean wave from a dripping tap. So much is lost; truth is a chimera.”
― Max Adams, The First Kingdom: Britain in the Age of Arthur

“More exotic still was Wulfstan's account of travels in the eastern Baltic and along the River Vistula; of a land of honey and plentiful fishing, of the habits of foreign kings and their burial rites and inheritance practices. In a time of war the Angelcynn were, at heart, still curious about the world beyond their shores.”
― Max Adams, Ælfred’s Britain: War and Peace in the Viking Age

“of Scotland’,”
― Max Adams, The First Kingdom: Britain in the Age of Arthur

“Through and beyond the period of Roman domination, vessels plied Atlantic waters. By the end of the seventh century bulk trade of minerals and grain, the sort of interaction we would recognise as maritime trade, was a thing of the long distant past.”
― Max Adams, The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria

“The dark ages are obscure but they were not weird. Magicians there were, to be sure, and miracles. In the flickering firelight of the winter hearth, mead songs were sung of dragons and ring-givers, of fell deeds and famine, of portents and vengeful gods. Strange omens in the sky were thought to foretell evil times. But in a world where the fates seemed to govern by whimsy and caprice, belief in sympathetic magic, superstition and making offerings to spirits was not much more irrational than believing in paper money: trust is an expedient currency. There were charms to ward of dwarfs, water-elf disease and swarms of bees; farmers recited spells against cattle thieves and women knew of potions to make men more - or less - virile. Soothsayers, poets and those who remembered the genealogies of kings were held in high regard. The past was an immense source of wonder and inspiration, of fear and foretelling.”
― Max Adams, The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria

“Templar. Periodically kings would try to bring land that had been carelessly alienated back into the royal portfolio. Henry VIII’s policy of recycling it all in a single (or double) tranche of dispossessions led to a new religion and a new phenomenon called the middle class; it saved the Tudor monarchy from bankruptcy, even if that policy is implicated in the outbreak of civil wars in the 1640s.”
― Max Adams, The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria