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Penguin History of Britain #2
Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070
The enormous hoard of beautiful gold military objects found in a field in Staffordshire has focused huge attention on the mysterious world of 7th and 8th century Britain. Clearly the product of a sophisticated, wealthy, highly militarized society, the objects beg innumerable questions about how we are to understand the people who once walked across the same landscape we inhabit, who are our ancestors and yet left such a slight record of their presence.
Britain after Rome brings together a wealth of research and imaginative engagement to bring us as close as we can hope to get to the tumultuous centuries between the departure of the Roman legions and the arrival of Norman invaders nearly seven centuries later. As towns fell into total decay, Christianity disappeared and wave upon wave of invaders swept across the island, it can be too easily assumed that life in Britain became intolerable - and yet this is the world in which modern languages and political arrangements were forged, a number of fascinating cultures rose and fell and tantalizing glimpses, principally through the study of buildings and burials, can be had of a surprising and resilient place.
The result of a lifetime of work, Robin Fleming's major new addition to the Penguin History of Britain could not be more opportune. A richly enjoyable, varied and surprising book, Britain after Rome allows its readers to see Britain's history in a quite new light.
Britain after Rome brings together a wealth of research and imaginative engagement to bring us as close as we can hope to get to the tumultuous centuries between the departure of the Roman legions and the arrival of Norman invaders nearly seven centuries later. As towns fell into total decay, Christianity disappeared and wave upon wave of invaders swept across the island, it can be too easily assumed that life in Britain became intolerable - and yet this is the world in which modern languages and political arrangements were forged, a number of fascinating cultures rose and fell and tantalizing glimpses, principally through the study of buildings and burials, can be had of a surprising and resilient place.
The result of a lifetime of work, Robin Fleming's major new addition to the Penguin History of Britain could not be more opportune. A richly enjoyable, varied and surprising book, Britain after Rome allows its readers to see Britain's history in a quite new light.
458 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
75 people are currently reading
2233 people want to read
About the author
Robin Fleming
18 books17 followersRobin Fleming is a medieval historian, professor of history at Boston College, and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. She is an accomplished writer of numerous books that focus on the daily lives and lifestyles of the people of England around the time of the Roman Empire and early medieval times. By working hand-in-hand with archaeologists she has been able to piece together details of their lives that may otherwise be overlooked.
When asked if she becomes emotionally invested in her research, she replied:
"Absolutely. I feel it’s my job to let people speak who have been forgotten and ignored. . . . It’s really hard in my period to get beyond kings and bishops and really . . . important people. But there were all these other people who had lives that were just as important. I want to speak for them."
Fleming received her B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1977 and 1984.[2] She has been the recipient of several awards honoring her groundbreaking research, from the following institutions: The Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of advanced studies at Harvard University, the Bunting Institute for advanced study (1993–94), the Harvard Society of Fellows, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
When asked if she becomes emotionally invested in her research, she replied:
"Absolutely. I feel it’s my job to let people speak who have been forgotten and ignored. . . . It’s really hard in my period to get beyond kings and bishops and really . . . important people. But there were all these other people who had lives that were just as important. I want to speak for them."
Fleming received her B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1977 and 1984.[2] She has been the recipient of several awards honoring her groundbreaking research, from the following institutions: The Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of advanced studies at Harvard University, the Bunting Institute for advanced study (1993–94), the Harvard Society of Fellows, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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August 28, 2019
Robin Fleming’s book is a great counterpoint to the political histories of the period. Because of the archeological evidence the book is strong on demographic, social and economic developments, and this allows stronger focus on the general population and women in particular than the written record.
Especially the last chapter is a showcase for the power of archaeology to (re)create real stories of common people from physical evidence. The first part focuses on the high number of women dying before their 35th birthday (often in childbirth) and its effects on society, like the many orphans. The second part, recording a live burial of a struggling woman suggests punishment or ritual burial of slaves with their masters. And the last one shows the high death toll in towns and the terrible hygienic conditions of people living close to their neighbours and animals.
And there's a host of similar episodes spread around the book that I haven't got time to mention here, but give a fresh look at what we call the Dark Ages based on relatively new evidence. But while the firm foundation in archaeology is the strength of this book, the long, speculative interpretation occasionally becomes a grind.
The archeological data frequently challenges the written record. Fleming suggests that the coming of the ‘Saxons’ (as most scholars now accept, it was a very mixed population of Germanic people from present day Northern France up to Denmark) was a lot less violent than suggested by the literary sources which were written later, sometimes centuries, than the actual events and who had their own agenda. According to Fleming the kingdoms of the 7th and 8th centuries used conquest myths to stress their legitimacy.
Archeological finds also point towards the conclusion that Roman economic decline started a few generations before the legions left for the continent in 410. Population had been declining during this period and continued even faster as Roman presence ended and political and economic fragmentation set in.
This suggests in Fleming’s view that there was room for newcomers, while few graves from this period show violent deaths, nor a heavily militarised society. However, I think even the smaller Romano-British population would maintain a claim to the land and it is unlikely they would have relinquished it totally without struggle. Also, men dying on the battlefield would not be buried in their home villages.
The newcomers mixed easily with the Romano-British. Based on the lack of high status burials in this period, Fleming concludes that the 5th and 6th centuries saw a remarkably egalitarian society. It also contained a wide local variation of combinations of Romano-British and Germanic elements, with individuals picking and choosing elements from different cultures to create their own styles. Identities became very local, as opposed to the Romano-British elite which had focused on the fashions of its continental counterparts. The immigrants also, even though they described themselves as Saxons or Angles, were in fact leading very different lives from their grandparents.
Would social structures be imported from the continent with the immigrants or would they assimilate into some sort of ‘melting pot’ as in the United States in the 19th century?
From the late 6th / early 7th century there are signs of economic recovery and rapid political concentration. First, a few dozen regional powers developed, which then coalesced into stronger kingdoms, like Mercia, that dominated the others. However, the subjugated kingdoms retained a high degree of independence. But the high level of competition forced all kings to find ways to stay on top of the political food chain. This found expression in increasingly high status burials.
Kings stimulated urban renewal by granting lands (hagae) to lords and monasteries. Two new sources of income for kings in the 7th century were the tolls levied on town markets and industry, as well as coin minting. The increasing number of locally produced coins found in hoards and around commercial buildings shows that money returned to the economy.
Christianity also offered several boons to ambitious kings. First of all, clerics could provide a powerful administrative force to a king, increasing the utility of his resources. Secondly, Christianity became a fashionable status attribute, and as it became more accepted by powerful lords, it became expedient for their followers and subjects to convert as well. This would lead to a chain reaction of conversions down client networks. But the archeological evidence suggests that many pagan symbols and rituals continued or were incorporated in Christian burial rites.
While during the 7th and 8th centuries the general tendency was towards concentration and consolidation, the coming of the Vikings overthrew the status quo. In certain parts of Britain it seems that regular institutions collapsed, and in others it forced them to adapt to the crisis.
The coming of the norsemen for example strengthened the power of the Saxon kings, as they found clerical and secular lords more easily accepted their protection. In the 9th century, the resurgent Saxons strove to bind the recovered territories more firmly to them and transferred their institutions as well as their authority (unlike the 7th century kings).
A major new Saxon institution was the burh, the fortified town. The support for protection of these towns was linked to landholding. The burhs developed into central places, combining trade and administrative functions, with the sheriff (shire-reeve) as the representative of royal authority. Finds reveal commercial expansion and increasing sophistication.
While the Danes had been able to bring a large area of England under their control, and many of the erstwhile raiders settled, archeological finds suggest that the norsemen mixed as easily with the Saxons and other people in Britain as the Saxons had done with the Celts and Romano-British in the 5th and 6th centuries. And again the genetic mix was matched by social and cultural interaction that defies orderly generalisation.
Fleming puts much store on bottom up agency and tends to interpret developments not as the result of kings' decisions, but of social phenomena driven by local lords and townspeople. Money in this period was not primarily a means of market transactions, but a means to monetise tribute, so lords and kings could easily buy status goods and pay for communal works. Local lords were able to impose tribute on their subjects. The physical evidence for this development shows more high status burials, suggesting more elaborate social stratification. By the 11th century the Saxon thegn had become more like a gentleman farmer than a warrior elite. That role was increasingly played by royal household troops like the huscarls.
Especially the last chapter is a showcase for the power of archaeology to (re)create real stories of common people from physical evidence. The first part focuses on the high number of women dying before their 35th birthday (often in childbirth) and its effects on society, like the many orphans. The second part, recording a live burial of a struggling woman suggests punishment or ritual burial of slaves with their masters. And the last one shows the high death toll in towns and the terrible hygienic conditions of people living close to their neighbours and animals.
And there's a host of similar episodes spread around the book that I haven't got time to mention here, but give a fresh look at what we call the Dark Ages based on relatively new evidence. But while the firm foundation in archaeology is the strength of this book, the long, speculative interpretation occasionally becomes a grind.
The archeological data frequently challenges the written record. Fleming suggests that the coming of the ‘Saxons’ (as most scholars now accept, it was a very mixed population of Germanic people from present day Northern France up to Denmark) was a lot less violent than suggested by the literary sources which were written later, sometimes centuries, than the actual events and who had their own agenda. According to Fleming the kingdoms of the 7th and 8th centuries used conquest myths to stress their legitimacy.
Archeological finds also point towards the conclusion that Roman economic decline started a few generations before the legions left for the continent in 410. Population had been declining during this period and continued even faster as Roman presence ended and political and economic fragmentation set in.
This suggests in Fleming’s view that there was room for newcomers, while few graves from this period show violent deaths, nor a heavily militarised society. However, I think even the smaller Romano-British population would maintain a claim to the land and it is unlikely they would have relinquished it totally without struggle. Also, men dying on the battlefield would not be buried in their home villages.
The newcomers mixed easily with the Romano-British. Based on the lack of high status burials in this period, Fleming concludes that the 5th and 6th centuries saw a remarkably egalitarian society. It also contained a wide local variation of combinations of Romano-British and Germanic elements, with individuals picking and choosing elements from different cultures to create their own styles. Identities became very local, as opposed to the Romano-British elite which had focused on the fashions of its continental counterparts. The immigrants also, even though they described themselves as Saxons or Angles, were in fact leading very different lives from their grandparents.
Would social structures be imported from the continent with the immigrants or would they assimilate into some sort of ‘melting pot’ as in the United States in the 19th century?
From the late 6th / early 7th century there are signs of economic recovery and rapid political concentration. First, a few dozen regional powers developed, which then coalesced into stronger kingdoms, like Mercia, that dominated the others. However, the subjugated kingdoms retained a high degree of independence. But the high level of competition forced all kings to find ways to stay on top of the political food chain. This found expression in increasingly high status burials.
Kings stimulated urban renewal by granting lands (hagae) to lords and monasteries. Two new sources of income for kings in the 7th century were the tolls levied on town markets and industry, as well as coin minting. The increasing number of locally produced coins found in hoards and around commercial buildings shows that money returned to the economy.
Christianity also offered several boons to ambitious kings. First of all, clerics could provide a powerful administrative force to a king, increasing the utility of his resources. Secondly, Christianity became a fashionable status attribute, and as it became more accepted by powerful lords, it became expedient for their followers and subjects to convert as well. This would lead to a chain reaction of conversions down client networks. But the archeological evidence suggests that many pagan symbols and rituals continued or were incorporated in Christian burial rites.
While during the 7th and 8th centuries the general tendency was towards concentration and consolidation, the coming of the Vikings overthrew the status quo. In certain parts of Britain it seems that regular institutions collapsed, and in others it forced them to adapt to the crisis.
The coming of the norsemen for example strengthened the power of the Saxon kings, as they found clerical and secular lords more easily accepted their protection. In the 9th century, the resurgent Saxons strove to bind the recovered territories more firmly to them and transferred their institutions as well as their authority (unlike the 7th century kings).
A major new Saxon institution was the burh, the fortified town. The support for protection of these towns was linked to landholding. The burhs developed into central places, combining trade and administrative functions, with the sheriff (shire-reeve) as the representative of royal authority. Finds reveal commercial expansion and increasing sophistication.
While the Danes had been able to bring a large area of England under their control, and many of the erstwhile raiders settled, archeological finds suggest that the norsemen mixed as easily with the Saxons and other people in Britain as the Saxons had done with the Celts and Romano-British in the 5th and 6th centuries. And again the genetic mix was matched by social and cultural interaction that defies orderly generalisation.
Fleming puts much store on bottom up agency and tends to interpret developments not as the result of kings' decisions, but of social phenomena driven by local lords and townspeople. Money in this period was not primarily a means of market transactions, but a means to monetise tribute, so lords and kings could easily buy status goods and pay for communal works. Local lords were able to impose tribute on their subjects. The physical evidence for this development shows more high status burials, suggesting more elaborate social stratification. By the 11th century the Saxon thegn had become more like a gentleman farmer than a warrior elite. That role was increasingly played by royal household troops like the huscarls.
February 8, 2023
A Narrow Approach
The Penguin History of Britain is a replacement for the Pelican History of England that came out in the 1950s and ‘60s and served as the go-to source for accessible multivolume British history. I’m starting my review off with this fact because I’m reading through the series in order and my opinions of the books will depend both on how well they stand up as individual volumes as well as how they fare as part of the broader series.
This book was rather a mixed bag for me. While I appreciated the early chapters and liked the way she described her approach in theory, in practice I found it somewhat lacking. A lot of this has to do with the series it makes a part of and the fine line it is trying to walk. She’s open at the beginning (with what I have to regard as an apologetic air) about the requirements set by the general editor. Namely: no footnotes, no historiography, and it had to be equally useful for general readers, students and professional historians. I feel that these restrictions held back the book from fully being what it wanted to be while at the same time I feel that her approach was not necessarily in line with the series’ goals. Since most of these questions concern its broader role in the series I’ll be putting them on the backburner and start off looking at the good parts (of which there certainly are a few) before going into the problems I have.
The basic goal of the book (stated at the beginning) is to provide a narrative account of British history that doesn’t focus around the comings and goings of political/military elites and instead reclaim the viewpoints of more average people. Books of this sort are increasingly common these days, but they are generally focused on the modern era where our sources enable us to recover the voices of those way down the social scale. In fact, she cites Seeking a Role (the second-to-last book of the New Oxford History of England) as a grand example of this. Taking this approach to Medieval Britain is an interesting idea and one I’ve never seen done before. The problem is (as I said) the lack of sources for the lower classes. Little documentation was ever made of this period (particularly in the earlier centuries) and not only has much of what was written down been lost it is unlikely that any of it ever came from a non-elite perspective. Ultimately, that leaves us with archaeology and I simply don’t feel that this can capture people’s lived experience in a meaningful way. Maybe it’s a limit of my imagination, but I look at a brooch and I see a brooch. There’s information that can be mined from it, but I don’t feel any personal connection to the individuals who owned it the way I might if I had something written by them. I don’t think this book changed my mind on that.
One of the main complaints I made about the last book in this series is that it deprioritized narrative entirely to the point where it almost felt more like a textbook than an introductory work. I attributed part of the problem to the necessary reliance on archaeological evidence, but this book shows that that was perhaps not as serious an issue as I thought. This is a fine example of how non-narrative material can be presented in a chronological manner to give a sense of narrative momentum. The account of the gradual development of an English identity (or identities), the rise of towns and trading depots, and the creation of a status hierarchy, all of this is presented as a continuingly evolving society. It’s not the story I was looking to see, but I do understand it’s value.
The first chapters on Roman and sub-Roman Britain are probably the most interesting. We have basically no written sources for this period and her obviously far-reaching knowledge of the archaeological evidence is put to good use in building a picture of what life in the ruins of Roman Britain was like. Her reconstruction of the development of status hierarchies is great. Based on the settlement patterns and homesteads constructed she presents the successful Roman villa and urban elites turning into more hereditary lords. The description of the change to a more simplistic form of community was told entirely through the excavation of hillforts and graveyards and dug up more than I thought possible. Mind you, I am suspicious to some degree of the chronology of all this. She lists some dates very confidently without clarifying how we know. In the absence of coin or pottery data I can only assume it’s based on radiocarbon dating which is only accurate to within 70 years or so; a large margin of error when discussing developments over the course of two centuries. One suspects this is an area where footnotes and direct references would be important. Still, one of the strengths of the work is that the same basic trends are described from Birdoswald in the north to Cadbury in the south in a way that brings coherence to an incoherent age.
The thing is (and this is where the criticisms will start), the interesting and innovative approach used in the earlier chapters starts to get decidedly repetitive and frustrating when it continues to be used for the entire book. Sub-Roman Britain was changing so rapidly that a survey of individual settlements reveals massive changes in a short period of time. Once we reach the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons the rate of change starts to become a bit more static. The story here is of the gradual development of larger national identities (Angle, Saxon, Jute, etc.) and the creation of new status hierarchies. The evidence here is entirely archaeological, and in fact the literary evidence is explicitly discarded. Which is fine, but… do we need two chapters looking at grave goods in immense detail explaining the new methods of demonstrating wealth? It seems a basic idea, so why do we need to spend so long looking at specific examples of the same trends? As with so much of this book, the account seems to be going into much greater detail than needed to prove basic points.
One thing that makes this even more difficult is the fact that I can’t fully understand how she’s coming to her conclusions. She’s clearly chomping at the bit and struggling to avoid historiographical questions as she discusses what can and cannot be learned from inhumations. She is very much of the opinion that the Anglo-Saxons were neither an invasive warrior elite nor a distinct group of people but were rather independent farmers who established communities in the ruined and abandoned east of Britain. So far as I’m aware this is going against the general consensus, which is what she’s struggling to imply without directly saying so. Unless you know something about the debates in the field you’ll go away with the impression that the only alternatives are her view and that of the obviously biased contemporary accounts. It’s very hard to confront historiographical questions when you can’t acknowledge there are any. Mattingly pretty much ignored that directive and I’m a bit surprised she didn’t too.
The reason this really matters is that for half a century archaeology has been moving away from the idea of determining ethnicity solely through burial. In the old days they viewed changes in burial customs as a sign a new race of people had taken over, but this has been shown to be false for decades now: burial rituals shift surprisingly easily and are often adopted by invaders. So many migratory peoples reported by early archaeologists have been shown to be the same as the existing population that it’s hard to know what to make of it. This isn’t to say that her approach is outdated or incorrect. It’s certainly widely-read using material from many different sites. The problem is that I simply don’t know where it stands with regards to these questions or the broader issue of methodology. And this is one of those subjects where you really can’t just pick up facts by implication. How are graves and other sites being dated? How reliable are those dates? What other interpretations have been offered and why are they problematic? I see that she has since published a book on what sounds like the first part of this one (The Material Fall of Roman Britain), which suggests to me that she recognized this issue. But that ultimately doesn’t help this book.
The really frustrating thing for me is that the entire book is like this. Once we reach the better-documented 7th century and beyond it continues to focus exclusively on material culture. We know quite a bit about the conversion of England thanks to Bede, but his account is mostly used to fill in gaps. There is certainly value to confirming the widespread Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England, but I really have to wonder how many pages of examples we need to establish that more and more Christian artifacts appear in graves during the time period Bede says the English converted. Is this really the place for such an account? Wouldn’t a summary of the gradual change in different areas make more sense? This is meant to be a broader approach that will capture more than the traditional narrative histories, but the sole topic is material culture. We’ve got subtopics like identity, hierarchy, and (on a more general archaeological level) the growth of towns and industry, but nothing else. The book obviously has nothing to say about war and politics, but it also has nothing to say about language, myths, art, theology, culture, the aristocracy, law, etc. I found it all quite limited. By the end I was skimming, and I never do that with history books.
I complained about some of the limitations of the last book (even though I liked it overall) but at the end of the day I came away with a better understanding of Roman Britain. I don’t think I did here. The details about the growth of towns was excellent and the idea that the economy was (unnoticed by any authors) dramatically growing in complexity and scale over the 10th and 11th century was genuinely interesting. But outside that I don’t think I can say anything specific about Anglo-Saxon culture. Not even, and here is where I find myself somewhat confounded, at the local level. How were farms run? What sort of tools did they use? What sort of social structure did they have? How did they relate to the larger estates? What about their laws? Traditions? Culture? How were monasteries and abbeys organized? How did they relate to their communities? These are all questions I came away knowing little or nothing about. Part of it is simply that archaeology just isn’t enough to tell us this kind of story, outside of some of the artifacts they used and the physical structures they had. But there is more, much more, that could have been said about life in Anglo-Saxon England which simply isn’t.
So I didn’t like this book on the whole. I feel in particular that it will really not fit in with the rest of the series, which seems to be aiming at providing broad-based introductions covering multiple themes. A history book that manages to break free from the top-down approach sounds like a great idea, but I just don’t think it can be done with the data we have. It certainly can’t be done without discussing alternative possibilities and historiography. I like the idea of telling a narrative without the usual narrative elements, but while this book shows it can be done to some degree I feel it really dropped the ball by ignoring everything not tied to this approach. A narrative history composed solely of political/military events would have been equally limited, and I don’t see why it should be different when the narrative is solely focused on other issues. I’m primarily a military/political historian so maybe some of that bias is creeping through here, but I feel that anyone looking for something beyond a study of material culture and some settlement patterns will come away disappointed.
If you’re looking for a better guide to the Anglo-Saxon period I’m not sure how helpful I can be as I’ve found the period generally in need of better accounts and was hoping this book would fix that. Rory Naismith’s Early Medieval Britain offers a nice summation of Anglo-Saxon England, albeit in a textbook format. James Campbell's The Anglo Saxons is a classic. If you’re not averse to political history, Pollard’s Alfred the Great is a good biography. On a more popular front, I’ve heard good things about Max Adams’ The First Kingdom and The King in the North.
The Penguin History of Britain is a replacement for the Pelican History of England that came out in the 1950s and ‘60s and served as the go-to source for accessible multivolume British history. I’m starting my review off with this fact because I’m reading through the series in order and my opinions of the books will depend both on how well they stand up as individual volumes as well as how they fare as part of the broader series.
This book was rather a mixed bag for me. While I appreciated the early chapters and liked the way she described her approach in theory, in practice I found it somewhat lacking. A lot of this has to do with the series it makes a part of and the fine line it is trying to walk. She’s open at the beginning (with what I have to regard as an apologetic air) about the requirements set by the general editor. Namely: no footnotes, no historiography, and it had to be equally useful for general readers, students and professional historians. I feel that these restrictions held back the book from fully being what it wanted to be while at the same time I feel that her approach was not necessarily in line with the series’ goals. Since most of these questions concern its broader role in the series I’ll be putting them on the backburner and start off looking at the good parts (of which there certainly are a few) before going into the problems I have.
The basic goal of the book (stated at the beginning) is to provide a narrative account of British history that doesn’t focus around the comings and goings of political/military elites and instead reclaim the viewpoints of more average people. Books of this sort are increasingly common these days, but they are generally focused on the modern era where our sources enable us to recover the voices of those way down the social scale. In fact, she cites Seeking a Role (the second-to-last book of the New Oxford History of England) as a grand example of this. Taking this approach to Medieval Britain is an interesting idea and one I’ve never seen done before. The problem is (as I said) the lack of sources for the lower classes. Little documentation was ever made of this period (particularly in the earlier centuries) and not only has much of what was written down been lost it is unlikely that any of it ever came from a non-elite perspective. Ultimately, that leaves us with archaeology and I simply don’t feel that this can capture people’s lived experience in a meaningful way. Maybe it’s a limit of my imagination, but I look at a brooch and I see a brooch. There’s information that can be mined from it, but I don’t feel any personal connection to the individuals who owned it the way I might if I had something written by them. I don’t think this book changed my mind on that.
One of the main complaints I made about the last book in this series is that it deprioritized narrative entirely to the point where it almost felt more like a textbook than an introductory work. I attributed part of the problem to the necessary reliance on archaeological evidence, but this book shows that that was perhaps not as serious an issue as I thought. This is a fine example of how non-narrative material can be presented in a chronological manner to give a sense of narrative momentum. The account of the gradual development of an English identity (or identities), the rise of towns and trading depots, and the creation of a status hierarchy, all of this is presented as a continuingly evolving society. It’s not the story I was looking to see, but I do understand it’s value.
The first chapters on Roman and sub-Roman Britain are probably the most interesting. We have basically no written sources for this period and her obviously far-reaching knowledge of the archaeological evidence is put to good use in building a picture of what life in the ruins of Roman Britain was like. Her reconstruction of the development of status hierarchies is great. Based on the settlement patterns and homesteads constructed she presents the successful Roman villa and urban elites turning into more hereditary lords. The description of the change to a more simplistic form of community was told entirely through the excavation of hillforts and graveyards and dug up more than I thought possible. Mind you, I am suspicious to some degree of the chronology of all this. She lists some dates very confidently without clarifying how we know. In the absence of coin or pottery data I can only assume it’s based on radiocarbon dating which is only accurate to within 70 years or so; a large margin of error when discussing developments over the course of two centuries. One suspects this is an area where footnotes and direct references would be important. Still, one of the strengths of the work is that the same basic trends are described from Birdoswald in the north to Cadbury in the south in a way that brings coherence to an incoherent age.
The thing is (and this is where the criticisms will start), the interesting and innovative approach used in the earlier chapters starts to get decidedly repetitive and frustrating when it continues to be used for the entire book. Sub-Roman Britain was changing so rapidly that a survey of individual settlements reveals massive changes in a short period of time. Once we reach the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons the rate of change starts to become a bit more static. The story here is of the gradual development of larger national identities (Angle, Saxon, Jute, etc.) and the creation of new status hierarchies. The evidence here is entirely archaeological, and in fact the literary evidence is explicitly discarded. Which is fine, but… do we need two chapters looking at grave goods in immense detail explaining the new methods of demonstrating wealth? It seems a basic idea, so why do we need to spend so long looking at specific examples of the same trends? As with so much of this book, the account seems to be going into much greater detail than needed to prove basic points.
One thing that makes this even more difficult is the fact that I can’t fully understand how she’s coming to her conclusions. She’s clearly chomping at the bit and struggling to avoid historiographical questions as she discusses what can and cannot be learned from inhumations. She is very much of the opinion that the Anglo-Saxons were neither an invasive warrior elite nor a distinct group of people but were rather independent farmers who established communities in the ruined and abandoned east of Britain. So far as I’m aware this is going against the general consensus, which is what she’s struggling to imply without directly saying so. Unless you know something about the debates in the field you’ll go away with the impression that the only alternatives are her view and that of the obviously biased contemporary accounts. It’s very hard to confront historiographical questions when you can’t acknowledge there are any. Mattingly pretty much ignored that directive and I’m a bit surprised she didn’t too.
The reason this really matters is that for half a century archaeology has been moving away from the idea of determining ethnicity solely through burial. In the old days they viewed changes in burial customs as a sign a new race of people had taken over, but this has been shown to be false for decades now: burial rituals shift surprisingly easily and are often adopted by invaders. So many migratory peoples reported by early archaeologists have been shown to be the same as the existing population that it’s hard to know what to make of it. This isn’t to say that her approach is outdated or incorrect. It’s certainly widely-read using material from many different sites. The problem is that I simply don’t know where it stands with regards to these questions or the broader issue of methodology. And this is one of those subjects where you really can’t just pick up facts by implication. How are graves and other sites being dated? How reliable are those dates? What other interpretations have been offered and why are they problematic? I see that she has since published a book on what sounds like the first part of this one (The Material Fall of Roman Britain), which suggests to me that she recognized this issue. But that ultimately doesn’t help this book.
The really frustrating thing for me is that the entire book is like this. Once we reach the better-documented 7th century and beyond it continues to focus exclusively on material culture. We know quite a bit about the conversion of England thanks to Bede, but his account is mostly used to fill in gaps. There is certainly value to confirming the widespread Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England, but I really have to wonder how many pages of examples we need to establish that more and more Christian artifacts appear in graves during the time period Bede says the English converted. Is this really the place for such an account? Wouldn’t a summary of the gradual change in different areas make more sense? This is meant to be a broader approach that will capture more than the traditional narrative histories, but the sole topic is material culture. We’ve got subtopics like identity, hierarchy, and (on a more general archaeological level) the growth of towns and industry, but nothing else. The book obviously has nothing to say about war and politics, but it also has nothing to say about language, myths, art, theology, culture, the aristocracy, law, etc. I found it all quite limited. By the end I was skimming, and I never do that with history books.
I complained about some of the limitations of the last book (even though I liked it overall) but at the end of the day I came away with a better understanding of Roman Britain. I don’t think I did here. The details about the growth of towns was excellent and the idea that the economy was (unnoticed by any authors) dramatically growing in complexity and scale over the 10th and 11th century was genuinely interesting. But outside that I don’t think I can say anything specific about Anglo-Saxon culture. Not even, and here is where I find myself somewhat confounded, at the local level. How were farms run? What sort of tools did they use? What sort of social structure did they have? How did they relate to the larger estates? What about their laws? Traditions? Culture? How were monasteries and abbeys organized? How did they relate to their communities? These are all questions I came away knowing little or nothing about. Part of it is simply that archaeology just isn’t enough to tell us this kind of story, outside of some of the artifacts they used and the physical structures they had. But there is more, much more, that could have been said about life in Anglo-Saxon England which simply isn’t.
So I didn’t like this book on the whole. I feel in particular that it will really not fit in with the rest of the series, which seems to be aiming at providing broad-based introductions covering multiple themes. A history book that manages to break free from the top-down approach sounds like a great idea, but I just don’t think it can be done with the data we have. It certainly can’t be done without discussing alternative possibilities and historiography. I like the idea of telling a narrative without the usual narrative elements, but while this book shows it can be done to some degree I feel it really dropped the ball by ignoring everything not tied to this approach. A narrative history composed solely of political/military events would have been equally limited, and I don’t see why it should be different when the narrative is solely focused on other issues. I’m primarily a military/political historian so maybe some of that bias is creeping through here, but I feel that anyone looking for something beyond a study of material culture and some settlement patterns will come away disappointed.
If you’re looking for a better guide to the Anglo-Saxon period I’m not sure how helpful I can be as I’ve found the period generally in need of better accounts and was hoping this book would fix that. Rory Naismith’s Early Medieval Britain offers a nice summation of Anglo-Saxon England, albeit in a textbook format. James Campbell's The Anglo Saxons is a classic. If you’re not averse to political history, Pollard’s Alfred the Great is a good biography. On a more popular front, I’ve heard good things about Max Adams’ The First Kingdom and The King in the North.
May 22, 2017
Britain After Rome is a rather exhaustive, not to say exhausting, history of Britain after the Romano-British period. It focuses on material culture like grave goods and excavations, rather than the texts and what we think we know. Sometimes these contradict each other, and sometimes they fit together in illuminating ways; Fleming takes her time unpacking both situations. It results in a broader look at society than we might see elsewhere, including the lives of women and the fashions of clothing, as well as the big questions of politics, commerce and religion. (Not that the role of women is a small question, but it’s one about which we know less.)
I did enjoy reading it, but I had to take it in little parcels rather than sitting down to read right through. Despite the avoidance of extensive footnotes, it feels scholarly, dense, lengthy. There’s a lot of material and some of it is lingered over very lovingly.
Originally reviewed for The Bibliophibian.
I did enjoy reading it, but I had to take it in little parcels rather than sitting down to read right through. Despite the avoidance of extensive footnotes, it feels scholarly, dense, lengthy. There’s a lot of material and some of it is lingered over very lovingly.
Originally reviewed for The Bibliophibian.
November 30, 2012
This is a classic example of a book that I would see in a bookstore or find in a library and really want to read. I know nothing of early medieval Britain...nothing, I would say to myself, in an attempt to justify spending time on this, when I know full well that I have way too many books assigned for my classes, and can't possibly find time for a few hundred pages on a period of history one thousand years earlier than my field.
But then this book was assigned! Hooray! Medieval Britain! I'm lucky Robin Fleming teaches at my school.
I just get so irritated when I pick up other history books about England or Scotland or France, and they zip through a thousand years of history in the first few pages. I know it is because the textual sources are lacking. But really, in that massive 900 page history of London you have seen in bookstores, the years 50 - 1066 C.E. are covered in the first 35 pages. There is more to learn about centuries of Roman, Celtic, Angle, Saxon, and Viking settlement and interaction. Because textual evidence is so lacking, and what little text there is inevitably concerns only kings and/or influential churchmen, Fleming must weave together a story from material evidence. She weaves well. Through artifacts found in medieval graves, medical evidence provided by skeletons, the traces of the built environment recoverable through excavation, even the entomology of medieval refuse heaps, Fleming is able to provide both a broader view of medieval British life and one filled with richer human detail. A history from below becomes possible even for a time when hardly any textual evidence exists for a history from above.
This sort of history is particularly good for exploring the lives of women...indeed, it seems as if the farther back in history you go, and the fewer textual sources you have, the more visible women's lives become. Authors tended to be men, but female bones survive just as well as male bones. The stories Fleming is able to piece together here are fascinating as well because of the mystery surrounding them. Historians can speculate about skeletons showing signs of execution, or diseased bodies buried in complex ways, but a certain amount of mystery remains and really fires the imagination. The kind of everyday life factors that Fleming brings in are fascinating too - what was it like to live in a society where hardly anyone was over the age of 35, where most people were in constant discomfort, where gangs of sickly orphans were forever roaming? What a crazy foreign country the past is.
This could be read and appreciated by anyone interested in the time, not just historians. There are no footnotes, and it is compellingly readable.
But then this book was assigned! Hooray! Medieval Britain! I'm lucky Robin Fleming teaches at my school.
I just get so irritated when I pick up other history books about England or Scotland or France, and they zip through a thousand years of history in the first few pages. I know it is because the textual sources are lacking. But really, in that massive 900 page history of London you have seen in bookstores, the years 50 - 1066 C.E. are covered in the first 35 pages. There is more to learn about centuries of Roman, Celtic, Angle, Saxon, and Viking settlement and interaction. Because textual evidence is so lacking, and what little text there is inevitably concerns only kings and/or influential churchmen, Fleming must weave together a story from material evidence. She weaves well. Through artifacts found in medieval graves, medical evidence provided by skeletons, the traces of the built environment recoverable through excavation, even the entomology of medieval refuse heaps, Fleming is able to provide both a broader view of medieval British life and one filled with richer human detail. A history from below becomes possible even for a time when hardly any textual evidence exists for a history from above.
This sort of history is particularly good for exploring the lives of women...indeed, it seems as if the farther back in history you go, and the fewer textual sources you have, the more visible women's lives become. Authors tended to be men, but female bones survive just as well as male bones. The stories Fleming is able to piece together here are fascinating as well because of the mystery surrounding them. Historians can speculate about skeletons showing signs of execution, or diseased bodies buried in complex ways, but a certain amount of mystery remains and really fires the imagination. The kind of everyday life factors that Fleming brings in are fascinating too - what was it like to live in a society where hardly anyone was over the age of 35, where most people were in constant discomfort, where gangs of sickly orphans were forever roaming? What a crazy foreign country the past is.
This could be read and appreciated by anyone interested in the time, not just historians. There are no footnotes, and it is compellingly readable.
October 4, 2018
It's funny how this book contradicts the first one in the series--Rome here has a much stronger influence. I'd love to get the two authors in a room together and hear them argue it out. They both make good cases which would make it an interesting argument.
This one was much easier to read than the first. Not surprising because the earlier the time period, the less evidence there is. It is well worth reading.
I'm on to the third volume now.
This one was much easier to read than the first. Not surprising because the earlier the time period, the less evidence there is. It is well worth reading.
I'm on to the third volume now.
Read
August 29, 2024Sorry book I didn’t mean to take 3 months to read you, I’m just bad at nonfiction. This was an interesting read because instead of focusing on texts and history and events, it focused on graves, archeological evidence, and monuments to learn more about the period between the Romans and the Normans in Britain.
April 1, 2017
In more ways than one, grave goods aren’t for everybody. Had the world turned on a different axis, and I’d not been so attached to luxuries like Brie or had not been so lazy, grave goods would have been my bread and butter. And even I found Fleming’s storytelling boring. It didn’t help that she has a reflex towards redundancy in her writing: her text is peppered with “in actual fact” and “standard modus operandi”. (I ground my teeth every time I saw those phrases.) But Britain after Rome and I profited from how much I loathed SPQR.
I enjoyed the archaeology of early Britain. It is worth remembering, as Marc Morris wrote in The Norman Conquest, that “scholars who [study the Early Middle Ages] can usually get all their primary source material on a single shelf and still have room for ornaments” (4). The story really gets exciting (comparatively) around the sixth century. The rise of the ecclesia was a highlight — if only because Fleming could then refer to the written sources as well as the physical evidence. The last chapter, “Life and Death in Medieval Britain,” is a gem, and I would have begun the book with it. I don’t know why medievalists save the humanization of their subjects for last. I bumped up my rating because that chapter was so very good, and it enhanced the preceding twelve chapters.
I enjoyed the archaeology of early Britain. It is worth remembering, as Marc Morris wrote in The Norman Conquest, that “scholars who [study the Early Middle Ages] can usually get all their primary source material on a single shelf and still have room for ornaments” (4). The story really gets exciting (comparatively) around the sixth century. The rise of the ecclesia was a highlight — if only because Fleming could then refer to the written sources as well as the physical evidence. The last chapter, “Life and Death in Medieval Britain,” is a gem, and I would have begun the book with it. I don’t know why medievalists save the humanization of their subjects for last. I bumped up my rating because that chapter was so very good, and it enhanced the preceding twelve chapters.
May 25, 2017
Any book on the history of Britain from 400 to 1070 that begins by referencing George W Bush Jr. on its very first page is going to be a bit of a mixed bag. I realize authors should be open about their influences but the fact that the author had to live eight years under a Bush administration does not make her stand out from the hundreds of millions of others who also did, nor does it really have anything to do with the subject matter at hand except to allow the author to vent a little in print. Lastly it's an unwelcome note to those of us reading about the distant past precisely so that we might escape having to thnk about the present.
The book is supposedly an introductory history text for that era. The problem is the prose is just a little too dense to make for casual readers while also being too simplistic and lacking necessary rigor (ex. no footnotes) for more academic readers. Add to that the author's occasional personal statements added in thst border on sanctimonious. Yes, it's a shame that most histories of the era tend to favor the rulers, as the author bemoans at one point, and not the common people. Maybe it's because we've all ignored commoners up to this precise moment. Or maybe its because there are few if any historical records on commoners from those centuries to draw from.
The author does do excellent work in drawing from recent archaeological finds to supplement the gaps in historical records, an approach that hopefully current and future historians will continue to utilize. There is also quite a bit of knowledge in the book and almost any reader will walk away from it having learned at least something.
The book is supposedly an introductory history text for that era. The problem is the prose is just a little too dense to make for casual readers while also being too simplistic and lacking necessary rigor (ex. no footnotes) for more academic readers. Add to that the author's occasional personal statements added in thst border on sanctimonious. Yes, it's a shame that most histories of the era tend to favor the rulers, as the author bemoans at one point, and not the common people. Maybe it's because we've all ignored commoners up to this precise moment. Or maybe its because there are few if any historical records on commoners from those centuries to draw from.
The author does do excellent work in drawing from recent archaeological finds to supplement the gaps in historical records, an approach that hopefully current and future historians will continue to utilize. There is also quite a bit of knowledge in the book and almost any reader will walk away from it having learned at least something.
July 17, 2015
Robin Fleming very consciously takes a less traditional approach to the Anglo Saxon period than most; there's relatively little about political history, though there is some, and it might well be argued that this is a more balanced approach, and much less focus on what the textual history tells us.
I really enjoyed it; it has a distinct flavour which is at times challenging and invigorating, and at others mildly annoying - it's a book I think that makes you react. I loved the real insights that the focus on archaeological evidence gave into the lives of everyone, not just the social winners; though at the same time, there's sometimes too much of the archaeology - the detail can get int he way, and the frustrating thing is that there are often no answers, of course, to the story burials tell - for example the woman buried on top of another, probably buried alive half crushed by a big stone.
The bit I found least convincing was the idea that much of the early migration was peaceful, migrants fitting into a kind of egalitarian community building. There's no doubt that generally the author's vision of the real world of the migrations is much more convincing than the older, traditional view of the migrations would have it, but I help but feel it must have been accompanied, even in the early years, by a substantial degree of violence.
The last chapter and the attempt to paint a picture of what life must have been like is brilliant, and I'd say this book, accompanies by others, is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the Anglo Saxon age.
I really enjoyed it; it has a distinct flavour which is at times challenging and invigorating, and at others mildly annoying - it's a book I think that makes you react. I loved the real insights that the focus on archaeological evidence gave into the lives of everyone, not just the social winners; though at the same time, there's sometimes too much of the archaeology - the detail can get int he way, and the frustrating thing is that there are often no answers, of course, to the story burials tell - for example the woman buried on top of another, probably buried alive half crushed by a big stone.
The bit I found least convincing was the idea that much of the early migration was peaceful, migrants fitting into a kind of egalitarian community building. There's no doubt that generally the author's vision of the real world of the migrations is much more convincing than the older, traditional view of the migrations would have it, but I help but feel it must have been accompanied, even in the early years, by a substantial degree of violence.
The last chapter and the attempt to paint a picture of what life must have been like is brilliant, and I'd say this book, accompanies by others, is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the Anglo Saxon age.
July 21, 2014
Absolute MUST READ, if you want to know what life was like for the 99% that weren't kings or bishops. Fascinating narrative, woven together with thousands of threads of material evidence. If you want to write history using archaeology, you have to read this book. This is how history should be written, but so rarely is.
September 10, 2016
What a boring book . I'm really having trouble getting through this one. I can't understand why people are so enthousiastic . The archeological evidence up to the eighth century is not very compelling. It's still a lot of guessing and this period remains pretty dark.
January 23, 2026
This took me so long to read just because I found a large chunk in the middle so dry and hard to get through. The first half was really interesting and contained a lot of really great archaeological evidence, however, I would say it had a habit of ignoring some later written sources that might have been applicable. Then, once it reaches the period of christianity entering Britain the pacing and interest completely dropped off for me, it felt like pages and pages of reading the same thing over and over. But then once it reached the development of land ownership, and especially the final chapter looking at illness and death in the medieval period and how it can be read in the archaeological remains, was great!
October 13, 2021
This is one of those rare cases in which I did not finish a non-fiction book I started. I stopped reading because I saw that I had good reason to not trust the author. Ms Fleming insists early and often that the people who came from the continent to Britain after the Roman legions left came in peace, as settlers. Not warriors! At least until I stopped reading, she kept the Angles and Saxons near to the east coast, and settled on land that for some mysterious reason no one previously wanted. No invasion, little or no migration, just a few boys off on a lark who decided to stay.
This rang bells for me immediately, it seems to preposterous. An entire turnover of language, and settlement over much of the island, with no fighting? I don't buy it. So why does she insist? If you've read post-1960s academic anthropology or archaeology to any degree you'll know why. At the time, both fields were being taken over by Marxists and leftists of various stripes, and for them, colonialism and imperialism were the enemies. They applied their ideology to the studies of cultures hundreds and even thousands of years ago, and invented a world in which there was no major migration, and certainly no warrior led invasions.
So now the Angles and Saxons and Jutes asked nicely, and the Romano-British welcomed them in and handed over their land. Absurd. I did do a quick search, and found a review in an academic publication that mentioned Fleming's materialist and Marxist viewpoint. Bingo! These kooks have to re-write history to make sure that no one thinks that taking over other people's land is acceptable - even if it happened thousands of years ago, and is entirely irrelevant to today. I'll find another author and another book to read.
This rang bells for me immediately, it seems to preposterous. An entire turnover of language, and settlement over much of the island, with no fighting? I don't buy it. So why does she insist? If you've read post-1960s academic anthropology or archaeology to any degree you'll know why. At the time, both fields were being taken over by Marxists and leftists of various stripes, and for them, colonialism and imperialism were the enemies. They applied their ideology to the studies of cultures hundreds and even thousands of years ago, and invented a world in which there was no major migration, and certainly no warrior led invasions.
So now the Angles and Saxons and Jutes asked nicely, and the Romano-British welcomed them in and handed over their land. Absurd. I did do a quick search, and found a review in an academic publication that mentioned Fleming's materialist and Marxist viewpoint. Bingo! These kooks have to re-write history to make sure that no one thinks that taking over other people's land is acceptable - even if it happened thousands of years ago, and is entirely irrelevant to today. I'll find another author and another book to read.
September 20, 2015
I found this book to be very 'lumpy'. That is, there were chapters that I found terribly interesting and others that I wanted to page through as quickly as possible. For example, I found the final chapter, and the chapters at the beginning of the narrative to be the best. The ecclesiastic-related chapters were less interesting.
Maps could have been used better. As an American, my knowledge of contemporary Britain's geography is as hazy as the exact boundaries of Mercia. While there were adequate historical maps, the contemporary place names sent me to other references.
Finally, what to believe? The book has more than one incongruity. For example, the 'Follow the Money' explanation never explained what the primarily agricultural, and backward by continental standards British were trading for all the foreign silver that entered Britain. This book is food for thought.
Maps could have been used better. As an American, my knowledge of contemporary Britain's geography is as hazy as the exact boundaries of Mercia. While there were adequate historical maps, the contemporary place names sent me to other references.
Finally, what to believe? The book has more than one incongruity. For example, the 'Follow the Money' explanation never explained what the primarily agricultural, and backward by continental standards British were trading for all the foreign silver that entered Britain. This book is food for thought.
May 3, 2022
I enjoyed this, it was a book of minute details. Sometimes quite dark, the authors intrigue shone through, in her writing about persons so long ago buried in the darkness of time, truely the dark ages. I have a feeling she protected the reader from the dreariness and violence of death in these times. Not gloating on mortality. I had forgotten about English silver pennies and enjoyed finding out all about this wealth. Fleming later clarified that the silver had been exported from " Germany". Even sections on the grueome Vikings were not gleefully bloody but more about conglomeration and growth.
May 21, 2016
Excellent overall, and with a broad approach both geographically and chronologically which avoids the usual trap of histories of this period; namely, over-focus on Alfred the Great and the generations either side of him in Wessex and southern England. My one criticism is that, in her attempt to avoid obsessing over high politics, Fleming perhaps glosses over political developments a little too readily. Still, a fascinating study and well-worth reading.
October 4, 2014
This is the best history of the little people ever. A few Archbishops and a king or two are mention but the majority of the text is about the average person and their lives during the Dark Ages. Full of amazing details.
November 25, 2012
An extremely thorough examination of ancient graves.
October 27, 2013
The writer is a professor of history, but in this book she concentrates on what we can learn about early medieval Britain from archaeology and physical anthropology. She is not so much interested in the high politics that interests contemporaneous writers and most historians. The usual historical narrative is there only as a framework. For example, the crucial dynastic events from the death of Edgar the Peaceable in 975 to the Conquest in 1066, including the rise and fall of the Danish dynasty, are dealt with in one page. Maybe that's all they deserve. Instead, we get an illuminating emphasis on the lived experience of people in ordinary life--building prosperity, coping with depredations, and so forth. The breadth of scholarship is amazing, and the integration of archaeology with documentary history well done. Most (but not all) of the author's judgments seem soundly based on the evidence.
The author wants to present what everyday life was really like, for the laboring classes as well as the aristocracy. Considering the paucity of written sources and the limitations of archaeology, this requires the use of imagination. However, I think she tells us a little too freely of what the medieval Britons "must have," "could have," "would have," or "might have" done. Some of this is necessary if we are to say anything at all about the subject of everyday life. However, it's dangerous--human beings very often see only evidence that confirms their previously-formed opinions when confronted with a mass of randomly selected data. Can we be confident that Dr. Fleming's judgments are not colored by preconceived notions? Alas, this book is marred by a pervasive class-oriented Marxist point of view. Whenever luxury items appear in the archaeological record, it means not that society is getting richer, but that income disparities are increasing as the powerful expropriate the labor of the weak. The rich apparently never get that way by unusual talent or effort. People in rich graves are pronounced "privileged," though all we really know is that they were rich. People "scramble" to the top of society (p. 96), they don't work their way there. They build barrows to proclaim "rights over the labor of others" (96), not to memorialize the dead. Jewelry is always bought to advertise status, not because it is beautiful. Collecting rent is "extracting surplus." A place called "Chiswick" must have supplied expropriated surpluses of cheese to the lord. The same word is used for "slave" and "foreigner" to claim a spurious ethnic distinction from slaves, not because captured foreigners were often reduced to slavery. (Our own word "slave" comes from "Slav.") The varied diet of the rich is explained as status displays, as if delicious food were not sufficient motivation. Even alms-giving is attributed to status-seeking (p. 311)! Dr. Fleming acknowledges the existence in the late Anglo-Saxon period of a class of prosperous farmers, merchants, etc. (p. 313), but seems to think them insignificant compared to the mass of peasants.
This pervasive class-conscious reductionism is easily recognized and accounted for, and much can be learned from Dr. Fleming's impressive scholarship despite it. However, one is left with lingering doubts when she gives judgments without giving adequate evidence behind them. We are assured that late Roman aristocrats in Britain spoke "hypercorrect Latin" (p. 79), though we really have no evidence at all about how they spoke. Rather too much is deduced from clothes fashions. We are told that the wealth of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 7th century was "more likely to come from conquest than long slow development," though it must have been created by some sort of development before it was conquered. We don't know why she is so sure that kings were not involved in the founding of the first AS towns (p. 204)--is this concluded simply from the absence of evidence to the contrary? She believes that the growing imposition of the king's justice was harsher and more arbitrary than village justice (365), without giving a reason. She describes at length how the famous 2009 Staffordshire hoard was a valued collection of heirlooms and mementos, but I have seen the hoard in a museum exhibit and I think this random collection of broken gold bric-a-brac is much more likely the result of stripping the aristocratic dead on some forgotten battlefield. She makes the interesting point that the only AS coin minted (the silver penny, worth 1/4 of a sheep carcass) was too valuable for the ordinary transactions of life, and was probably only needed to pay rent and taxes (p. 312). There must have been a secondary barter and subsistence economy. This is reasonable enough, but she attributes the great social divisions of the time to the lack of low-denomination coins, even though similar wide division are common enough in societies with small coins, and those without any coins at all.
The period from the departure of Rome to the establishment of the AS kingdoms is particularly interesting to me, and Dr. Fleming's approach this period is particularly odd. The figures of the conventional and plausible documentary history--Vortigern, Ambrosius Aurelianus, and Arthur--are not even mentioned, so we do not know why Dr. Fleming ignores them. The usual story is that the British strongman Vortigern invited Saxon mercenaries to come in and help fight the Irish, but they revolted and invited their families and friends to join them in settling the land. Then Ambrisius and Arthur organized a British counter-attack that stopped the Saxon progress for a generation. Instead, Dr. Fleming sees an egalatarian and almost peaceful Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, pointing to AS homesteads on marginal land and British jewelry in AS burials from the period (and vice versa). She portrays small groups of AS settlers moving into ungoverned areas and living next to British neighbors. I suppose their children played together. The later AS kingdoms were the result of a gradual (but startlingly rapid) indigenous growth in a mixed British-Saxon society, as local leaders became more and more powerful by subjecting other local leaders. As far as I can tell, she concludes this mostly from the absence of evidence for anything more organized, or for any large-scale violence. I say, if their children played together then far more Celtic words would have made their way into English than the paltry few that we have. I don't find the egalatarian mixed society to be plausible. Some law, either Romano-British or Saxon, must have been used to settle disputes--which was it? If the AS kingdoms were a natural local growth from a kind of Rousseauian state of nature, then some of the small kingdoms in the area would have been founded by local Roman officials that managed to hang on to power, as happened west of the AS settlements. At the least, some of the eastern kingdoms would have been led by Britons, but none of them were. It seems to me overwhelmingly clear to me that the advent of the Saxons was a conquest, not a peaceful migration, and that the Britons were too weak and disorganized for large-scale resistance. Those who did not flee were subjugated.
Dr. Fleming does give convincing evidence that the British economy had collapsed in the later 300s, before the Saxons arrived. The small market towns around the countryside withered away, as did the walled cities, though without signs of widespread destruction. My guess is that as the Roman armies were withdrawn in this period, local trade became more and more difficult because of thieves and small-scale brigandage, including Irish and Pictish. Eventually things got bad enough that most of the ruling class left for the relative security of the Continent. In the east, the remaining British peasants, with no leadership or martial tradition, were no match for the invading Saxons. In the west, with a little more time, a few remaining families who had governed under the Romans managed to set up small kingdoms. That story seems more likely to me than Dr. Fleming's.
On the other hand, I think Dr. Fleming is convincing when she says that the foundation stories of the AS kingdoms were the product of a later period, attempts to add luster to the family that won the later contest for power. That actually fits well with the stories in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle of groups coming over in two or three or five boats--smaller groups than you'd expect from an invading army. I suppose other small groups of boats arrived, but were not memorialized in the Chronicle because the families in them did not enjoy great power later on.
The author wants to present what everyday life was really like, for the laboring classes as well as the aristocracy. Considering the paucity of written sources and the limitations of archaeology, this requires the use of imagination. However, I think she tells us a little too freely of what the medieval Britons "must have," "could have," "would have," or "might have" done. Some of this is necessary if we are to say anything at all about the subject of everyday life. However, it's dangerous--human beings very often see only evidence that confirms their previously-formed opinions when confronted with a mass of randomly selected data. Can we be confident that Dr. Fleming's judgments are not colored by preconceived notions? Alas, this book is marred by a pervasive class-oriented Marxist point of view. Whenever luxury items appear in the archaeological record, it means not that society is getting richer, but that income disparities are increasing as the powerful expropriate the labor of the weak. The rich apparently never get that way by unusual talent or effort. People in rich graves are pronounced "privileged," though all we really know is that they were rich. People "scramble" to the top of society (p. 96), they don't work their way there. They build barrows to proclaim "rights over the labor of others" (96), not to memorialize the dead. Jewelry is always bought to advertise status, not because it is beautiful. Collecting rent is "extracting surplus." A place called "Chiswick" must have supplied expropriated surpluses of cheese to the lord. The same word is used for "slave" and "foreigner" to claim a spurious ethnic distinction from slaves, not because captured foreigners were often reduced to slavery. (Our own word "slave" comes from "Slav.") The varied diet of the rich is explained as status displays, as if delicious food were not sufficient motivation. Even alms-giving is attributed to status-seeking (p. 311)! Dr. Fleming acknowledges the existence in the late Anglo-Saxon period of a class of prosperous farmers, merchants, etc. (p. 313), but seems to think them insignificant compared to the mass of peasants.
This pervasive class-conscious reductionism is easily recognized and accounted for, and much can be learned from Dr. Fleming's impressive scholarship despite it. However, one is left with lingering doubts when she gives judgments without giving adequate evidence behind them. We are assured that late Roman aristocrats in Britain spoke "hypercorrect Latin" (p. 79), though we really have no evidence at all about how they spoke. Rather too much is deduced from clothes fashions. We are told that the wealth of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 7th century was "more likely to come from conquest than long slow development," though it must have been created by some sort of development before it was conquered. We don't know why she is so sure that kings were not involved in the founding of the first AS towns (p. 204)--is this concluded simply from the absence of evidence to the contrary? She believes that the growing imposition of the king's justice was harsher and more arbitrary than village justice (365), without giving a reason. She describes at length how the famous 2009 Staffordshire hoard was a valued collection of heirlooms and mementos, but I have seen the hoard in a museum exhibit and I think this random collection of broken gold bric-a-brac is much more likely the result of stripping the aristocratic dead on some forgotten battlefield. She makes the interesting point that the only AS coin minted (the silver penny, worth 1/4 of a sheep carcass) was too valuable for the ordinary transactions of life, and was probably only needed to pay rent and taxes (p. 312). There must have been a secondary barter and subsistence economy. This is reasonable enough, but she attributes the great social divisions of the time to the lack of low-denomination coins, even though similar wide division are common enough in societies with small coins, and those without any coins at all.
The period from the departure of Rome to the establishment of the AS kingdoms is particularly interesting to me, and Dr. Fleming's approach this period is particularly odd. The figures of the conventional and plausible documentary history--Vortigern, Ambrosius Aurelianus, and Arthur--are not even mentioned, so we do not know why Dr. Fleming ignores them. The usual story is that the British strongman Vortigern invited Saxon mercenaries to come in and help fight the Irish, but they revolted and invited their families and friends to join them in settling the land. Then Ambrisius and Arthur organized a British counter-attack that stopped the Saxon progress for a generation. Instead, Dr. Fleming sees an egalatarian and almost peaceful Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, pointing to AS homesteads on marginal land and British jewelry in AS burials from the period (and vice versa). She portrays small groups of AS settlers moving into ungoverned areas and living next to British neighbors. I suppose their children played together. The later AS kingdoms were the result of a gradual (but startlingly rapid) indigenous growth in a mixed British-Saxon society, as local leaders became more and more powerful by subjecting other local leaders. As far as I can tell, she concludes this mostly from the absence of evidence for anything more organized, or for any large-scale violence. I say, if their children played together then far more Celtic words would have made their way into English than the paltry few that we have. I don't find the egalatarian mixed society to be plausible. Some law, either Romano-British or Saxon, must have been used to settle disputes--which was it? If the AS kingdoms were a natural local growth from a kind of Rousseauian state of nature, then some of the small kingdoms in the area would have been founded by local Roman officials that managed to hang on to power, as happened west of the AS settlements. At the least, some of the eastern kingdoms would have been led by Britons, but none of them were. It seems to me overwhelmingly clear to me that the advent of the Saxons was a conquest, not a peaceful migration, and that the Britons were too weak and disorganized for large-scale resistance. Those who did not flee were subjugated.
Dr. Fleming does give convincing evidence that the British economy had collapsed in the later 300s, before the Saxons arrived. The small market towns around the countryside withered away, as did the walled cities, though without signs of widespread destruction. My guess is that as the Roman armies were withdrawn in this period, local trade became more and more difficult because of thieves and small-scale brigandage, including Irish and Pictish. Eventually things got bad enough that most of the ruling class left for the relative security of the Continent. In the east, the remaining British peasants, with no leadership or martial tradition, were no match for the invading Saxons. In the west, with a little more time, a few remaining families who had governed under the Romans managed to set up small kingdoms. That story seems more likely to me than Dr. Fleming's.
On the other hand, I think Dr. Fleming is convincing when she says that the foundation stories of the AS kingdoms were the product of a later period, attempts to add luster to the family that won the later contest for power. That actually fits well with the stories in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle of groups coming over in two or three or five boats--smaller groups than you'd expect from an invading army. I suppose other small groups of boats arrived, but were not memorialized in the Chronicle because the families in them did not enjoy great power later on.
March 11, 2018
I have mixed feelings about this book. There are aspects of it that I fully enjoyed. Fleming puts forth a study based on concrete archaeology and freely admits she is NOT presenting a history of the important people and dates--- Offa, Alfred and others make very short appearances in the book.
She does a good job of introducing the fall of Roman influence in Britain prior to the actual fall of Rome. She also uses great examples from the archaeological record--primarily graves sites-- to examine how the written "historical" record is not providing the full picture. I enjoyed that she paid special attention to difference between various regions in post-Roman Britain-- especially her treatment of the Welsh.
But the author seems very biased in favor of the Merician kingdom and almost hostile to the West Saxons and the legacy of King Alfred and his dynasty. She tries very hard to re-write some of the historical record and claim that Alfred, his children and other descendants were not responsible for many of the changes they brought forth after the invasion of the Danes. However, at times even-though she tries to dismiss their activity, she is forced to recognize the that historical record AND the archaeology back up many of the actions taken by the House of Wessex. I do admit that many aspects of the Alfred story are peppered by centuries of nationalist identity formation. None-the-less, many of his reforms were CRITICAL to the survival of Angle-Saxon England prior to the Norman Invasion.
This issue aside, I found the book to provide a strong understanding of the archaeological evidence found in Britain related to the post-Roman period.
She does a good job of introducing the fall of Roman influence in Britain prior to the actual fall of Rome. She also uses great examples from the archaeological record--primarily graves sites-- to examine how the written "historical" record is not providing the full picture. I enjoyed that she paid special attention to difference between various regions in post-Roman Britain-- especially her treatment of the Welsh.
But the author seems very biased in favor of the Merician kingdom and almost hostile to the West Saxons and the legacy of King Alfred and his dynasty. She tries very hard to re-write some of the historical record and claim that Alfred, his children and other descendants were not responsible for many of the changes they brought forth after the invasion of the Danes. However, at times even-though she tries to dismiss their activity, she is forced to recognize the that historical record AND the archaeology back up many of the actions taken by the House of Wessex. I do admit that many aspects of the Alfred story are peppered by centuries of nationalist identity formation. None-the-less, many of his reforms were CRITICAL to the survival of Angle-Saxon England prior to the Norman Invasion.
This issue aside, I found the book to provide a strong understanding of the archaeological evidence found in Britain related to the post-Roman period.
February 13, 2019
Robin Fleming does a good job trying to uncover what life would have been like for the "everyday" person during the early Middle Ages. This is tough to do since there is a lack of textual evidence, so she uses archaeological evidence and supplements it with textual evidence, coins, place names, etc. She tells us of the forming of towns, the reusing of Roman ruins, the changing of religions, the coming of conquerors/vikings, etc.
My favorite chapter was the last one. There, she explains how archaeologists can tell age, sex, diet, and stress factors such as diseases and malnourishment. She also tells of particular burials and tries to connect real living humans with the bones we now only see. One particularly interesting female was buried with grave goods. This was a revered woman. However, this female also showed signs of having leprosy. Other, later burials were "cut into" her grave which may have been family members who wanted to be with her in death.
Fleming stresses the fact that these were mostly hard times but it depended on who you were and if you were lucky or not. Some villages fared better than others. Towns created opportunity but were generally nasty and had a higher death rate. Kids were generally slow-growing (behind our modern time growth rates by four years) and grew till late 20's. Women usually died young. Babies died young. In a time of less females and children, and small boys, finding people to do work would have been hard. Overall, a recommended read.
My favorite chapter was the last one. There, she explains how archaeologists can tell age, sex, diet, and stress factors such as diseases and malnourishment. She also tells of particular burials and tries to connect real living humans with the bones we now only see. One particularly interesting female was buried with grave goods. This was a revered woman. However, this female also showed signs of having leprosy. Other, later burials were "cut into" her grave which may have been family members who wanted to be with her in death.
Fleming stresses the fact that these were mostly hard times but it depended on who you were and if you were lucky or not. Some villages fared better than others. Towns created opportunity but were generally nasty and had a higher death rate. Kids were generally slow-growing (behind our modern time growth rates by four years) and grew till late 20's. Women usually died young. Babies died young. In a time of less females and children, and small boys, finding people to do work would have been hard. Overall, a recommended read.
February 5, 2026
Pet hates in history/archaeology are books that try to cover too large a time period and books which make massive generalisations - this ticked both boxes. I really do wish that when archaeologists make some finds which don't fit the established pattern for a period, they try to find a new pattern rather than accepting that some folk are just wierd and sometimes like-mindedness attracts. Also never been convinced that grave goods are anything more than things someone found special. if that was gold, cool and if it was the raven they fed corn to daily and whose wing they removed as a memory when it died, then little bit strange, but an element of their life which they might want in their afterlife.
The book is well written and the author up front explains the brief, which is grand, but sitting somewhere between an academic and a public stance is a tricky line to walk and the lack of footnotes is probably a point the author wishes she had pushed back on.
It does take an interesting approach with the first 9 chapters following a timeline and the last four repeating and covering multiple timelines which was odd, but I can see why this approach was used rather than a subsection within each on the themes covered.
Overall, informative, quite readable but rated for the reasons above, plus a minor gripe in a lot of academic material - I appreciate that less pages costs less to print, but shrinking the font to barely readable ain't a winner.
The book is well written and the author up front explains the brief, which is grand, but sitting somewhere between an academic and a public stance is a tricky line to walk and the lack of footnotes is probably a point the author wishes she had pushed back on.
It does take an interesting approach with the first 9 chapters following a timeline and the last four repeating and covering multiple timelines which was odd, but I can see why this approach was used rather than a subsection within each on the themes covered.
Overall, informative, quite readable but rated for the reasons above, plus a minor gripe in a lot of academic material - I appreciate that less pages costs less to print, but shrinking the font to barely readable ain't a winner.
May 3, 2021
Fascinating interpretations of what the title says based on multiple fields of research up to 2011. History does seem to rewrite itself with new discoveries and developments. Most interesting to me were two subjects. The first was the early Christian practice found in a cemetery just outside modern Cardiff and a few other places of placing a white quartz stone with the body. A Google search found me the archeological report on this that speculates it may be a reference to the white stone with a new name referenced in the Book of Revelation. Another was the author's interpretation of the royal palace of Brycheiniog at Llangorse, a place I have visited (well, from the shore) where my ancestors may have been. If they weren't of the royal family, they could have been the slaves or workers who built the crannog. The only fault I found with the book was that while it has an extensive list for "further reading," it is not footnoted so I had to Google for some sources as noted above. This is probably due to the style of writing for a general audience interested in the subject. Oh, and [spoilers] the fall in Britain was due not so much to the withdrawal of the Roman Army and the invasion of pagan hordes, but to an economic collapse when international trade drastically diminished. No lessons there! (sarcasm.)
April 11, 2023
An extremely thorough and overall enjoyable review of early medieval history in Britain, a period shrouded in textual darkness but rich in material evidence. As other reviewers have noted, this read was at times dense (particularly in the chapters about monasteries and clerics etc, but that’s probably my general disinterest in church history) but Fleming’s ability to pull compelling conclusions from amongst her evidence ultimately shines through. I particularly enjoyed the last chapter, and her writing on the warring families who emerged from the Roman ruins to grapple power and wealth for sometimes.
“It is little wonder, in a world like this, that elites orchestrated lavish weapon- and barrow burials when the great men in their lives lay dead; that they embellished their past histories and exaggerated the antiquity of their rights; that they moved so aggressively against their competitors; that they were so often armed to the teeth”
Also an interesting case study in how social and economic inequality develops out of a more egalitarian society (in the sense that few elites were left after the Romans nicked off) and how nobility and elitism and class and families of influence are established for the most part with violence and luck, creating class divisions which, as Fleming notes, persist in modern Britain
“It is little wonder, in a world like this, that elites orchestrated lavish weapon- and barrow burials when the great men in their lives lay dead; that they embellished their past histories and exaggerated the antiquity of their rights; that they moved so aggressively against their competitors; that they were so often armed to the teeth”
Also an interesting case study in how social and economic inequality develops out of a more egalitarian society (in the sense that few elites were left after the Romans nicked off) and how nobility and elitism and class and families of influence are established for the most part with violence and luck, creating class divisions which, as Fleming notes, persist in modern Britain
August 10, 2024
Valuable corrective to traditional narrative and overly political histories of early medieval England, although with an excessive reliance upon materially determined explanatory frameworks, particularly where archaeological evidence of economic development and trading practices is too narrowly interpreted to explain social and, particularly, cultural change, and with an underweighting of profound social and economic changes that resulted from political and ideological agency.
Robin Fleming in writing a 'history from below' of post-Roman Britain has been extremely successful in constructing a socio-economic explanation for the emergence of medieval England, but one which does not sufficiently accommodate political and administrative actions as agencies of historical development, the role of elites not just as accruers of surplus and consumers of luxuries but also as administrators of government and dispensers of justice within local communities, or how, ultimately, the unitary kingdom of the English that is distinctly recognisable within the administratively unified realm of Anglo-Norman England after the Conquest was as much a political construct with its own historical and cultural identity as the demographic, social, and economic product of material change.
Robin Fleming in writing a 'history from below' of post-Roman Britain has been extremely successful in constructing a socio-economic explanation for the emergence of medieval England, but one which does not sufficiently accommodate political and administrative actions as agencies of historical development, the role of elites not just as accruers of surplus and consumers of luxuries but also as administrators of government and dispensers of justice within local communities, or how, ultimately, the unitary kingdom of the English that is distinctly recognisable within the administratively unified realm of Anglo-Norman England after the Conquest was as much a political construct with its own historical and cultural identity as the demographic, social, and economic product of material change.
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August 15, 2025I would not recommend this book as the first book about Anglo-Saxon England that you read. The history of ASE is much more interesting than this book makes it out to be. This is written as a social history rooted in archaeology. Such an approach is definitely useful, but it hardly captures the imagination (I'm sorry, but despite what watching Indiana Jones movies might lead you to believe, archaeology is rather boring--punctuated with a few, rare, fantastic finds). It's one thing to use the archaeology to flesh out the narrative history; it's another to try to tell the story only using archaeology—to be fair, that's not quite what Fleming has done here; Gildas, Bede, etc. do show up, but only to supplement the archaeology. Thus, what Fleming gains by telling the archaeological history of Anglo-Saxon England, she loses by ignoring the 'story' of the history of Anglo-Saxon England. For a better place to start, try The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, 400–1066.
March 15, 2018
I read this because I realized that my cache of books about post-Roman Britain was starting to get a little stale, and looked for something more recent. This is less than ten years old, so I figured it would include more recent research. And indeed it does. More than that, it makes a lot more extensive use of archaeological material than was done twenty or so years ago. I don't agree with all of Fleming's conclusions; she really seems to feel that the Anglo Saxons were mostly peaceful in their takeover of the Britons' lands, which I have a hard time buying. (Not that I think there was wholesale population replacement, of course, but I imagine there was a fair amount of Germanic tribesmen showing up with swords and saying something like, "We're in charge now.") Still, I don't expect to agree with everything every book has to offer, and most of what Fleming says is quite interesting. Plus, there's a good solid bibliography which will point me in the direction of even more stuff.
January 11, 2025
A highly readable account of life in the dark ages. Drawing mainly on archaeological evidence, Robin Fleming describes the development of religious institutions and towns during the six hundred years or so following the Roman withdrawal. Although they left an enormous vacuum, she finds little evidence for aggressive invasion by the saxons, angles and jutes. Their migration was more like modern economic migration than the later marauding vikings. Surprises for me were the complete abandonment of towns built by the Romans. Clearly there was a huge loss of skills on all sorts of levels from administrative to the ability to build in stone. She also debunks the schoolboy fallacy (at least in my case) that St. Augustine brought christianity to England. Whilst he was influential, particularly in Kent, the practice of christianity was already widespread in England particularly the west. She also points out that the king of Kent was already married to a christian.
Overall, this account filled in a number of gaps in my understanding of this period of history.
Overall, this account filled in a number of gaps in my understanding of this period of history.
February 15, 2024
The archeological focus of the book attempts to provide a new perspective on a period normally dominated by political history. The book's highlights included:
- a gripping introduction
- a wonderful account of life and death, including what analysis individual skeletal remains can tell us about the period
- analysis of broad social shifts such as the development of towns, migrations, and the creation of hierarchical structures
- a sense of change over time: from collapse to gradual growth
More disappointingly, the focus on case studies tends to narrow the scope of analysis. Lots of discussion is focused on south-east England. Some discussions, like those of Saxons and Vikings, felt overly focused on case studies, without a broader picture analysis.
Overall an enjoyable read, with some inconsistency in quality. The chapter on life and death at the end was really excellent. I wish all chapters would've been as strong.
- a gripping introduction
- a wonderful account of life and death, including what analysis individual skeletal remains can tell us about the period
- analysis of broad social shifts such as the development of towns, migrations, and the creation of hierarchical structures
- a sense of change over time: from collapse to gradual growth
More disappointingly, the focus on case studies tends to narrow the scope of analysis. Lots of discussion is focused on south-east England. Some discussions, like those of Saxons and Vikings, felt overly focused on case studies, without a broader picture analysis.
Overall an enjoyable read, with some inconsistency in quality. The chapter on life and death at the end was really excellent. I wish all chapters would've been as strong.
August 6, 2017
This was really fascinating. I thought the last chapter was especially interesting, although some of the earlier chapters were also good. I am continually amazed by how much archaeologists are able to learn from the few remains we find. I think the last chapter did an especially good job at removing the romance from the Middle Ages, and reminding the reader that life really was "nasty, brutish, and short." Some of the descriptions of grave sites in the early chapters really made me want to figure out how to mess with future archaeologists. Bury me in tree pose, standing on a stone etched with a basilisk, surround my body with whole chickens, and make sure I'm pointing north. Then, scatter a bunch of random (non-organic) stuff in the grave. In fact, archaeologists don't usually make too many assumptions from a single grave, but it's still fun to think about.
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