Set in a Silver Sea: The Island Peoples from Earliest Times to the Fifteenth Century

by Arthur Bryant

A History of Britain and the British Set in a Silver Sea volume One 1 (A History of Britain & the British people)

Genres: History, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Sir Arthur Wynne Morgan Bryant was an English historian, columnist for The Illustrated London News and man of affairs. His books included studies of Samuel Pepys, accounts of English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, and a life of George V.

Bryant's historiography was often based on an English romantic exceptionalism drawn from his nostalgia for an idealised agrarian past. He hated modern commercial and financial capitalism, he emphasised duty over rights, and he equated democracy with the consent of "fools" and "knaves"

Reviews

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in November 1998.

In his introduction to Set in a Silver Sea, Arthur Bryant says that he believes that each generation needs its own popular history, a book based on recent scholarship to help people understand the past and its particular relationship to the times. In particular, the general histories available before the eighties were still very concerned with political history, ignoring the social and economic history that has proved so important in academic history over the last fifty years or so. In some ways, Arthur Bryant was ideally placed to write such a history of England, having recently completed a large multi-volume academic history of the country, which he drew on for Set in a Silver Sea.

The fact the Bryant was retired when he began to write Set in a Silver Sea has both positive and negative consequences for the book, at least as it affected me while I read it. After a long and illustrious career as a historian, he could certainly speak from a position of knowledge. But as an old age pensioner, could he really be said to be writing for the generation of the eighties? I would consider myself to have passed my formative years in the eighties, and I must be over forty years younger than Bryant. My perspective on history is certainly somewhat different, at least a few steps further removed from the chivalric adventures that filled histories of the middle ages written in the nineteenth century.

And that brings me to another problem; this history, ostensibly covering the period from the earliest prehistoric settlements to the end of the fourteenth century, is really a history of the middle ages. The whole period up to the reign of Alfred, thousands of years, is covered in forty pages; the five hundred years of the middle ages from that date takes the remaining four hundred or so. If Bryant was uninterested in the earlier period, it would perhaps be helpful to say so; if this is meant to be a general history, a more general coverage is necessary. That is not to say that the history of the five hundred year period which takes up the major part of the book is not excellent; Bryant succeeds in giving an insight into the medieval mind which does not usually come through in this sort of work.

[Alan Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

...ever since I read this book, I've been able to walk the streets and marvel at the celebration of different people that make up the population; about how they and I arrived on these shores.

I love the anecdotes that he sprinkles through the pages of the book. I found it thoroughly readable, and if I want to inform the friends of mine, who are more recent additions to these shores (than my 1066AD), then I buy them a copy of this book.

When you read it, you appreciate the magic of this island. This book got under my skin and unraveled my DNA. I love that historians debate this book (and am instructed by it); but, it is nonetheless one of the most accessible instruments to fire the human imagination - on the subject.

[Thomas Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first volume in a beautifully written three volume narrative history of Britain and the British people. The author Arthur Bryant was Winston Churchill’s favourite historian, and the laudations on the dust jacket compare the achievements of the man to that of a Gibbon or Macaulay. Whether or not this is the case I am not qualified to judge, but I can say that the work is worthy of high praise indeed. Suitable for longtime fans of British history and the totally uninitiated alike, the defining characteristics of Bryant’s work are on the one hand his delightful prose, which is both eloquent, cogent, and concise, and really a pleasure to read; and on the other, the depth and breadth of his scholarship. Bryant brings the glorious tale of our nation’s history to life and his passion for the subject shines from every page. As an extra bonus, Bryant was wrote these books at a time before the odious miasma of political correctness took a stranglehold of our universities and it became fashionable to despise our history as being an utterly shameful story best forgotten. As such, unlike many modern works on the subject, one does not have to read between lines of self-hating diatribe in order to decipher our nation’s glories and achievements. These books will find an ideal place on the shelf of anyone who loves our history and civilisation.

[Jacqueline Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most dog-eared book on my shelves, a treasured favourite. Imbued with an imagination that matches his breadth of research and knowledge, this is historical writing at its best; the language is as dazzling as the content is erudite. What makes this author's work stand above so many of those I read for pleasure and for research is its vividly rich prose which moves me in the same way that music or poetry can.

[Saleh Razzouk]

Written in a stylish way. Not dry.