Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons

Britain #2

by Francis Pryor

Leading archaeologist Francis Pryor retells the story of King Arthur, legendary king of the Britons, tracing it back to its Bronze Age origins.

The legend of King Arthur and Camelot is one of the most enduring in Britain's history, spanning centuries and surviving invasions by Angles, Vikings and Normans. In his latest book Francis Pryor – one of Britain’s most celebrated archaeologists and author of the acclaimed ‘Britain B.C.’ and ‘Seahenge’ – traces the story of Arthur back to its ancient origins. Putting forth the compelling idea that most of the key elements of the Arthurian legends are deeply rooted in Bronze and Iron Ages (the sword Excalibur, the Lady of the Lake, the Sword in the Stone and so on), Pryor argues that the legends' survival mirrors a flourishing, indigenous culture that endured through the Roman occupation of Britain, and the subsequent invasions of the so-called Dark Ages.

As in ‘Britain B.C.’, Pryor roots his story in the very landscape, from Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, to South Cadbury Castle in Somerset and Tintagel in Cornwall. He traces the story back to the 5th-century King Arthur and beyond, all the time testing his ideas with archaeological evidence, and showing how the story was manipulated through the ages for various historical and literary purposes, by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory, among others.


Delving into history, literary sources – ancient, medieval and romantic – and archaeological research, Francis Pryor creates an original, lively and illuminating account of this most British of legends.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Archaeology, Arthurian, British Literature, Medieval, Ancient History

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 5, 2005

About the author

Francis Manning Marlborough Pryor MBE (born 13 January 1945) is a British archaeologist who is famous for his role in the discovery of Flag Fen, a Bronze Age archaeological site near Peterborough, and for his frequent appearances on the Channel 4 television series Time Team.

He has now retired from full-time field archaeology, but still appears on television and writes books as well as being a working farmer. His specialities are in the Bronze and Iron Ages.

His first novel, Lifers’ Club, is due to be published in 2014.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

A fun read, and I think fun for the author to write, but I felt the author was out of his depth, well not out of his depth, because depth is his speciality, perhaps better to say that he was out of his breadth and dealing with specialisms where his knowledge was limited while his enthusiasm was unlimited. However since I bought it at a shop that only sells end of line items and it was at a sale price of seventy-five pennies I have to confess that I was well entertained for my money.

Anyway although I have an opinion on what the book was about, I am not certain that the author has the same opinion, I felt there was a bit of bagginess about it as though separate books about Post-Roman Britain (or Romxit potentially, but I'll come back to that), King Arthur and how the "Anglo-Saxons" didn't exist, sort of collided to produce the current book which **Spoiler Alert** is not about Britain in the first 600 odd AD years but in fact about England with a bit of Wales. Scotland gets a couple of mentions but that's about it.

Perhaps that is a warning, Pryor's strength is depth, the longue duree, cultural continuities over long stretches of time, primarily based on studying a couple of Fenland areas of England (an east coast region) beyond his home patch he's most impressed by people with a similar approach, however since these people are also all working in England and he makes no reference to currant continental archaeology - which if you are arguing that the "Anglo-Saxons" were not migrants and that everything labelled as "Anglo-Saxon" in terms of physical remains was an indigenous cultural development is to my mind an obvious blind spot. Is there evidence of population movement in the Anglo-Saxon homelands? Are there similarities between pottery or elite burials in North Germany and eastern England, if not that would strengthen Pryor's argument, but he doesn't have the breadth of knowledge for that, which I find a bit odd.

However he makes good use of his depth of knowledge pointing out that there is no evidence of disruption or destruction in Eastern England, Roman villa sites appear over time to simply become Anglo-Saxon without an intermission, nor, he says, is there evidence for masses of people fleeing westwards and evidence from stable isotope analysis from early "Anglo-Saxon" cemeteries shows that the people had almost all spent at least their childhood's in Britain.

If that is what the data says, then that is what the data says, but with his no or very limited migration argument he simply creates a new more complex problem which if you are reading this you have already seen - English has been the dominant language in England for a long time, and it can't get to be the dominant language in pre-modern times without a dominance in numbers of speakers, while we joke about the sexual habits of the Welsh (and indeed Gildas in part blamed the triumph of the Anglo-Saxon's on the British fondness for sodomy ) I hesitate to believe that sexual preference alone determined the linguistic triumph of English. Pryor gets a bit hand wavy assuming that a blend of Latin and Pictish and other stuff became Old English, which is weird since English is linguistically pretty plainly a Germanic language and not a daughter language of Latin, and I'm not sure if anybody can be definite about what kind of language the Picts spoke.

Although I felt that his claim that the Sutton Hoo ship burials can be explained purely as a continuity of local Iron Age practises was, ahem, pretty wild, there is something evocative about the claim for long cultural continuities, however typically for him, he deals with the argument that Sutton Hoo ship burials have parallels in early Sweden by ignoring it all together.

At one point he says "Either you believe that England was founded by people from abroad, or you don't" (p.234) which I thought would be absolutely fine in the context of a chat down the pub about
post-Roman Britain, but utterly jarring in a book in which there has been a careful presentation of evidence. He is completely wedded to the notion of continuity, he points out that areas where "Anglo-Saxon" cremations occur seem to have had a tradition of cremation back into the iron age,
that he seems at a loss to acknowledge or deal with some of the discontinuities of the Post Roman period, : Grubenhäuser begin to appear in England while in Western England new elite centres appear in strongly defensible positions such as Tintagel, some iron age hillforts are reoccupied, and these places seem to have had trade links into the Byzantine world.

I'm quite moved by his argument that the Anglo-Saxons didn't dominate England due to a mass violent migration / barbarian invasion event, however at the same time English is the dominant language and historically we're on a time table here - since we can be reasonably confident that Old English was the dominant language in England, say by the eighth century, that is outside of Cornwall and maybe Cumbria there's not much if any evidence of communities of indigenous non-English speakers even before the time of the Viking invasions.

Pryor's alternative, having thrown the traditional invasion story out is to suggest that we was always here, there was simply a continual movement of (maybe small numbers) of people across the North sea already in pre-history who simply didn't go home when their visas expired. Well maybe, but again this opens up another problem because Old English diverges from Old German and then from Frisian - if peoples on all sides of the North Sea had been a single cultural community with regular peaceful exchanges of population then why did this change so that linguistic separation occurred?

The Roman empire imported huge numbers of slaves and we know in other parts of the late Roman empire that barbarian migrants were settled within the empire as foederati or allied military communities so there are ways of explaining a big influx over time of many Old English speakers before the end of the Roman empire. Pryor thinks it is stupid to imagine proto-saxons recruited to fight proto-saxons, and he's right, but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen because historically that kind of situation is quite normal - just consider Afghanistan where Afghans are employed to fight Afghans, or the US army using Native Americans as auxiliaries to fight Native Americans, or the British in India...For me this is an area in which Pryor could have benefited from collaboration. Peter Heather in Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe discusses how barbarian tribes like the Goths and the Vandals were less like modern nations and more like political parties - collections of sociopaths who combine to win power, and one can imagine a similar story in Post Roman Britain various people coalescing around new political identities of being Saxon (or west Saxon, mid-Saxon, south- Saxon and east-Saxon) or Angle, or possibly even Jutish.

But enough of my day-dreaming. Pryor's point, somewhat buried in his habit of writing as he speaks, is that the notion of the English being the descendants of Anglo-Saxon migrants is due to the Victorians being racists, they felt the need to explain why the English lorded it over a mighty world empire and over the British isles and Racism provides easy and comfortable answers because as everybody knows your true born Germanic person is naturally diligent, loyal, fair-mind, inclined to representative institutions, and law abiding, while your standard Celt is dreamy, treacherous, slimy, disorganised, prone to Catholicism, and takes offence at being crudely categorised. This for the Victorians explained why the English were best and Alfred was great, and for Pryor such notions consciously and unconsciously have infected archaeological and historical thought, for example in depictions of Post Roman Britain as some kind of Terra Nulla, Roman villas which had become scrubby wasteland, fields thick with second growth forest waiting for the axe of the honest Saxon.

I think Pryor intends this adoption of the migrant Anglo-Saxon as tribal ancestor to parallel the development and adoption of the Arthur myth among the Welsh and then the Normans and Medieval English. But here maybe in my excavation of his text I am over interpreting the evidence.

His treatment of Arthur linking the Lady in the Lake to the iron age habit of depositing swords in bodies of water, or the sword-in-the-stone story to how swords were cast in the Bronze age, I found evocative but where does it leave us? Imaging a mystic link over centuries or that other older stories from the Bronze an Iron Age got translated into Arthur myths in the early medieval period?

Pryor considers that the elites in Southern Britain were already Romanised before the armies and elephants of Claudius's army landed in 43 AD and that they may have been welcomed in at least part of the country, this isn't a new idea, it's been long suggested that Fishbourne Palace was built was for such a collaborator (or realist, or pragmatic politician, or Romanophile, depending on your viewpoint). Later he suggests that there may have been a process of Romxit with Romano-British elites opting out of the Roman Empire although quite what that actually means in the context of the Roman empire, already complex in order not to have to contribute money to faceless bureaucrats in Ravenna or wheresoever the Emperor was hiding out, this isn't a new idea either, in In Search of the Dark Ages Michael Wood kicks around with that idea with Post-Roman Britain as some kind of Rhodesia making an UDI with some kind of precursor to Ian Smith lurking in Wroxeter or South Cadbury trying to prevent Anglo-Saxon Majority rule and enjoy the twilight of Rome as robustly as possible.

Hmm, anyway, I promised less non-celtic daydreaming rather than more, I can only apologise for breaking my barbarous promises and sharpen my axe and seax, the pleasure of the book is when Pryor conveys his depth of knowledge, his joy at how Christian foundations around Lincoln mirror sites significant already in the Bronze Age, the uninterrupted use of farmland in eastern England, the amazement comes when he gets out of his breadth - assuming that Gnostic belief was widespread in early Christian England and then linking that back to the Druids and forward to Pelagius, at which one is tempted to ask for a pint of whatever he's drinking because it certainly reaches parts of the brain that standard beers and ales don't - how or if Christian belief was widespread in England circa the year 400 AD is a difficult and uncertain issue, let alone wondering what the nature of that belief was. Still I have to admit, looking back over what I written and not written it was a stimulating book (the Arrass culture really wasn't influenced by the Parsii, Mr Pryor, really they just came up with chariot burials by themselves and totally co-incidentally these guys in the Marne basin did the same-thing?).

Naturally this book is a perfect pairing with The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization. Let the bearded archaeologists battle! Francis (no migrations) Pryor versus Bryan (super destructive migrating barbarians hordes) Ward-Perkins, may the sharpest sherds of evidence win. I think this is 'a watch this topic' kind of book, maybe in twenty or thirty years time we'll see that a new consensus has consolidated on the emergence of the Anglo-Saxons. This book on its own fails even to notice the new questions that it throws up, let alone answer them.



There was apparently a TV series for those of you who prefer the audio-visual approach.

[zed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another fine book from the indomitable Francis Pryor and, as always easy, to read. Pryor writes a rather compelling book that puts the "Anglo-Saxon" invasion of England firmly in the realms of being overwrought. He makes the point that there had to be some movement of peoples of Angles and Saxon origin into England and no doubt plenty of contact across the seas but why would, when the Roman authorities departed, there be a wholesale invasion by said peoples when the archaeological evidence is tenuous and the historical evidence light on and full of holes. Where, indeed, did the ancient population go when there is no evidence that they went anywhere?

[Nicky · Rating 2 out of 5]

From my perspective, speaking as an English Lit postgrad who concentrated heavily on Arthurian and medieval literature, Britain AD has two main weaknesses. The first is the fact that Pryor doesn’t understand or attempt to engage with the shift in language to form English. He suggests there is no reason to suspect mass migration of Angles and Saxons into the UK, regardless of accepted work by people like Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza into the way population genetics tends to show that language, identity and genetics move together.

Secondly, he doesn’t know the subjects he’s talking about nearly well enough. I’d be happy to defer to him on the archaeology of King Arthur, but when it comes to the textual history, I know my stuff — and Pryor has enormous gaps. For example, he speaks of Sir Thomas Malory introducing the ‘Holy Blood’ aspect of the Grail legends… heedless of the fact that Robert de Boron pre-empted Malory by two centuries. (And possibly the Vulgate cycle did too — I don’t have my copies handy to check and I don’t trust online sources to steer me right!) He also utterly ignores the existence of the Saint’s Lives that mention Arthur and the Welsh folk tales.

These might not be important to the way Pryor views Arthur, but I think it’s always been clear that the Arthurian legends are more fiction than fact — so if you’re going to talk about them, you really need to understand the fictional aspects and how the legends developed. Pryor simply does not, and that puts all the rest of the book on shaky footing for me.

The same applies when it comes to understanding whether or not there was an Anglo-Saxon invasion or settlement or anything of the kind. He never manages to account for the rise of the Anglo-Saxon language. He talks about the spread of ideas instead, yet if that were the case, we’d expect to see much more influence from the Celtic languages on English in names for basic, everyday things. Why do we say “bread”, then, from Germanic brood, instead of bara? Why is it a “church”, from cirice, and not eglwys?

I’m not an expert on linguistics, but Pryor’s theories don’t accommodate the way languages work at all — and to be convincing, they must.

Then there’s the fact that he picks which genetic study he proves because, and I quote, “It also supports my own theories — which is an enormous point in its favour.” This may be intended as flippant, but still, that is not the way to critique studies, especially ones which are outside your area of expertise. You can’t pick which theories you like based on which one agrees with your own theory, or it becomes horrifyingly circular.

Where he speaks about archaeology, I don’t have the tools to criticise — and he is well known and well thought of, so I’m sure he’s at least along the right lines. But where it crosses things I do understand — genetics, linguistics, and most of all literature — I find Pryor’s grounding very shaky. I enjoy his writing, but can’t give him more stars than this because his thesis is just too questionable. And it really makes me question whether Britain BC was all that, although it was more deeply grounded in archaeology.

Originally reviewed for breathesbooks.com.

[Fiona · Rating 2 out of 5]

It took me fourteen months to read this book, which runs 250 pages with pictures and endnotes. The reason it took so long is because I couldn't read ten pages at a go without checking my phone. Or Goodreads. Or another book. Or putting it back on my bedside table and turning the light out. Is it terribly dry? I don't think so - I've read drier. It's more technical than I was expecting, but that's not the same thing, and I recently read Moby-Dick in a week and a half, so I cannot put my finger on what's going on here.

It's a shame, really, because the book is both really quite interesting, and woefully misrepresented on the cover. There's not a lot of King Arthur going on, and you'd be forgiven for expecting more. The real selling point, I think, about what's actually in the contents of the book, is how very little we really do know about the "Dark Ages" which Pryor dutifully puts in quotation marks because apparently the term is out of fashion at the moment.

The point of that, apparently, is that "Dark Ages" suggest there was nothing going on, when actually there was a lot going on. That's not what I thought it meant: I thought it was that we just don't know very much about all the things that were going on. Judging by the big debate that Pryor is concerned with, that seems to hit the mark.

The debate he's talking about is whether there was much by way of Anglo-Saxon migration from the European mainland to Britain, circa the fourth-ish through sixth-ish centuries AD. As far as I can tell, long-time historical orthodoxy, as far back as the Venerable Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth and such, says yes, there was quite a bit of migration. Francis Pryor thinks there wasn't: that people change, fashions change, and politics change in populations as a matter of course - it doesn't take a massive influx of foreigners to change it. He thinks the evidence that has previously been used to point to migration is actually more likely to point to trade. He would rather trust what seems to be a combination of archaeological evidence and Occam's Razor than the historical documentation. Which, fair enough, Geoffrey of Monmouth was hardly a paragon of academic rigour.

But the impression I get of archaeology as a discipline from this book seems to veer from Sherlock Holmes-esque grandiose inferences from tiny pieces of data, to basically reading tea leaves. It's a dark art, and I can't really tell how much I trust it. In a book that's ostensibly aimed at the archaeological layman, and which contains page-long descriptions of how geophysics works, I would have liked a bit more discussion of how these inferences get made. I couldn't trace the trajectories of quite a few of his leaps, and he showed his working only patchily, and that might be one reason I switched off.

At any rate, he's delightfully enthusiastic about his subject, and if I ever got the chance to go for a pint with him, I'd absolutely take it. And then I'd buy him a round and ask him ALL THE QUESTIONS, and refuse to let him leave until I understood properly what he was talking about.

This book is designed for a niche I am not in. If you are in it, you might like it.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 2 out of 5]

So dry I was parched afterward. Did I read the same book as the other reviewers? To be fair to the author and the book, I think it is (intentionally or not) directed at people with an interest in archaeology and anthropology. I really didn't pick it up to get detailed soil analysis or an explanation of stable isotope analysis. I do think the title (or at least the subtitle) is misleading since it makes it sound more historical than archaeological. The simple addition of "Archaeological" or "Scientific" before "Quest" would have told me what I was actually getting when I bought the book.

Added later:

I found the conclusion told me everything I needed to know from the book. Pryor does not believe there was ever an "Anglo-Saxon invasion." "I believe we should discard the simplistic idea that invasions of mass migrations were the cause of the major changes that we see in the archaeological and historical record of the so-called 'Dark Ages.'" He believes in a more complex reality arguing that writers have used the archaeological findings to support their pet beliefs gotten from historical chronicles when they should have gone the other way around. At one point he says something to the effect that a foreign vase at a burial site does not confirm the presence of hundreds of foreigners. The rest of the book is just mucking through all the evidence "on the ground" (literally).

[James Calbraith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pryor is a good, engaging writer, but his reasoning leaves a lot to be desired; what he doesn't notice is that his view of history, belonging to the "no migrations, ever" school, becomes as dogmatic and one-sided as that to which it reacted - the earlier "only migrations, always" school. His conviction that people "simply don't migrate" is patently false - as both past and present sufficiently demonstrate. He skips over the most important question of English history - the one of language - feigning convenient ignorance of the subject, and proceeds with arguments deriving as much from his own, conservative and down-to-earth world view as from his experience as a prehistorian.

For some answers to the questions which will no doubt pop to your head while reading Pryor, I'd recommend Peter Heather's later book "Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe". I find Heather's moderate approach - "some migrations, sometimes" - much more convincing than Pryor's dogmatic intuitions.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent takedown of the Anglo-Saxon invasion theory, though it's odd nothing has been added about recent DNA evidence that furthers this hypothesis. Very little about the historical arguments for Arthur (not that they stand up well); seems this was included to cash in on the public fascination with a "real" Arthur, which the author argues against. Pryor is at his best summarizing and critiquing other archeologists -- the sections relating to his own digs are filled with detail even a well-read non-professional would find pretty boring.

Skip this and read Britain After Rome by Robin Fleming or The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story by Oppenheimer.

[Ana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really cannot comment on the head-butting between archeologists and cultural archeologists on what Anglo-Saxon means or what "purity" is in a people. For a book which has Arthur in its title there is very little of said Arthur inside. This work also felt more aimless than the other work of his which I've read. It kept circling and circling without really getting to the point. When it comes to the archeology of the Fens I trust Pryor and anything Bronze Age feels safe in his hands... but maybe the factthat this book feels shaky is more of an editorial fault? I'm really conflicted about this. I guess I have to read much more on and around the subject and then revisit this at some point to see where it stands.

[Speesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just when you thought you had the early history of Britain straight:

Celts living peacefully fighting with each other. Romans invade and rule and civilise. Romans go back to Rome, leave some Romanised British and other troops here. Civilisation declines, cities are deserted, fields overgrown, forests cover the land. Angles, Saxons, Jutes and others seize the opportunity to invade and stay. Poor Celts are pushed west and north to the fringes and Britain becomes Angle-Land. (Early) English springs up, the new England enters the Dark Ages and people long for King Arthur to return before Vikings come and Normans conquer again. And especially afterwards.

Just when all the historical novels and films you've seen fitted that 'truth'...along comes Francis Pryor and says 'maybe you should think again.'

I'm not goiing to spoil the book for you, by going into precisely what he does think happened in the first 700 years Anno Domini. But whilst the conclusions he presents are perhaps a little less spectacular - and certainly not as blood-soaked - than the picture we perhaps all have of boatloads of Germans and south Scandinavians sailing over and taking advantage of a vacuum created by the sudden departure of the Romans - proto-Vikings who then set about killing everyone and setting up their own, new country: His are at least conclusions based on the archaeological record and not the few surviving 'histories' we have, surely written at the time to satisfy an audience, who largely wanted to hear what they wanted the documents to say.

However, Francis Pryor is far too respectable an archaeologist to say 'THIS is exactly what happened.' He knows that he is still presenting interpretations of the facts - until we invent time-travel, i guess. He does still point out that these are conclusions and interpretations based on archeological study of what we have available now; evidence- and technology-wise. He points out how interpretations of the archeological facts have themselves changed, throughout the 20th Century, for example, as more and more sophisticated techniques and ways of studying these 'facts', have developed down the years. But he can back up his conclusions with a lifetime of archeological work and an inquisitive ability to think around a problem and say 'what if what we 'know', is wrong? Are we fitting the facts to what we want to believe?' Similarly to what the writers of the first histories tried to do, if you ask me.

Above all, this is a fascinating, engrossing, and extremely readable tour around 'Britain', pre- and post-Roman invasion. If you've read the first of his 'Britain' books; 'Britain B.C.', you'll know how Franics Pryor works and writes and you won't be disappointed. I understand he is now the main archaeologist on 'Time Team', which unfortunately we don't get out here in Denmark, but is an excellent appointment in my book. I felt he writes as if he is explaining things over a long lunch and a coffee in a cafe - warm and friendly and relaxed. Just right.

One thing I was not happy about - but that hadn't influenced my decision to read the book - was that the sales blurb does, mischievously I think, try and sell the book on the promise of an explanation of the Arthurian legends. But the book rarely touches on that. If you read it hoping to find Geoffrey Ashe-like revelations, you're going to be disappointed. The Arthurian legends are investigated and a possible explaination put forward. But no one is named as the 'real' Arthur, no place is pointed to as being the real Camelot or Mount Badon. You'll have to go and visit Cadbury Castle and let your schoolboy/girl imagination wander.

Otherwise, go read this one NOW! And especially before you see another King Arthur or Robin Hood film!

[Patrick Neylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, here's the skinny: the Anglo-Saxon invasions never happened. There are a few written sources but none are reliable, while the archaeological record (which is objective and plentiful) is so lacking in evidence of migration from the continent that it can almost be taken as proof that there was no invasion of Britain in the 5th-6th centuries.

But this is history, and any history you read is coloured by whoever wrote it, and so Pryor's offering definitely isn't the whole story. Still, he's a proper archaeologist and his arguments are rooted in the archaeological facts (which also explains why this book is more academic in tone than some readers expected). In debunking the idea of a Dark Age invasion, he is hardly a maverick: historians have been downgrading it for some time. The 19th Century idea of a mass replacement of the Celtic population went out of fashion decades ago, but till now few people have gone so far as to say that nobody at all crossed the North Sea from Germany.

Pryor claims exactly that, but he also takes the story right back to the Iron Age, examining how archaeology reveals that the British Isles before the Romans arrived were very different to what is popularly believed. He also stresses that Roman Britain was prosperous almost to the end, and that the Romans didn't leave; the British threw them out, after which things improved instead of descending into anarchy.

Even if this surprises some lay readers, it is close to the modern consensus among scholars. Pryor points out that the presence of continental-style pottery is no proof of an invasion, any more than the presence of German goods in Britain today is evidence that Hitler won the war.

Establishing these facts is good, but it leaves one question unanswered: why did the bulk of the British population adopt a Germanic language - as alien to them as Greek would have been - in the space of a couple of generations if there were no immigrants at all? Pryor lacks the courage to tackle this one. He might have debunked some old theories, but his theory isn't the whole truth either.

[Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The founding mythology of the English people based on historic writings is, more or less, first the Britons, who were pushed back by the invading Celts, who, after the Romans left, were in turn pushed back by the invading Anglo-Saxons.
Pryor's archaeological research on many sites in southern England does not find evidence of the disruption that would have been caused by invasions, but rather a very smooth transition from one culture to another. He is quite dismissive of the school of archaeology which, every time it finds a new style of pottery, invents an invasion or a migration to explain it.
He also maintains that back and forth contact with the continent was ongoing from the bronze age onward and never diminished. He also presents evidence of trade between western Britain and the Phoenicians of the eastern Mediterranean.
The book should have spent more time dealing with how the Celtic culture swallowed up that of the Britons and how eastern Britain became dominated by the Anglo-Saxons if there were no invasions or mass migrations. It was an interesting read but left me hanging in too many places.

[Riversue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Francis Pryor knows his archaeology . I always enjoy reading his books, they teach so much and do so in such a readable way.

[Martin Mostek · Rating 4 out of 5]

One can just see that scene. An historian stand at his ornate lectern intoning: as Gildas first wrote and Bede attest... while an archeologists kneels in his trench, trowel in one hand, brush in others hears that proclamation for thousandth time, turns his head and says just slightly exasperate: Thats all very profound but i just don't see that here!
Francis Pryor in this very well written and accessible (not all historians, let alone archeologist are capable of that) book covers two great epochs of history of Britain - Roman and Anglo Saxon. He explores among others thing origins and development of Arthurian myth and argue against two others myth as he perceives them: myth of "Dark Age" after departure of Romans being especially dark and perhaps more controversially that Anglo Saxon period was not started by mass migrations of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, let alone waves of them. His general point is that story written in history books and stories written in landscapes and archeological record are simply too different. His story grounded both in his prehistorical expertise and farming experience deserves fair hearing a serious consideration even if it perhaps does not fully answers all question which raises - one may very well accept almost as common sense that not every change in pottery type or style represent yet another new "people" or "migration wave" but when it comes to explanation of changes in burial rites or even development of new language as result of cultural exchanges and acculturation I guess that jury is still out at remain there for some time to come.

[Roxanne Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of a history of England AD then Britain AD.

[Bert Bruins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good companion to the TV documentaries on Channel 4, written by clearly passionate, national treasure Francis Pryor. However, as a self-confessed convert to the case of post-Roman continuity in "Dark Age" Britain (as opposed to the older theory of widespread collapse after the Romans left), he does overdo it I believe, and does not explain the near-complete eradication of Celtic languages from England very well at all. People are very attached to their language and culture, and the "peaceful adoption" of Anglo-Saxon by the existing Romano-Celtic population of current England sounds a bit far-fetched to me.

[Kerry Hennigan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this very readable account of post-Roman Britain, Francis Pryor explodes the old idea of mass migrations/invasions being responsible for changes in the Early Medieval (a.k.a. Dark Age) period of history. Instead, he uses archaeological examples to argue that instead of one group of people forcibly wresting control from another and imposing their way of life on the resident population, it was more likely to be a matter of acculturation.

Findings such as the Dover boat indicate that goods and ideas were freely exchanged between Europe and Britain, with some infiltrating local populations and replacing the old ways of doing things – or of communicating. No longer as controversial an idea as it once was, Pryor’s book presents convincing arguments for a complete re-think of the history of the period.

If we need some convincing of how our various modern societies are impacted by ideas from elsewhere, consider the case of “Britain’s national dish” – chicken tikka masala. Considered an example of the multi-cultural society of modern Britain, the changes in Early Medieval Britain could similarly reflect a society that was influenced by people and ideas from abroad without the need for mass invasions either side of the Romans and Vikings, respectively.

[Nicole Gibas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book started strong, hit a dry spell, then rebounded. By the end, I was glad I hadn't given up on it. I found the historiography of Arthur that opened the book a quick and enjoyable segment to read. However, the book doesn't circle back to Arthur at all until the final chapter/conclusions. If you came for Arthur, you won't get him.

What you will get is an understanding of Britain's evolution pre- to post-Roman occupation and into the "Anglo-Saxon migration". The author uses archaeology (it's heavy on archaeology but isn't dry) to counter sources like Gildas or Bede—too readily accepted as factual by the mainstream in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He demonstrates the continuity of the British people through these periods, debunking the oft-recited narrative that Anglo-Saxons conquered/invaded Britain or migrated en masse and supplanted the "native Britons".

Topically, it wasn't what I expected, but I'm glad to have read it. Before reading tho book, I didn't have an accurate understanding of the topic but believed I did.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is billed as the 3rd in a set of 3 books on Britains pre-history. The first 2 are straight-forward archaeolgical accounts of the pre-history of Britain. This one is a bit more of a theory piece. Pryor is pushing the new idea that the Anglo-Saxons didnt invade Britain en masse after the Romans left. He provides a lot of compelling evidence in his favor, but in the end i'm left not fully persuaded and thinking the real truth (as always) lies somewhere in the middle between mass migration and virtually no migration. The book jumps around from "Dark Ages" to the Roman period to the Iron age and even Bronze age a lot to prove different aspects of its hypothesis and ends up feeling non-fluid. There is not a lot in the book on the figure of King Arthur, dispite Pryors use of Arthur's name in the subtitle. The book was ok, but not as satisfiying as Pryors other books.

[Lee Broderick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Francis Pryor is well known to those with an interest in archaeology in Britain through his appearances on Time Team and the series which accompanied this book. Although it received some criticism from Mediaeval Archaeologists upon its publication (Francis is primarily a prehistorian) I felt that he covered the subject fairly convincingly.

No one writes archaeology for a popular audience as well as Francis and here, as ever, he combines his research with an approach thoroughly grounded in good-sense and laces it all with gentle humour.

[Tedders · Rating 1 out of 5]

Alternately boring and frustrating.

Admittedly I'm biased in favor of both Arthur and the Anglo-Saxon invasion, but reading this was like pulling teeth.

I suspect I'd have enjoyed a dry text book more than this. It was somewhat disordered and thrown out of balance by anecdotes about the authors adventures in archeology and people he knew. The ever present "I" was grating.

The single biggest draw back for me was Pryor's fixation on political correctness, and how this or that idea about the past is/was fuelled by racism.

Total disappointment.

[David Newell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly dense, but wonderfully informative look at Britain during and after the Romans. Pryor presents many themes and balances the various schools of thought with his own opinions, all backed up with plenty of archaeological sources and spirited discussion.

This is a book that is not only fascinating, but a genuine joy to read, Pryor's enthusiasm bleeds into the text and imbues it with a real passion.

[Robert Godden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read. Francis at his irascible best. Explains why he's right, or at the very least others are wrong. This is the sort of books on archaeology and history that there should be more of.

[Emily]

Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed the readable style, and I think this is a much needed reconsideration of the transition from "Roman Britain" to "Anglo-Saxon England."

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Logical archaeological history of the not so dark ages, where people lived as they saw fit and moved about a little bit.

[Iain Parkes]

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13696881

[Nicholas (was Allison) · Rating 4 out of 5]

*4.34 Stars
Notes: I had found this book after researching books related to earlier times of British history that weren’t commonly known, for a while. The historical content in this book, as well as archeological content, was really quite explained well enough that I could understand it without a reread. I kept reading this book until the end, since I could just really easily learn about what was being explained.

This book isn’t necessarily light reading, though everything is edited very well. I would rather have read as much of it as I could, than to not have looked through several chapters. This novel was definitely worth it for further historical research, before I look for other novels related to similar historical topics on British history that happened a while in the past as well. This is more of the type of historical nonfiction to include detailed references and properly written explanations for why things occurred in the past. The descriptive paragraphs were not too difficult to read through, even though there is dense factual information written in many chapters. Sometimes I had to read slower to try to comprehend everything more, though it was worth it.

I was glad that I read this book after reading some other nonfiction novels earlier this year, so I could read it through in less than a month. There are very useful discussions on events that occur much more than a few centuries ago in British history that are necessary to learn about, if someone really does have a keen interest in Britain’s past. I was intensively looking up research articles about events that occurred in Britain for the past few months, so I was alright with the sort of content in this book. Nothing is really skipped over when described - in the end, this novel was something that I really would not have missed out on.

I would recommend this to those interested in it from the description, or those who have read some of the author’s other books before. This is a worthy historically researched novel to read through, should someone else have a definite interest in what it is about.

[Archant · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book although well written, along with the TV series that accompanied it, back in 2005, is an example of how one discipline sbould never be seen in isolation, it is example of archaeologists producing analyses almost for sake of it, academic naval amazing. Pryor chooses to dismiss accepted accepted historical dogma, with placenames, burials, language, written contemporary sources showing there was a large scale settlement/migration after the departure of the Romans, instead focusing on the idea that because there was no large scale field use change in one small area of the fens and extrapolate this for the whole of the country. Isotope analysis on teeth to show if they had overseas origins, ignoring that they might be 2nd generation migrants and ignoring vital data, such as skull shape and dna of the bones etc. In the TV show he meets a geneticist who showed there was a 50-100% replacement of male y dna in England but not Wales, this dna matching that of Friesland in Northern Netherlands, a likely source population on of the Anglo saxons. Certainly mitochondrial dna (female line) would be more indigenous Briton, with the Anglo Saxons integrating with the britons, some of the leaders moving to brittany, but more than likely most stayed, so here is some validity for his argument for the west of England, but there had to have been a significant settlement of people to enact these enormous changes. Thankfully genetics has finally provided the missing piece in all this. The People of the British Isles project, the largest dna population analysis ever undertaken anywhere, released in 2015, shows Anglo saxon dna at 10% in Wales to 40% in the east of England, with York at 50%. This shows that Pryor was partially right, people did integrate and adapt, but there also had to have been a large scale settlement, to show such a significant input in dna, which matches the linguistic, place name and written evidence after all.

[Pippi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've had this book a while, since reading and enjoying Britain BC but I'd given up on it halfway and not bothered to pick it up again until now. I remembered why I'd given up! It's not a patch on Britain BC and it made me wonder if Francis Pryor is too famous or important for someone to tell him to go back and do a thorough job of redrafting this. First of all, it is not an overview of British archaeology from 1-1000 AD but more of a polemic explaining why the great Francis Pryor does not subscribe to the theory of mass Anglo-Saxon invasions, and exploring the continuity evident in the archaeology. I'm not sure if it was a particularly revolutionary idea 15 years ago, but it isn't now. There's an awful lot of "I believe ...", "It's my opinion ...," " It seems to me ..." running through the book. The first chapter is dedicated to a long and detailed historiography of the Arthur legend, which could have been shortened considerably. Later, we get the minutiae of the later Roman emperors, governors and changes in the power structure. I skimmed this to no ill-effect, and I think this is where I gave up last time! As for the archaeology, there is great detail of a few sites in Hertfordshire, a good overview of West Heslington in Yorkshire, and passing references to a few other places. "Britain" is a misnomer (the Scots won't be surprised), and even "England" is a stretch. Disappointing.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have VERY limited knowledge of this time period in history limited to a few podcast episodes and the traditional understanding of the Anglo Saxon invasion of England.

I had read that Francis Pryor wrote very readable books about prehistory, and I was interested in learning about the period, the archeological evidence, and Pryor’s (controversial?) view of the development of England during this period. I will say that this book really made me interested in this time period and since reading it, I have purchased several more covering similar subjects. I found it thought-provoking and interesting to read the archeological information we currently know about the time period. I didn’t quite buy into Pryor’s arguments about the Anglo Saxon invasion, because his argument seemed to lack enough supporting evidence and seemed a bit repetitive. However, I did find it really good food for thought, and it has made me much more interested in the early medieval period.

[Lucy Cummin · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a fan of Time Team I'm a fan of Francis Pryor-- his enthusiasm, intelligence and eloquence is irresistible. He writes well also. Here he examines the evidence for a) an Arthur b) a saxon invasion. Both, he argues should be ascribes more to a metaphysical/emotional need to connect the dots of pre-Roman Iron age Britain to post-Roman Britain, to create a 'story'-- archaeologically and more and more definitively, the DNA record, makes it evident there was no invasion of actual people from the continent, but a few people and a lot of ideas, did the job, the same way the latest fashion catches on here. What you do have is a difference in attitude from east (especially the southeast of Britain--the heart of 'England' to west and north. At its simplest the differences might simply be an openness to the continent and new ideas and ways . . . He presents a convincing argument that makes sense. Always a pleasure to read too. ****1/2