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Little Kingdoms: An A-Z of Early Medieval Britain: An A-Z of Early Medieval Britain

by Alex Harvey

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CPE said: " Alex Harvey’s Little Kingdoms: An A-Z of Early Medieval Britain is enthralling but best read in small chunks. Imagine you’ve been given a huge bottle of the best whisky/brandy/whatever available: you should pour a small amount; sip it; and savour it, Alex Harvey’s Little Kingdoms: An A-Z of Early Medieval Britain is enthralling but best read in small chunks. Imagine you’ve been given a huge bottle of the best whisky/brandy/whatever available: you should pour a small amount; sip it; and savour it, not quaff it by the pint. Similarly, I got far more out of the book when I limited my reading to a few pages a day rather than reading for a couple of hours.

I don’t recall reading a book like it (and that is emphatically not a pejorative comment). It demonstrates deep, deep scholarship but sometimes addresses the reader in an almost New Age traveller mode, “[…] you gasp out of breath and look up and see arrows whizzing past loosed from the frigid hands of village boys and you feel what they feel. They don’t want to be here. You don’t want to be here.” The change of tone can be quite disconcerting but, rest assured, the author soon reverts back to a scholarly discussion.

The book is a series of sixty-four short essays about “places”, rather than kingdoms, that existed between the fifth and tenth centuries. I write “places”, but some of them are groups of people such as the Haliwerfolc. These followers of Saint Cuthbert roamed across Northern England for some centuries after Cuthbert’s death in 687. Harvey uses them as the basis for explaining how the cultural assimilation between the English and the Scandinavians (Vikings, if you wish) was very gradual, with memories and the cultural influence of Scandinavia growing weaker with each successive generation. That lesson is echoed in “The expansion of Northumberland in the seventh century took several decades but key battles happened only for a few hours.” We, in the twenty-first century, are impatient; wanting to get from the beginning to the end of a story as quickly as we can. Harvey’s reminder that the purpose of a battle was not to massacre as many people as possible, but to eliminate the enemy’s leadership and to subdue or intimidate the remainder so that there were still people left to farm and to pay taxes to the new regime. Over time, everyone settles into the new status quo.

Although this is an excellent book, written by an expert, I suspect the audience will be smaller than it deserves. If you are interested in Britain during the sixth to tenth centuries and are happy reading about polities where we might know a name but not the actual location of a place, this is the book for you.

#LittleKingdoms #NetGalley ...more "

Dec 23, 2025 09:31AM · see review