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Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070 Paperback – May 1, 2011
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin UK
- Publication dateMay 1, 2011
- Dimensions5 x 0.8 x 8 inches
- ISBN-10014014823X
- ISBN-13978-0140148237
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- Publisher : Penguin UK (May 1, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 014014823X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0140148237
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5 x 0.8 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #267,041 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #448 in Ancient Roman History (Books)
- #1,069 in Great Britain History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Customers find the book's content fascinating and enlightening. They appreciate the author's use of archaeological evidence to flesh out details about work, homes, and burial customs. Readers describe the pacing as engaging and ground-breaking. However, some find the writing style concise and well-sourced, while others mention that primary written sources are scarce. There are mixed opinions on the narrative style, with some finding it realistic and bringing to life real people of this period, while others feel it's grim and not narrative.
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Customers find the book's content fascinating and enlightening. They appreciate the mix of archeology and history that brings the dark ages to life. The book is well-researched and enjoyable, providing an analysis of everyday life in Britain during this period. It's a typical history textbook, but better than average college text.
"...Overall one comes away from this book armed with much evidence about how lives where shaped economically and socially, an awareness of what's still..." Read more
"This is a very interesting, even brilliant, rethink of British history in the Dark Ages...." Read more
"...And the actual story is pretty interesting, anyway, that is enough for a parenthetical remark)...." Read more
"This excellent history of Britain covers the period between the departure of the Romans around 400 AD and the arrival of the Normans in 1066...." Read more
Customers find the book's archeological evidence interesting. They say it provides details about work, homes, and early Middle Ages based on cemetery exhumations. The author also provides information about burial customs, religion, trade, and economics, as well as housing patterns.
"...Here the archaeological evidence is very convincing...." Read more
"...The author works strongly from archeological remains, with telling details about work, homes, and the lives of the inhabitants of Britain...." Read more
"...There is much information about burial customs, religion, trade and economics, housing patterns and so on...." Read more
"...But the graves tell a different story...." Read more
Customers find the book's pacing engaging. They appreciate the well-written and insightful history of Britain. The book brings to life everyday people during this period, including government, religion, and community living.
"...on what the bones tell us about health, lifespan, and ordinary living is revelatory...." Read more
"...is able to carefully infer much about government, religion, and community living...." Read more
"...this one is clearly aimed at the popular history crowd, with an engaging tone and an attempt to construct a "narrative"...." Read more
"Brings to life real, everyday people of this period...." Read more
Customers have different views on the writing quality. Some find it concise and illuminating, with good details about everyday life in Britain after the Reformation. They describe the author as masterful and readable. Others mention that primary written sources are scarce, with only 2.5 pages of sources and no notes.
"...The author works strongly from archeological remains, with telling details about work, homes, and the lives of the inhabitants of Britain...." Read more
"...a lot of time collecting different pieces of research to provide in pretty good detail the lives of people in Britain (mostly England) over a period..." Read more
"...These stories are as vivid as any could be -- for example, the excavations at Repton, which was sacked and occupied by vikings in 873, reveal an..." Read more
"This book is extremely well sourced, very well written and engaging...." Read more
Customers have different views on the narrative style. Some find it engaging and realistic, describing everyday people in this period. Others describe it as grim, boring, and lacking action.
"...The story is grim, it isn't often pretty, but it also isn't necessarily as brutal as you might think...." Read more
"This book is not a narrative history of post-Roman Britain...." Read more
"Brings to life real, everyday people of this period...." Read more
"...when the narrative reached the mid-11th century and the book came to an end!..." Read more
Customers find the book dry and mention it requires a good working knowledge of English geography.
"A bit dry at times, which isn't really a surprise I guess. It is a long slog through to the end, as century gets layered onto century...." Read more
"Very cerebral and dry. At the same time quite interesting at times. Not what I was expecting but a good read." Read more
"very dry, one needs a good working knowledge of English geography to make sense of this." Read more
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How Britain Evolved Post-Rome
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2020Preamble:
Overall this is an insightful, honest and comprehensive work. This is not, however, as at least reviewer points out, a narrative history. If you're looking for a "big history" narrative style of kings, queens, dates, battles and vikings this is not the book for you. The reader may note some surprise at this state of affairs given that this work comprises the 2nd volume of Penguin's History of Britain. Obviously when a reader sees a publisher's "History" of such-and-such notions of streamlined narratives and grandeur fill the head. And editor David Cannadine's penultimate volume certainly fit that bill, at least within the confines of what's acceptable in post-modern historiography!
The simple fact of the matter is: the paucity of documented (and incontrovertibly reliable) sources from the time of the departure of Rome's legions to the Normal Conquest is so severe that any narrative style history must necessarily founder on the twin rocks of factually-unwarranted overgeneralization and hubristic misinterpretation (those are some big rocks!). Instead our author reverts to the archaeological record as the original source of truth. In this she has a masterly command of the subject matter and comes across as eminently well qualified to such an extent that when she does make a generalization it carries with it the weight of fact. Most of what she discusses though is (and must be) caveated with the probabilistic language of incomplete inquiry. Which is to say that sometimes it can seem there is very little we can be certain about during this period.
Here are some key takeaways I was left with:
-The Anglo-Saxon "invasion" of the British Isles is misnamed as the evidence doesn't suggest a uniform migration of Germanic peoples to the Isles using violence and rapine to achieve settlement. Instead the evidence suggests extended family groups travelling in small boats (plus ca change?) to forge small settlements (often in marginal, unpopulated areas) over a period of many decades. Here the archaeological evidence is very convincing. No stone is unturned (pardon the pun) in extracting and inferring information from burials and settlement sites.
-The amount that can be discerned about material culture by excavating said sites shames anyone who believes that narrative history is the end-all and be-all of historiography. We learn vast amounts about intercultural European trade; who had which luxury goods and who broke their backs for a living; fashion and styles of a variety of socio-economically placed individuals; and the rise of towns and agriculture. The student of modern day inequality could learn much from how resources and surpluses appeared to be divided in such times.
-The notion of "Dark" ages must be continually revisited. Sometimes they were, sometimes they weren't. We find silks from Byzantium and garnets from India as well as countless goods from the Rhine and France. While these goods were no doubt few and limited it was not as if Britain reverted to some Stone Age after Rome.
-The immediate post Roman world included many features that I was previously unaware of. While Roman cities were mostly abandoned, many towns were not and settlement patterns indicate that Brittons were not immediately struck with poverty and ruin - in fact an argument could be fashioned that the century following Rome's retreat life was quite idyllic for many. However in the absence of the sustained capital investment the Roman military occupation provided (along with collateral trade benefits - traders routinely used extra storage space aboard military transports for moving civilian goods) British material culture declined with increasing rapidity... though the evidence of an anarchistic break-down of law and order is only limited.
-This book does not attempt to draw any conclusions about the nature of the human political condition and how it may have given rise to Feudalism and the social structures thereof. This may have been deemed outside the author's scope but it does allow the reader to form their own opinions - how nice! It does provide many facts (based on the excavatory evidence) based on the evolution of material culture that the informed reader may add to their arsenal and deploy in concluding how society in post Roman Britain transformed from Imperial "freedom" to Feudal submission (or however one feels inclined to characterize it).
-While there is scant evidence of prosperity in the 6th and 7th century, the 8th and 9th centuries were ones in which those with surplus producing property become ever wealthier, deployed their surpluses in ways that resulted in increased trade and town formation and resulted in agricultural intensification and settlement clustering (that had the effect of reducing the lifespans and health of the surplus producing population). This was not a period devoid of prosperous people.
Overall one comes away from this book armed with much evidence about how lives where shaped economically and socially, an awareness of what's still missing from the record, a healthy skepticism of whatever contemporary sources are extant and a sense of what many aspects of life must have been like. One does not come away with much knowledge of which rulers did what (if indeed they did) or the strategy of the viking Great Army or Alfred the Great (who's sobriquet was invented by 19th century historians) or what lead to the end of Anglo-Saxon control of Britain. But the emphasis on material culture archaeology does leave me convinced more than ever that so-called trends and movements in history, articulated in narrative history, are not necessarily wrong as much as they must be integrated into existing societal/economic/cultural trends of those times. If I may savage the analogy: we don't so much get an answer to the hoary chicken-egg paradox but we get plenty of compelling evidence about individual chickens and eggs, to the extent that we cannot help but be irreversibly informed.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2013This is a very interesting, even brilliant, rethink of British history in the Dark Ages. Fleming abandons narrative history in favor of which might be called anthropological history, attempting to recreate what happened to the lives of ordinary inhabitants of Great Britain from about 400 A.D. to the Norman Conquest. Some of her take, particularly her analysis of the "Anglo-Saxon" conquest, is highly controversial, even radical. In particular, she argues that the Germanic migrations were largely peaceful, that the Germanic population amalgamated with the pre-existing Celtic-speaking population, and that the claims that the Saxons conquered the British population with "fire and sword" was a later confabulation concocted by successful aristocrats of both Germanic and British origin to glorify their pedigree. This is a startling reversal of the usual narrative of Anglo-Saxon conquest, and it is based almost wholly on archeological discoveries. But is it right? There are some reasons to think it is not:
1. Genetics. About 35% of the present male population of southeast England descends from Germanic stock (See Bryan Sykes, "Saxons, Vikings & Celts"), twice that of the Germanic input into the present South English female population. This points to a moderate "Genghis Khan" effect -- male conquerors killing or displacing the indigenous male population and impregnating the local females. As Sykes put it:
"The gory chronicles of Gildas do contain a grain of truth. The roughly twofold excess of Saxon/Danish Y-chromosomes compared to their maternal counterparts hints at a partially male-driven settlement with some elimination or displacement of the indigenous males." (at 286)
Since there has been considerable "internal migration" within Great Britain since the dark ages, the percentage of Anglo-Saxon male genetic input in the fifth and sixth centuries was probably even greater at that time. Fleming hardly mentions genetics and as far as I can tell does not even acknowledge Sykes and his DNA studies on English ancestry. Trying to do archeology without considering genetic input is like doing paleontology without mentioning DNA -- the needle is often more convincing than the spade. What Fleming needs are Saxon graveyards with a number of high-status burials of men with Celtic Y-chromosomes, and British cemeteries with some burials of low-status men with Germanic Y-chromosomes. To date, she does not have theses.
2. Linguistics. Old English contains very little Celtic input, but is almost mutually comprehensible with, e.g., Old Frisian, the language of many Germanic settlers. If the Celtic and Germanic populations melded, rather than the latter assimilating the former, we would expect a more "Creole" type language, or at least heavier linguistic input, such as Norman French provided to Middle English.
3. Literature. Gildas records the incursions of the "gallows crew" of Saxons in a manner consistent with the "fire and sword" narrative, noting that their conquests stopped about fifty years before at Mt. Badon. Gildas may have been alive at that earlier date, and certainly many of his parishioners were. It is hard to distort a history which substantially contradicts the living memory of one's contemporaries.
4. History. Already by the fourth century the Romans had fortified the "Saxon shore" against Germanic invaders. It is hard to believe that Saxon pirates, who may have already settled in Southeastern Britain during Roman times, spawned harmless farmers in the fifth century. And it is difficult to imagine such a Saxon farmer saying to a Celtic indigene something like "Hi! I'm your new neighbor. I'll be taking over the fifty acres next to your homestead," nor that Celtic neighbor saying, "Glad to meet you." And why did the Western Celts (the proto-Welsh) uniformly consider the invaders to be Saxons rather than invaders of mixed pedigree?
5. Demographics. For Fleming's thesis to work, the population of Southeast England in the fifth and sixth centuries must have been low relative time the periods before and after so that there was a lot of available land. Was it? And if so, why?
There is a great deal to like about Fleming's account, however. First, her observations about the small size and disparate origins of many of the early Germanic settlements rings true. Second, she is certainly right that the Germanic and Celtic elements often did form alliances and fight with their own ethnic group almost as much as against each other. Third, her accounts of British history after about 600 A.D. (when the English were Christianized and written records became more numerous) is plausible, even convincing. Fourth, her concentration on what British history and life were like for the ordinary people is both refreshing and ground-breaking. And her last chapter on what the bones tell us about health, lifespan, and ordinary living is revelatory.
I give this book a "5" even though I disagree with its central thesis -- or perhaps because I do. I would not have been nearly so stimulated if that thesis had been less problematical.
Top reviews from other countries
- Cliente KindleReviewed in Brazil on July 30, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Great 👍
Great 👍
- Ian AReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 28, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Britain after the Romans
Excellent sequel to David Mattingly's "An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire" in the same series. Engagingly written. It's filling in a load of blank spaces in my dodgy historical memory.
- Jerry J BrettReviewed in Canada on August 7, 2017
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Well researched and written account of everyday life during a little known era.
- IvyFlorenceReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 10, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars A story of collapse
A good review of an era that is fascinating even with so little evidence to work with compared to other periods
- Victorian32Reviewed in Canada on August 6, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Well-researched and well-written. Only for people really interested in this period of our history. Not for general reading.