HOW ENGLAND BEGAN

What did the Romans ever do for Britain?

Higham, author of King Arthur: The Making of the Legend (2018), reminds readers that Rome conquered Britain in the first century and abandoned it in the fifth but always considered it a land at the edge of the world inhabited by barbarians. Germanic tribes that invaded Gaul, Spain, and the Balkans quickly adopted Roman culture, language, and Christianity, yet Britain was an exception. English owes less to Latin than Romance languages. Even the Anglo-Saxon “invasion” was more likely a migration, although by 500 C.E., Britain was divided between a British west and a Germanic east. Higham warns against seeing the Britain of that era through an Arthurian lens; that legend was created later. In the absence of effective government, significant warfare was rare before the sixth century, when early British and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms took shape. Higham eschews turgid academic prose, but this is a scholarly work less concerned with bringing an ancient culture to life than examining surviving evidence to determine if it describes reality. Literacy was a church monopoly, so surviving documents focus on usually obscure theological quarrels. Events of the day—mostly disastrous—were considered God’s punishment on a depraved humanity, so accounts of government and culture took second place to pleas for readers to repent. A fifth-century monk, Gildas, produced the only account of this period written by a contemporary; the many pages that Higham devotes to a close textual analysis will test the average reader’s patience. Unlike historians, archeologists continue to turn up new information, and Higham does not ignore what graves, coins, tools, and, lately, DNA reveal, although the end result is often controversy rather than hard data.

The latest on the rise of Anglo-Saxon Britain, but directed at a scholarly readership.