Book Review: The Anglo-Saxon World
/The Anglo-Saxon World
Historical debts that seem self-evident to one generation are rejected and repudiated by the next. Yet is is clear that the Anglo-Saxons do still matter. For whether we know it or not their shadow still lies long over England itself, and over, too, the whole English-speaking world. We tread where those ancestors trod, in a world which still bears the imprint of their decisions, their deeds, their wants and their needs.
There can be little doubt of it, and not just England - Thomas Jefferson, for instance, famously considered 8th century Anglo-Saxon government to be "the wisest and most just ever yet devised by the wit of man." The period covered in such lavish detail in Higham and Ryan's book stretches stretches over a longer period than any other in British history, from the fifth to the eleventh century, conveniently bookended by the collapse of Roman colonial power and the death of the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold II, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. It includes a roster of iconic names, from Alfred the Great to the Venerable Bede - and of course one name that stands above all the others:
It is Geoffrey of Monmouth who took up these stories in the 1130s and reimagined British history around the figure of Arthur, who dominates a substantial section of his extraordinarily popular History of the Kings of Britain. In his King Arthur, 'both upright and generous' and a mighty warrior, who underlines the irruption of the icon of chivalric insular kingship into which Arthur metamorphosed across the centuries that followed. Geoffrey made the connection between Arthur and various sites in the south West, including Tintagel, where he placed his birth and the court of the rulers of Cornwall. And it was Geoffrey who popularised the 'once and future' king for the Anglo-Norman elite and so began the reconciliation of Arthur with the English. The round table is perhaps the greatest surviving relic of the Arthurian revival in the Plantagenet era, which was then 'improved' on behalf of Henry VIII to impress his new Hapsburg relatives. The whole story had become firmly entrenched in England by the fifteenth century, when Malory wrote his Mort d'Arthur.
It's always difficult to work in the shadow of a legend, but Higham and Ryan, marshaling the latest research from archeology, genetics, paleobotany, and even plain old literary studies (oddly enough, those literary studies, safe enough to do in any library carrel, are some of the most exhilarating sections of the book, although isn't it just like a reviewer to say that), do a superlative job of putting actual day-to-day flesh and bone onto a period that for far too long was rather conveniently labeled "The Dark Ages."Their efforts - hugely aided by the glorious illustrations with which Yale University Press has packed this pleasingly oversized volume - are comprehensive and successful; the Anglo-Saxon worlds in all their violent splendor come alive in these pages. And they return often to a point that's easy to overlook: the Anglo-Saxon age may have ended a thousand years ago, but the Western world in general - and of course England in particular as we know it - wouldn't exist without it:
Study a map and look up local parish or township names in the Domesday Book and, like as not, you will find them listed, or who held them in 1066, how much land there was, of what kind, and how much tax was owed. England is an old country, therefore, and many of its basic structures and its local geography were sketched out, at least, in the Anglo-Saxon period
By its very nature, The Anglo-Saxon World represents a factual advance over all similar volumes that have preceded it, but the passion of its enthusiasms is its main recommendation. Our authors have a big, sprawling story to tell - of ornate tombs and sword-hacked skulls, of gorgeous handcrafts and marauding Vikings, and of some remarkable warrior-kings who stitched a country together out of fragments left behind by the most powerful empire the world had ever seen - and they tell it exceedingly well.