The First Kingdom
Britain in the age of Arthur
Max Adams
Having read it
★★★☆☆
A well researched and written book that got me intrigued in some of the early happenings of post-Roman Britain, certainly in its first part.
But, unfortunately it seemed to get a bit bogged down in its academic fortitude and lost some of its appeal to me, which definitely included part two (and some of part three), hence a final rating of three out of five, rather than a four out of five; it had moments of interest!
A good passage
The diversity of Britain’s climate, soils, cultural histories and sense of local identity suggests a mosaic of challenges, opportunities and accommodations faced or embraced by the communities of the former Roman province. Unless forcibly coerced, people adopt new cultural values and material expressions of identity because they see them as socially advantageous. Warriors, pirates, refugees, economic migrants and family followings all have their place in any picture of the emerging native societies of Early Medieval Britain. A seemingly inescapable concentration on, in not obsession with, ethnicity (either native of Germanic) is intellectually unhealthy and redolent of a late Victorian mindset, fixated on the origins of formative ‘nations’ and races. Even the almost universal employment of the terms ‘Early Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘British’ or ‘Migration period’, to describe the archaeology of eastern Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, is a straitjacket.
A second good passage
Art is, above all, labour intensive; creativity is time consuming. The forges, kilns and weaving paraphernalia that archaeologists find in towns and rural settlements all speak of investment in time – not just for conception and creation but in training craftspeople, developing and maintaining their skills; acquiring specialist raw materials. And, since jewellery, glassware, architectural embellishments, decorated pots and luxury textiles were not, so far as one can tell, being traded for cash profit in urban markets, their production must have been fostered by patronage, through gift and commission.