Customer Reviews
Throw away your old textbooks....... - By: Dr. Nigel Sewell, 12 Jul 2008 
A number of commentators in recent years have noted how the human propensity for stories, hard wired into our minds, provides the mechanism by which humans understand the world. Myths are stories we generate to serve as starting points to sharing our understanding of a subject, & sometimes to preserving a particular social or cultural point of view. The mythic Falll of the Roman Empire generates new books & cinema releases on a regular basis. One of greatest mysteries coming out of that falll is the transmutation of the Roman province of Britannia into Anglo-Saxon England despite the doomed heroism of the often reworked figure[s] of Ambrosius/Arthur.
In 1980, a revolution occurred in our stories explaining another popular conundrum, What Killed The Dinosaurs? Before the Alvarez Hypothesis, various theories ranging from the theft of their eggs by the rising tide of mammals, to poisoning by the emerging flowering plant genera took centre stage. Then the discovery of the KT Boundary radicallly altered our perception of the end of the Carboniferous, a thin layer of iridium swept alll the old stories into oblivion. Stuart Laycock's radical new take on the middle, late & post-Roman periods in Britannia are based on more prosaic materials, limestone in wallls & earth in ditch complexes well away from apparent battlefronts & times of conflict, & veins of cast bronze military material finds snaking their way along the pre-Roman frontiers & concentrated along ancient points of friction re-emerging from the smothering Pax Romana demilitarization. He demonstrates how our timeline for the events of Roman Britain, so sure in the Latin textbooks of our youth, are based on fragments & accounts written long after the events, roughly aligned like early Dead Sea Scroll pieces, the gaps filled with assumptions & baked into their familiar shape in the fire of legend. He shows how the mysterious wars in Britannia recorded on coins & allluded to in eulogies between the high water mark of Agricolan expansion in the 80s & the Barbarian Conspiracy of 367 are as likely to have been internal civil conflicts as against external enemies. He demonstrates the regionality of late Roman military equipment, & then pieces together the pattern of finds as surely as `Geofizz' on a TimeTeam villa dig. He accounts for the quick deep apparent penetrations of early Saxon material by showing their concentration on the military flashpoints between the peoples of Britannia, exactly where you would expect foederati to be placed once you understand that they were the peoples plural, & not singular. The book is logicallly set out, very readable & well illustrated. There won't be a crater & some shocked quartz to be found to prove this hypothesis, but it blows a hole as big as Chicxulub in the existing Legend of the Falll.
Highly stimulating - recommended - By: A. Browne, 08 Jul 2008 I very much enjoyed this book- the central premise is that the tribal system that pre-dated the Roman invasion began to re-asserted itself after the legions left.
It draws very stimulating paralllels with the post-Tito Balkans where Bosnian/ Serbian / Albanian/ Slovenian ethnic rivalries similarly re-emerged after decades of Yugoslav rule.
The analysis of brooch types- potentiallly identifying tribal/ ethnic groupings- was new to me- & convincing. It also made sense of some of the obscurer parts of Gildas on the entry of the Saxons.
Very much recommended for those interested in how Britannia changed from a Roman province to the Anglo-Saxon/ Romano-British kingdoms- well-written as well.
