Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons [Paperback]

In the Pryor version of things, post-roman civitas polities evolve into British and Saxon kingdoms and there is no more migration than usual, while the Saxonisation of eastern Britain is explained by cultural influence rather than wholesale immigration. In doing so, he takes a position even more extreme than that of Saxon expert NJ Higham, who explained this change as the influence of a small Saxon warrior elite that rapidly seized power in lowland Britain.

So how well does he prove his case? In archaeological terms, pretty well. Pryor has been excavating around Peterborough for more than thirty years, and if there was any evidence for mass immigration from across the North Sea, it would certainly show up here, in fertile farmland easily reached by Saxon keels rowing up the brackish river Nene. In fact, as he shows, there are none of the sudden changes in building and farming that would be expected, only the partial switch from grain production to stock raising predictable from the loss of Roman era long-range trade. On the way, he comprehensively demolishes the idea that the “Saxon shore” forts were actually built to keep out raiders, showing that they are much more consistent with use as secure supply ports for the Roman army (though he doesn’t mention their obvious usefulness in the event of a rebellion).

The traditional objection to this more mundane view of the Dark Ages is that since English contains very few Celtic words, there must have been wholesale population replacement. Although I knew that Hungarian was a Finnish-related language adopted by a Germanic people, I always found this objection persuasive. The change for me came when I moved to a triple language border in Europe and began to raise children bilingually. By talking to other people in the same position it quickly became clear that people just do not learn languages “mixed-up”. Bilingual children do make mistakes but they’re very quick to correct themselves, and find switching from one language to another as easy and natural as putting on a posh accent to answer the telephone. All that’s needed for complete replacement is several generations in which one language confers a higher attainable status than another and is therefore more worth retaining. That’s why the main threat to Europe’s minority languages is not any risk of merging with other languages but rather the risk of being wiped out completely by their low percieved status.

So with that objection out of the way I was ready to read this book without thinking “Ah yes, but what about language” all the time. This is a more impassioned book than Pryor's Britain BC or Seahenge, and he doesn't justify or reference his claims as systematically as he did in those books, but this also makes it a more exciting read.

Pryor is an engaging and authoritative commentator, both on screen and in print, and this book is a very good read. Pryor is firmly in the camp of the ancient Britons and in Britain AD he argues against the migration theory of the origins of England. He puts forward some interesting arguments based on recent research, but I have to say that Pryor's pudding has far too many eggs for my liking.

Explaining cultural changes by way of migration theory has long been out of fashion in the archaeological world (remember the Beaker folk; whatever happened to them?) But in Britain AD, Pryor takes a revisionist step too far by effectively erasing the early English from history. Pryor uses inverted commas whenever he mentions the Anglo-Saxons (sorry, 'Anglo-Saxons') to ensure that the reader is left in no doubt of their mythological origins. Even King Alfred gets reduced to the legendary status of Arthur, even though he is a known historical figure.

Pryor's belief is that no more more than a tiny trickle of continental immigrants came to Britain in the Dark Ages and that the English are simply the indigenous population with a new language and new clothes.

The number of Anglo-Saxon immigrants is arguable and there is little doubt that much of the population of early England would have had British roots. But Pryor's theory that such huge changes to society were simply due to the adoption of continental fashions or influences strikes me as highly improbable.

The English language is Pryor's main hurdle and proves to be insurmountable. Only 20 or so words from the Celtic language were recruited into English. The contrast between the failure of the Celtic language in lowland Britain and the continuation and eventual triumph of English after the Norman Conquest (where it is known that there were just a few thousand immigrants who replaced the ruling classes) is striking.

My one other criticism of Britain AD is that I wish Arthur hadn't crept in quite so much. The use of Arthur's name in the sub-title will presumably increase sales but the Arthurian themes seem a bit of an add-on.