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This book is a collection of essays, unconnected with any television series. Wood is after all as much a historian in his own right as a `mere' presenter of historical documentaries. In this collection, he returns to a theme covered in previous books, especially his `In Search of the Dark Ages' and his `Domesday Quest', in which he seeks to discover the essence of Englishness. What is it about England's - Britain's - modern day society that can be connected specifically to events and developments in medieval England?
In his introduction writes Wood, "This book looks at some aspects of what one might call the Matter of England. It is a series of stories which directly or indirectly, touch on some questions of English history and identity and the transmission of tradition ... The book is a miscellany, then, but which I hope adds up to more than a sum of its parts ... My emphasis is in the Early Middle Ages, the ninth and tenth centuries, when the English state was created, and when certain crucial elements became apparent in the English identity."
Over the length of its more than three hundred pages, Wood's book does not address this `Matter of England' directly. Instead, he focuses on particular aspects of medieval England in its broadest sense as test-pits, as it were, on the wider archaeo-historical enterprise. Rather than a full excavation, then, this is a series of slices through some ruinous and partly-hidden remains of the past. Wood remarks that if the devil is in the detail, so are the angels. Wood undertakes his search by way of fifteen chapters. These are split into three parts: myths, texts, landscapes.
Part one's five chapters address the supposed myths of the Norman yoke, of King Arthur, of Glastonbury, of Robin Hood (hero, terrorist, or the neighbour from hell?) - and of England itself. When did England become England? Does `England' exist at all? (Here is not the place to dispute Wood's contentions or criticise his omissions.)
`Manuscripts and Mysteries' is the subject of part two. In the first of its four chapters, he accompanies the Tudor antiquarian Leland to Glastonbury Abbey, Wood remarking that "the greatest destruction of the heritage of these islands occurred in the 1530s and 1540s; this is the threshold over which we must pass in any attempt to get to our early roots through the texts; to recover the lost history of English culture in the thousand years before the Reformation."
The second chapter asks if Asser's biography of King Alfred is a fake, whilst the third conjectures whether William of Malmesbury's second-hand description of King Athelstan is a forgery. Wood argues it is from a genuine source: "The book [now lost] was real enough." The final chapter in this section witnesses how clues in the contents of a manuscript infer it was once owned by Athelstan.
The final part comprises six chapters. The first sees Wood retrace the steps of HV Morton in seeking out William Lailey of Bucklebury, the Anglo-Saxon woodturner of the twentieth century; the second sees him postulate that Tinsley Wood near Sheffield was the site of the battle of Brunanburh in 937, the site of which remains "one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in British history"; whilst the third witnesses Wood make good his attempt to confirm the assertion of WG Hoskins that "It would be possible to take any house and write its story, which somehow would also be a history of part of England itself." In this instance it is Bury Barton in Devon.
That the common law of England is one of the bases of English freedom is discussed in the fourth chapter, where Wood visits Peatling Magna in Leicestershire to explore a court case dating to 1265.That Wood treats the reader as an equal is here made manifest by dropping the roll number and the membrane into his narrative, in case you wanted to go to the Public Record Office and see it for yourself. (The book eschews footnotes or endnotes.)
The fifth chapter takes us up to Jarrow and the work of Bede. Here Wood attempts to show the reader how the cultural as well as the physical landscape there means that his `Ecclesiastical History' could have been written in that vicinity rather than in, say, Kent. The final chapter - an epilogue - is an extraordinary and timely redefining of Englishness and what it means today to be English.
There is a strong personal element in many of these tales, whether it be his own meeting as a schoolboy with Field Marshall Montgomery at the Houses of Parliament, or his own trudging through some remote landscape that nevertheless speaks volumes to his sixth sense of the living past.
If that was not enough, the book ends with a marvellous twenty-page guide to his sources and suggestions for further reading. In this extensive bibliography he refers to work done at Kibworth Harcourt in reconstructing "the history and topography of a Leicester village", work he would subsequently use and build upon in his own `Story of England' book and series.
Whilst Wood holds no formal academic position - and, indeed, has (I understand) still to complete his PhD - the freedom that this has engendered in approaching some of the issues of English, indeed World history from a variety of different aspects, whether it be the life of Shakespeare or the routes of the Conquistadors, means that he continues to deliver the goods without sacrificing academic discipline and rigour in his arguments. My own feeling after reading this book is that Wood is surely on to something in his seeking to base the essence of Englishness in such early times, but that the precise form continues to elude him - and, by definition, will continue to do so. But it is an invigorating and fascinating and necessary search nonetheless.
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