Thomas Williams (16)

I didn't realise it when I picked this book up, but having read it, I feel it's a good complement to [[The Anglo-Saxons]] by [[Marc Morris]]. Where The Anglo-Saxons focused on the stories for which there's evidence, Lost Realms focuses on the kingdoms for which there's a lot less evidence and which in many cases were subsumed into the bigger and better-known kingdoms over time. Fascinating all around if frustrating at times too because of the lack of evidence.

Alternatively annoying and enchanting; writing which is suggestive and evocative rather than getting too involved with making the few facts fit a coherent narrative.
With so few facts to make generalisations, the author appears happy to meander off-topic, for example to discuss differences between the calculation of the date of Easter between Roman and British Christians. They can be interesting facts, but probably read many times already by readers about this period.

After a stirring Prologue show more which sets the tone of the book, coming across as sceptical of recent revisionism and also somewhat romantic about the period, Williams sets out in an introductory chapter his process of choosing nine “little kingdoms”, lost realms, from the time in Britain between the withdrawal of the Roman Empire in about 410 until the Viking invasions that are the subject of an earlier book by Williams. In particular, Williams chooses not to write about the kingdoms of the larger four kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon “heptarchy” (so no Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia), nothing directly on the largest Welsh kingdom, Gwynedd, and nothing about the Scottish kingdom of Alt Clut, which has been written about by Norman Davies in Vanished Kingdoms (2010).
We therefore get chapters on:
• Elmet (West Yorkshire) - just a couple of mentions together with warlords or princes in records written decades or centuries after the kingdom ceased to exist. Just place names that once referred to Elmet and other place names that refer to a British church in Old English (Eccles). (There is irrelevant reference to poetry by Ted Hughes set in the general area, but in the eighteenth century).
• Hwicce (Gloucestershire and Worcestershire)
• Lindsey (North Lincolnshire)
• Dumnonia (Devon and Cornwall) - long term trade links to Rome and Byzantium probably continued after withdrawal of Roman Empire, especially at Tintagel where significant archaeological artefacts have been found
• Essex (Essex and Middlesex) - East Saxon kings claimed descent from Seaxnot, rather than claiming Woden as most other Saxon kings. Description of the excavations at Mucking of a hamlet over the period from about 400-700
• Rheged (Cumbria, Dumfries and Galloway)
• Powys (Montgomeryshire, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Cheshire, Shropshire)
• Sussex (East Sussex, West Sussex)
• Fortriu (Nairnshire, Moray, Banffshire, Aberdeenshire)

I read until I was part way through the chapter on Essex before deciding that I really wasn’t enjoying the book sufficiently, and this wasn’t compensated by the learning. I would recommend The First Kingdom: Britain in the age of Arthur instead.

Some curious choice of language used at times too, for example kipple, a colloquial word introduced in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? show less