The evolution of England — from ragbag kingdoms to a centralised state

The title of Marc Morris’s new history makes me want to get up and dance a little jig. The modern Inquisition has been jabbing its finger at the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, accusing it of thought crime and threatening it with the cucking stool. (At least one august history society in the US has renamed itself in response.) Bad people have no doubt used the word, but Alfred the Great (871–99) and Æthelstan (924–39), among others, identified as such, and so contemporary historians have a reasonable case for using it too. Bravo Mr Morris for getting on with it. Having spent many years at academic conferences around the world, I can reassure readers that if today’s Anglo-Saxon scholars are closet white supremacists, their cover is pretty darn deep.

Undertaking a single-volume history of the Anglo-Saxon period is a sufficiently unmean feat that few have found the energy for it. Doing so requires an evaluation of some six centuries of British history — from the influx of German types at the end of Roman Britain c. 400 through to William the Conqueror’s rude arrival in 1066 — roughly the same length of time as from now back to the Battle of Agincourt. A lot happened, most of it unpredictable, obscured by the passage of time and the loss of primary sources.

Since the Anglo-Saxons at the outset lived in such a markedly different world to those at its close, one might ask whether they deserve to be considered together. The departure of Rome’s legions precipitated a catastrophe for which there is no parallel in British history. Late Roman Britain had towns built in stone, Christianity, writing, currency, hot water and central heating. Within a few generations, a ragtag of barbarous kingdoms occupied lowland Britain: the towns were empty, the gods were many, literacy had departed, there was no coinage and everyone was speaking Saxon and taking cold showers.