Henson's book examines a territory notorious for its obscurity: the fifth and sixth centuries. During this period Germanic tribes made their way into post-Roman Britain. Exactly how they did this, who they found there, and the nature of their relationship with those peoples, are still contentious questions. Thus, in The Origins of the Anglo- Saxons, the author tries objectively to lay out the data, gleaned for the most part by synthesizing published scholarship of recent decades. Henson forthrightly acknowledges that his book arises from frustration with attempts to answer these questions; attempts which he believes are hampered by disciplinary prejudice and overspecialization. As it emerges through the course of the book, this problem manifests specifically as a lack of mutual regard between historians and archaeologists who, in accordance with the nature of their fields, privilege either documentary sources or the evidence of material culture. I believe that a similar frustration is shared by many Anglo-Saxonists attempting to incorporate the knowledge of many disciplines as they stitch together the fading fabric of Anglo-Saxon culture. It was thus particularly pleasing to see a book attempting to lay out the evidence from a variety of fields, to set the record straight, as it were, before proceeding to conclusions. Unfortunately, this book is itself very frustrating to read, because of the very tactics it employs in the name of transparency. In the end, The Origins of the Anglo-Saxons presents no new ideas and does little to clarify the debate about the emergence of "English" ethnicity.
Henson adopts a constructivist approach to ethnicity, laid out in detail in the first chapter "Constructing Ethnicity," in which he argues that "ethnic identity is the sum total of largely accepted norms arising from the various active networks that share a self perceived view of themselves as members of an overall, usually passive, network, based around the notion of themselves and some other group" (20). According to his definition, Henson continues, ethnicity is thus largely inherited as a pre-existing network of "markers." Individual choices nonetheless allow for manipulation, conscious or otherwise, as individuals learn new languages, migrate, intermarry, or convert to new religions. Ethnicity changes over time, and so to be an Anglo-Saxon in the seventh cetury is not the same as being "English" today. Nevertheless, Henson believes that understanding the evolving history of Anglo-Saxon ethnic identity might allow the English to "reclaim something from earlier expressions of being Anglo-Saxon and enliven our consiousness of our own English ethnicity right now" (22).
This chapter, despite its obvious intent to clarify a complex issue, nonetheless muddies the water further. Before long, the majority of the discussion of ethnic malleability diverges into a lesson into the relationship between Liberal politics and interpretive archaeology, citing Locke and Mill as philosophical antecedents because of their ideas about the relationship of individuals and the social group. This line of thinking becomes, turning again, a history of archaeological schools, culminating in a brief summary of current constructivist opinion in archaeology. The identification of connections between liberal thought and constructivism is not, I think, the most effective way to explicate the constructivist view. The constructedness of identity is, indeed, not such a new idea and seems not to merit the reconstruction that Henson affords it. If the audience for the book is composed of undergraduates, or a general readership being introduced to these concepts then the initial discussion of ethnicity will provide them with a reasonable, plain-language primer in academic ideas about ethnicity. However, for a different audience Henson's discussion is unsophisticated compared, for example, to the treatment of ethnicity in the introduction of another recent book on Anglo-Saxon identity, Stephen Harris' Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Routledge, 2003). Considering the aims of the first chapter, Harris' work is an important study of which Henson seems unaware. In a similar lapse, Patrick Geary's The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton UP, 2001), cited on p. 15 as Geary 2002, does not appear in the bibliography.
The evidence is organized into chapters composed of a dizzying number of subsections, each of which reports on a specific kind of evidence or social sphere. This reliance on headings, understandable given the vast but very fragmented field of evidence across a variety of disciplines, unfortunately emphasizes fragmentation and robs the book of the coherence the headings are intended to impose. Thus, for example, the introductory chapter is divided into no less than seven subsections, three of which are divided into further subsections. One main division entitled "Behavioural culture markers" considers each of these markers in separate subsections on Language, Religion, Action, and Social and Political Structure. Furthermore, each of these subsections is covered in about a single page. The section about language as a cultural marker, for example, notes that while language "can play a highly symbolic role in ethnic identification" (37) language groups are not equatable with biological groups as some scholars, Henson claims, have simplistically assumed. But the brevity of the investigation is dissatisfying here, as in many of the other sections.
Henson often generalizes such accusations about what "some scholars" suppose, giving the impression that the scholarly myopia that so frustrates him is a straw man. This is a pity because his general complaint about the lack of cross-disciplinary awareness in Anglo- Saxon studies is well-taken. Given that overturning misinformation and prejudice is put forward as a governing logic of the study, it is crucial that the author be clear about which positions he views as erroneous, rather than issuing cautionary notes about, for example, how place-name evidence must be "very carefully investigated if spurious reasoning is not to produce spurious results" (70). Occasionally, as for example in his discussion of the nature of Bristish society when the Anglo-Saxons arrived (79), Henson names a specific group of recent studies that apparently ignore progress in our knowledge of the migration, and such instances certainly lend credence to the frustration he expresses as well as anchoring his own summary of the (hopefully) prejudice-free facts more firmly.
Another potential concession to a wide audience, Henson's prose style, also ends up an obstruction to clarity. Paragraphs frequently develop, often over a page at a time, as a series of declarative sentences. While information-rich, these paragraphs do little to connect their information to the discussion of ethnicity and origin in the first chapter or the cross-disciplinary confusion that motivates the book. Thus, the argumentative and concluding statements that do exist bear an unusually heavy burden to make sense of the dense information that precedes them.
Some conclusions, laudable attempts to carefully conclude only what can be fairly gleaned from evidence, end up as disappointing statements that we might have surmised without recourse to any evidence at all. For example, he concludes that "[i]t is clear that the Anglo-Saxons were an intimate part of a northern Germanic cultural entity that spanned the North Sea. They used cultural markers from within this Germanic identity to reflect different types of Germanic identity within Britain" (70) or, again, that "the settlement of Germanic peoples at different levels of society was subject to the realities of power and the concerns of strategy" (73).
Henson supports some specific views regarding the emergence of an Anglo-Saxon ethnie: migration involved movements of whole social groups not merely smaller bands of warrior elites; Roman Britain was an organized and still functioning diocese when they arrived (as opposed to an empty land of scattered tribes) even though this system of rule broke down over the sixth-century (181, 184). The conclusion, though, is most useful in reminding us of what was unlikely to be the case rather than in its speculations about what could, may, or indeed "must" have happened: We can only guess about the religion and social and political structures of the Germanic migrants (180-81); the connection between material culture and ethnicity is ambigious (182); the length of the Anglo-Saxon period precludes treating it as a single culture (185). Rather than developing an argument, however, this book draws together fundamental evidence about how language, religion, and material culture contribute to the development of an Anglo-Saxon identity as distinct from a mass of tribal identities, from overarching continental germanic identities, as well as distinct from Romano-British culture that preceded the Anglo-Saxons in Britain. Assembling this information in one place, including a full seventy-nine pages of appendices (lists of kings, Roman emperors, chronologies, a summary of Germanic Philology, place name tables, a timeline, and most unusually a collection of extracts from primary sources regarding King Arthur) creates a resource of potential use to students. In this it fits well with the similar guides already published by Anglo-Saxon Books. I still wonder, however, if a book that sacrificed the attempt at completeness for a more engaging integration of evidence with narrative would have produced a more cogent overview of the debate and might better serve students and general readers alike.