Robin Fleming's masterful contribution to the new Penguin History of Britain does fulfill its goal to reach an audience ranging from both undergraduate students to professional historians. Although the series eschews footnotes and historiography, in fact Britain After Rome explicitly makes a significant historiographic argument in favor of material culture over narrative sources, an approach that is put into action in the structural balance and voice of the book in a way hitherto unseen in any previous synthetic history of Anglo-Saxon England. The opening quote from George Eliot's Middlemarch reveals this distrust of the traditional narrative sources by invoking the image of a candle on a scratched metal surface creating an illusion of concentric circles with its "exclusive optical selection." Instead, Britain After Rome offers a single author's integration of the fragmentary material and documentary sources, painstakingly accumulated over decades of study, with particular attention paid to the wealth of recent archaeological information not often well used by historians trained primarily in narrative sources. Archaeologists are notoriously disdainful of written sources, while historians tend to mine archaeological reports selectively to fit bits of evidence into their narratives, a pattern hard to break. Fleming has succeeded by writing from within the material evidence first, then weaving in the narrative sources as contrast or support, the same way one would with documentary sources like charters.
Indeed, Fleming is the ideal Anglo-Saxon historian to have pulled off this feat. Domesday Book and the Godwin clan from her earlier work do make an appearance in the volume, but the emphasis on the physical realities of ordinary people's lives is evident in her more recent biographical essays on women's bodies found in grave sites (see chapter 13). The result of this combined expertise is perhaps one of the clearest explanations of the emergence of elite families in post- Roman Britain and their changing relationships to the majority of the populace in rural and nascent urban areas. Although the geographic focus is primarily on the zones affected by Anglo-Saxon migration, due attention is paid to regional differences between eastern and western Britain, as well as the complex dynamics between British and "English" newcomers. Wales and Scotland are treated separately where their differences stand out; Ireland, as usual, is left to its own devices except insofar as the Irish interact with the main isle (cf. p. 267). Despite this seemingly traditional geographic space of "Anglo-Saxon England," Fleming has turned its history inside out by relegating master narratives to an almost tangential role in relation to the diverse evidence of material culture.
Free of narrative constraints, the organization of the volume is only roughly chronological, with time periods overlapping between its thirteen intriguingly titled topical chapters, thus effectively precluding stark periodization. The earlier centuries receive remarkably more attention than the usually dominant late Anglo-Saxon era, if only because the material evidence is not quite as biased toward the later periods as the surviving written sources are. After a quick view of late antique Britain in the first chapter, the fifth and sixth centuries in chapters 2 and 3 merge into the sixth and seventh centuries in chapters 4 and 5 (the latter surveying belief and ritual from the fourth to seventh centuries), while chapter 6 addresses missionaries and converts from the late sixth to early eighth centuries. If there are chronological breaks in these interlocking chapters, it may be the broader perspectives offered in chapter 7, "The Rebirth of Trading Communities: The Seventh to Mid- Ninth Century," and chapter 9, "New Towns: the Ninth to Eleventh Centuries," unsurprising subjects given the book's overall emphasis on economic transformations triggering political ones. The intervening chapter 8, on the Norse impact, stresses historical contingency by highlighting lost histories of peripheral areas in contrast to the seemingly inevitable rise of Wessex (221-22, 226, 240; see also chapter 10 on the Wessex achievement). It is only in the last few chapters (9-12) that Fleming gets to the era most heavily covered in standard textbooks, the ninth to eleventh centuries, examining economic and material factors first--as throughout the volume, then political and religious movements as results rather than as causes. The last chapter (13) is a summary of the fifth to eleventh centuries focused on "living and dying" from graveyard evidence that has, in fact, been used extensively throughout the volume.
Although the book is lengthy, the thirteen chapters break its 366 pages into manageable chunks, each further organized into insightfully labeled sections (e.g., "Building a Usable Past," p. 90), with inviting bibliographies for further reading in the back ("Ten Books [Articles] that are Good to Think With," p. 370). The approach is, obviously, more descriptive than narrative. The pattern in most chapters is to set up the material conditions first, then explore people and their interactions. Each chapter includes two or three sample sites from various parts of Britain, carefully chosen so that by the end of the book most areas and major archaeological sites have found their way into the book (to my mind, the most impressive accomplishment).
Given the series' ban on historiography, the discussion of sites and sources is less analytical and more reflective, primarily by suggesting alternative interpretations. These reflections are thoughtfully presented: even if occasionally one might disagree with an interpretation--inevitable in any book of this scope worth reading- -one isn't forced to agree to follow the line of argument. Most of the cases where I put a question mark were those that seemed to treat beliefs reductively or to take an excessively bleak view of existence, unmitigated by the kinds of hopes or aspirations found in the admittedly biased written sources. Chronic illnesses made people cranky while high infant mortality left pervasive sadness (19), but psychological mood and emotional tone absent the spiritual meaning that religious people may attribute to suffering betrays a secular materialist set of values. That babies were no longer buried with other dead as they were in Romano-British graveyards does suggest a change in view of infants (47), but even speculatively calling into question recognition of their personhood seems unwarranted given the difficulty of identifying infant remains outside of graveyards. Although she notes the influence of late antique monastic asceticism in attitudes toward the body as the source of sin (130), what remains unmeasured is the tangible grace found in the celebration of the body of Christ imbedded in liturgical rituals that accompany penance and console those who have suffered from the material deprivations Fleming so frequently emphasizes. Still, the complexities of competing belief systems are for the most part given nuanced treatment, with conversion described as a process not only of monk missionaries making converts, but of converts making Christianity (154, 159).
What makes the book compelling are the many insights into daily life in early medieval Britain that challenge pre-existing notions, both those derived from traditional narrative sources as well as modern preconceptions. Some of these are nuances easily lost in the generalizations commonly found in textbooks. For example, the myths surrounding the collapse of Roman Britain and the Anglo-Saxon "invasions" are dispelled in the early chapters by examining the complex relations between post-Roman British society and the English settlers, including "long and peaceful coexistence" (57) resulting in a "new sense of Englishness" that "was as much the invention of British as of Germanic-speaking people" (60). This malleable identity formation is detailed cogently without invoking ethnogenesis theory and while making innovative use of a range of sources. Bede is summarily put in his place as subservient to the material evidence (chapter 3), but he is also read carefully for what he can--and more especially cannot--tell us about pre-Christian pagan practices (134- 35). Even Beowulf gets a fresh reading as portraying "one of these overwrought, faux-traditional, pagan funerals" favored by self- conscious elites of a certain period recycling the past, as they did also at Yeavering (98, 102). On the chicken and egg question of whether farmers or lords drove innovation and productivity in the ninth to eleventh centuries, Fleming nicely balances the equation by noting that strategies developed independently by local communities earlier were clearly co-opted later by the elite landowners to their economic advantage (283). One of the more interesting results of relying first and foremost on material evidence over written is the more balanced picture of women and their varying life experiences (for example the labor of farmwomen, p. 285).
If there is a weakness to this materialist approach, it is perhaps in its functionalist explanations that seem to reflect modern, secular values. This is particularly apparent in Fleming's treatment of the elite and their increasing economic consumerism and political capital, treated suspiciously like the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush- -a presidency that she cites as evidence that "people at the top can have dramatic effects on the lives of the individuals and on the societies in which they live" (pp. xix-xx). The overuse of the term "conspicuous" in reference to elite consumption and display, especially in chapter 11, is a clue to an underlying Marxist reading of economies then and now. The expensive almsgiving in Wales is presented as almost entirely self-serving rather than as altruistic (310-11), while the "extraordinary and unprecedented prosperity" of the elite in the tenth and eleventh centuries came "at the expense of their agricultural dependents" (313-14). Similarly, the prolific church building of late Saxon landholding families not only serves to "monumentalize their piety" in the same way as other ostentatious displays of wealth and status, but also "remind the peasants just who was boss" via the "weekly ritual reminder of the social order" in the separate entrances to the church (336; see also p. 150 on the cut throat political environment). Undoubtedly a true picture, it is nonetheless incomplete without considering the potential for social leveling in Christian ritual, with its humbling emphasis on divine power and eternity versus human fallibility and the ephemeral nature of temporal materialism. Nonetheless, in chapter 12 Fleming does offer a good measure of religious life, while acknowledging (338) the hints of deep devotion and religious enthusiasm evident in church foundations and architecture.
In terms of audience, the book has much to offer both students and specialists, within certain limits imposed by the series and the physical format of the book. The style is readable and the tone friendly, with colorful descriptions of frippery found in graves and imaginative reconstructions of life on a farmstead or town (the former healthier than the latter). The absence of druids, Arthur, and other popular medievalisms will disappoint the more naive undergraduates, who might nonetheless find that the execution burials reinforce other stereotypes about the nasty, brutish, and short life of a typical medieval person. More significantly, given the emphasis on artifacts and archaeology, is the complete absence of pictures or diagrams, except the dust jacket art of the Staffordshire hoard and the very well done maps at the outset (although a map of the north Atlantic would help chapter 8). The print cost for images is a chronic problem, one which might be resolved by creating a website that offers full color images and diagrams, or hotlinks to relevant websites. The lack of footnotes presents some challenges for scholars and students: one has to dig through the chapter bibliographies in the back to find the relevant articles or books from which the examples were drawn. Each chapter has multiple bibliographies by topic (after an initial "fundamental readings"), but then each of these are organized alphabetically rather than in the sequence used in the chapter, so it might not be obvious by title which item supports which anecdote. Of course, this could force students to do more research and reading, a good thing indeed. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Britain After Rome and learned much from it, so I can imagine using it in an advanced undergraduate course on early medieval Britain or in a graduate seminar. I would hope also that both archaeologists and historians will treat it as a model for future integration of our complementary disciplines.