It is notoriously difficult to gain any clear impression of the realities of sub-Roman Britain given gaping holes in the archaeological record and the smokescreen of centuries of myth-making and historical invention. Green’s book represents an engaging and readable interpretation of what may have happened in the region we know as Lincolnshire in the shadowy period between ad 400 and 650. Through considerable dexterity and the integration of a wide array of historical, linguistic and archaeological sources, the author conjures a lively hypothetical narrative of the transformation of a Late Roman province into the historically attested Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Lindissi.
The book commences by highlighting the vitality of the Lincolnshire region in the late Imperial world of the fourth century, a vitality which the author suggests may have sustained Romanised ways of life somewhat later here than in other regions of Britannia. In this version of events, the fall of the Imperial administration did not so much result in political implosion as in mutation: by the fifth century what had been the northern part of Civitas Corieltavorum had re-emerged as the lost British kingdom of *Lindēs, inheriting much of the organisational infrastructure of its predecessor, including the provincial capital of Lincoln, which persisted as a centre of political and episcopal authority. As portrayed, this post-Imperial polity was sufficiently robust and cohesive to influence the inflow of Anglo-Saxon immigrants, orchestrating the controlled settlement of Germanic enclaves in regions distant from the British nerve-centre of Lincoln. Ultimately, however, British resistance collapsed, paving the way for the formation of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Lindissi, which first emerged into clear historical light in the seventh century. According to Green, this new political formation drew heavily upon its British precursor: it was similar in geographical extent; the Lincoln region continued to function as a ‘core territory’; and other component parts of the kingdom (including those named in the Tribal Hidage) and their central places can invariably be shown to reference the Late Roman past in their siting and configuration.
Green is not afraid to stick his neck out and make some brave assertions on the basis of what he readily admits is a very difficult and incomplete evidential base. While speculative, his analysis is nevertheless critically informed in relation to general academic discourse on Dark Age Britain and contributing fields of study. There are some, however, who may find the book’s conceptual framework (not unreminiscent of Alcock’s Arthur’s Britain) somewhat outdated. In the final analysis, this is a familiar account of Britons versus Anglo-Saxons. Although there is acknowledgement that these were fluid categories with significant evidence for British populations acculturating to Anglo-Saxon norms and, to a more limited extent, vice versa, the dynamic is still interpreted in binary terms: depending upon context, one identity is proclaimed in opposition to, or subsumed by, the other. There is no space here for the cultural blurring and complexity known from better-documented post-Imperial domains (such as Gaul) or that might otherwise be inferred from migration theory. If you can forgive these absences of nuance, then prepare to be stimulated by a valuable contribution to Dark Age studies written in the traditional mould.
