There are lots of books on early medieval England, fewer on what became Scotland and even less on what became Wales. Thus, the world of scholarship has produced grand narrative accounts of regions that for the most part post-date their chronological focus, reflecting nineteenth-century nationalist histories and a continuing insularity of academic interests. Carver's new synthesis, then, is to be greatly welcomed in terms of its geographic coverage alone. It is also timely in view of the huge volume of new material available from development-led excavation, the creation of national schemes for the recording of objects and a very healthy field of study and research that has grown exponentially in the last 30 years, all providing Carver with rich pickings from which to assemble his account.
It is a long book. Its approach to the chronology of the early medieval period—the ‘Formative’ of the book's title—will be familiar to those working on Anglo-Saxon England (Formative 1: fifth to seventh centuries; Formative 2: seventh to ninth centuries; Formative 3: ninth to eleventh centuries), but less so to those working on the other regions of Britain. Its 735 pages are divided into seven chapters that deal with mainly traditional themes, including personhood and identity, settlement, burial, and monumentality, but in new and invigorating ways. The challenge facing the author with regard to how to order his material cannot have been an easy one, yet he has managed this task with aplomb.
The book opens with an extended treatment of the natural topography of Britain and its islands, and of the material legacy of the previous inhabitants of these spaces, the latter one of the most exciting fields of study to have developed in the last 25 years. Complex debates are discussed with clarity and balance; for example, the matter of ethnicity and the ongoing discord between the contributions of ‘hard’ scientists and those working from a cultural perspective. The chapter on settlements refreshingly considers sites with an ecclesiastical core alongside ‘secular’ sites, and presents a strong argument for a distinct difference in ecclesiastical culture either side of the River Humber in Formative 2, which makes a new contribution to the long-running debate among medievalists about the nature of churches at this time. Towns receive concise treatment and a high degree of Anglo-Saxon kings drawing upon Roman models is emphasised, although this is questionable in so many other areas of Anglo-Saxon secular culture as to challenge this notion. The discussion of London raises the idea that (spatially) there were ‘five Londons’ between the Roman period and the eleventh century, but neglected is the strong likelihood that there was no densely occupied town to speak of for a large part of the ninth century. The comparative Britain-wide approach to settlements of all kinds makes this piece particularly engaging. Cemeteries are interrogated for what they reveal about social and ideological developments, with a particular focus on the fifth to seventh centuries. In the English area, a sixth-century interest in prehistoric monuments as cemetery sites changes in the seventh century towards an alignment with Roman sites. There is excellent discussion of how cemeteries can be translated into living populations, again with a keen eye on developments in neighbouring regions. The chapter on monumentality builds upon much of Carver's previous work on monuments as political and ideological instruments, with particular reference to the evidence of stone sculpture. There is excellent wider contextualisation of this material in relation to regional patterns and developments farther afield, for example in Scandinavia.
The penultimate chapter considers the much-discussed relationship between archaeological evidence and textual sources, with Carver consciously acknowledging that most scholarly discussions begin instead with a historical framework. Many now see disciplinary divisions as undesirable and indeed unnecessary, and scholars in other fields of study must find it bizarre that medievalists effectively working on similar questions and problems still choose to do so without drawing upon the full range of evidence available to them. It cannot be denied, however, that Carver's focus on the material has allowed a powerful narrative to emerge.
Overall, Carver's emphasis is very much upon sites and material culture. Landscapes feature to a lesser degree: the great linear ditch systems, the territorial framework of early medieval Britain, and the spatial organisation of power could all have been examined in greater detail. A close eye is kept throughout on developments and comparisons found in Ireland, Scandinavia and Continental Europe, and this is a fundamentally important aspect of the book. The potential audience for this book is broad, although its length and level of detail will find particular appeal among academics and their students. From an aesthetic perspective, the copious illustrations would have benefitted from uniform styling.
In conclusion, it is a pleasure to enjoy an extended synthesis produced by a deep thinker who has done so much to frame the ways in which students (writ large) of the early medieval period think about their material. A review of this length cannot tackle points of detail consistently, and there are many such points that others may take issue with, but that in itself will hopefully generate a body of responses and reactions to move debate forward. This volume will have a long shelf-life as a work of reference and as a statement of current knowledge of indeed one of the most formative periods in Britain. It undoubtedly has an agenda, but it is a well-argued and well-balanced one, and in that sense it is much more than a textbook. I cannot but recommend it without hesitation. Carver has created his own form of monumentality in the shape of this book and it is an impressive one at that.
