The Past Imperfect series of ARC Humanities Press advertises itself as providing concise and provocative studies on matters of serious contemporary historical debate. Those descriptions fit this book; the further promise that I would be ‘enthralled and enlightened’ was not met, however. Without using the term pejoratively, this short treatise might be regarded in terms of the polemical pamphlet genre that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; I estimate its length somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 words. The position promoted rejects the idea that England evolved from a horizon marked by substantial population change in southern and eastern Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. There is nothing new in that, of course, but here the low-number option of ‘elite dominance’ is also rejected and we are left with no actual Anglo-Saxon period at all. Oosthuizen proposes to divide these centuries between late antique (fifth–sixth century), early medieval (seventh–mid-ninth century) and pre-Conquest periods (mid-ninth–eleventh century). The final chapter invokes the concept of the longue durée; here, the author is on her home turf of historical agrarian geography.
Relevant knowledge and understanding are otherwise markedly wanting. It would take much more space than is available for this review to identify all the errors, distortions, misunderstandings and non-sequiturs out of which the case is built. Starting at the very beginning, there is no source that shows that ‘by 600 at the latest [people] referred to themselves and their language as English’. The date would seem to relate to Æthelberht of Kent’s laws, but those do not refer to anything English: the association is presumably based on reading that he had them written in English, although Bede’s actual phrase, conscripta sermone Anglorum, is a significant circumlocution. It then looks as if Procopius wrote in Latin, referring to Angli; actually the forms he used to denote both the Angles and Frisians imply a well-rooted, educated Greek transmission of ethnographic information. The ‘Angles or angels’ pun attributed to Gregory in fact runs a lot more cutely in Greek than Latin (μὴ Άγγίλoι ἀλλά ἄγγελoι), which has intriguing implications for the background to the Augustinian mission. Pope Gregory’s usage is a perfect example of the importance of nomenclature used externally, and its sources are to be sought in his own complicated circumstances – but this is no evidence for self-identification within what would become England.
Those are fundamental problems raised by the nine lines of the first paragraph. And so it proceeds. It may seem precious and ostentatious to make an issue of the difference between Greek and Latin, but supposedly ‘flawed premises and arguments’ in the work of most other scholars in the field are alleged over and again. Key historical sources are seriously misrepresented in the book: Gildas, for instance (no notice of the identification of ‘Agitius’ with Aetius ter consul); Zosimus (‘[his] account of the rebellion by the “the British” against Saxon rule in about 409’ [sic]); the Old English law-codes – Æthelberht, as just noted; no account taken of the composite nature of Ine’s Laws. Understanding of the crucial languages and terminology is generally weak and seriously erroneous in places: eg Saxons – ‘anyone from beyond Rome’s north-west European frontier’ – or the supposition that Romano-British origins are somehow ‘indicated’ by the suffix of Old English names in -sǣte. The archaeological evidence is as badly handled: it is asserted, for instance, that cruciform brooches in England represent beyond question or need for argument the adoption and development of a brooch-form by Romano-British craftsmen, a point somehow missed by Toby Martin in his doctoral research on these brooches (Martin Reference Martin2015); the sub-phasing of the Anglo-Saxon period into Early, Middle and Late is allegedly ‘largely based on changing political organization’. I admit that I am probably more inclined than most to emphasise caution due in extrapolating from the isotopic data of a set of nineteen relatively early dated samples from the cemetery at Berinsfield in Oxfordshire, which show that the overwhelming majority here lived their whole lives locally, although I do not question the integrity and significance of the data, nor that it is reasonably concluded that these results ‘are most consistent with the acculturation [ie population continuity] hypothesis’ (Hughes et al Reference Hughes, Millard, Lucy, Chenery, Evans, Nowell and Pearson2014, 91). But it is misuse of data to reconstrue that (plus the actually less consistent results from a cemetery at Eastbourne, East Sussex, also briefly noted: Hughes et al Reference Hughes, Millard, Chenery, Nowell and Pearson2018) as demonstrating for a fact that ‘most people in fifth- and sixth-century cemeteries were locally born and brought up’ – and furthermore thus British: not even the descendants of an insignificant immigrant minority.
Others’ work is misrepresented. Tom Lambert’s recent book Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (2017) is purported to show Romano-British customary law suffusing and underlying the earlier Old English law-codes, but it neither does that nor tries to. Lambert is rightly sceptical of clean slate/new population scenarios, but states explicitly that the early chapters of his book (those cited) are ‘not about how Kentish law related to other legal traditions, but about how law functioned and what law meant within Kentish society’. A more precise reference (to Lambert Reference Lambert2017, 71–2) suggests that it has mistakenly been imagined that the Germanic tradition of ǣ, ‘law’, was the Romano-British tradition. Another specific reference initially seems to be of no relevance at all, except that just over the page cited (Ibid, 99; see p 100) Lambert concludes that (in respect of legislation on theft) earlier Anglo-Saxon kings ‘were imposing new and foreign punitive priorities against the grain of native legal culture’. This is hardly a passage that foregrounds or suggests that indigenous tradition was the bedrock of the legislation. An article of my own is referenced as exemplifying the assumption that ‘ethnicity’ (and migration) were key factors of changes in the fifth and sixth centuries. It is true that I accept that migrations were a significant phenomenon – across most of Europe and beyond, in fact; it is also true, as fuller appraisal of the available literature would have shown, that I have consistently argued (from empirical evidence; and by no means alone) that a wave of larger group-identity formation (sc ‘confederation’) was a major phenomenon outside the Empire in the late second to the fifth centuries that appears to have been especially dynamic in some parts of Germanic-speaking Europe – which is rather different from proceeding on the unthinking basis of a habitual presupposition. I am willing to categorise identities as ‘ethnic’ in some circumstances, but personally never employ a concept of ‘ethnicity’ unless I need to discuss it as used by others. The first page specifically referred to from that article in fact reviews the hybrid origins of a reconstructed Anglian identity in England, including direct if limited evidence of a Romano-British component.
Where there is nothing good to say, nor sympathetic or encouraging comments that could be justified, it would be lovely to pass over in silence. But this book is being given a vast amount of uncritical publicity, and endorsement from some influential individuals who have no excuse not to know better. Fake history differs from fake news only in terms of time-depth. There are infinitely worse forms of historical misportrayal than anything perpetrated here, even if the issues are live and sensitive in current cultural politics. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time: nonsense will eventually get sorted from reality in future study and research. I stress that the selection of specific flaws pointed out here are all readily verifiable cases of factual error or false argument, not differences of opinion. Unless you take the view that only attitude matters and veracity does not, this is not work of publishable quality in any defensible view, and the publishers need to reflect on how they identified peer-reviewers. This booklet trumpets forth the very opposite of the proper critical approaches responsible academics try to instil in the students they seek to educate: respect for and care with evidence and interpretative methods – ie ensuring that you know what you are talking about; reading secondary sources with care and objectivity – not seeing only what you are looking for whether it is there or not, or cherry-picking references. ‘Post-truth’ is the disreputable realm to which this profoundly deficient work belongs, and it should be treated as such. We are better than this, ALL of us; the subject is better than this; and any and every target readership deserves infinitely better than this.
