REVIEW BY CH
Nicholas Higham’s comprehensive exploration of how ‘Roman Britain’ transitioned into ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ brings with it a wealth of topics that still resonate today – discussions of migration, integration, and cultural influences; Britain’s relationship with continental Europe; and ideas of identity and hostility towards ‘otherness’.
It is an ambitious work, densely detailed and covering a diverse range of subjects – but that is not to suggest that the book is heavy going: Higham writes with a brisk confidence and clarity, and he has a particular knack for summarising how interpretative trajectories have evolved over time. The book is scholarly and thoroughly referenced, with almost 100 pages of endnotes and bibliography – rich ground for those wanting to delve even more deeply into a particular topic, but there is an impressive level of detail already packed into the preceding pages.
Higham (who is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Manchester) shows an almost effortless command of written sources, marshalling Classical accounts and inscriptions, early medieval chronicles, and saints’ lives. As a historian, he also makes a plea for these sources to be more prominent in discussions about the period. Several chapters include a suggestion that a focus on archaeological evidence is dominating current scholarship of this period, and Higham states that ‘part of this book’s purpose… is to reclaim for the historian and their written sources a role in discussing the Roman-British-Saxon interfaces… alongside other, equally valid disciplines’.
