My approach is a personal one. I believe with some passion that archaeology is a personal discipline, and consider it misleading to suggest that there are such things as impersonal, dispassionate or objective archaeological books, just as there are no absolute facts in archaeology, other than the objects themselves. The objects are facts, but anything we attribute to them is interpretation. You may think that a term like ‘cremation urn’ has to be factual; but that presupposes that we all agree on what constitutes a cremation—and here, as elsewhere, there are many grounds for argument. If archaeologists and historians care about their subject, they will have axes to grind, and I prefer to sharpen mine in public.
In all my books I have tried to think and write in time-depth, because I am convinced that the fundamental attitudes underlying human society take a long time to change. Such a long-term view of British history and prehistory would have been impossible without the work of the Venerable Bede, who was one of the ablest minds of all time. It was Bede, in his great Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), which he completed in the year 731, who introduced the system of BC/AD to British history.2
In Britain BC I used archaeology to give an impression of what it might have been like to have been alive in the supposedly anonymous and faceless world of prehistoric times. Prehistory, incidentally, is the name given to the study of human history before the advent of writing and written records, which arrived in Britain with the Roman Conquest of AD 43. Too often it is portrayed as a time when individuals, who of course could not be identified, did not matter. So they have tended to be forgotten, their humanity replaced by explanations that assume that prehistoric people somehow lacked free will. In the past prehistorians were too ready to attribute social and cultural innovation to external processes such as migration, economic collapse and environmental change. By approaching their subject in this cold-blooded way, they dehumanised it and made ancient people appear like machines that merely responded to various stimuli in a predictable fashion. This was far too mechanistic for my taste: I prefer my archaeology, like my friends, to be human, fallible and hard to explain. But for some reason nearly all archaeologists detest unsolved mysteries; they would prefer any explanation to no explanation.
Archaeologists dealing with the period covered by Britain ad have also fallen, too often, into a mechanistic explanation of change and the denial of free will to the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxons’. But there is an important difference between the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ and prehistory, because now we are no longer wholly reliant on archaeology. In the present book I have tried to reconcile the contrasting views of ancient life provided by historians and archaeologists; and I conclude that in many significant respects the two are irreconcilable. I do not believe that this matters a great deal, because the authors of the only ‘historical’ sources available were not writing history at all: they were writing polemic, with a well-defined audience and purpose. I shall have more to say on that in Chapters 1 and 2.
In this book I will suggest that in the fifth and sixth centuries AD there are, if anything, rather too many faces: unreliable ancient authors, semi-mythical leaders and one impossible hero called Arthur. These faces have been dominant for far too long, and the voices that have attended them—sometimes their own, more often those of their modern academic supporters—have tended to drown out the quieter, subtler, and to me far more persuasive, stirrings of archaeology. In this book I have made a conscious effort to redress this imbalance.
I have tried to write about more than just the lives of people in the past. I have attempted to make my work relevant to the world around us today. If archaeology is only about antiquity it will soon wither and die, as a pointless, self-serving pursuit. This trilogy addresses themes that matter in the twenty-first century: questions about ideology, the role of religion in daily life, problems of identity and sense of place. In the present book I have also grasped the nettle of what it means to be British—but I do not offer solutions, because there aren’t any. I also avoid the easy way out of saying that there is no such thing as Britishness. Popular definitions of Britishness certainly vary, but that does not invalidate them. Some of them may be jingoistic, or worse, but I believe that a sense of community, however one chooses to define that term, is something worth holding on to in a crowded world that is growing increasingly self-centred.
Finally, I write about something that is surely quintessentially British, namely the keeping up of appearances. Over the years I have become increasingly convinced that the British use their past as a surface coating, a facing, to prevent them from thinking about who they really are as individuals. You can see a rather extreme expression of this tendency if you visit Glastonbury. Anyone who stood outside the Abbey Gates with a loudhailer and proclaimed that Arthur never existed, and that Camelot and Avalon were not intended to be taken as literal truth, would be jeered to the echo, before the rocks began to fly.
Much of the Arthurian New Age ‘philosophy’ is actually quite closely linked to early-twentieth-century views on racial purity, in which people like the Celts were seen to have an actual, ethnic identity. In today’s New Age, the ancient Celt is seen to possess mystical virtues that your average Irish Dark Age warlord would have found less than attractive.Half-baked, wishy-washymysticism would not have appealed to him.
In the first two chapters of this book we will see how Druidism, Arthur and what is called the ‘Celtic Twilight’ are largely modern inventions. This already grossly distorted view of early British history has been further elaborated by the New Agers. I wouldn’t object to this—after all, everyone is free to believe what they choose—were it not for the fact that I detect whiffs of quasi-racism in much of this muddled thinking. I get very wary when I hear talk of how wonderful the Celts were. The unlamented Aryans lurk not far below the Arthurian surface, in legends such as Tristan and Yseult; if, that is, one treats these stories as anything other than fiction, pure and simple.
In Seahenge I played down the full horror of some of the events surrounding the lifting of the timbers from the beach at Holme-nextthe-Sea in Norfolk, as I was writing principally about archaeology, and did not want to chase what I then regarded as a red herring.3 It was also both too close and too unpleasant even to attempt to write about with any degree of objectivity. Readers may however recall that the unfortunate archaeologists on the beach had to face the wrath of neo-Pagans and Druids, which they did with dignity and not a little courage. I remember how one of the Druids proclaimed angrily that he was a ‘British Aboriginal’, and that we were desecrating ‘his’ religious site. I replied, in a foolish attempt to use humour to defuse the situation, that that was fine, because I was descended from Vikings and was therefore allowed to do a little light pillaging. This made him apoplectic with rage. He genuinely believed in his racial purity, and that that gave him certain rights. The linking of rights to race is just a blink away from Nazi beliefs.
Although it is not my main purpose, I do hope to debunk some of these spurious half-truths, and in the process help people come to their own conclusions about what it meant to be British in the past, what it means in the present, and what it will mean in the future—and of these three, the future is the one that matters most.
I have had a lot of fun writing this book. I have visited remote and extraordinary places, and met many old friends and some fascinating new people. The old friends were generally archaeologists, and the new people were mainly historians or specialists in fields of study that a prehistorian such as myself is unlikely to encounter. Britain