Product Description

Efforts to understand how Roman Britain ends and Anglo-Saxon England begins have been undermined by the division of studies into pre-Roman, Roman and early medieval periods. This groundbreaking new study traces the history of British tribes and British tribal rivalries from the pre-Roman period, through the Roman period and into the post-Roman period. It shows how tribal conflict was central to the arrival of Roman power in Britain and how tribal identities persisted through the Roman period and were a factor in the three great convulsions that struck Britain during the Roman centuries. It explores how tribal conflicts may have played a major role in the end of Roman Britain, creating a failed state scenario akin in some ways to those seen recently in Bosnia and Iraq, and brought about the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. Finally, it considers how British tribal territories and British tribal conflicts can be understood as the direct predecessors of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Anglo-Saxon conflicts that form the basis of early English history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16879 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-06
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Stuart Laycock has an MA Hons in Classics from Jesus College, Cambridge. Since leaving Cambridge he has worked as a writer in advertising and television, but during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo took time out to work as an aid worker there. His particular combination of original research on the end of Roman Britain combined with first-hand experience of the dynamics and consequences of tribal and ethnic conflict is perhaps unique.

Customer Reviews

Highly stimulating - recommended
I very much enjoyed this book- the central premise is that the tribal system that pre-dated the Roman invasion began to re-asserted itself after the legions left.

It draws very stimulating parallels with the post-Tito Balkans where Bosnian/ Serbian / Albanian/ Slovenian ethnic rivalries similarly re-emerged after decades of Yugoslav rule.

The analysis of brooch types- potentially identifying tribal/ ethnic groupings- was new to me- and convincing. It also made sense of some of the obscurer parts of Gildas on the entry of the Saxons.

Very much recommended for those interested in how Britannia changed from a Roman province to the Anglo-Saxon/ Romano-British kingdoms- well-written as well.

Highly plausible, not quite convincing
Too long the history of sub-Roman Britain has relied too much on doubtful small snippets of written evidence, often from authors on the other side of Europe writing over a century after the events described, which too many people have accepted at face value. Really the only thing we can rely on for sure is the evidence from archaeology.

Laycock presents here a thesis, which he attempts to back up from the archaeological evidence, that the tribal kingdoms of pre-Roman Britain retained their boundaries, their identity and their accompanying tribal hatreds, throughout the Roman period. Despite the Roman administration, the province never became unified. Many of the "barbarian attacks" of the Roman period may actually have been in effect civil wars between rival tribes. Furthermore, he asserts, these tribal mini-states formed the nuclei for the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Each brought in various Germanic tribes from the continent as foederati to fight for them against their immediate neighbours, as opposed to the standard historical model in which they were intended to fight against outside invaders such as Picts and Irish. Subsequently these Germans, either peacefully or by coup d'etat, took over the leadership of the mini-states and turned them into kingdoms. The spread of the Anglo-Saxons as indicated by archaeology has always seemed far too rapid to me compared to the standard historical model based on the written sources, and such a scenario as posited here with geographically widespread Anglo-Saxon immigration right from the start seems more consistent. (There's even serious discussion these days about the possibility that some of the peoples of south-eastern pre-Roman Britain were Germanic speakers rather than Brythonic speakers. See for example The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story.)

I would say that Laycock's thesis is highly plausible, more plausible than many other scenarios presented by historians and archaeologists, but not quite enough evidence to be totally convincing. Like much archaeology and history writing, there is plenty of phraseology used of the form "we may suppose that" or "there is no reason to doubt that" as a prelude to certain conclusions. We may have to wait to see what further archaeological evidence build up in future.

Certainly a valuable contribution to the history of pre-Roman, Roman and post-Roman Britain, and recommended reading.

(Update 30/5/09: Laycock has since followed up this work with Warlords: The Struggle for Power in Post-Roman Britain.)

Throw away your old textbooks.......
A number of commentators in recent years have noted how the human propensity for stories, hard wired into our minds, provides the mechanism by which humans understand the world. Myths are stories we generate to serve as starting points to sharing our understanding of a subject, and sometimes to preserving a particular social or cultural point of view. The mythic Fall of the Roman Empire generates new books and cinema releases on a regular basis. One of greatest mysteries coming out of that fall is the transmutation of the Roman province of Britannia into Anglo-Saxon England despite the doomed heroism of the often reworked figure[s] of Ambrosius/Arthur.


In 1980, a revolution occurred in our stories explaining another popular conundrum, What Killed The Dinosaurs? Before the Alvarez Hypothesis, various theories ranging from the theft of their eggs by the rising tide of mammals, to poisoning by the emerging flowering plant genera took centre stage. Then the discovery of the KT Boundary radically altered our perception of the end of the Carboniferous, a thin layer of iridium swept all the old stories into oblivion. Stuart Laycock's radical new take on the middle, late and post-Roman periods in Britannia are based on more prosaic materials, limestone in walls and earth in ditch complexes well away from apparent battlefronts and times of conflict, and veins of cast bronze military material finds snaking their way along the pre-Roman frontiers and concentrated along ancient points of friction re-emerging from the smothering Pax Romana demilitarization. He demonstrates how our timeline for the events of Roman Britain, so sure in the Latin textbooks of our youth, are based on fragments and accounts written long after the events, roughly aligned like early Dead Sea Scroll pieces, the gaps filled with assumptions and baked into their familiar shape in the fire of legend. He shows how the mysterious wars in Britannia recorded on coins and alluded to in eulogies between the high water mark of Agricolan expansion in the 80s and the Barbarian Conspiracy of 367 are as likely to have been internal civil conflicts as against external enemies. He demonstrates the regionality of late Roman military equipment, and then pieces together the pattern of finds as surely as `Geofizz' on a TimeTeam villa dig. He accounts for the quick deep apparent penetrations of early Saxon material by showing their concentration on the military flashpoints between the peoples of Britannia, exactly where you would expect foederati to be placed once you understand that they were the peoples plural, and not singular. The book is logically set out, very readable and well illustrated. There won't be a crater and some shocked quartz to be found to prove this hypothesis, but it blows a hole as big as Chicxulub in the existing Legend of the Fall.