This is a provocative book. You agree enthusiastically, then you wonder what this man is doing trying to write a book on medieval Britain, then you agree again and this not only from chapter to chapter but almost from paragraph to paragraph. I found myself alternately murmuring 'Yes! Right!' and muttering 'Total nonsense!' as I turned the pages.
For instance, he starts out by pressing the advantages of archaeological research over mere (traditional) "history":
In this book I will suggest that in the fifth and sixth centuries AD [I like the fact that he uses "AD"; I am allergic to the no doubt "politically correct" term "CE" (Common Era) and have noticed while it has crept into certain academic circles, no historical novelists ever use it in dating their stories. If they did, the book would not be reviewed on this site. JM] 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.
Now this is a very barren approach. What would we know of Jesus or indeed Julius Caesar or Ethelred the Unready if we had to rely on archaeology? Little if any more than we know of Arthur. But this is the prehistorian speaking, one who is used to being "wholly reliant on archaeology".
Then on the next page, he says:
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-washy mysticism would not have appealed to him.
He tells us there are "whiffs of quasi-racism in much of this muddled thinking" and goes on: I get very wary when I hear talk of how wonderful the Celts were. The unlamented Aryans lurk not far below the Arthurian surface.
It is time indeed that somebody said this. Not that it hasn't been said - and ignored - before; for instance F. Marian McNeill in "Scottish Folklore and Folk-belief" [The Silver Bough, Vol I], quoting with approval R.A.S. Macallister in "Ancient Ireland", says that "strictly speaking there is no such thing as a Celtic race, any more than there is an Aryan race. 'There is a group of languages and a certain cultural complex associated with them.'" The kind of artificial (partly jingoistic, partly New Age) racism promoted in such books as Beresford Ellis's "Celt and Saxon" is unethical and unscholarly and its effect is pernicious.
Francis Pryor is an honest thinker and writer, and clearly a man of principle, a man to respect. Yes, he is a prehistorian and his grasp of the Dark Ages is no better than that of many (other) amateurs. (The best chapter in the book is predictably Chapter Three: Ancient Britons, which begins "It is my belief that one cannot understand what was happening in late-Roman and 'Dark Age' Britain unless one has a grasp of what life was like before the Roman Conquest," and goes on to tell us what life was like before the Roman Conquest. ) But he says things which need to be said and calls our attention to some strands of our island story which are just that - stories, legends, like those you find in the chronicles of every country and people, and which must be viewed as such and not used as a basis for spurious racial theories. We had enough of that with Goebbels.
Love it or hate it, then - and I think most readers will, like me, do both - it is a book which must be taken seriously by all who are interested in what actually happened during the early medieval period, and all who are concerned about the rewriting of history by special interest groups.
JM
