Book Review: Britain Begins
Britain Begins
Fans of archeologist Sir Barry Cunliffe's earlier books, including Europe Between the Oceans and his fantastic Facing the Ocean, will be well pleased with the appearance of his most comprehensive volume to date, Britain Begins, which not only looks at the whole canvas of life in Britain and Ireland from prehistoric to medieval times but does so without any subtitle at all, much less the 70-word subtitles now commonly used by publishers to calm readers who might be terrified at encountering a work of history at the bookstore that is their favorite coffee shop.Instead, Cunliffe commences right away his account of these far, far western islands, places regarded with fear and wonder by ancient writers such as Herodotus or Pliny the Elder, “places where normal rules held no sway, places where anything could happen.”Britain Begins is a big, beautifully-illustrated book that covers a vast amount of time. Britain and Ireland, which today are home to 68 million people, have hosted upright hominids of one kind or another for hundreds of thousands of years, with life always locked into the cycle of glaciation that periodically rendered the area virtually uninhabitable. Cunliffe's genial narrative glances at Britain's Neanderthal population, but his focus first really sharpens when his story reaches 11,000 years ago when the Younger Dryas, the co-called “Big Freeze,” finally relented and allowed animals to flourish in Britain again – and allowed scattered bands of enterprising humans to hunt them and construct rudimentary societies in the process.“One must remember we are dealing with barbarians,” the Roman historian Tacitus could sniff when writing of British tribes in the late first century AD (his father-in-law Julius Agricola had brought back lurid tales from his time as governor of Britannia), but by that point Romans were encountering the extreme refinement of British societies, the centuries-old end-product of the Neolithic building cultures that replaced those first Mesolithic hunter-gatherers around 4100-3800 BC. As Cunliffe explains, archaeologists armed with the latest dating equipment are better able to pin down the specifics of those lost times than ever before (the book's delightful opening chapter, “Myths and Ancestors,” pokes some gentle, inclusive fun at much earlier generations of those investigators, doing fieldwork in their top-hats). Studying pollen records and tree trunks preserved in Irish bogs yields precise reckonings of ancient disasters such as the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Hekla in the middle of the twelfth century BC:
A volcano like Hekla was capable of throwing thousands of tons of dust into the air, which could have had a devastating short-term effect on climate by deflecting the sunlight, thus causing much cooler conditions with greatly increased rainfall, leading to rising water-tables. In conditions like these, extending over a number of consecutive years, plant growth would have been severely restricted and crops devastated.
This is the pattern throughout Britain Begins: the cold and dark advance, and human civilization hunkers down or flees; the warmth and sunlight return, and Neolithic life flourishes again. And as that life grew more complex, recognizable societal institutions began to take shape. We see fortresses, walls, elaborate burying-places, multiplied evidence of foreign trade – and even a codified priesthood, the famous Druids who so seem to fascinate Julius Caesar in the pertinent bits of his Gallic War. Cunliffe's more dispassionate reading makes them sound like 20th century clerics (minus the burning wicker-men):
They were the philosophers, the guardians of all knowledge charged with the responsibility of passing it on to future generations. Their wisdom enabled them to intercede between man and the gods and to pass judgements on civil issues. Without their intercession men were cut off from their deities and became outlaws.
And as superb as Britain Begins is (by far the best snap-shot we currently have of a rapidly-changing scene – another such summary will be badly needed in only two or three years; we can hope Cunliffe issues a second edition), its end-matter gives its main text a run for the prize – the book's final section, “A Guide to Further Reading,” is a thirty-page marvel of spirited erudition that will surely exhaust the book-buying budget of any history buff (among the hundreds of titles discussed, for instance, Robin Fleming's Britain After Rome is called “a major text with an extensive and well-structured bibliography”).By the concluding pages of Cunliffe's book, farms are established, the Romans have come and gone, the Vikings have come and gone (or come and stayed and minded their manners), the ready roll of kings and queens unfurls, writing and record-keeping (the better to tax you with) are everywhere, and trade flourishes – Britain has begun, and its inhabitants are far too busy to think about the deep thousands of years that laid the groundwork for modern times. That groundwork is laid bare in these bright, sturdy pages – a story that gets more fascinating the more we know about it, especially when it's this well told.