Building Anglo-Saxon England

"What I like particularly is the way in which history and archaeology and landscape history all came together to tell us so many new things about Anglo-Saxon England. I was very pleased that we could include this book, because it’s not natural territory for the Wolfson Prize. It’s difficult to make Anglo-Saxon England come to life, but this book does because it’s got such an eye and an ear for what remains. For instance, the book takes place names which are familiar to us, like Burton, which you hear all over England. You wonder, ‘Why are we hearing this name Burton all over the place?’ John Blair makes sense of it. He takes us back to a world in which it had a particular function. I thought that was tremendous. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I’m an archaeology fan, and a nerd for churches, and all that was in there and yet there is a sharp political focus as well. The future of England was not Mercia, it turned out to be Wessex and yet the big historic, political hero of the book is the kingdom of Mercia. Mercia has been lost to obscurity because the archive was lost. We have very few documents. But what we do have is the landscape—and also extraordinary things like the Staffordshire Hoard—to remind us that this was once the future of what might have become something other than England. Yes, he is straddling two worlds which don’t always talk to each other properly. Historians often despise archaeologists and can’t understand what they’re on about and archaeologists sometimes are not good at keeping up with the way that documentary history has gone, though I think that’s less true than the other way around. This is a wonderful example of how you do both and that there’s no gap between them: when there aren’t documents you just go to the archaeological record. It means that identities were being created which, in the end, created something which you can call England. But if you had no hindsight, that’s not where you might expect it to go. That’s what I mean by Mercia being a future which didn’t happen. It was Wessex, but it could have been Merica—in which case we’d have had something which wasn’t England. It might have been some entity whose headquarters was Birmingham or Tamworth forever. And we’d have had a greater Tamworth instead of a greater London. Read more in the best books of 2019 interview series."