Early Britain

Early Britain, Anglo Saxon Britain is a short historical study by Grant Allen, published in 1884 as part of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge series on early English history. It is one of Allen’s nonfiction efforts in straight popular history, distinct from the science essays for which he is better remembered.

The book covers the period from the late Roman withdrawal from Britain in the early fifth century through the conversion of the Anglo Saxon kingdoms to Christianity and on into the consolidation of Wessex under Alfred the Great. Allen moves through the material at a steady pace, with chapters on the original Saxon migrations and settlements, the slow displacement of the Romano British population in the east, the resistance led by figures associated with the Arthurian legends in the west, the establishment of the seven kingdoms, the missions of Augustine and the Irish monks, and the long wars against the Danish invasions.

The historiography is of its period. Allen was working from the standard late Victorian view of the early English settlement, which assumed a fairly clean ethnic replacement of the British population by Germanic newcomers across most of what would become England. Modern archaeology and genetic studies have complicated this picture considerably, and many of the broad ethnic generalisations in the book are now considered overstated. The political narrative, however, is reasonable and clearly told, and Allen is good on the slow building of institutions like the witenagemot and the early parish system.

For a reader today the book is most useful as a clear introduction to the basic shape of Anglo Saxon political history, with the understanding that more recent scholarship is needed for the questions of who the Anglo Saxons actually were and how far they really replaced the people they found. The book runs about two hundred pages and reads quickly. It pairs naturally with E A Freeman’s Norman Conquest, which it partly serves as background for, and with the more recent and more cautious general histories of early medieval Britain.