Little Kingdoms: An A-Z of Early Medieval Britain

Before England, Wales, and Scotland were created, before Alfred the Great and the Great Viking Army, before even a raid on Lindisfarne, the kingdoms that made up the British Isles were a squabbling, kaleidoscopic mosaic of realities. Some centred their livelihood around rivers, others dug deep to harvest resources from the ground beneath them. There were kingdoms that straddled the sea, others divided by marshes, and some that stuck to rugged mountainsides, or even caves. All these places, remembered now in place-names, artefacts, and obscure chronicles, have become obscured and forgotten, in many cases lost entirely. Little Kingdoms peels back the veil on sixty-two unique realms, listed alphabetically like a travelogue, showcasing the most diverse corners of Early Medieval England, sandwiched in that tantalising gap between the Roman and Viking periods. By using a mixture of disciplines, folklore, and a little imagination, all sixty-two (and many more besides) are brought to life through careful detective work, inventive illustrations, and detailed maps, highlighting the multicultural people of this island and their many, many origins. * Imagine a time when Harrow-on-the-Hill was crowned with a pagan temple, when the commercial heart of London beat not in the City but at the Aldwych, when giant zombies patrolled Strathclyde, and when the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire were a single swamp and the home of eel-wranglers, egret-catchers, and bog-miners. This is the world to which Alex Harvey transports us in this powerfully evocative and clever account of Britain in the centuries after the Roman withdrawal. Made up of more than sixty micro-histories of the places which flourished between the fifth and tenth centuries, his book is both a time machine and an A to Z of a lost age. But it is much more besides. By starting with the little kingdoms, Alex Harvey reverses the standard narrative which interprets Dark Age Britain through the lens of what it was to become. You will never see the Anglo-Saxon world in the same light and you will probably never again describe it as Anglo-Saxon but instead as a multiplicity of overlapping cultures, languages, and myths of origin. - Martyn Rady, Masaryk Professor Emeritus of Central European History at UCL and author of The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe * Much of the early medieval period can seem impenetrable - place-names difficult to pin down now, snippets of fact immersed in a soup of myth and legend - and it would take a brave person to try and make sense of it all. Alex Harvey has taken on the challenge and produced a book, in my opinion, like no other, and furthermore a book that is easy to read and digest. - David Johnson, author of New Light on the "Dark Ages" in North Craven * This book is a veritable treasure hoard of information, derived from archaeology and historical chronicles, place-name studies and folklore, Old English poetry and saints' lives. Alex Harvey dispels the myth that early medieval Britain was a heptarchy, the home of a people easily categorizable by ethnicity or nationality. Instead, Harvey breathes life into a sweeping miscellany of little kingdoms, some familiar and prominent in our early medieval histories, others mysterious and elusive. Whether it's in reports of strange weather (mole rain) or references to undead islands (a misinterpreted place-name), the reader of Little Kingdoms will find more than a little to explore in a richly complex medieval Britain. - Hana Videen,author of The Deor Hord: An Old English Bestiary * Post-Roman Britain is a land of myth, legend and wonder for many, and a true dark agefor others. A place which could easily sit in the Middle Earth of J.R.R. Tolkien, notsurprising given it was the inspiration for many of his best-known plot lines.Yet here Alex Harvey skilfully brings this little-known period of British history to vibrantlife, showing in striking detail how events then set in place the multiple i...