Lost Realms: Histories of Britain from the Romans to the Vikings

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Williams] is just brilliant at bringing them to light' Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics From the bestselling author of Viking Britain, a new epic history of our forgotten past. Wasting nine pages of the chapter on Dumnonia on a summary of Geoffrey of Monmoth's utterly non historical story is as baffling as the author's desire to tell the reader that the story of Arthur's conception makes him 'queasy'.

Overall a tougher read than expected, perhaps because of the poetry within the book sometimes confusing the chronology. It does go off topic in places, but highlights nine powerful realms who disappeared while others prospered. However lots of the information was based on lore and snippets of evidence, so there was a lot of ‘maybe’ and possibly’.

This is a book about those lands and peoples who fell by the wayside: the lost realms of early medieval Britain. Williams takes those places or polities that are edged over or around in general histories - places like Elmet, Sussex or Hwicce and teases out everything that can be known about them plus what assumptions are possible.

This book focuses on the “Lost realms” of Britain, those that we know less of, smaller kingdoms that came and went alongside more well-known places that tend to hog the limelight due to the fact we know way more about them and that they were larger and longer established (think the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex). Sometimes it felt like the author wrote not one book but several seperate stories and put them together for a book. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report.Often he can say little more than we don't know a lot but his presentation of the topography, local politics, cultural developments and the understanding of archaeological discoveries could not be bettered. In restoring some of these voices, he raises questions matching many we face today: how do nations form and why do some fail? Particularly enjoyable is the use of each kingdom to highlight the different forces and events changing Britain between Roman and what we consider the medieval period.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Prior to this he gained an MA with Distinction in Cultural Heritage Studies (UCL) with a prize-winning dissertation that explored the role of fantasy and medievalism in the modern interpretation of cultural heritage sites in Britain and Germany.The author does an excellent job of reviewing the evidence that we still have of a time long gone, telling the story of people's who barely left any trace is quite difficult.