North Men

ONE of my best recent charity-shop finds is The Men Of The North, which I bought from Oxfam at Greenwich in November for £4.99.

The subtitle, The Britons Of Southern Scotland, gives a better clue as to the subject.

As most people know, before the arrival of Angles, Jutes, Saxons, etc in what was to become England, most of Britain was occupied by people whose descendants were to be restricted by the Germanic immigrants to Wales and Cornwall.

But what is less well-known is that as well as in Wales and Cornwall, there were petty kingdoms of the 'Welsh' in what is now northwest England and southwest Scotland.

These are The Men Of The North, to be differentiated from the other men of the north in those days, namely the Picts and, in increasing numbers from Ireland, the Scots.

As Tim Clarkson shows in his book, the picture was complicated, the sources are limited and not always reliable, and the archaeological evidence is by no means conclusive.

I knew about the Ancient Britons, as the Celtic tribes are often called, and their kingdom of Strathclyde.

But I really knew very little, and I did not know how intricate the various alliances were, and indeed that there were many petty realms I had never heard of, let alone studied.

I was also not aware, or at least not as aware as I should have been, that much of the fighting was not ethnic - Britons also fought Britons, Scots fought Scots, and proto-English fought proto-English.

Great read

The book has inspired me to hunt down and buy a copy of the famous boardgame Britannia.

I can hardly wait to watch history unfold on my tabletop.