The second volume of The Pelican History of England covers the early Middle Ages, from the time of the Roman withdrawal to the time of Norman Conquest. Originally published in 1952, the book went into a second edition in 1954. The copyright page of my 1991 printing notes it was revised several times after 1964, most recently in 1974; author Dorothy Whitelock died in 1982, but the book would not be superseded by a volume of The Penguin History of Britain covering the same period until 2010. I purposefully picked a 1991 printing because I figured it would match my 1995 printing of volume 1, but even though they have the same cover design, they're different sizes! My copies of all the ones I have so far (volumes 1-4 and 8) are mass market paperbacks, except for volume 1, which is a trade paperback. But my copies that are the same size also span several different decades and thus have different cover and spine designs. By the time I am done, I will have a very higgledgy-piggledy collection if this keeps up.
Anyway, like I. A. Richmond and Malcolm Todd in volume 1, Whitelock does not attempt to cram a narrative of over five hundred years into 243 pages; the book makes no claim of being historically comprehensive. There are lots of kings mentioned, but you won't get explanations of who became king when and why; we are told the Anglo-Saxons took over in 449 but not really why or how. Which makes sense—how can you go blow by blow when you'd have to cram over two years onto each page?
The Pelican History of England: 2. The Beginnings of English Society |
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Second edition published: 1954 Originally published: 1952 Acquired and read: January 2025 |
The book has a real emphasis on economic power. If Whitelock has a thesis, I would say it's that the power of the king was exerted through money, but that the responsibility of the king was thus to regulate the economy. She gives a lot of data about the penalties for violating bonds and oaths and laws other obligations, which were almost always financial: lord to king, churl to lord, it was all about supplying economic power but also receiving economic power on your behalf. If you raised cows for a landowner, for example, you of course had to bring in as much profit as you could... but the landowner also provided you with a certain number of those cows per year, encouraging your best work.
Probably this is obvious to actual historians (I am but a literary critic, of course), but I had not actually really thought about kingship in this way before, more in terms of military might and protection. But as Whitelock tells it, anyway, the power and potential of kingship was largely economic, more as a regulator of trade than anything else.
The last few chapters flesh out other aspects of early English society—education, literature, and art—and to be honest, they felt a bit tacked on; I felt like Whitelock had more to say about Beowulf, for example, when using it earlier in the book to illuminate aspects of kingship than she did when discussing it as a literary work. But that's a small negative in what I found to otherwise be a successful book; I hope later volumes of the Pelican History are more like this one than the first.
As a small aside, I—as a person who was quite enthusiastic about all things Arthurian in my youth—was a bit surprised that the historical Arthur didn't even rate a passing mention. I mean, I know he wasn't actually a king of Britain, but surely he did something worth noting as an early warlord. But if he was mentioned, I missed it, and he's not listed in the index. I did a bit of research and learned that current thinking is that there probably wasn't any historical Arthur, not even as a random post-Roman warlord! A bit depressing, but there are some books I think I'll check out when I'm done with this project to learn more.
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