Thought and Memory

Tag: Middle Ages

The Island Rome Left Behind

Celtic and Anglo-Saxon history, saga, and poetry

Bede tells the story as a tradition handed down from the elders. Before he became pope, Gregory passed through the Roman slave market and saw boys for sale, fair-skinned and fine-featured, and asked where they came from. Britain, he was told, and the people were called Angles. He answered that they had the faces of angels and ought to be fellow heirs with the angels in heaven. Whether or not the exchange happened as Bede gives it, what followed is plain history. In 597 Gregory, now pope, sent the monk Augustine and forty companions to Kent, and the English began to become a Christian people.

The last shelf ended with Rome giving up Britain. This one picks up the island Rome left behind, and the two peoples who held it after: the Celts who were there first and the Germanic settlers who came over the sea. It is the first shelf in the library where the reader watches pagan peoples become Christian, and it carries a fact worth keeping in view from the start. Nearly everything we know of the pagan past of the Irish, the Welsh, and the English was written down by Christians, in monasteries, by men who thought that past worth keeping.

Who the Celts Were

The Celts, Nora K. Chadwick

If a reader buys one book on the Celtic peoples, it should be this one. Chadwick was a Cambridge scholar of the early Celtic world, and her survey runs from the continental Celts the Greeks and Romans wrote about to the Christian Ireland and Wales of the early Middle Ages. She is strongest on what most surveys hurry past: the literature, the law, and the church that grew up on the Atlantic edge of Europe while the West was falling apart.

The Celts: Conquerors of Ancient Europe, Christiane Eluère

A short, heavily illustrated book by a French archaeologist, and the right companion to Chadwick. Where Chadwick works mainly from texts, Eluère works from the ground: the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures, the hill forts, the gold. It shows how far the Celts once reached across the continent before Rome pushed them to its edges, and it is the book to hand a reader who needs to see the Celts before reading about them. Caesar’s account of the Gallic Celts is already on the Rome shelf and reads well beside it.

What the Celts Remembered

Queen Medb of Connacht, who raised the army of the Táin to seize the Brown Bull of Cooley, in a frontispiece by the American illustrator J. C. Leyendecker, born in Montabaur, Germany. Leyendecker made her an Edwardian queen on a throne. The monks who copied the Táin remembered someone harder: a queen who would set a province at war to win an argument with her husband.

The Táin

The great epic of early Ireland. Queen Medb of Connacht raises an army to seize the Brown Bull of Cooley, and the boy-hero Cú Chulainn holds the ford for Ulster alone. It is the nearest thing the Celtic world left to an Iliad: violent, boastful, often strange, and full of the warrior code the earlier shelves traced back to the steppe. It survives in manuscripts copied by Irish monks around the twelfth century, who preserved a pagan heroic world they no longer shared. Thomas Kinsella’s translation is the one to own.

The Mabinogion

Eleven medieval Welsh tales, preserved in fourteenth-century manuscripts and given their collective name in the nineteenth century. The Four Branches at their core are the oldest stratum, a world of shape-shifting, enchantment, and kings of the Otherworld, set down by Christian storytellers who kept the old gods as half-remembered heroes. The collection also holds Culhwch and Olwen, the earliest Arthurian prose in any language. Read it after the Táin: the Irish epic is harder and more martial, the Welsh tales stranger and more courtly.

Who Came Over the Sea

Germania, Tacitus

A short Roman treatise, written in AD 98, describing the Germanic peoples beyond the Rhine: their tribes, their gods, their chiefs and war-bands, their marriage customs and their loyalty to a lord. It is the only extended ancient portrait of the peoples from whom the Angles and Saxons came. It is also a Roman book written for Romans. Tacitus never went to Germany, and he drew his barbarians partly as a mirror for Roman decadence. Read it as evidence for what an intelligent Roman saw and wanted his readers to see, and it remains indispensable.

The Anglo-Saxons, James Campbell, Eric John, and Patrick Wormald

The best single history of the English from the end of Roman Britain to the Norman Conquest. Three Oxford historians divide the six centuries between them, and the book is lavishly illustrated with the coins, crosses, manuscripts, and buried treasure that make up much of the evidence. If a reader buys one book on the Anglo-Saxons, this is it. Everything else in the post can be read against it.

How the English Told Their Own Story

Ezra the scribe at work before an open cupboard of the Scriptures, from the Codex Amiatinus, made around 700 at Wearmouth-Jarrow, the monastery where Bede lived and wrote. The painter is unknown. It is the oldest surviving complete Latin Bible, and Abbot Ceolfrith set out with it for Rome in 716 as a gift to the pope. A century after Gregory sent missionaries to the English, the English were sending Bibles back to Rome.

The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede

Finished in 731 by a monk of Jarrow, and the foundation of English history. Bede tells how the English came to Britain, how they were converted, and how a scattering of warring kingdoms came to think of itself as one people under one church. He is careful with his sources and names them, and his use of the year of the Lord to date events did more than any other book to spread the practice through Europe. He also gives the scenes that stay with a reader: the poet Caedmon given the gift of song in a cowshed, and the counsellor of King Edwin comparing a man’s life to a sparrow flying through a lit hall out of the winter dark and back into it.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

A year-by-year record of English history, begun in Alfred’s reign in the 890s and kept up in several monasteries afterward, one copy running to 1154. It is written in English, not Latin, which no other people in Europe was doing on that scale at the time. Its entries can be one line or several pages, and they record raids, battles, deaths of kings, comets, and famines with the same flat voice. Read it beside Bede: Bede tells the story of a church, and the Chronicle tells the story of a kingdom at war.

Life of King Alfred, Asser

A biography of Alfred the Great, written in 893 while the king was still alive by Asser, a Welsh monk from St Davids whom Alfred brought to his court. It describes the years when the Danes had nearly overrun England and Alfred was driven into the marshes of Somerset, the victory at Edington that turned the war, and the king’s labour, at nearly forty, to learn Latin and have the books he thought “most necessary for all men to know” translated into English. The Penguin edition by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge prints it with Alfred’s own prefaces and his will, and that is the one to buy.

What the English Sang

The opening page of Beowulf, beginning “Hwæt,” in the only manuscript that survives, copied around the year 1000. The scribe is unknown. The edges are scorched from the 1731 fire that burned through the library holding it. The great poem of the English came down to us in a single copy, which is the whole argument for keeping books.

Beowulf

The longest surviving poem in Old English, and the great epic of the Germanic north. Beowulf crosses the sea to kill the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother, and returns home to rule, and dies an old king fighting a dragon. It survives in a single manuscript from about the year 1000, which was nearly lost in a fire in 1731. The poem is set among Danes and Geats in a pagan past, but it was written by a Christian, and it carries both worlds at once. Seamus Heaney’s translation is the one most readers start with.

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, J. R. R. Tolkien

The 1936 lecture that changed how Beowulf is read. The scholars of Tolkien’s day mined the poem for history and complained that its author had wasted his talent on monsters. Tolkien answered that the monsters are the point: the poem is about man’s long defeat in a world of darkness, told by a Christian poet who looked back on his heathen forebears with sorrow and with sympathy. Short, and best read after the poem.

The Anglo-Saxon World, Kevin Crossley-Holland

An anthology of the whole Anglo-Saxon inheritance in modern English: heroic poems, laws, letters, charters, riddles, sermons, and extracts from Bede, the Chronicle, and Asser. It contains a full Beowulf, but its real value is everything around it. Here are The Battle of Maldon, where an English lord’s retainers choose to die beside his body; The Wanderer and The Seafarer, the great elegies of exile; and The Dream of the Rood, in which the Cross itself tells of the Crucifixion and speaks of Christ as a young hero who strips for battle. Taken together, those four poems are the best short account there is of what the English were.

The Inheritance

The two peoples on this shelf handed on different things, and the faith is what joined them. While the continent was being carved up, Irish monks kept Latin learning alive on the edge of the world and carried it back into Britain and Europe: Columba founded Iona in 563, and Irish missionaries were in Gaul and Italy within the century. The English, converted from both Rome and Iona, turned within a few generations from the converted to the converters. Boniface, a monk from Wessex, became the apostle of Germany and died a martyr in Frisia in 754, taking the gospel back to the lands his people had come from.

What the English kept of their own was just as lasting. They kept their language and wrote it down, and they gave it a literature centuries before most of Europe wrote in anything but Latin. Under Alfred’s house they made a single kingdom, with shires, laws, and a church that outlasted the Danes and the Normans both. The old heroic code did not vanish when they converted. It was taken up into the faith, so that an Old English poet could imagine Christ on the Cross as a young warrior going to battle, and a lord’s household at Maldon could die in his service in a poem written by a Christian.

But in 793 the Chronicle records fiery dragons in the air over Northumbria, famine, and then heathen men destroying God’s church at Lindisfarne. The next shelf turns to the Norse world, and to the men who came over the sea after the English.

November 4, 2026
The City Which Had Taken the World

The fall of Rome, Byzantium, and the kingdoms that came after

On the fifteenth of October, 1764, a young Englishman sat among the ruins of the Capitol in Rome while barefoot friars sang vespers where the temple of Jupiter had stood. It was there, Edward Gibbon later wrote, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first came into his mind. Twelve years later the first volume appeared, and the last came out in 1788. The question that occurred to him on the Capitol has been argued ever since.

The last shelf ended with Rome unable to keep itself in the West. When Alaric’s Goths sacked the city in 410, Jerome heard the news in Bethlehem and wrote that the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken. Yet the question is not only why Rome fell, but how much of it fell, and when. The empire in the East lasted another thousand years, and in the West the church, the Latin language, the bishops in the old cities, and a good deal of the law outlived the emperors. This shelf holds the books that ask what was lost and what was kept.

This is the fourth shelf of the library described in Why Build a Library. It opens with the book that set the question, follows the Western empire to its end, gives a group to the historians who still dispute what that end was, and then turns to the two places where Rome survived: Constantinople, and the barbarian kingdoms of the West.

The Question Gibbon Asked

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

Six volumes, from the age of the Antonines to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, written in the most commanding prose of the English eighteenth century. Gibbon summed up his own work as the triumph of barbarism and religion, and his fifteenth and sixteenth chapters explain the rise of Christianity by natural causes alone while bowing politely to Providence. This shelf reads the evidence the other way: the faith Gibbon counted among Rome’s destroyers is what carried its inheritance through the fall, as the last group of books on the shelf shows. Every later book on this shelf is in some way an answer to him, and none has replaced him. The unabridged text is the thing itself; for a reader who will not get through six volumes, David Womersley’s one-volume Penguin abridgement keeps the best of it.

How the West Was Lost

The Sack of Rome by the Barbarians in 410, 1890, by the French painter Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, born in Béziers. Goths haul down a Roman statue with ropes while its marble city looks on. The picture shows the fall as Gibbon imagined it, but the kings who followed spent the next centuries trying to stand where that statue stood.

The Later Roman Empire, Ammianus Marcellinus

The last great Latin historian was a Greek from Antioch and a staff officer who had served on the eastern frontier and marched with the emperor Julian into Persia. His surviving books cover the years 353 to 378, and he writes as a soldier who saw much of what he describes. His history ends with the battle of Adrianople, where the Goths destroyed an eastern Roman army and killed the emperor Valens, the first blow from which the West did not recover. The Penguin selection, translated by Walter Hamilton, is the place to start.

The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians, J. B. Bury

Lectures given at Cambridge by the editor of Gibbon, published in 1928, the year after his death. Bury follows the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and the peoples after them from their first crossings of the frontier to the kingdoms they founded inside it, and he is careful about what the sources can and cannot tell us. He wrote that the collapse of the West was the result of a series of contingent events rather than of any general cause, which makes him a sober counterweight to the grander theories elsewhere on this shelf.

The Roman and the Teuton, Charles Kingsley

Cambridge lectures of 1864 by the clergyman and novelist, who reads the fall of the West as a work of Providence. His Teutons are “great boys,” brave and greedy, who broke a Rome already rotted by its own vices and were then taught by suffering and the Gospel until they became Christendom. The lectures run on past the end of the Western empire through the Goths and Lombards, and they close on “The Strategy of Providence.” The book is a better guide to how Victorian England understood itself, as heir of the Germanic conquerors under a guiding God, than to the fifth century, and read beside Bury and Heather it shows the difference plainly.

The Fall of the Roman Empire, Peter Heather

The best modern narrative of how the West was lost, published in 2005. Heather argues that the empire was not dying of internal decay when the barbarians arrived, but was brought down from outside: the Huns drove the Goths and others across the frontier, and the new groups inside the empire cut away the tax base the Western government needed to fight them. He tells it as a story, with battles, emperors, and generals, and it reads faster than a book of its weight has any right to.

Whether It Fell at All

The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown

A short, illustrated book from 1971 that changed how a generation of historians saw the years from about 150 to 750. Brown refused to treat them as a decline, and wrote instead of a world being transformed: of holy men and monks, of a Christian culture taking shape in Rome’s cities, and of an empire in the East and new powers in Persia and Arabia. His “late antiquity” became the name of an academic field, and the book remains the most persuasive case that something was being made in these centuries, not only lost.

The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins

An archaeologist’s answer to Brown, published in 2005. Ward-Perkins looks at pottery, roof tiles, coins, and even the size of cattle, and finds that across the West the material standard of living fell further and faster than in any comparable collapse he knew of, in places to below where it had been before the Romans came. Its argument is that the fall was real, violent, and a catastrophe for ordinary people, and that nothing is gained by pretending otherwise. Read it straight after Brown.

Mohammed and Charlemagne, Henri Pirenne

The Belgian historian’s last book, published in 1937, two years after his death. Pirenne argued that the Germanic kingdoms left the Mediterranean world largely Roman, and that the real break came in the seventh century, when the Arab conquests closed the sea and turned Europe north toward the Franks: “without Mohammed, Charlemagne would be inconceivable.” Later archaeology has shown that trade was failing well before the Arabs came, but the question Pirenne posed about when the ancient world ended has never gone away, and his book poses it more sharply than any other.

The Rome That Did Not Fall

The emperor Justinian with his court, clergy, and guard, mosaic in the church of San Vitale, Ravenna, completed about 547. The mosaicists are unknown. Justinian ruled from Constantinople and probably never set foot in Ravenna, but his armies had taken the city back from the Goths, and here the Roman emperor stands again in an Italian church, carrying the offering for the altar. Photo: Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, Judith Herrin

The Roman empire in the East lasted until 1453, governed from a Christian capital founded by Constantine, and its people called themselves Romans to the end. Herrin’s book, built from short chapters on single subjects, from the walls of Constantinople and Greek fire to icons, eunuchs, and the empress Irene, is the best introduction for a reader who has never given Byzantium a thought. It makes the case that this empire shielded the West for centuries and handed it much of what it later called its own.

History of the Byzantine State, George Ostrogorsky

The standard one-volume political history of the empire for most of the twentieth century, by a Russian-born historian who worked in Belgrade, first published in German in 1940 and translated by Joan Hussey. Ostrogorsky follows the state itself: its emperors, armies, taxes, and the system of military provinces that let it survive the Arab conquests. It is dense and unadorned, and it is the book to go to once Herrin has made the subject interesting.

The Secret History, Procopius

Procopius was the official historian of Justinian, the emperor who tried to win back the West and very nearly did. In his public histories he praised the reconquest of Africa and Italy and the building of Hagia Sophia. In this book, which he could not publish and which was found in the Vatican library more than a thousand years later, he describes Justinian and the empress Theodora as demons in human form. It is malicious, often unbelievable, and indispensable, and like Curtius on the Greek shelf it teaches that an ancient source must be read as an argument.

What Survived in the West

The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius

Boethius was a Roman senator and consul who served Theodoric, the Gothic king of Italy, and set out to translate all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin. Accused of treason, he was imprisoned and put to death around 524, and he wrote this book while waiting to die. In alternating prose and verse, Lady Philosophy visits him in his cell and teaches him that Fortune’s wheel turns for every man and that the only good which cannot be taken away is God. Alfred the Great put it into Old English and Chaucer into Middle English, and through this one book much of the mind of ancient philosophy passed into the Christian Middle Ages.

The Baptism of Clovis, about 1500, by the painter known as the Master of Saint Giles, who worked in Paris and was probably trained in the Netherlands (National Gallery of Art, Washington). A thousand years after the event, the painter set it in a church of his own day, because by then the kings of France counted their line from this font. Gregory of Tours is the reason anyone knew it happened.

The History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours

Ten books by a Gallo-Roman bishop of Tours, written in the later sixth century, which are nearly all we know of the first Frankish kings. Gregory tells of Clovis, whose Catholic baptism set the Franks apart from the Arian Goths and Vandals and won them the bishops of Gaul, and then of his grandsons’ murders, feuds, and treacheries, in a Latin he himself thought rough. He also shows, without meaning to, how much of Rome was still standing in Gaul: the cities, the bishops, the saints’ shrines, and the Latin he wrote in. It is the eyewitness account of what came after Rome in the West.

The Long-Haired Kings, J. M. Wallace-Hadrill

Seven essays on the Franks by an Oxford historian, published in 1962, including a chapter on how to read Gregory in the light of modern research. Wallace-Hadrill explains the kingship of the Merovingians, whose long hair marked their royal blood, the bloodfeud and the law that tried to contain it, and the relation between the new kings and the Roman Gaul they ruled. Read it after Gregory; it turns his chronicle of crimes into a picture of how a barbarian kingdom actually worked.

The Inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham

A history of Europe from 400 to 1000, from Ireland to Byzantium and the caliphate, published in 2009. Wickham insists that these centuries be read on their own terms rather than as a waiting room for the nations of later Europe, and he follows the Roman inheritance through the Frankish, Gothic, Lombard, and English kingdoms down to the Carolingians and beyond. It is long and demanding, and it is the best single account of how the Roman West became medieval Europe.

The Inheritance

What the fall of Rome handed on was the distinction between a state and a civilization. The empire in the West ended, but what it had carried did not end with it: the church kept its bishops and its Latin, the monks kept the books, the law outlived the lawgivers, and the barbarian kings who took the provinces were soon baptized, and spent the next centuries trying to become Roman. In the East the empire itself survived, and kept the name of Rome for a thousand years. Gibbon thought he was describing a fall; the books on this shelf show that it was also a handing over. The next shelf turns north, to the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons, and to the island Rome had given up first.

October 15, 2026