 THE ANTIQUARIES JOURNAL
material is divided into fourteen numbered
sections, themselves split into subsections.
The main sections are: the Invasion of Britain
in AD  and subsequent military operations
(sections –); Hadrian’s Wall and the
Antonine Wall (sections –); the later second
and early third centuries (sections –); such
topics as soldier and civilian, administration,
the economy and religion (sections –) – which
together cover approximately half the entries –
and the final two sections ( and ), which
return to the historical order and cover the third
and fourth centuries. Items selected by Tomlin
for inclusion are designated by main section
number, and then numerically, so ‘.’ as
quoted below means the nineteenth text in
section , a system that is simple and works well.
One difficulty that Tomlin faced will have been to
decide into which section to put some of the
items – thus the famous writing tablet from
Vindolanda (.) written by Claudia Severa,
the wife of the commanding officer, to Sulpicia
Lepidina, the wife of a fellow officer, is given in
a sub section on Vindolanda in main section 
– an early chronological section preceding the
section devoted to Hadrian’s Wall – whereas it
would have been tempting to put it in section 
(Soldier and Civilian in the subsection entitled
’equestrian officers and their families’).
There is only one case where this reviewer
disagrees with Tomlin’s interpretation and that
is the inscription round the mouth of the Ilam
Staffordshire cup (.), and Tomlin’s taking
the name Aelii with Valli – ‘the Wall of
Aelius’, ie of Hadrian, while it almost certainly
goes with Draconis ‘(the property) of Aelius
Draco’. For this name, possibly the same man,
see Henzen et al (, ,), Rome T Aelius
Aug. lib Draco. Of course any second edition
of Britannia Romana would also include inscrip-
tions found after Tomlin’s closing date of
, such as the inscription from Dorchester
(Tomlin ), the tombstone of a veteran of
Legion II Augusta comparable to the tombstone
of the Veteran of the same legion from Alchester,
Oxon (.), and, like that, useful in tracing the
changing location of the legion in the first years
of the Roman occupation.
In conclusion it is often said that there are
too many books on Roman Britain and
readers – and possibly reviewers! – may well
agree. However, if this statement is limited to
books based on the historical or epigraphic
source or one confined to the historical sources
themselves, this is certainly not true; and it is
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available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003581520000359
hard to conceive of any other writer who would
have the knowledge to produce a work like
Britannia Romana or one who would have had
the ability to have read texts like the
Bloomberg documents or lead curse tablets
from Bath or Uley in the first place.
BURN, A R . The Romans in Britain, nd
edn, Basil Blackwell, Oxford
COLLINGWOOD, R G and WRIGHT R P . The
Roman Inscriptions of Britain. Vol. :
Inscriptions on Stone, Clarendon Press,
Oxford
COLLINGWOOD, R G, WRIGHT R P and TOMLIN,
R –. The Roman Inscriptions of Britain.
Vol. : Instrumentum domesticum, Alan Sutton,
Gloucester
HENZEN, W, DE ROSSI, G B and HÜLSEN, C
. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.
Vol. VI: inscriptiones Urbis Romae Latinae:
part III Tituli sepulcrales: Claudius-Plotius,
G Reimerum, Berlin, <http://ancientworld
online.blogspot.com///coming-soon-
from-arachne-digitized.html> (accessed 
Jun )
KEPPIE, L . Inscribed and Sculptured Stones in
the Hunterian Museum University of Glasgow,
Society for the Promotion of Roman
Studies, London
TOMLIN, R S O . Roman London’s First
Voices: writing tablets from the from the
Bloomberg London excavations –,
MOLA, London
TOMLIN, R S O . Inscriptions, Britannia,
 (), –, <https://doi.org/./
SX> (accessed  Jun
)
MARK HASSALL
doi:./S
The Emergence of the English. By SUSAN
OOSTHUIZEN. Past Imperfect. mm. Pp viii +
,  figs. ARC Humanities Press, Leeds,
. ISBN . £. (pbk).
 REVIEWS
The Past Imperfect series of ARC Humanities
Press advertises itself as providing concise and
provocative studies on matters of serious con-
temporary historical debate. Those descriptions
fit this book; the further promise that I would be
‘enthralled and enlightened’ was not met, how-
ever. Without using the term pejoratively, this
short treatise might be regarded in terms of
the polemical pamphlet genre that developed
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries;
I estimate its length somewhere between ,
and , words. The position promoted
rejects the idea that England evolved from a
horizon marked by substantial population
change in southern and eastern Britain in the
fifth and sixth centuries. There is nothing new
in that, of course, but here the low-number
option of ‘elite dominance’ is also rejected and
we are left with no actual Anglo-Saxon period
at all. Oosthuizen proposes to divide these cen-
turies between late antique (fifth–sixth century),
early medieval (seventh–mid-ninth century) and
pre-Conquest periods (mid-ninth–eleventh cen-
tury). The final chapter invokes the concept of
the longue durée; here, the author is on her home
turf of historical agrarian geography.
Relevant knowledge and understanding are
otherwise markedly wanting. It would take
much more space than is available for this re-
view to identify all the errors, distortions, mis-
understandings and non-sequiturs out of which
the case is built. Starting at the very beginning,
there is no source that shows that ‘by  at the
latest [people] referred to themselves and their
language as English’. The date would seem to
relate to Æthelberht of Kent’s laws, but those
do not refer to anything English: the associa-
tion is presumably based on reading that he
had them written in English, although Bede’s
actual phrase, conscripta sermone Anglorum, is
a significant circumlocution. It then looks as
if Procopius wrote in Latin, referring to
Angli; actually the forms he used to denote both
the Angles and Frisians imply a well-rooted,
educated Greek transmission of ethnographic
information. The ‘Angles or angels’ pun
attributed to Gregory in fact runs a lot
more cutely in Greek than Latin (μὴ Ἀγγί λoι
ἀ λλάἄγγελoι), which has intriguing implica-
tions for the background to the Augustinian
mission. Pope Gregory’s usage is a perfect ex-
ample of the importance of nomenclature used
externally, and its sources are to be sought in
his own complicated circumstances – but this
is no evidence for self-identification within
what would become England.
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
Those are fundamental problems raised by
the nine lines of the first paragraph. And so it
proceeds. It may seem precious and ostentatious
to make an issue of the difference between
Greek and Latin, but supposedly ‘flawed prem-
ises and arguments’ in the work of most other
scholars in the field are alleged over and again.
Key historical sources are seriously misrepre-
sented in the book: Gildas, for instance (no no-
tice of the identification of ‘Agitius’ with Aetius
ter consul); Zosimus (‘[his] account of the rebel-
lion by the “the British” against Saxon rule in
about ’ [sic]); the Old English law-
codes – Æthelberht, as just noted; no account
taken of the composite nature of Ine’s Laws.
Understanding of the crucial languages and
terminology is generally weak and seriously
erroneous in places: eg Saxons – ‘anyone from
beyond Rome’s north-west European frontier’
– or the supposition that Romano-British origins
are somehow ‘indicated’ by the suffix of Old
English names in -sǣte. The archaeological
evidence is as badly handled: it is asserted, for
instance, that cruciform brooches in England
represent beyond question or need for argument
the adoption and development of a brooch-form
by Romano-British craftsmen, a point somehow
missed by Toby Martin in his doctoral research
on these brooches (Martin ); the sub-phas-
ing of the Anglo-Saxon period into Early,
Middle and Late is allegedly ‘largely based on
changing political organization’. I admit that I
am probably more inclined than most to empha-
sise caution due in extrapolating from the isoto-
pic data of a set of nineteen relatively early dated
samples from the cemetery at Berinsfield in
Oxfordshire, which show that the overwhelming
majority here lived their whole lives locally,
although I do not question the integrity and
significance of the data, nor that it is reasonably
concluded that these results ‘are most consistent
with the acculturation [ie population continuity]
hypothesis’ (Hughes et al , ). But it is
misuse of data to reconstrue that (plus the
actually less consistent results from a cemetery
at Eastbourne, East Sussex, also briefly noted:
Hughes et al ) as demonstrating for a fact
that ‘most people in fifth- and sixth-century
cemeteries were locally born and brought
up’ – and furthermore thus British: not even
the descendants of an insignificant immigrant
minority.
Others’ work is misrepresented. Tom
Lambert’s recent book Law and Order in Anglo-
Saxon England () is purported to show
Romano-British customary law suffusing and
underlying the earlier Old English law-codes,
  THE ANTIQUARIES JOURNAL
but it neither does that nor tries to. Lambert is
rightly sceptical of clean slate/new population
scenarios, but states explicitly that the early
chapters of his book (those cited) are ‘not about
how Kentish law related to other legal traditions,
but about how law functioned and what law
meant within Kentish society’. A more precise
reference (to Lambert , –) suggests
that it has mistakenly been imagined that
the Germanic tradition of ǣ, ‘law’, was the
Romano-British tradition. Another specific ref-
erence initially seems to be of no relevance at
all, except that just over the page cited (Ibid,
; see p ) Lambert concludes that (in
respect of legislation on theft) earlier Anglo-
Saxon kings ‘were imposing new and foreign
punitive priorities against the grain of native
legal culture’. This is hardly a passage that fore-
grounds or suggests that indigenous tradition
was the bedrock of the legislation. An article
of my own is referenced as exemplifying the
assumption that ‘ethnicity’ (and migration) were
key factors of changes in the fifth and sixth
centuries. It is true that I accept that migrations
were a significant phenomenon – across most of
Europe and beyond, in fact; it is also true, as
fuller appraisal of the available literature would
have shown, that I have consistently argued
(from empirical evidence; and by no means
alone) that a wave of larger group-identity
formation (sc ‘confederation’) was a major
phenomenon outside the Empire in the late
second to the fifth centuries that appears to
have been especially dynamic in some parts of
Germanic-speaking Europe – which is rather
different from proceeding on the unthinking
basis of a habitual presupposition. I am willing
to categorise identities as ‘ethnic’ in some
circumstances, but personally never employ a
concept of ‘ethnicity’ unless I need to discuss
it as used by others. The first page specifically
referred to from that article in fact reviews the
hybrid origins of a reconstructed Anglian iden-
tity in England, including direct if limited evi-
dence of a Romano-British component.
Where there is nothing good to say, nor sym-
pathetic or encouraging comments that could be
justified, it would be lovely to pass over in
silence. But this book is being given a vast
amount of uncritical publicity, and endorsement
from some influential individuals who have no
excuse not to know better. Fake history differs
from fake news only in terms of time-depth.
There are infinitely worse forms of historical
misportrayal than anything perpetrated here,
even if the issues are live and sensitive in current
cultural politics. But you can’t fool all of the
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available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003581520000359
people all of the time: nonsense will eventually
get sorted from reality in future study and re-
search. I stress that the selection of specific flaws
pointed out here are all readily verifiable cases of
factual error or false argument, not differences
of opinion. Unless you take the view that only
attitude matters and veracity does not, this is
not work of publishable quality in any defensible
view, and the publishers need to reflect on how
they identified peer-reviewers. This booklet
trumpets forth the very opposite of the proper
critical approaches responsible academics try
to instil in the students they seek to educate: re-
spect for and care with evidence and interpreta-
tive methods – ie ensuring that you know what
you are talking about; reading secondary sources
with care and objectivity – not seeing only what
you are looking for whether it is there or not, or
cherry-picking references. ‘Post-truth’ is the dis-
reputable realm to which this profoundly deficient
work belongs, and it should be treated as such.
We are better than this, ALL of us; the subject
is better than this; and any and every target read-
ership deserves infinitely better than this.
HUGHES, S S, MILLARD, A R, LUCY, S J,
CHENERY, C A, EVANS, J A, NOWELL, G
and PEARSON, D G . ‘Anglo-Saxon ori-
gins investigated by isotopic analysis of burials
from Berinsfield, Oxfordshire, UK’, J
Archaeol Sci, , –
HUGHES, S S, MILLARD, A R, CHENERY, C A,
NOWELL G and PEARSON D G .
‘Isotopic analysis of burials from the early
Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Eastbourne,
Sussex, UK’, J Archaeol Sci: Reports, ,
–
LAMBERT, T . Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon
England, Oxford University Press, Oxford
MARTIN, T F . The Cruciform Brooch and
Anglo-Saxon England, Boydell, Woodbridge
JOHN HINES
doi:./S
The Prittlewell Princely Burial: Excavations at
Priory Crescent, Southend-on-Sea, Essex, .
By LYN BLACKMORE IAN BLAIR SUE HIRST
CHRISTOPHER SCULL. mm. Pp xxix + ,