20 December 2024
The Anglo Saxons
It's the last Book Club of the year and we're heading back to pre-conquest Britain for the history of the Anglo Saxons with Marc Morris. Rich and Marc talk about how little people know about this period and how most of the things they do know never happened, why having very few sources to work from doesn't make this light and easy work, how Marc discovered the best way to cover this sprawling and tumultuous half a millennium was to tell it through the stories of various individuals and why unfortunately all these individuals had to be male, why the Venerable Bede is good if you have an ill cow, but not always so good if you want the facts of what happened, which Anglo Saxon king allegedly shat in the font at his baptism, which king had a threesome with his wife and her mum and which king came close to becoming a cropper in Cheddar Gorge. Plus the skill required to combine academia with readability and whether comedians and historians would have survived the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Vikings (no they wouldn't).
Buy the book here - https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-anglo-saxons-a-history-of-the-beginnings-of-england-marc-morris/5048642?ean=9781529156980
