Warriors and Kings is subtitled ‘The 1500-year Battle for Celtic Britain’ but in this it is not strictly accurate.  While the book is certainly about warriors and kings, rather than Celtic Britain Wall concentrates almost exclusively on the long struggle between the English and the Welsh. Although the first chapters delve into the pre-history of the wider Celtic peoples, once the Angles and the Saxons enter the story the book tracks the long and fraught relations between the Welsh and the English, with only passing nods towards the other Celtic areas, such as Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany. By thus concentrating on the encounters between English and Welsh, Wall misses the chance to elucidate one of the key aspects of Celtic culture: the way that the sea allowed a people that were, geographically, widely spread, to maintain a culture held together by song and saga, history and trade.

Once into the turbulent history of Anglo/Welsh relations, Wall does a good job of leading the reader through the tangled and deeply depressing history of Welsh internecine warfare, where brothers and cousins routinely turned upon each other in suicidally sanguinary warfare. What Wall brings out clearly is that, if there was one factor that ensured ultimate English political dominance over Wales, it was the Celtic practice of partible inheritance as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon and Norman custom of primogeniture. For the Celts, inheritance was divided equally between all of a man’s sons, even including those born illegitimately, whereas the Anglo-Saxon and Norman lords passed their estates on to the eldest born, allowing these lords to increase the family holdings through the generations. Indeed, the repeating pattern of Welsh resistance to English domination was for a great leader such as Llywelyn the Great, through much toil and conflict, to unite the warring Welsh kingdoms, fight the English to terms, only for everything to fall apart on his death when his sons and heirs fell to fighting it out over the inheritance.

While Wall brings this aspect of Welsh history vividly to life, his treatment of the religious divide between the Welsh and the English is less convincing. It’s undoubtedly true that the church in Wales, which followed Irish practices for dating Easter that diverged from that of the wider church, was seen as heretical and schismatic by churchmen such as Wilfrid. However, Wall comes close to arguing that the English saw fighting the Welsh as an early version of the Albigensian Crusade, despite the fact that the Welsh church had abandoned its heterodox practices by the middle of the 8th century. In presenting the conflict as rigid orthodoxy against free-spirited heresy, Wall reads the past through the prism of post-Reformation conflicts. He also ignores how the insular Celtic church influenced wider Christianity, suggesting a process in which both sides accommodated and adopted as much as they pronounced anathemas and excommunicated. For example, he fails to mention how the wider Christian church adopted the characteristic Celtic pentitentials and its practice of personal confession, nor the impact that monks on pilgrimage for Christ had in converting the Germanic peoples of north-western Europe.

Although an interesting book within the parameters it adopts for itself, there are better accounts of the long struggle and longer influence of the Celtic peoples of Britain.