Blog

The Snare of War

21 April 2025
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: History

Britain was once a place of little kingdoms. By the end of the fifth century, the two Roman dioceses, Britannia Inferior and Britannia Superior, had given way to a mosaic of petty princedoms. Some were the size of a county. Some were smaller: the land around a cluster of villages, perhaps demarcated by some natural features such as forest and river. Many of these tiny kingdoms have left not the slightest trace on the historical record: they disappeared with the deaths of the kings who claimed to rule them. And the reason that so many were forgotten was that the life of a king was short and ended in blood.

For the kings, the men sitting at the apex of the social pyramid, had made a deal with devils in their ascent: having reached the top of the mountain there was no way back down. They were caught as tight as a hare in a wire. It did not matter if their subjects were Britons, Angles, Saxons or any of the other peoples who lived on the land. The farmers were constrained by the rhythms of farming: ploughing, sowing, harvesting, preparing. But the kings were trapped. They were trapped more firmly than any of their subjects.

The kings were caught in the snare of war.

Warriors Born and Warriors Made

21 April 2025
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: History

Could the son of a farmer become a warrior in Anglo-Saxon Britain? Whether the warrior caste was sufficiently open to allow such a boy to enter it is an interesting question. Certainly, the easiest way to enter the warrior caste was to be born into it. However, it might have still been possible for a farmer’s son to become a warrior and part of the king’s warband.

While the social distance between king and peasant was great, the physical distance was not. The king and his warband were personal and present; they travelled their kingdom. A young man exhibiting strength, courage and initiative could attract their attention, particularly if he had the opportunity to do something that drew attention to his abilities: taking part in a battle and distinguishing himself, alerting the warband to the presence of an enemy, acting as a scout. Any of these could bring the farmer’s boy to the king’s attention and lead to his recruitment into the warband.

Once in, it was deeds that counted. While there was a hierarchy within the warrior aristocracy and the son of a farmer was never going to be an ætheling, his son or his grandson might.

Separated by Battle, Joined by Warfare

15 April 2025
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: History

The warriors of early medieval Britain – Angle, Saxon, Briton, Irish, Pict – shared much even when they were separated by different religions: following the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, their cultures converged further.

The threads holding them together ran through language, the hierarchical but meritocratic organisation of the warband, the training necessary for fighting men, the broader horizons established by travel and the many outlanders among them. Indeed, perhaps a majority of warriors learned their skill far from their own mead hall.

It was a common practice for kings in Anglo-Saxon Britain to send their sons, from the age of seven and up, to be fostered as part of the retinue of an allied king. This served to broaden the experience of the growing boy, and it cemented ties between competing and allied kingdoms.

The Rules of Battle

15 April 2025
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: History

One of the paradoxes of warfare is that for it to occur, the combatants have to share comparable views of how war is waged. They must share the same, or similar, war cultures. Indeed, the whole idea of a determining battle deciding the winner and the loser is part of a particular idea of war that is not universal. Threading it back through the past, it seems to have originated from the internecine warfare of the Greek city states. The citizen soldiers of the city states could not afford to be away from their homes during harvest since missing the harvest meant starvation. So rather than the long-drawn out conflicts of raiding and slave taking that characterised ancient warfare before the Greeks, the armies of the city states met and decided it all in a furious clash of arms, leaving the dead for the dogs and the living time to return home and harvest their crops.

When the Persians invaded Greece, there was a clash of very different military cultures. The Persians did not expect to have to fight set-piece battles with an enemy that would rather die than retreat – withdrawal to fight again another day was perfectly respectable within their military culture. There must have been a consuming feeling among the Persian officers that the Greeks weren’t fighting fair. But it was rather that the Greeks were fighting a different kind of war, and no one had told the Persians.

Meta is Theft

3 April 2025
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: Things You Never Knew, Writers, Writing
Some of my work that @meta has stolen to train its AI.

@meta, the company that controls Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has stolen my work, and the work of countless other writers, to train its AI. It has done so without asking and without paying anything to do so. This is theft. If you would like to register your voice against this, and help to ensure that human writers have a future, please sign this petition: https://chng.it/z2mFLV8HMY

Swords For Hire

30 March 2025
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: History
Photo by Fernando Cortés: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-viking-holding-a-sword-10068848/

It’s plausible that a substantial percentage of an Anglo-Saxon king’s warband were not local men – and that that percentage increased as the fame and renown of the king grew, attracting from further afield young men keen to make their names.

Indeed, this practice was in no way confined to the Anglo-Saxons. The poem Y Gododdin, ascribed to the Brittonic poet Aneirin, tells how the king of the Gododdin called warriors to his kingdom from all over Britain, feasting them for a year in his hall until they launched a doomed attack on their enemy (the battle is now generally accepted to have taken place around 600 and resulted in the defeat of the Gododdin by the Northumbrians).

Spice Run

30 March 2025
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: History
Photo by Engin Akyurt: https://www.pexels.com/photo/assorted-color-herbs-3368291/

News from the outside world was one of the currencies a travelling warrior took with him, along with his sword and, sometimes, things to trade. Gifts, particularly portable, exotic gifts, were highly prized and, if small and light, reasonably easy to transport.

Things like spices were ideal. Living in Britain in the seventh century, you would only taste spices when someone returned from abroad bringing a taste of far away. Spices were the ideal gift to bring home since they are light, portable and appreciated in a taste world lacking many of the flavours we know today.

Warriors Abroad

30 March 2025
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: History
Photo by Samuel Kalina: https://www.pexels.com/photo/rock-formation-in-the-middle-of-body-of-water-3800084/

Anglo-Saxon warriors travelled. In Beowulf, we hear of a Geatish warrior, Beowulf, fetching up at the court of Hrothgar, king of the Danes, to help him in his fight against the monster Grendel.

There was clearly nothing outlandish to the audience that first heard this poem in a warrior setting off to a different country in search of adventure, renown and an enemy against whom to pit his sword. It was quite common for a warrior to travel to another kingdom and offer his fighting skills there.

Indeed, the most renowned of all the kings of Northumbria, Oswald, took refuge in the sea-spanning kingdom of Dál Riata as a boy and fought for its rulers as a man. While there, he learnt the language of the Dál Riatans, heard their stories, sang their songs. There were many stories for him and his men to tell when they returned to Northumbria.

Book review: Rupert of Hentzau by Anthony Hope

30 March 2025
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: Book review
Rupert of Hentzau by Anthony Hope

I read Anthony Hope’s most famous novel, The Prisoner of Zenda, more years ago than I care to remember but I only recently found out that he’d written this sequel. Although its titled for the dastardly villain, Rupert of Hentzau, Rupert doesn’t really appear in the book as often as one would like, as he really is a thoroughly good villain, but Hope does ramp up the conflicts of the first book hugely. In the Prisoner, our hero, Rudolf, has to impersonate the king of Ruritania. In the second, he has to become the king, while impersonating the king, because the king has gone and died, after faffing around in a humiliated tiff that everyong preferred Rudolf as king to him. It’s a book of its time, and I mean that in a good way as it manifests the best of that era while showing few of its failings. A worthy sequel to the original.

Book review: The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour

30 March 2025
Edoardo
No comments
Categories: Book review
The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour

I was a little non-plussed on first picking this book up: I had no idea that Pink Floyd’s guitarist had so intense an interest in Italy that he’d written a book about it. But then, I remembered the famous Pink Floyd concert at Pompeii and it all made sense. After all, having made ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, Dave Gilmour would have had more than enough money to buy a house, or houses, in Italy. But I did expect some sort of mention of Pink Floyd somewhere in the text.

Then I realised that it was a different David Gilmour, a journalist rather than a musician. I was, at first, a little disappointed as I was looking forward to learning how an extended Italian lunch had been the inspiration for ‘Comfortably Numb’ (at one family lunch in Italy when I was young I was reduced to tears by the refusal of my uncle to believe me when I said that I was full and I really, really, really couldn’t eat any more). However, it turns out this other version of David Gilmour is very knowledgeable, and opinonated, about Italy, so I gave up on hoping for Pink Floyd reminiscences and settled down to read his tour through Italian history.

Italy’s history is famously long but Gilmour only takes half the book to get to the 19th century: this is swift run through a rich story. It turns out, Gilmour is most interested in the Risorgimento, the movement in Italy that forced unity onto an Italy that was previously divided between different states, and what has happened since. My mother is from Piedmont so it’s interesting to see the Piedmontese, and in particular King Vittorio Emanuele, cast as the villains of the piece for straitjacketing a reluctant assortment of independent cities and statelets into a unified state.

Gilmour’s basic point is that Italian loyalty is more local and regional than national (except when the Azzurri are playing) and in this I think he’s right. Other countries spent centuries unifying, slowly assembling the sentiments and assembleys necessary to make a truly unified country; in Italy, they did this all in a couple of decades. As such, it’s no surprise that Italy remains a collection of regions forced into a country. And Gilmour’s book is a very good place to understand how that happened and its consequences.