Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Peter Ackroyd is a prolific writer, principally known for his novels, and for TV programmes about London; but the question posed by this book is whether he is worth reading as an historian; and I am afraid the answer is no. `Foundation' is intended as the first volume in a multi-volume History of England. It is highly `readable' (which would please this year's judges of the Booker Prize); but the approach taken here is simplistic and superficial. Conclusions are repeatedly presented as fact. `Foundation' is devoted to the period between the earliest origins and the advent of the Tudor dynasty , which inevitably means that the text is a summary; but Ackroyd presents us with little more than sketches, some of them highly misleading. I will take two examples. In dealing with the Anglo-Saxon invasions, he says that the invaders `were all accommodated and according to the best genetic evidence, eventually made 5% of the people we now call English; in the Eastern regions it may have reached approximately 10%; but there is no hint of deliberate genocide'. Well, the Welsh historian Gildas did more than hint at it, and he wrote soon after the invasions. We are not told what Ackroyd's genetic evidence is, and there are no footnotes to take us to that evidence. In fact there have long been two views as to the numbers who came by sea from Germany at the end of the Roman period in Britain. The Anglo-Saxons may have arrived in massive numbers, or very few, though either way they eventually dominated England, politically and culturally. Ackroyd ignores that intense debate, as well as the literary, linguistic and archaeological evidence on which the two views are based. The jury is still out, but this does not prevent Ackroyd from giving judgement. Ackroyd seems to regard the indigenous population of England as English, while the invaders are Saxon. This would have surprised Bede, the only man who wrote a coherent history of the country between the departure of the Romans and the reign of King Alfred; and it would have astounded the Welsh. My second example concerns Henry V. Here again we are treated to an entirely superficial, and this time conventional, view. Take the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. There is no discussion of Anne Curry's revision of the numbers involved: we are simply told that 8,000 Englishmen faced 20,000 French, as if the wild figures given by the chroniclers were acceptable at face value. Likewise, we are given no idea of the depth of hostility to Henry and his war, both in fifteenth century France and amongst modern historians on both sides of the Channel. No one reading `Foundation' would understand why Henry VI came to regard his French inheritance as a `damnosa heritas', just as his predecessor Richard II had done. Or why Henry V has recently been condemned as a war criminal. `Foundation' may well become a bestseller - Peter Ackroyd has an attractive style, unlike many historians, and he is very well known; but he is not engaged in writing serious history. Stephen Cooper