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By
FRANK BEHRENS
What Happened When the
Romans Left?
As interesting as is much of the material on the
Acorn Media DVD release of "King Arthur's
Britain," very little of its 147 minutes is
devoted to the Arthurian legend. It is used more
or less as a jumping off place for writer-narrator
Francis Pryor's thesis that everything found in
history books about post-Roman Britain is all
wrong.
This 3-part series is dedicated to the thesis that
once the Romans left, Britain did not fall into
the "dark ages," nor was it invaded by the
Anglo-Saxons, but that it thrived under its own
steam to develop a highly productive and cultured
society.
Pryor offers as part of his evidence the many
inscriptions found on stones in highly poetic
Latin. From this, he jumps to the conclusion that
there must have been a highly literate public to
read them. Considering the high rate of illiteracy
in classical Athens, this is a weak bit of logic
indeed.
Much of the other evidence is highly scientific. I
found some of it rather boring and hard to follow.
Just how one can trace a Y-chromosome based on the
evidence of a not very large number of skeletons
and conclude a link between the ancient Britons
and the Swedes was not well explained; nor was the
dropping of case-endings from nouns, which the old
television series about the English language
explained very nicely.
I did enjoy the computer-generated reproductions
of what the architecture must have been like,
based on the Roman models and the foundations that
remain; but again, Pryor seems to take "probably"
to mean "definitely."
Yes, there is plenty of interesting material here;
but if you want to learn anything new about the
Arthurian legend, this is not the shop for it. |
