Contemporary Authors

In the Land of Giants by Max Adams: the Dark Ages illuminated

Book review: Adams succeeds in this remarkable, engaging book in bringing the Dark Ages to vivid life, writes Neil Hegarty
Max Adams, whose travels take in Inishowen, above, is commendably sensitive to the specificities of Irish fieldwork: “In England, where the historical evidence is generally a little simpler, there is much less relevant or useful <> to assist or perplex the landscape archaeologist; in Ireland there is a whole universe of richly nuanced narrative which<< has to be interpreted as a textual source in its own right>> and woven into the broad tapestry we are trying to create, even if much material evidence has been lost or deliberately destroyed in acts of cultural barbarity”. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien

Max Adams, whose travels take in Inishowen, above, is commendably sensitive to the specificities of Irish fieldwork: “In England, where the historical evidence is generally a little simpler, there is much less relevant or useful oral tradition to assist or perplex the landscape archaeologist; in Ireland there is a whole universe of richly nuanced narrative which has to be interpreted as a textual source in its own right and woven into the broad tapestry we are trying to create, even if much material evidence has been lost or deliberately destroyed in acts of cultural barbarity”. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien

Neil Hegarty

Fri, Nov 20, 2015, 11:14

First published:
Fri, Nov 20, 2015, 11:12

Book Title:
In the Land of Giants

ISBN-13:
978-1784080341

Author:
Max Adams

Publisher:
Head of Zeus

Guideline Price:
£25.0

In December 2014, on the day of the winter solstice, the English historian and archaeologist Max Adams set off on a long, dark walk from York across the wolds to the North Sea at Whitby. Before leaving York, he called at the city’s glorious Minster – and his description of his visit bears a little examination. Adams is not concerned with describing the splendid interior of this vast church; nor is he especially interested in recalling his temper, his attitude, his frame of mind at this particular moment. Indeed, his record of the day is not notably about him at all. Instead, he draws attention to aspects of the Minster that lie hidden out of sight – and that can stay out of mind too, unless we know what we are about.

Below the church lies the heart of the garrison fort of old Roman Eboracum; in the undercroft can still be seen intact lengths of Roman walls, stone laid painstakingly to defend this northernmost city of the Empire, which slowly took on a new face as the imperial era gave way to what are known as the Dark Ages.

In the Land of Giants, as it ranges widely in a series of long walks across the landscapes of Britain and Ireland, is concerned with such glimpses and accretions: of history unseen or barely seen; its long, slow layering; its destruction by time, fire or neglect; its recovery and interpretation – and in particular with the sense that it is etched all about us, if only we take the trouble to learn or understand.

Adams’ particular terrain is, of course, especially problematic. The Dark Ages, the long centuries between Rome and the beginnings of modern history, are not called this without reason: this was a period of population decline in Europe and of a general withering in trade and other human interactions. Every Irish schoolchild knows that the endeavour of Irish monks maintained a light of culture burning in this time – yet it remains the case that hard facts, figures, numbers from this era are difficult to come by.

Adams, then, has quite the task on his hands: but he succeeds in this remarkable and engaging book in bringing the period to vivid life. Much of this has to do with his own training as an archaeologist: history, we realise, can be inscribed on a jug or a bead just as eloquently as on a piece of parchment – and again and again in this book, he is able to point to the materials brought from the ground that have made these Dark Ages considerably less dark, year by year.

But much of the book’s success also rests on Adams’ geographical range: his movement through these landscapes, <> and without taking himself too seriously. Aspects of In the Land of Giants, in particular the careful and thoughtful walking of the land, are reminiscent of WG Sebald – but whereas The Rings of Saturn roves what amounts to an eerily unpopulated country, Adams’s world is thick with people, with warm companionship. Not for him either a grave-faced Wordsworthian pacing or Colossian bestriding of the land: Adams is keen on his motorbike as a means of getting around; and keen too on observing his basic human needs, the scrambled eggs and toast, roast lamb, tea and buns and much else that even the most solemn landscape walker needs to sustain great thoughts. There is not much sense of an overarching Romantic ego at work, and this is all to the good.

Rather, there is a keen-eyed awareness of the political and cultural ramifications of the terrain. By enquiring in such a way into these Dark Ages and into the peoples and cultures that inhabited them, Adams brings these centuries and these people into the light – and in particular, he illuminates the ties that bind them to us and to our modern world. As he walks the border between Wales and England, for example, he sees the extent to which such a frontier has never had much relevance in the lives of the people who lived there; place names blur and fuzz from Welsh to English and back again; trade and human relationships work endlessly back and forth.

This sense of an endless dialogue is especially interesting in the case of Ireland. As Adams stands on the hill above the Manx harbour of Peel, the Irish coast is cloaked below a looming cloudbank; as he bobs in his boat off the harbour wall at Holyhead, the lights of invisible Dublin cast a dramatic purple glare above the western horizon – and yet Ireland is felt everywhere in this book. A speculative birthplace is allocated to St Patrick: the fort at Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall, high in the Pennines and today set amid “a landscape of boggy mires, dispersed sheep farms and conifer plantations”, was formerly a solid, powerful place – and its Roman name of Banna was similar to the Bannavem Taberniae of Patrick’s Confessio. Similarly, Adams’ treatment of Dál Riata, that Irish-Scots kingdom knit together by the sea, is shadowed by the presence of Ireland: the kings of Dál Riata brought the booty of Europe to their fortress at Dunadd (its domed shape compared by the ever-peckish Adams to a Walnut Whip) but their rule was legitimised by Colmcille following his arrival from Derry.

And at length the book and Adams come to rest briefly in Ireland itself – specifically on the north-eastern shoulder of Inishowen. Here, on the slopes above Lough Foyle, he and his fellow archaeologists look back across the sea to the Scottish islands floating in the distance, mull on the ties that bind – and explore the rich material heritage of the district and make connections.

Adams is commendably sensitive to the specificities of Irish fieldwork: “In England,” he writes, “where the historical evidence is generally a little simpler, there is much less relevant or useful oral tradition to assist or perplex the landscape archaeologist; in Ireland there is a whole universe of richly nuanced narrative which has to be interpreted as a textual source in its own right and woven into the broad tapestry we are trying to create, even if much material evidence has been lost or deliberately destroyed in acts of cultural barbarity”. It is impressive – though very much in keeping with the tone of the whole book – to see such awareness in action; and absorbing to note the results that can flow from such openness.

In the Land of Giants offers many pointed lessons – not least that history ought to play a central role in our culture and education. A psychological effect of contact with history, after all, is that it reminds us of the temporary nature of culture and politics. States and nations that can seem eternal and unchanging are in fact anything but; and our own sense of centrality becomes healthily diminished too, as we shrink to being a mere part of an ongoing drama, rather than its stars. And this book reminds us too that – unwelcome though such a reflection will be in some quarters – we hold a collective title deed to the land itself. It connects us to our past and our present and to ourselves; and we sever this connection at our peril.

Neil Hegarty’s books include That Was the Life That Was, the biography of David Frost; The Secret History of our Streets, a social history of twentieth-century London; Story of Ireland; and Dublin: a View from the Ground. His debut novel, The Inch levels, will be published by Head of Zeus next year

No smoke without fire
Miranda Seymour admires an ingenious study of the modern disciples of Prometheus

Miranda Seymour

Saturday 7 March 2009 00.01 GMT
First published on Saturday 7 March 2009 00.01 GMT

Historians and biographers like to emphasise the galvanic effect of science on culture during what we have come to call the Romantic age. Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men placed the birth of this productive coupling in the monthly moonlit meetings, during the 1770s, of five exceptional men (Joseph Priestley, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin). Richard Holmes, in The Age of Wonder, more recently charted the influence on Romantic writers and poets (Mary Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Keats) of the new skies unveiled by William Herschel's telescopes, and of the chemical revolution effected by Humphry Davy, the Cornishman hailed as "the chemical Prometheus", and his brilliant assistant Michael Faraday.

Max Adams has undertaken something new in The Firebringers; he has done it dazzlingly. A Newcastle man, he examines the effect of the northern-based coal economy - at a time when the Great Northern Coalfield fuelled the country - on a generation of engineers, inventors, artists and businessmen. These are Adams's "firebringers", and the word "fire" firmly links them to the mining industry. It also enables Adams to give cohesion to a disparate group by seeing them as the <>, the bestower of fire on mankind, the sacrificial figure condemned - as punishment for his hubris - to an eternity of suffering, chained to a rock for the delectation of a ravenous, liver-loving eagle. Prometheus's fire and chains provided, Adams suggests,<>: "The collective output of a generation of firebringers suggests a conflation of Prometheus, Satan, Mephistopholes, Adam and Christ into a single, sacrificial, insolent, liberating and redemptive figure."

An examination of a group that had no name ("The Prometheans" is Adams's own unifying phrase) requires focus and a centre. Adams's ingenious solution is to place the extraordinary quartet of Martin brothers - among whom only John, the artist, will be known to most readers - at the heart of his narrative. Here, in a single family, Adams is able to exemplify the explosive mix of imagination, confidence and inventive skill that marked out the "Promethean" mind.

The Martins were northern men of simple stock, the offspring of a tanner and a vision-prone Methodist. William, the eldest son, designed the first spring scale. More intriguingly, Adams identifies him as the inventor of a miners' safety lamp that, according to statements signed by the satisfied miners at a colliery where it was introduced in 1819, proved considerably more reliable than the more famous model that honoured its proud inventor's name. (Fatalities in mining galleries actually increased, Adams tells us, following the introduction, in 1818, of Sir Humphry's "Davy" lamp.) Another Martin brother, Jonathan, became an inspired religious lunatic, whose message from the Lord instructed him, in 1829, to burn down York Minster and carry home to Hexham the velvet trimmings from the archbishop's throne. A saner brother, Richard, was a military man of artistic skill. But the star of the family - and of Adams's engrossing book - was John.

Several factors in the Martin family conspired to make John, the youngest of the four brothers, an ideal candidate to become the leading Promethean. A dramatic fall in the death rate - despite the country's heavy and enduring engagement in continental warfare - meant that more of the younger sons in working families were surviving. John, as the youngest, was under no pressure to follow his father into the tanning business. On the contrary, his father devoted his energies (in good Promethean style) to fostering the boy's talent and supporting him in his ambitions. When, aged 14, John broke his contract to paint coats of arms for a Newcastle coach-builder (the master had denied his apprentice a legitimate pay rise), Mr Martin backed his son and promptly hired a local artist to give lessons to the boy. When this tutor's son went south, to work for a London-based glass painter, 17-year-old John went with him. The elder Martins, once again, bestowed their blessing. (This parental pattern, as Adams points out, was being repeated across the country, as the gifted, ambitious sons of blacksmiths, builders and colliers set off to exploit and market their skills in the commercial heart of the nation.)

John Martin, to judge from Adams's account, must have possessed, alongside exceptional artistic abilities, a winning personality. The story of his fellow Prometheans is bound together by the one quality that seems to have united them in life: their affection for their hospitable and enterprising friend, one who shared their ardent commitment to scientific progress. Martin's weekly dinner parties appear quite as remarkable as - and, I'd guess, a lot more fun than - the famous supper in 1817 at which his artistic competitor, Benjamin Haydon, introduced Keats to Wordsworth. Martin's generous nature can best be seen in his attempt to come to his former rival's rescue, privately sending Haydon money the day before the ruined artist took his life, aged 61, in 1846.

Posterity, while rating Martin considerably higher than Haydon, has never equated him with his great contemporaries Turner and Constable. Even in his own time, Martin had a struggle to win approval from critics for his grandly theatrical compositions. Disgust, rather than professional jealousy, may have caused one high-minded exhibitor, in 1814, to deface and wreck Clytie, the first of Martin's works to be granted a respectable position in the main hall of the Royal Academy. William Beckford's response to Martin's opulent Belshazzar's Feast ("Oh, what a sublime thing!") was that of a kindred spirit. Beckford, the author of the lush eastern romance Vathek, did not speak for the established art world of the day.

Martin suffered - and bore with great fortitude - more than his fair share of tragedy. Seldom prosperous, he often struggled to support his less successful siblings (as well as their offspring); this altruistic task became harder after 1824, when the bank in which he had placed all his earnings went bust. (The bank's owner was hanged for forgery.) Two of Martin's own sons died young; a favourite nephew, Richard, killed himself. His beloved brother Jonathan - on whom he spent a fortune in hiring the best defence lawyer in Britain, Henry Brougham, following the torching of York Minster - died in Bedlam.

Martin's financial and artistic survival, throughout troubling times, was due in part to an unlikely royal connection. Visiting London for the victory celebrations of 1814, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg found lodgings in the street where Martin lived. The two neighbours became friends, close enough for the prince to act as godfather to the artist's favourite son. In 1816, when Leopold married Princess Charlotte, heir apparent to the British throne, Martin's reputation soared. As a widower (Charlotte died in 1817), Leopold stage-managed the alliance between his own nephew and niece: Victoria and Albert. Further royal commissions ensued, providing a second, much-needed boost to Martin's ailing career.

Presented by Adams as the arch-Promethean, Martin was as much at home in the world of engineering as in that of art. A vivid appreciation of this connection lends spice and originality to Adams's book. Martin, who studied river sunsets from a boat he shared with Turner, also made the drawings (possibly in collaboration with his friend Faraday) for his elder brother's safety lamp. He worked on town planning; he designed a circular underground line; he founded the Metropolitan Sewage Company; he even drew up the urban sanitation scheme that was later implemented by Joseph Bazalgette.

<>, beyond the headlong speed of its narrative thrust, <> - as Martin's colleagues and allies - <>. Martin's own 90mph ride with his friend Isambard Kingdom Brunel, along six miles of the engineer's new Great Western Railway, can hardly have been more exhilarating than this tearaway voyage through stirring times.

• Miranda Seymour's In My Father's House is published by Pocket Books. To order The Firebringers for £18 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop

The Firebringers, By Max Adams
If Shelley was the 'prophet of Prometheanism', then the romantic painter John Martin was its high priest

Reviewed by James Grande
Saturday 18 April 2009 23:00 BST
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John Martin "single-handedly invented, mastered and exhausted an entire genre of painting, the Apocalyptic Sublime". The fantastic architecture of his cityscapes anticipated the worlds of science fiction and inspired early cinematic set design. Above them, bolts of lightning – "a John Martin trademark" – deliver divine judgment and "put an essential seal of sublimity on his paintings".

Martin was the youngest of 13 children – of whom five survived childhood – in an ordinary, provincial family, and was born the same week that the Bastille fell. He was never admitted to the Royal Academy, yet became one of the most popular artists of his day. Max Adams' The Firebringers: Art, Science and the Struggle for Liberty in 19th-Century Britain interweaves Martin's remarkable story with those of his brothers and contemporaries. His fascination with fiery apocalypse was shared by his brother, Jonathan, who believed he was called by God to act out the divine vengeance that John Martin specialised in painting. On 1 February 1829, Jonathan hid himself in York Minster after it had been locked up for the night, draped himself in velvet curtains torn down from the archbishop's throne, set light to two piles of prayer books and then abseiled out. The fire destroyed the organ, choir stalls, pulpit, bishop's throne and many other parts of the 14th-century oak interior; the arsonist was arrested five days later, miles away in the Tyne valley.

His brother William, a self-proclaimed debunker of Newtonian mechanics, took a sympathetic view of Jonathan's actions, celebrating the event in doggerel. More practically, John and Richard Martin, a veteran of Waterloo, arranged for Henry Brougham to conduct the defence. Brougham successfully argued that the defendant was insane and Jonathan spent the rest of his life in Bedlam, where he was allowed paper and ink to make apocalyptic sketches of Babylon-on-Thames.

Max Adams portrays the Martins as part of a generation of artists and scientists inspired by the myth of Prometheus, the Greek Titan who stole fire from Zeus to give to man. Many of these fearless radicals and innovators collected at John Martin's Marylebone home, where the stellar guest list included Faraday, Dickens, the Brunels, Robert Owen, JMW Turner, William Godwin, Caroline Norton and Charles Wheatstone.

However, The Firebringers <>, which extends beyond Martin's Marylebone set to include every passing luminary. This leads to some bizarre summary judgements: we are told that Mary Wollstonecraft was "passionate but undisciplined" and Percy Shelley "England's great white hope". Adams' definition of the Promethean is baggy enough to include almost anyone, yet he admits that "no written document survives to prove that John Martin was a devotee of Prometheus" and struggles to align Martin and Shelley, respectively "high priest" and "prophet" of Prometheanism. Writing about Martin's Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (1812), he concedes that Martin "had not perhaps, at this time, yet met Godwin and through him Shelley", and then that he "may in fact never have met Shelley". Martin only met Godwin in 1830, eight years after Shelley's death, and there is no evidence that Shelley and Martin ever met.

If The Firebringers fails as a portrait of an entire age, it succeeds brilliantly as a biography of a family and place. John Martin was born in Haydon Bridge and Adams describes him drawing in the silt of the Tyne with a stick and pays attention to the "unmistakably Northumbrian" light of an early painting. The region was at the centre of scientific advance, and in 1825, George Stephenson's Locomotion No. 1 opened the Stockton and Darlington railway line, putting Tyneside at "the forefront of industrial progress". Writing of an age before rigid disciplinary boundaries, Adams illuminates the links between a generation of artistic and scientific visionaries.

Review: The King in the North by Max Adams
By James Aitcheson On 10 February 2014

A prince-in-exile makes his triumphant return from obscurity, slaying the tyrant who was ravaging his homeland and reclaiming the throne that, half a lifetime earlier, was stolen from him, before establishing himself as one of the pre-eminent kings of his age and ushering in a golden age for his people. The story of King Oswald of Northumbria (reigned 634-42) is a remarkable one – indeed the stuff of legend – and yet nowadays his achievements have largely been forgotten by most except Anglo-Saxon specialists.

The King in the North by Max Adams

The King in the North
Max Adams • 448 pp. • Head of Zeus
Hardback • £25.00
The seventh century was a golden era in another, quite different sense. This is the age of Sutton Hoo, with its marvellous treasures, as well as the recently excavated Staffordshire Hoard. These and other discoveries illustrate the vibrant craft and culture and the immense wealth of Oswald’s world, but in constrast the documentary record for these years is incredibly thin. Certainly compared with the tenth and eleventh centuries, my own particular period of specialism, the seventh century truly is a dark age. What written material does exist is not only sparse in the detail it provides but also very often fragmentary, and not easy to piece together. Reconstructing a narrative of events therefore presents a tough challenge for historians, but Max Adams rises to it admirably in The King in the North, sifting through the complex primary source material and, where possible, tying that in with more recent archaeological evidence.

In keeping with the book’s subtitle, “the life and times of Oswald of Northumbria”, Adams does not examine his subject’s career in isolation, but also explores the array of societies and cultures – religious and secular – that inhabited seventh-century Britain, and so places his reign in its historical context. While Oswald, his achievements and his afterlife as the focus of a saintly cult form the backbone of the book, a significant amount of attention is given also to the career of his predecessor Edwin (616-32) as well as to the long reign of his successor, his brother Oswiu (642-70). Indeed The King in the North is less a biography of a single man than it is a study of a dynasty, and of the leading role played by Northumbria in the politics, religion and culture of seventh-century Britain. This was a land divided: a land of seemingly perpetual conflict between rival families, Anglo-Saxons and Britons, new and old customs, pagans and Christians, and even between different branches of the Church: the Irish, the British and the Roman traditions.

Oswald’s reign as king was relatively short – only eight years – and yet his impact in that time was decisive in forging the Northumbrian kingdom. After ousting a Welsh army from his ancestral homelands in order to claim his crown, he proceeded first to unite the ancient provinces of Bernicia and Deira under one rule and, later, to win a great victory over a coalition of forces drawn from the southern Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which in the following century led the historian Bede to assert that he had “brought under his dominion all the nations and provinces of Britain.”

Exactly how much can and should be read into these words isn’t clear. It would perhaps have been useful to have seen a deeper interrogation of Bede’s statement, which Adams accepts at more or less face value. There’s no doubt that both Oswald and Oswiu were among the most powerful rulers of their age, and widely respected throughout these isles. What’s more questionable is the extent to which they can be justifiably said to have been overlords over all the kingdoms of Britain, south as well as north of the Humber. What might this overlordship have entailed? How might it have been achieved and exercised in practice? What was the exact extent of their authority, and was it was uniform throughout the territories that lay beyond their kingdom’s borders? Given that their power base was centred upon Bamburgh, it is hard to imagine how they could have exercised much influence over Wessex or Kent, for example.

Lindisfarne Castle on Holy Island

Lindisfarne Castle on Holy Island. The castle was built in 1550, re-using stone from the Norman priory. (Photo credit: Matthew Hunt. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.)
Oswald was also responsible, during his years as king, for establishing Christianity in Northumbria. Edwin was the first to accept the faith into Northumbria, but his support was never more than half-hearted. It was under Oswald (634-42) that churches were first built across the kingdom and the monastery at Lindisfarne was established, under royal protection just a few miles from the fortress at Bamburgh. In contrast to his predecessor, he was an enthusiastic promoter of the Church: so much so that after his death in 642 at the Battle of Maserfeld – probably near Oswestry in Shropshire – at the hands of the pagan Penda of Mercia, he was regarded as a Christian martyr. The spot where he was said to have fallen became associated with miracles, and his relics became the object of veneration, thus ensuring the survival of his reputation for centuries to come.

Around these events Adams expertly weaves his account. If the title of The King in the North is intended as a nod towards George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, then the comparison between the world of Oswald and that of Eddard Stark is an apt one. The political landscape of seventh-century Britain was a ruthless and volatile one, in which rival dynasties pursued vicious bloodfeuds and in which fortunes of entire kingdoms could be overtuned at a single sword’s blow. Elaborately constructed networks of alliances and tribute rarely outlived the rulers at their head. Power rested in the hands of the most military successful: those who were able to attract the largest warbands, and who were able to prove their throne-worthiness through victory in battle.

<> <> as well as to the specialist scholar, The King in the North vividly reconstructs the world that Oswald not only inhabited but also helped to shape.