Merlin, Myrddin Wyllt, & the ‘Men of the North’

Tim Clarkson, Scotland's Merlin: A Medieval Legend and Its Dark Age Origins, John Donald, 2016. Amazon US $22 PB, $8 Kindle. Tim Clarkson's new book, Scotland's Merlin, was a lovely break from my usual plague reading. Merlin is one of the few Arthurian characters who can stand alone from the Arthurian corpus as the Welsh figure...

Heavenfield Round-up 7: June Links

I'm not sure where June went. I wish I had been more productive, but luckily some of my fellow bloggers have been  much busier. Bamburgh Research Project has been out in the field for most of June. Various updates have been posted on their blog. Curt Emanuel, the Medieval History Geek, has posts on late...

Heavenfield Round-up 5: Signs of Power and Piety

The find of the week was the grave of a medieval abbot of Furness Abbey in Cumbria. Past Horizons has the best write up of the discovery at the abbey, which is just southwest of the Lake District. They have also had good features on reinterpreting the mass grave of Vikings found in Oxford, and...

Kingship in Early Northern Britain

When we write about 5-7th century kings we have this misplaced need to assign them a kingdom. We forget that when their contemporaries in neighboring kingdoms referred to them, they were usually referred to as King of Britons, King of Picts, King of Saxons. Within their people, they do refer to kings of tribes, or...

Northern British Bibliography

This is a bibliography for Strathclyde,  Gododdin (Lothian),  Isle of Man, and Cumbria -- 'the Men of the North', Gwyr y Gogledd. Alcock, Leslie(1979) ' The north Britons, the Picts and the Scots', p. 134-42; In: The End of Roman Britain: Papers Arising from a Conference, Durham 1978 Edited by P.J. Casey. BAR British Series...

The Long Seventh Century

There seems to be a new trend to name certain transitional centuries as "long centuries" because the important events that happened tend to wrap over both century marks. Its not surprising that real life doesn't match our numbering system. I've heard of the long 19th century* - from the American Revolution to World War I...