Books! Books! Books!

{long review is long}Halsall is one of those academics who suffers from what might be called a deplorable excess of personality, which in this case is, I think, absolutely adorable. He knows how to make a joke in his books without it turning into a facepalm moment. (Which is appropriate, since another of his publications is the outstanding edited collection Humor, History, and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.) An excess of personality is useful in this particular context because he always seems to be involved in academic fights; in late antiquity, his interpretations often clash with those of, say, Peter Heather and Brian Ward-Perkins, while in Warfare and Society he is most often at odds with Bernard Bachrach.

This, honestly, makes for a great deal of fun. For my money, the most interesting part of history is the stuff that doesn't get taught until late in one's undergraduate career, or even not until graduate school: historiography, clashes of differing interpretations of the facts or indeed clashes of the underlying philosophy behind approaches to the past. Although Warfare and Society does an outstanding job of describing the salient features of the period to a nonspecialist, it also takes positions on several key historiographical debates: the nature of Anglo-Saxon warfare (cavalry? mounted warriors?), the size of armies in the barbarian west, and so on, along with perhaps less well-known ones like the nature of specific Breton mounted units.

Halsall also strikes a good balance between a thematic overview (necessary in a subject this wide and diverse) and a narrative. History is, after all, the study of change over time, and you can't really describe change without a narrative of some form. Halsall is at considerable pains to point out that although many publications subsume Western Europe from 450 to 900 into a general "Dark Ages" [sic] heading that evinced little change over the course of centuries, naturally there was considerable variation in the way armies were raised and fought over time and place. Although change didn't just happen all at once, Halsall locates two primary areas of considerable change: around the year 600, across all of Western Europe, and then again in the ninth century as specifically northwestern Europe tried to figure out how to deal with vikings, with decidedly mixed results before the end of the period.

The other aspect of variation is not just "change over time" but also in space. The usual, persistent problem of the very old "national history" paradigm is that few if any historians venture outside their bailiwick and sometimes craft narratives that make zero sense when comparing them to concurrent events in a neighboring country. British history is particularly parochial in this respect (or, indeed, "insular"); if writers on Saxon England remark on the similarities and differences between the Saxon societies and contemporary Frankish ones at all, they usually ascribe any similarities to coincidence. Halsall's focus is naturally on Frankish warfare, as it is the best-documented, but he does a reasonably good job of integrating the national narratives and comparing them when useful. Italian and Iberian warfare do get something of a short shrift, largely because of the paucity of sources.