Most cultures around the world have a Noah’s ark-style story – of a great inundation that consumes the whole planet. One rare exception is the eastern parts of the British Isles. Which is odd, because the archaeologists have recently established that just off the east coast of England there was a great lost land, an area greater than the existing UK, you might even call it a culture, which disappeared completely beneath the waves only around 6,000 years before today. One explanation for this loss might be that the repeated invasions of the east coast in the historical period disrupted regional myth cycles, in contrast to the continuity of Celtic cultures of the west coast.

But one effect of this historical disruption is clear: it makes Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland particularly fascinating and gripping – slightly odd really, when you consider that this has the dry-sounding subtitle of “Research Report No 160 Council of British Archaeology”.

You’d have, however, to be a very dry sort indeed, not to be captured by the tale of the gradual unfolding of knowledge of an entire lost world in Europe – a world that the geological surveys of oil companies and pipe-laying firms has enabled the experts to map, and the archaeologists to reconstruct. Some of the seismic data is a bit on the technical side; some of the images (and the council deserves credit for producing such a finely and voluminously illustrated as well as accessible monograph) are only for the expert to really judge, but they do bring alive this story of a lost – and possibly one day recoverable – culture.

The name Doggerland comes from the Dogger Bank, a relatively shallow area in the North Sea from which fishermen have for decades been dredging artefacts – including some finely carved tools and weapons.

Europe’s Lost World takes the unusual step for something labelled a “research report” of following the gradual unfolding of knowledge of Doggerland, starting with the work early in the 20th century of Clement Reid, who in a little book called Submerged Forests identified the potential archaeological value of buried lands: “In them the successive stages are separated and isolated instead of being mingled.”

The report then goes on to look at what is known from the land of the sites of the period – the Mesolithic, the intermediate culture that it says has traditionally been neglected between the deep mysteries of the Paleolithic and the excitement of great change into farming of the Neolithic. The authors here make a now fashionable claim that at least some of the peoples of the time were considerably less nomadic, and built grander structures, than has traditionally been thought.

They look in detail at the site of Thatcham in Berkshire, centred around a hut about 6m in diameter. (It is impossible now due to erosion to know whether this was solitary or part of the group.) “All the evidence suggested that the house had been maintained and rebuilt on several occasions by a family group, perhaps six or eight people, and that it served several generations of hunters… burnt bone fragments included wild pig, fox and, possibly, a domestic dog. Marine shellfish, particularly dog whelks, were also present on the site.”
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David Horspool’s new popular history has an interesting thesis: that the English are a rebellious lot, always champing at the bit to overthrow their rulers. It’s always good to challenge popular conceptions – by European tradition the French have the role of bloody rebels, while the English are the phlegmatic, unchanging, unchallenging lot, working slowly if not always steadily towards an agreed constitution so complex it can’t even be written down.

And in The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking, From the Normans to the Nineties, Horspool covers, as the title suggests, a lot of ground, and finds some solid support for his thesis, particularly up to the “Glorious Revolution” (or Dutch invasion, whichever you prefer). He also identifies a perhaps particularly English formulation for rebellion: “this isn’t against the king, it is to save the king from the evil councilors surrounding him”.

The idea of the English as rebellious is not itself new; as Horspool points out Thomas Paine in Common Sense calculated that since the Norman conquest there had been “(including the Revolution) no less than eight civil wars and nineteen rebellions”. Not a new idea then, but one that keeps coming up.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, however, the text suffers from some disappointing flaws. One is that it trails rather dutifully but uninspiringly through all those medieval aristocratic squabbles, not just Simon de Montfort and Perkin Walbeck, but rather lesser known figures such as Roger Bigold and Sir John Oldcastle. For such exciting, dramatic, blood events, the writing is surprisingly flat, and the half chapter or so per rebellion formula fails to inspire.

Horspool is also very unclear about what he means by “rebellion”. A lot of the time he is talking about attempts to overthrow the regime, but sometimes he’s simply talking about standing out against the king’s will, from Thomas a Beckett to in modern times, where the thesis gets really stretched, he trails through the suffragettes and the Greenham Common protests. Certainly the participants in both these movements were rebels in the most general sense, but to group them with some medieval aristocrat setting out his stall for the crown really fails to work.

This perhaps is a book that covers around 500 years more than it should. About half-way through it, Horspool himself identifies a major change in the way the English look at revolt, with the arrival of Protestantism, and specifically the doctrine of obedience to the Crown as a religious duty. Horspool writes (in one of his livier passages):

“The theory took time to catch on. When Matthew Parker, who became Elizabeth’s Archbishop of Canterbury, went to preach, as an up-and-coming evangelical churchman, to Kett’s rebels at Mousehold Heath in 1549, it was his theme of submission for the common god which almost caused a riot. Though the rebels immediately demonstrated their evangelical credentials by being so distracted by the singing of a new English version of the Te Deum that they allowed Parker to get away, at this time the association of Protestantism and obedience was not yet commonly accepted. ..Increasingly, however, it would become a keynote of English Protestant thinking, and one widely disseminated by preaching and in treaties, pamphlets and biblical exegesis.”

If Horspool had stopped here, the book would have been a lot more coherent. Certainly after this he finds interesting events – and quite a few disproving the always rather weak claim that “the English don’t build barricades”. But had he covered the medieval period – thematically perhaps rather than chronologically, and used those conclusions to perhaps reflect on more recent events, this might have been a much better, more coherent book. What is on the page here is rather a useful handy reference to rebellions, rather than a book you really want to sit down with to read through.