A remarkable new study disappoints in its coverage of Swaledale

Max Adams lives in County Durham and is a former professional archaeologist who has turned variously to being a woodsman, broadcaster, historian, and novelist. His previously acclaimed books include: Ælfred’s Britain: War and peace in the Viking Age (2017); The Land of Giants: Journeys Through the Dark Ages (2015); The Wisdom of Trees (2014); and The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria (2013).

In this latest work, The First Kingdom: Britain in the Age of Arthur, he draws upon his exceedingly broad-ranging knowledge and skills to produce a coherent and highly readable account of life and events in Britain from around 350, during the last decades of the Roman occupation, until the late 6th and early 7th centuries and the beginning in Britain of divinely anointed, Christian kingship.

Such has been the glacial pace of discovery about this period, that Adams’ analysis of the historiography – the writing of the history - is as fascinating as his excellent synthesising of the conclusions reached by modern academics covering several specialist disciplines. He acts as a brilliantly well-informed guide to the relative strengths of the arguments expressed by leading scholars over the last 60 or so years. For the most part, Adams’ research has kept right up to date. For example, he draws upon the superbly argued findings of Susan Oosthuizen, Emeritus Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, in her illuminating work The Emergence of the English (2019).

And so, it is disappointing that in his coverage of academic studies of Swaledale, which covers four pages in Chapter 5, his reporting of the work by landscape archaeologist Andrew Fleming is not up to date. Adams tells us that in 1994 Fleming argued that the cross-dale earthworks known as the Grinton-Fremington Dykes were post-Roman constructions that marked a defensive boundary of a minor British kingdom occupying the upper dale. Reasoning correctly that the name-element dale in Swaledale would have been a later addition by Norse speakers, Fleming suggested that the British kingdom must have been called ‘something like Swar’. He worked this out from the modern local pronunciation of Swaledale, which could be written phonetically as Swardal and which had been recorded in similar fashion as far back as the 1538, when it appeared as Swawdall¹.

But Fleming discounted the evidence from four-centuries-earlier of the spellings Sualadala, Svaledale, Swaledal and Swaldale, which clearly indicate that the later loss of the first ‘l’ sound was a 16th-century dialect development. His faulty conjuring of the name Swar was vigorously scotched by a leading scholar of place-name studies, Gillian Fellows-Jensen, who wrote in 1997, in direct response to Fleming, that Swar was ‘a completely erroneous suggestion’ and added ‘may the tribe of Swar herewith be consigned to oblivion’. Fellows-Jensen was clearly miffed and took the opportunity to warn that non-philologists were ‘well advised to leave philological matters alone’². Fleming accepted the criticism, never mentioned Swar again, except once in a paper published in 2015 in which he acknowledged it had been ‘a linguistic howler’.³

It’s a pity, therefore, that Adams apparently did not consider any of these correctional publications, repeating Fleming’s original erroneous idea of Swar, and by including the imagined name on two maps of Early Medieval England (pp. xvi, xvii), he gives the impression that its existence was a historical fact. Adams also omitted that Fleming’s dating of the Grinton-Fremington dykes as post-Roman, suggested in 1994 and repeated in 1998⁴, was reviewed and overturned in 2015 after a thorough survey by a team of three distinguished archaeologists.⁵

The revisers examined the same landscape elements as Fleming but argued convincingly that the evidence pointed to a date before the Roman occupation. They concluded that Fleming’s ‘bold hypothesis that the dyke could represent the boundary of an Early Medieval kingdom has been conclusively refuted’. In an immediate response to the new findings, Fleming acknowledged his earlier date attribution as ‘mistaken’ and accepted the new interpretation.⁶

As Adams’s The First Kingdom: Britain in the Age of Arthur, appears otherwise to provide an excellent summary of the latest academic research, it is to be hoped that any future revised edition will delete references to Swar and to any imagined upper-dale kingdom in Swaledale. And if any references to the Grinton-Fremington Dykes remain, then it should be acknowledged that only one of the four cross-dale dykes has been studied in detail and the current professional consensus dates it to the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age.

This criticism aside, The First Kingdom: Britain in the Age of Arthur is a remarkably thorough study of the period. It is recommended for anyone seeking a highly readable account of what is currently known about this generally opaque era of British history.

Postscript – The above review of the initial hardback edition of the book was sent directly to Max Adams in February 2021, as a courtesy, before it was published here. The author responded positively and consequently, the paperback edition, published in November 2021, has a commendable addition in the form of a footnote on p.158. It provides the url to this review and states: “It has been pointed out to me that more recent study has cast serious doubt on Fleming’s interpretation of ‘Swar’, and on the date of some of the Swaledale earthworks.”



¹Andrew Fleming (1994) ‘Swadal, Swar (and Erechwydd?): early medieval polities in Upper Swaledale’, Landscape History 16:1, 17-30.
² Gillian Fellows-Jensen (1997) ‘Place-names in context’, Archaeological Dialogues 4:2, 215-219, responding to Andrew Fleming (1997) ‘Patterns of names, patterns of places’, Archaeological Dialogues 4:2, 199-214.
³Andrew Fleming (2015) ‘Yorkshire Dykes’, Landscapes 16:1, 18-25, responding to Stewart Ainsworth et al. (2015), Swaledale’s ‘Early Medieval Kingdom’ revisited, Landscapes 16:1, 3-17.
⁴Andrew Fleming (1994) ‘Swadal, Swar (and Erechwydd?): early medieval polities in Upper Swaledale’, Landscape History 16:1, 17-30. Andrew Fleming (1998, reissued 2010), Swaledale: Valley of the Wild River, pp. 18-32.
⁵Stewart Ainsworth et al. (2015), Swaledale’s ‘Early Medieval Kingdom’ revisited, Landscapes 16:1, 3-17.
⁶Andrew Fleming (2015) ‘Yorkshire Dykes’, Landscapes 16:1, 18-25, responding to Stewart Ainsworth et al. (2015), Swaledale’s ‘Early Medieval Kingdom’ revisited, Landscapes 16:1, 3-17.