Howard Wiseman's Hobby: History (especially dark-age Britain)
History has been a passion of mine since I discovered how much we do
know about the past. I particularly remember being astonished to find
out,
in my early teens, that the barbarian invasion of the Roman Empire was
not a time of complete chaos with no historical record, but rather that
we know pretty well what happened and when. Despite enjoying and doing
well in history in junior school (age 15) I did not continue it in
senior,
opting for science subjects instead. I don't regret this, because I
think history is more accessible to an interested amateur than science
(or at least physics) is.
My current level of activity in my history hobby dates from c.1993
when
I
bought the book King Arthur - The True Story by Phillips and
Keatman.
Although in hindsight I don't think much of the book's arguments, its
importance
was again that it revealed to me that this period of British history
does
have historical records, however meagre, and not just legends. The
meagreness
of the records meant I was eventually able to become familiar with
pretty much all
of them, and to create my first history webiste, The Ruin and Conquest
of Britain in 1997. Also as a
consequence, I managed to publish a (minor) research
paper in this area in 2000.
The transition from Roman Britain to early-mediaeval England and Wales
is, to me, one of the most fascinating periods in history. The struggle
and ultimate failure of one society to defend itself against decline
and replacement by another is bound to be interesting. It is of course
the
time
of the real "King Arthur", if there ever was such a person. It has
become
a hobby for me to try to reconstruct the history of the 5th and 6th
centuries
in Britain. I first put this website up c.1997, and it has been
evolving
ever since. Fans of "King Arthur" will not find the Once and Future
King of the Romances, but rather a Romano-British warrior who
"fought
against them [the English] in those days, together with the kings of
the
Britons." This site also contains
the hitherto unpublished historical novel Albion:
The Lame Dancer by
Patrick McCormack.
From an interest in the survival of Roman institutions in Britain in
the 5th and 6th centuries grew an interest in the mixed fortunes of the
Empire itself in that time: the end of the Western Empire and the
flowering
of the Eastern Empire. This in turn led to finding out about the
ups and downs of the Roman Empire over its entire (but especially its
later)
history, which I began studying in c.1998. This website charts
the history of the Roman Empire from 338 BC to 1453 AD. Here "charts"
is used advisedly, as maps form the core of this
site.
Drawing historical maps of all sorts has been a hobby of mine since my
mid-teens. Now I can do it digitally, and inflict it upon the world!
This site first went up
in
2002, and has been added to several times.
I enjoyed the process of charting the
Roman Empire, and was led to
try a similar exercise to my old region of interest, Britain. Here
there
is no continuity of a state over millennia. Rather, I have prepared
maps
showing the territorial extent of any state which could claim (however
loosely) to be a British Empire in each century. This encompasses 20
centuries,
from the over-kingdom of Cunobelinus, in the first century A.D.,
through
the Empires of the Romano-British, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans,
Plantagenets,
Tudors, Stuarts, and through to the United Kingdom of the present day.
This site first went up in 2003.
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