The First Kingdom

For the indigenous élite in eastern Britain, part of the attraction of adopting the new language and half-familiar customs and possessions of Continental traders, brokers and bucellari, may have lain in embracing a culture that was both exotic and decidedly not Roman. The apparently wholesale rejection of Christian practice in the south and east by

Use of a certain sort of pottery for serving ale or the choice of yarn and weave for one’s clothes was as sensitive to ideas of identity and fashion as the choice of trainers or home furnishings or holiday destinations is today.

His daughter Eanflæd was brought up, also in exile, as a Christian in the courts of Kent and then of Dagobert I in Paris.35 Her experience of sophisticated Frankish politics was to play a key role in the development of the Northumbrian state.

Peter Schrijver, a specialist in Celtic languages, has shown that although Old English, as it emerges into the written record at the beginning of the seventh century, shows no signs of having been influenced by the so-called Highland Brythonic of the west and north (reconstructed from inscriptions and from the development of Early Welsh), its chara

Linguists and place-name scholars have, on the other hand, held out for the wholesale replacement of the bulk of the native population, believing that the complete loss of Brythonic and Latin in favour of what would become Old English, in the east and south of Britain, cannot otherwise be explained.26 Old English inherited very few words from eithe

Given the evidence for widespread violence between warbands in the dynastic inter-tribal wars of the late sixth and seventh centuries, when weapon burials were declining or absent, the direct association of weapons with professional careers as warriors begins to look a little shaky. Härke also points out that the sets of weapons found in most grave

It seems, then, that the elusive ‘big men’ of the fifth century might be found in a number of characteristic places: at Roman forts with evidence for continued life; in some, perhaps many of the smaller towns with coherent hinterlands; on some villa estates; in the hillfort country of the west and north and along Continent-facing navigable rivers.

Geographers might classify it as a ‘break of bulk’ location, where goods were transferred between river and road at a point where those networks met. Goods landed here from along the River Cam would pass close to the grand Fenland tower house at Stonea; thence south, west and east into the province’s heartland. By the time it gained stone walls, Gr

At least two female landowners are known from Britannia. Melania, a celebrated Christian patron and the immensely wealthy wife and cousin of Valerius Publianus, owned estates across the empire, including land in Britannia, at the beginning of the fifth century. Her portfolio is known to historians only because she and her husband were induced, by n