The First Kingdom

The cumulative thinking from ethnography, near-contemporary literature and later tradition suggests the prevalence in native societies of an animistic world view: spirits, often capricious, sometimes malign, inhabited animate and inanimate objects – birds and animals, springs, rivers and dark pools. They were to be found in trees, rocks and caves,

although warlords might claim possession of territory by conquest, they were unlikely to enjoy, in their new-won lands, the networks of élite client relations on whom secure rule depended. As late as the tenth century very powerful kings of Wessex struggled to engender loyalty among peoples recently ‘liberated’ from Viking control. There is a fine

The richest seams for anthropological researchers to tap are the means by which the late Roman population and their fifth- and sixth-century successors used display – in buildings, personal adornments, burial ceremonies and trappings – to express and reinforce ideas about identity, belonging and status.

But two other explanations come to mind. The first is that, somehow, Kent’s traditional status as the first of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, its dynasts’ claim to descent from Hengest, gave it some sort of mythic primacy among the English. The second is that, by virtue of a long relationship with Gaul and then with Frankish kings,f it had inherited som

Some chieftains took substantial diplomatic gifts – or bribes – to stay neutral or act as buffers. Raiding parties of Scotti and Attacotti from Ireland or Argyll, and Picti from Caledonia increased in scale and sophistication to the point where, in 367, frontier scouts – the areani – were comprehensively bribed into complicity. Channel pirates, car

When, in 577, King Ceawlin of the West Saxons went to war with his neighbours, he killed three British kings whose territories were apparently based on former Roman towns at Bath, Gloucester and Cirencester – at least, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Humans are messy: they dig holes, generate rubbish, leave buildings to fall down, manure their fields and garden plots with all sorts of detritus, and are generally unsuccessful at covering their traces. Many of their manufacturing processes – butchery, ironworking, pottery firing – leave admirable and distinctive waste for excavators to find. Arch

In the now silent streets of Roman Silchester, Wroxeter or Caistor, had they been abandoned by fleeing citizens in fear of their lives, we ought to find the sherds from whole pottery vessels lying where they were dropped; the nails and upholstery pins from beds and dining furniture; ovens with half-baked loaves in them, carbonized by engulfing…

Kings had to be more than mere warlords, as Clovis’s investiture shows: they must hold their sceptres and wear their ornamented battle helms as of divine right – whether that divinity was Christian or not. They must be able to claim that their family had always been kings; that the territories over which their writ ran had always been theirs. They