The First Kingdom

the young St Patrick, son and grandson of British Christian priests (one of them also a town official), before his fateful abduction by Irish slave raiders at the age of about sixteen. Patrick’s is the sole unambiguously British narrative voice from the whole of the fifth century.

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.

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

A dozen or so credible locations of late Roman churches in Britain include the towns of Silchester, Colchester, Lincoln, Canterburyc and London; coastal forts at Richborough in Kent and at South Shields on the River Tyne; three of the Wall forts between the River Tyne and Solway Firth; villas like Hinton St Mary, with its famous chi-rho mosaic; and

No serious scholar believes that anything like those numbers can be proposed for Bede’s day, or any time until after the Norman conquest – even supposing that many settlements and burial sites of the second half of the first millennium lie as yet uncounted. By the implication of Gildas’s testimony, there was a substantial fall in birth rates or an

Excavations at West Hill, near Uley, in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, have revealed the history of a major shrine complex that thrived and evolved right through the prehistoric and Romano-British periods and beyond.30 First identified as a special place in the third millennium BCE, the wooded hill top here, once cleared of trees, became a focus fo

As barbarians by definition, their traders may have been forced to queue at the entrance to the empire. Intriguing concentrations of finds from the Northumberland village of Great Whittington, just a mile or so north of the Wall, suggest that here was a sort of caravanserai where drovers, traders, petitioners, embassies and wannabe citizens had to

Subjected to many programmes of piecemeal excavation over the last two centuries – a sort of death by a thousand cuts – Castor has nevertheless produced evidence of a huge complex, far grander than a mere villa. Its status as a possible administrative centre for imperial estates in the Fens, perhaps as a successor to the imposing establishment at S

Field archaeologists record, with increasing confidence, transitions in space and time at all scales, from the remodelling and repair of individual artefacts and buildings to broad trends in settlement pattern and form: fine dinner plates broken and not replaced but mended, held together with copper wire; villas inhabited long into the fifth centur