What Was Life In Dark Age Britain Really Like? | King Arthur's Britain | Complete Series | Chronicle

In the year 407, Emperor Constantine III led the last Roman troops on these islands. The empire that built this remarkable war had collapsed in Britain. Now the history books tell us that when the Romans withdrew, they took with them all the vestiges of civilization and were effectively converted. Outside the light, the country descended into centuries of cultural and economic chaos known as the

dark

ages. Now this would all be fine if it weren't

complete

garbage. As an archaeologist, I have spent my career exploring Britain's ancient past and now believe I have misunderstood the first few centuries of this country's history as a nation crushed and then created by invaders.

I have found a strong society with a unique and enduring culture. Roman colonization is supposed to have wiped out the ancient Britons and instigated a turbulent period dominated by invasions from higher civilizations - a period whose only hero was a mythical one, the legendary King Arthur, fighting valiantly against the invading hordes - but I don't think our ancient culture was so overwhelmed. Easily as that I am determined to examine

what

really

happened in this country after the Romans invaded. I am going to embark on an archaeological journey to discover compelling evidence of the history of Britain in the first centuries of its recorded history.

The history of Britain AD using the latest archaeological research. I'm going to tell the real story of. great

britain

from the perspective of the men and women who lived on this island during this period and i will begin with the first chapter of

britain

and the roman occupation of britain this peaceful corner of somerset is the site of one of the first and bloodiest battles and is evidence of the crushing of our ancestors in the early years of Britain AD. For hundreds of years before the Roman conquest, this dramatic hill fort was a religious center for the ancient Britons.

When the Roman conquerors arrived, the people here were ready to The banks of the hillside are the remains of walls They would have been five meters high, but the fort was not designed to face the disciplined power of the Roman army. The defenders were driven back and the gates illuminated the Romans. the troops burst through the burning gate and massacred the British, men, women and children were murdered and their bodies were left to rot where they fell after this massacre, the Roman troops destroyed fields and farmland, a clear message to the British so that they would not interfere with the power of Rome.

The events at Cadbury Castle tell a familiar story of native Britons as tragic victims. It is a story that fits well into the conventional narrative of Britain. I am going to show that this version of our past is wrong in the early centuries of Britain. We saw the forging of our national identity. Archeology is beginning to show that far from being a

dark

time, this was a time of enormous creativity and development. Until now, the legacy of Roman Britain has blocked our understanding of this period from appreciating the significance of these times. We must return to archaeology.

Archaeologists excavating Cadbury Castle here not only found evidence of a Roman massacre, but also found building foundations dating from shortly after the Roman occupation. This confirmed

what

I thought was ancient British culture. It was strong but there is a final twist. The archaeologists had been loo

king

for Arthur's Camelot. The locals actually believed it was a Camelot. They had been plowing this field. They were ta

king

out all kinds of materials, mostly from the Iron Age with some Roman material. but they

really

thought it was the site of a battle, yes, and then a relatively small-scale excavation came across a massive renovation of the fortifications at about the right period, found a timber-framed room in the middle with piles and piles of Mediterranean type Pottery strewn about the fact that there is already a connection with the name of Arturo means that everything is ready to go.

Could Arthur be a clue to what happened in Britain? The problem is that Arthurian archeology is more than a little short. of evidence there is no corner of britain but it does not claim a connection with this historical celebrity this is where

arthur

was supposedly conceived and this is

arthur

's footprint this is the film mound king arthur's round table is buried here and every year on summer day he levitates and this is arthur's camelot this is the slaughter bridge where arthur finally died before being taken to avalon as an archaeologist i have always been quite skeptical of the arthur industry arthur is the ultimate product a ready-made hero who has been kidnapped by history and in this spectacular visitor attraction high in the Shropshire countryside there is a

complete

Arthurian package there is a deep lake with a legend of an excalibur sword and I am standing in the grotto of arthur where someone claims to have found the holy grail there was even a stone with a sword until someone cut the sword.

Arthur encapsulates so many good qualities that we really want to identify with the great warrior figure of Arthur and he will return to save us when the nation is in its greatest danger. and that type of story has enormous appeal. This gripping story of medieval Britain has fired the imaginations of writers and artists for centuries and it would be easy to dismiss it as a fairy tale with no basis in historical reality, but myths are not necessarily lies. Stripped of its medieval trappings, Arthur has new things to tell us about this period, the idea of ​​noble Arthur conflicts with the conventional view of the barbarian dark ages and supports my view that British culture survived the Romans intact and in the heart of arthur's story i found a clue about the resistance of the native britons after roman rule the myth of the sword excalibur contains a clue about what really happened in britain the story of king arthur is not a happy one the story involves a An illegitimate child who is raised by a wizard named Merlin, the boy becomes king and gathers a group of loyal followers of 12 men known as the Knights of the Round Table.

King Arthur and his knights fight many brave battles, but finally Arthur dies. His body is taken to the magical island of Avalon, where legend says that Arthur is not dead but asleep awaiting the moment when his kingdom needs him again. Throughout the different versions of this story, there is a powerful image that returns again and again. Swords play a central role in the Arthurian legends he learns. that he will be king of britain when he miraculously removes a sword from a stone at the end of his

life

his magical sword excalibur is returned to a goddess in a lake like a prehistorian these stories sent a shiver of recognition down my spine the image the image of Arthur drawing his sword from the stone was a haunting reminder of the ancient practice of casting bronze.

I have witnessed this process. The bright orange sword is actually cast from a stone mold. In my work as a prehistorian, I discovered ritual traditions in which weapons are used. were eliminated in watery places and where islands have a particular potency. How did these ancient British traditions find their way into the story of King Arthur written centuries later? The answer lies just north of the fence in a region known as the Whitham Valley. In 1981, an archaeologist excavating here came across a remarkable discovery just below the surface of the bog: a

series

of vertical posts and horizontal beams were discovered.

They were part of a causeway built more than 2,000 years ago on both sides of the causeway, archaeologists found dozens of pieces of ancient weaponry, including a large number of swords and spears and this was not the first time such objects had been found. here in the late 18th century when they were dredging with them, so Joseph Banks, a great scientist and collector, sent out a notice to the workers to Say if anyone finds anything, come see me, I'll get a good look at you and it was a wonderful thing because these things wouldn't have made it to museums if that hadn't happened over the years, literally hundreds of swords.

Daggers and other precious objects have been removed from the fence here. Its date ranges from the prehistoric period to the 14th century. Now this was not a localized Finnish cult, but part of a much broader belief system. They are still found today. We've been here every weekend or so since August and look how many people have shown up. They have already walked a lot through their parish. They've found some fantastic sites there, of course, just walking around the countryside. If we hadn't we would never know about them, although individually you wouldn't have thought you were finding much, but collectively we have found almost 2000 separate objects now and that is one part of the shaft of an Iron Age axe. they are still there again so I rarely see them an eight which is a Viking accent made to split heads this extraordinary and complete iron age spear handle is the longest in Europe medieval iron swords a masterpiece the shields of rhythm are not really useful as a shield since much of this is a ritual piece, although we found weapons, we also found tools, the great, the good and the common people, I believe that by joining together in this activity, it was not until recently that archaeologists began to notice a pattern in the location of these objects throughout the valley.

There are these slightly higher sandbars and ridges. These were the remains of ancient roadways that were once part of this extraordinary landscape. The Whitham Valley extended in a long, thin line to the town of Lincoln until these fends were drained in the 1780s. The pace would have spread throughout the lowland, weaving a network of islands and swamps, the Local people moved around the fence on a

series

of wooden causeways, the weapons were always found near these causeways, at first it was assumed that they had been accidentally dropped or lost in battle in In fact, there is a very long explanation. more mysterious: people visited the river using the river and for some reason they left this type of material.

The spear could have been used in the river, but it looks like it was given to the river and I like it. The idea of ​​them being delivered and returned to the waters perhaps and these medieval iron swords. The sword theme actually spans millennia for hundreds of years. Weapons have been deliberately thrown from these causeways into the water. I think the story of the king. Arthur receiving his sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake is a direct reference to this ancient British tradition, but the Arthurian legends were written much later, long after these ancient religious ideas were supposedly eliminated by the Romans and Christianity, How did they survive the The rhythm had one more secret to reveal.

This area of ​​Finland has one of the highest concentrations of monastic sites in Britain. There can be no practical need for so many abbeys in such a small area. So why was the early medieval church built here with something so extraordinary? Additionally, the narrow 10-mile stretch of the Whitham Valley is dotted with the remains of 14 abbeys. Each of these abbeys is built at the end of an ancient road. We found it really difficult to understand why there should be 14 church sites all lined up. for 10 miles along the edge of Whitham Valley, historians Dave Stocker and Paul Everson don't think this is a coincidence, the abbey we are on is on an island, you will see there is only one way to get here and It is a long road.

It seems strange, but a causeway should determine where you are going to place an abbey. You have to keep in mind that crossing any type of body of water, but especially crossing a swamp by boat, was a dangerous business and, in order for it to be a successful crossing some type of mercy had to be offered now some type of let's call it superstition but it was a kind of popular superstition that was linked to religion, the weapons and the water in which they were being placed had meaning to the people of ancient Britain swords were not just a weapon the sword is a great symbol of authority that was distributed from lords to their tenants as a badge of office once the tenant dies that sword has to disappear back to the lord and that is attested in many Anglo-Saxon wills now imagine you are a king and you do not have a lord or at least not on land and in the story of arthur, of course, it is the spirit of the lake, it is the lady of the lake who is the guardian of great britain. the story of the lady in the lake echoes the ancient tradition of laying weapons in water the medieval authors who wrote these stories knew such traditions because Christianity had not killed them but kept them alive.

When did the last swords appear? The last one is from the 14th century and is quite interesting, it is precisely the same moment in which theSwords and indeed full armor tend to start hanging in churches over the burials of lords, I mean, it rings a bell. I see him as a prehistorian, but actually what some of these guys are doing in the abbeys sounds terribly pagan to me. Pope Gregory said: "I don't want you to tear down these pagan temples. I want you to convert the pagan idols. Water is the connecting thread. The Bronze Age burial mounds were next to the water.

The roads cross the water. The swords go into the water like this. that the connecting thread to all of this is water and do you suppose that could be a reason why that fantastic cathedral over there is located right next to the river with them, I have very little doubt that that is the case. first name of the indocon city of lincoln by the pool nikkor is what the normans tended to call the place and the word nikkor means water spirit the story of The rhythm is one of continuity, suggesting that deeply held ideas that began in the Prehistory continued well into the medieval period.

Clashes in what I learned at school where the first 1000 years of British history were a series of massive invasions, in fact the first of them, the Roman invasion may not have been an invasion forced at all, at the heart of a story about a boy on a magic sword I found evidence that ancient British traditions survived the Roman invasion a new series of archaeological discoveries are beginning to rewrite the history of the Roman invasion of Britain this elegant mosaic decorated the floor of one of the most luxurious buildings in Roman Britain, but this was not the overseas residence of some extravagant Roman governor, but the home of a rich Romanized British palace Fishborn, it is the largest building never excavated in Roman Britain.

Martin Hennig helped dig the gardens. It was absolutely amazing digging with your trowel couldn't help but sink and we were actually uncovering the trenches for the beds, probably to look for bark. You can see similar gardens on a much smaller scale if you go to Pompeii or on smaller scales. Yes, what you have here is something equivalent to the palaces of the greatest Roman aristocrats. Larger than Buckingham Palace, 160 stone columns support the roof, built with 100 tons of imported Italian tiles. Hallways surround more than 100 rooms, some of which are decorated with elaborate mosaics. When Fishborne was discovered, it was assumed to be the palace of a Roman governor. symbol of the imperial regime that had been imposed in Great Britain, but during excavations archaeologists found a gold signet ring with an unusual inscription, the seal of Tiberius Claudius Catuarius, the ring belonged to a rich Britain, but what did it do? in Fishball to understand why a British?

We could be living in a Roman palace, we must look again at the events leading up to the invasion of 43 AD. C., perhaps because we haven't been invaded since 1066, we British have a simplistic attitude towards invasions, we see them as inevitably oppressive, so we imagine that when the Romans arrived they wiped out British culture and customs, but in reality they don't. It was a simple process of colonization. Archaeologists are beginning to radically rethink the Roman invasion of Britain. I imagine the British faced with the power of Rome would have been trembling. in his boots i don't think it was entirely that the previous attempt to invade britain was the work of the evil and mad emperor caligula who had marched a large army to the channel coast, then lined up all his catapults and shot huge rocks at The sea after a while told them that he had won a great victory over Nixon.

You can imagine how that happened. The great Roman empire was led by many Charlies and completely destabilized the, of course, pre-Roman situation. Britain was in fact a collection of often feuding tribal kingdoms. There is very little written evidence about early British tribes, but John Crichton showed me a burial from the period that contained some intriguing elements. Military legitimacy is a burial found on the outskirts of Colchester. The days were around the year 10 BC. So this is still about 50 or 60 years before the Roman conquest. Roman wine containers. A small bronze work of Cupid that comes from the Italian world.

This material is simply not produced in Britain. Here is a small medallion of the Roman emperor. The emperor. august, it is a very nice personal gift from the emperor, but why would an iron age king in Britain want to have the head of a Roman emperor? It's great that they are partnering with Rome, it's like all the satellite states around the Soviet Union or the influence of the United States had in Central America large powerful empires that have very, very close relationships with all the states around them. Certain tribal leaders in Britain had been friends of Rome for decades before the invasion.

Its coins reflect the glory of the empire. The coinage is never politically neutral, it always says something that always means something, to begin with it has its own native style, but then around the time of this type of burial we start to find classical images appearing on the coins, so they would have been familiar with classical literature, certainly, the upstairs, yes, and that may not be a coincidence that kings and Britain are closely linked to power politics in Rome. We see them adopting the same images again showing their affiliation with the new world order. There was a British king known as Verica who was on particularly good terms.

With Rome his tribe was the Atrabartis in the most complete version of the Roman invasion, the historian almost described Verica inviting Roman troops in certain Verica had persuaded the Emperor Claudius to send a force to Great Britain led by the distinguished senator Plortius . t a relationship of subordination verico would help the romans if he could do it and that they would help him if necessary in av-43 the need arose when the kingdom of verica was invaded the atrobates had effectively been under military occupation by tribes from the north that implies that for the people here at least the romans were not so unpleasant the romans came as liberators this is a revolutionary idea but it can be supported by archeology cassius dial about the invasion on the way they were first discouraged but recovered when they saw a flash of light in the sky from east to west the direction they were traveling when the fleet arrived at the island there was no one to oppose them dayo however it emits the dimension where the invasion took place why I was taught as a student that the Romans landed in large quantities on the Kent coast at Ritchborough.

There had been excavations at Richboro that certainly uncovered some early military evidence. They examined the 3rd century account and added topographical details so that a battle at Medway became almost a historical fact. although actually the Med River path is not mentioned anywhere, so the archaeologists invented it, yes, it is a total invention. If the Romans did not reach Richborough, where did they land? There is another possible view of the Roman invasion: the churches, the port right in the middle. of varicose territory, this is a fairly typical tidal creek, which makes it special, pleasant and protected, a wonderful natural harbor that would have allowed a large number of men to disembark.

Yeah, if there was a Roman invasion coming here, what kind of ships, um, maybe? uh, two or three hundred, so, a lot of ships that would need to be maneuvered. Chichester Harbor is actually right next to Fishbourne Palace, so the palace had something to do with King Verrica. The palace was built 30 years after the invasion, however, the finds are recent. Pottery analysis has revealed that there was a base at Fishborn before the invasion. John Manley was involved in the excavations. The fact that we found this type of pottery and food remains suggests that it was a very Romanized place before AD43, in my opinion, makes it much more likely that a large part of the invading force landed here in territory they knew, perhaps in a territory where they already had client kings.

It was Verrica who begged the Romans to come to Britain and Verica lives somewhere around here, chatting about the fish area and that was used as a pretext for the invasion of Britain, now we don't hear a verica again after 1841, so it is conceivable that his relative, perhaps even his son, was brought by the incoming Romans and settled here as a client king, although we can't be sure that Varicosam was probably called Toggy Dubness. Excavations at Fishbourne found the marble bust of a child. This was the owner of the palace. The marble head must have been carved in Rome.

There were no marble carvings in Britain. It is very likely that he was Toka. darpanas at the time he became a Roman citizen, do you think Toggy Dubness himself would have lived here in Fishbone? I think there is almost no doubt that he did it. It is a huge palace. This must have been a kind of power center for the union of the king, who was given more and more territories. and authority to govern much of the rest of the province, this contradicts the conventional account of the Roman conquest. King Verrica opened his gates to Roman troops who sailed peacefully to Chichester in honor of his new alliance.

The most splendid palace was not built as a symbol of Roman suppression, but as a celebration of British tribal power, the Romans claimed they came, saw and conquered, but in reality they were invited to this country, once here they did not crush our native culture, But they guided the development of an increasingly diverse society in the Years after the invasion, the Romans built a series of cities in Britain, perhaps the most opulent of them was Bath. The buildings here typify the elegance and glory of the Roman Empire. The city was built on the site of an ancient spring that had been a religious site. for thousands of years it is a great natural phenomenon a quarter of a million gallons of water a day simply gushes out of the ground it is hot it is 40 degrees celsius and peak barry cunliffe dug the baths in the 1970s within 30 years of the invasion which They were organizing this great monument and the first job was to contain the spring.

It was a pretty impressive piece of engineering because of that water coming out all the time. You could see it here. Here are the Romans who came to this place and prevailed. This large Roman building was knocked down into the landscape and this could be seen as a kind of imperialism, but I don't think that's the case at all. What we are seeing here is that the Romans are very, very sensitive to the sanctity of the place, they recognize it as a sacred place, they appreciate it as a sacred place, even though the buildings are Roman and the sculptures look Roman, the iconography I think hints at something that goes back. back to the iron age when we excavated the temple precinct we were able to understand that there was a real order about it, facing east with the head of the great gorgon was the front of the temple itself and then on each side there was two sculpted facades with pediments uh on the north side the pediment had the moon goddess on it uh who She was shown riding her chariot through the night sky on the south side there was a pediment with a soul of the sun god with a pointed crown , so you have a feeling of north, cold, south, heat, the south side presiding over the hot springs and the balance between the goddess and the god, the man and the woman, this sums up a much older belief, so The Romans, if they like, take over the sacred geography of the place and monumentalize that many objects were thrown into the sacred spring as offerings.

This is a surprising reminder. From the ancient customs in Whitham Valley and the Arthurian story of the Lady of the Lake, the spring is a fissure that descends to the underworld where the deities live so that you can communicate there, this we know since the Roman period was sacred to the sulis . Minerva the two words together now Minerva of course is the Roman goddess and Sulis is presumably the Iron Age goddess the person venerated here going back in time the oldest occupation which is Mesolithic dates back to 7000 BC. C. people will have always revered it, you can Imagine what it would have been like at the time of the Roman conquest, the water brings iron rust and that would have spread red scabs over this black mud and it must have looked almost as if the ground was bleeding, The construction of these baths is a magnificent feat of engineering for which the Romans are rightly admired, although they gave us magnificent buildings and luxurious baths.

I don't think the Romans fundamentally changed the soul of this country through the years of Roman occupation. Britain developed a unique ability to absorb foreign influences without losing its own identity, but the greatest foreign influence had not yet emerged, originating not in Rome but in the holy lands.of jerusalem and would contribute to the fall of the empire in britain, it has long been assumed, but having imposed themselves on britain, the romans abandoned this insignificant island to deal with more pressing problems at home, however, i do not believe that it was So. This huge lead tank has been restored to its original state, but when I first saw it it was crammed at the bottom of a Roman well and the tank lay there like a crumpled milk carton.

I remember thinking why the heck didn't they melt it down and reuse this valuable lead. Why get rid of it in this deliberate way? What was so special about this tank? The tank is decorated with a symbol combining the Greek letters kai and roe, which were a sign of very early Christian worship, this is Constantine the Great, near this place in July 306, he was appointed emperor of Rome and later became Christianity in the official religion of the Roman Empire. It was a time. Of an immense political change that presaged the final collapse of the Roman Empire in the West by encouraging Christianity in Britain, Constantine gave his subject something that would become more powerful than Rome itself.

Constantine's conversion occurred towards the end of the Roman occupation of Britain, by which time the structure of society had begun to change in the late 3rd century and by the 4th century the super-rich stopped spending their money on buildings. public for the benefit of the general population, they spent it on themselves, large amounts of money moved out of the cities, it is a pattern that we have seen in our time, rich people tend to take their money to their properties in the countryside. large villas were scattered throughout southern Britain there we have these people just outside the Roman world imitating a classical world of hundreds.

Many years ago these people would paste references to classical mythology and classical literature on the floors of their houses. These mosaics hold a key to the way beliefs changed in Britain. Chadwick Filler in Gloucestershire was one of the richest country houses. Phil Bethel showed me Around this was probably one of the 10 richest and most opulent houses in all of Britain in the 4th century. Along this corridor there would be a continuous mosaic floor almost 80 meters long, so they had everything that money at that time could buy mosaics in each room. Underfloor heating systems. Two bathrooms. Your own water sanctuary.

All of this was designed to show you who I am. Rich and powerful, so this was actually a small temple and here was actually part of their daily religion where they worshiped in a traditional way. It harked back to the Celtic origins of the British Roman religion, but they worshiped the spirit of In the spring, they almost seem to recreate a bit of their earlier cultural history. The idea that this was the Roman from Rome who lived here seems a little unlikely. The Roman Empire was a bit of a franchise. You know, they opened a branch. of Rome here in Britain and the people who actually ruled and ran the country day to day, generally natives, in this case they would have been native British, but from families that were probably already important before the Romans arrived. it seems that in gloucestershire there was no big conquest here the local bunny tribe seemed to play along with the romans when they invaded, maybe that's why it became a very rich area, the rich and powerful people who lived here already took advantage of that new system To increase its wealth some of the mosaics that covered the floor of Chedworth Villa have been destroyed, but many British mosaics have been preserved in architectural drawings from a society that did not leave many written records.

These mosaics are a unique insight into the complex minds of the British Romans and the beliefs that changed their world. Some of these mosaics contain a strange mix of Christian and pagan symbols that have long been dismissed as clumsy errors, but in reality these images are connected to the mystery of a lead tank. I think we should look at mosaic pavements the same way one would look at stained glass windows in churches when you go and look at the glorious stained glass windows of the Gothic church, each image says something, we have to look at this as a literate person. society a scientific society elite members of society with a lot of free time who were interested in reading the classics and literature and are trying to make sense of the world they live in at the roman villa of lollingston the discovery of a converted chapel was proof that Christianity had been practiced here within the mosaics, Dominic Perring has found a sign that people here were involved in a very unusual Christian cult called Gnosticism.

In the 4th century, it seems like a vigorous intellectual reaffirmation and while today we have a strong idea that science guides us forward. so it was very clear that it was philosophy that people were trying to escape the mortal condition of this prison of our world to escape it was about knowing the secrets it was about knowing how to move to a higher plane of existence and knowledge was largely measure part of that knowledge of images knowledge of mythology knowledge of philosophy knowledge of Christ but also secret knowledge hidden in the mosaics Dominican has found Gnostic images that mix classical myths with Christian ideas about immortality this strange fusion of beliefs was At the heart of a Gnostic cult that may have had become a symbol of Roman British culture by slaying a monster he is riding a winged pegasus the message here is both good and evil but also the attempt to achieve immortal

life

, certainly was a set of beliefs that lent itself to urban aristocratic elite society and villa society.

The people who were able to participate in these arcane discussions, these philosophical debates, that independent thinking could not be tolerated by the empire and in 380 the emperor denounced Gnosticism as a heresy, the emperor established edicts against heresies and was allowed to exile the people, confiscate the lands and Whatever it is, how can you prevent heretics from being heretics? Well, prevent them from baptizing. If a bishop cannot baptize a flock, the size of the flock is not increased, so destroying baptismal fonts is one way to do it. We have archaeological evidence of damage. lead tanks, some of which were clearly used for baptism, being cut into pieces and thrown into wells.

The crumpled baptism tank I had seen was just one of many Christian items that had been deliberately destroyed or buried in this area. We have church plaques. baptismal spoons the chalice used in the eucharist being buried in some of these hordes of silver people are dismantling these items whoever buried this collection of precious silver must have felt anger and resentment that their property, their beliefs, their very identity was under attack at the time this treasure was buried Rome had lost the hearts and minds of the native Britons after having invited the Romans to absorb and digest the rich and diverse influences of a classical world.

Britain turned its back on the kingdom and looked toward an independent future. The end of Roman administration was a new beginning for the people of Great Britain. Three and a half centuries after the Romans destroyed it, the magnificent hill fort of South Cadbury was reoccupied. It has been imagined for a long time, but the figure who led this revival was King Arthur. Arthur is sort of a product of different generations and how they see themselves Arthur was largely created by medieval romantic historians who wanted to create a sort of pseudochronology of events after the Roman invasion and the problem is that it's loosely interwoven with pieces of genuine evidence and it depends on how literally you choose to do it.

Take bits and pieces from that, rather I suspect that Arthur is a kind of metaphor, a symbol for the kind of small tribal chief who would have taken power in a region after the collapse of Roman power in Britain, a man who could hold together his people, this brave king. It embodies a brave new world in which the descendants of Roman Britain began to build an independent future, and yet for centuries we have shrouded this exciting time under a veil of mystery and labeled it the dark ages. Next week we will discover what Arthur's Britain was in fact. a time of creativity and progress in which nothing less than the future identity of this country was forged in the Oxford history of England that the great historians of Frank Stenton wrote between the end of Roman rule in Britain and the rise of the first English kingdoms. a long period whose history cannot be written with the departure of the Roman troops.

Historians imagined the end of history and from its empty pages we have evoked a desolate wasteland of abandoned cities, overgrown fields and marauding barbarians and we call this the Dark Ages In fact, sophisticated societies developed in Britain in the Middle Ages, liberated by its associations with Rome, Britain began to forge an independent identity. Ancient trade routes were resurrected. Languages ​​evolved and the foundations of modern European thought were laid. This was not the Middle Ages, the autumn. of Rome led to a period of political instability throughout Europe tribes of barbarian invaders spread throughout the provinces of Rome plundering and plundering the land Saint Jerome laments this terrible time, savage tribes in untold numbers have invaded everywhere and those to whom the sword forgive the famine ravages i I cannot speak without tears, but what became of Britain on the outskirts of its ruined empire?

The problem is that there is a gap in the historical record. At one end we have 410 a date as indelible and emotional as 1066. 4 10 was the year in which Rome counted great britain look at your own defenses at the other end we have 597 the year in which Pope Gregory the First of Rome converted the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity in the middle there are only fragments and stories a murky and historical no man's land the perfect breeding ground for the myths and legends that emerge from the shadows of his period is the figure of King Arthur, who, if he existed, jumped to prominence in these turbulent years, but here lies a crucial paradox: how is it that a period of dark ages barbarism has also produced Britain's greatest folk hero?

Was it ever invented by Arthur to compensate for the lack of real history or is there some basis for these peculiar myths as a prehistorian I am used to dealing with long periods without written records, but that doesn't mean nothing happened. I'm going to find out what really happened in this mysterious time and I'm going to start where the collapse of Roman rule must have been felt most keenly: the cities where the Romans built a network of civic centers across Britain. He went to York, one of the largest, to find out what happened after the legions abandoned the city's medieval walls.

It is possible to see the early layers of the city's rich history, while later Roman and Viking layers provide abundant archaeological evidence. age layers contain few recognizable artifacts; it is almost as if the period is invisible to archaeologists; However, next to the Roman bridgehead in York, archaeologist Mark Wyman has made a breakthrough by re-examining thousands of pieces of pottery believed to be part of a city's heritage. Roman history has begun to shed some light on the city's dark ages, okay Francis, well this is where we make the pottery. One thing that definitely happened at the end of the 4th century in Britain is that coins disappeared.

Coins are crucial to establishing the chronology. but since there were no coins available, Mark had to find a new way to interpret the evidence we were looking for. A type of pottery that may have continued in production beyond the end of Roman Britain. The pottery Mark was analyzing couldn't match any traditional Roman ones. products well, why do you think this rather strange looking thing is from the 5th century? Well, this is what is known to cats as sandy wear. It is a type of rough pottery from the late Roman period made in large quantities in East Yorkshire.

The material we are looking at here is actually from a site excavated by the Roman Bridgehead Site in New York. The layers that produced Mark's pottery must have dated after the Roman period, this suggests that the pottery was being made in York. after the Romans abandoned this business of making pottery in the 5th century. Put the cat among the pigeons Why is the received view of Roman Britain one that is still fairly widely held? I think it has been that the end of Roman Britain is extremely certain and the archaeological material that we need to understand the activity and understand the past simply is not.

The reason why II proposed doing this research was to identify a type of artifact that we could say was made in the 5th century to argue against the idea that everything suddenly comes to a standstill. Life in York did not stop. In 410 Mark had found evidence of some form of activity in the city after the departure of the Romans and he is not alone with these discoveries throughout the country. Archaeologists are beginning to piece together a picture of Dark Age Britain very different from the conventional story of the collapse. It's time to start rewriting the history books Archaeology, like all humanities, is a product of its time and Victorian archaeologists were part of a British Empire that was compared to Rome, so they had every reason to suggest that When great empires collapse, disaster and chaos follow amidst the The gentle hills of the Shropshire countryside lie the remains of the Roman city of Rockstar.

The romantic ruins fascinated early antiquarians, who saw them as an evocative reminder of a great civilization that had fallen into ruins. Rockstar was first excavated in the 19th century. These Victorian archaeologists were so excited by the Roman remains here, they didn't see something that would completely rewrite the city's history. It wasn't until the 1980s that archaeologists discovered Roxanna's true story. While they were wandering through the rubble they found these two large round stones. The inspector said: Well, maybe these are the same ones. They noticed lines of piled up rubble and plaster and suddenly I realized I had this big huge building.

It was so big, but it's a bit like trying to see an elephant standing a foot away. The north wall was torn down. They dismantled it and the rubble was used to create a huge construction platform. What they were doing was creating a solid foundation upon which they could then build a wooden structure. Dating was the biggest problem. The large building and all the other buildings around it had to fit. between about 520 and about 590 600. So I mean, we're a long time after the official end of Roman Britain in 410, right? And they are constructing huge buildings that are presented in Roman measurements.

I mean, they're thinking. like the Romans, aren't they? They are Romans. This is our perception that we think that the Romans are foreigners who come, occupy the country and leave again, they were not, the people in the country became Romanized, they became Romans, I mean, central The control of the central administration had fallen apart, so I mean who was organizing and what it was. A character similar to Arthur. It's a very difficult question to answer because you had no evidence, but if you think about it, it's like trying to answer the question. The question of who lives in Buckingham Palace purely from the foundation, what we can say however is that this person has power, so he is someone capable of exercising authority.

There is a structure to society. Rockstar's discoveries were a breakthrough in archeology that they opened up. How archaeologists reexamine other Roman sites in Britain to discover what happened during the so-called Dark Ages The Padrón Wall was one of the most important military sites in Roman Britain Stretching from coast to coast The Wall includes A garrison series of thoughts in its heyday, this was a community of soldiers and their families defending the northern fringe of the empire. What happened after the Roman army withdrew has long been a mystery. It used to be believed that King Arthur fought his last battle at Kamlan near this remote location. windy place on Hadrian's Wall, but recent work has shown that within Bird Oswald's fort there was a far more extraordinary archaeological story to tell.

Bird Oswald is the most westerly of the series of thoughts that line the wall. Miriam Lincoln showed me around the remains of their military headquarters is the main road running through both sides of the fort building huge drill hall and the granaries to the south here were the granaries that archaeologist Tony Willmott decided to examine when he began excavation here. Looking around the site I had a feeling the late Romans would survive quite well and the guy in the corner said Tony. I think we have a bit of a straight line here, in another corner, a bit of a right angle and I basically went to the top of the farm tower, looked down and there was a big rectangle on the stone foundation.

Of Roman Granaries Tony discovered the remains of a massive structure that was built long after the Roman troops had retreated. It was a unique archaeological discovery. As was? You are speechless. You are thinking about God. This is. You have this beautiful one. huge open structure with a thatched roof and would be the first thing you would see when passing through the front door. I put one of my most experienced diggers in just to give this slip trench a very quick cleanup and I didn't tell her what I was looking for and I said something strange about this and she said there are these kind of flat hard patches, oh where are and she said?

Well, there's one here and I pointed that out, yeah, and there's one here and I pointed that out and sure enough, they paired up. above is completely objective because I had not told him what I was doing, this is how the strange marks that Tony found with the remains of twelve footballers that formed the skeleton of a huge wooden room that had been built after the departure of the Roman troops. So what kind of group of men built a building like that? I mean, it's a great thing. I think the key is that there is no break with the commander.

Perhaps even a hereditary commander at this point would have become a central authority and it can be seen. that is gradually transforming into the idea of ​​a little king or a little leader. Are we talking about some kind of protection business? It's not hard to see them saying: well, keep paying your Roman taxes and we'll keep seeing you. and from taxes to protection fraud maybe it's not such a big jump, such a big jump, the history books tell us that the Roman soldiers were withdrawn, they turned out the lights and and and darkness descended yeah, it wasn't happening here um, These were natives of Britain who had no way to go, this was their home, yes, and so they had to make a living somehow, there was certainly no mass retreat from Bird Oswald.

Do you think there are more late forts along Hadrian's Wall? I think there will surely be these communities. disappear if you're sitting behind some high stone walls you're not going to just disappear and start practicing subsistence farming you're going to stay put there's starting to be evidence in several places now that this kind of thing took place maybe Bird Ottawa is just one of a network of fortified centers that are growing and could go southwest. There are reoccupied hillforts. I think we should see Bird Oswald as one of them instead of being part of the Roman city. border system at that time everything has changed yes, to the east of Bird Oswald there is a lake called Craglock, from here archaeologists have extracted soil samples to build a picture of how the landscape changed when the Roman troops withdrew.

This process known as pollen analysis involves examining the types of trees that once grew here. I like trees, which is why I planted them on my farm, but to archaeologists the presence of trees on land that was once farmed shows that the countryside It has been abandoned and in the Middle Ages the traditional view is that the countryside reverted to wild forest once the Romans withdrew. Worker Craig Locke challenges his view. It was carried out by Petra Dark from University Reading. The full analysis gives us really good evidence of what the countryside was like in the past that we can actually identify the pollen grains of different plants, such as trees, cereals, etc., and we can count the pollen samples taken through the sediments. and reconstruct vegetation changes over long time scales.

Petra is able to build an image of what the landscape was like for hundreds of people. of years if we obtain pollen from cereals that tells us that they are cultivating nearby if we have pollen from trees that tells us that there were forests nearby and this is very important to reconstruct the changes in agriculture in the past because we can see where they cultivated very intensively or there were areas of land abandoned for agriculture, in which case they quickly revert to forest using carbon dating for samples. Petra is able to tell when a landscape changed during the Roman period.

This is a fairly open landscape. Much of the forest has disappeared. The graphs from Petra clearly show that on Hadrian's Wall there was no massive increase in the forest when the Romans removed it, at the end of the Roman period we start to have an increase in birch pollen but the other trees are not really changing , so there is no Massive forest regeneration is occurring contrary to popular belief. The landscape on Hadrian's Wall did not return to forest when the Romans abandoned it. Petra has compared samples from a selection of sites across Britain, while some see an increase in woodland in many, the land continued to be cultivated. in exactly the same way and in certain places land use really intensified after the Romans left, we can't generalize to the entire landscape the way you know, in the 1950s, before we had this evidence , there was this generalization that is too simple.

The image of Petra's work overturns the vision of Britain returning to a wild forest once the Romans left in forts like Bird Oswald and cities like Rockstar. The end of Roman administration did not cause the collapse of society freed from the controlling hand of Rome. New leaders and society emerged. regrouped but this new independence did not mean that britain had isolated itself from the rest of the world a series of extraordinary contacts were about to be made with some of the most powerful actors of the ancient world on the atlantic coast of cornwall there is a steep promontory, this spectacular site has long been associated with the warrior king of the Dark Ages, King Arthur.

I think this is one of the most romantic places in Britain and I'm not surprised Arthur is supposed to have been conceived in a castle here. The problem is those dramas. The ruins there are from the 13th century and have nothing to do with Arthur or Camelot. King Arthur first became associated with Tintagel when author Jeffrey of Monmouth wrote a version of a legend in which King Arthur is born here and the Earl of Cornwall decided to build an Arthurian-style castle in the headlines Tourists have been coming here since to take a look at camelot however the dark ages story of Tintagel is much more exciting the excavations here have shed new light on britain's ancient contacts with the rest of the world charles thomas explains that this is the way classic to see it to get closer because we have the island, we have that neck there and you can see most of the important parts, you can see the top, the summit there in the early 1980s there was a very dramatic fire here and the entire top of port five, the grass burned, even the roots burned, we then had a unique opportunity to examine two or three acres and found that the top, far from being a bear, was covered with the remains of the bases. of small huts 20 or 30 rectilinear buildings we thought they were all medieval we now know that post-Roman we investigated the top 10 percent of the island we found that the pottery, although burned, was still recognizable as imported post-Roman pottery something there was been taking place at the top, not on a grand scale, in the precise place where writers imagined a king of the dark ages was born.

Modern archeology had found the remains of a large settlement dating back to the mid-Middle Ages and not all was trampled among the remains of buildings with thousands of intriguing ceramic liners. The fines are extraordinary because there were large quantities of pottery made on a wheel. None of this was the same as what we get in Roman Britain and none of it was anything that could have been produced here in Post-Roman archaeologists thought the pottery looked of Mediterranean origin, but to be sure, David Williams from the University of Southampton analyzed it. What I did with my colleagues was make a thin section of part of the actual vessel and glue it onto a glass slide. and grind it so that it is terribly fine.

When you put it under the microscope, you can see the minerals and rock fragments in the clay of the pot and they will reflect what type of geological area the clay came from, so if I look through this on that slide you have a lot of white and yeah, three types of pinkies, that's right, that's serpentine, ah, that's not a common mineral at all, you get examples of serpentine around the Mediterranean in Western Cyprus and They are also found across the coast and in the south of Turkey. There are a whole series of ovens therewhen we compare them to Tintagel ceramics and it's almost a dead ringer.

David discovered that Tintagel pottery had been made at one of a series of huge kiln sites. In southern Turkey, so much pottery was produced at these sites that it still lies in huge piles on the side of the road today. These are thick, sturdy containers that were made for transporting seeds. They were very heavy. In fact, these sturdy pots were used to transport goods such as olive oil and wine across the Mediterranean, the ship that visited Tinchagel may well have left Turkey, perhaps to collect more cargoes, tableware, micaceous jars, to the Peloponnese, collect more amphorae and then to Carthage, where they possibly collected them. amphora of olive oil from North Africa plus the African tableware and from there possibly through the strait that you brought to Tintagel the large containers are really the Coca-Cola cans of their time if that appears in tin tangi or these things do not last forever the first time some idiot drops it it shatters you can say this is a group of pottery from the mediterranean that arrived here in some period like 530 to 560.

Britain was on the edge of a vast trading network driven by Constantinople, the new The power of the ancient world moved to Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul after Rome was sacked by barbarians in 410. The Eastern Empire continued to rule here for a thousand more years, but what led these Mediterranean traders to Great Britain? What did we have to offer them? A discovery in Devon in 1995 provided a clue that divers searching for the remains of a galleon made a very unusual find: this estuary, yes, they were mistaken for the entrance to Plymouth Sound and then they saw this huge expanse of water and of course , you.

You have this hidden reef of rocks and you hit it, I mean, you have it. The first two divers came to the surface with big smiles from ear to ear with these tin ingots. Oh, look it's heavy, isn't it? It is pure tin when we analyze them, they analyzed them with 99.9 percent pure tin and this is a clue that they are very old. One theory is that there was a boat anchored there, they were being transported and they capsized on the reef. It had been a British export since prehistoric times. The Romans knew it as British metal.

This is what Byzantine traders came to collect from Tintagel. If you control a large area, you let it be known that in mid-summer the tribute comes into effect. of tin and a lot of this is collected and this is something that would be extremely interchangeable in terms of Mediterranean delicacies. The can the divers found was located just meters from a beach that has yielded some intriguing remains. Coastal erosion has revealed that the half where the meat had been cooked could be connected to the tin tray. Sam Turner is about to start digging here. Well, there are several halves eroding from the cliff.

The site has been known about since the 1960s and has been monitored since erosion became quite a bit. Bad recently, in fact, you can see some of the coal deposits here in front of the sand cliff. The blackened material got the charcoal, yeah, yeah, big chunks of charcoal and that's part of a hearth that extends like five or six feet across this area, but I mean, there's more than just charcoal there, I mean. Just look down, look there, what is that? It looks like a bit of bone. There are bones of several species here. Some of the bones have clearly been butchered at the site.

Yeah, what's going on? They are right. the seashore must have signed that has to do with this, it is probably some type of seasonal settlement associated with an activity that was happening here, probably a commercial activity and we know that pottery imported from the Mediterranean has been found at this site with this type of features. This is the type of commercial activity that we know was taking place throughout the southwest of the peninsula at this time. Why is this Mediterranean pottery used in the port? I mean, you don't open bottles of champagne in the port of London, right? that happens elsewhere I certainly believe that this activity must be associated with the social elite.

These would presumably be the people who are here conducting business using it as a meeting place to meet and exchange news and ideas. Sam's discoveries were not unique throughout the world. Coastal archaeologists are beginning to find evidence of more of this elaborate activity on this coast alone. 500 pottery fragments and 10 banquet places have been found. These halves were the remains of what can only be described as beach parties held on the occasion of visits by Mediterranean merchants. Such festivities indicate that there was more to this Mediterranean contact than the simple exchange of can for wine. Today we place different aspects of our lives in clearly labeled boxes work trade religions politics but in the past these partitions did not exist, so I do not assume that the Mediterranean and British merchants were there only to exchange goods.

These beach markets were about something much deeper: the ceremonial exchange of beliefs and ideas. Some archaeologists even believe that these ceremonies were politically driven in the 6th century. The Byzantine emperor Justinian the First organized an attempt to reconquer the Western Roman Empire. This reconquest program was accompanied by a diplomatic initiative. A charm offensive to try to attract local elites from all over Western Europe. One area where such elites existed was in western Britain and it is possible that what we see as trade between the Byzantine world and the British west was actually diplomacy between Constantinople and the British kings who ruled that area, regardless of whether these traders had or not a political mission.

I am sure that this contact was never purely commercial. The trade networks established between Britain and Byzantium provided a basis for the transmission of spiritual and intellectual ideas. They bring with them a whole range of new ideas. Archeology cannot show us that archaeology, history and the language between them can infer its existence and pure archeology the archeology of the land of the vessels shows us a method by which it could have arrived then yes there is a trade of ideas the Byzantine traders did not sail halfway across the gnome world to visit a deteriorating island. They arrived at an economically independent country whose people had goods and ideas to share with the rest of the world, but what were those ideas?

There was one more step in the history of ceramics that would reveal the words of a dark age civilization hidden for centuries. Very little written material survives from the fifth and sixth. For centuries in Britain, for a long time, this was taken as proof that these were times of illiteracy and lack of education. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The Dark Ages of Britain were a time of intellectual and economic advancement: a single shirt of Mediterranean pottery identical to the Tintagel material was recently found on the remote island of Caldey off the south coast of Wales Chaldee has been a sacred island for hundreds of years old it still houses a monastery today jonathan wooding showed me around it is the only piece we have found here but where do you find one there is doubt there has to be more oriental pottery where they are appearing here it represents a period in the that the east is interested in the rise of the west, trade missions, diplomatic missions, whatever they are, but people from the east are appearing in Celtic Britain and they.

We hope to find people who are essentially like them, descended from Romans, who know the same language, the same rituals, the same basic cultural ideas. Caldi was part of the first monastic movement to arrive in Britain with pottery on ships from the Mediterranean well. The move comes at the same time as the departure of Roman rule in the east. It was already playing a role in providing new leadership, almost a new approach to leadership in a changing society, and I'm sure it was the same here. It emerged with great enthusiasm as an alternative to the more settled or urban Christianity of the Roman world.

Dozens of monasteries arose in Britain in the Dark Ages period and produced a new class of learned monks. There is a historical source for Dark Age Britain written by a monk called Gildas in the 6th century, about a hundred years after the departure of the Romans, it is an extraordinary and exciting account of the history of this country, it was written in a high level and quite florid latin, it was clearly intended for a sophisticated and literate audience because it is peppered with classical references, gildas was the preeminent theologian of monasticism in his time, the great founder of the irish monasteries on the continent, actually he He quotes as someone who should have been read in writing by the Pope, not just any old Pope, but Gregory the Great.

Actually, the most monastic Pope of the first millennium. He is largely a well-known figure throughout Western Europe. A world that can produce a gildas. It is the scholarly world in close connection with a broader intellectual. A broader religious community. He is certainly not a righteous one. a unique figure, perhaps he is unique in our records, but that tells me more about our records and about the time when Gildas and men like him were not isolated monks, hidden from reality, but scholars in contact with intellectual and religious ideas of his time. We see a Britain that is in touch with the rest of the world.

It is a normal contact process. He's not just an Eastern missionary who shows up in a strange place. I think we have to start thinking about it now as something much more global. I think some places like Tintagel and Bantham are now on a scale that makes it unlikely there will be just one or two boats, but more fines appear every year and I think over time we will have a much clearer idea of ​​the scale and importance. Of these contacts, more or less contacts have escaped history, so it is an example that archeology has actually told you something that you simply did not know before literacy was not limited to the monastic elite in the Middle Ages, Britain called the island and had one more secret. to surrender in the form of an ancient stone inscribed in Latin with the sign of the cross.

I ask everyone who walks there to pray for the soul from inside the cardagon. This is a rhythmic syllabic adonik verse and is by centuries the oldest of these. people are using the meters that have become standard fare in all later European literature it is not the dark ages it is not illiterate stones like Caldi's have been found scattered across western Britain these inscribed stones provide evidence clear view of a highly literate society in dark ages Britain are memorials written not by kings or priests but by ordinary people who etched their thoughts in stone for centuries.

These inscriptions have been dismissed as clumsy scribblings of a semi-literate society. In fact, they give us a unique insight into the ideas they were structuring. early british thought the job of deciphering these ancient messages has been the work of david howlid editor of the medieval latin dictionary at oxford we are reaching the oldest part of the bodlean library and what we see here is an embodiment in stone of the view of the universe that our ancestors had adopted since ancient times seven liberal arts human constructions of language grammar rhetoric and logic and divine hard science all of them mathematical arithmetic is static the music of numbers is the geometry of astronomy of numbers david believes that the structures that still shape learning today were first formulated in the dark ages, was it some form of intellectual opposition that structured the way you thought it was a cooperation, a combination?

You have the school of languages ​​at the same door as the school of geometry and arithmetic and further the school of astronomy at the same door as the school of rhetoric it was a cooperation a combination of the human arts with the divine mathematical art you need both you cannot having one without the other during the 6th century modern Europe was invented and it was invented here within Britain what we have is both this highly polished rhetorical Latinity of gildas 130 years after the departure of the legions and these stone inscriptions, now the inscriptions have seemed like strange and clumsy Latin prose because they are actually verses, no one reads them out loud to see that they become dumpty dumpty dumpty, it's just there you see it, once you see it, it transforms your vision of what you are reading and, even more seriously, transforms the society from which it emerged.

Some of these stone inscriptions contain hidden layers of meaning and the inscription says carrasius heek yucket in lopidum kerasius de hoke con guerriere here lies in this a simple pile of stones but if you read it backwards it says um which is a flawless dactylic hexameter which is classical latin this is classical latin poetry butread backwards and if we return to the simple inscription of juerga and counting at intervals of seven letters we find the name of the woman who designed this which is viola jorvert and hualaon in sepulcros see in peace the terrible advent of the judgment sanctusima moulier hikit here lies a holy woman who was the most beloved wife of bilatesus in moral discipline and wisdom than gold and precious stones this woman was better now she is the most holy and beloved wife of a bishop you have said that there are thousands of these inscriptions from the age dark, which rather implies that there was a terrible For many readers, some of these inscriptions are on the slopes of hills in the deepest brachinion, they imply that there is a large class, large enough to be worth islands are the focus of the actual survival of Latin, if you imagine that at the time of the departure of The Legions of the British they are the only people in Europe who would continue to write in very high level literary Latin and the reason why this is kept pure was that they were the only people in Europe who didn't speak a Romantic mother tongue and there was less linguistic interference from one another, so they learned Latin by the book, sort of like Salman Rushdie learned English by the book and then wrote a very high level literary language and the British are the only people in Europe who do this.

Are we facing a renaissance here? For it to happen you have to be in a dark age and I don't think the dark age ever existed what I see is continuity in intellectual life the fall of Rome in 410 which caused the withdrawal of the legions from Britain is a historical moment finite with Big ramifications and they are serious and catastrophic and people have just assumed that that was what happened in Roman Britain, but it wasn't. This is the only place that didn't happen, so in other words, instead of turning off the lights, really? I think the lights went on brighter, this is the only place where the lights went on brighter, Britain had not only survived the Roman retreat, reshaping cities and resurrecting trade links, but had also begun to lay the foundations of an intellectually exciting future.

I started this. journey with the mythical figure of arthur in the background, a reminder of the lack of real evidence we have of the dark ages. I finished it believing that I had really found my camelot, this period had given rise to myths and legends as magical as that. of arthur because it really was an extraordinarily creative time arthur may be historical fiction but he is placed in a real historical situation to crystallize it he becomes a person around whom these myths gather and I do not mean myths as lies, this imagined gold Age had a really solid foundation and that's Camelot.

My own belief is that what counts is that there was an Arthur who was a local war leader and that it all took place in the north of Britain. Arthur could have been one of many strong leaders in this turbulent situation. society perhaps he was one of the tough soldiers on Hadrian's Wall who took advantage of a crumbling government perhaps he was a Romanized sophisticate who helped restructure cities like Roxata so he could continue living a civilized life who could have been a merchant become a good an elite of the southwest with the abundant Mediterranean lynx or part of the monastic elite of the west well versed in Latin and the holy life in searching for arthur I have found a world much more exciting and much more real than any romantic knight story and shining armor these were the true men and women of arthas great britain, but this world could not last forever the rockstar roman city where archaeologists had found such remarkable evidence of survival and reconstruction in the dark ages finally collapsed in the 7th century A pagan ruler known as Pender overwhelmed the city and its inhabitants.

The fate of this city was sealed, so if Arthur was ever needed, then he was, but he was not there. These fantastic early Welsh poems talk about Arthurian-like figures, they talk about this period, but they're actually written in the 8th and 9th centuries and one can imagine this kind of feeling that if only there was someone who could come and help us, If only there was someone who could fight these oppressors and I think that's what this Arthur is. Everything about Arthur is about this desire, this nostalgia for a pass that never really happened, but only if it had, would they have returned everything and kept his kingdom, whether or not they had an Arthur to protect.

When the inhabitants of Roxata abandoned their city in the 7th century, the changes that had been occurring elsewhere in Britain finally caught up with them. It was a revolutionary tide that came not from the hills and mountains of Wales in the west, but from the fertile plains of the east. england the end of rockstar was the beginning of a new chapter in the history of britain the anglo-saxon invasions in the next program i will show how archaeologists are beginning to question whether even this famous event really happened after all the conventional history about the The Creation of England describes how the British sank into a state of torpor after the departure of the Roman troops.

They were only revived by a massive infusion of Anglo-Saxon blood from across the North Sea. These sturdy tribesmen arrived on ships along the eastern shores of Britain. It was a brave new world in which dark forests filled and England was born. The problem was that there was no archaeological evidence of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. The traditional creation story. of England is completely wrong real history will change our future and rewrite our past as an island people who The British have been obsessed with the idea of ​​invasion and the story of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons has long been accepted as part of our history.

I'm going to show it, but the myth of the Anglo-Saxon invasion is just a leading tale. Cutting-edge archeology is beginning to reexamine the dramatic changes that took place in this country in the centuries after the departure of Roman troops, and a very different story to the one we are used to is emerging just before archaeologists of World War II World Cup discovered in Suffolk. one of the greatest discoveries of our time the anglo saxon burial mounds at sutton who helen geek explains this beautiful decided to investigate the mounds on her property she called the ipswich museum and asked an independent archaeologist for advice it seems like another world where a landowner can simply hire to an archaeologist to open his burial mounds, but that's what happened to the man one there, he discovered an intact ship and a burial chamber when the news broke, archaeologists from the University of Cambridge and the British Museum came to help. and there the most fabulous and extraordinary archaeological treasure was discovered.

Excavations revealed a person's burial chamber in a wooden boat. He was accompanied by a large number of fabulous objects. This was the grave of a very rich man. Helmets are incredibly rare. A special headdress seems appropriate. for a king like he is today, it has other things like the strange wet stone that turns into a scepter, it has polish in the middle where your hand could have held it and a small cup that could be placed on your knee so you can hold it . your scepter like a modern king some people see a very strong Swedish influence some people see a very strong classical Byzantine influence other people say he has a little bit of everything and is trying many different methods to make us see that he is an important ruler of the eastern angles In the 7th century parts of Britain had become a series of politically powerful kingdoms that would later be known as England.

Do you think a ship full of Anglo-Saxon royal family came sailing towards the devil and thought: this is the place? For me, I got off the ship and established his kingdom here. The origin myths that we've recorded by people like Bead seem to indicate that in the 5th century, ships full of royalty rowed out and thought, well, I'll create my kingdom here, um, but but. We just don't have any archaeological evidence to support that, what seems much more likely is that, by some process of internal social development, kings emerged sometime in the late 6th century and then decided to create this. this origin myth to explain where they came from, they probably just murdered and fought their way to the top, but they meant that they had always been royalty, in fact, they are descended from the gods, you know, Sutton, who is the most drawn from a series of rich anglo-saxon burials in the south and east of britain archaeologists are divided over where these new and powerful leaders came from heinrich harker favors the idea that they were invaders until sutton, who discovered that paul was the tomb richest anglo-saxon england these large 7th century anglo-saxon barriers were often located on the tops of ridges and occupied a dominant position in the landscape.

Show who you are and who your family was. Heinrich Harker believes that an invasion is the best way to explain the changes in culture that took place after the Romans left why we have to have migrations it is very difficult to prove that people came here in large numbers from abroad Francis I think you can show that this is still given the evidence the best possible explanation your argument is that I don't need migrations to explain cultural change, this is essentially the underlying argument. I agree with that, and in fact, if you look at Russia right now, post-Soviet Russia, you see a big cultural change, but it's not exactly brought by Western immigrants. is traded there, of course, you can say there is no evidence they came here and I accept we can't trace them across the North Sea, but it's still the best explanation.

I would love to agree with you, I just don't see any strangers. I would have come here without there being a big fight and there is no evidence of a fight if people move to my land. I'm not happy with that, if you're there you're not right, so you think people think that. people would have actually moved because there is not much to do after the collapse of a civilization, there is a decrease in population, if there is a decrease in population, there was also more space in the landscape than in the Roman system, I don't think so. believe.

There was a hole in British society. If you know anything, taxes were eliminated. I would have thought people were saying, "Wow, it's Christmas. I don't have to pay taxes. I'm much better off. So when the Romans left, people probably became more prosperous." um, very much like a farmer's point of view. I would have thought that whether farmers saw it or not the explanation of the invasion is simply not enough when archaeologists cannot explain a period of social change or innovation, they look for the general explanation of the invasion of new people, but actually, no. There is no evidence to support this story, we simply cannot prove it.

Science, however, is trying at University College London. Genetics professor Mark Thomas and his team have carried out a study of DNA in the British Isles, the male genetic marker. It is known as a chromosome and a father passes a virtually unchanged copy of his own chromosome to his son. Mark has tried to establish how nearby are related populations, he discovered that there was an unusually high similarity between the DNA of Great Britain and parts of Holland within England. All the cities look very similar but different to the Welsh cities and the second, the most notable feature was the incredible genetic similarity between the English cities and the In fact, we could not statistically distinguish any difference between them, this suggests that the chromosome and native British at some point in history mixed with that of the people of northern Europe.

Complex statistics we use to determine when this genetic mixing may have occurred. We conclude that we would need the mass migration of the last two thousand five hundred years to be one hundred percent replacement or if it were less it would have to have been more recent and if we assume that that mass migration was the Anglo-Saxon mass migration then we estimate that that replacement must have been between 50 and 100. The sheer completeness of this population change actually conflicts with the archaeological evidence of three million people expelled. Well, they don't prove that now we can't say anything about the exact number. what the process was, like I said, it could be a push or it could be a cull or it could be something much more benign, like just economic differences between different populations and over time a gradual replacement, we can't really say how it happened, but another team.

Several geneticists in Mark's same department have conducted a similar survey and gotten very different results. They conclude that the native British y chromosome has not been replacedlargely in the south and east of England. Furthermore, they stated that it is not possible to distinguish between the genetic chromosome. influence of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings who definitively invaded Great Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries. I just don't think we should trust these genetic versions of the story alone, especially when two similar studies produce such different results. I am also quite distrustful of simple explanations in complex times.

The dramatic changes that took place in the 5th and 6th centuries laid the foundations for this country's modern identity. I will demonstrate that these changes were not the result of massive invasions and By revisiting this powerful origin myth, I will discover who we English really are. On the south coast of Hampshire, at the entrance to a natural harbour, stands one of the best preserved Roman buildings in Britain. This is Porchester Castle. It is one of a series of coastal forts. Built by the Romans in the 3rd and 4th centuries, they are known as Shaw's Saxon Force because it is still widely accepted that they were built to keep out marauding Anglo-Saxon bands from across the Channel, but in reality they may have been used For a very different purpose in all, eleven Shaw Forts line the south and east coast from Porchester in the south around the coast.

These coastal forts have been taken as an imposing reminder of the Anglo-Saxon threat as far as Brancaster in Norfolk. of these forts further east, the castle still dominates the landscape, all this, all the green fields there would have been what was called the great combination of open water estuary, marshes and intertidal streams, that sort of thing probably until the 10th and 12th century. Andrew Pearson has been re-examining the force and has come to the surprising conclusion that they may have nothing to do with the Anglo-Saxons. I think the traditional view of these sites is that they are a defense against cross-channel pirates from Saxony. from freesia of jutland basically from the peoples who in later periods colonized great britain the name saxon shawford actually comes from a roman military list that was translated in the 16th century by the famous antiquarian william camden what the term saxon refers to is not clear which Camden more or less said so when it was considered archaeological fact for many centuries to come.

I really think he also came up with a very evocative idea, it is very dramatic and it is also very simple that these forts were erected as a defense against the Saxons, now the earl is called earl of the Saxon coast, whether that means that the coast is being attacked by the Saxons or colonized by the Saxons. We really don't know. Andrew has discovered that huge walls are actually better suited to protecting assets. kept inside the forts rather than attacking the enemies from outside, well I think these sites are doing a lot more than defending the coast, if the Saxons had attacked it wouldn't have been monthly, it might not even have been every year or every 10 years, so in terms of what these forts do, I think it's much more likely that they have an important economic role or perhaps a supply role rather than this kind of defensive function that they're normally described as, so What it seems to suggest then is that these forts might have been actually used to aid trade from outside Britain rather than stopping people from entering.

Yes, I think rather than trying to block access to the interior, as some perhaps traditionally think, in fact, they are quite the opposite as far as materials and goods get here. and then being sent outwards and beyond the empire as a whole, Andrew has found no archaeological evidence that these forts were built to defend against an Anglo-Saxon invasion, so what is the evidence for the invasion? The Yorkshire worlds are the latest in a series of chalk markings. hills that stretched eastwards across Britain and it is here that Anglo-Saxon invaders are supposed to have settled these fields 1500 years ago.

One of the most extraordinary archaeological investigations is being carried out. Thirty years ago archaeologist Dominic Powersland was asked to excavate some 5th century burials found in a quarry near the village of West Hezleton. Dominic has carried out one of the world's largest archaeological surveys here, scrutinizing every inch of a landscape for traces of its ancient past. Such a comprehensive study should confirm the conventional view of the 5th and 6th centuries as a time when invaders took control, except that they did not, this is a tremendous settlement that may be as early as the Bronze Age. The Dominicans discovered the remains of miles of farms and villages.

The settlement began its life four thousand years ago and continued. until the 8th century, which covers the crucial period of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Dominic calls this discovery the ladder settlement. We have the ladder going across the edge of the field where we have been digging. Yeah, it runs right through here, so those crops. The markings there that are the path that runs down the spine of the settlement basically comprise a series of farms or even small villages that follow the path that hugs the very edge of the wetlands. We have tracked the settlement for 15 kilometers. We have inspected in detail about seven and a half to eight kilometers, I am sure it reaches the coast.

This is a new type of archeology dedicated to understanding the long-term life and meaning of an entire landscape. I've had a team walk from dawn to dusk for three years and the results are absolutely amazing - it's a long walk. I've personally walked further than from Land's End to John Groats, I mean, and that's just in these little fields up and down here. This is a flow radiometer that measures minute variations in magnetic signal beneath the ground. Imagine this field was untouched by human hand and someone comes and digs a trench through it and then that trench is filled with various forms of material that goes into the ditch then everything fills up again and it looks like this you can't see the ditch when we get there we walk over it and we read the sign so we have zero around it and all of a sudden it goes up one two three four two three one zero zero zero and it just walk back and forth through that and build this picture as we go, the gradiometer detects soil disturbances that occurred hundreds and even thousands of years ago, how much more do you have to do?

The ending is printed. This is what geophysics looks like. It must be the largest geophysical study in the country. I think it is now the largest in the world, unfortunately this massive evidence dominates surely tells us a different story about the population in the area, yes it must mean we have a high population, the idea that hardly anyone lives here is completely unsustainable, we end up with the same type. of settlement density like we would have had a hundred years ago, once the studies are done, Dominic and his team will get to work. Four thousand years of history lie beneath the ground waiting to be discovered.

We are just emerging from the front of the The world runs quite steeply to the wetland and the main area of ​​occupation throughout later prehistory. The geology of this part of the country is unique. A thick layer of windblown sand protects ancient remains that in other areas of Britain modern plowing has destroyed. Dominic and his team were about to start digging an archaeological gold mine. Now, the first time we looked at the ladder settlement, we opened up an area of ​​15 meters and there were 35,000 fighters. This has been like archaeological gold dust because we have archaeology. I can't see it, but we know it's well preserved, yes, and that's very rare in Britain.

There are probably a few square kilometers of archeology that is so well preserved in the countryside. Dominic's excavations uncovered what the ghostly patterns of a geophysical survey had hinted at at the actual site. Remains of houses, roads and settlements that spanned 000 years of ancient history. This is the field we are working on right now and the land from the settlements passes through here and we can magically put layers and layers of the past on top of this air. In the photograph, you can see the line of the ladder settlement running across the countryside, so what can the ladder settlement tell us about the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons?

The archaeological remains of the invasion are usually clear enough to detect the Roman army in the 1st. Both the 19th century and the 8th century Viking invaders left their archaeological mark in the form of war cemeteries and deliberately destroyed houses and religious sites, but Dominic could not find such evidence, what he did find was a village and a cemetery full of people which looked like anglo-saxons the anglo-saxon cemetery is located here under the main road we have the cemetery so we set out in search of the settlement and found the entire anglo-saxon village 49 acres now it is the shadow of the globe As we entered the site of the old anglo-saxon village which It extended to the foot of the hills, it was absolutely enormous, much larger than the current village.

Dominic's meticulous studies could have detected the massive disturbance that an invasion causes to a landscape, but all he could find was evidence of peaceful, continuous settlement and there sat some people, Roman people, Iron Age people, bronze age people and of course they moved into the next countryside and things went absolutely crazy, we can't argue that this is a farm. It has to be some kind of small town, oh yeah, and of course, just to the south, all these little blimps here, this is another cemetery, well, it's a little speechless, I mean, you have a long-term agreement.

You've got the cemetery here, you've got a whole way of life and it's gone, it's flat, dusty sand and it feels like there's nothing here and it goes on mile after mile, that's fantastic. Dominic discovered that the site had been occupied since prehistoric times. until the mid-8th century Neolithic cemeteries Bronze Age tumuli Roman settlements Anglo-Saxon towns were part of its continuously occupied landscape there were no occupation gaps there were no war cemeteries there were no dramatic changes in the layout of the towns in short, there were there were no invasion, what there was, however, was a change in fashion.

Cloned pottery, weapons, and funerary practices underwent dramatic change in the centuries following the collapse of Roman rule. These new fashions are very similar to the styles found on the continent and this change in fashion did not happen by chance. In West Hezlot for decades, these burials have been taken as key evidence that a new group of people had taken control, but what were the invading Anglo-Saxons doing in Dominic's peaceful landscape? Could be, but they weren't actually trespassing. There will be one here in this field somewhere Dominic gave some of the skeletons from his Anglo-Saxon cemetery to Paul Budd at Durham University Paul has pioneered a new form of biological research called stable isotope analysis what we are really interested in are teeth and particularly tooth enamel because tooth enamel is formed in childhood and, unlike any other tissue in the body, is not remodeled throughout life.

It gives you a little window, a little microcosm of what was happening in your diet, what you were eating at the time of your childhood. When the tooth formed, Paul discovered that tooth enamel has materials specific to the person's birthplace. One of these materials contains oxygen isotopes. His main source of oxygen is the oxygen he consumes in the form of water because he is eating local foods. This sign. It will find its way to bones and teeth by measuring oxygen isotopes in a person's tooth enamel. Paul is able to tell in what climate and what part of the world they were born.

This is a technique that offers the opportunity to identify the first generation. immigrants specifically because you can look at the people you're going to see people who grew up somewhere different. Paul successfully analyzed 24 of the bodies from Dominic's cemetery and some of them were indeed foreigners, but the other results were surprising, which we expected. We could see some mainland migrants in the west hesitantly and in fact we saw four people from the site who have drinking water that you can't really find in the UK. So aren't these rich, swaggering warrior type people? What's interesting about those four is that they are all women, they are very poorly furnished tombs and in fact, they are the only four women who essentially have no clothing whatsoever for any domestic service. or something like that, it certainly seems to be the lowest. people of status, the most likely candidate will be some sort of Scandinavian Norwegian coast here or possibly um Sweden over here what about the rest of the population and presumably they were all yorkshire?

Well, you might think so, but the surprises didn't stop. there, in fact, we findthat about half the sample seemed to be undecided between the west and the place and then we had another half of the population that is associated with the western side of the country, the early days of East Yorkshire seem to be uh, occupied by a large proportion of Cumbrians, as far as I can tell, you have a large immigrant component in the wavering population of the west, but it doesn't come from the east, it comes from the west, so the strange bodies in the cemetery were not continental warriors, but visitors or economic immigrants.

The results did not surprise Dominic at all, there are a small number of newcomers, yes there are a small number of mainland Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, etc., in different parts of the country, but the majority of the population is exactly the same. The same is a landscape cared for and in continuous evolution. We see Roman sites with Anglo-Saxon components. We see Roman activity beneath the Anglo-Saxon settlement. There is no gap between the two. If there was, we would have had a great sighting of that bonito. red ocher red sand sitting between the two, yes, and that doesn't happen, historians tell us that the Anglo-Saxon invaders came to a society that had been severely weakened by the collapse of Roman rule, but Dominic's vast excavation had found no such evidence. coming to appreciate the image that we have thought was genuine for so long is seriously flawed and we can show that our population includes one or two people who come from Scandinavia, but this is not an invasion, there is always resistance to change because people are a Once people are happy with an established understanding, they don't want to change it, it's actually much more exciting to discover that everything is wrong.

The people of the 5th century cemetery at West Hesleton seemed to have just arrived from the continent and yet most of them were born in Britain, if this change was not the result of an invasion, what was happening were profound cultural changes in the 5th century and perhaps the most significant was the language. There is no doubt that the spoken language changed from the native British, sometimes called Celtic, to English, which was a descendant. from the German surely this, in any case, has to be proof of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Modern linguistics, however, is beginning to question this assumption.

Katie Lowe has been looking at the traces of native British grammar in modern English. We've come to the conclusion that we've just known as a fact that the Celtic languages ​​just didn't really affect modern English and I think that basically made people stop looking, they just thought that there just can't be any influence at all, But linguists have discovered a hidden code in the structure of our language. which shows a strong influence from the British, if you are Celtic and you are trying to learn Old English, like any second language acquisition, you will make mistakes, that is, if you go to France today, you will surely make them. errors errors that actually show the structure of your own language, for example you may make syntax errors, you may make vocabulary errors, of course your accent will also be very strange and it is thought that perhaps some of the Celts will extend the affected language by English.

The process of learning English, native British people retain the structure of their own languages ​​and these ancient patterns are still visible in the grammatical structure of modern English. Old English was actually similar to German in structure and the way a sentence was constructed relied heavily on endings. that indicated what a word did within a sentence nowadays the order of the words is very important if I say that the cat chased the man it does not mean the same as the other way around in German word endings and not the order of the words would have told us who was persecuting Who, so why did the English language suffer this strange mutation?

We've moved it, we've changed to a different kind of word order within the sentence, where does it come from?, because it doesn't seem to have happened as much in any of the other Germanic languages. Recent research has shown that the Celtic languages ​​had a role that play in this there has to be contact there has to be contact over generations there is no other way to do it the rise of English in these islands did not come from a tidal wave of invaders, but from a prolonged period of contact during which the native British They chose to adopt a new way of speaking, but why did this happen?

Archaeologist Sam Lucy has been examining graves from that period to understand why this dramatic cultural change took place, so this would be similar to some of the graves they found in West Hesleton yes, very similar up on your head you have the tip of metal of a spear and the wooden shaft is rotten you have below on your hip the metal center of a larger wooden and leather shield Just as the language of the native Britons changed in this period, so did their style of clothing and weapons at the end of the Roman period. Many items you will find changed.

Why do I want to say that it has traditionally been attributed to the Anglo-Saxons? -Saxon migrations or Anglo-Saxon invasions you certainly start to get different burial rights women tend to be buried with a much greater variety of furniture to wear this is a type of brooch that is known as a cruciform brooch a cross-shaped bridge and this brooch en It is not a continental import, its idea ultimately came from the continent, but it is a British product. People living in Britain are perhaps aligning more with a continental style and ideas, so I think it's that kind of process that's happening rather than a population replacement. which is what the traditional idea of ​​Anglo-Saxon migrations implies.

The mistake has been to take cultural artifacts as evidence of racial origin. If I were wearing American jeans, that doesn't make me an American. If I drive a German car, that doesn't make me. Don't make me German, it doesn't work that way, there is no doubt that a handful of warriors and families on the moon were arriving in Britain from the northern European countries in this period, but the traditional picture of invasion and population replacement is untenable. The people of Britain learned a new language, adopted new fashions and changed their political allegiances because they knew from experience that this was the best way to keep up with rapidly changing times.

It was only in later centuries that the complex details of this process were transformed. In a captivating story, history books can be dangerous things, especially when they are brilliantly written. In 731, a Tyneside monk called Venerable Bead completed his ecclesiastical history of the English people, which still forms the basis of modern history lessons, but beed, like all historians, had his own particular acts to ground according to beed the origins of the church in England lie in 6th century Rome, where Pope Gregory the Great saw some beautiful blonde slaves for sale when he was told that they were angles of the pagan island of Britain, he famously replied. who to him look more like angels, according to beed gregory immediately arranges for saint augustine to sail to britain and convert these pagan creatures to christianity to make augustine's mission more significant than it actually was. bead portrays britain as a country populated by unbelieving pagans.

He calls these pagans the Anglo-Saxons and describes their conversion as a glorious achievement in creating this story. The accounts give the church a new start in Britain. The newly converted Anglo-Saxon English are represented as true Christians disconnected from the murky Celtic Christianity of the native Britons. He is writing this story 200,300 years after it happened, so he is trying to present it as a coherent process, therefore, he interested in making things more orderly and organized perhaps than they really were. great in the late Roman period, Augustine arrives at the end of the 6th century, he is already entering a country that knew everything about Christianity and when Augustine arrives by invitation, he finds an island where there are already Christians and bishops and in some parts there is ecclesiastical life organized. of the island, so there are different currents of Christianity, conventional wisdom would say that the Anglo-Saxons brought paganism with them from abroad and that Christianity was not introduced to England until the year 597, when Saint Augustine arrived in Canterbury, what do you say of that?

I don't believe a word of it the British church survived intact and was flourishing the missionaries thought they were coming to barbaric ruritania and when they got here there was a church with its own traditions intact from ancient times men who knew how to operate 10 different computer cycles for the Easter calculation. They could write classier prose and verse than the Roman missionaries were capable of. Then the Roman missionaries found a completely self-possessed church intact. They were so flabbergasted by this, but they just deleted it. They pretended it had never existed, they pretended it didn't exist to overlook the confusing origins of English Christianity.

Bead invented a new breed of people. The Anglo-Saxons who came to be known as the English Speed ​​have an agenda to present the Anglo-Saxons. -the Saxons as a coherent body of people and are predestined to inherit southern Britain similar to how the children of Israel inherit the holy land and inherit it from the British according to b because the British are not fit to live here, so the English are a Bead's influence on the chosen people is even more extraordinary when you realize that he never ventured out of the monastery on Tyneside where he was raised.

We know that Beed had particular reasons for writing his story, one of them was really to create a sense of the English language. In doing so, he gave us an origin myth. Do you think B invented England? He certainly invented the notion of an English town. What you need to keep in mind is that England did not exist before, perhaps, the 9th to the 10th century. Only later did it become a single political nation. In fact, I can call it a single political nation if you like. Before this point, you're looking at much smaller territorial groupings, to a large extent, um, and so putting in writing that that ecclesiastical history is creating that sense of English or beginning to create that sense by telling the The history of the Anglo-Saxon invasion laid the groundwork. foundations for an English identity, but I don't think this version represents who we are as a nation.

My journey into British history has uncovered a very different picture of the people of this island. So who are we really, whether we go back to Arthur or the Anglo-Saxons? We British people have always used history to create a national identity for ourselves. The problem is that these are identities based on a completely imagined past, so we end up not knowing who we really are. they go to the heart of our democracy and you see what I mean, when the Victorians decided to decorate the dressing room here in the House of Lords, they chose to use a figure of King Arthur, the Victorians had revived the myth of the Anglo-Saxon invasion with vigour.

The invasion identified the English nobles as descendants of pure Teutonic stock, unlike the irrational and undisciplined Celts in the paintings. King Arthur, a native British warrior from our past dark ages, had to adapt to the Anglo-Saxon virtues of the Victorian era. the result was a ridiculous combination of two very separate aspects of our national identity. British identity just wasn't that simple in the 19th century, at the same time that Anglo-Saxon archaeologists, Anglo-Saxon historians were writing the history of the English. To call them that, Celtic historians do the same for the Welsh, the Irish and the Scots and it is actually in direct opposition to each other, they do not happen in a vacuum, they are done as a direct consequence of each other, you see a very deliberate manipulation. of historical sources and archeology to try to create a sense of the history of Britain's first centuries AD.

They were formative years in creating the identity of this country it is not just the British who are being exercised by their early medieval past, it is the Germans the French are all over Europe if we now seek to find our roots who we are what is our identity we almost invariably end up in the early middle ages in the immediate post-Roman period which eliminated a common culture and created small groups of smaller groups smaller units that we can look at and say this is where I come from and maybe you'll agree In my opinion, what the past is about is identity, our ancestors were not brave Anglo-Saxon supermen or mysterious Celtic warriors like Arthur.

These origin myths that tie us to one pure race or another do not do justice to our culture. We were not a weak and disorganized society dominated by the Romans, nor did we dissolve into chaos when they left, we did not suffer a period of confusion in the ages. dark and We never needed to be saved by the tribes of Anglo-Saxon legend. The royal townof Britain not only survived an influx of foreign influences, but flourished because of them. We absorbed Roman and later Byzantine and Northern European culture without losing a sense of our own identity. It is this ability to absorb and adapt this creative plagiarism that has always been at the heart of British identity and this diversity is not just a characteristic. from our distant past, is a trait that can still be seen in all aspects of our lives.

Even our cook Robin Cook, the former British Foreign Secretary, selected chicken tikka masala as Britain's national dish. I think our national identity itself is the result of a combination of a huge amount of different inputs over the centuries from different ethnic groups that have come here and settled. here they are not so much absorbed as they have made their contribution become part of the resulting mix of what we now recognize as our own national identity and I think that actually what makes Britain great, what makes us strong is not purity, it's diversity, it's all those different influences. that have shaped our language, they have shaped our history, they have shaped our culture and they have shaped our character, we Britons are moving into the 21st century with all the confidence of our Victorian ancestors, but at the same time To plan the way forward we must keep an eye on the past because if we discard our sense of history we will be like people without memory who do not know who they are to find the true origins of Britain and I have had to look beyond the headlines that capture the figures of the Roman King Arthur and the Anglo-Saxons and instead I turned to the true heroes of these lands, the millions of ordinary Britons who invented our diverse and resilient culture.

One last thought: it could be Indian or Chinese tea and on the packet it says it was grown in Kenya, but despite or perhaps because of these obvious foreign origins, this remains the best known symbol of Britain.