The First Kingdom

Most linear earthworks function in complex ways that have little to do with fortification. They are predominantly displays of prestige and power, like the grandiose walls and gates of country parks. Even the massive ramparts of the great Iron Age hillforts say much more about display than they do about direct military threat. In an unmistakeable co

The thought that identities were under threat from real or perceived conflict is echoed in the apparent re-occupation of Iron Age hillforts – reminiscent of Gildas’s image of citizens fleeing into the mountains – particularly in the south-western counties of England and in Wales. Inside the massive Iron Age ramparts of South Cadbury in Somerset, th

political and social tensions that are even more dramatically chiselled onto the landscape by the great, enigmatic earthen dykes that belong to the centuries after Rome’s province cut itself adrift. From Wansdyke, striding across Wiltshire’s downs, to the Fleam Dyke of Cambridgeshire, apparently built to block the lines of prehistoric trackways and

At Congresbury, close to the opposite shore in Somerset, archaeology has revealed a re-occupation of the Iron Age hillfort by people who were able, like their counterparts at Dinas Powys, to import fine luxury goods from the eastern Mediterranean at a time when Britannia had fallen off Rome’s own radar.

After ‘a few years’ Patrick was able to return to his family. This is remarkable: how on Earth was a young man, stolen from his home at sixteen, able to navigate his way back in a country with no maps or road signs and not much more than local knowledge of place names?

But, as historians have often pointed out, names like Vortigern (perhaps a direct Brythonic translation of Gildas’s superbus tyrannus), Hengest (Old English ‘stallion’) and Horsa (‘horse’) do not inspire confidence that these are much more than legendary figures.

Anno Domini dates (not, in any case, invented until the sixth century)

Unlike Gildas, he was not classically educated – his Latin was, by his own testimony, uncultured. The backdrop to his life is a landscape in which arbitrary violence, extreme wealth and poverty, kindness and cruelty are shadowed by a functioning, literate institutional church capable of conducting business with daughter churches across the Irish Se

Gildas’s silence on Arthur says one of three things: that he was unknown to Gildas (perhaps his orbit was local; perhaps he was not yet famous when Gildas wrote); that his story came with inconvenient baggage (a reputation for extreme brutality or licentiousness, perhaps, like Gildas’s tyranni); or that he is a poetic figment of later imagination.