Bernician kings of the mid-seventh century were wont to install their sons as equivalent subreguli in Deira, partly as a policy of devolved dynastic government, partly as training and partly so that they could keep an eye on potential rivals coming up on the rails.

Some names, especially those with Brythonic or Latin roots like the -funta (‘spring’) in Chalfont, can be securely placed in the centuries either side of 400; others, like the suffixes -leah (‘woodland, wood pasture or a clearing in a wood’) and -ham (‘farm’) are sufficiently common before Bede’s day to be regarded as reliably early. Many words

Rheged might, in fact, have been a polyfocal kingdom, with key areas of economic productivity, royal centres and ecclesiastical patronage spread from the extreme west of Galloway as far as Carlisle and beyond, united by its seaways rather than as a coherent land unit.

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

Anthropologists use the term ‘ethnogenesis’ for the process by which disparate groups coalesce around a novel group identity, often retrospectively given divine or mythic origins.

More than a dozen villas flank the river immediately to the west while across the river to the north substantial pottery kilns – the centre of a thriving industry between the second and fourth centuries – produced high-quality Nene Valley ‘colour-coated’ wares: beakers, flagons and bowls, often decorated in relief and sometimes in imitation of fine

Ceawlin’s long reign over the West Saxons, from 560 to 592, is, nevertheless, instructive. He was the first of the West Saxon kings whose career is marked by tangible achievements in subduing rivals and poaching their territory. However, looking at the geography of his victories, it becomes clear that his wars were not campaigns of conquest but of

Archaeologists have seen how the flattish hierarchies of the fifth century, reflected in modest architectural and material displays of rank and wealth in cemeteries and settlements, became more differentiated during the following century. At settlements like Mucking and West Stow, where social rank was at first expressed within households, dominant

The provincials of Roman Britain had a full array of crockery to choose from: fine dinnerware; mortaria for grinding and mixing; amphorae for storing and transporting liquids; cups, beakers and jugs for wine and ale; cooking pots in all shapes and sizes. The pottery of their successors was both utilitarian and diverse, if less showy, and totally