The First Kingdom

Many artefacts were recovered without their provenance being recorded; we cannot say how grave goods were disposed about the bodies except by analogy from other sites of the period; but they included a handful of Roman coins (four of them perforated for use as pendants); more than fifty brooches, various bracelets and finger rings; two swords; comb

The so-called Walesby cistern, one of several late Romano-British lead ceremonial tanks found particularly across the East Midlands and East Anglia, appears to depict the induction into such a congregation of a female catechumen or baptismal candidate, flanked by two other officiating women.3 One of the striking painted figures on a frieze in a pri

By the end of the fourth century the temple at Uley Hill had partially collapsed and been demolished. It was now rebuilt on a more modest scale, as an L-shaped structure.o Within another generation or two, at some time during the fifth century, it was replaced by a timber building that looks for all the world like a basilica, with accompanying bapt

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

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

The name Alban (literally ‘Briton’) may, in fact, be Germanus’s invention: the personification of Britain’s fall and revival as an orthodox Roman Christian state.

It is a conspicuous fact that, with few exceptions, the boundaries of the many historic townshipsv that lie along the line of Hadrian’s Wall do not butt up against it, as one might expect of such a great physical barrier, but straddle it.33 Historical geographers have established that the origins of many historic townships and parishes lie in their

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

Sidonius Apollinaris, a Gallic diplomat, poet and inveterate correspondent in the mid-to-late fifth century, wrote to his friend, a naval commander called Admiral Namatius: I whiled away some time talking with [the courier] about you; and he was very positive that you had weighed anchor, and in fulfilment of those half military, half naval duties o