The First Kingdom

Place-name scholars have, perhaps understandably, taken it as axiomatic that Old English settlement and topographic names were introduced by Germanic settlers ‘exploring new lands’, as it were overpainting an existing topographical canvas of British, Latin, Pictish and Irish names. But no one can be sure if the majority of Old English names were tr

No surviving English, Welsh or Scottish document describes such arrangements: the earliest Anglo-Saxon law codes speak of obligations between lords and their followers and dependants, not between kings. Even so, a set of rules can be reconstructed with some confidence through the careers of those who were able to wield imperium over others and by l

Droitwich Spa (‘dirty market’, or perhaps ‘noble market’) lies on the River Salwarpe (‘waters that throw up salt’), a tributary of the Severn in north Worcestershire. The river, together with a convergence of Roman roads and the Latin name Salinae, are clues to Droitwich’s importance in earlier centuries as an unusually productive and pure source o

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

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

A few miles north of Greave’s Ash the indomitable twin-domed hillfort of Yeavering Bell looms imperiously over Glendale and the Milfield plain beyond. Here, an Iron Age fortress and summer camp were the focus of regional power and of a tribal cult. Yeavering’s chieftains seem to have retained their power and identity through the Roman centuries and

it is worth thinking of a figure like Arthur in terms of the sort of lordship he might have enjoyed. In the Historia Brittonum he is explicitly not a king but a leader in war, fighting alongside kings or on their behalf. Conspicuously, while Gildas’s tyrants and the piratical warlords of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Irish Annalsp are territorial l

After the second century the limitanei or frontier troops would have been recruited largely from local youth under the command of professional officers from the Middle East or from beyond the Rhine frontier.

The native British goddess Sulis, equated by Romans with their Minerva, was a popular cult figure whose steamy, healing hot springs prompted them for both offerings – coins and small gifts in great profusion – and supplications, like that of the outraged glove theft victim of Uley whose surviving plaque heads this chapter. No fewer than 130 message