The First Kingdom

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

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

Close to the boundary between Essex and Cambridgeshire, on a Roman road apparently blocked by a series of major fifth- or sixth-century linear earthworks,l lies the town of Great Chesterford. This is a landscape of crossroads and frontiers – between the boulder clay plateau of north-west Essex and the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire – where the old trib

At least two female landowners are known from Britannia. Melania, a celebrated Christian patron and the immensely wealthy wife and cousin of Valerius Publianus, owned estates across the empire, including land in Britannia, at the beginning of the fifth century. Her portfolio is known to historians only because she and her husband were induced, by n

In the now silent streets of Roman Silchester, Wroxeter or Caistor, had they been abandoned by fleeing citizens in fear of their lives, we ought to find the sherds from whole pottery vessels lying where they were dropped; the nails and upholstery pins from beds and dining furniture; ovens with half-baked loaves in them, carbonized by engulfing…

Early Medieval kings were required to fight, to defend and expand their territories, and to display their successes appropriately. The Beowulf poem provides the model. As Hrothgar, king of the Danes, prospers, so the size of his warband increases: Then to Hrothgar was granted glory in battle, Mastery of the field; so friends and kinsmen gladly obey

Records of a synod held at Ariminum (Rimini) in 359 tell how three British bishops who were present requested financial support from public funds.

Projecting the aisled halls and villas of the late Roman province, which tell of thriving rural lordship, into the century after, say, 450 is a tough ask. Archaeology has little to say of individuals like Vortigern, Hengest, Arthur or Ambrosius, although one might ascribe to them, as a governing class, the planning and execution of the linear earth

Who, then, was in charge; and of what? Had Britannia seceded from the empire or been abandoned by it? Were the emerging lords of the fifth century descendants of ancient tribal families, now styled as magistrates or provincial officials? Were they arriviste entrepreneurs and industrialists; retired army officers, perhaps? Some, possibly, were Chris