The earliest cremation urns seen in eastern Britain have long been recognized as having direct Continental counterparts in the lands of north Germany and southern Scandinavia, rather neatly tying the fifth-century inhabitants of eastern England to the poetry of Beowulf and to Gildas’s apocalyptic history. On the face of it, the Early ‘Anglo-Saxon’

Violence, then, will not do as the primary explanation for the profound changes visible in Romano-British towns in the late fourth century and beyond. Those changes include the introduction of burial within walled areas, a practice specifically forbidden in Roman law; the construction of large, apparently public buildings that encroached on

Some special places attracted the attention of the Roman state by virtue of their mineral resources: salt springs in the West Midlands and briny fens in East Anglia; the lead ores of the Pennines and Mendip hills; the ironstones and timber of high forests of the Weald and of Dean; tin from Cornwall; copper and gold from Wales.

Settlement names, equally, betray acute sensitivity to both location and facility. They might be described by their relationship with major routeways. Names with the suffix -stræt invariably indicated a settlement on a Roman road, while -peth or -weg applied to those places sited on respectively shorter or longer distance routes; -anstig or

The first kings of Early Medieval Britain were not off-the-shelf products of a homogeneous history, geography or philosophy; they were experimenting with new forms of power born out of the necessity to rule self-identifying peoples and regions that generated a directly consumable surplus; by the needs of mobile lords and their warbands.

Geographers might classify it as a ‘break of bulk’ location, where goods were transferred between river and road at a point where those networks met. Goods landed here from along the River Cam would pass close to the grand Fenland tower house at Stonea; thence south, west and east into the province’s heartland. By the time it gained stone walls,

An anthropologist, sifting though fragments of excavated remains and social spaces and comparing the institutions, languages and cultural rules of Roman Britain with those of Early Medieval Wales, Scotland and England, must address a complementary set of problems. How did people’s lives change through those tumultuous centuries? What were the

Kentish kings exercised their lordship in at least three locations – at Canterbury itself, where the old Roman theatre provided a suitably grand assembly place; at Lyminge, where recent excavations indicate a likely royal presence, and at Rochester, seat of one of the earliest bishoprics. Æðelberht is likely to have enjoyed royal residences in all

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