Like Gildas, modern historians want to understand how a productive, ordered, taxed, administered and highly functional, populous society was apparently so rapidly laid low and, after many tribulations, in later centuries rebuilt in a new fashion. They look for clues in excavated remains, in Gildas’s testimony, in the earliest Anglo-Saxon, British a

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

As material barriers, many of the larger linear earthworks of the Early Medieval landscape functioned most effectively to control the movement of livestock. Small armies might ignore a ditch and bank or climb over or around it; cattle and sheep are much less inclined to scale something as massive as the Wansdyke, especially if they are being herded

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.

One might speculate endlessly on the social and economic drivers and tensions that led to the emergence of recognizable kingdoms and kingship in Britain before the end of the seventh century – almost a hundred years after similar developments in Frankish Gaul. But it is hard to avoid an association between the rise of Insular kingship and what has

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

But, as historians have often pointed out, names like Vortigern (perhaps a direct Brythonic translation of Gildas’s superbus tyrannus), Hengest (Old English ‘stallion’) and Horsa (‘horse’) do not inspire confidence that these are much more than legendary figures.

To cremate the dead of a community was to invest emotional, material and social capital in a ritual display that transmuted a person and their corpse into elemental, then intangible, then back into material existence.

In these mid- to late sixth-century phases are hints, no more, of Yeavering’s magnificent future as a royal residence under Kings Edwin and Oswald, complete with church, great hall and a unique grandstand. But that lack of early architectural pretension may be illusory. If occupation was annual or seasonal, based on a mobile encampment of tents inv