The idea that Kentish kings regarded themselves as direct inheritors of the late Roman state is reinforced by the minting of coins in the late seventh century at Canterbury. One, found in a hoard at Crondall, Hampshire, bears the inscription DOROVERNIS CIVITAS.*7 That a Canterbury mint of that late date should call Canterbury a civitas—an

Three items show that at least some of the participants in the battle or battles from which the hoard came were Christian. Two are crosses of marvellous workmanship, made of thin sheets of Byzantine gold and Indian garnets, both folded as if to compress them.

The seventh century is outstanding for the number of women who played active, sometimes decisive roles in the fortunes of kingdoms, both earthly and spiritual. They are not to be underestimated. They had their own queenly agendas, engineering lines of patronage for their families, acting as brakes on hot-headed husbands, as brokers of deals, as

The suffix wic—Sandwich on the East Kent coast is a prime example—seems to reflect the sites of beach or estuarine markets.*4 When kings began to see opportunities for controlling and taxing them in the seventh century they were given royal protection and patronage and developed into what have become known as emporia. Hamwic, near Southampton, is

The monk Bede, writing in the year 731, knew that the Earth was round, that seasons changed with latitude and that tides swung with the moon’s phases.

The real dark age in British history, the yawning gap in its continuous narrative history, can be found in Book I of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, between Chapter 21, in which the fifth-century Gaulish bishop Germanus puts down a heresy among British Christians, and Chapter 23 which opens with events in 582. Germanus’s visit is generally dated to

Thanks to the sensational discovery of a hoard of battle-booty in a field near Lichfield in Staffordshire in 2009, we now have an idea of just what the spoils of Dark Age warfare looked like. Here are more than seventeen hundred objects of gold and silver, precious stones, millefiori and cloisonné, the peak of Early Medieval craftsmanship, equal in

In death his severed head and arms were displayed on stakes at a place which came to be known as Oswald’s Tree or Oswestry and his skull, a sacred possession of Durham Cathedral, exhibits a sword-cut wide enough to accommodate three fingers. His post-mortem career was as extraordinary as his life and death had been. Many miracles were said to have

It begs the question, what was so special about Kent, or Æthelberht? Its natural wealth as a ‘garden of England’ is one explanation; its geographical proximity to the kingdom of Frankia is another. The lands ruled by the Merovingian dynasties had never entirely shaken off their Romanitas; by comparison with the earliest English kingdoms they were