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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.

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

The fort at Banna (Birdoswald) on Hadrian’s Wall is, perhaps, the best place to catch sight of localized lordship in its early development.b The last army pay wagons cannot have arrived here much later than the 390s; the last visit by a Dux Britanniarum probably occurred in the same decade. Banna’s fifth-century commanders responded by expediently

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

Unlike coin, paid out from the imperial treasury in wages and taxed directly at markets, tax raised in kind and consisting primarily of consumable, perishable foods – ale, honey, meat and cheese – along with grain, wool, linen, underwood, timber and crafted items, could not be moved over great distances. Their production and consumption were, essen

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

Between the Fenland edge at Cambridge and the scarp that forms the north-west edge of Essex a series of dykes survives that seems designed to control, or prevent, access between East Anglia and the Chiltern heartlands, some time between the late fourth and sixth centuries.37 This narrow strip, perhaps formerly the northern border of the Trinovantes

Any study of the great and small linear earthworks of the British landscape must reach beyond ideas of conflict and chronology to consider the labour and organization involved in their construction. Such joint enterprises must have grown out of a sense of place, of belonging and ownership. They involved coercion – slaves or defeated enemies – or pa

The Wansdykes of the south-west, two discrete (but by no means discreet) earthworks that may belong to a single grandiose scheme, are massive in all respects. The east section runs for 13 miles along a high chalk ridge looking south across the Vale of Pewsey. The great prehistoric monuments of the Kennet valley – Avebury and Silbury Hill – lie in p