Sublime

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

sanguine

Cernunnos.

Whatever the complexities of Britannia’s terminal political history, the fragmentary remains that survive from these few manuscripts, remote in time and distance from events on the ground, are unsatisfactory grounds for telling the whole story. In themselves they paint a crude picture of conflict, insecurity, imperial impotence and internal dissens

In the mid twentieth century it was thought to have lasted for a few hundred years, and to have commenced after fully developed urban civilizations had arisen in Egypt and Mesopotamia, relegating Britain to the status of a barbarous frontier.

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

In both Byzantium and the Frankish West, it was the fusion of secular with religious influences that created societies cohesive enough to withstand the aftershocks of imperial breakdown, barbarian invasion and Islamic expansion.

Most linear earthworks function in complex ways that have little to do with fortification. They are predominantly displays of prestige and power, like the grandiose walls and gates of country parks. Even the massive ramparts of the great Iron Age hillforts say much more about display than they do about direct military threat. In an unmistakeable co

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’