The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

• 178 • Catherine Hills
retrospectively defining the centuries before the arrival of the Augustinian mission in AD 597 as
‘the Pagan period’.
Outside southern and eastern England, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ seems inappropriate. ‘Pictish’ is used
instead in parts of Scotland, but oversimplifies complex and rather vague tribal organization. In
the south-west, ‘sub-Roman’ is current because it has been argued that elements of the social and
political structure of the Roman province survived there. ‘Arthurian’ is another term more current
in popular than academic literature; it implies the existence of King Arthur or an ‘Arthur-type
figure’ in the post-Roman period, usually in the decades around AD 500. ‘The Later Iron Age’
stresses continuity between later prehistory and the first millennium AD, while ‘Early Christian’
accentuates the role of the Church.
Attempts at neutrality include ‘Early medieval’ and ‘Early historic’. However, ‘medieval’ can
still be understood as meaning ‘after AD 1066’, and ‘Early historic’ suggests a very limited range
of documentary sources, which is not true for the second half of the period covered in this
chapter. Archaeological dating for this period is either imprecise, as with radiocarbon, or indirectly
dependent on historical sources, as with coins. Dendrochronology, used to great effect in this
period in Scandinavia, depends on the survival of wood, which has not yet been found in sufficient
quantity in Britain.
Historically derived dates are still the main basis for chronology, yet the significance of these
dates is open to considerable doubt. We might begin in AD 410, the date when traditionally a
beleaguered emperor Honorius told Britain to look to its own defences; but had the withdrawal
of troops begun much sooner? Did vestiges of Roman authority last much longer? Is this a
reliably transmitted imperial letter? Why should that date have had any meaning in Scotland (see
Chapter 8)? Alternatively, we could start with the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in AD 449, a date
that Bede, writing centuries after the events, gives us as the best sense he could make of the
records at his disposal. He was a careful scholar, but he could have been wrong, and much ink has
been spilt in inconclusive discussion of both these dates. At the other end, 1066 is agreed by all
as the date when William, Duke of Normandy defeated and replaced the Anglo-Saxon kings as
ruler of England, although that did not have an immediate impact on Scotland and Wales. Nor is
it a date traceable in much of the evidence used by archaeologists. It can be seen in those places
where the impact of an aggressive, intrusive, military aristocracy might be expected, most notably
in the construction of castles, as well as in the scale of church building, and in the destruction of
ordinary houses, but in other respects there was no change: house types, burial practice, pottery
and even coinage continued uninterrupted. The year AD 1000, or perhaps 1050, might be better
because neither carries the overwhelming historical message embodied in ‘1066’.
SOURCES
Even from the earlier centuries, two major narrative sources survive, the De Excidio Britanniae by
Gildas (Winterbottom 1978) and the Historia Ecclesiastica by Bede (Colgrave and Mynors 1969),
although they could both be seen as casting as much darkness as light on the period, partly,
paradoxically, because they are so persuasive in the picture they present. Both authors had messages
to convey; neither was attempting to write ‘objective’ history and neither is easily verifiable outside
their own writings, which themselves constitute the main sources for the periods about which (or
during which) they wrote. For the fifth century, only one of them is really independent, since
Bede drew heavily on Gildas for this period.
Gildas is usually described as a monk who wrote in the sixth century in south-western Britain,
although this is not fully demonstrable. He was an educated British Christian cleric, but not
necessarily a monk at the time of writing. His precise dates are not clear, although his life must