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

Early historic Britain
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have fallen within the second half of the fifth and the sixth centuries, and he probably lived in
south-western Britain. What is clear is that the chapters of his work that are most often used
today form only one part of a carefully constructed literary work, the main theme of which was
a comparison of the Britons of his own day with the Israelites of the Bible. Gildas’ account of
the invasion of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons is presented within a framework of history in which
assaults by barbarians were seen as punishments by God for the sins of the British. This had
happened, he claimed, after the Romans had left (at a much disputed date in the fifth century),
and the wickedness of Gildas’ contemporaries made it likely that it would happen again unless
they mended their ways. From Gildas we learn that barbarians invaded Britain in the fifth century,
that they caused great destruction and that they took control of parts of the country. However,
much of the detailed history that has been constructed from De Excidio has gone far beyond
what can legitimately be learnt from it.
Bede is better documented. He was a learned Christian monk who lived and wrote at the
monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria. He died in AD 635, having completed the Historia in 631.
In this work, he told the story of the Anglo-Saxons’ conversion to Christianity. His main aim was
not to write a narrative history of the creation of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, although the
information he provides is our main source for that history. He wrote from an Anglo-Saxon
perspective and had a negative view of the British which he was able to support by reference to
their own historian, Gildas.
Bede was not alone in his scholarship. From the later seventh century onwards, an increasing
body of written documents of all kinds survives, both secular and religious in purpose, including
poetry, chronicles, law codes, letters, charters and wills, gospel books, sermons, lives of saints,
and even collections of riddles (Godden and Lapidge 1991). Late Anglo-Saxon England had a
complex administration which used written records and which was taken over by the Normans.
The Vikings may have torn holes in our knowledge of the ninth century, but the eighth century,
and the centuries immediately before the Norman conquest, look as fully historical as those after
it.
The archaeological evidence for the period is unevenly preserved in time and space, so that
discussion of, for example, fifth-century Scotland will be based on different kinds of evidence
from that of tenth-century Wessex, and will need to be conducted on different terms. Outside
Anglo-Saxon England, there is relatively little archaeological evidence for the whole period, and
what there is is not always precisely datable. Fortified strongholds, and the metalwork made for
their rulers, predominate in the record. There are few lower status settlements, no towns and not
many burial sites. By contrast, in England, cemeteries and the artefacts buried with the dead still
provide the basis for research into the fifth to seventh centuries, although in recent decades
settlement sites have been excavated more extensively. From the seventh century, burials ceased
to be elaborately furnished and decline in importance as a source of information, while churches,
sculpture and manuscripts emerge as an important class of evidence throughout Britain. At the
same time, towns reappear for the first time since the Roman era, at first as coastal trading places
but later as a network of administrative centres with, amongst other functions, that of mints for
a re-established coinage.
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS
Because the history of the period has always been bound up with national identity, more significance
has been attached to the differences between peoples than to their similarities. The Anglo-Saxons
have been seen as arriving in force from northern Germany, displacing the Romano-Britons of
eastern and southern Britain, so that the English were and are a distinct people from the Welsh