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

• 180 • Catherine Hills
and the Scots. This view suited not only the Anglo-
Saxons but also the English of later centuries. In the
sixteenth century, the Church of Bede was seen as
the ancestor of the reformed Anglican Church,
predating and avoiding the errors of medieval
Catholicism. We owe much of our knowledge of
Anglo-Saxon England to this idea, because it was
what led Queen Elizabeth’s archbishop, Matthew
Parker, to seek out, preserve and study Anglo-Saxon
manuscripts (some of his collection remains to this
day in the library of Corpus Christi, Cambridge,
Parker’s college). Seventeenth-century
Parliamentarians saw the Anglo-Saxon witan, the
council consulted by the king, as the model for
constitutional monarchy from which the Stuarts had
wrongly departed. They and others after them also
believed in an ancestral, free, democratic Germanic
society, which by the nineteenth century had become
the basis for the thesis that the English were a
peculiarly blessed nation, suited to rule others around
the world and distinctly superior to their Celtic
neighbours. The Victorians saw King Alfred as the
model of a virtuous, wise and patriotic king (Figure
10.2). The twentieth century, however, brought two
wars with Germany and the end of empire. It began
to seem better to play down the role of the Anglo-
Saxons and to stress both continuity from Roman to
medieval and the kinship of all the inhabitants of
Britain with each other, rather than with ancestors
Figure 10.2 Perception of King Alfred.
of the German enemy.
Source: A.S.Esmonde Cleary
This approach is supported by an alternative
version of the history of the fifth century in Britain
which can be derived, albeit in sketchy outline, from some (but not all) readings of Gildas. This
allows for the survival of an extensive part of Roman Britain under British rule, preferably the
rule of King Arthur or someone like him. The existence of Arthur as a real person at all, let alone
as a great king, has been much, and inconclusively, debated. The story became popular after the
Norman Conquest, because it seemed to provide an alternative to the defeated Anglo-Saxons’
view of the history of Britain. It was popularized most vigorously by Geoffrey of Monmouth,
who wrote his History of the Kings of Britain in the early twelfth century. At the end of the Middle
Ages, Arthur was the name given by the Welsh Henry Tudor to his eldest son, and Arthur has
persisted as a figure in myth and literature through the centuries. He had a brief vogue as an
archaeological inspiration in the 1960s and early 1970s, with the excavation at South Cadbury
(‘Camelot’), and at other western British sites such as Glastonbury, Cadbury Congresbury, and
the Roman city of Wroxeter, near Shrewsbury. Occupation of these sites in the fifth or sixth
centuries was seen as evidence for the existence of sub-Roman leader(s) and for survival of a
partly Roman way of life, thus providing a factual basis for the later Arthurian stories. In part,
this was the inspiration for a more widespread search for ‘continuity’ from Roman to Saxon on
both urban and rural settlement sites. In towns, this search has been largely unsuccessful, and has