Not a Note On Some Matters with Britain

OK then, Peter, I hear you ask, WTF is it with all this Dark Ages shit? Are you serious?
Well, yes and no, you know. As always. But this is not an enterprise in search of The Origin. There
isnt one; there are lots and lots. Whats always most important is who, what and where we are
now. Where were headed is a part of that. And where weve come from, yes, obviously, we find
determining factors an infinity of them. Im not trying to do atavistic simplification nor essentialist
philological hermeneutics, but in the end some kind of forward-looking comprehensible complexity.
What I present here, this little heap of obscure rubbish I have accumulated (& what better starting
point for poetry?), isnt The Truth About Who Were And Therefore Really Are As Shown Back In Ye
Dark Ages. Its some fragments out of the past which glittered and glistened in the same way as
some things do now. No more than that.
So, the earliest kings of Wessex, especially Cerdic. You may well know the issue here, but Ill try not
to assume this, here, or elsewhere. Wessex was the South-Western Anglo-Saxon kingdom, one of
the relatively major ones with a familiar name, collectively labelled in the past the Heptarchy.
Virtually the sole written source for its early history is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a record
inaugurated (892 or so) at the time of Alfred of Wessexs project to build a literate culture in his
kingdom, as it became the only survivor of the wreck of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the first
great Viking Invasion. Its record of events in Wessex prior to the establishment of a stable line of
rulers with secure successions by Alfreds grandfather Ecgbert in 802 is generally patchy and
obscure, more so obviously as we go back to the origins of the West Saxon settlements in
post-colonial Britain (and I will use that phrase, as it is a correct one):
495. In this year two princes [note: MSS. aldormen, perhaps a translation of principes;
duces duo F Lat(in version of Chronicle)] Cerdic and Cynric his son, came to Britain at the
place which is called Cerdicesora, and the same day they fought against the Welsh.
(The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, translated by GN Garmonsway [JM Dent & Sons, 1953], p 14
including footnote #1)
The point is, our Cerdic bears a Celtic name not a Germanic name, a version of the British *Caraticos,
Latinised as Caractacus, the leader famous for his resistance to the Roman Conquest. The Chronicle
gives him a genealogy dating with antiquarian relish back nine generations to the chief
Anglo-Saxon god Woden (via his son Bldg), though written down under the resolutely pious
late Ninth Century Wessex kings. The genealogy has likely been ripped off from that of the Kings of
Bernicia (the northern component of Northumbria, extending up from North of Yorkshire to beyond
the current border with Scotland), for whom it may be genuine, ie an old & well-established lie.
Moreover, other subsequent kings from Cerdic have born Celtic names too, eg the great Cdwalla
(*Katuwallios, Welsh Cadwalla, a variant of Cadwallon, a name of several Welsh kings).
Whoever the West Saxons, whatever that may mean, were, is not simple. Their original name as a
grouping was the Gewisse (says Bede [in the other Anglo-Saxon historical text, A History of the
English Church and People [731]) a word translated as wise, certain, sure. A possible ethnonym

more suitable for a mixed grouping, a bunch of mercenaries very good at seizing and maintaining
control of their chances a bunch of wise guys in fact. The use of external forces to provide, as we
would say now, security was widespread in the Late Roman Empire, and probably a necessity in
the post-colonial period in Britain. The Roman armies stationed on the island had been taken to the
continent to support successive failed attempts at claiming imperial power, and the famous reply by
Emperor Honorius to an appeal for help in 410 called on the communities of Britain to defend
themselves his armies were busy fighting the ex-army of Britain in Gaul and Spain, and vainly
dealing with the Visigoths. The famous story of Hengist and Horsa, invited in as mercenaries by
Vortigern and settling in Kent, then rebelling (dated at 449, probably not accurately, by the
Chronicle), may well represent just one episode in a pattern repeated elsewhere in Britain.
A problem with the early history of Wessex is fitting together the archaeology Fifth Century
settlements in the Upper Thames Valley of a typical Anglo-Saxon nature, not matching the not very
believable and rather jumbled foundation story in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, with lame eponymic
details and otherwise unknown and unrepeated place names and personal names. What did happen
was not coherently recorded, beyond the importance of Cerdic it appears as if all other
Gewisse/Wessex rulers needed his ancestry. Id bet on some royal scribe (or churchman acting as
such) being delighted at inventing the cunningly similar new name for the Gewisse, Wessex,
perhaps in the days of Cdwalla. It put the enterprise on a par with more respectable longestablished kingdoms named after the invading groups, and helps hide its dodgy, ethnically impure
origins. The Celtic names of the rulers have to be kept everyone knows them anyway: we just dont
talk about it! (Northumbria hides the British names of its constituents, Bernicia (Bryneich) and Deira
(Deywr), though Kent could still run, a venerable monosyllable that sounds Germanic enough.)
Though the Anglo-Saxons maintained the myth of their descent from the Angles, Saxons and
Jutes, and their enemies the Welsh from the native Britons (reciprocating this simple ethnic
dichotomy), all sorts were wandering around this island in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (not to
mention later): as German-language speaking groups involved in the Anglo-Saxon (and Jutish!)
Conquest also Franks (nearest neighbours across the Channel), Frisians (whose language is closest to
English), Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and other more obscure tribes (eg the Rugini and the
Boructari, even the Huns, get mentioned all floating around in Gaul during and after Attilas
Hunnish Invasion of 451-3); and then of course other raiders and settlers: Picts (probably
linguistically and culturally distinct from the British), Irish, and dont forget the Attacotti, who had
groups employed as mercenaries in the early Fifth Century Roman army, a fine reputation as
cannibals (according to St Jerome), but an obscure origin (either from Old Irish aithechthatha,
tributary peoples, similar inferior status groups to the historically attested Irish groupings called
Disi [vassals] who made settlements in the South West of both Wales and England; or from Celtic
roots meaning the Ancient Ones, and you can emphasise that they are usually linked with the
Picts). And the natives too! Speaking British/Primitive Welsh (and with surviving regional dialects of
these?), Vulgar Latin (similar probably to the Gaulish version thatll end up as French), and even yer
proper Latin (or whatever version the ruling elite actually used). We know all this from both the
contemporary historical accounts, and from archaeology.
Some of these migrants were individuals or families simply hoping for a new life escaping climate
change and flooding in the Low Countries, the constant warfare across Gaul, the irruption of raiders
and settlers into their own territory; some isolated raiders and adventurers, and some organised

bands of warriors, whether acting as mercenaries or on their own account (our gallant lads the
Gewisse here), and possibly some well-organised large-scale migrations (of which the clearest
example is of Britons from largely the South-West to transform Armorica into Brittany, and beyond
to Galicia). As with contemporary and recent migrants, there were often close ties and connections
with the homeland for many years (which can be traced archaeologically). We must add also
whatever even more miscellaneous remains of multi-ethnic Roman civilisation were stranded after
the last helicopter left Londinium and other cities (which were Latin-speaking at a popular level). The
ruling elites in Britain probably varied in their levels of Romanisation between fully acculturalised in
the lowland cities (and what villas remained), to families in the more upland areas more conscious of
and involved in traditional ways of life. The failure of Latin to provide the language of the people
after the end of the Roman Empire in Britain speaks volumes though it was probably not a simple
matter.
And it is clear that though there may have been massacres and exterminations, there was also much
living together: possibly in an apartheid-style situation with the Welsh given lower social and legal
status but still present. The West Saxon stuff, they sailed in and conquered, giving a fraudulent
story to match Sussex, Essex and East Anglia in antiquity and pure Anglo-Saxonness is a lie. The
foundational lie at the base of any nation state (which England became extremely early): that we
come from a simple and original band of heroes, in direct descent. Youll find the Queens descent
from Cerdic the Saxon still if you want to find it, the crucial link being the marriage of St Margaret
(Anglo-Saxon King Edmund Ironsides grand-daughter) to Malcom Canmore, King of Scots, and
their daughter marrying Henry I, from whom descend the Plantagenets and all the rest since of
course.
We Britons must encounter Hybrid Theory. We are all bastards; those claiming purity of blood are
deluded or deluding. I refer the reader to Daniel Defoes The True-Born Englishman:
These are the heroes that despise the Dutch,
And rail at new-come foreigners so much,
Forgetting that themselves are all derived
From the most scoundrel race that ever lived;
A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones,
Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns,
The Pict and painted Briton, treacherous Scot,
By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought;
Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes,
Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains,
Who, joined with Norman-French, compound the breed
From whence your true-born Englishmen proceed.
And lest by Length of time it be pretended
The climate may this modern breed ha' mended,
Wise Providence, to keep us where we are,
Mixes us daily with exceeding care.
We have been Europe's sink, the jakes where she
Voids all her offal outcast progeny.

...
Dutch, Walloons, Flemings, Irishmen, and Scots,
Vaudois and Valtelins, and Hugonots,
In good Queen Bess's charitable reign,
Supplied us with three hundred thousand men.
ReligionGod, we thank Thee!sent them hither,
Priests, Protestants, the Devil and all together:
Of all professions and of every trade,
All that were persecuted or afraid;
Whether for debt or other crimes they fled,
And so on. Glorious support for the (oh foundational lies indeed!) Glorious Revolution brought
over too many Dutchmen, you know. The poem demonstrates, with gusto, how From this
amphibious ill-born mob began / That vain ill-natured thing, an Englishman. Thats what we are. If
you want more Mongrel Theory I refer you to China Mivilles Perdido Street Station (Pan Books,
2000), where the gangster (or wise guy, remember) Mr Motley, composed of uncountable
heterogeneous bodily elements joined together (being remade is a punishment imposed on the
masses to keep them in line in the world of this book Motley would appear to have made himself
to exceed such pariah status and flaunt and celebrate it). He discourses to the artist he has chosen to
make a statue of himself, Lin, herself of a defined species combining human and insect elements,
when she enquired what his origins were:
I wondered when youd ask that, Lin. I did hope you wouldnt, but I know it was most
unlikely. It makes me wonder if we understand each other at all . . . Youre still not looking
the right way. At all. Its a wonder you can create such art. You still see this he
gesticulated vaguely at his own body with a monkeys paw - as pathology. Youre still
interested in what it was and how it went wrong. This is not error or absence or mutancy:
this is image and essence . . . This is totality. . . . You too are the bastard-zone, Ms Lin! Your
art takes you to a place where your understanding and your ignorance blur. . . . Mr Motley
continued with his philosophical ramblings, his ruminations on mongrel theory. pp140-1
Looking back, you will encounter not purity of origins not unless you look back to the near-lifeless
monotony of the Wrm Glaciation but migrations, mixtures, impossible hybridisations
(British-speaking princes and peasants alike choosing to adopt, lock stock and barrel, a culture and
language inspired by the new ways offered by the Anglo-Saxons); later resolved away into a simple
foundation myth. West Saxons a phrase as much a PR coinage I suspect as my local train
franchise operators working name, Abellio West Anglia. Another bunch of Low Countries
carpetbaggers out to loot our wealth! Good thing were used to it. I should applaud it. My paternal
ancestors were likely medieval Picard or Walloon economic migrants, bless them.
And this why Cedric is suspect Scotts last of the Old Skool Saxons in Ivanhoe, in changed times
resolutely holding true to Origins (and with a capital O, I mean the Foundation Myth: his ancestors
were probably far more culturally flexible and adept). He is indeed a real old dull-as-ditchwater
Anglo-Saxon pudding, with a fake name given more Old English connotations in its morphemes than
the dubious Cerdic. Cedric is someone who cannot accept change and process, unwilling to make the
most of what there is around him. A man of absolute inherited and unreflected-upon principles, not

someone able to envisage and help create a new reality out of the fragments history (as always, but
particularly at some times of rapid change) presents him with, unlike Scotts hero Ivanhoe or my
hero, Caraticos, Dux of the Gewisse. The greatest British-born wise guy until Curly Humphreys.
And whos next then? Ahh! Arthur himself, always out of time. Probably, if he existed (ie a dude
called something Artorial doing some important stuff against the Anglo-Saxons), a little earlier
than Cerdic. Probably, too, also not a king, but a warband leader, a dux. OK so Gildas doesnt
mention him: his On the Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae), written early or mid Sixth Century, is
the only British/Welsh contemporary narrative of the post-colonial period dealing with the early
Welsh kingdoms. It is a splenetic sermon, a rant addressed to those who know what hes talking
about, in which actual leaders are transformed into political cartoon monsters. It is like trying to
obtain historical information from the cartoons of Steve Bell or Martin Rowson.
Well, if Arthur never existed, that is not something we can be sure of. He has existed since then of
course, and still exists, more so than most who walked the earth in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries. It is
a negative space Arthur occupies no mention by Gildas, earliest reference probably the famous
he was no Arthur applied to Gwawrddur in The Gododdin, and the other very early poetic
reference to Arthur, in The Stanzas of the Graves (Englynion Y Beddau) of the Black Book of
Carmarthen, A wonder or mystery is the grave of Arthur. The Once and Future King indeed a
perpetual active absence.
This is getting theological. In the way of all those who attempt to actualise Arthur, Ill do so on some
on the basis of some carefully chosen details, also as it happens theological. Now, one of the two
native born British who played a public role in the Roman and post-Roman world in the Fifth Century
and has left a public record is Pelagius Morgan in good Welsh whose anti-Augustinian theology of
redemption through individual effort rather than through grace worried the central party cadres in
Rome greatly. (The other was that upper-class Briton and slave, Patricius.)
Though his field of action seems to have been the Roman world (Rome, Carthage, finally Jerusalem),
Pelagius had many followers in Britain. The Life of St Germanus of Auxerre (Vita Germani of
Constantius of Lyon, 470s?) is the source here. He was sent over (429?) by a Gaulish Synod to fight
the Pelagian heresy in Britain, whose proponents were the post-colonial ruling elite (RomanoBritish), who are certainly not depicted as being on their uppers at this point. (One benefit of the
ending of Roman rule was the ending of Roman taxation.) He was not (despite his Lifes claims)
successful St David in the next century was still battling against Pelagianism, more successfully in
his case. Gildas was linked with David in this Age of Saints that created Celtic Christianity.
Though the Life provides evidence of a prosperous and assured ruling elite, and Gildas famously talks
of present prosperity, it is clear that post-colonial Britain was in many ways a failed state. There
was no mint and no connection to the Imperial treasury any longer nor any source of specie that the
now removed Roman army had been. Industrial production, eg of pottery, has ceased. The economy
is likely to have at once degraded (an age of austerity like ours so you cant be surprised at the
paradox of a rich and self-confident ruling elite still milking a dead economy, can you?). There would
be few professional soldiers left, and the political class and its traditions may well have been
decimated earlier after each defeat of the rebel Emperors. Real, ie successful in winning absolute
power, Emperors were savage in punishing disloyalty. Urbanisation was weak at this far edge of the
Empire, with small cities lacking it would appear (by this time) public or communal buildings. Though

theres evidence for use of Latin in cities (widely across the population), the villa-owning class and
the army, the countryside would seem to have adopted the language less than in mainland Europe.
The result of the sudden loss of external absolute authority enabling a cash-based market economy
linked to mainland Europe appears to have been a failed state, a break up into competing factions
and localities, based often on the Roman political territorial divisions (civitates), themselves based to
some extent on pre-Roman political/cultural divisions, or on military commands (eg in the Hadrians
Wall environs).
Apart from localism, there are likely political divisions in terms of what to do in the situations they
found themselves in: return to the Empire and Roman values; maintenance of a Britannic Empire,
like that of Carausius in the Third Century (and effectively in the late Fourth/early Fifth Centuries); or
return to traditional pre-Roman (ie rural) culture and values is one trichotomy. Another issue,
reflecting the migrations of the time, both of soldiers as hired mercenaries (often given a settled
status as lati/foederati) and of family groups making a new life, is whether to reject these migrants,
or to accommodate with them to use their barbarian fighting skills is obvious, whether defensively
by community decision or on the other hand by forces seeking dominance over communities but
one can also see that at the basic rural peasant level, these economic migrants had greater
experience of the subsistence agriculture that now had to replace market production as the model.
Their skills and culture could well be far more useful for survival than Roman-British culture.
Religion similarly provided a range of splitting points. Christianity within the Late Roman Empire was
an urban phenomenon: as everyone knows pagani were the countrydwellers. The catastrophic
decline in urban life in Britain (not an ending, but a transformation greatly to the worse) will have
led to a crisis within religion. There had been quite a revival of Paganism during the earlier part of
the Fourth Century it seems unlikely that pagan beliefs and practices (and especially not those of
the rural masses) will have been Christianised by the mid Fifth Century, just like that. There is
evidence of Druidic culture persisting in Gaul after the Roman colonisation but its link to
organised resistance to the Romans may have led to its extirpation as a system of organised elite
religion in Britain. But a religious compromise blending Roman and traditional practices appears
throughout the Roman period. Indeed the activity recorded in the hagiographies of the Age of the
Saints reveals the necessity for missionary activity within the westernmost areas of Britain during
the Fifth and Sixth Centuries those unaffected of course by the pagan Anglo-Saxons. These Saints
operated within the new monastic culture within Christianity, embracing isolated rural spots and
ignoring largely the historic urban church of the bishops. There is conflict, too, as discussed above,
with the Pelagians (linked with the old urban elite). Some Christianity seems to have survived in
urban areas Lincoln, Canterbury, St Albans (though there the focus shifts outside the walls to the
martyr site), possibly elsewhere (Worcester and Gloucester), even in some smaller places, eg
Wareham.
Religion then was in a fluid situation, with conflict within the British Christian communities, where
the groups successfully imposing their views (yes! the Saints!) seem utterly opposed to spread the
Gospel amongst the Enemy, or the Britons left stranded in the East of the island. Christianity was a
purely Proto-Welsh speaking in Southern Britain, until Augustines mission in 597; (the Gaelic
speaking church in Ireland lacked the intense hatred towards the Anglo-Saxons that the Cymry
defined themselves by, and of course had initiated missionary activity in the North of the island
earlier.)

Hence I think Gildass silence. The incest, murder and general tyranny he records of his
contemporary rulers were venial sins, which can be forgiven and repented of but heresy! Extirpate
and practise damnatio memoriae eliminate their very existence in history! Anglo-Saxons were
sent by God to punish the British sins and merely threatened the flesh; Pelagians would be direct
from Satan, threatening British souls. The early medieval saints lives, following a common line,
present Arthur always in negative terms a true tyrant though his popular image was totally
different of course, suggesting some conflict between him and what became the mainstream of
British Christianity. A little supporting evidence to this view of Arthur is that his Romanness can be
seen clearly, ie that he belonged culturally to the class most likely to be Pelagian. His name could be
Roman or Latinised Celtic; but consider the character who appears in the earliest mentions as his
number two Cei (later Kay) Gaius of course. And consider that Arthur appears in his earliest
mentions not as a king, claiming local rule along local traditions, but as dux or imperator even
a war leader not claiming such unRoman powers.
Identity, to draw back a bit, is fluid in Fifth and Sixth Century Britain (across certain choices). You can
choose who you are going to be. A xenophobic bunch of fellow-ex-Roman-British rejecting the more
Romanised elements of the ruling-class, but with a memory of the Empires uniting of Britain and a
more vernacular version of the previous language is one. You will call in, for example, sections of the
Votadini/Gododdin of South-East Caledonia, historically outside the Empire, but its allies, and
speaking your language, to provide military force when needed; never again, once the lessons
been learnt by the end of the Fifth Century, the Anglo-Saxons. Thats one way. You have a
renewed and active form of Christianity, and you tend to occupy lands less tied in to the shattered
Roman market economy, so more able to at least keep feeding yourselves. You will be the Cymry
soon enough, your kings in Wales mainly descended indeed (or claiming to be) from Cunedda of
Manaw Gododdin (the South shore of the Firth of Forth).
Another is rejection of the old entirely. In the post-colonial world and economy, what enables you to
survive is what is valuable. In a post-money economy, those who already live in a subsistence
economy, in unstratified small groups it appears when they first come over, are very appealing role
models. You might as well join in with them entirely the old ways are gone, you may even have
begun to lose your language a little in the more Romanised lowlands, and you have no connection
with your former ruling elite still based in the decaying cities, who dont even speak your old
language (which itself is in a state of flux). Learn Anglo-Saxon (itself a koine of dialects) and live like
the Anglo-Saxons! The future is Low German speaking and hard work in the fields, but, at least at
first, possibly as free men and women.
At first. The archaeology is reasonably clear. In many places in eastern Britain the immediately
post-colonial human settlements appear as being of relative equals, with some evidence of ranking
ie only relatively equal, some plainly richer etc than others (within limits), but no evidence of
hereditary wealth. Some people were just better growing or making whatever it was. To quote my
favourite book on this period, Robin Fleming, Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise 400 to 1070
(Penguin Books, 2011), p 59:
The picture that emerges is one of incoming migrants without much social hierarchy and
certainly without a warrior aristocracy. . . . British peasants may have preferred immigrant
agriculturalists as neighbours to omnivorous villa owners . . . The newcomers and the natives

married one anothers womenfolk, and they were buried in the same cemeteries. Roman
material culture was dead and gone in eastern Britain in the fifth century, and many British
seem to have adopted that of the newcomers, whose numbers were significant by the year
500, but who were never so many that they outnumbered the indigene. . . In the eastern
half of Britain, it looks very much as if the descendants of the Romano-British were
experimenting with barbarian material culture, all the while exposing the immigrants to
their own habits and social practices. In doing so, British people and immigrants alike began
to devise novel identities. Over the course of the next century, these new solidarities would
begin to coalesce into a nascent Englishness
or
People living and dying in eastern England in the generations after 420 were cobbling
together distinctive little cultures all their own out of this cacophony of peoples and
circumstances, and these cultures were heterogeneous, highly localized and very fluid.
(p 49)
This is shown in both excavated strictures and graves (with amongst pagans, grave goods). During
the Sixth Century, this changes as the formation of high status elites becomes apparent in both
housing and funeral arrangements. With increasing prosperity, and a new identity to boot, pioneer
relative equality was replaced by hereditary privilege (and we can bet too that the areas controlled
by force-based gangs and traditional rulers heavily emphasised status differentiations, and that
such areas were constantly increasing). The movements of peoples are not recorded in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; it is the movements of small groups or leaders establishing themselves by
force. They may have born little connection with the origins of the people they were claiming power
over. One can witness here the possible Swedish origins of the East Anglian dynasty, established
later above a population who appear more straightforwardly from the Angle and Saxon groups.
So, our archaeologically inflected historian can comment:
the appearance of costly child burials in sixth-century England discloses the development of
the heritability of high status and the notion that it belonged not only to those who had
earned or arrogated it, but to their offspring as well. (p 72)
and, aligning the barrow burials of Sutton Hoo (and elsewhere in Britain, including reuse of existing
prehistoric monuments) with the famous funeral of Beowulf, in a classic example of the Invention of
Tradition (that truly traditional British cultural habit, dating back at least as far as Stonehenge):
Whatever their inspiration, the barrow burials, the elaborate cremations and the
weapon-burials were all making uniform arguments about ancestry, dynasty and the
timelessness of privilege, just as the genealogies and the origin stories were. All were
important components in a novel vision of the past, one that a foreign warrior elite had
come to Britain and had conquered much of it. (p 99)
A final quotation, to remind us that all origins are complex acts of bastardy: p 87
Another pair of inscriptions allows us to see these changes occurring over time. The first
probably dates to the second half of the fifth century, and it was carved in honour of a

certain Clutorigus son of Paulinus Marinus of Latium. The second, later inscription, found a
dozen kilometres away, commemorates Maglicunas son of Clutorigus. . . . The language of
the first stone is Latin, but the second is bilingual [ie, with an ogham alphabet Irish language
inscription also] and includes a Hibernicized version of Maglicunass name. Thus we have a
grandfather with a very Roman [whatever that may mean!] nomen and cognomen, who may
have been born in Latium in Italy. His son, Clutorigus was known by a British name, and his
grandson spent enough time on the company of Irishmen that it was deemed appropriate,
when he dies, to commemorate him both in Latin and in Irish. We seem to be moving
inexorably from a more or less Roman world to a world of bilingual or even trilingual
households, places where formerly Romanized elites and Irishmen cooperated and made
common cause to gain or solidify control over bits of territory. (p 87; first stone at
Llandyssilio, Pembrokeshire, second stone at Nevern, accompanied by a second bilingual
Latin and ogham inscribed stone to Vitalianus Emeritus)
So its not great war leaders establishing realms by conquest allowing their grateful followers to
settle the land; its largely disorganised migration all over the place (including of course Britons to
Brittany; and Saxons and Franks too back and forwards across the Channel), some by groups of
honest people wanting a new life in safety, and willing to work hard in a new land; some by smaller
bunches of protectors, mercenaries and wise guys seeking to obtain the good life without
backbreaking labour in the fields. Unsurprisingly, the latter end up in time controlling the former
(merging also with those whom chance and aggression have made more dominant amongst the
non-militarised communities), and both making sure that they and theirs carry on the family racket.
This all seems real to me. Alas, the Myth of the Norman Yoke, good enough for the Levellers, so it
ought to be good enough for us, has to go. According to Robin Flemings book, and her account
(except for assumptions about the limitations of Bedes knowledge of his own world!) always
combines intelligent analysis of up-to-date archaeology with excellent textual knowledge and a
grasp of how power and hegemony work, the yoke was of course put on us earlier, as you can guess.
Some places may never have escaped it the upland regions where a still tribal-based local elite
remained, or areas where Roman/ Romano-British estates in their entirety fitted into the new
order through direct take-over or cultural change. As more settlements ended up in someones
control, so the wealth of the ruling elites increased. We get trade, need for money, powerful
institutions emerging that necessitate supporting on a more elaborate basis than sending in tribute
in kind and providing occasional manpower to the Big Man. We get a money economy again (and a
state powerful and clever enough to organise and control this), and we find then the development of
nucleated settlements, your English village. Areas of centralised control larger than a days journey
across need subdivision, and subordination a few very rich players, on the level of
ealdormen/earls, and a large number of localised smaller-scale owners of land and people, thegns,
similar to the gentry class who still provide the dominant social tone and ruling elite in this Britain.
They controlled the populations lives (literally directing labour on the village communal fields and
their own directly owned demesne), ensured the requirements of life (religion & burial, access to
markets, rights to use of land, rights to justice and protection, access to mills) were under their
control, and available at a cost to those under them, when once they could have been freely
obtained or under communal control. Privatisation of what had been communal, wealth built up
from small payments from the poor masses paying for the right to have the necessities of life (I
wont use the word enjoy here), all maintained by ideology (Christianity loves a ruler though the

early pagan period complexes seem to have contained religious sites also, suggesting links between
rulers and the gods and mythical history), written law codes taking justice out of the community, and
central monopoly of physical force. This is not an obscure and irrelevant story; it is our story now.
One story from the time that doesnt seem real, though, is the Hallelujah Battle, when, after
rhetorically routing the Pelagians, Germanus defeated a raiding group of Picts and Saxons by getting
the British to jump out and shout Hallelujah at them. His hagiographer is obviously remembering
the ancient Gallic folk-tale of The Travels of Babar.
The poem sequence jumps to Stane Street, the basis for Stortfords existence as a setlement. Its the
name of the old road from Colchester, touching on Braughing, then St Albans, between in fact the
two most developed towns in pre-Roman Britain, and with a major settlement between. All became
important Roman sites, and the route was modernised, ie straightened, under their rule. At this
point a settlement began at a crossing-point just to the North of the present town centre, either a
ford or a very light bridge. There seems to have been a settlement around there throughout the
Roman period, with some industrial and villa development locally (sounds very Victorian phrased like
that!). The place name Wickham, a small separate manor adjacent to the town suggests early
Anglo-Saxon settlement next to a surviving vicus, a place remaining some identity as a small
Romano-British town still. Id like to imagine not just Boudicca making the journey between
Camulodunon and Verlamion, whether in warlike wrath or just travelling, but maybe Artorius
between Verulamium and Camulodonum.
I cant get it out of my head either that Camulodonum, our Colchester, somehow lies behind
Camelot, at least as a name; but not much can be made from that other than Arthur and his
warband travelling through Stortford. Verulamium (St Albans) is interesting as being a Roman city
based on a pre-Roman British town, with archaeological and written evidence (Vita Germani) for
some continuing activity there in the post-colonial period, with emphasis shifting to Albans
martyrdom and burial site, which was outside the Roman city walls. Burial places always had to be
outside the city. Alban was an important saint to the British, with a shrine established over the
martyrdom site by the early Fifth Century, though the institutional traditions of the Abbey start with
King Offa of Mercias foundation of 703 perhaps completely purging and replacing the earlier
foundation, rather than continuing it, unlike what happened when Cenwalh of Wessex (note the
British name!) took possession of Glastonbury in 658. But it also occurs to me that as a name
Albanus is all too suitable for the first saint and protomartyr of Albion. He was beheaded: cults of the
cut off head were a special favourite of Celtic-speaking regions, and pre-existed the Martyr in
Verulamium (buried in sunken ritual shafts), and his decollated head was linked in legend also to a
holy well, that great Celtic holy locus. Suspicious or not? Id better add I find the head cult a powerful
metaphor for all intellectual cults of individual thinkers, whose thought become systematised and
worshipped in its own right, whether Albanus, Charlie Marx, or even Theodor Wiesengrundt Adorno
(more of this in Within These Latter Days and A Second Life).
Stortford is still important as a stopping place for travellers the A120 following Stane Street to the
West, where there are fewer settlements, but with many by-passes to the East, though you can
follow the old road through the small towns (also Roman-British small towns). Its a major route
from North of London to Felixstowe and Harwich, but is less important to the town than the
North-South axis. The towns High Street, up the hill East from the Market Square is short and has

few shops the main drag is North a little of the Market Square, and South quite a length. The
North-South road, the former A11 remains for its local users, an ad hoc collection of roads going
North-South, but diverting away from Cambridge into East Anglia about 12 miles beyond Stortford. It
was turned into a coherent road only by turnpiking in the Nineteenth Century, when the Epping New
Road was cut through Epping Forest. Its replaced for distant journeys by the M11 now, and the
railway line, of course, the main line between Liverpool Street and Cambridge, only trace left of the
mysterious West Angles. This is a major commuter route between a run of stations to the South of
Cambridge into the City, with Stortford greatly expanded after the line was opened, and is also now
the rail link between London and Stansted Airport (which by being prioritised has benefited the
Stortford commuters). Location, location, still.
So Boudicca couldstill come through the town, even from Kings Cross if she changed from tube to
train at Tottenham Hale. The Kings Cross mention relates to a Twentieth Century folk tale, which you
will find duly repeated as fact (just like the old Dark Ages, eh?). Celticist, fantasist and pioneering
Scottish Nationalist Lewis Spence decided to locate Boudiccas defeat by Suetonius Paulinus, in his
1937 book Boadicea, Warrior Queen of the Britons, at Battle Bridge, the genuine older name
(possibly a corruption of Broad Ford Bridge, over the River Fleet) for Kings Cross. As often in his
writings, it was a detailed lie. Her burial site being located under Platform 9 (or thereabouts) seems
to be an urban folk tale grace note added subsequently locally, and possibly inspiring the Harry
Potter ritual site later constructed on the platform. Or it can all be taken as it stands if you like I
refer you to < http://www.sotterraneidiroma.it/notizie-sdr/item/boudiccas-burial-discovered-atkings-cross >.
Now, Ive linked Boudicca with the Belgae, as the latter seem to represent the dominant elite culture
across South-East Britain in part maybe as a tribal migration (or more likely conquest of a native
population by a smaller band to form their new ruling class), like the Belgae of Hampshire, but also
as the most prestigious culture amongst a range of groupings. Prestigious because closer to richer
and more technically advanced Mediterranean culture. Roman accounts are quite clear about close
links across the Channel and archaeology supports this.
The Belgae are interesting, because they point out, again, the falsity of Pure Origins. Caesars
language is unclear to us in its famous descriptions of their separation from the main Gallic peoples
in Commentarii de Bello Gallico but he cant be blamed for the lack of a precise ethnographic
vocabulary, he just reported what he had observed (and, yes, I would trust both his powers of
observation and his accounts of what he observed). So Id happily accept that in a region of
North-East Gaul, just across from Britain in fact, some cultural bloc or blob existed (not an absolute
linguistic boundary), with a Celtic identity & probably Celtic-speaking ruling class (coming from the
groupings involved earlier in the Celtic Great Expedition and returning to establish hegemony over
the peoples to the North of the already established tribes/states of Gaul, but other features closer to
Germanic culture. A mongrel culture, probably therefore highly productive and successful. As
another example, I can think of the Cimbri of Jutland, identified by their Roman foes as Celts, having
the Gundestrop Cauldron centre-piece of the recent Celtic Exhibition created for them by Sarmatian
smiths (with its typically Celtic [what! yes: what indeed?] elephants no one ever wants to discuss),
yet living plonk where a couple of hundred years later we find our dear old friends the Jutes,
speaking it is presumed a language able to merge with/into Old English. The dichotomy that has
dominated ascriptions of identity and self-identity in British postcolonial history was a product of

new group affiliations based on defining us against them even though the groups were in fact
heavily mixed, with certainly many who were born or recently descended from
Celts/British/Welsh/&-what-about-the-Picts-Irish-&-Attacotti amongst the Germanic speaking,
even in dominant positions, and likewise amongst the British-speaking, the Welsh, many who had
were/had been Irish etc speaking (probably fewer Germanic speaking). This bastardising is the reality
of Migration Age population changes changes more subtle than one people chasing out another.
Here are some very pertinent statements from Anthony Conrans Introduction to The Penguin
Book of Welsh Verse (Penguin Books, 1967), pp 22-3:
The Welsh . . . when we first meet them in the sixth century, are in the process of
undergoing the traumatic experience of Roman withdrawal, re-emergence of total tribalism,
failure to keep their lands, mass migration and constant war. A people does not change its
language for nothing: suddenly to adapt a whole new pattern of syntax or rather, to let the
old formalities of speech lapse into linguistic chaos this is tantamount to cultural amnesis.
The same phenomenon can be witnessed in Anglo-Saxon England in the centuries following
the Norman conquest.
This provides a good cue for my grandson Neirin to make a cheerier entrance than his namesake.
Neirin is a standardised version of the original (proto-Welsh) name of the poet of Y Gododdin,
usually referred by a more modern Welsh form, Aneirin. It is enjoyable to consider Neirin/Aneirin as
the earliest named British, the earliest named Scottish and the earliest named Welsh poet. (Yes,
Taliesin is of the previous generation, but less has survived linked to his name that is genuinely from
his period, and his biography is muddled by folklore he is resonant but too strongly Celtic in his
associations, no longer a credible real person.) Aneirins poetry (and some of the Taliesin poetry) is
the limited, militaristically survivalist poetry Conran was referring to, whose purpose and value are
fighting the English. It is beautiful, plangent, vivid, formally masterly; but pretty monotonous,
unless you were in the meadhall getting drunk, and listening out for how you and your mates were
being ranked. A poetry for the hardest of times and the fiercest of societies. Probably similar to what
was sung in the Great Hall at Yeavering to thelfrith, just different language & different forms, and
probably a more elegiac tone, cos Neirins side was losing. Oh fuck thelfrith? King of Bernicia and
the whole of Northumbria, a great fighter and conqueror, of Deira, of the British/Welsh and even of
Dl Riata (the Irish-speaking group, centred originally on the Western Highlands, which later formed
the Kingdom of Scots after taking over the Pictish kingdom of Alba). He may well have been
responsible for defeating and killing virtually all the 300 warriors whod set out some time just
before 600 from Din Eidyn (Edinburgh Castle), a fortress of the Gododdin to attack the English at
Catraeth, probably Catterick, still a major base for the English Army.
Our final, well, obscure and puzzling Early Medieval personage enters after this, and brings in some
local interest. Stortford was owned before the Norman Conquest by someone referred to in the
Domesday Book as Eddeva Pulchra, a major land-owner at this point. She can be identified, and I
choose to do so, with Edith Swan Neck Eadgifu Swann Hnecca King Harold Godwinssons
mistress/first wife/wife more danico/ handfast wife. As opposed to his Queen, Ealdgyth,
daughter of lfgar Earl of Mercia, and previously wife to Gruffudd ap Llewellyn, King of Gwynedd
and last King of the Britons (before he was defeated by Harold and killed by his subjects). Eadgifu
Swann Hnecca was his love and the mother of his children. The other Queen also around was

Edward the Confessors Queen, Ealdgyth, Harolds sister. Eadgifu Swann Hnecca is reported as
having identified Harolds body on the battlefield at Hastings through secret marks.
OK. Apart from this fruitful confusion of Ediths, there is the tradition (ie someone wrote it down
quite a little way after, but much nearer to the time than we are) that Edith Swan Neck had Harolds
body buried in St Michaels Church in Stortford, which is given some support by reliable Victorian
accounts of the presence of Early Norman stone coffins in a crypt. Alternative, and possibly more
reliable, traditions, give Waltham Abbey, which Harold had refounded and rebuilt, or Bosham, a
royal manor with an important church (shown in the Bayeux Tapestry) where the Conqueror could
control any cult of the dead king. These are all equally un/convincing narratives, with some evidence
or rationale for each.
But I choose the story with the Swan Neck. Some claim she was Swann Hnesce, the Fair Swan, as if
a Swan Neck does not immediately indicate clearly a tall, willowy slim elegance. I discovered too a
further delightful complication (thank you, oh at times not reliable, but always interesting,
Wikipedia) - a claim that the Swan Neck, retiring from the world, was the Richilde who had the vision
of the Virgins House, and built it in Norfolk, at Walsingham.
The Pynson Ballad of Walsingham (printed 1495) is the source of this, which youll find online at
< http://www.walsinghamanglicanarchives.org.uk/pynsonballad.htm >. It is claimed Richilde
(meaning rich and beautiful) was a coded name for Eddeva Pulchra. Theres more: deepest
Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic stuff. She had a vision and built a replica (with miraculous aid
etc) of the BVMs house in Nazareth. This became, it goes without saying, a shrine and place of
pilgrimage until the Reformation, with a strong popular appeal and a haunting literary appeal (after
its ending) Ophelias song in Hamlet, Sir Walter Raleighs As you came from the holy land / Of
Walsinghame. The shrine, curiously, predates the more famous one of Loreto, which is, as Im sure
you know, the actual BVM House, transported to Italy in 1294 after a couple of years in Dalmatia. All
I can say to this is that the ruins of the Priory created around the shrine are still peaceful,
peace-giving and atmospheric (when unaccompanied by mass religiosity).
I enjoy this vanishing of any certainty or sense a past as obscure, unreadable in useful detail and
full of possibilities as the future. Ill add to the confusion and connections above the name of St
Ealdgyth of Stortford. A saint of whom nothing is known: possibly a Mercian princess sent off to run
her own nunnery (and fly the flag for Mercia in this distant and contested corner), like the other
names she is listed alongside in a post-Conquest list of saints (more familiar saints like Eadburh of
Southwell, Edith of Polesworth and Osburh of Coventry); but with no evidence at all of her name or
cult. A ghost of a saint, who only appeared to me, I must confess as I wrote this prose, not during the
writing of the sequence.
She is a grey lady, a naming phrase Im sure you will recognise as one common among ghosts. Here,
a malevolent presence encountered in a number of old buildings in the town centre. There are also
stories about secret tunnels from St Michaels Church down the hill to what are now the shop
premises of Coopers, which contain some rooms remaining from a Sixteenth Century house owned
by the nephew of Edmund Bonner Bishop of London, a notorious Marian burner of heretics, and of
course Lord of the Manor of Bishops Stortford. These are meant to continue, in all unlikelihood, to
the Castle mound, the other side of the historic course of the River Stort (a 1960s town centre
modernisation shifted its course). There are also odd details about other underground structures in

the town centre, which may or may not link up, including cell-like rooms under the present NatWest
Bank. The health and safety phrase in the poem about stopping showing these underground ritual
spaces to children (an initiation rite?) comes from my source for the detail on this, Jenni Kemp,
Haunted Bishops Stortford (The History Press, 2015), p 14. The secret tunnels, though, I had heard
about years ago. Everyone used to know about them.
This isnt then to claim Bishops Stortford is important or unique. Any town would do. Its just this
place here where I am now. Underneath every town is a fluid and unknowable past, which can still
bubble up and transform your sense of reality.
As does Eostre, another echo of St Ealdgyth of Stortford. Nothing is really known but her name. Bede
declared Easter was named after her, while talking about the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon calendar
in his De temporum ratione. He stated she had a festival in the equivalent month to April, which
name was then used for the Paschal season, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured
name of the old observance (Bede: The Reckoning of Time, translated by Faith Wallis, Liverpool UP,
1999, p 54) a typical recuperation by the Christian proselytisers of the Anglo-Saxons of the pagan
traditions. Easter for the Paschal season has obvious cognates in Dutch and German. Yet,
curiously, Bedes statement is often queried though not I would imagine by anyone as familiar with
actual Anglo-Saxon culture (including its pagan past, which he treats quite factually and
respectfully) as the Venerable One. There is a lack of supporting evidence, apparently, and we know
he wouldnt have known anything about paganism because of his upbringing in a monastery. Come
on! Id take his word for it. But, beyond that, and the obvious etymological connections with East
(all to do with dawn and light-bringing), were free to project our visions of renewal and regrowth,
based, indeed, if we choose, on eggs, sex and chocolate pleasures.
That takes us just about to the end. What Ive done in the poetry is a kind of game, a serious game,
whose rules I discover as I go along, using what comes to hand. Some of it is true, ie established as
how things were (eh, Cerdic, old chum?), some of it is utopian fiction (heads up, Arthur!), some of it
mere pleasant speculation (eg the quarrel between Eddeva and Boudicca). The two important ideas
that make it worthwhile, I hope, are that all Myths of Origin are masking the muddy and radically
diverse things that did happen; and that there is a near constant domination by high status elites, a
new iteration of which we are undergoing now (but always its alternative capable of springing into
life).
Its fantasy, a term Id like to valorise rather than dismiss. Ill end this deliberately incoherent essay
with an extended riff on a piece from BFS Journal #15 (the publication of the British Fantasy
Society), Playing with Fire: Memory, medievalism and transmediality in Dantes Inferno the video
game by Colin Harvey. He is discussing in detail the Dantes Inferno video game released by
Electronic Arts in 2010, plus an associated animation telling much the same narrative as that of the
video game (p 87), plus a comic (C Gage and D Latorre, Dantes Inferno [Wildstorm Productions,
2010]) and tie-in collectible figurines. After discussing various retellings and transformations of
Dante, from Chaucer to Halo3: ODST, Harvey uses this term transmedia: Transmedia, as a term
was coined by Marsha Kinder in 1991: she identified childrens consumption of media in terms of
transmedia intertextuality, whereby young consumers actively connected together related content
across different kinds of media . . . (p 85: referenced by Harvey as M. Kinder, Playing with Power in

Movies, Television and Video Games [University of California Press, 1993], pp 39-86). Harvey relates
this to fantasy/SF franchises, and then goes on to discuss related text-transformational processes:
Though there is considerable contention around what constitutes transmedia storytelling,
commentators tend to concur that each element constitutes a new narrative strand rather
than a retelling, so transmedia storytelling as a concept can be seen as distinct to processes
of adaptation and dramatization . . . . However . . . there is necessarily some overlap
between transmedia storytelling and processes of adaptation and dramatization (pp 85-6)
Discussing how the Dantes Inferno franchise [ie the game + associated different media texts]
converts but also but also creates new material, both in relation to Aligheris original but also with
regard to the various versions existing within the current franchise, Harvey introduces Henry
Jenkins term transmedia play (H. Jenkins, Transmedia 202: Further Reflections, on his website
Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins). He advances his argument boldly:
I have previously suggested in a variety of contexts that memory can be a useful tool for
understanding both transmedia storytelling and transmediality more widely. Telling new
stories set in an existing storyworld or reinventing stories to tell in different media both rely
on the studied remembrance of attributes seen elsewhere in the franchise. Memory,
forgetting and non-memory (in which no memory trace is evident) can equally be viewed
as important aspects of this process. (p 86)
This sense of any connection between a given text and texts that (in whatever way) lie behind it as
dependent upon a faculty of memory, which as a human faculty is both fallible and creative, and of
the collection together of whole ensembles of different memories taken from different
experiences that nonetheless do relate to originating texts, produces a powerful metaphor in
Harvey:
These manifold varieties of remembering, misremembering, forgetting and
non-remembering can be understood as flows, processes that constantly affect both the
creation and consumption of the Dantes Inferno (2010) franchise, but also subsequent
interactions between the multiple creators of the various aspects of the franchise, the
franchises consumer-base, associate publicity, journalism and wider society. (p 86)
I like this. It is a very enlarging way of making sense of any text, in any medium, whether video
game, work of academic history, Dark Age genealogy or innovative poetry sequence. The
Hedge of Utterance sequence is the third component in a compound work of three sequences
(plus this essay at an essay). The first, Fragments of Vulgar Things, took off from the crossfertilisation of my reading (and hearing) of Tim Atkins Collected Petrarch (Crater, 2014) by a visit
to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse one hot and arid August. I would contend Atkins (and Peter Hughes
equally delightful and inventive Quite Frankly: After Petrarchs Sonnets [Shearsman, 2015] which
I hadnt read at the time of the visit) can be understood within this complex process labelled
transmedia. Thus Hedge of Utterance is a further generation beyond them in the enlargement
of the Petrarchan Franchise (and he hoped wed all be wowed by his Latin epic, Africa). It is a
much more positive, joyful and creative way of discussing versions, influences, etc, taking it
out of literary jargon into something wider and more populist in its application. And Ive always
wanted to combine cultural studies or media theory with poetics. Do try the Henry Jenkins

article: he has a persuasive grasp of the varieties of things possible with stories and texts. More
fruitful intellectual bastardisation.
Now, also, the thing about the period of history I have invoked and referred to in Hedge of
Utterance, is that this transmedia model is plainly one of the best ways of looking at the huge
bundle of texts associated with it: The Dark Ages Mega-Franchise we can call it. Yeah, some of it
is intensely serious, intelligent and deliberately intellectually limited to facts, eg Robin
Flemings Britain After Rome (which impresses me more with re-reading). But even within this
intensely controlled and focussed text, fantasy, imaginative re-creation is impossible. I dont buy
her fantasy about Bede being unaware of his surrounding and immediate past culture apart from
the elements of his monastic life. She has fun pointing out that the famous story in Bedes A
History of the English Church and People, of Coifi the Priests conversion by Paulinus and Edwin
(remember the sparrow flying through the hall comparison) is certainly not history. No, not
history as we know it, Robin, though our man provides that often, with good reliable sources
even for the holy miracles he records (which, maybe unsurprisingly, historians do tend not to
dwell on or discuss as history.) But there is some act of non-memory by Fleming, since she has
dwelt earlier on how the pagan Anglo-Saxon royal sites excavated, like Yeavering, contained
religious ritual sites: a theatrical backdrop for newly invented ritual practices (p 102). This does
strongly suggest important pagan priests (whatever they may be: religious specialists)
attached to the early royal courts. Fleming gives a fantasy of what Bede was thinking of, an
Archbishop type figure at the top of a clear hierarchy. No evidence for that; evidence for pagan
religious ritual associated with royal courts, probably therefore with some important and high
status specialist: Primus Pontificum in Bedes phrase, of course using the language of Christian
hierarchy. He may not have been named Coifi, but it is a story that vivid deserves a name. All
later versions of the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons Franchise include, and ought to include,
him. He is at least possible, and may well be based on some sense of likelihood. I see no
evidence of Bede being intellectually incapable of thinking outside of an ecclesiastical box. He
depicts a pagan Anglo-Saxon priest seriously and worthily, seeking truth (not a gibbering
or misled devil worshipper) and finding it of course, as one would expect with Bede, in
Christianity.
And Arthur? The Greatest Story Never Told? The Matter of Britain? What is there to say? I have
many volumes with titles like The Real Arthur, Arthur The Truth, Yer Actual Arfer etc.
Fascinating range of narratives, picking up on one or two details from the stinking midden of
whatever remains of the Fifth and Sixth Centuries, to build an elaborate and obviously partial
fantasy. Do not go there! Except creatively. And even then Id avoid anything direct.
Hybridise. Bastardise. Mongrelise. We know nothing except what we imagine strongly.
Oh, and the ever-present nightmare of power and oppression. There are few periods when the
mass of the population have led lives other than of wretched exploitation. It is likely that that
was the lot of the bulk of the people before the Roman Conquest, which loaded fresh burdens
upon them. Forget all that Roman citizenship crap: elite only. Though citizenship was famously
extended to all free men by Emperor Caracalla in 212, the same edict created a major class
distinction between honestiores and humiliores the holders of political power in Rome and the
other cities, and the rest of the population. The differences in power and rights was immense,

symbolised by the torture, crucifixion and burning alive which were punishments reserved for
the humiliores. Both paid taxes; those with least power tend to be least effective in not doing
so. One reason for the collapse of the Western Empire was the increasing opting-out by the
great honestiores for a system that was evidently failing. The Roman socio-economic system in
Britain, already weakened by raids from beyond the borders and disastrous civil wars, will have
begun to collapse with the loss of a source of coin, and the lack of a central controlling agency
backed up by force. Individual civitates or military commands may have had some ability to grab
peasant surpluses (either through mercenaries, or still active traditional mechanisms in the less
Romanised highland areas), which will have transformed into the rights claimed by both the
Welsh and Anglo-Saxon military castes later. In other areas, perhaps those where agriculture
was more market-oriented, systems will have broken down entirely, with a return to
autonomous and self-reliant subsistence communities .
Stature in Britain . . . increased after the Roman empires collapse, which suggests that many
people had healthier childhoods once urbanization, taxation and galloping social inequalities had
disappeared (Fleming, p 357 she ends with an excellent chapter on osteoarchaeology). On
the other hand she records that there is clear evidence that the inhabitants of the centralised
villages introduced from the Tenth Century onwards were less healthy partly because more
dispersed settlements were less unhygienic, but also because of the greater burdens placed
upon those living in the new settlements under the lords eyes and directly working his lands
(rather than with some annual submission of goods or labour when the Big Man processed
around).
The Dark Ages can thus appear as a time when some of the population may have lived under a
relatively mild burden, or even no burden at all though in the main briefly for the latter
condition. The society of the pre-Conquest Kingdom of England was hierarchic and resolutely
unequal, with the bulk of the population existing to promote the wealth of the ruling elites, eg
Eddeva Pulchra. There had been a brief period when some at least could live free of subjection
and organised theft. It may have been a longer period than the mass of people enjoyed through
the political and social changes in the Twentieth Century, changes actively being undone by our
present honestiores class. Their rule is as self-serving and incompetent as their examples in the
later Roman Empire. They too may be succeeded by brute force when the system collapses.
Choose with care what warband has the right to protect you when this time comes round
again!

List of Books Used in Writing This Essay

with comments on the texts not cited in the text
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, translated by GN Garmonsway (JM Dent & Sons, 1953)
Aneirin, The Gododdin, translated by Steve Short (Llanerch Publishers, 1994)
Bede, translated by Leo Sherley-Price, A History of the English Church and People (Penguin Books,
1955)
Bede, translated by Faith Wallis, The Reckoning of Time (Liverpool UP, 1999)
Bishops Stortford and Thorley: A History and Guide < http://www.stortfordhistory.co.uk/ >
informative, considered and detailed website on local history
The Black Book of Carmarthen, introduction and translation by Merion Pennar (Llanerch Enterprises,
1988)
P Hunter Blair, Roman Britain and Early England 55 BC-871 AD (Sphere Books, 1975) provides some
very eloquent accounts of the crucial transition period between Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon
England
Boudiccas Burial Discovered at Kings Cross < http://www.sotterraneidiroma.it/notiziesdr/item/boudiccas-burial-discovered-at-kings-cross > on Sotterranei di Roma: Centro ricerche speleo
archaeologiche (dated April 2, 2014)
edited by James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxons (Penguin Books, 1991) much valuable and detailed
information
John B. Coe and Simon Young, The Celtic Sources for the Arthurian Legend (Llanerch Publishers,
1995) a very useful and focused collection
edited by Anthony Conran, The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (Penguin Books, 1967)
Barry Cunliffe, Britain Begins (OUP, 2013) a fine recent general survey by an expert on early
(pre-Norman) British history; and hes very enthusiastic indeed about Robin Flemings Britain After
Rome
John Davies, A History of Wales (Penguin Books, 1994) a fine, detailed and balanced history
Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman (1703) text from The Earlier Life and the Chief Earlier
Works of Daniel Defoe, edited by Henry Morley (George Routledge and Sons, 1889, cited on
Luminarium Editions < http://www.luminarium.org/editions/trueborn.htm >
Robin Fleming, Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise 400 to 1070 (Penguin Books, 2011)
Gildas, On the Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae), (Serenity Publishers, 2009)
Colin Harvey, Playing with Fire: Memory, medievalism and transmediality in Dantes Inferno the
video game, BFS Journal #15 (2016)

Henry Jenkins, Transmedia 202: Further Reflections, on Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official
Weblog of Henry Jenkins < http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html >
Jenni Kemp, Haunted Bishops Stortford (The History Press, 2015)
Venceslas Kruta, Celts: History and Civilization (Hachette Illustrated, 2004) bought for its gorgeoius
photos of La Tne Celtic art, but with a fascinating text, concentrating on the continental Celts.
China Miville, Perdido Street Station (Pan Books, 2000)
John Morris, The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650 (Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1973) the finest fantasy of them all! A breathtaking attempt to deal with every relevant
written source plus the archaeological evidence would that it could have been thus
The Pynson Ballad of Walsingham (1495)
< http://www.walsinghamanglicanarchives.org.uk/pynsonballad.htm > on The Walsingham Archives:
The Archives of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham
A.L.F. Rivett and Collin Smith, The Place-Names of Roman Britain (Book Club Associates, 1981) full
of serious information, including that the pronunciation of London indicates that in London more
than in most places towards the east of the country some Latin speech would have survived into
early Anglo-Saxon times (p 397)
Miles Russell and Stuart Laycock, UnRoman Britain: Exposing the Great Myth of Britannia (The
History Press, 2011) an interesting account of Roman Britains inner UKIPness, and our many
premature Brexits
Gus Russo, The Outfit: The Role of Chicagos Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America
(Bloomsbury, 2003) the stage of primitive accumulation of capital laid bare, and source of my
knowledge of the incomparable Curly Humphreys
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (Penguin Books, 2012)
Christopher A. Snyder, An Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons A.D. 400-600 (Sutton Publishing,
1998) precise and detailed readings of the contemporary sources reveals much about the political
and social world of the time yes! some sense out of Gildas!
Taliesin Poems, introduction and translation by Merion Pennar (Llanerch Enterprises, 1988)
Gwyn Thomas, Gododdin: The Earliest British Literature (Gomer Press, 2012)
Tom Williamson, The Origins of Hertfordshire (Hertfordshire Publications, 2010) detailed recent
research
Michael Wood, Domesday: A Search for the Roots of England (BBC Publications, 1986) surprisingly
detailed and coherent social history
Barbara Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses (Continuum, 2003) in whom you will
encounter St Ealdgyth of Stortford, listed by the Twelfth Century chronicler Hugh Candidus,
presumably in his Historia Cnobii Burgensis