Quote:
Originally Posted by Philidor
I love the way this gold gives a glimps into pre-Arthurian England. The Romans had gone, the rule of law had shrunk to a few petty kingdoms, it was an anarchical, Hobbesian, pre-Leviathan land of virgin forest (out of which blue-painted Welshmen emerged to murder and pilage the English before disappearing back into the trees) a melding of Christian, Roman and ancient British beliefs, the whole place God-intoxicated, the landscape dotted with Pictish symbol stones and megalithic stone circles, the Saxons (who only arrived in the 3rd century) living alongside the ancient Britons, Celts, Picts and Vikings.
Who were these people with this great stash of gold? Where did they get it? Why did they abandon it? How Powys would have loved the find!
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I hate to say this, Phil, but English history in the Dark Ages clearly isn't one of your areas of expertise. (For that matter, it isn't one of mine either, but I do know something about it.)
A few points:
1) King Arthur almost certainly never existed, but the Welsh resistance to the invading Anglo-Saxons (i.e. the English) was ultimately in vain. (The Arthurian legends were popularised by the Normans to weaken the English sense of national identity - not the last time that English national sentiment has been suppressed for political reasons.) Even if we accept Arthur as a (legendary) synthesis of real British (in the sense of native Celtic) chieftains, their struggles preceded rather than followed the ultimate triumph of the Anglo-Saxons, and the eventual establishment of England as a nation-state out of the Heptarchy which initially resulted from the defeat and rout of the Britons.
2) The Romanised Celts (aka the Welsh) were not, during the period of English invasion and settlement, woad-painted near-savages (as your image suggests); they were actually culturally more sophisticated than their conquerors and displacers.
3) Although some Anglo-Saxon mercenaries had been brought over by the British king, Vortigern, in the period immediately after the departure of the Romans (whose grip on their far-flung imperial possessions had in any case been weak), the early English did not arrive in any significant numbers until about the middle of the Fifth Century AD. (AD 449 is given as the date when the semi-legendary figures of Hengist and Horsa arrived at Ebbsfleet, near to Ramsgate in Kent.)
4) Had the Anglo-Saxons "lived alongside" the Celts and Picts in the peaceable fashion you suggest, then we would expect the English language to contain a large number of Celtic words, and for Celtic place-names to be common in England; both are conspicuous by virtue of their extreme scarcity. Had the Celts remained a subject majority, with the Anglo-Saxons a numerically small ruling elite (a recently popular theory asserted, on the flimsiest of evidence, on the analogy of the later Norman Conquest) we should expect the Welsh language to have survived more or less intact in England, or at the very least for an Anglo-Celtic creole to have arisen. The Welsh language did not survive in England, and an Anglo-Celtic creole did not arise either there or anywhere else.
5) The Picts were actually the enemies of the Britons, and were one of the hostile peoples (along with marauding Vikings) that the Britons had originally hired Anglo-Saxon mercenaries to protect them against.
6) The Vikings, although initially hostile to the Anglo-Saxons, were culturally and linguistically close enough to them (unlike the Celts) eventually to be assimilated. (Indeed, one of the greatest pre-Norman kings of England, Canute, was a Viking.) However, they made no significant impact until the Eight Century AD.
7) One of the most impressive features about these archaeological discoveries is that such Anglo-Saxon relics have hitherto been comparatively rare, fuelling revisionist theories of early English history that are clearly at odds with the observable cultural and linguistic facts.
You can read the classic works of writers such as Sir Frank Stenton and Dorothy Whitelock on early English history. Alternatively, there is a reasonable (if necessarily brief) account in Rebecca Fraser's
A People's History Of Britain.
01-10-09, 12:17 AM
