Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England, and the Anglo-Saxons by Francis Pryor

Author:Francis Pryor [Pryor, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, Ireland, Social Science, Arthurian, Juvenile Fiction, Prehistoric peoples, Juvenile Nonfiction, General, Legends; Myths; Fables, Britons, Great Britain, Historical, Biography & Autobiography, Romania, Anglo-Saxons, Excavations (Archaeology), Archaeology, History
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

Myres caused something of a sensation when he suggested that the earliest Saxon settlers arrived in Britain during his first phase of ‘overlap and controlled settlement’ (c.360-410). This is just a decade or so later than the height of Romano-British fourth-century prosperity. Myres’ next phase, of ‘transition’ (c.410-50), sees limited settlement during the so-called ‘sub-Roman’ period;* but the main waves of immigration are in his next phase, of ‘invasion and destruction’ (450-500). This half-century was a period of ‘massive and uncontrolled land-seizure by Anglo-Saxon and other barbarian peoples, and…the accompanying destruction of Romano-British civilisation’. He completes this summary of the main events of his third phase of Anglo-Saxon settlement with a telling phrase which provides us with the motivation behind his study: ‘The contemporary pottery should throw some light on the nature and range of these movements, and on the background of the principal groups of settlers in different parts.’17 In other words, the information found in the field during excavation was explicitly to be used to amplify and flesh out the observations of writers such as Gildas.

Somewhat later, in 1977, in the discussion chapters to his comprehensive catalogue of English Anglo-Saxon pottery,Myres turns to Bede, who was writing in the years prior to 731, and who used Gildas as his main source for these early events. Myres had been writing about the regions from where the early Anglo-Saxon settlers might have come, and had drawn extensively on Bede. This is what he wrote next:

These assumptions are all amply confirmed by the pottery. Even if Bede had never written what he did, it would have been abundantly clear from their pottery that the bulk of the settlers must have come from precisely the regions to which he pointed as their homes.18

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