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Miniatures Adventure => Medieval Adventures => Topic started by: armchairgeneral on October 01, 2018, 12:53:41 PM
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Just wondered if anyone saw this documentary?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bkvw8v/king-arthurs-britain-the-truth-unearthed?suggid=b0bkvw8v
In summary the archaeological and DNA evidence indicates there was no significant conflict between the Britons and the Saxons. The Saxons gradually migrated across to England after the Romans left intermingling and inter-marrying with the resident British with little evidence of friction between the two peoples.
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I'm familiar with the theory but not sure if I agree with it.
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Modern DNA evidence seems to support it more and more.
I am leaning to the idea that it was a mixed bag. Some places integrated peaceable while others fought it out. And even in the places they fought, out right massacre' s of the local none warrior class was not the norm. (Why kill the people that make you wealthy and work your field's?)
I am of the mind that it was like when the Danes invaded and imposed Dane law, or even when the Normans took the crown.
Just a change of upper management but, the people for the most part remained the same.
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I saw it the other week, and it seemed convincing. There is a mix of evidence, the DNA results showing lots of homengenity for much of England (except the SW). The lack of evidence of any battles, but lots of evidence of habitation. They showed analysis of a piece of Saxon jewlry that had British elementd.
What was also interesting was the idea of viewing the seas as the highways, and this in part is why the East and SW were separate, because they were both trading by sea, but in different directions. And communications across the middle of the country were lesser.
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Now that is interesting. I was not aware of that.
How do they explain Cornwall, Wales remaining more Britain
than Anglo-Saxon?
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They quoted figures of 2% of burials from the period having sharp weapon injury, so clearly some conflict did happen, just not on a massive genocidal scale. There wasn't an explanation of how the West remained 'British' but logically it must be because there was less far Westward movement of those Saxons/Angles who did come over and blend in with the British. I always thought that the old 'Saxon invasion and slaughter of the Britons' thing was unlikely due to the cultural norms of the time.
Advances in archaeology seem to be leading to some radical rethinks of several things - am very intrigued by some re-thinking of the early Roman Republic (for example) based on new archaeology and different interpretations of the available evidence and less reliance on written sources which are fraught with problems (as any student of the 'Arthurian' period knows only too well!)
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Didn’t see it, but the arguments are well rehearsed.
The old theory of the 1000 year epoch of invasions, was that successive cataclysmic waves of incomers drove their predecessors into the west, with subjugation, extinction and wholesale changes of population.
The more recent, revisionist theory, mainly based on advances in DNA over the last 20 years, is that the population as a whole didn’t really change very much at all - it was just, as mentioned, a ‘change of management’, with a different nation of overlords arriving and imposing themselves with each wave. The poor old worker bees simply had to readjust to the new cultural norms handed down from the new ruling class, whilst basically staying put and doing what they had always done.
Being the Dark Ages of course, no-one can possibly say for sure. There were probably elements of both things happening at different eras within the great timespan, and in different geographies within these islands.
I still base my views on all this on my favourite boardgame of all time, Britannia.
As long as the Welsh can sack York in turns 7/8, all is well :D
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lol
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I saw it as well, but wasn't convinced at all. They seemed to have a pre-determined agenda ("Uncontrolled mass immigration is good m'kay, is nothing new and is what makes us British...") and then set about twisting the paltry evidence to fit the theory, while ignoring what didn't suit the theory.
The suggestion that the Romano-British population was 'massacred' is a strawman argument. Neither the Danes or the Romans or the Normans 'massacred' the population en masse, yet there can be no question that theirs was a violent and brutal subjugation of the pre-existent populace.
2% of the population is a perfectly normal ratio for a population engaged in warfare if you ignore the 'massacre' hyperbole. I'd also add that in any case, the total number of bodies found from the period is small - is it really a sufficient quantity to be statistically representative of the population at the time?
Some comparison with similar stats from the Roman, Norman and Danish conquests would have been useful, but wasn't given. I suspect that the stats would probably be similar and would therefore shoot down their theory, so weren't presented.
What was the Saxon Shore fortress network built for, if there were not a massive existential threat to Britannia from the East? Yes, this was before the period we're looking at, but did the threat to Britannia suddenly vanish because the Roman armies sailed away?
Why does the archaeological record show a massive wave of re-fortification in previously-abandoned hill forts at this time?
Why does Welsh literature abound with tales of war with the Saes?
Why is it that by the time documented history resumes, Romano-British language seems to have been completely erased from everywhere east of the Severn, within only a couple of centuries? The amount of Latin/British absorbed into old English is vanishingly small. Latin didn't replace the pre-existing language and nor did Norman-French, so what made English so much more dominant?
I don't think we can ever possibly know, but I firmly believe that the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes of their strawman 'The Saxons massacred the British' argument and the pink & fluffy revisionism of 'The Saxons were welcomed as immigrants and made Britain a stronger and better place'.
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I don't think we can ever possibly know, but I firmly believe that the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes of their strawman 'The Saxons massacred the British' argument and the pink & fluffy revisionism of 'The Saxons were welcomed as immigrants and made Britain a stronger and better place'.
Agreed.
I wonder how much blending of the Britans & Saxons occurred before the Romans left, it would not surprise me if trading networks assisted with genetic spread over to the north and east as it did with the Atlantic facade in the south and west.
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Caught the thread earlier and got round to watching it last night. I must thank you chaps Im full of cold and that cheered me up no end.I put that on par with that juvenile
Hunt for Nazi gold .
As some one who works alot within the field (number three son is an archeologist to boot.) I know There's some serious ego's and reputations bouncing through that twaddle. All ignoring one of the basic principles of modern archeology.
Absence of proof is not. Proof of absence.
It chooses to ignore some very simple observations. It's very uncommon to find multiple victims of a battle in a graveyard related to a settlement.
If your victorious against a raid then as a social group its very unlikely you'll dig graves for your attacker's in your sacred space. ( you can see examples of this right through to modern conflicts) Also your casualty rate is likely to be very low.
It's also common to bury the dead near the battlefields(if at all) not in Civil cemeterys. Has been for thousands of years.
It's a needle in a haystack provenance . If you don't know the site of a battle then you don't have a starting point to find evidence of conflict.
It also ignores how little resistance is put up by a civillian population as a milita moves through.
It's possible to take a stretch of land inwards from the Atlantic coast of Europe and find bugger all evidence of the two major conflicts of the 20th century( even more so in a thousand years). Theories are tailored by evidence. Not the evidence tailored to fit a theory.
Holding up cultural artifacts as proof of an integrated and peaceful society is twaddle.
You can find modern examples of dress and music being influenced by conflict. Alot of music has Persian and Arabic influence that werent evident before confict in those theatre's.
Definitely a view influenced by the social and political climate of today rather than subjective.
It felt dated . All I could think about is how well this would fit in with the Timewatch specials that review previous programmes noting the political climate of the period.and its influenced on interpretation.
This had more in common with Mortimer's ( born and bread British imperialism ) view of the Roman conquest . Or Magnusson's bias , a thinly veiled distaine for the English establishment.
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Jehovah save us from academic ego and the manipulation of evidence to flog a trendy theory. Experience has convinced me that revisionist history is an oxymoron by definition.
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... but all history reflects the mores and world vision of both the historian and his time, so at one time the 'traditional view' was itself revisionist twaddle. I'll mention that Teutonic Invasion fit into the zeitgeist of the Late Victorian Era as one example.
To talk of Britons and Saxons as if they were both national entities is the biggest fault in most depictions of the time, it's as valid as using 'Yugoslavian' or 'Soviet' in today's world.
Trendy theories or misinterpretation/manipulation of evidence perhaps, but there is hard science at the root of it. People look to Gildas, Nennius and Bede for the 'true story', but turn a blind eye to portents, duelling dragons and other fantastical portions of their writing at the same time.
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lol
Its the bane of my life.
The amount of times I've been. Dragged to stand next to a muddy hole in the ground . So I can be a one-man audience.
When all they want is a model of a roundhouse.
Actually in this case the hard facts are only isolated tit bits. Totally ingnored the dig Alice Robert's took part in on the same site. So not. So new evidence.
As for an 11km survey although comprehensive and a wonderful training ground . The problem is where ever there's the edge /limit. Sod's law says you missed something by an inch.
There's nothing at all to say the settlements either side of this survey weren't destroyed or ravaged by conflict.
The only truth that is solid is that the settlements found in the dig.show no evidence of conflict .
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It's difficult to be sure of anything, but the whole (?) population of Lloegr was speaking English quickly enough after they were invaded. So there may have been some dramatic changes taking place.
In Gaul it's the Franks who adopted the local language (somewhat changing it, of course, but it remained more latin than germanic), as did later the Vikings in Normandy; and so did the Normans in England (except that they wanted to eat mutton and not sheep, and not bother with declensions).
The Romans managed to have latin spoken in Gaul but it took hundreds of years and it was perhaps not even completed everywhere at the end of the Empire.
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Theories are tailored by evidence. Not the evidence tailored to fit a theory.
I’m afraid the latter is standard practice for too many archaeologists, and especially TV archaeologists. They confidently spout authoritative explanations of what something was, or what was happening, or what it means, based on a few flimsy fragments of next to nothing - and a huge mountain of supposition... ::)
The language point is interesting. The Normans had an extremely profound impact on the English language. There are basically two words for almost everything you can think of in the English language - the formal, long winded, Latin-French word, and the informal, shorter Germanic root word. One the language of the conquerors and overlords, which even 1000 years later still rules the roost in the upper echelons of British society - in law, academia, government, commerce, officialdom, etc. The other, the language of the ordinary people which we use in natural conversation with each other every day. This dichotomy strongly supports the view of a thin veneer of a French speaking ruling class holding sway over a largely unchanged Anglo-Saxon general population...
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I don't normally get tired of watching Alice Roberts, but after an excellent C4 programme on Roman Chester a few days ago, I watched this one too. I can't help feeling that there was a committee responsible for what was included, it was a right mess. Geoffrey of Monmouth for example, was as close to the Age of Arthur as I am to the start of the Hundred Years War.
The line shown that bissected 'Angland' from the 'Britons' is also pretty much the line that separated 'civilian' aka 'wealthy and materialist' Roman Britain from the military 'highland' districts. Besides being roughly the route of the Foss Way, it also marks a border between coin finds Post-383 AD, which are almost entirely unknown West of the line, other than those few outposts on the N Welsh Coast that could be supplied by sea.
Barring the settlements along the 'Via Deva' (A5/A41 from High Cross to Chester) and the hinterlands of Chester and Wroxeter, there is little 'Roman' apart from the area around the Severn Estuary (Caerleon, Gloucester, Bath, Cirencester et al), West of the line.
I'm supportive of the 'less warfare' and 'smaller battles' lobby, but 2% is still 70,000 out of a population of c.3.5 million. In comparison Britain had 7% of its population under arms in 1945. Britain's Great War casualties were under 2% and look at the impact of that on our society, we are still affected by it in popular memory today.
No mention of the Irish and Scots, who were the main threat in the West and certainly the only one for the Cornish for quite some time after.
In any case Arthur came from Shropshire and lived at Wroxeter, where he built the wooden palace we call 'Camelot'. ;)
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In any case Arthur came from Shropshire and lived at Wroxeter, where he built the wooden palace we call 'Camelot'. ;)
Au contraire, I've spent many a summer in Tintagel, Cornwall, and the amount of gift shops selling Arthurian artefacts alone should be proof enough that he was born there. Plus there's a rock with 'Artor' or something scratched into it nearby. Only Dark Age Britons knew how to scratch rock like that.
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Isn't there a polygamist wanabe cult leader down that way who claims to be Arthur. Or was that more South Wales?
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Isn't there a polygamist wanabe cult leader down that way who claims to be Arthur. Or was that more South Wales?
Probably both. I'm Arthur and so's my wife.
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I haven't watched it, do they discuss all the defensive dykes/reinforced across the south and east in this period?
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Nope totally avoids the issue of defensive fortifications. If I remember rightly it simply inferred that Rome left and every body abandoned forts and towns never actually says were they went.
Totally ignoring that a British version of Roman culture florished long after the empire. Or that high Latin poetry was been written hundreds years after the collapse of the western empire. Expamles exist written by noble women not just monk's.
No it inferred a dystopian power vacuum and economic collapse that magically has not been preasure kegged by the gentle intergration of an influx of people with a different culture and language driven by the desire for new land.
it' was okay because the unicorns set out some ground rules before they left. ::)
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There's good evidence for the decline and partial abandonment of towns well before the Romans left, or more properly, before the administrators and supporters of Constantine III were kicked out. Once everybody became a Roman Citizen in 288, the wealthy by and large, stopped funding public works and ploughed their money into their villas.
Economic collapse happened when the Rhine Frontier was breached, as Britain was the bread basket for the army there. It has also been suggested that almost everything West of the Foss Way was turned over to local leaders after Theodosius's reconquista, or Magnus Maximus's bid for the Purple. Certainly Welsh tradition has it so.
The dykes were just there to mark borders symbolically... I mean some guys just put a stone there, but harnessing the labour of thousands says far more than yer white picket fence. Totally not needed to keep enemies out, no sir, that's some crazy talk.
The present-day King Arthur is a Yorkshire man living in Salisbury, he's had quite an interesting life; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Uther_Pendragon
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Nobody's mentioned the most annoying thing yet. She called his spear 'Ron'. >:( >:( >:(
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Blame Geoffrey of Monmouth, he shortened it from Dadooronron, or whatever it was in the Annals, to give it more pep. Be thankful he didn't call the shield Hermione, or change Arthur to Harry.
;)
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Blame Geoffrey of Monmouth
At least he was bright enough to realize that books called "The Prophecies of Merdin" or the "Life of Merdin" would not be very attractive for the Norman-French elite, and that Merlin would be more commercial if the name Myrddin had to be adapted. :D
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Not the Arthur I was thinking of.
The in Salisbury is a new age equivalent of the Monster raving loony party.
It's one just one of those weird ways my life bounces along but I actually do European tradition martial arts on a Monday night which are run by a druid. He's alway popping off on some retreat or other.He often comes back with vegetable
Last week Tony and I left training with a marrow in hand and bearded long axe in the other.( i wish you could have seen the look on the faces of the Hobby bobbies as we walked around the corner lol lol)
The dykes were most definitely boundaries but I suspect the had an economic dimension to.
It requires a serious logistical capacity to under take the construction of one.Which requires an infrastructure. The inference was that wasn't a functional infastructure to organise against any influx so it must have been a passive intergration because no one could get their tish together to say "Oi jog on."
I don't buy inner city decline as evidence of a lack of a cohesive infrastructure.If that were true .We'd be mad maxing it right now.
The need to eat and be able to live .Is more likey a driving force to move you to a new area to be self sufficient .
Dykes are a psychological statement of defensive intent .Over here is our not yours and it will stay ours.
You don't expend such efforts if your all just one big happy family in commune Britannia.
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I am always lightly amused by titles like "King Arthur's Britain: The Truth Unearthed"...
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... Merlin would be more commercial if the name Myrddin had to be adapted. :D
Well as 'dd' is a 'th' sound it's very close to 'the Prophecies of Mervin', so pretty much anything would be better.
;)
The elite shifting their focus from urban works to development of large indjvidual estates, does create instant micro kingdoms once central authority is removed. Our urban centres are in decline but we do still have local and central government, a tax system, police and a military. All that went overnight leaving just landowners with their private armies, or tribal groups that had existed outside 'Roman Britain', depending on where you were.
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With all due respect to the science, the notion that genetics can entirely explain a largely cultural phenomenon 1500+ years ago borders on myopia, if not hubris.
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I saw it as well, but wasn't convinced at all. They seemed to have a pre-determined agenda ("Uncontrolled mass immigration is good m'kay, is nothing new and is what makes us British...") and then set about twisting the paltry evidence to fit the theory, while ignoring what didn't suit the theory.
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the pink & fluffy revisionism of 'The Saxons were welcomed as immigrants and made Britain a stronger and better place'.
Careful there, you might get busted for inciting racial hatred or whatever law your Bolshie government has inflicted on you.
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On our political spectrum they fill the gap between right of centre and far right. As the party that best represents the landowning elite and royalty, it's interesting that they might be perceived as 'Reds' elsewhere to say the least.
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...Merlin would be more commercial if the name Myrddin had to be adapted. :D
Well as 'dd' is a 'th' sound it's very close to 'the Prophecies of Mervin', so pretty much anything would be better. ;)
Yes indeed. ;)
Latin, and Old French, didn't know the sound "TH". They knew "Z" but it wasn't very usual. A good translation for "DD" was certainly difficult.
(...and myself I'm able to pronounce "LL" when I'm a bit drunk and surrounded with Welsh-speaking people, otherwise I can't find a good inspiration, but yes you can do it when you actually want to).
Incidentally, a Breton harpist (Rémi Chauvet) choose the stage name "Myrdhin" years ago.
...but most of his (French-speaking) public, even here in Brittany, pronounce it: "Mirdin".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsRPuKR44tg
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If anyone's wondering;
A Welsh 'Dd' is exactly the same as a vocalised English 'Th' (e.g as in 'The', 'There', 'With', 'Thou' and 'Further'). 'Th' is used in Welsh for the sibilant English 'Th' (e.g. 'Through', 'Throw', 'Three, and 'Sloth').
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With all due respect to the science, the notion that genetics can entirely explain a largely cultural phenomenon 1500+ years ago borders on myopia, if not hubris.
I suspect there was a lot of racial/genetic mixing for hundreds of years along the north sea as there was elsewhere in Europe as so the genetics of "native Briton" at that time might have been similar to a native from north Europe, but culturally they might have been very different.
This link may be of interest. I enjoyed the whole podcast series, but this particular episode is relevant for this discussion:
https://soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast/20-the-anglo-saxon-migration
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Careful there, you might get busted for inciting racial hatred or whatever law your Bolshie government has inflicted on you.
::)
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I suspect there was a lot of racial/genetic mixing for hundreds of years along the north sea as there was elsewhere in Europe as so the genetics of "native Briton" at that time might have been similar to a native from north Europe, but culturally they might have been very different.
This link may be of interest. I enjoyed the whole podcast series, but this particular episode is relevant for this discussion:
https://soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast/20-the-anglo-saxon-migration
Thank you for sharing that, it was most enjoyable... :)
... and right on the money to me. >:D
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'King Arthur: Nothing New To Say' probably wouldn't get as many viewers to be fair.
What bemuses me is the bandying about of 'high-status dwelling' for anything with four walls and a roof that might not have leaked.