Rewriting History

 

Rewriting History

The weather is inclement so not much boules playing or gardening and too much TV watching. I’m already to go on the allotment but need to wait another week or so. IMarch is the starting point for me. So here’s another blog post.

The TV watching hasn’t been entirely without point though. I was aware that archaeology h had gone high-tec, no longer just scrapers and paint brushes, but not up to date on recent findings, some of which I find greatly pleasing. I have always been much more interested in social history, books like Mayhew’s London, Akenfield and Montbaillou, than the kings and wars I was taught about at school; and some recent findins have reinforced that. In particular some findings about the so-called Dark Ages in Britain after the Romans all left, a period of presumed misery about which there is precious little documented evidence. Now, it seems, we understand it wasn’t like that at all.

I was taught that after the Romans all left (which they didn’t, only the army left, or most of it) Germanic Anglo-Saxon hordes invaded the country, laying waste to the land and driving the Britons, mostly Celts, into Wales, Cornwall and Scotland. Good kings and wars stuff that. With the new archaeological evidence, the picture doesn’t look like that at all. It looks rather more as follows.

There were probably already some Anglo-Saxons in England at the time anyway, through trade. But the Romans left a bit of a vacuum so a few boatloads arrived on a beach somewhere (sound familiar?). The local lord of the manor thought “great, I can use more manpower to farm more of my land”. The locals thought “great, more choice of whom to couple up with” and they all got coupling and farming together. Word got back to the continent that England was a good place to be (lots of pretty girls there) and boatloads more came over. DNA proves that at least the coupling happened. Of hundreds of skeletons unearthed from the period only a tiny minority show signs of violence; so no bloody invasion, perhaps a few spats (“too many foreigners here” – sound familiar?) Other technologies indicate extensive building and farming and that England was thriving at the time. The Celts in Cornwall, almost certainly not all Celts, far from beaten and cowering in rocky enclaves were doing a roaring trade with countries across the seas and building large settlements. Of course this may not be exactly as it happened but it is a more likely version than the one I was taught at school.

All this gives me the same feeling of elation that I felt when I came across chaos theory in the 1990s, which destroyed all those neat little equations I had been taught in physics. I do love it when everyone has to think again. It may be obtuse of me but it does brighten up a gloomy day.