How The Anglo-Saxon Settlement Changed British Culture | King Arthur's Britain | Timeline

the conventional story about the making of England describes how the Britain sunk into a state of messages after the departure of the Roman troops they were only revived by a massive infusion of anglo-saxon blood from the other side of the North Sea these robust tribesmen arrived in boats along the eastern shores of Britain it was a brave new world in which dark forests are felled and England is fall trouble is there is no archaeological evidence to the anglo-saxon invasion the traditional story of the making of England is completely wrong the real story will reshape our future and rewrite our past [Music] as an island people we Brits have been obsessed with the idea of invasion and the story of the arrival of the anglo-saxons has long been accepted as a part of our history I'm going to show but the myth of the anglo-saxon invasion is just a tale leading-edge archaeology is beginning to re-examine the dramatic changes that took place in this country in the centuries after on the Roman troops departed and a very different story to the one which we have become accustomed is emerging just before World War two archaeologists in Suffolk uncovered one of the greatest discoveries of our time the anglo-saxon burial mounds of Sutton Hoo Helen DT explains this is pretty decided to investigate the burial mounds that were on her property she rang up at 6 Museum and asked for advice on a freelance archeologist it seems like another world where a land owner can simply employ an archaeologist to open their burial mounds but that's what happened in man 1 over there he discovered an intact ship and burial chamber when knew that this got out archaeologists from Cambridge University in the British Museum came in to help and the most fabulous extraordinary archaeological treasure was discovered there [Music] excavations revealed the burial chamber of a person in a wooden ship he was accompanied by a wealth of fabulous objects this was the grave of a very rich man helmets are incredibly rare special headgear seems to be appropriate for a king as it still is today he's got other things like with strange whetstone that's made interceptor not polished in the middle way your hand could have held it a little cup which would sit on your knees and called your scepter like the modern king how do you foresee a very strong Swedish influence some people see a very strong classical Byzantine influence other people say that he's got a bit of everything he's trying out a lot of different different methods of making us see that he's a important ruler of the east angles five or seventh century parts of Britain have become a series of politically powerful kingdoms later to be known as England do you suppose a boatload of anglo-saxon royal family came sailing up the deben and thought whoopee this is the place for me got off the boat and set up their kingdom here the origin myths that we have recorded by people like bead do seem to indicate that in the fifth century boatloads of royalty did row up and think well I will create my kingdom here but we just don't have any archaeological evidence to back that up at all what seems much more likely is that that by some process of internal social development Kings arose at some point in the late sixth century and then decided to kind of create this is origin myth to explain where they'd come from probably they just murders and fought their way to the top but they wanted to say that they'd always been royal in fact they're descended from the gods you know Sutton who is the most elaborate of a number of rich anglo-saxon burials over the southeast of Britain archaeologists are divided about where these powerful new leaders came from [Music] Henryk Harker favors the idea that they were invaded until suddenly was found tableau was the richest anglo-saxon grave in England these big anglo-saxon bearers of the 7th century were very often located on the clubs of ridges taking up a dominant position in the landscape demonstrates who you are who your family Hynek heart believes an invasion is the best way of explaining the changes in culture that took place after the Romans left why do we have to have migrations it's very difficult to prove that people came here in large numbers from abroad Francis I believe you can demonstrate that this is still given the evidence the best possible explanation your argument is we do not need migrations to explain culture change this is essentially the underlying argument yeah I agree with that and actually if you at the moment you look to Russia post-soviet Russia you see a huge culture change but it is not brought in by immigrant Westerners it is marketed there of course you can say there is no proof that they came here and I accept that we cannot trace them across the North Sea but it is still the best explanation and if I'd love to agree with you only I can't see any outsiders would have come here without there being one hell of a fight and there is no evidence for a struggle if people move on to my land I'm not happy about that if you're there you are not right so you think people you think that people would actually have moved out but there are problems for that after the collapse of a civilization you do have population decline if there is population decline there was also space more space in the landscape than there was in the Roman system I don't believe that there was a hole in British society if anything you know the taxes were removed I would have thought people said whoopee heaps that's Chris I don't have to pay taxes I'm much better off and so when the Romans left people actually probably got more prosperous um very much a farmer's view i I would have further like that farmers view or not the invasion explanation just isn't enough whenever archaeologists can't explain a period of social change or innovation they reach for the catch-all explanation new people invasion but there isn't actually any evidence to support this story we just can't prove science however is trying at University College London professor of genetics mark Thomas and his team have conducted a survey of the DNA in the British Isles the male genetic marker is known as a Y chromosome a father passes a largely unchanged copy of his own Y chromosome to his son it is a very good way of tracing ancestry through history by comparing Y chromosome information from different populations markers tried to establish how closely the populations are related he discovered that there was an unusually high similarity between DNA from Britain and parts of Holland within England all the towns look very similar but different to the world towns and second the more remarkable feature was the incredible similarity between the English towns genetically and the Frisians in fact we couldn't statistically tell any difference between them this suggests the native British y-chromosome has at some point in history being mixed with that of people from Northern Europe complex statistics we used to work out when this genetic mix might have happened we conclude we would need the mass migration in the last two-and-a-half thousand years that was a hundred percent replacement or if it was less it has to have been more recently and if we assume that that vast migration was the anglo-saxon mass migration then we estimate that that replacement must have been between fifty and a hundred percent the sheer completeness of this population change it really does conflict with the archaeological evidence three million people have died well they don't show that now we can't say anything about the exact what what the process was as I said that could be pushing it could be slaughtering or it could be something much more benign like just economic differences between the different populations and over time a gradual replacement I can't really say how it happened but another team of geneticists in the same Department of Mark have conducted a similar set and come up with very different results they conclude that the native British ye cremes has not been largely replaced in Southern and Eastern Inc furthermore they stated that it's not possible to distinguish between the genetic influence of the anglo-saxons and that of the Vikings who definitely did invade Britain in the eighth and ninth century I just don't think that we should rely on these genetic versions of history on their own especially when two similar studies produce such different results I'm also pretty suspicious of simple explanations in complex times the dramatic changes that took place in the 5th and 6th centuries laid the foundations for the modern identity of this country I'm going to show these changes were not the result of mass invasions and in revising is powerful originally I will discover who we the English really are [Music] on the south coast of Hampshire at the entrance to a natural harbour is one of the best preserved Roman buildings in Britain this is Porchester castle it's one of a series of coastal forts built by the Romans in the third and fourth century they are known as Saxon Shore force because it's still widely accepted that they were constructed to keep out broad in anglo-saxon bands from the other side of the channel but in actual fact they may have been used for a very different purpose in total 11 short skirt the southern and eastern coast from Porchester in the south around the coast these shorts have been taken as an imposing reminder of the anglo-saxon threat all the way up to Branca star in Norfolk one of the most easterly of these forts per castle still commands for landscape [Music] all of this for all the green fields over there would have been what was termed the gray destory combination of open water and action into tidal creeks that kind of thing probably until 10th 12th century Andrew Pearson has been reexamining the forms and has come to the surprising conclusions but they may have nothing to do with anglo-saxons I think the traditional view of these sites is that they are a defense against pirate Raiders from across the channel from Saxony from Frasier from Jutland basically from the peoples who are in later periods going to colonize Britain the name Saxon Shore form actually comes from a Roman military list which was translated into 16th century by the famous antiquarian William candle what the terms Saxon refers to is unclear what Canton said pretty much when went as archaeological fact that for many centuries to come really I think also what he hit on was a very evocative idea it's very dramatic it's also very simple that these forts are put up as a defense against the Saxon the count is called the count of the Saxon Shore and however that means it is the shore being attacked by the Saxons or settled by the Saxons really we just don't know Andrew who's found but the huge walls are actually better suited to protecting goods kept inside the force rather than attacking enemies from outside I think these sites are doing much more than defending the coastline if ii came raiding it wouldn't have been monthly may not have even been every year every ten years so in terms of what these thoughts do i think it's much more likely that they have a major economic role or perhaps a supply role rather than this kind of defensive function that's described to them normally so what you seem to be suggesting them is that these forts could have been used actually to help trade from out of britain rather than stop people coming in yes i think rather than trying to block access to the interior as it's traditionally thought in fact these are quite the opposite insofar as materials and goods are coming here and then being shipped outwards and beyond into the Empire as a whole and who has found no archaeological evidence that these forts were built to defend against an anglo-saxon invasion so what is the evidence for invasion the Yorkshire Wolds are the last of a series of choc Daniels which spread east across Britain and it's here that anglo-saxon invaders are supposed to have settled 1500 years ago in these fields one of the most extraordinary archaeological investigations is being carried out 30 years ago archaeologist dominick caslo was asked to excavate some 5th century burials but have turned up in a quarry site near the village of West Heslington dominic has conducted one of the largest archaeological surveys in the world here scrutinizing every inch of a landscape for traces of his ancient past such a comprehensive survey should confirm the conventional view of the fifth and sixth centuries as a time when invaders took over except it didn't this is a tremendous settlement that maybe as early as the Bronze Age Domenic discovered the remains of miles of farms and villages the settlement began like 4000 years ago and continued through to the eighth century spanning the crucial anglo-saxon invasion period Dominic calls his discovery the ladder settle beam up the ladder running straight through following the edge of the field where we've been digging yeah it runs straight through here so those crop marks there that's the track way down the spine of the settlement they comprise a series of farmsteads or even small villages following on a track way hugging the very edge of the weapons wave trace of the settlement for 15 kilometers we've surveyed in detail about seven and a half to eight kilometers I'm sure it goes all the way to the guts this is a new kind of archaeology dedicated to understanding the long term life and meaning of an entire landscape I've had a team out there walking from dawn till dusk for three years and the results are absolutely staggering it's a long walk I have walked personally further than from Land's End to John O'Groats I mean and that's just in his little field up and down here this is a great gravy ometer of which measures minut variations in magnetic signal under the soil imagine this field was untouched by human hands and someone comes along and digs a across it and then that dick fills in with various bonds of material snowball getting into the ditch and it all gets filled in again and it looks like this you can't see the ditch we come along we walk over it and if we read the signal so we'll get zero all around it then suddenly it'll go up 1 2 3 4 to see one zero zero zero and we just walk backwards and forwards across there and build up this picture as we go the Grady almost of picks up soil disturbances which will made hundreds even thousands of years ago how much more have you got to do too much we're over halfway there having said that way at the end printed out this is what we're here for this or that that must be the biggest geophysical survey in the country is little bit I believe it's now the biggest in the world good grief this mass of evidence Tommy surely tells us a different story about population in the area yeah it must mean we've got a high population the idea is hardly anybody living here is completely unsustainable we end up with the same sort of density of settlements as we would have had a hundred years ago once the surveys are done dominic and his team go to work four thousand years of history my beneath the soil just waiting to be uncovered we're just coming up first of all well I quite sting you down to the wetland and the main area of occupation throughout later prehistory the geology of this part of the country is unique a thick layer of windblown sand protects ancient remains which in other areas of bringing the modern prior is destroyed Dominic and his team were about to start digging an archaeological goldmine now the first time we looked at a lot of settlement we opened a 15 meter area and there were thirty five thousand five this is Bissell Drucker ontological goals does because we have opportunity we can't see but we know it's well preserved yeah and that is very well in Britain there are probably a few square kilometers of activity that flat wealth is out in the countryside Dominique's excavation uncovered what the ghostly patterns of a geophysics Survey had hinted at the actual remains of houses track wings and settlements which spanned 3,000 years of ancient history visit the fair we're working at the moment the line of settlement comes through here magically for layers and layers in the past on the top of this a photography there is the line of a ladder settlement going right the way through the field there so what can banana settlement tell us about the arrival of the anglo-saxons the archaeological remains of invasion are usually clear enough to spot the Roman army in the first century and the Viking invaders of the 8th century both left their archaeological mark in the shape of wall cemeteries and deliberately destroyed houses and religious sites but Dominic could find no such evidence what he did find was a village and a cemetery full of people who looked like anglo-saxons the N lisatsen cemetery is located here underneath the Lane Rose we've got the cemetery so we set off in search of the settlement and found the whole of the anglo-saxon village 49 acres the shadow of the balloon is now ensuring the site of the early anglo-saxon village which send it right up into the foot of the hills and so huge much bigger than present village Dominic's meticulous surveys would have been able to pick up the massive disruption but an invasion causes on a landscape but all he could find was evidence of peaceful and continuous settlement and where's that some people their Roman people their Iron Age people from those people and of course Moving's material next door and things go absolutely crazy good we can't argue that this is a farm this has got to be sort of small village oh yeah and of course just to the south of it all these little blips here this is another cemetery well it's sort of a little lost for words I mean you have got a long-term settlement you got the cemetery here you've got a complete way of life and it's banished it's flat it's dusty sandy and it looks like there's nothing here and it goes on for kilometer after kilometer Dominic discovered but the site had been occupied from prehistory until the middle of the eighth century Neolithic cemeteries Bronze Age Barrens Roman settlements anglo-saxon villages were all part of is continuously occupied landscape there were no gaps of occupation no wars cemeteries there were no dramatic changes in the layout of the villages in short there was no invasion [Music] what there was however was a change in fashion clothes pottery weapons and burial practices underwent a dramatic change in the centuries after the Roman government collects these new fashions are very similar to styles found on the continent and has changed in fashion did not just happen at West Haslett for decades these burials have been taken as the key piece of evidence but a new set of people had taken over but what were invading anglo-saxons doing in Dominic's peaceful landscape could it be but they weren't actually invading everyone here in this field somewhere [Music] Dominic gave some of the skeletons from his anglo-saxon cemetery to Paul but at Durham University Paul has pioneered a new form of biological research called stable isotope analysis what we're really interested in actually is the Vitesse and particularly the tooth enamel because tooth enamel is formed in childhood and unlike any other tissue in the body it's not remodeled during life it's giving you a little window a little microcosm of what was happening in your diet what you were eating and at the time of your childhood when the teeth was formed paws discovered but tooth enamel has within it materials specific to the person's vacation of birth one of these materials contains oxygen isotopes your main source of oxygen is the oxygen that you consume is water because you're eating local food this signal will find its way into your bones and into your teeth by measuring the oxygen isotopes in a person's tooth enamel Paul is able to tell what climbing's and in what part of the world they were born this is a technique which offers the opportunity of identifying first-generation immigrants specifically because you can look at people who you are going to see people who grew up somewhere different Paul successfully analyzed 24 of the bodies from Dominic cemetery and a few of these were indeed foreigners but the other results were surprising for the things that we expected that we likely would be some continental immigrants so in hesitant and in fact we did see four individuals from the site who have drinking water which you can't really find in the UK so with these rich swaggering warrior type people now the interesting thing about those four is that they're all female they're very poorly furnished grades and in fact they're the only four females that essentially don't have any dress fittings at all household service or something like that I certainly think it'll be the lower status people most likely candidates going to be sort of Scandinavia Norwegian sort of coast up here or possibly Sweden overnight what about the remainder of the population and presumably they were all your chemin whether when you would think so [Music] the prizes didn't stop there we did indeed find that about roughly sort of half the sample did look like they were sort of local to West hesitant and then we had another part of the population who are associated with the western side of the country early East Yorkshire seems to be occupied by large proportion of Cumbria and this is far as I can tell you've got a big immigrant component to the west peasant and population but not coming from the East coming from the West so the foreign bodies in the cemetery weren't continental warriors but visitors or economic migrants the results did not surprise Dominique at all as a small number of newcomers yeah there are a small number of continental Saxons jibs frisians and so and so forth in different parts of the country but the majority of the population are exactly the same it's a continuously evolving and cared for landscape we see Roman sites with anglo-saxon components we see Roman activity underneath the anglo-saxon settlements there is no gap between the two if there were then we would have had a huge wad of nice red ochre red sand sitting between the two and it doesn't happen historians tell us that the anglo-saxon invaders came to a society which had been severely weakened by the collapse of Roman rule but Dominic's vast excavation had found no such evidence [Music] people are trying to appreciate the picture that we've thought was genuine for so long is seriously flawed an our population we can prove includes one or two people that come from Scandinavia but this isn't an invasion there is always resistance to change because people are once people are happy with an established understanding they do not want to change it is actually much more exciting to find that it's all wrong the people of the fifth century Cemetery at West Heslington look like newcomers from the continent and yet most of them were born in Britain the first change wasn't the result of invasion what was going on there were profound cultural changes in the fifth century and perhaps the most significant was language there is no doubt that spoken language change from native British sometimes called Celtic to English which was a descendant of German surely this if anything has to be proof of the anglo-saxon invasion modern linguistics however are beginning to question Katy loan has been looking at the traces of native British grammar in modern English it come down twist that we simply know as a fact that the Celtic languages just didn't really affect modern English and I think that basically stop people looking they just thought well it dysentry can't be any any influence at all but linguists have discovered a hidden code in our language structure which shows a strong influence from the Britons if your account and you're trying to learn Old English just like any second language acquisition you're going to make mistakes if you go to France today you're bound to make mistakes mistakes which really show structure from your own language so for example you might make mistakes in syntax you might make mistakes in vocabulary of course your accent will be very strange as well and it's thought the perhaps some of the Celtic structure language affected English in the process of learning English the native Britons retain the structure of their own languages and these ancient patterns are still visible in the grammatical structure of modern easy Old English was really rather like German in structure and the way you constructed a sentence was based largely on endings that indicated what a word was doing within a sentence nowadays word order is all-important if I say the cat chased the man it does not mean the same as the other way around in German word endings are not word order would have told us who was chasing who so why did the English language undergo this strange mutation we've moved it we've shifted to a different kind of word order within the sentence where's that come from because it doesn't seem to have happened quite so much within any of the other Germanic languages recent research has shown that the Celtic languages had a part to play in this there has to be contact as the contact over generations there's no other way of doing it the rise of English in these islands came not from a tidal wave of invaders but from a prolonged period of contact during which for native Britons chose to adopt a new way of speaking but why did this happen archaeologists am Lucy has been examining graves from the period to understand why this dramatic cultural change took place so this would be similar to some of the graves they found at West has looking yes very similar up by his head and you've got the metal tip of a spear and the wooden shaft has rotted away you've got down over his hip the metal center of a bigger wooden and leather shield just as the language of a native Britons changed in this period so too did the style of clothes and weapons at the end of the Roman period a lot of objects that you find changed what was that I mean it's traditionally been attributed to and your sexual migrations are anglo-saxons and invasions you do certainly start to get different burial rites women tend to get buried with a much greater variety of dress furnishings this is a prototype that's names a cruciform Rocha cross shaped rose and this road isn't a continental import its idea came ultimately from the continent but it is a British product the people living in Britain are perhaps aligning themselves more to a continental style and continental idea so I think it's that sort of process that's going on rather than population replacement which is what the traditional idea of Anglo Saxon migrations involves the stators be to take cultural artifacts as evidence of racial origin if I were wearing American genius that doesn't make me an American if I'm driving a German car that doesn't make me German it doesn't work like that there can be no doubt but a trickle of warriors and families on the moon were coming into Britain from the countries of northern Europe in this period but a traditional picture of invasion and population replacement is unsustainable the people of Britain learnt a new language adopted new fashions and shifted their political allegiances because they knew from experience that this was the best way to keep up with the rapidly changing times it was only in later centuries but the complex details of this process were transformed into a captivating story [Music] history books can be dangerous things especially when they're brilliantly written in 731 the time side monk men the venerable field finished his ecclesiastical history of the English people which still forms the basis of modern history lessons but bead-like all historians had his own particular ax to grind according to beat the origins of the church in England lie in 6th century Rome where Pope Gregory the Great spotted some beautiful fair-haired slaves for sale upon being told that they were angles from the pagan island of Britain he famously replied but to him they look more like angels according to bead Gregory immediately makes arrangements for center Gaston to sail to Britain and convert these heathen creatures to Christianity to make Augustine's mission more significant minute action was the portrays Britain as a country populated by heathen unbelief he calls these pagans the anglo-saxons and describes their conversion as a glorious achievement in creating his story bead gives the church a fresh start in Britain the newly converted anglo-saxon English are depicted as proper Christians unconnected to the murky Celtic Christianity of the native Britons beed it's writing the story 200-300 years after it happened so he's trying to present it as a coherent process therefore it's in his interest to make things tidier and more organized perhaps than they really were in fact Christianity is big by the late Roman period Agustin arrives in the end of the sixth century he's already stepping into a country that knew all about Christianity and when Agustin arrives by invitation he finds an island where there are already Christians and bishops and organized church life exists in parts of the island so there are different streams of Christianity the conventional wisdom would have it that the anglo-saxons brought with them paganism from abroad and that Christianity wasn't introduced to England until 597 when central Gaston arrived in Canterbury what do you say to that I don't believe a word of it the British Church survived intact and it was flourishing the missionaries thought they were coming to barbarian retain Ian and when they got here here was a church with its own traditions intact from antiquity men who knew how to to operate ten different computational cycles for the reckoning of Easter they could write classier prose and verse than the Roman missionaries were capable of so the Roman missionaries found intact a church completely self-possessed they were so dumbfounded virus that they just blanked it out they pretended that it had never existed they pretended that it didn't exist in order to gloss over the messy origins of English Christianity being invented a new race of people the anglo-saxons who came to be known as the English fie has an agenda to present the anglo-saxons as a coherent body of people and their predestined to inherit southern Britain rather like the children of Israel inherit Holy Land and they inherit it from the British according to be because the British are unfit to live here so the English are a chosen people [Music] [Music] be its influence is all the more extraordinary when you realize that he never ventured out of the monastery in tyneside where he was brought up we know that he'd had particular reasons for writing history one of them was really to create a sense of the English in doing so he gave us an Origin left [Music] do you think that be did invent England he certainly embedded the notion of an English people what you have to realize if the England doesn't exist before perhaps the 9th 10th century it's only later on that you can actually call it a single political nation if you like and before this point you're looking at much smaller territory based groupings largely and so bead in writing that that ecclesiastical history is creating that sense of the English you're starting to create that sense in telling the story of the anglo-saxon invasion bead laid the groundwork for an English identity but I don't believe this version represents who we are as a nation my journey into the story of Britain aiding has uncovered a very different picture of the people of this island so who are we really whether we heart back to Arthur or the anglo-saxons three Brits have always used history to create a national identity for ourselves [Music] the trouble is these are identities based on a holy imagined past so we end up not knowing who we really are go to the heart of our democracy and you see what I mean [Music] when the Victorians decided to decorate the robing room here in the House of Lords they chose to use the figure of King Arthur the Victorians had revived the anglo-saxon invasion myth with vigor the invasion identified the noble English as descending from pure Teutonic stock as distinct from the irrational undisciplined Celts in the paintings King Arthur a native British warrior from our Dark Age paths had to be made to fit the anglo-saxon virtues of the Victorian age the result was a ludicrous conflation of two very separate aspects of our national identity British identity just wasn't that simple in the 19th century at the same time that anglo-saxon archaeologist anglo-saxon historians are writing the history of the English you get if you want to call them that Celtic historians doing the same for the Welsh and the Irish and Scottish and it's actually in direct opposition to each other they don't happen in a vacuum they're done in direct consequence of each other is the very fundamental notion of historical sources and archaeology to try to create the early centuries of Britain ad were formative years in the making of this country's identity it is not just the British who are being exercised by their early medieval past it is the Germans it is the French it is right across Europe if we are now looking to find our roots who are we what is our identity we almost invariably end up in the early Middle Ages in the immediate post Roman period which removed a common culture and created little groups of smaller groups smaller units to which we can look and say this is where I'm coming from and perhaps you will agree in my view what the past is all about is identity our ancestors were not brave anglo-saxon supermen normos serious Celtic warriors like Arthur these origins tying us to one pure race or another do not do justice to agriculture we were not a weak and disorganized society overpowered by the Romans nor did we dissolve into chaos when they left we did not suffer a period of Dark Age confusion and we never needed to be saved by the tribesmen of anglo-saxon pledge the real people of Britain ad did not only survive an influx of foreign influences but actually flourish because of them we absorbed Roman and later Byzantine and North European culture without losing a sense of our own identity it is just ability to absorb and adapt this creative plagiarism which has always been at the heart of British identity and this diversity is not just a feature of our distant past it's a trait that can still be seen in every aspect of our life even our food Robin Cook former British Foreign Secretary famously selected chicken tikka masala as Britain's national dish I believe that our NASA identity itself is a result of a blending of an enormous number of different inputs over the centuries of different ethnic groups have come here and settled here become but so I to absorb but have made their contribution become part of the resultant mix what we now recognize as our own national identity and I think actually what makes Britain great what makes us strong is not purity it is diversity it's all those many different influences that have shaped our language shaped our history chevre Caltrain shaped our character [Music] we Britons of striving into the 21st century with all the confidence of our Victorian ancestors but in planning the way ahead we must keep an eye on the past but if we discard our sense of history we'll be like people with no memory who don't know who they are [Music] so to find the true origins of Britain ad I've had to look beyond the headline grabbing figures the Roman King Arthur and the anglo-saxon and instead I turned to the real heroes of these lands the ordinary Britons in their millions who invented a diverse and resilient culture one final thought this could be Indian or China tea and it says on the packet that was grown in 10-year yet despite their maybe the count of these obvious foreign origins this is still the best known symbol of drift [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 821,265

Rating: 4.6745925 out of 5

Keywords: Archaeology, Full Documentary, history documentary, Francis Pryor, Roman rule, Anglo Saxons, History, 2017 documentary, King Arthur, Documentaries, Documentary Movies - Topic, Full length Documentaries, real, BBC documentary, Documentary, Britain A.D, TV Shows - Topic, stories, Roman occupation, Channel 4 documentary, documentary history

Id: ErA2hDJwWVY

Length: 48min 35sec (2915 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/bibib0i]

The case for almost completely peaceful adopting another language is utterly unconvincing. He's arguing with an agenda instead of going where the evidence leads him. Lots of stuff in part I & II is quite good, but that's where he lost me.