Were The Dark Ages Really That Dark? | King Arthur's Britain | Chronicle

[Music] in the oxford history of england the great historians of frank stenton wrote between the end of roman government in britain and the emergence of the earlier english kingdoms there stretches a long period of which the history cannot be written with the departure of the roman troops historians imagined the end of history and from their empty pages we have conjured up a desolate wasteland of abandoned cities overgrown fields and marauding barbarians and we call this the dark ages [Music] in actual fact sophisticated societies developed in britain in the dark ages released for its associations with rome britain began to forge an independent identity ancient trade routes were resurrected languages evolved and the foundations of modern european thought were laid down these were not the dark ages [Music] the fall of rome led to a period of political instability throughout europe tribes of barbarian invaders swept across the provinces of rome looting and pillaging the land saint jerome laments this terrible time savage tribes in countless numbers have overrun all parts and those which the sword spares famine ravages i cannot speak without tears [Music] but what became of britain on the outskirts of his crumbling empire [Music] the trouble is there is a gap in the historical record at one end we have 410 a date as indelible and emotive as 1066. 4 10 was the year that rome told britain look to your own defenses [Music] at the other end we have 597 the year in which pope gregory the first of rome converted the anglo-saxons to christianity in between there are only fragments and stories a murky historical no man's land the perfect breeding ground for myths and legends emerging from the shadows of his period is the figure of king arthur who if he existed at all rose to prominence in these troubled years but here lies a crucial paradox how can a period of dark age barbarism also have produced the greatest folk hero britain has ever had [Music] was arthur invented to make up for a lack of real history or is there some foundation to these peculiar myths a prehistorian i'm used to dealing with long periods without any written records but that doesn't mean that nothing happened i'm going to find out what really did happen in this mysterious time and i'm going to start in the place where the collapse of the roman government must have been most keenly felt the city the romans built a network of civic centers across britain i went to york one of the largest of these to find out what happened after the legions left [Music] underneath the medieval city walls it's possible to see the earliest layers of the city's rich history whilst the roman and later viking layers provide plenty of archaeological evidence the elusive dark age layers contain few recognizable artifacts it's almost as if the period is invisible to archaeologists however by the side of the roman bridge head in york archaeologist mark wyman has made a breakthrough by re-examining thousands of pieces of pottery thought to be part of the city's roman history he has begun to shed some light on the city's dark age past okay francis well this is where we do the pottery one thing that definitely does happen at the end of the fourth century in britain is that coins disappeared coins are crucial to establishing chronology but with no coins available mark had to find a new way of interpreting the evidence we were looking for a type of pottery that might have continued in production beyond the end of roman britain the pottery mark was looking at could not be matched to any traditional roman products well why do you believe this rather strange looking stuff is fifth century well this is what's known as counts like gritted wear it's a late roman coarse pottery type manufactured in huge quantities in east yorkshire the material we're looking at here is actually from a site excavated by the site of the roman bridgehead in new york the layers that produced mark's pottery had to be dated later than the roman period this suggests that pottery was being manufactured in york after the romans left this business of making pottery in the fifth century has put the cat among the pigeons why is that the received view of roman britain one that's still quite widely held i think has been that roman britain's end is exceedingly certain and the archaeological material that we require to understand activity to understand the past just isn't being made the reason i set out to do this research was to identify a type of artifact which we could say is manufactured in the fifth century to argue against the idea of everything suddenly coming to a judging hold life in york did not come to a standstill in 410 mark had found evidence for some kind of activity in the city after the romans left and he is not alone with these discoveries all over the country archaeologists are starting to piece together a picture of dark age britain very different from the conventional story of collapse it's time to start rewriting the history books archaeology like all humanities is a product of its time and victorian archaeologists were part of a british empire which compared itself to rome [Music] so they had every reason to suggest that when great empires collapse disaster and chaos follow [Music] amid the gentle hills of a shropshire countryside lie the remains of the roman town of rockstar the romantic ruins fascinated early antiquarians who saw it as an evocative reminder of a great civilization which had fallen into ruin rockstar was first excavated in the 19th century these victorian archaeologists were so excited by the roman remains here but they did not spot something that would completely rewrite the history of the town it wasn't until the 1980s but archaeologists discovered the real story of rockstar as they wandered over the rubble he found these two large round stones the inspector said well perhaps these are the same they noticed lines of packed rubble and plaster [Music] and i suddenly realized i had this massive great building it was so big but it's a bit like trying to see an elephant standing a foot away the north wall was taken down dismantled and the rubble was used to create a huge building platform what they were doing was making a solid foundation onto which they could then build a timber frame structure [Music] the dating was the major problem the big building and all the other buildings around it had to fit in between about 520 and about nine to six hundred so i mean we're long long after the official end of roman britain in 410 aren't we and they're building huge buildings which are laying out in roman measurements i mean they're thinking like romans aren't they they are romans it's this is our perception that we think of romans as being foreigners who come over occupy the country and go away again they weren't they the the people in the country romanized they became roman i mean central control central administration had sort of broken down so i mean who who was organizing and what was it an arthur-like character it's it's a very difficult question to answer because you had no evidence no but if you think about it this is like trying to answer the question of who lives in buckingham palace purely from the foundations what we can say however is that this person has power so they are someone who's able to command authority there is a structure to the society the discoveries of rockstar were a great advance in archaeology they opened the way for archaeologists to re-examine other roman sites in britain to discover what happened during the so-called dark ages padron's wall was one of the most important military sites in roman britain [Music] stretching from coast to coast the wall includes a series of garrison thoughts in its heyday this was a busting community of soldiers and their families defending the northern fringes of the empire what happened after the roman army pulled out has long been a mystery it used to be believed that king arthur fought his final battle of kamlan near this remote windy spot on hadrian's wall but recent work has shown that within the fort of bird oswald there was an altogether more extraordinary archaeological story to tell bird oswald is the most westerly of the series of thoughts which line the wall miriam lincoln showed me around the remains of his military headquarters it's the main road through the fort building's either side huge drill hall the granaries to the south here it was the granaries that archaeologist tony willmott decided to examine when he began excavation here i just had a feeling from looking around the site that late roman would survive quite well and chap in one corner said tony i think we've got a bit of a straight line here chap in another corner a bit of a right angle and i basically went to the top of the tower of the farmhouse look down and there was just this great rectangle sitting there above the stone foundations of the roman granaries tony discovered the remains of a huge structure which was built long after the roman troops withdrew it was a unique archaeological discovery what was it like it's jaw-dropped you're thinking god this is this is it you've got this lovely huge open structure thatched roof and it would be the first thing you saw as you came through the gateway there [Music] i put one of my most experienced diggers just to give a very quick clean to this slide trench and i didn't tell her what i was looking for and i said anything odd about this and she said there's these sort of hard flat patches oh where are they and she went well there's one here and i pointed to that yeah and there's one here and i pointed to that and sure enough they paired up [Music] it's completely objective because i hadn't told her what i was doing that's how it became confirmed the strange markings that tony found with the remains of 12 footies which formed the skeleton of an enormous wooden hall that had been built after the roman troops departed [Music] so what kind of a group of men built a building like that i mean it's a sucking great big thing i think the key is there's no break to the commander perhaps even a hereditary commander by this point would have become a central authority and you can see that kind of gradually morphing into the idea of a petty king or a petty leader are we talking about a sort of protection racket it's not hard to see them saying well okay carry on paying your roman taxes and we'll carry on seeing you all right and from from taxation to protection racket it's perhaps not such a huge such a huge jump the history books tell us roman soldiers pulled out turned out the lights and and and and darkness descended yeah it wasn't happening here um these were native britons they had they had no way to go this was home and so had to find a living somehow certainly there was no mass withdrawal from bird oswald [Music] do you reckon there are more late forts along hadrian's wall i think there's certain to be these communities didn't just disappear if you're sitting pretty behind some high stone walls you're not just going to disappear and start practicing subsistence farming you're going to stay put there's started to be evidence from a number of places now that this sort of thing took place perhaps bird ottawa is just one of a network of fortified centers that are growing up you could go down to the southwest you've got hill forts being reoccupied i think that we should see bird oswald as one of those rather than being part of the roman frontier system at that time everything's changed yes [Music] to the east of bird oswald is a lake called crag lock from here archaeologists have extracted soil samples to construct a picture of how the landscape changed when the roman troops pulled out this process known as pollen analysis involves examining the types of trees that once grew here i like trees which is why i've planted them on my farm but to archaeologists the presence of trees on land that had once been farmed shows that the countryside has been abandoned and in the dark ages the traditional view is that the countryside reverted to a wild wood once the romans had withdrawn the worker craig locke challenges his view it was carried out by petra dark of reading university whole analysis gives us really good evidence for what the countryside of the past was like we can actually identify the pollen grains of different plants like the trees the cereals and so on and we can count the pollen samples taken through cores of sediment and reconstruct vegetation change over long time scales petra is able to build up a picture of what the landscape looked like hundreds of years ago if we get cereal pollen that tells us that they're growing crops nearby if we have tree pollen that tells us there was woodland nearby and this is very important for reconstructing changes in farming in the past because we can see were they farming very intensively or had areas of land being abandoned to farming in which case they quite rapidly revert to woodland by carbon dating the samples petra is able to tell when a landscape changed by the roman period this is quite an open landscape a lot of the woodland's gone petra's charts clearly show that at hadrian's wall there was not a massive increase in forest when the romans pulled out by the end of the roman period we start to get an increase of birch pollen but the other trees are not really changing so there isn't massive woodland regeneration happening contrary to popular belief the landscape at hadrian's wall did not revert to forest when the romans left petra has compared samples from a selection of sites across britain while some do see an increase in woodland at many the land continued to be farmed in exactly the same way and in certain places land use actually intensified after the romans departed we can't generalize across the whole of the landscape in the way that uh you know in the 1950s before we had this evidence there was this generalization that's much too simple a picture petra's work demolishes the vision of britain reverting to a wildwood once the romans departed in forts like bird oswald and towns like rockstar the end of roman administration did not bring about the breakdown of society released from the controlling hand of rome new leaders emerged and society regrouped but this new independence did not mean that britain had cut herself off from the rest of the world a series of extraordinary contacts were about to be made with some of the most powerful players in the ancient world at tintagel on the atlantic coast of cornwall there is a rugged promontory this dramatic site has long been associated with the dark age warrior king arthur [Music] i think this one of the most romantic places in britain and i'm not surprised that arthur is supposed to have been conceived in a castle here the trouble is those dramatic ruins over there are 13th century and have nothing whatsoever to do with arthur or with camelot king arthur first became associated with tintagel when the author jeffrey of monmouth wrote a version of a legend in which king arthur is born here the earl of cornwall decided to build an arthurian-style castle on the headline tourists have been coming here ever since to catch a glimpse of camelot however the dark age story of tintagel is far more exciting excavations here have shed new light on britain's ancient contacts with the rest of the world charles thomas explains this is the classic way to see it to approach it because we've got the island we've got that neck there and you can see most of the important parts you can see the top the summit there in the early 1980s there was a very dramatic fire here and the whole of the top of the platter port five the grass burnt even the roots burnt we then had a unique opportunity to examine two or three acres we found that the top far from being bear was covered with the remains the footings of little huts 20 or 30 rectilinear buildings we thought that these were all medieval we now know that post roman we've investigated 10 percent of the top of the island we found that the pottery although burnt was still recognizable as post-driven imported pottery something had been taking place at the top on a big scale at the precise location where writers imagined a dark age king being born modern archaeology had found the remains of a large settlement dated to the middle of the dark ages and this was not all trampled amongst the remains of the buildings with thousands of shirts of intriguing pottery the fines are extraordinary because there were large quantities of wheel made pottery none of this was the same as we get in roman britain and none of it was anything that could conceivably have been produced here in post-roman times archaeologists thought that the pottery looked mediterranean in origin but to be certain they had it analyzed by david williams at southampton university what i did with colleagues is to make a thin section of part of the actual pot stick it onto a glass slide and grind it down so it's terribly thin [Music] when you put it under the microscope you can actually see the minerals and the rock fragments in the clay of the vessel right and they will actually reflect what type of geological area the clay came from so if i look through this at that side you've got in there lots of white bits and yeah three sort of pinky things that's right that's serpentine that isn't a common mineral at all you do get examples of serpentine around the mediterranean in western cyprus and they also occur just across the coast and southern turkey there's a whole string of kilns around there when we compare them with the tintagel pottery and it's almost a dead ringer david discovered that the tintagel pottery had been made in one of a series of enormous kiln sites in southern turkey so much pottery was produced at these sites that it still lies in huge piles by the side of the road today [Music] these are thick sturdy vessels that were made for the buffeting of sea transportation they were very heavy indeed these heavy-duty pots were used for transporting goods such as olive oil and wine around the mediterranean the ship that visited tinchagel may well have started from turkey perhaps pick up further cargo's tableware micaceous jars across to the peloponnese pick up more amphora and then to carthage where possibly it picked up north african olive oil amphora plus the african tablewares and from there possibly through the straits that you brought up to tintagel the big containers they're really the coca-cola tins of their period if that's turning up in tin tattle these things don't last forever the first time some idiot drops it it's shattered you can say this is a group of pottery from the mediterranean which got here in some such period as 530 to 5 60. britain was at the edge of a vast trade network driven by constantinople the new powerhouse of the ancient world power shifted to constantinople modern-day istanbul after rome was sacked by the barbarians in 410 the eastern empire continued to be run here for a further thousand years but what brought these mediterranean traders to britain what did we have to offer them a discovery in devon in 1995 provided a clue divers looking for the remains of a galleon came across a most unusual find this estuary yeah was mistaken as the entrance to plymouth sound and then they'd see this great big expanse of water and of course you've got this hidden reef of rocks and you hit that lot i mean you've had it [Music] the first two divers came up to the surface big smiles from ear to ear with these tin ingots oh look at that it's heavy isn't it yes it's pure tin when we have them analyzed they analyzed them at 99.9 percent pure tin and this is a clue that they're very old one theory is there's a boat anchored out there they were ferrying them out and they turned over on the reef tin had been a british export since prehistoric times it was known to the romans as the british metal is this what byzantine traders were coming to collect from tintagel [Music] if you control a large area you let it be known that by mid-summer the tribute you're going to enforce is x blocks of tin and you collect a lot of this and this is something which uh would be extremely exchangeable in terms of mediterranean goodies the tin that the divers found lay a few meters away from a beach which has yielded some intriguing remains coastal erosion has revealed half where meat had been cooked could these be connected to the tin tray sam turner is about to start excavating here well there's several halves eroding from the cliff the site's been known about since the 1960s and it's been monitored since and the erosion's got really quite bad recently um in fact you can see some of the charcoal deposits here in the face of the sand cliff blackened material got the charcoal yeah yeah big lumps of charcoal and that's part of a hearth which extends sort of five or six feet across this area but i mean there's more than just charcoal there i mean just looking down here look there what's that it looks like a bit of bone there's bone from various species here some of the bone has clearly been butchered on the site yeah what's going on they're right on the seashore it must have signed to do with it this is probably some kind of seasonal settlement associated with um activity that was going on here probably trading activity and we know that imported pottery from the mediterranean has been found at this site with these kind of features this is the kind of trading activity we know was going on all around the southwest peninsula at this time this mediterranean pottery why is it being used on the port i mean you don't get champagne bottles being opened in the port of london do you when that happens somewhere else certainly i think that this activity must be associated with the social elite these presumably would be the people who are here undertaking trade using it as a meeting place to meet and exchange news and ideas sam's discoveries were not unique all along the coast archaeologists are beginning to find evidence for more of this elaborate activity on this shoreline alone 500 shards of pottery and 10 feasting sites have been found these halves were the remains of what can only be described as beach parties held on the occasion of visits from mediterranean traders such festivities indicate there was more to this mediterranean contact than the straightforward exchange of tin for wine [Music] we place different aspects of our lives into clearly labeled boxes work trade religion politics but in the past these partitions didn't exist so i don't suppose that the mediterranean and british traders were there just to exchange goods these beach markets but to do with something altogether more profound the ceremonial exchange of beliefs and ideas and some archaeologists even believe that these ceremonies were politically driven in the 6th century the byzantine emperor justinian the first organized an attempt to reconquer the western roman empire this program of reconquest was accompanied by a diplomatic initiative a charm offensive to try to get local elites across western europe on board one area where such elites existed was in western britain [Music] and it's possible that what we see as trade between the byzantine world and the british west was in fact diplomacy between constantinople and the british kings who ruled that area whether or not these traders are on a political mission i am certain that this contact was never purely commercial the trade networks established between britain and byzantium provided a basis for the transmission of spiritual and intellectual ideas they're bringing with them a whole range of new ideas archaeology can't show us that um archaeology and history and language between them can infer its existence and the pure archaeology the dirt archaeology of pots shows us one method by which it could have come so yes there is a trade in ideas the byzantine merchants did not sail halfway across the gnome world to visit a deteriorating island [Music] they came to an economically independent country whose people had goods and ideas to share with the rest of the world but what were these ideas there was one more step in the pottery story that would reveal the words of a dark age civilization hidden for century very little written material survives from the fifth and sixth centuries in britain for a long time this was taken as proof that these were illiterate uneducated times in actual fact nothing could be further from the truth [Music] dark age britain was a time of intellectual as well as economic advance a single shirt of mediterranean pottery identical to the tintagel material was recently found on the remote island of caldey off the south coast of wales caldey has been a holy island for hundreds of years it still houses a monastery today [Music] jonathan wooding showed me around it's the only piece we've found here but where you find one there's doubt there's got to be more eastern ceramics where they're turning up here represent a period when the east is interested in the west ascending trade missions diplomatic missions whatever it may be but eastern people are turning up in celtic britain and they're expecting to find people who are essentially like them descendants of romans who know the same language as the same rituals the same basic cultural ideas kaldi was part of the early monastic movement which arrived in britain with the pottery on boats from the mediterranean well the monastic movement arrives at the same time as the departure of roman rule in the east it was already playing a part in providing a new leadership almost a new focus of leadership in a changing society and i'm sure it was much the same here people took it up with great enthusiasm as an alternative to the more settled or urban christianity of the roman world dozens of monasteries sprung up in britain in the dark age period and they produced a new class of learned monk there is one historical source for dark age britain written by a monk named gildas in the sixth century about a hundred years after the departure of the romans it's an extraordinary arousing account of this country's history it was written in high grade and rather flowery latin it was clearly intended for a sophisticated and literate audience because it's peppered with classical references gildas was the preeminent theologian of monasticism in his era the great founder of irish monasteries on the continent actually uh cites him as someone that the pope ought to have read in writing to the pope not just any old pope but gregory the great the most monastic pope really of the first millennium he is very much a figure who is known all over western europe a world that can produce a gildas is the learned world in close connection with a wider intellectual a wider religious community [Music] he certainly isn't a just a unique figure he's unique in perhaps our records but that's more tells me more about our records and it does about the time gildas and men like him were not isolated monks hidden away from reality but scholars in touch with the intellectual and religious ideas of their time we see a britain that's in contact with the rest of the world it's a normal process of contact it's not just an eastern missionary turning up in an odd place i think we have to start thinking about it now as a sort of much more global thing i think finds some places like tintagel and bantham are on a scale now that make it unlikely that there's just one or two ships but more fines are turning up every year and i think in time we will have a much clearer picture of the scale and the importance of these contacts the more or less contacts have escaped history so that's an example of archaeology has really told you something that you just simply didn't know before literacy was not confined to the monastic elite in dark age britain called the island had one more secret to give up in the form of an ancient stone inscribed in latin the sign of the cross i ask from all those walking there that they pray for the soul from within of cardagon this is rhythmic syllabic adonik verse and it is by centuries the oldest these people are using the meters that become the standard fare of every subsequent european literature that's not dark age it is not illiterate [Music] stones like the one in caldi have been found scattered across western britain [Music] these inscribed stones provide clear evidence for a highly literate society in dark age britain they are memorials written not by kings or priests but by ordinary people committing their thoughts to stone for centuries these inscriptions have been dismissed as a clumsy scrawling of a semi-literate society in actual fact they give us unique insight into the ideas that were structuring early british thought [Music] the job of deciphering these ancient messages has been the work of david howlid editor of the latin medieval dictionary in oxford we're coming into the oldest part of the bodlean library and what we see here is an embodiment in stone of the view of the universe that our ancestors had adopted from antiquity [Music] seven liberal arts the human constructs of language grammar rhetoric and logic and the divine hard science all of them mathematical arithmetic is static number music is moving number astronomy geometry david believes that the structures which still shape learning today were first formulated in the dark ages was it some form of intellectual opposition that structured the way they thought it was a cooperation a combination you have the school of languages at the same door as the school of geometry and arithmetic and over there the school of astronomy in the same door as the school of rhetoric [Music] it was a cooperation a combination the human arts with divine mathematical art you need both you cannot have one without the other during the sixth century modern europe is invented and it's invented here inside britain what we have is both this highly polished rhetorical latinity from gildas 130 years after the departure of the legions and these stone inscriptions now the inscriptions have looked like ropey odd latin prose because they are in fact verse nobody read them aloud to see that they go dumpty dumpty dumpty it's just there you see it and once you see it it transforms your view of what you're reading and it even more seriously transforms view the society from which this emerged some of these stone inscriptions contain hidden layers of meaning and the inscription reads carrasius heek yucket in hoke con guerriere's lopidum kerasius here lies in this a heap of stones straightforward but if you read it backwards it reads um lapides which is a faultless dactylic hexameter that's classical latin this is classical latin poetry but read backwards and if we return to the straightforward carouse inscription and count at intervals of seven letters we find the name of the woman who designed this which is viola jorvert and hualan in sepulchers look in peace for the awesome advent of the judgment [Music] [Music] a most holy woman here lies who was the most beloved wife of bilatisous in morals discipline and for wisdom than gold and precious stones this woman was better now she is the most holy most beloved wife of a bishop you've said that there are thousands of these dark age inscriptions that does rather imply that there were an awful lot of readers some of these inscriptions are on hillsides in deepest brachii they imply that there is a large class large enough numbers to make this worthwhile these islands are the focus for the real survival of latin if you imagine that at the time of the departure of the legions the brits are the only people in europe who'd carry on writing very high level literary latin and the reason this remained pure was that these were the only people in europe who did not speak a romance mother tongue there was less linguistic interference from one to the other so they learned latin by the book rather like salman rushdie learning english by the book and then writing very high level literary language and the brits are the only people in europe who do this are we looking at a renaissance here for a renaissance to occur you have to have a dark age and i don't think the dark age ever existed what i see is continuity in the intellectual life the fall of rome in 410 what caused the withdrawal of the legions from britain is a finite historical moment with great ramifications and they're serious and catastrophic and people have just supposed that that was what happened in roman britain but it didn't this is the only place that did not happen so in other words it's instead of turning the lights out you actually think that the lights were turned up brighter this is the only place in which the lights were turned up brighter [Music] not only had britain survived the roman withdrawal refashioning towns and resurrecting trade links she had started to lay the foundation for an intellectually exciting future i started this journey with the mythical figure of arthur looming in the background a reminder of a lack of real evidence we have for the dark ages i ended it believing that i'd really found my camelot this period had given birth to myths and legends as magical as that of arthur because this really was an extraordinarily creative time [Music] arthur may be historical fiction but he is put in a real historical situation in order to crystallize it there becomes a person around whom these myths gather and i don't mean myths as lies this imagined golden age did have a real solid foundation and that's camelot my own belief what it's worth is that there was an arthur that he was a local war leader and all took place in the north of britain [Music] arthur could have been one of many strong leaders in this turbulent society perhaps he was one of the tough soldiers on hadrian's wall who took advantage of a crumbling government maybe he was a romanized sophisticate who helped restructure towns like roxata in order to carry on living a civilized life he could have been a merchant made good one of a south western elite with the bountiful mediterranean links or part of the monastic elite of the west well-versed in latin and the holy life in looking for arthur i have found a world far more exciting and far more real than any romantic tale of knights and shining armor [Music] these were the real men and women of arthur's britain but this world could not last forever the roman town of roxata where archaeologists had found such remarkable evidence for dark age survival and rebuilding did eventually collapse by the 7th century a pagan ruler known as pender overwhelmed the town and its inhabitants this town's fate was sealed so if ever an arthur was required it was then it was but he wasn't there these fantastic early welsh poems talk about arthur-like figures they talk about this period but they're actually being written in the eighth and ninth century and one can imagine this sort of sense that if only there was someone who could come and help us if only there was someone who could fight off these this these oppressors yeah um and i think that that's what this arthur is all about arthur is all about this this wish this nostalgia for a past that never actually happened but it only if it had they would have turned it all back and it would have they would have kept their kingdom whether or not they had an arthur to protect them the inhabitants of roxata abandoned their town in the seventh century changes which had been happening elsewhere in britain had finally overtaken them it was a revolutionary tide which came not from the hills and mountains of wales in the west but from the flat fertile plains of eastern england the end of rockstar was the beginning of a new chapter in britain's history the anglo-saxon invasions in the next programme i'm going to show how archaeologists are beginning to question whether even this celebrated event really did happen after all [Music]

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 96,546

Rating: 4.8991032 out of 5

Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages, dark ages documentary, were the dark ages really dark, were the dark ages really that bad, were the dark ages real, were the dark ages dark, were the dark ages violent, were the dark ages that bad, how dark were the dark ages, why were the dark ages called the dark ages, british history documentary, british history documentary bbc, francis pryor britain ad, francis pryor

Id: 0wLoU5Wp6b0

Length: 48min 39sec (2919 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021