What Was Life In Dark Age Britain Really Like? | King Arthur's Britain | Complete Series | Chronicle

[Music] in the year 407 the emperor constantine iii led the last few roman troops from these islands the empire that constructed this remarkable war had crumbled in britain [Music] now history books tell us that when the romans pulled out they took with them all vestiges of civilization and effectively turned out the light [Music] the country then plunged into centuries of cultural and economic chaos known as the dark ages [Music] now all of this would be fine were it not complete rubbish [Music] as an archaeologist i've spent my career exploring britain's ancient past and i now believe we've misunderstood the early centuries of this country's history instead of a nation crushed and then created by invaders i've found a strong society with a unique and lasting culture the roman colonization is supposed to have erased the ancient britons and instigated a troubled period dominated by invasions from superior civilizations a period whose only hero was a mythical one the legendary king arthur valiantly fighting the invading hordes [Music] but i don't believe our ancient culture was overwhelmed as easily as that i'm determined to examine what really happened in this country after the romans invaded [Music] i'm going to embark on an archaeological journey to uncover hard evidence for the story of britain in the first centuries of its recorded history the story of britain a.d [Music] using the latest archaeological research i'm going to tell the real story of britain from the perspective of the men and women who lived on this island during this period and i'm going to start with the first chapter of britain a.d the roman occupation of britain [Music] this peaceful corner of somerset is the site of one of britain's earliest and bloodiest battles and is evidence for the crushing of our ancestors in the early years of britain a.d for hundreds of years before the roman conquest this dramatic hill fort was a religious center for the ancient britons when the roman conquerors arrived the people up here were ready for them the banks on the side of the hill are the remains of ramparts that would have stood five meters high [Music] but the hill fort was not designed to face the disciplined might of the roman army the defenders were driven back and the gates set a light the roman troops stormed through the burning gateway and slaughtered the britons men women and children were cut down and their bodies left to rot where they fell after this massacre the roman troops destroyed fields and farmland a clear message to the britons not to mess with the might of rome the events at cadbury castle tell a familiar story of the native britons as tragic victims it's a story that fits well into the conventional narrative of britain a.d [Music] i'm going to show that this version of our past is wrong the first few centuries of britain a.d saw the forging of our national identity archaeology is beginning to show that far from a dark age this was a time of huge creativity and development until now the legacy of roman britain has blocked our understanding of this period in order to appreciate the significance of these times we must go back to the archaeology [Music] the archaeologists who excavated here at cadbury castle didn't only find evidence of a roman massacre they also came across building foundations that dated to soon after the roman occupation this confirmed what i'd thought that ancient british culture was strong but there's a final twist the archaeologists had been looking for arthur's camelot the locals actually believed that this was camelot they'd been plowing this field they were coming out with all sorts of materials most of it iron age with a bit of roman stuff coming up but they thought it was the site of a battle really yeah and then relatively small-scale excavation comes across massive refurbishment of the of the fortifications in roughly the right period comes across a timber-framed hall in the middle with loads and loads of mediterranean-type pottery scattered about the fact that there is already a connection with arthur's name means that the the whole thing is ready to roll could arthur be a clue to what happened in britain a.d the problem is that arthurian archaeology is more than a little short of evidence there isn't a corner of britain but doesn't claim a connection with this historical celebrity this is where arthur's supposed to have been conceived and this is arthur's footprint this is the cine mound king arthur's round table is buried here and every year on midsummer's day it levitates and this is arthur's camelot this is slaughter bridge where arthur finally kicked the bucket before being carted off to avalon [Music] as an archaeologist i've always been rather skeptical of the arthurian industry arthur is the ultimate commodity a ready-made hero who's been hijacked by history [Music] and in this dramatic visitor attraction high in the shropshire countryside there's a complete arthurian package there's a deep lake with a legend of a sword excalibur and i'm standing in arthur's grotto where someone claims they found the holy grail there was even a stone with a sword in it until somebody nicked the sword arthur encapsulates so many good qualities that we really want to identify with arthur's the great warrior figure and he'll come back to save us um when the nation in is in its greatest peril and that sort of story has an enormous attraction [Music] this gripping tale of dark age britain has fired the imagination of writers and artists for centuries and it would be easy to dismiss it as a fairy tale with no grounding in historical reality but myths are not necessarily lies stripped of his medieval embellishments arthur has new things to tell us about this period the idea of noble arthur conflicts with the conventional view of the barbaric dark ages and supports my view that british culture survived the romans intact and at the heart of arthur's story i found a clue to the resilience of the native britons in the aftermath of roman rule the myth of the sword excalibur holds a clue to what really happened in britain a.d the story of king arthur is not a happy one the tale involves an illegitimate boy who is raised by a magician called merlin the boy becomes king and assembles a loyal following of 12 men known as the knights of the round table king arthur and his knights fight many gallant battles but eventually arthur is killed [Music] his body is taken to the magical island of avalon where legend has it arthur is not dead but sleeping waiting for a time when his kingdom will need him again throughout the many different versions of this story there is a potent image that comes back again and again swords play a central role in the arthurian legends he learns that he is to be king of britain when he miraculously withdraws a sword from a stone at the end of his life his magical sword excalibur is returned to a goddess in a lake as a prehistorian these stories sent a shiver of recognition down my spine the image of arthur pulling his sword out of the stone was an eerie reminder of the ancient practice of casting bronze i have witnessed this process the orange glowing sword is actually pulled from a stone mold [Music] in my work as a prehistorian i had discovered ritual traditions in which weapons were disposed of in watery places and where islands have particular potency how did these ancient british traditions find their way into the story of king arthur written centuries later the answer lies just north of the fence in a region known as the whitham valley [Music] in 1981 archaeologist digging here came across a remarkable discovery just under the surface of the fen a series of upright posts and horizontal timbers were uncovered they formed part of a raised causeway constructed over 2000 years ago at either side of his causeway archaeologists found dozens of pieces of ancient weaponry including a large number of swords and spears and this was not the first time that such objects had been found here in the late 18th century when they were dredging the with them so joseph banks a great scientist and collector put out a a notice to the work men to say anybody finds anything you come to me i'll see you all right and and it was a wonderful thing to do because this stuff wouldn't have found its way into the museums if that hadn't happened over the years literally hundreds of swords daggers and other precious items have been dredged from the fence here they range in date from the prehistoric period right through to the 14th century now this wasn't some localized finland cult but part of a much larger belief system they're still being found today we've been out here every weekend more or less since august and look at how many people have turned up they've walked a lot of their parish already um they've found some fantastic sites over there of course just through field walking if they hadn't done it we'd never know about them although individually you might not have thought that you're finding very much but put all together we've found nearly 2 000 separate objects now [Music] and that's an iron age axe part of the shaft still there again so rarely see them one eight that's a viking accent made for splitting heads [Music] this extraordinary complete iron age spearshaft it's the longest in europe medieval iron swords a masterpiece the rhythm shields not really useful as a shield as with much of this it's a ritual piece although we find weapons we're finding tools as well the great and the good and the everyday people i think coming together in this activity it wasn't until recently that archaeologists began to notice a pattern in the location of these objects throughout the valley there are these slightly higher sand banks and ridges these were the remains of ancient causeways which once formed part of this extraordinary landscape [Music] the whitham valley stretches in a long thin line up to the city of lincoln until these fends were drained in the 1780s the rhythm would have sprawled all over the low-lying land weaving a network of islands and marshes local people moved around the fence on a series of wooden causeways the weapons were always discovered near these causeways at first it was assumed they were accidentally dropped or lost in battle in fact there is a far more mysterious explanation people were visiting the river using the river and for whatever reason they were leaving this sort of material the spear could have been used in the river but it seems to have been given to the river and i like the idea of them being given and returned to the waters perhaps and these medieval iron swords the sword theme does actually go all the way through through millennia for hundreds of years weapons have been deliberately thrown from these causeways into the water i believe that the story of king arthur receiving his sword excalibur from the lady of the lake is a direct reference to this ancient british tradition but the arthurian legends were written much later long after these ancient religious ideas were supposedly wiped out by the romans and christianity how on earth did they survive the rhythm had one more secret to reveal this area of finland has one of the highest concentrations of monastic sites anywhere in britain there can be no practical need for so many abbeys in such a small area [Music] so why was the early medieval church building here with such extraordinary further the narrow 10-mile stretch of the whitham valley is scattered with the remains of 14 abbeys every one of these abbeys is built at the end of an ancient causeway we found it really difficult to understand why there should be 14 church sites all lined up for 10 miles along the edge of the whitham valley historians dave stocker and paul everson don't think that this is a coincidence the abbey we're standing on is on an island you find there's only one way to get here and it's long a causeway it seems odd but a causeway should determine where you're going to put an abbey you've got to bear in mind that to cross any sort of body of water but particularly to cross a fen by boat was a dangerous matter and uh in in order to er to make it a successful crossing you had to offer some sort of um piety now some sort of call it superstition but it but it was it was a sort of folk superstition which was bound up with religion the weapons and the water into which they were being placed had significance for the people of ancient britain swords weren't just a weapon the sword is a great symbol of authority which is distributed outwards from lords to their tenants as a badge of office once the tenant dies that sword has to go back to the lord and that's attested in many anglo-saxon wills now imagine that you're a king and you haven't got a lord or at least not on earth and in the arthur story of course it's the spirit of the lake it's the lady of the lake who is the guardian of britain the story of the lady in the lake echoes the ancient tradition of depositing weapons in water the medieval authors who wrote these tales knew about such traditions because christianity had not killed them off but it kept them alive when were the last swords going in the latest one is 14th century and interesting enough that's precisely the same moment at which uh swords and indeed whole body armor tend to start being hung up in churches over burials uh of lords i mean it sounds to me looking at it as a prehistorian but actually what some of these chaps in the in the in the in in the abbeys are doing sounds awfully sort of pagan to me pope gregory said i don't want you knocking down these pagan temples i want you converting the pagan idols water is the one connecting thread the bronze age barrows were by the water the causeways cross the water the swords are put into the water so the one connecting thread of all this is water and do you suppose that might be a reason why that fantastic cathedral over there is placed right by the river with them i have very little doubt that that's the case the first name for lincoln's indocon city by the pool nikkor is what the normans tended to call the place and the word nikkor means water spirit the story of the rhythm is one of continuity it suggests that deep-rooted ideas that began in prehistory continued well into the medieval period this clashes in what i learnt at school where the first 1 000 years of british history were a series of massive invasions indeed the first of these the roman invasion may not have been a forced invasion at all at the heart of a tale about a boy in a magical sword i found evidence that ancient british traditions survived the roman invasion a new series of archaeological discoveries are beginning to rewrite the story of the roman invasion of britain [Music] this elegant mosaic decorated the floor of one of the most luxurious buildings in roman britain but this was not the overseas residence of some extravagant roman governor but the home of a wealthy romanized brit fishborn palace is the largest building ever excavated in roman britain martin hennig helped excavate the gardens it was absolutely amazing digging along your trowel couldn't help sinking in and you were actually uncovering the bedding trenches probably for barks you can see similar gardens on a much smaller scale if you go to pompeii or smaller scales yes [Music] what you've got here is something that's equivalent to the palaces of the greatest roman aristocrats fishborn covers a larger area than buckingham palace 160 stone columns support the roof which is constructed from 100 tons of imported italian tiles corridors surround over 100 rooms some of which are decorated with elaborate mosaics when fishborne was discovered it was assumed that this was a palace of a roman governor a symbol of the imperial regime that had been forced on britain but during excavations archaeologists came across a gold signet ring with an unusual inscription the seal of tiberius claudius catuarius the ring belonged to a wealthy britain but what was it doing at fishball to understand why a briton might be living in a roman palace we must look again at the events leading up to the invasion of ad43 maybe because we haven't been invaded since 1066 we british have a simplistic attitude towards invasions we see them as being inevitably oppressive so we imagine that when the romans arrived they wiped out british culture and customs but in actual fact it wasn't a straightforward process of colonization [Music] archaeologists are starting to radically rethink the roman invasion of britain i would imagine the britons faced by the might of rome would have been quaking in their boots i don't think it was quite that the previous attempt to invade britain was out of the bad and mad emperor caligula who had marched a large army up to the channel coast he then put all his catapults in a row and they fired enormous rocks into the sea after a time he told them that he had won a great victory over nixon you can imagine how that got about the great roman empire was run by a lot of charlie's and it completely destabilized the the situation of course [Music] pre-roman britain was in fact a collection of often feuding tribal kingdoms there is very little written evidence about early british tribes but john crichton showed me a burial from the period which contained some intriguing items legitimacy military is a burial found just outside colchester days were about 10 bc so this is still about 50 60 years before the roman conquest containers of roman wine small little cupid bronze work coming in from the italian world this stuff just isn't being produced in britain at all here's a small little medallion of the roman emperor the emperor augustus so a really nice personal gift from the emperor but why would an iron age king in britain want to have a roman emperor's head it is great they're associating themselves with rome it's like all the satellite states around the soviet union or the influence of america had in central america big powerful empires have very very close relations with all the states around them certain tribal leaders in britain have been friendly with rome for decades before the invasion their coins reflect the glory of the empire coinage is never politically neutral it's always saying something it's always meaning something it has its own native style to start with but then around about the time of this kind of burial we start finding classical imagery appearing on the coins so they would have been familiar with classical literature certainly the upstairs yes and that can't be a coincidence the kings and britain are very tightly bound in with the power politics in rome we see them adopting the same imagery again showing their affiliation to the new world order there was one british king known as verica who was on particularly good terms with rome his tribe was the atrabartis in the most complete version of the roman invasion the historian cassius dio describes verica inviting the roman troops in [Music] a certain verica had persuaded the emperor claudius to send a force to britain led by the distinguished senator plortius this wasn't a subservient relationship verico would help the romans if he was able to do so and that they would help him if need be in av-43 the need did arise when verica's kingdom was invaded the atrobates had been effectively under military occupation by tribes from the north that rather implies that to people down here at least the romans weren't that unwelcome the romans arrived as as liberators [Music] this is a revolutionary idea but can it be supported by archaeology cassius dial on the invasion on the way across they were first discouraged but they recovered when they saw a flash of light across the sky from east to west the direction they were travelling when the fleet reached the island there was no one to oppose them dayo however emits dimension where the invasion took place [Music] why was i taught as a student that the romans landed in large numbers on the kentish shore ritchborough there had been excavations at richboro which just certainly discovered some early military evidence they looked at the third century account and added topographical details so that a battle on the medway uh became almost a historical fact though actually the the river med way is nowhere mentioned so so archaeologists invented it yes it's a total invention if the romans didn't arrive at richborough where did they land there is another possible sight for the roman invasion churches the harbour slap bang in the middle of varicose territory this is a fairly typical tidal creek what makes it special it's nice and sheltered a wonderful natural harbour which would have allowed large numbers of men to be disembarked yes if you had a roman invasion arriving here what sort of number of boats um perhaps uh two or three hundred uh so a large number of boats that would need to be maneuvered [Music] chichester harbour is in fact right next to fishbourne palace so was the palace anything to do with king verrica the palace was built 30 years after the invasion however recent finds of ceramics have revealed that there was a base at fishborn before the invasion john manley was involved in the excavations the fact that we found these kind of ceramics and food remains suggests it was a heavily romanized place before ad43 to my mind it makes it much more likely that a large part of the invasion force landed here in territory that they were familiar with maybe in territory where they already had client kings it was verrica who pleaded with the romans to come to britain and verica lives somewhere around here chitchat of fishborne area and that that was used as a pretext for the invasion of britain now we don't hear a verica again after 1841 so it is conceivable his relative maybe even his son was brought in by the incoming romans and settled here as a client king although we can't be certain varicosam was probably called toggy dubness excavations at fishbourne found the marble bust of a child was this the owner of the palace the marble head has to have been carved in rome there was no marble carving in britain it's very likely that of toka darpanas at the time he was made a roman citizen do you think toggy dubness himself would have lived here at fishbone i think almost undoubtedly he did it's an enormous palace this must have been something of a power center for uh king togetherness who was increasingly given territories and authority to rule much the rest of the province [Music] this contradicts the conventional account of the roman conquest king verrica opened his doors to the roman troops who sailed peacefully up chichester in honor of his new alliance the most splendid palace was built not as a symbol of roman suppression but as a celebration of british tribal power [Music] the romans claimed that they came saw and conquered but in actual fact they were invited into this country once here they didn't crush our native culture but guided the development of an increasingly diverse society in the years after the invasion the romans built a series of towns across britain perhaps most opulent of these was bath the buildings here typify the elegance and the glory of the roman empire the town was built on the site of an ancient spring which had been a religious site for thousands of years it's a great natural phenomenon a quarter of a million gallons of water a day just pours out of the ground it's hot it's 40 odd degrees centigrade barry cunliffe excavated the baths in the 1970s within 30 years of the invasion they were putting up this great monument and the first job was to contain the spring it was a pretty impressive piece of engineering because of that water coming out all the time you could take one view here are the romans who've come to this place and they've imposed this great roman building um slapped it down on the landscape and this could be seen as a sort of imperialism but i don't think it's like that at all what we're seeing here is the romans being very very sensitive to the sanctity of the place they recognize it as a sacred place they appreciate it as a sacred place although the buildings are roman and the sculptures look roman the iconography i think is hinting at something that goes right back into the iron age when we excavated in the temple precinct we were able to work out there was a real order about it facing east with the great gorgon's head was the temple front itself [Music] and then on either side there were two sculptured facades with pediments uh on the north side the pediment had the goddess luna in it uh who was um shown riding her chariot across the night sky on the southern side was a pediment with a god of the sun soul with a spiky crown so you've got some sense of north cold south hot the south side presiding over the hot spring [Music] and the balance between the goddess and the god the male female this encapsulates a much earlier belief so the romans are if you like taking over the sacred geography of the place and are monumentalizing that many objects were thrown into the sacred spring as offerings this is a startling reminder of the age-old customs in the whitham valley and the arthurian story of the lady of the lake the spring is a fissure going down into the underworld where the deities live so you could communicate there this we know from the roman period was sacred to sulis minerva the two words put together now minerva of course is the roman goddess and sulis is presumably the iron age goddess the person revered here going right back in time the earliest occupation that is mesolithic going back to 7000 bc people will always have revered it you can imagine what it would have looked like at the time of the roman conquest the water brings up iron oxide and that would have spread red crusts around on this black mud and it must have looked almost as though the ground was bleeding [Music] the construction of these baths is a magnificent feat of engineering for which the romans are quite rightly admired although they gave us magnificent buildings and luxurious baths i do not believe that the romans fundamentally changed this country's soul through the years of roman occupation britain developed a unique ability to absorb foreign influences without losing its own identity but the biggest foreign influence had yet to arise it originated not in rome but in the holy lands of jerusalem and it would contribute to the fall of the empire in britain it's long been assumed but having forced themselves on britain the romans abandoned this insignificant island to deal with more pressing problems at home [Music] however i don't believe this was the case [Music] this vast lead tank has been restored to its original state but when i first saw it i was crammed at the bottom of a roman well and the tank lay there like a crumpled milk carton i remember thinking why on earth didn't they melt it down and reuse this valuable lead why dispose of it in this deliberate fashion what was so special about this tank the tank is decorated with a symbol which combines the greek letters kai and roe which was a sign of very early christian worship [Music] this is constantine the great near this spot in july 306 he was made emperor of rome he later went on to make christianity the official religion of the roman empire it was a time of immense political change that foreshadowed the ultimate collapse of the roman empire in the west by encouraging christianity in britain constantine gave his subject something that would become more powerful than rome itself constantine's conversion came towards the end of the roman occupation of britain by which time the structure of society had begun to change during the late third century and on into the fourth the super rich stop spending their money on public buildings for the benefit of the population in general they spend it on themselves the big money moves out of the towns it's a pattern we've seen in our own time wealthy people tend to take their money out to their country estates the great villas were just scattered throughout southern britain there we have these people right out on the fringe of the roman world aping a classical world from hundreds of years ago these people were sticking references to classical mythology classical literature on the floors in their houses [Music] these mosaics hold a key to the way in which beliefs in britain changed chadwick filler in gloucestershire was one of the richest of these country houses phil bethel showed me around this was one of probably the top 10 richest most opulent houses in the whole of britain in the 4th century [Music] all along the length of this corridor there would have been a continuous mosaic floor nearly 80 metres long so they had everything that money at that time could buy mosaics in every room underfloor heating systems two bath houses their very own in-house water shrine this whole thing was designed to show you i'm rich and i'm powerful so this was actually a little temple and here was actually part of their daily religion where they worship in time-honored fashion came back to the celtic origins of the romano british religion but they'd worship the spirit of the spring they seem to almost recreated a bit of their earlier cultural history [Music] the idea that this was the roman from rome living here seems a bit unlikely the roman empire it was a bit like a sort of a franchise you know you sort of they opened a branch of rome out here in britain and the people who actually did the day-to-day governing and running the country by and large natives it would in this case would have been native britons but from the families that were probably already important before the romans came it seems in gloucestershire there wasn't a big conquest here the local tribe the bunny seemed to play along with the romans when they invaded [Music] that maybe why it became a very wealthy area rich powerful people who lived here already took advantage of that new system to increase their wealth [Music] some of the mosaics that covered the floor of chedworth villa have been destroyed but many british mosaics have been preserved in architectural drawings from a society who didn't leave many written records these mosaics are a unique insight into the complex minds of the romano brits and the beliefs that change their world some of these mosaics contain a strange mixture of christian and pagan symbols which have long been dismissed as clumsy mistakes but in actual fact these images are connected to the mystery of a lead tank i think that we ought to look at mosaic pavements in much the same way one would look at stained glass windows in churches when you go to and look at the glorious stained glass windows in the gothic church each image out there says something [Music] we have to see this as being a literate society a learned society elite members of society with a lot of time on their hands who were interested in reading the classics and literature and they are trying to make sense of the world they live in at lollingston roman villa the discovery of a converted chapel was evidence that christianity had been practiced here within the mosaics dominic perring has found a sign that the people here were dealing in a very unusual christian cult called gnosticism fourth century is appeared vigorous intellectual firming [Music] and whereas today we have a strong idea about science as leading us forward then it was very clearly philosophy people were trying to escape the mortal condition this prison of our world to escape it was about knowing the secrets it was about knowing how to move into a higher plane of existence and knowledge was very much part of that knowledge of the images knowledge of mythology knowledge of philosophy knowledge of christ but also secret knowledges [Music] hidden in the mosaics dominic has found gnostic images which blend classical myths with the christian ideas about immortality this strange fusion of beliefs was at the heart of a gnostic cult it may have become a symbol of romano british culture [Music] slaying a monster he's riding winged pegasus the message here is both good slaying evil but also the attempt to reach life immortal it certainly was a set of beliefs which lent itself to urban aristocratic elite society and villa society these were people who were able to engage in these arcane discussions these philosophical debates such independent thinking could not be tolerated by the empire and in 380 the emperor denounced gnosticism as heresy the emperor establishes edicts against heresies and you're allowed to exile people confiscate the lands and whatever how does one stop heretics being heretics well stop them baptizing if a bishop can't baptize a flock you don't increase the size of the flock so destruction of baptismal fonts is one way of doing it we've got archaeological evidence of damaged lead tanks some of which quite clearly were used for baptism which are being cut into pieces and thrown down wells the crumpled baptism tank that i had seen was just one of many christian items which had been deliberately destroyed or buried in this area [Music] we have church plate baptismal spoons the chalice used in the eucharist being buried in some of these silver hordes people are decommissioning these items whoever buried this collection of precious silver must have felt anger and resentment because their property their beliefs their very identity were under attack by the time this treasure was buried rome had lost the hearts and minds of the native britons [Music] having invited the romans in absorbed and digested the rich and various influences of a classical world britain turned its back on realm and looked to an independent future [Music] the end of roman administration was a new beginning for the people of britain three and a half centuries after the romans destroyed it the magnificent hill fort of south cadbury was reoccupied [Music] it has long been imagined but the figure who led this resurgence was king arthur arthur is a kind of product of different generations and how they see themselves arthur was created largely by medieval romantic historians who wanted to create a kind of pseudo-chronology of events after the roman invasion and the trouble is it's loosely threaded together with pieces of genuine evidence and it depends on how literally you choose to take bits of that i rather suspect that arthur is a kind of metaphor a symbol for the sort of petty tribal chieftain who would have taken over power in a region after the roman power collapsed in britain a man who could hold his people together [Music] this valiant king embodies a brave new world in which a descendants of roman britain began to build an independent future and yet for centuries we have shrouded this exciting time under a veil of mystery and labeled it the dark ages next week we will discover that arthur's britain was in fact a time of creativity and progress in which nothing less than the future identity of this country was forged [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 their 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 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 was arthur invented to make up for a lack of real history or is there some foundation to these peculiar myths as 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 cities 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 a 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 cats 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 [Music] archaeology like all humanities is a product of its time and victorian archaeologists were part of a british empire which compared itself to rome so they had every reason to suggest that when great empires collapse disaster and chaos follow [Music] amid the gentle hills of the shropshire countryside lied 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 that they did not spot something that would completely rewrite the history of the town it wasn't until the 1980s that archaeologists discovered the real story of roxanna 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 590 600. 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 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 and 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 looked 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 [Music] 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 twelve 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 britain's they had they had no way to go this was home yeah 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 centres that are growing up could go down to the south west 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 craglock 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 cause 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 for 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 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 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-roman imported pottery something had been taking place at the top not 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 slide you've got in there lots of white bits and yeah three sort of pinky things that's right that's serpentine ah 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 a 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 seed 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 to pick up further cargos 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 tangi or 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 560. 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 had 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 was 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 of entering force 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 um the site's been known about since the 1960s and it's been monitored since 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 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 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] today we place different aspects of our lives into clearly labelled boxes work trade religions politics but in the past these partitions didn't exist [Music] so i don't suppose that the mediterranean and british traders were there just to exchange goods these beach markets were 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 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 caldee 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 caldi 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 call the island had one more secret to give up in the form of an ancient stone inscribed in latin with 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 it'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 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 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 hualaon in sepulchers look in peace for the awesome advent of the judgment sanctusima moulier hikit [Music] a most holy woman here lies who was the most beloved wife of bilatesus 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 brachinion 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 do 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 sophisticated 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 lynx 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 arthas britain but this world could not last forever the roman town of rockstar 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 and i think that that's what this arthur is all about arthur is all about this this wish this nostalgia for a pass 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] the conventional story about the making of england describes how the briton sunk into a state of lethargy 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 filled and england is born the trouble is there is no archaeological evidence for 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 [Music] 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 the roman troops departed and a very different story to the one which we have become accustomed is emerging just before world war ii archaeologists in suffolk uncovered one of the greatest discoveries of our time the anglo-saxon burial mounds at sutton who helen geek explains this pretty decided to investigate the burial mounds that were on her property she rang up ipswich museum and asked for advice on a freelance archaeologist it seems like another world where a landowner can simply employ an archaeologist to open their burial mounds but that's what happened in man one over there he discovered an intact ship and a burial chamber when news of this got out archaeologists from cambridge university and 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 um other things like the strange wet stone that's made into a scepter [Music] it's got polish in the middle where your hand could have held it and a little cup which could sit on your knee so you can hold your scepter like a modern king some people see 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 an important ruler of the east angles by the 7th 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 demon 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 um but but we just don't have any archaeological evidence to back that up at all what seems much more likely is that um that by some process of of internal social development kings arose at some point in the late sixth century and then decided to kind of create this this origin myth to explain where they'd come from probably they just murdered 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 south and east of britain archaeologists are divided about where these powerful new leaders came from [Music] heinrich harker favors the idea they were invaders until sutton who was found pablo was the richest anglo-saxon grave in england [Music] these big anglo-saxon barriers of the 7th century were very often located on the tops of ridges taking up a dominant position in the landscape demonstrates who you are who your family was heinrich harker 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 um migrations to explain culture change this is essentially the underlying argument i agree with that and actually if 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 exactly it is marketed there of course you can say there's 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 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 because there's nothing much 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 it's christmas 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 thought i 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 it science however is trying to 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 [Music] by comparing y chromosome information from different populations mark has 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 welsh towns and the 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 been mixed with that of people from northern europe complex statistics we use 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 would have to have been more recently and if we assumed that that mass migration was the anglo-saxon mass migration then we estimate that that replacement must have been between 50 and 100 the sheer completeness of this population change really does conflict with the archaeological evidence three million people shoved out well they don't show that now we can't say anything about the exact about what the process was as i said that could be pushing or 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 we can't really say how it happened but another team of geneticists in the same department of mark have conducted a similar survey and come up with very different results [Music] they conclude that the native british y chromosome has not been largely replaced in southern and eastern england 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 8th and 9th centuries 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 fifth and sixth 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 this powerful origin myth 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 centuries they're known as saxon shaw force because it's still widely accepted that they were constructed to keep out marauding 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 eleven shaw forts skirt the southern and eastern coast from porchester in the south around the coast these shore forts have been taken as an imposing reminder of the anglo-saxon threat all the way up to brancaster in norfolk one of the most easterly of these forts the castle still commands the landscape [Music] all of this all of the green fields over there would have been what was termed the great estuary combination of open water and marsh and intertidal creeks that kind of thing probably until 10th 12th century andrew pearson has been re-examining the force and has come to the surprising conclusion that 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 freesia from jutland basically from the peoples who are in later periods going to colonise britain the name saxon shawford actually comes from a roman military list which was translated in the 16th century by the famous antiquarian william camden what the term saxon refers to is unclear what camden said it pretty much when went as archaeological fact for for many sort of centuries to come really i think also what he hit on was a very evocative idea it's it's very dramatic it's also very simple that these forts are put up as a defense against the saxons the count is called the count of the saxon shore now whether that means it is the shore being attacked by the saxons or settled by the saxons really we just don't know andrew has found that the huge walls are actually better suited to protecting goods kept inside the forts rather than attacking enemies from outside well i think these sites are doing much more than defending the coastline if the saxons came raiding it wouldn't have been monthly it may not have even been every year or every 10 years so in terms of what these forts 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 then 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 some is perhaps traditionally thought in fact these are quite the opposite in so far as materials and goods are coming here and then being shipped outwards and beyond into the empire as a whole andrew 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 worlds are the last of a series of chalked downs 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 thirty years ago archaeologist dominic powersland was asked to excavate some fifth century burials that are turned up in a quarry site near the village of west hezleton 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 may be as early as the bronze age dominic discovered the remains of miles of farms and villages the settlement began life four thousand years ago and continued through to the eighth century spanning the crucial anglo-saxon invasion period dominic calls this discovery the ladder settlement we've got 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 trackway down the spine of the settlement basically comprise a series of farmsteads or even small villages following on the trackway hugging the very edge of the wetlands we've traced 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 coast 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 groats i mean and that's just in these little fields up and down here this is a flux skate radiometer which measures minute variations in magnetic signal under the soil imagine this field was untouched by human hand and someone comes along and digs a ditch across it and then that ditch fills in with various forms of material stubble getting into the ditch then it all gets filled in again and it looks like this you can't see the ditch when we come along we walk over it and we read the signal so we'll get zero all around it then suddenly it'll go up one two three four two three one zero zero zero and we just walk backwards and forwards across that and build up this picture as we go the gradiometer picks up soil disturbances which were made hundreds even thousands of years ago how much more have you got to do during too much we're over halfway there having said that where's the end printed out this is what the geophysics looks like that must be the biggest geophysical survey in the country i believe it's now the biggest in the world good grief this massive evidence dominate surely tells us a different story about population in the area yeah it must mean we've got a high population the idea that 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 lie beneath the soil just waiting to be uncovered we're just coming out from the front of the world runs that quite steeply 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 wind-blown sand protects ancient remains which in other areas of britain the modern plow has destroyed dominic and his team were about to start digging an archaeological gold mine now the first time we looked at the ladder settlement we opened a 15 meter area and there were 35 000 fighters this has been sort of like a archaeological gold dust because we have archaeology we can't see but we know it's well preserved yeah and that is very rare in britain there are probably a few square kilometers of archaeology that's that well preserved in the countryside dominic's excavations uncovered what the ghostly patterns of a geophysics survey had hinted at the actual remains of houses trackways and settlements which spanned 000 years of ancient history this is the field we're working in at the moment and the land of settlement comes through here and we can magically put layers and layers of the past on the top of this air photography there is the line of the ladder settlement going right the way through the field there so what can the ladder 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 1st century and the viking invaders of the 8th century both left their archaeological mark in the shape of war 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 look like anglo-saxons the anglo-saxon cemetery is located here underneath the main road we've got the cemetery so we set off in search of the settlement and we found the whole of the anglo-saxon village 49 acres the shadow of the balloon is now entering the site of the early anglo-saxon village which extended right up into the foot of the hills absolutely huge much bigger than the present village dominic's meticulous surveys would have been able to pick up the massive disruption that an invasion causes on a landscape but all he could find was evidence of peaceful and continuous settlement and there sat some people there roman people there iron age people bronze age people and of course move into the field next door and things go absolutely crazy [Music] 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 blimps 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've got the cemetery here you've got a complete way of life and and it's vanished it's flat dusty sandy and it looks like there's nothing here and it goes on for kilometer after kilometer that's fantastic dominic discovered that the site had been occupied from pre-history until the middle of the eighth century neolithic cemeteries bronze age barrows [Music] roman settlements anglo-saxon villages were all part of its continuously occupied landscape there were no gaps of occupation no war 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 clones pottery weapons and burial practices underwent a dramatic change in the centuries after the roman government collapsed these new fashions are very similar to styles found on the continent and this change in fashion did not just happen at west hezlot for decades these burials have been taken as the key piece of evidence that 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 there will be one here in this field somewhere [Music] dominic gave some of the skeletons from his anglo-saxon cemetery to paul budd 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 the teeth 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 at the time of your childhood when the tooth was formed paul's discovered that tooth enamel has within it materials specific to the person's location of birth one of these materials contains oxygen isotopes your main source of oxygen is the oxygen that you consume as water because you're eating local foods this signal will find its way into your bones and into your teeth [Music] by measuring the oxygen isotopes in a person's tooth enamel paul is able to tell what climate 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's cemetery and a few of these were indeed foreigners but the other results were surprising the things that we expected that we might see would be some continental immigrants at west 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 were these rich swaggering warrior-type people no the interesting thing about those four is that they're all females they're very poorly furnished graves 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 well certainly seems to be the lower status people the most likely candidate is going to be sort of scandinavia norwegian sort of coast up here or possibly um sweden over here what about the remainder of the population and presumably they were all yorkshire well you would think so [Music] but the surprises 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 half of the population who are associated with the the western side of the country [Music] early east yorkshire seems to be uh occupied by a large proportion of cumbrians as far as i can tell [Music] you've got a big immigrant component to the west hesitant 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 dominic at all there's a small number of newcomers yeah there are a small number of continental saxons jutes frisians and so on 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 settlement there is no gap between the two if there were then we would have had a huge watch of that nice red ochre red sand sitting between the two yeah 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 [Music] but dominic's vast excavation had found no such evidence [Music] people are coming in to appreciate the picture that we've thought was genuine for so long is seriously flawed and 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 it's actually much more exciting to find that it's all wrong the people of the 5th century cemetery at west hesleton looked like newcomers from the continent and yet most of them were born in britain [Music] if this change wasn't the result of invasion what was going on were profound cultural changes in the 5th century and perhaps the most significant was language there is no doubt that spoken language changed 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 this assumption katie lowe has been looking at the traces of native british grammar in modern english it's come down to us that we've simply know as a fact that the celtic languages just didn't really affect modern english and i think that's basically stopped people looking they just thought well there simply 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 you're a celt and you're trying to learn old english just like any second language acquisition you're going to make mistakes i mean 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 that perhaps some of the celtics stretch the 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 english 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 [Music] 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 and not word order would have told us who was chasing whom 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 there has to be 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 the native britons chose to adopt a new way of speaking but why did this happen archaeologist sam 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 hesleton yep very similar up by his head you've got the metal tip of a spear and the wooden shaft is rotted away you've got down over his hip the metal center of a bigger wooden and leather shield just as the language of the native britons changed in this period so too did their style of clothes and weapons at the end of the roman period a lot of objects that you find changed why was that i mean it's traditionally been attributed to anglo-saxon migrations or anglo-saxon invasions you do certainly start to get different burial rights women tend to get buried with a much greater variety of dress furnishings this is a brooch type that's known as a cruciform broach a cross-shaped bridge and this brooch 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 ideas 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 mistake has been to take cultural artifacts as evidence of racial origin if i were wearing american jeans 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 that a trickle of warriors and families on the moon were coming into britain from the countries of northern europe in this period but the 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 that 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 a tyneside monk named the venerable bead finished his ecclesiastical history of the english people which still forms the basis of modern history lessons but beed like all historians had his own particular acts to grind according to beed 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 that to him they look more like angels [Music] according to beed gregory immediately makes arrangements for saint augustine to sail to britain and convert these heathen creatures to christianity to make augustine's mission more significant than it actually was bead portrays britain as a country populated by heathen unbelievers he calls these pagans the anglo-saxons and describes their conversion as a glorious achievement in creating this 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 [Music] speed he's writing this 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 augustine arrives in the end of the sixth century he's already stepping into a country that knew all about christianity and when augustine 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 saint augustine 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 ruritania and when they got here here was a church with its own traditions intact from antiquity men who knew how to to operate 10 different computational cycles for the reckoning of easter they could write classier prose and verse than the roman missionaries were capable of [Music] so the roman missionaries found intact a church completely self-possessed they were so dumbfounded by this but they just blanked it out they pretended that it had never existed they pretended that it didn't exist [Music] in order to gloss over the messy origins of english christianity bead invented a new race of people the anglo-saxons who came to be known as the english speed has an agenda to present the anglo-saxons as a coherent body of people and they're predestined to inherit southern britain rather like the children of israel inherit the holy land and they inherit it from the british according to b because the british are unfit to live here so the english are a chosen people [Music] bead's 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 beed had particular reasons for writing his history one of them was really to create a sense of the english [Music] in doing so he gave us an origin myth [Music] do you think that b did invent england he certainly invented the notion of an english people what you have to realize is that 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 before this point you're looking at much smaller territorially based groupings largely um and so bead in writing that that ecclesiastical history is creating that sense of the english or starting to create that sense 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 a.d has uncovered a very different picture of the people of this island so who are we really whether we hark back to arthur or the anglo-saxons we brits have always used history to create a national identity for ourselves the trouble is these are identities based on a wholly 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 a 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 past had to be made to fit the anglo-saxon virtues of the victorian age [Music] the result was a ludicrous conflation of two very separate aspects of our national identity british identity just wasn't that simple [Music] in the 19th century at the same time that anglo-saxon archaeologists 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 the 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 you see very deliberate manipulation of historical sources and archaeology to try to create a sense of history the early centuries of britain a.d 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 nor mysterious celtic warriors like arthur these origin myths tying us to one pure race or another do not do justice to our culture 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 legend the real people of britain a.d did not only survive an influx of foreign influences but actually flourished because of them we absorbed roman and later byzantine and north european culture without losing a sense of our own identity it is this 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 national 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 not so much absorbed 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 shaped our culture and shaped our character [Music] we britons are striding 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 because 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 a.d i've had to look beyond the headline grabbing figures the romans king arthur and the anglo-saxons and instead i've turned to the real heroes of these lands the ordinary britons in their millions who invented our diverse and resilient culture one final thought this could be indian or china tea and it says on the packet it was grown in kenya yet despite or maybe because of these obvious foreign origins this is still the best known symbol of britain [Music]

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 1,656,131

Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages, dark ages documentary, dark ages explained, were the dark ages real, were the dark ages dark, were the dark ages actually dark, king arthurs britain full series, francis pryor britain ad, francis pryor archaeologist, medieval archaeology, medieval life, medieval peasant, what was life like in medieval times, dark ages show, medieval show, medieval history show

Id: TqDusYEXwD0

Length: 145min 34sec (8734 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022