Why Britain's Dark Ages Remain Shrouded In Mystery | King Arthur's Britain | Timeline

[Music] in the Oxford history of England the great historian of Frank Stenton wrote between the end of Roman government in Britain and the emergence of the earlier English kingdoms there stretches a long period of which the history cannot be [Music] written with the departure of the Roman troops historians of imagine the end of history and from their empty pages we have conjured up a desolate Wast land of abandoned cities overgrown fields and marauding barbarians and we called this the Dark Ages in actual fact sophisticated societies developed in Britain in the Dark Ages released from its

associations with Rome Britain began to forge an independent identity ancient trade routs were resurrected languages evolved and the foundations of modern European thought were laid down these were not the Dark [Music] Ages the fall of Rome led to a period of political instability throughout Europe tribes of Barbarian Invaders swept across Ross the provinces of Rome looting and pillaging the land St 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 but what became of Britain on the outskirts of

his crumbling Empire 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 410 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 I of Rome converted the Anglo-Saxons to [Music] 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 city the Romans built a network of Civic centers across Britain I went to York one of the largest of these to find out what happened after the legions [Music] left underneath the medieval city walls it's possible to see the earliest layers of a city's Rich history whilst the Roman and later Viking layers provide plenty of archaological 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 reexamining thousands of pieces of pottery thought to be part of the city's Roman history he has begun to shed some light on the city's Dark Age past okay Francis well this is where we do the pottery one thing that definitely does happen at the end of the 4th Century in Britain is that coins disappeared coins are crucial to establish chronology but with no coins available Mark had to find a new way of interpreting the evidence we were looking for a Tye 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 Mar why do you believe this rather strange looking stuff is fifth century well this is what's known as calite gritted Weare yeah it's a late Roman coar 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 Bridge head at 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 still quite widely held I think um has been that Roman Britain's end is exceedingly sudden 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 juddering hold life in York did not come to a standstill in 410 Mark had found evidence for some kind of activity in the city after the Romans left and he is not alone with these discoveries all over the country archaeologists are starting to piece together a picture of Dark Age Britain very different from the conventional story of collapse it's time to start rewriting the history books archaeology like all Humanities is a product of its [Music] time and Victorian archaeologists were part of a British Empire

which compared itself to [Music] Rome so they had every reason to suggest that when great Empires collapse disaster and Chaos [Music] follow amid the gentle Hills of a Shropshire Countryside lie the remains of the Roman town of roxa the Romantic ruins fascinated early antiquarians who saw it as an evocative reminder of a great civilization which had fallen into ruin roxa 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 Rock 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 and they suddenly realized they had this massive great building it was so big it was 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 [Music] structure 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 59600 so I mean we're 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 then go away again they weren't they the

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 were who was organizing and was it an Arthur likee character it's it's a very difficult question to answer because you had no evidence no but if you think about it this is like trying to um answer the question of who lives in buck and Palace purely from the foundations what we can say however is that this person had power so they are someone who's able to command Authority there is a structure

to the society the discoveries at roxetta were a great advance in archaeology they opened the way for archaeologists to reexamine other Roman sites in Britain to discover what happened during the so-called Dark Ages hen's wall was one of the most important military sites sites in Roman [Music] Britain stretching from coast to coast the wall includes a series of Garrison forts 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 camlan near this remote windy spot on hadran'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 forts which line the wall Miriam Lincoln showed me around the remains of his military headquarters it's the main road through the fort buildings either side huge drill Hall the granaries to the South here it was the granaries that archaeologist Tony Wilmont 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 Cha in one corner said t I think we got a bit of a straight line here and chap in the other Corner said it's 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 what was it like jaw dropped you know you you thinking God this is this is it really we'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 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 where are they he 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 [Music] up it was completely objective cuz I hadn't told her what I was doing that's how it it became confirmed the strange markings that Tony found were the remains of 12 footings which formed the skeleton of an enormous wooden Hall that had been built after the Roman troops Departed so what kind of a group of men built a building like that I mean it's a socking 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 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 from from taxation to protection recet is 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 that's yeah it wasn't happening here um these were Native Britains they had they had nowhere to go this was home and so had to find a living somehow certainly there was no Mass withdrawal from B oswal do you reckon there are more late fors along hen'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 osw is just one of a a network of fortified centers that are growing up you could go down to the Southwest you got Hill fors being reoccupied I think that we should see bird oswal as one of those rather than being part of the Roman Frontier system at that time Everything's changed [Music] yeah to the east of bird Oswald is a lake called CAG lock from here archaeologists have extracted soil samples to construct a picture of how the land scape 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 work at CAG lock challenges this view it was carried out by Petra dark of Reading university po analysis gives us really good

evidence for what the country side of the past is like we can actually identify the pollen grains of different plants like the trees the cereals and so on and we can count the pollen samples taken through cores of said siment 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 seral 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

uh changes in farming in the past because we can see were they farming very intensively or had areas of land being abandoned to farming in which case they quite rapidly revert to Woodland by carbon dating the samples Petra is able to tell when a landscape Changed by the Roman period this is quite an open landscape a lot of the woodlands gone Petra's charts clearly show that at hen'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

colon but the other trees are not really changing so there isn't massive Woodland regeneration happening contrary to popular belief the landscape at Haden'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 contined to be farmed in exactly the same way and in certain places land use actually intensified after the Romans departed we can't generalize across the whole of the landscape in the way that uh you know in the 1950s before we had

this evidence there was this generalization that's much too simple a picture Petra's work demolishes the vision of Britain reverting to a Wildwood once the Romans departed in Forts like bird Oswald and towns like roxetta the end of ran 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 [Music] world Aton Tad on the Atlantic coast of coral there is a rugged promary this dramatic site has long been associated with the Dark Age Warrior King [Music] Arthur I think this one of the most romantic places in Britain and I'm not surprised that Arthur is supposed to have been ConEd received 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 tinel 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 head t have been coming here ever since to catch a glimpse of camelon however the dark AG 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

sum there in the early 1980s there was a fairly dramatic fire here and the whole of the top the platter caught fire 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 bare was covered with the remains the footings of little Huts 20 or 30 reinar buildings we thought that these were all medieval we now know them post Roman we've investigated 10% 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 on a big scale at the precise location where writers imagined a Dark Age King being born modern archaeology had found the remains of a large settlement dated to the middle of the Dark Ages and this was not all trampled amongst the remains of the building with thousands of shs of intriguing Pottery the finds 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 light and grind it down so it's terribly thin when you put it under the microscope you can 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 that slide you've got in there lots of white bits and yeah three sort of Pinky things that's right that's Serpentine that isn't a common mineral at all you do get examples of serpentine around the Mediterranean in Western Cyprus and they also occur just across the coast and Southern turkey there's a whole string of kils around there when we compare them with the tintagel pottery and it's a almost a Dead Ringer David discovered that the tentagel pottery had been made in one of a series of enormous Kil sites in

southern turkey so much Pottery was produced at these sites but it still lies in huge piles by the side of the road [Music] today these are thick sturdy vessels uh that were made for the buffe in of of sea Transportation they were very heavy indeed these heavyduty pots were Ed for transporting goods such as olive oil and wine around the Mediterranean the ship that visited tin SCH May well have started from the turkey perhaps to pick up further caros table wear mous jars across to the pelones pick up more anra and then to Carthage where

possibly it picked up North African olive oil AER plus the African table Wares and from there possibly through the Strait of Jaa to tinag the big containers they're really the Coca-Cola tins of their p period if that's turning up in tagel these things don't last forever the first time some idiot drops it at shatter 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 gallion came across a most unusual find this EST 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 hav [Music] you the first two divers came up to the surface big smiles from ear to ear with the these tin ingots oh look at that God it's heavy isn't it yes it's pure tin when we had them analyzed uh they analyzed them at 99.9% pure tin and this is a clue that they very old one theory is there was a boat anchored out there it were fing 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 [Music] tinel if you control a large area you let it be known that by Midsummer the tribute you're going to enforce is X blocks of tin and you collect a lot of this and this is something which uh 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 halfs 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 hars eroding from the c um the site's been known about since the 1960s and it's been monitored since and the erosions 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 big lumps of charcoal and that's part of a Heth which extends sort of five or six feet across this area but I mean there's more than just charcoal there I mean just looking

down here look there what's that it looks like a bit of bone there's bone from various species here some of the bone has clearly been butchered on the site yeah what's going on they're right on the seashore it must have something 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 potery from the Mediterranean has been found at this site with these kind of features this is the kind of trading activity we know is 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 open opened in the port of London do you I mean 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 uh undertaking trade um using it as a meeting place to uh to meet and 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 shs 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] they we place different aspects of Our Lives into clearly labeled boxes work trade religion politics but in the past these partitions didn't [Music] exist so I don't suppose that the Mediterranean and British Traders were there just to

exchange [Music] 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 I 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 IDE 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 tradeing ideas the by bantine Merchants did not sail halfway across the gnome world to visit a deteriorating Island 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 six 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 [Music] truth Dark Age Britain was a time of intellectual as well as economic Advance a single sh of Mediterranean Pottery identical to a tinal material was recent ly found on the remote island of CDI off the south coast of Wales CI has been a holy Island for hundreds of years it still houses a monastery today Jonathan wooding showed me around it's the only piece we found here but where you find one there doubt there's got to be more Eastern Ceramics where they're turning up here represent a

period when the is interested in the west is sending 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 languages the same rituals the same basic cultural ideas CDI 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 uh playing a part in

providing a new leadership almost a new focus of leadership in a 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 6th Century about a 100 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 flowy Latin it was clearly int ended 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 um he is uh very much a figure who is known all over Western

Europe a world that can produce a gild as is the Learned World in close connection with a wider intellectual a wider religious community he certainly isn't just a unique figure he's unique in perhaps our records but that's more tells you more about our records than it does about the time gildas and men like him were not isolated monks hidden away from reality but scholars in touch with the int ual and religious ideas of their time we see a Britain that is 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 find some places like tentagel and Bantham are on a scale now that make it unlikely that there's just one or two ships but more find 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 they're more or less contacts had escaped history so that's an example of archaeology has really told

you something that you just simply didn't know before literacy was not confined to the monastic Elite in Dark Age Britain called the island had one more secret to give up in the form of an ancient stone inscribed in Latin with the sign of the cross I ask from all those walking there that they pray for the soul from within of Kagan this is rhythmic cabic adonic verse and it is by centuries the oldest these people are using The Meters that become the standard Fair of every subsequent European literature is not Dark Age it is not

illiterate Stones like the one in CDI have been found scattered across Western [Music] Britain 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 stay for centuries these inscriptions have been dismissed as a clumsy scrawling of a semi- literate [Music] 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 hoid editor of a

Latin medieval dictionary in Oxford we're coming into the oldest part of the bodan library and what we see here is an embodiment in stone of the view of the universe that our ancestors had adopted from antiquity Seven Liberal Arts the human constructs of language grammar rhetoric and logic and the Divine hard science all of them mathematical arithmetic as static number music as 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 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 6th 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 Pros because they are in fact verse nobody read them aloud to see that they go Dumpty Dumpty tumpy it's just there you see it and once you see it it transforms your view of what you're reading and it even more seriously transforms view the society from which this emerged some of these Stone inscriptions contain hidden layers of meaning and the inscription reads kazus hik yaket in hul karia lapidum kazus here lies in this a heap of stones straightforward but if you read it backwards it reads which is

a faultless dactylic hexameter that's classical Latin this is classical Latin poetry but readed backwards and if we return to the straightforward Cor inscription and count at intervals of seven letters we find the name of the woman who designed this which is Viola yvert and ran in sepers look in peace for the awesome Advent of the [Music] Judgment Kuka aiva a Most Holy woman woman here lies who was the most beloved wife of biva isus 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 uh that there are thousands of these dark agan in in criptions that does rather imply that there were an awful lot of readers some of these inscriptions are on hillsides in deepest brog 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 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 Salon rushy learning English by the book and then writing very highlevel 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 legance from Britain is a finite historical moment with great ramifications and they 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 in 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 [Music] brighter not only had Britain survived the Roman withdrawal refashioning

towns and resurrecting Trad Lings 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 extraordinary creative time 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 for what it's worth is that there was an author that he was um a local War leader and all took place in the north of Britain Arthur could have been one of many strong leaders in this turbulent Society perhaps he was one of the tough soldiers on hen's wall who took advantage of a crumbling government maybe he was a romanized sophisticate who helped restructure towns like roxetta in

order to carry on living a civilized life he could have been a merchant made good one of a Southwestern Elite with a bountiful Mediterranean links or part of the monastic Elite of the West well versed in Latin and the holy life in looking for Arthur I have found a world far more exciting and far more real than any romantic tale of nights and shining armor these were the real men and women of Arthur's Britain but this world could not last forever the Roman town of roxetta where archaeologists had found such remarkable evidence for dark AG

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 author was required it was then it was but he wasn't there these fantastic early Welsh poems talk about Arthur likee figures they talk about this period but they're actually being written in the 8th and 9th century and one can imagine this sort of sense that If Only They was someone who could come and help us if only there was someone who could fight off these this

these oppressors yeah um and I think that that's what this Arthur is All About Arthur is all about this this wish this Nostalgia for a past that never actually happened but 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 roxa abandoned their town in the 7th Century changes which have 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 PLS of Eastern England the end of roxetta was the beginning of a new chapter in Britain's history the Anglo-Saxon [Music] invasions