Managing Transition: Western Britain from the End of Empire to the Rise of Penda

Abstract

The transition of Britain from being a province within the Roman Empire to the Kingdoms of Medieval England is one that is dominated in the public imagination by the historical account written by Bede. This tells us of how the Anglo-Saxons were invited into Britain, settling in specific territories. This largely accords with the archaeological record. What Bede does not talk of is how the other nations of Britain arose. It is argued that the genesis of the peoples of the West, the Welsh and Cornish, derives from the survival of one of the later Roman provinces of Roman Britain, Britannia Prima. While the other three provinces succumbed swiftly to the incoming Anglo-Saxon populations that had been invited to defend the territory, in the West Britannia Prima was able to defend itself for a century and a half until Penda began to erode its frontiers. In doing so, it managed to develop and sustain an identity that was no longer Roman but was something new, based on the Brittonic culture of the coastal region of the province and which coalesced into the peoples known today as the Welsh and Cornish.The traditional view of the end of Roman Britain is one that has been enshrined in the literature since the Age of Bede in the eighth century. Bede tells us of incoming peoples from the continent who settled in discrete areas and in effect replaced Roman rule with their own, occupying the power vacuum left when Roman troops and administrators were withdrawn in the first decade(s) of the fifth century. Although the essentials of Bede's narrative appear correct -we can still today point to historic counties apparently corresponding to areas settled by the Angles or the Saxons -modern archaeologists and historians would challenge much of the detail. 1 Not the least of the issues with this narrative is that Bede conveniently ignores those parts of the British Isles that did not succumb so readily to the English. These comprise the other nations of Britain: the Scots, the Welsh and, arguably, the Cornish whose genesis too lies in this period. When, and how, did these nations arise?The Scottish nation also came into being as the result of an incoming population and political conquest. Roughly contemporary with the Anglo-Saxon adventus, the Dál Riada Scots migrated from the North-East of Ireland to establish themselves in Western Scotland, eventually taking over the Pictish kingdom under Kenneth MacAlpin to create Scotland in the ninth century. 2 What of the Welsh and Cornish? In the traditional narrative, the inhabitants of these western areas were supplemented by an influx of refugees of the British populations who fled from the incoming Anglo-Saxons, a view that has been familiar from the middle of the last century, which pictured changes in society as the result of 'waves' of invaders from the continent that pushed the existing populations to the margins. 3 If this were the case, then we would surely see evidence for this influx of refugees in the archaeological record, but no such evidence has been found. 4 In fact, what we s...

The Organisation of the Mid–Late Anglo-Saxon Borderland with Wales

“…This road had throughout the Roman period (and probably also for much of its length thereafter) enabled movements of messengers, troops or supplies between London, the southern midlands, and the Dee valley (towards Ruabon and Llangollen) and Chester. These 'southern midlands' regions included the area centred upon Wall (the site of a former Roman posting station, Letocetum), Lichfield (the chief Mercian episcopal centre) and Tamworth (the Mercian secular capital) -in other words the very heartlands of the kingdom (White 1998;2013). So far, no studies have been made equivalent to those concerning Wessex to try to establish the relationship between defensive systems and routeways in the Welsh marchlands, nor have detailed studies been carried out of how the long-distance Dykes of the Welsh marchlands related to the surviving (and augmented) inherited Roman road system.…”