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Chapter 2

The Evidence of early Post-Roman Burials

After the first period of post-Roman British history in which people were coming to terms with the new situation, there inevitably came a time when things begin to settle down and we can start to see the pattern of the future and the strands that will make up that pattern come to the surface. Confusing at first and perhaps contradictory at times this pattern shows a medley of small societies that have thrown off the restraints of the Roman economy and administration and whose number will eventually dwindle down to those whose economy is strongest. But this is a long off yet and we must first examine the strands that are our evidence.

Besides weaving, another domestic industrial activity was the manufacture of pottery. An early excavation  at  Purwell Farm, Cassington in Oxfordshire (Arthur), uncovered the remains of two pottery kilns each dug into the ground and consisting of two conjoined pits, one the stoke-pit  and the smaller one a firing chamber above which the beehive superstructure of the kiln itself would have been constructed.  Remains of the pots demonstrated that they were made out of local clay containing limestone fragments without the aid of a fast wheel .The pots were flat-bottomed bowls or pans and some had pierced lugs above the rim, presumably used for hanging the vessels up in a breeze to contain food that needed to be kept cool. Unlike the large pottery concerns of the Romano-British period, it seems that they were being made for local use and were not likely to have travelled far.

Evidence of a wider trade network in pottery during the late fifth to early seventh centuries comes from the eastern Midlands where it is thought the production sites were in east Leicestershire and their pots were being distributed within an area stretching from North Yorkshire to the English Channel. A distribution area as extensive as has been suggested would have been unusual both in Romano-British times and in the succeeding medieval period.  How this distribution was achieved is not yet clear and it is difficult to understand but it has been suggested that pots could have been exchanged in ceremonies at large cremation cemeteries which are found in the Charnwood area. The pottery, known as Charnwood ware, rough textured and dark grey, was used for both domestic and funerary use. (Vince)

For some years a potter identified as the Illington/Lackford potter (Myres) has been known to have working during the late-sixth century somewhere along the west Norfolk/west Suffolk borders. His output was cinerary urns of a number of standard types decorated in two or three routine styles. Decoration was stamped on to the vessels while they were still damp. One of these stamps has been found and it was made out of a red-deer antler and bore a cross die. Stamps frequently used by the potter(s) were a cross-in-circle, a St Andrew’s cross and a concentric circle with a blob centre. Decoration in the main was restricted to pots used as cinerary urns. Distribution of the products was roughly within a radius of some thirty miles centred on Lackford with one outlying example some eighteen miles further on at Castle Acre in Norfolk.

Some of Roman military buildings on Hadrian’s Wall continued to be occupied.  Sixteen sites contain fifth or sixth-century pottery evidence but this was perhaps civilian occupation after abandonment by the Roman army. Pottery evidence like this  is not always very prolific on settlement sites and it is in graves that we find the best ceramic evidence.

Cemeteries also allow us to identify the locations although not the actual sites of early settlements. It may be that a particular cemetery was used by more than one settlement so it is not wise to suggest that one cemetery equals one settlement. During the later Romano-British period inhumation burials were more numerous than cremations but both rites were still being practised and in the first post-Roman cemeteries we find the mixture although in eastern areas cremation was more popular. At Spong Hill in Norfolk (Hills, Penn and Rickett) for example, a typical if large example of an early post-Roman cemetery in East Anglia, there were 2400 cremations contained in pots and only 57 inhumations. In England almost all the early post-Roman cemeteries were initiated on 'green-field' sites as though actually burying the dead was part of the ‘nouvelle vie’ for most erstwhile Romano-Britons for we certainly don’t have anywhere near enough ordinary Romano-British cemeteries nor any that approach the size of the post-Roman ones. Where, for example are the large cemeteries that should be outside the walls of all Roman towns as they are found for example lining the Via Nuceria and Via dei Sepolcri leading out of Pompeii?

The counties of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Humberside contain all the large post-Roman cremation cemeteries that were often placed on upland sites. Grave-goods, where they are provided, apart from the cremation vessel, consist mainly of brooches often distorted by the heat of the cremation process which is likely to have taken place on the spot although so far evidence of the process has been  difficult to locate

Archaeologists use the brooches (Ǻberg) in the graves as a primitive method of dating and also as a guide to ethnicity but these brooches and associated knick-knacks can be found all over Europe from the Crimea to Spain and from Scandinavia to Italy so that attempts to describe them as ‘Anglian’, ‘Saxon’ or ‘Jutish’ are often a waste of effort. In ordinary graves the cheaper varieties are simply cast out of bronze in a flat mould but more elaborate craftsman-made ones are also discovered. They can be found in both inhumation and cremation graves where it seems that they were sometimes placed in the urn on top of the hot ashes rather than actually being in the fire.

Basically, early decorative metalwork dating from the fourth century is described as ‘chip-carved’ , that is, the casting gives the impression of the pattern having been wrought with a ‘V’- shaped wood chisel. This technique seems to have become more or less defunct by the first part of the sixth-century. Motifs were generally classical – running scrolls, stars, rosettes and other geometrical patterns – are the commonest and are clearly derived from the ancient tradition. These are later displaced by animal ornament in which distorted bodies and bits of animal parts are mixed in a frenzy of decoration that is described as Style I and is common all over Europe. In the late sixth century Style II appears which features interlacing and a fantastic creature seen in profile with its body outlined by double lines, an eye which is uaually the most prominent feature and jaws that bite, often on what can be perceived as its own body. It is this style which was elaborated by Kentish metal workers to produce the finest and most costly jewels that are often referred to as being Kentish Style II and were clearly inspired by Frankish jewel smiths.

During the fourth century in Europe, chip-carving and animal ornament was used on military belt sets comprising belt stiffeners, rosettes, belt loops and strap ends. Over a hundred sets have been found in Europe in a swathe stretching from north-western Gaul to the Balkans but mostly concentrated along the Rhine and Danube frontiers of the Empire with a spill over the Straits of Dover to Britain where six sets have been discovered: three almost certainly at Richborough and one each at Alfriston in Sussex, at Smithfield in London and Winchester. Chip-carved animal ‘barbarian’ ornament became fashionable in both the military and the civilian worlds during the fourth century and examples of this latter popularity in Britain is demonstrated in Figure Two which shows the distribution of one particular metal artefact - a buckle with an openwork plate (see Number One, Figure Three and Appendix) - at a time when fashions in personal ornaments and clothing were changing and resulted in the appearance of a multiplicity of types all over Europe from that time onwards. (Figure Three) The dolphin buckle distribution in Figure Two (On the map, dots  =  dolphin buckles with or without plates and the crosses are the six belt sets) is mainly a western one with some groups in north-eastern Britain and this perhaps reflects the locations of the craftsmen who manufactured them.  The list of find-spots is given in the Appendix.

One of the commonest Style I brooches (Figure Three) is the early long brooch, appearing in Britain in the second half of the fourth century, which can be up to fifteen centimetres long and consists of a decorated bronze strip with the middle formed into a bow behind which is placed the pin hinged to the strip at the top and with a holster at the bottom into which the end of the pin is caught when the brooch is fastened. It is, in fact, a large safety pin. The top of the bronze strip ends in a knob and at the bottom of the strip the decoration often resembles a horse’s face. As time goes on, the metal strip becomes broader and the top end sprouts ‘arms’ that give it a cruciform shape. This is referred to as a ‘cruciform’ brooch. Later, perhaps, at the end of the fifth century, the ‘square-headed’ brooch becomes fashionable when the cruciform shape is replaced by an oblong plate which gives more scope for decoration. Parallel with this development is the replacement of the cruciform shape by a semi-circular plate with knobs sticking out of it around the semi-circular upper circumference. This is known as the ‘radiated’ brooch. Circular brooches were also popular. They are of two kinds, one which is simply a dished bronze plate, exactly like a saucer, with decoration inside, called a ‘saucer’ brooch while more elaborate ones with a circular plate that fits onto the face and is secured to the saucer which acts as a back-plate, is described as an ‘applied’ brooch. Other Style I items include disk brooches, equal-armed brooches which are rare,  penannular brooches whose ancestry stretches back to the Iron Age, and  quoit/annular brooches that are confined in England. to the south (Figure Three). In the middle of the sixth century, excavated evidence from Kent shows that women wore the front-fastening ‘Frankish’coat with brooches that was typical of the garments worn in northern France and territories west of the Rhine as well as the more common ‘peplos’, a tubular garment fastened on the shoulders with a pair of brooches  (Rogers).

Kentish Style II and Frankish jewellers used enamelling, filigree, garnet cell-work, gold foil inlay, silver and solid gold together with imported semi-precious stones which, apart from garnets, included meerschaum, amethysts, sapphires, hyacinths, turquoise and lapis lazuli that were imported in company with ornamental shells from the Indian Ocean, Byzantine buckles,  bronze bowls and vases and, perhaps, Egyptian beads. Coptic trade ramified throughout Europe in the centuries immediately preceding the Arab conquest of Egypt for, in contrast to the West, this was the Golden Age of the eastern Mediterranean before the advent of the Moslems and the traders of various nationalities in the area were seeking new outlets outside their area. The more elaborate Kentish brooches are made of gold or silver and some were bejewelled or enamelled.

Cremation ashes and any grave goods were contained in pottery urns placed in a shallow hole. It is not possible to know for certainty whether there were grave markers nor do we know whether the burial area was fenced off to form a regular cemetery but it is likely that this would have been done if the cemetery were a large one. Inhumation burials contain more in the way of grave goods and the best are found in south-eastern England. Graves have been categorised, in the usual archaeological fashion, into 'warrior-graves', with a weapon of some sort, 'female-graves' and 'poor-graves. Outside Kent, most graves are fairly unexciting poor graves, containing iron knives, coarse pottery, perhaps a comb and, in a few cases, cast bronze brooches, but all types of these have so far have been categorised as Anglo-Saxon, a description which should be seen simply as indicating fashion and not ethnicity especially as the fashion had its beginning in the late Romano-British period (Figure Three)

People seem to have been buried fully dressed with the body supine but occasionally flexed and rarely prone inside graves which were occasionally stone- or wooden-lined. In some cases a board may have been placed over the interment and grave goods, sometimes, weapons were arranged on top. Whether graves were normally marked or not is still a moot point but some excavators have identified evidence of a low mound, a ring ditch, or a wooden marker/structure. In a number of cases a prehistoric burial mound was the focus as in the case of Uncleby in Yorkshire (Lucy) where a seventh-century cemetery of inhumations surrounded the Bronze Age barrow. In some cases coffins have been recognised by stains in the soil but in most cases these stains are not evident and it is thought that most of the deceased were simply placed on the floor of the grave at no great depth, commonly not much more than a metre.

Inhumation cemeteries are nowhere near the size of some cremation cemeteries, the largest are in Norfolk and Kent and number fewer than four hundred burials but they are commoner and certainly more informative than the cremation cemeteries. At Barrington in Cambridgeshire (Malin and Hines) an inhumation cemetery has been excavated. Some 115 graves were uncovered, about half of the Edix Hill ‘A’ cemetery, most with grave-goods. Amongst the sixth to early seventh century burials were a number of bed burials (bodies lying on the remains of some sort of wooden structure). .Excavations at Springfield Lyons in Essex (Buckley and Hedges) found a mixed burial site dating from the fifth to the seventh century with about a third of the burials containing the usual range of grave-goods. In Suffolk, further excavations at the famous boat-burial in the cemetery at Snape (Filmer-Sankey and Hestell) produced a mixture of rites with graves under small barrows, in chambers and in another boat, all dating from the fifth to the seventh century. It is difficult to avoid the suggestion that this burial ground has some connection to the one at Sutton Hoo (Bruce-Mitford).

Weapons in graves were usually either spears, swords, or shields, the former being by far the most common. Knives also appear but these are deemed to be the normal accompaniment to ordinary life at the time. But by far the most common weapon in graves was the spear which could be thrown and might also be described as a javelin. It tended to have a rather hefty head with a socket into which the end of the shaft was fixed. As far as is known this would have been about two metres in length and suggests that the weapon would have been rather cumbersome in close fighting. Although not very common, iron spear-heads could be decorated with silver inlay.

The swords in the earlier period are late-Roman models and usually had blades that were almost parallel-sided down to the tips where they abruptly tapered to points and were intended as a slashing weapon. They were clearly regarded as items of value whether from sentiment or from the decoration on the pommel. This would have been executed – silver inlay or gilding most commonly – on pommels that were usually ‘cocked hat’ shape. Grips were of horn, wood and antler, sometimes wrapped with leather or cord-bound.  Scabbards do not survive in graves but there is some little evidence to suggest that they were made in wood in two halves glued together to encase a fleece lining while the finished artefact was perhaps covered with linen and given a final ‘overcoat’ of thin leather. Like the sword, the scabbard could be decorated.

Apart from some soil stains at Mucking, for shield shapes one needs to go to pictorial representations. Presumably, there were no shields or other weapons in Britain during the Romano-British period apart from army gear antecedent to the post-Roman examples so the circular shape at Mucking and the shield on a carving on a stone at Repton and those pictured on the Franks casket in the British Museum were presumably copied from the late-Roman military examples which were commonly circular. The diameter of the Repton shield would have been about thirty centimetres but during the post-Roman and pre-Norman periods in England the diameter gradually increased to around ninety centimetres with a convex perimeter.  

Only one military axe has been found in a grave, on the Isle of Wight at Chessel Down (Underwood), and the type is better known from examples found in Merovingia.  Such a weapon was referred to as the Francisca and was used for throwing. Elsewhere, representations of the later broad-axe are found in the Bayeux Tapestry. It had a fairly light head with a broad blade and a cutting edge of some 22 to 45 cm and an ash handle of around 1.3m in length. Also unrepresented in burial is the bow and arrow, admittedly not a common weapon in the period in England. Bows were usually made of yew, elm or ash with a length between 1.65 and 1.9m so not yet a ‘longbow’. Arrows generally had broad iron heads and the earlier examples were tanged with fletchings of goose or swan feather glued and bound with a spiral of linen onto the shafts.

Wealthy warriors could equip themselves with coats of mail, the term hauberk being used to describe the later version with a hood attached to the shirt. Mail has been found in the Sutton Hoo burial which suggests that it was not common equipment for the ordinary fighting man. Mailshirts could be made of riveted rings or links and would be worn on top of a padded under-garment made of fleeces and known as a gambeson, the whole outfit reaching down to just below the waist in earlier times and extending to just below the knees in the later period as in the illustrations in the Bayeux Tapestry.

The best-represented piece of protective equipment was the helmet, known from the Sutton Hoo example and three others. The tops of two of them, the Pioneer helmet from Northampton dating from the seventh century and the Benty Grange helmet from the late-eighth/early ninth-century were decorated with figurines of boars. That from Sutton Hoo, with side-flaps and a face shield dates from 625 and the York helmet with side-flaps and a nose-guard from the eighth century. In the Bayeux Tapestry the warriors, both English and Norman, are shown with pointed unadorned helmets with nose-guards or figurines..

Whalebone carvings on the Frank’s Casket  which  dates from about 700 and comes from Northumberland feature an extraordinary mixture of scenes from Roman history, the Bible, mythology, hunting, Romulus and Remus, the capture of Jerusalem by Titus and the Siegfried Saga. For the military historian the figures showing soldiers in chain-mail with sword, spear, shield and bow and arrow are useful evidence for this period. These swords seem to have a tapered blade rather than parallel sides and the shields are round and about 0.45m in diameter. One soldier seems to be carrying a spear and one is wearing a helmet with a nose-piece like the Sutton Hoo specimen. On the panel showing the hunting scene the four figures are carrying spears, presumably for hunting boar. All four side panels of the casket are also decorated with runes that comment on the scenes while on the back the inscription is in poor Latin. 

These weapons, either found as grave-goods or in representations, were not simply fashion accessories since what look like early defensive military structures are identified in the shape of the Cambridgeshire Dykes. These five linear earthworks face south-westwards, forming barriers in the gap that existed between the River Cam and ancient woodlands in north-western Essex. This is the gap through which the Icknield Way runs towards the north-east. The dykes are (from south-west to north-east) the Bran Dyke, Brent Ditch, Fleam Dyke, Devil’s Dyke (the longest) and Black Ditches. Most have been sampled archaeologically.  Radiocarbon determinations from Fleam Dyke provide a sequence from construction in the early fifth century, to remodellings in the sixth and early seventh centuries. Why they were built is still a matter of argument but the early date suggests that the post-Roman British authorities in the area were already security conscious. (Malim, Robinson, Wait and Welsh)

Apart from West Heslerton, forensic dental surveys have been carried out at two other cemeteries. Berinsfield in Oxfordshire produced no evidence of burials of ‘foreigners’ amongst the native population but at Eastbourne some 37% of the samplings produced evidence of Germanic upbringing. (Susan Hughes, Durham University) Franks, of course, were a Germanic race and one wonders whether migrants from that part of the world not only settled in Kent but a bit further along the coast in what is now East Sussex and that Beachy Head was the limit of expansion further to the west.

On the Continent the same cemeteries were in use both in the later-Roman and the post-Roman periods. Examples can be found at Frénouville in Normandy (with late-Roman graves at one end of the site and Merovingian at the other), at Krefeld-Gellop in the Rhineland and at Sezegnin near Geneva.  Some 40,000 Merovingian (post-Roman) burials have been excavated so far in France alone which cannot all be those of migrants. Cemeteries at Wasperton, Warwickshire, Frilford in Berkshire, Llandough in Glamorgan and Cannington and Henley Wood in Somerset are the documented cemetery examples in England of site-continuity from Romano-British to post-Roman times. Whithorn is a similar example in Scotland.

The burials of the period, like burials at any time, are the best indicator the archaeologist has of social ranking. It is in Kent that we find most evidence of prosperity. A find of a 5th to 7th century cemetery at Buckland near Dover (Evison) is characteristic. It contained about 410 graves of individuals of varying degrees of wealth, the wealthiest containing quantities of gold, silver, gem-encrusted jewellery and swords while the poorest burials were accompanied by bronze jewellery and spears.  Even these last graves do not indicate abject poverty and suggest that they were at least ‘middle class’ in economic terms. The finds also illustrate the adoption of  personal weapons by people whose immediate ancestors in the Roman period did not customarily bear arms.

By the sixth century native jewellery workshops can be discerned, the best probably attached to royal households like that of the Kentish and East Anglian kings and whose work is represented in the fine burials around Canterbury and the renowned ship-burial at Sutton Hoo. But the fact that jewellery workshops were also working for the ‘general public’, so to speakas well as nobility and royalty, does say something for the wealth that was being accumulated by the of society of the time.

Many of the richest graves in Kent belonged to women. The most splendid was the grave of a 30 year-old woman with a necklace of 175 glass beads, two pendants of silver and crystal, five silver brooches, two inlaid with garnets, a headband of gold thread, and two crystal balls, one enclosed in a silver cage. On the edge of the marshy ground drained by the River Stour in an area where there was an arm of the sea that divided Thanet from Kent called the Wantsum, the village and neighbourhood of Sarre have produced some valuable jewellery. No doubt this sheltered channel with its access to the port of Canterbury was an important area in post-Roman Kent. One of the richest grave groups was discovered in 1860 and contained a jewelled applied brooch, an openwork bronze bowl, a necklace of coins, a silver quoit brooch with engraved animal patterns amongst other things. Elsewhere in Kent, at Faversham, a series of coloured glass beakers, decorated swords and the use of gold thread from perished garments have been found. One could give many other examples of rich finds from Kentish post-Roman cemeteries but this is perhaps enough to point up the contrast between them and the lesser finds of the period in most graves in other parts of the country. Wealthy people in Kent were also in a position to buy exotic goods from the traders who operated across the narrow seas and this accounts for foreign items like the bronze bowl and the necklace of Merovingian coins.

Influences from the Frankish Rhineland are evident in much of the material and it appears likely that we are looking at some graves of people who were migrants from   the earlier Merovingian phase of the Frankish Empire that was to change Roman Gaul imperceptibly into France. At the Byzantine court around 550, an envoy stated that the Merovingian (Frankish) king claimed overlordship over Britain and it has been said that the Coptic hanging-bowl and the Byzantine silver in the Sutton Hoo grave were Frankish gifts given to a tributary king. Certainly, Redwald, a prince of the East Anglian kingdom, spent time in the Frankish Empire. Frankish links with Byzantium remained strong right up to the period of the Crusades and beyond and suggest a conduit for the eastern objects. Another indication of Frankish influence in England is the popularity of Frankish style in women’s dress mentioned above (Page 18).

Along the east bank of the Rhine a confederacy of Germanic tribes had arisen during the latter part of the Roman empire that was soon to be known as the Merovingian Franks. During the fourth century numbers of them became valuable recruits to the Roman army and as federates of the Roman Empire they were defeated by the Vandals in 406, a victory that allowed the barbarians to breach the Roman frontier for the first time. After this influx had passed, Franks followed the example they had been given and settled in lands west of the Rhine inside the borders of the Roman Empire. In modern Brabant and Flanders were the Salian Franks who advanced as far as the River Somme. Their leader was Childeric, a descendant of Merovech, hence the dynastic name, Merovingians. He died in 481 and was given a splendid. burial at Tournai accompanied by magnificent grave goods that are reminiscent of those found in Kentish graves in the next century.. After the burial was opened  in 1693, the best of these disappeared, including a double-edged long sword with a gold-mounted hilt and scabbard, both set with red semi-precious stones (almandines), a single-edged short sword, also ornamented with gold and almandines, an iron throwing axe, a gold bracelet and much more. What we have left are gold cicadas originally on a fur cape, a signet ring and fragments of cloisionné work now in the Cabinet des Médailles, Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris.

This jewelled grave was the first of a sequence of such burials of royal and noble families which was continued by graves beneath Cologne cathedral, one of which is an aristocratic woman’s grave and another, perhaps her son from c550; near St Denis in Paris is Arnegunde, second wife of Clothar, c570; 6^th and 7^th century graves at Krefeld-Gellep; a noble at Morken and, with the tradition passing on to England along with the craftsmanship in jewellery, the graves of Segbert in Essex, c616, and Sutton Hoo some ten years later.  

Other graves of Frankish nobles have yielded similar material in silver gilt and brooches, both long and saucer, with cloisoneé and filigree decoration while in the seventh century, after the conversion, there are jewelled reliquary caskets. Influences that were responsible for this outburst of artistic activity, termed barbarous by the more cultured folk further south, are thought to be both Gallo-Roman (officers in the Roman army who were fond of this jewellery) and eastern from as far afield as the Crimea and Hungary.

Clovis, son of Childeric, at first sight would appear as a treacherous barbarian who attacked and overthrew the Roman ruler of northern Gaul, making himself master of that part of the Empire as far south as the Loire and as far west as the borders of Brittany but in 493 he married a Catholic princess and three years later was baptised himself together with 3000 of his kin at Rheims. Despite this apparent change of heart, he continued his military expansion and by 511, shortly before his death, he ruled practically all of what we call modern France.

But his death brought disaster to the realm. His four sons divided regnum Francorum into four parts and their fratricidal greed made them bitter and faithless enemies. The civil wars that then broke out rendered the country a dangerous place for wealth and provided the background for the suggestion that this was a time of migration to Kent for those who wished to preserve their possessions. They took with them their taste for expensive jewellery and exotic objects and the craftsmen who could create these things. After their deaths the evidence for this move and the diffusion of their taste to those natives who could afford it lies in their graves.

Kentish cemeteries clearly demonstrate this development. Buckland cemetery, on the outskirts of Dover, was excavated in the early 1950s and in 1994. Inhumation burials, some with coffins, yielded up 75 brooches, half of which had been brought from the Continent (Parfitt). Three other similar cemeteries have been uncovered at Saltwood near Folkestone (Canterbury Archaeological Trust). Dating from around 525, a little after those at Buckland, the earlier graves contain pairs of square-headed brooches. A little later are inhumations with amber and glass beads, brooches, another crystal ball in a silver mount, a Frankish ring sword and Merovingian pottery. Coptic bowls were found, similar to the one found in the Sutton Hoo burial which must also have been obtained from Kentish traders. A grave of around 620 contained a woman who was buried with a gold, silver and garnet composite round-brooch, beads, silver pendants and a Merovingian coin on a gold pendant.

Excavators of these cemeteries have been in a position to demonstrate how fashions in necklaces changed from the sixth to the seventh centuries. Sixth century beads are usually polychrome, each bead being made in two colours while seventh century beads are plainer, being mostly made of glass in contrast to the amber beads common in the preceding century. They do include some purple amethysts and most of the glass beads are a single colour – either red, orange or blue. It might be possible to restring them so as to reconstruct these fashionable adornments of Kentish society.

Because of these links with the Merovingian Frankish Empire, Kent was able to continue to exercise the role of gateway to Britain that it had enjoyed during Roman times. Even with open rowing boats, the sea-journey across the Straits of Dover was possible and so, as a result, were the trade routes that led from the French coast south to the Mediterranean, probably to the port of Marseilles. No other part of Britain was in such an advantageous position.

Wealthy migrants formed an important ‘upper class’ and it may be because of their influence that the Kentish king, Ethelbert, married the daughter of the Merovingian monarch in a ceremony conducted by a Christian bishop who became her chaplain. The church of St Martin in Canterbury was built under his aegis on a foundation of Roman times. No doubt in those days the port of Canterbury bore a marked resemblance to many of the smaller post-Roman Merovingian towns. Later, in 597, these contacts brought about the arrival of the haughty Augustine and his missionary cohorts from Rome.

Resettlement rather than Settlement
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