Prof. Nick Higham 
Britons in Anglo-Saxon England 

The question of the British presence in Anglo-Saxon England readdressed by archaeologists, historians, linguists, and place-name specialists.


The number of native Britons, and their role, in Anglo-Saxon England has been hotly debated for generations; the English were seen as Germanic in the nineteenth century, but the twentieth saw a reinvention of the German ‘past’. Today, the scholarly community is as deeply divided as ever on the issue: place-name specialists have consistently preferred minimalist interpretations, privileging migration from Germany, while other disciplinary groups have been less united in their views, with many archaeologists and historians viewing the British presence, potentially at least, as numerically significant or even dominant.

The papers collected here seek to shed new light on this complex issue, by bringing together contributions from different disciplinary specialists and exploring the interfaces between various categories of knowledge about the past. They assemble both a substantial body of evidence concerning the presence of Britons and offer a variety of approaches to the central issues of the scale of that presence and its significance across the seven centuries of Anglo-Saxon England.


NICK HIGHAM is Professor of Early Medieval and Landscape History at the University of Manchester.


Contributors: RICHARD COATES, MARTIN GRIMMER, HEINRICH HARKE, NICK HIGHAM, CATHERINE HILLS, LLOYD LAING, C.P. LEWIS, GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER, O.J. PADEL, DUNCANPROBERT, PETER SCHRIJVER, DAVID THORNTON, HILDEGARD L.C. TRISTRAM, DAMIAN TYLER, HOWARD WILLIAMS, ALEX WOOLF

Table des matières

Britons in Anglo-Saxon England: An Introduction – Nicholas J. Higham

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes – Catherine Hills

Forgetting the Britons in Victorian Anglo-Saxon Archaeology – Howard Williams

Romano-British Metalworking and the Anglo-Saxons – Lloyd Laing

Invisible Britons, Gallo-Romans and Russians: Perspectives on Cultural Change – Heinrich Harke

Historical Narrative as Cultural Politics: Rome, `British-ness’ and `English-ness’ – Nicholas J. Higham

British Wives and Slaves? Possible Romano-British Techniques in `Women’s Work’ – Gale R. Owen-Crocker

Early Mercia and the Britons – Damian Tyler

Britons in Early Wessex: The Evidence of the Law Code of Ine – Martin Grimmer

Apartheid and Economics in Anglo-Saxon England – Alex Woolf

Welsh Territories and Welsh Identities in Late Anglo-Saxon England – Chris Lewis

Some Welshmen in Domesday Book and Beyond: Aspects of Anglo-Welsh Relations in the Eleventh Century – David E Thornton

What Britons Spoke Around 400 AD – Peter Schrijver

Invisible Britons: The View from Linguistics – Richard Coates

Why Don’t the English Speak Welsh? – Hildegard L.C. Tristram

Place-Names and the Saxon Conquest of Devon and Cornwall – Oliver J. Padel

Mapping Early Medieval Language Change in South-West England – Duncan Probert

A propos de l’auteur

Gale R. Owen-Crocker is Professor Emerita of the University of Manchester where she was previously Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture and Director of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies.