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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, DUNCAN PROBERT, PETER SCHRIJVER, DAVID THORNTON,
HILDEGARD L. C. TRISTRAM, DAMIAN TYLER, HOWARD WILLIAMS,
ALEX WOOLF
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