Chop the five pages of personal speculation, or at least interweave the personal observations in the context of telling us what linguists and actual specialists know about the history of Norse-English language contact! Despite the fact that Togidubnus looms large in just about any modern account of Roman Britain, his name only appears twice in the historical and archaeological record. The Romans were essentially invited into southeast Britain, but then they met with opposition from factions not yet amenable to their rule. History becomes very personal – as we learn about people who lived in this land all those centuries before us.

I love Alice Roberts, her enthusiasm, the depth and breadth of her knowledge and expertise, and the gift she has for bringing the past to life. The problematic histories of Bede and others seldom reflect the mind's eye of the temporal inhabitants.In this follow-up to Ancestors, Roberts looks at various funerary and death rites in Britain's prehistory. This is followed by discussion of decapitated burials, starting with an example of seventeen decapitated Roman period burials at Great Whelnetham cemetery, near Bury St Edmunds, which distinguishes between victims of beheadings and post-mortem decapitations. But further away from that point of contact with the continent, the Empire would surely have been seen very differently. Vespasian – following military successes in Britain, and then in Judaea – had become emperor in 69 CE, with his eldest son, Titus, succeeding him in 79.

Sitting at the intersection of art, science, and history, this week’s podcast reveals fresh perspectives and fascinating insights into our material world. Into the medieval period and beyond, Caerleon remained small – occupying just a fraction of the original footprint of the fortress. And she's keen to emphasise that there have always been migrants, and always been people whose families have lived in the same place for a long time, and that these two groups have intermixed over the centuries. Chapter 6 discusses skeletons found in a ditch at Llanbedrgoch on Anglesey, were they Welsh defenders of the site, captured Viking raiders, or slaves.Roberts discusses funerary and death rites in the Roman, Dark Ages and Anglo-Saxon eras of Britain, using a selection of archaeological finds to lay out history and educated guesses. In the year following those initial excavations, there were plans to extend the nearby churchyard into an adjacent field, and the Liverpool Antiquarian Society teamed up with the Monmouthshire Antiquarian Society to excavate, before the church began to fill up the field with bodies. However, Beowulf in its OE context influences Dark Age and Medieval OE/ME context, as did Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio, and the far more extant fragments of village-oriented poetry/storytelling. But after reading in the reviews that needlessly bringing up modern social, political, and religious dogma is even far more prevalent, I'll probably pass on it.

Although not a central topic of this book, she traces how the adoption of Christianity as an organised religion shaped the way our ancestors lived and died, and how our ancestors shaped Christianity to meet their own aspirations and political ends, when the Anglo-Saxons, like the Romans before them, began to realise the exceptional potential of institutionalised religion. Roberts discusses increased infant mortality in non-modern, first world locations and different burial practices for infants. Registered office address: Unit 34 Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EF. He may have ruled that region from a base in Chichester, and perhaps that base was the palace at Fishbourne – the largest Roman palace anyone’s ever found north of the Alps, larger even than Buckingham Palace.Amassed genomic data are starting to shed light on major population movements, mobility and migration in the past. But just a year later, in 211, they were rebelling again, and Severus was dying of gout in Eboracum, York. Alice Roberts (of Digging for Britain on the BBC), postulates that perhaps we have it all wrong about the Anglo-Saxon invasion and the term "Anglo-Saxon" as it's applied in Britain. But since the 1950s, archaeologists have added to the corpus of writing from Roman Britain, finding ephemeral pieces of text that have, quite astonishingly, survived the test of time – in the form of ink on thin wooden sheets, and scratched impressions of writing on the wooden casings of wax tablets. When historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists of the future look back on our civilisations, they will see reductions in infant mortality, improved longevity - but they will still detect deep inequalities.

For certain people, in certain areas of Roman Britannia, at particular times, it may have felt like living under an oppressive regime enforced by a military occupation. They’d fought in the Cantabrian Wars as Rome extended its empire into Spain in the first century BCE, and then in Germany, in the early first century CE, after which they were stationed at Argentoratum, now Strasbourg.

And you'd have to be an extreme relativist and pessimist not to think that we have progressed, as a society, since the time of Roman Britain. The first three case studies are properly enthralling, covering pipe burials, evidence of infanticide, and decapitated burials, but after this I found it very hard to maintain my concentration.