One of the joists supporting the argument that Anglo-Saxon invaders and colonists physically displaced the natives of Britannia has been sawn half-through. Caesar, then, at this time was the first of the Romans to cross the Rhine, and later, in the consulship of Pompey and Crassus, he crossed over to Britain. This country is sixty miles distant, by the shortest way, from the Belgic mainland, where the Morini dwell, and extends alongside the rest of Gaul and nearly all of Spain, reaching out into the sea. To the very earliest of the Greeks and Romans it was not even known to exist, while to their descendants it was a matter of dispute whether it was a continent or an island ; and accounts of it have been written from both points of view by many who knew nothing about it, because they had not seen it with their own eyes nor heard about it from the natives with their own ears, but indulged in surmises according to the scholarly sect or the branch of learning to which they severally belonged. In the lapse of time, however, it has been clearly proved to be an island, first under Agricola, the propraetor, and now under the emperor Severus.

These were the occurrences in Rome while the city was passing through its seven-hundredth year. In Gaul during the year of these same consuls, Lucius Domitius and Appius Claudius, Caesar among other undertakings constructed ships of a style half-way between his own swift vessels and the native ships of burden, endeavouring to make them at once as light and as seaworthy as possible and capable of being left high and dry without injury. When the weather became fit for sailing, he crossed over again to Britain, giving as his excuse that the people of that country, thinking that he would never make trial with them again because he had once retired empty-handed, had not sent all the hostages they had promised ; but the truth of the matter was that he mightily coveted the island, so that he would certainly have found some other pretext, if this had not offered itself. He came to land at the same place as before, no one daring to oppose him because of the number of his ships and the fact that they approached many points on the shore at the same time ; and he straight-way got possession of the harbour. As all Old English dialects were influenced by Lowland British Celtic, this language must have been spoken from south-eastern Scotland to the Isle of Wight;

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All the same, the direction of his argument is not all one-way. For instance, Morris does not claim that the migrants outnumbered the hapless Britons; or that the conflicts reported by Gildas were necessarily fought on ethnically binary terms; or indeed that the same processes were at work across Britain, with Morris envisaging more of an elite warrior model in the north of the country. Nonetheless, Morris does maintain that the population transformations of the fifth century were enough to effect a radical alteration of the cultural and political landscape. According to Morris, a few elements of the existing social organisation were adopted by the Saxons, such as “the boundaries of existing fields,” which would have been “too laborious to alter.” Generally speaking, however, the transformation was more or less complete. For the Anglo-Saxons, there was little, if anything, in British culture “they wished to emulate.” In time the archaeological record may tell us otherwise; for the present, Naismith concludes with a bob-each-way: Just because the Romans didn't know how she died doesn't mean she wasn't the leader of the rebellion.

Otherwise, I liked this book. And I think Guy de la Bedoyere is great and highly recommend his works. Published in collaboration with The British Museum, this children’s information book offers a humorous and informative introduction to daily life in Ancient Rome and has a high appeal to readers in KS2. Lowland British Celtic was the language of pre-Roman Britain and the language encountered by the Germanic colonists of the 5th century;The absolute decisive shift in the history of eastern Britain in the fifth century may not be so much the willing or unwilling embrace of Scandinavian or Germanic cultures, but the rejection of much that was Roman: town life, villas, privatized wealth and display, conspicuous consumption, crushing centralized taxation, martial rule, corruption and absentee landlords.