The Anglo-Saxon settlement of England The State of researcb in Britain in the late 1980s BY CATHERINE HILLS When I gave my paper at Reichenau I tried to explain why it is difficult at present to produce a satisfactory synthesis of the evidence for the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain. In particular, I focussed on two works, which seem to me to epitomize two very different approaches to the subject, and I tried to explore the reasons for those differences. I did this because I think that theoretical and ideological perspectives are important, and that they do affect the way we select and interpret evidence for the past, although I might not go so far as R. Reece, who has recently claimed »the way that you see Britannia turning into early England is going to say far more about you ... than about Britain from AD 200 to 800« l\ The point I was trying to make was that conflicting views of how to set about interpreting the evidence for the fifth Century in Britain exist, and that the conflict sometimes seems to have inhibited research. It was not really fair to concentrate on two authors, or on the two kinds of thinking I think they represent. In fact a number of perspectives can be detected in current work, and scholars seldom fit quite so neatly into categories as I might have seemed to suggest. A second very important point which needed more emphasis is that there is a great deal of recent and current research, by scholars in various disciplines, which is relevant to our understanding of this period. The detail and volume of this work constitute another obstacle to synthesis, but offer considerable hopes for future resolution of some problems. In this paper I want to review some of the different approaches and to outline some recent work on different aspects of the problem, rather than myself attempting to offer any general account of the settlement of England by the Anglo- Saxons. At Reichenau I discussed the paper published by H. W. Böhme2). I also discussed the book by C. Arnold »Roman Britain to Saxon England« (London 1984). These two works seem to me to represent very different approaches to the subject, indeed to archaeology. Böhme has collected and plotted the distribution of certain categories of metalwork of late fourth and fifth Century date found in Britain. He has interpreted this in the light of historical evidence, although, as he says, he is attempting to use the archaeological material to go beyond existing 1) R. REECE, My Roman Britain. Catswold Stud. 3 (Cirencester 1988) p. 110. 2) H.W.BöHME, Das Ende der Römerherrschaft in Britannien und die angelsächsische Besiedlung Englands im 5. Jahrhundert, in: Jahrb. RGZM 33, 1986, p. 469-574. 304 CATHERINE HILLS historical accounts. In particular, he traces a declining but surprisingly long-lived sphere of authority for the Roman army in southern Britain well into the fifth Century, and the arrival of Germanic settlers in East Anglia during the same period. He has a specific topic, and sets out one kind of explanation for one kind of material in a very clear and persuasive manner. The relation of artefacts to written history in this way is very familiär, from generations of scholarship cast in the same mould, although not always with the same precision of detail. Arnold's book is more ambitious in its aims, and refers to a much wider ränge of archaeological material: Settlements, landscape history, burial ritual as a whole rather than confining himself to specific groups of artefacts. Inevitably he cannot bring to each aspect of the material the mastery of detail shown by Böhme's analysis of belt fittings and brooches, but he does try to bring a ränge of different kinds of evidence together and to see how coherent a picture can be derived from all of them. He sets his work within a theoretical framework derived from the »New« archaeology, which has had, as Arnold and a few other medievalists have complained, remarkably little effect on the thought and practice of Roman and post­ Roman archaeologists in Britain. In principle it is clearly necessary to have a rationale behind the collection of Information: questions to be asked, hypotheses to be tested. Reference to general models of the development and behaviour of human societies should help towards understanding of the specific case of fifth­century Britain, and computer­aided Statistical analysis should be a valuable tool in coping with large data sets. In practice, in order to produce a clear picture, there must be selection from the vast mass of potentially relevant Information. There is a temptation to emphasize those pieces of evidence which fit the predetermined theory and ignore or play down contradictory indicators. The evidence is still very fragmentary, so that some of the Statistical techniques applied are too sophisticated, and produce misleadingly firm results from small samples. British scholars are now confronted with a dilemma. There are still those who continue to work entirely within an artefact­based, historical framework close to that employed by Böhme. Most of the rest of us also occasionally produce work in this tradition: but we tend to keep to small articles or to deal with specific sites or regions, and keep away from grand synthesis. We are concerned that the historical framework may not be what it once seemed, while none of the various »isms« (eg. Marxism, processualism, structuralism, post­structura­ lism ...) which have flourished in British archaeology in the past twenty years seems a satisfactory Substitute. A few scholars, like Arnold, have attempted new interpretations from a theoretical viewpoint, without, perhaps, taking enough account of all the detail for their conclusions to carry conviction3). 3) See for example R. HODGES, Peer polity interaction and sociopolitical change in Anglo­Saxon England, in: C.RENFREW and J.C. CHERRY (eds.), Peer polity interaction and socio­political change, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge 1986) p.69­78; C.J.ARNOLD, Stress as a Stimulus for socioeconomic change: Anglo­Saxon England in the 7th Century, in: C.RENFREW and St.SHENNAN (eds.), Ranking, Resource and Exchange, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge 1982) p. 124­131; R. HODGES, The evolution of gateway communities: their socioeconomic implications, ibid. p. 117­123; K. RANDSBORG, THE ANGLO-SAXON SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND 305 Justifiable criticisms have been levelled at each side: traditionalists can be narrow, they do sometimes take historical Information at its face-value, and they do sometimes lose the wood for the trees of detail about pots, brooches, house-types and so on. On the other hand, interesting ideas are sometimes not worked out with sufficient reference to what we really do already know, and statistics can be used to obscure rather than to enlighten. In the end, it is probably a futile argument: it is really the questions asked which differ, as much as the methods of answering them, and scholars will always differ as to which topics they see as most important. But there are clearly some contradictory conclusions, implicit and explicit, some of which do arise from underlying preconceptions. If you believe that most of the population of Roman Britain died, went to Wales, or became serfs, your account of the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons will be very different from the account written by someone who believes that a minority of immigrant Germanic people somehow achieved dominance over a substantial indigenous population. If you give the written word priority over material evidence or vice versa some of your conclusions will be predetermined. Writing the history of the fifth Century in terms of kings and princes, again, will not give the same picture as one deriving from study of peasant life, or the use of the land. As well as a diversity of philosophies, English scholarship also faces the problem caused by the success of what has often turned out to be destructive criticism, which has underminded confidence in both archaeological and historical conclusions which once seemed securely founded. Vollrath's paper will have shown you how effective the source criticism of people such as D.Dumville4) has been in removing the possibility of using our earliest documents as the straightforward account of events in the fifth and sixth centuries which previous generations of historians and archaeologists assumed they could be if one could only get the precise dates exactly right. Most English scholars would now use with great caution all of the sources Böhme quotes in his historical summary: few of these can now be taken as easily accessible accounts of events in fifth-century Britain. Also, given that we have such small fragments of written history it is not reasonable to suppose that they will be reflected clearly in the equally fragmentary archaeological record. Recorded events, such as battles or deaths of kings, are in any case notoriously badly reflected in the archaeological record which usually teils us most about the ways of life of ordinary people. So we can no longer take it that we have an outline to be filled in, even if we were not rather more ambitious for archaeology than that it should fill in a few spaces provided by historians. Archaeological evidence has been as critically examined as the documents. It is now not possible to look at a distribution map and read it at once as a simple pattern of past activity. Agricultural, building and archaeological activity in recent centuries has been patterned for various reasons, such as the fertility of the soil, the location of universities or gravel quarries. One active fieldworker can alter the picture quite considerably: some parishes, like Witton in Ranks, rights and resources: an archaeological perspective from Denmark.