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Two Saxon warriors – realistic portrayal of the sort of warrior farmers who entered the former Roman province of Britannia in numbers, in the fifth century AD. “Saxon warriors, southern England, 6th century CE”, Angus McBride It is obvious that the sequence pagan England–Augustine of Canterbury–Christian England is hardly an approximation to the reality of seventh-century history, even to the…
Danevirke: construction phases With all the evidence measured, examined and weighed, it is now time to put raiding into the narrative of early medieval warfare, where we now know it belongs. Many saints’ lives, chronicles and histories contain references to ‘battles’, but this is possibly because decisive set-piece actions were…
How a Dyke could Counter Raiding In 1959, Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Burne published a paper arguing that Offa’s Dyke was more likely to be a military structure than an agreed frontier as Fox had suggested. Burne suggested that the reason why there were English settlements west of the dyke was that…
Bargains made and broken involving the exchange of hostages and the swearing of oaths were such an important part of Anglo-Saxon warfare that scarcely an event was recorded without such an accompaniment. It is the glue that held the model of the political world together. By looking at the nature…
Battle of Stamford Bridge, 1066. The English army under King Harold Godwinson fights off an invading Norwegian force led by King Harald Hardrada. On Edmund’s death in 946, he was succeeded by another brother Eadred (946–56), who in the first year of his reign conquered Northumbria and was granted oaths…
655 Battle of Winwaed: Penda of Mercia was defeated by Oswiu of Northumbria. Although the battle was said to be the most important between the early northern and southern divisions of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, few details are available. Significantly, the battle marked the effective demise of Anglo-Saxon paganism. Battle…
Visigoths and Ostrogoths fight each other on the Catalaunian fields. Ostrogoths Siege of Rome AD 537 A barbarian people whose name means “Goths of the rising sun,” or “Goths glorified by the rising sun,” or simply “East Goths,” the Ostrogoths played an important role in the history of the later…
Danevirke: construction phases With all the evidence measured, examined and weighed, it is now time…
655 Battle of Winwaed: Penda of Mercia was defeated by Oswiu of Northumbria. Although the…
The Frankish caballarii or protoknights had been modeled directly on the klibanarioi of the Byzantine…
Bargains made and broken involving the exchange of hostages and the swearing of oaths were…
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