I send out an additional post each month that is behind a paywall. I do this partly to say thank-you to paid subscribers, but also to foreshadow research I’ve undertaken that I’d like to share which hasn’t appeared in print yet. Here’s the paywalled post for September — on the ancient British god Cocidius.

Each British summer, holidaymakers visit the museums and do the walk along Hadrian’s Wall, from Wallsend in Tyneside to Bowness-on-Solway in Cumbria. The museums are stacked with all sorts of artefacts uncovered during excavations of the wall and its many forts and outposts, but not much is made clear for visitors about the many religious finds the museums hold. These include scores of altars engraved with Latin dedications — and even finds from a whole temple of a Celtic god called Cocidius.

Part of the problem the museum curators have stems from the lack of the mention of the gods in the dedications in medieval sources. Only one of the gods mentioned on altars from Hadrian’s Wall has a direct equivalent in medieval Welsh literature. The character of Mabon son of Modron from the Arthurian tale Culhwch and Olwen is generally accepted to reflect the earlier Celtic god Maponus whose name is recorded in dedications on altars from Ribchester in Lancashire, Brampton in Cumbria, and Vindolanda and Corbridge in Northumberland.

But many more altars dedicated to Cocidius are known from the region about Hadrian’s Wall, and in 1937, a temple to Cocidius was uncovered at Bewcastle in Cumbria, a site that is described in a late Roman source simply as Fanococidi ‘the fane of Cocidius’. So who was Cocidius and does he have a later reflection in medieval Welsh sources?

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It is widely understood that England takes its name from the Angles, one of the three peoples that migrated to Britain after the end of Roman rule. The early English historian Bede called his most famous work a history of the ‘English people’ (gentis Anglorum), and despite the later rise of West Saxon kings to political pre-eminence, the description ‘English’ stuck. The Angles were known in Old English as the Engle and the country became known, accordingly, as England.

The part of Britain especially associated with the Angles is still known as East Anglia. But there has never been a “West Anglia” – the specification “East” arose originally to distinguish the people known as the East Angles from a group called the Middle Angles who were later absorbed into the Kingdom of Mercia. The name of Mercia derives from a meaning ‘borderland’ or ‘march’, and its inhabitants were called Mercians (Mierce) rather than “West Angles”.

Yet it is clear that the East Angles came first. In the 1930s, excavation of an early cemetery at Caistor St Edmund, near Norwich, even saw the discovery of a particularly early runic inscription. The Caistor St Edmund inscription has been dated most recently by archaeologists to c. 425-450 and it appears to be an indication that East Anglia was one of the earliest regions in Britain that were settled by Anglo-Saxon migrants.

Caistor St Edmund is the site of the ruins of Venta Icenorum, the former capital of a British people called the Iceni. The Iceni are famous because of their revolt against the Romans in the first century that was led by their queen Boudicca. Or at least that is how her name is recorded in the earliest accounts – many popular books refer to her, ahistorically, as Boudica, a spelling that is not attested in any ancient source.

The reason why the Angles settled in Caistor St Edmund also seems reasonably clear. During the fifth century, Venta Icenorum could be accessed from the sea. The River Yare formerly flowed into a large estuary where the northern parts of Great Yarmouth are now located that was later filled up with silt and drained for farming. Roman forts guarded both sides of the ancient estuary, at Caister-on-Sea and Burgh Castle, with a lighthouse at Reedham guiding ancient mariners to Venta Icenorum.

The Caistor St Edmund inscription is preserved on a deer ankle bone and it merely records that the find is raïhan ‘from a deer’. The rune-inscribed bone was discovered along with a set of black and white gaming pieces that seem to have been used to play a variant of what Roman sources call the ludus latrunculorum or ‘soldier game’, or tafl as it was known later in Old English.

But the finds from the cemetery at Caistor St Edmund do not indicate what the people who were buried there called themselves or why they or their ancestors migrated to Britain. Sets of similar gaming pieces have been discovered in northern Germany, however, in Angeln, the region where Bede records that the Angles originally came from. Yet Bede calls the homeland of the Angles Angulus – unlike New England in the United States, East Anglia does not seem to have been considered a “New” Angulus, 340 miles away. The masculine noun Angulus has a different gender than the feminine Anglia and the vowels of Angulus are slightly different than those of Anglia.

There is also a further difficulty with associating the Angles with Angeln in northern Germany. The Angles are mentioned in the first century by the Roman historian Tacitus living on the Jutland peninsula. Writing in the second century, however, the Greek geographer Ptolemy does not record a tribe called the Angles in the same location. Instead, he mentions peoples called the Sigulones and the Sabalingi where Tacitus placed the Angles, and Ptolemy mentions a people called the Angeilon in what is now central Germany. It is as if the Angles had moved out of Angeln by the second century and headed further south. Ptolemy calls this people the Sueboi Angeilon as if they had joined up with the Suebians, the most powerful tribe in Germany at the time.

So had the Angles really left Angeln by that date? Historians have not known what to do about Ptolemy’s Sueboi Angeilon, but the term Angeilon is clearly connected with Angulus and Anglii, and comparable variation is recorded in Greek and Roman mentions of the name of the Vandals. Some ancient sources refer to the Vandals as Vandali, others call them Vandili, and more rarely still they are called Vanduli, as if the vowel before the l was unclear. Yet the variation of Vandali, Vandili and Vanduli is the same as that found in the English verbs sing, sang, sung and it has long been recognised to reflect what German linguists call Ablaut or what in English is often called vowel gradation or apophony.

Apophony is well known to English speakers because it still affects verbs such as freeze, froze and drink, drank as well as sing, sang, sung – it indicates a change in tense, from present to past (and in sang, sung, from the simple past to the past participle). Yet variation such as that seen in the name of the Vandals appears to have also influenced the place-name Angulus and Ptolemy’s form Angeilon (where the spelling ei seems to stand for i) even though Old English does not display active apophony in its nouns. Apophony in nouns seems largely to have died out from English before the time of the oldest Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.

Yet it is well known why apophony occurred in early Germanic nouns because similar variation is recorded in the nouns of some other early Indo-European languages. The variation originally arose because of how some nouns were inflected – it occurred when they were used as objects or possessives rather than subjects, in what is known as their case forms (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive).

It is difficult to reconstruct now what the difference between Vandali, Vandili and Vanduli signified originally, but it is likely that the variation originally distinguished subject from object and possessive forms of the name of the tribe. The variation seems to have not been understood by Roman and Greek authors, however, who adopted different spellings of the vowel before l in the name of the Vandals in what appears now to be a willy-nilly manner.

The variation in the name of the Angles and Angulus, however, is slightly different. The name of the people is spelled with no vowel before the l in Anglii, with ei before the l in Angeilon and with a u in Angulus. But Anglii and Angeilon appear to be secondary forms derived from the place-name Angulus. Angeilon seems to be a variant of Angulus with the vowel u changed to i (written by Ptolemy as ei) and the vowel before the l appears to be dropped altogether in Anglii as if the recorded names of the people were derived from different inflected forms of Angulus.

How Angulus received its name is not as clear, although quite a lot is now known about the old homeland of the Angles. A tradition has survived in the Old English poem Widsith that records that Angulus was ruled by a king called Offa and that he fixed its southern boundary at Fifeldor, presumably the River Eider. The northernmost boundary of Angulus seems to be indicated by the survival of two ancient fortified dykes in what is now southern Denmark (known as Æ vold and Olgerdiget), and archaeologists have long recognised that there are pottery styles that are restricted only to Angeln. A particular kind of housing construction is also typical of the region and runic inscriptions are attested, dating from the third to the fifth centuries, that preserve evidence of the language spoken in Angulus before the migration to Britain.

But how did Angulus receive its name? The most obvious explanation is that Angulus was related in some way to the Old English term angol ‘fishhook’ which is also sometimes written angul or ongul in early manuscripts. The Old English term is related, etymologically, to Old English anga ‘a sting’ and the name of the angon, a type of javelin employed by the early Anglo-Saxons that had a barbed head.

The most likely reason why Angulus received its name is that Angeln is a peninsula. The description Angulus is related both to the Ancient Greek adjective ankulos ‘crooked, curved’ and the Modern English verb angle ‘to fish with a hook and line’, but the association with fishing hooks seems to be relatively late. Part of the old homeland of the Angles juts out into the Bay of Kiel and it appears to have been thought to be akin in shape to a spike or a barb originally.

The distinction recorded in the spelling Angeilon also seems to explain why Ptolemy placed the Angles in Central Germany. The names Sigulones and Sabalingi appear to mean the ‘victors’ and the ‘followers of Saba’ respectively and they are not attested otherwise. But it is as if the Angles had spilt up into rival groups by the second century, with the group that Ptolemy calls the Sueboi Angeilon perhaps representing a third faction.

The Suebian Angles appear to have been a group of Angles who had left Angulus and gone to join up with the Suebians. They appear likely to have been exiles from Angulus, ejected by the Sabalingi or the Sigulones (or both). The description Angeilon employed by Ptolemy suggests that they took their name directly from Angulus while the place-name was still subject to apophony. The description Angeilon appears to have been a way of indicating ‘from Angulus’ that was formed in a different manner from the term Anglii and the later description Engle used for the Angles in Old English.

The name of the Angles seems to have derived from a physical description of the Angeln peninsula. Yet by the time that the Angles arrived in Britain, the apophony that allowed the inhabitants of Angulus to be called both Anglii and Angeilon had died out in English. The people called the Angeilon by Ptolemy were known by a different form of the place-name Angulus as if they did not consider themselves to fully be Anglii anymore, but instead to be people from Angulus who had joined up with the Suebians. Yet in Britain, a new variant of the place-name Angulus arose, employing different vowels and a different gender. As apophony was no longer active in early English nouns, a quite different description Anglia emerged in Britain to describe the new territory of the Angles. Both Angulus and Angle remained associated with each other, but the loss of apophony from Old English nouns meant that a new form of the old place-name arose in Britain, one derived directly from the name of the Angles, not the place they originally came from.

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King Arthur has traditionally been thought to be a southwestern British figure, a successful early medieval king associated especially with Wales and the West Country of England. In the Arthurian romances, he held court at Caerleon in Wales or the fabled castle of Camelot. The earliest historical mentions of King Arthur are mostly preserved in Welsh sources and it is not only Welsh nationalists who assume that Arthur must have been a Welshman – or at least someone from near the Welsh borders

But the earliest historical records appear to make Arthur a northern British leader, fighting battles near Hadrian’s Wall and as far north as Scotland. Arthur appears in these sources as if he were a hero of what medieval Welsh accounts call the “Old North” (or Hen Ogledd), a name used for northern Britain in the years before the rise of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria.

So which of the two King Arthurs was real? Was Arthur an originally northern British figure who was later turned into a Welshman? Or is there a better explanation? He was later hailed as a paragon of medieval kingship and treated as if he was really an early king of England. So could Arthur have originally not been truly Welsh, but only subject to a later “Welshification”? Did King Arthur undergo a transformation in early Welsh tradition similar to that which later made him an exemplar of English royal virtue?

Debate over where Arthur came from – which part of Britain “owns” King Arthur – has been raging for centuries. He seems to be linked in the earliest sources with places in both the north and south of Britain. So where did he originally come from?

Arthur is recorded in the Welsh annals dying in the year 537 at Camlann, a place usually associated now with the Roman Fort of Camboglanna, at Castlesteads, Cumbria, on Hadrian’s Wall. Similarly, Arthur is held in the Historia Brittonum to have fought battles against the Saxons at locations such as a river known as the Glein and the Forest of Celidon. The River Glein has usually been identified with the River Glen in Northumberland and the Forest of Celidon seems to have been located in the Southern Uplands of Scotland. King Arthur may have originally had something to do with the region about what is now the border between Scotland and England.

The names of the battles in the Historia Brittonum have seen several attempts to link King Arthur with Scotland. The twelve battles of Arthur are set out in the Historia Brittonum as if the most important early battle he fought against the Saxons occurred at a site called Fort Guinnion and this place-name has been linked recently with that of Carwinning hillfort in Ayrshire. But like nearby Kilwinning, Carwinning hillfort was named after a British bishop called St Winning who seems to be called Vinniau in earlier sources, not someone called Guinnion. And Ayrshire is too far away from where the Anglo-Saxons are recorded in the early sixth century for Carwinning to have been the location of one of the twelve battles of Arthur.

Similarly, the Historia Brittonum records that Arthur fought four battles on the River Dubglas, and the river on which they were fought has been associated with the Douglas Water in Lanarkshire as if the battles were fought in the region of the later Kingdom of Strathclyde. But the list of Arthur’s battles records that the River Dubglas was in a region called Linnuis, not Strathclyde, and the Anglo-Saxons are not known to have settled anywhere in Scotland early enough for King Arthur to have fought battles against them in Strathclyde.

Yet is northern England really any better a location for Arthur’s battles? No one has ever been able to find a suitable location for Fort Guinnion anywhere near Wales or the West Country of England. Instead, Fort Guinnion has long been connected with Binchester Roman Fort in County Durham whose name is recorded in inscriptions as Vinovia and Vinoe. Earlier Vin- regularly becomes Guin- in Welsh and Vin- evidently developed to become Bin- in the English place-name Binchester. The element -chester commonly appears in English place-names and it clearly derives from a loan of castrum, the Latin word for a fort. The ending -ion is also common enough in Welsh place-names where it is the equivalent of the English adjectival suffix -ian. Fort Guinnion seems very likely to have been the old Roman fort that Binchester was named after.

But who would King Arthur have been fighting? Most historians accept that the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that preceded Northumbria was founded in 547 when the monk Bede records that its first king Ida came to power. Ida was the king of Bernicia, the northern part of what was later renamed Northumbria, but 547 seems too late for Ida to have fought battles against King Arthur. Arthur is recorded to have died in 537 in the Welsh annals and the Historia Brittonum clearly places Arthur in the period immediately before the reign of Ida. Accordingly, some historians have claimed that there were no Anglo-Saxons north of the River Tees before 547 for King Arthur to fight against.

There is, however, evidence that Anglo-Saxon settlement in the region about the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall predated Ida’s founding of the Kingdom of Bernicia. The early British cleric Gildas records that the Anglo-Saxons were invited to Britain to help protect its inhabitants from raids by the Picts and Scots, and a likely location where soldiers hired for the job would have been stationed is on Hadrian’s Wall.

The Historia Brittonum records that Hengist sent his son Octa and nephew Ebissa north to the country about Hadrian’s Wall to defend against the Picts, hyperbolically claiming they were so successful they even raided Orkney. But is there any evidence that Anglo-Saxon soldiers were first sent north to guard Hadrian’s Wall as early as the fifth century?

In 1908, archaeologists excavating the ruins of the Roman town at Corbridge discovered two brooches. They have since been stolen, but it is clear that they were of a cruciform type that is typically associated with Anglo-Saxons. Corbridge is the site of the ancient Roman town of Coria and the archaeologists dated the brooches to the late fifth century.

The ruins of the Roman town of Coria can be visited today, just outside Corbridge. Coria was one of the most northerly towns in Roman Britain, and lying just to the south of Hadrian’s Wall it must have been a key supply centre for the soldiers who guarded the fortifications. The town is mentioned in letters that have survived from Vindolanda, dating from the second century, and the discovery of two typically Anglo-Saxon brooches at Coria suggests that there is some truth to the account preserved in the Historia Brittonum.

The illustration of the brooches from Coria that has survived indicates that they are early examples of a type of cruciform brooch dated most recently to c. 475-550. Cruciform brooches are only found in Britain otherwise in areas of Anglo-Saxon settlement, and the pair found at Coria seem to be clear evidence that there was an Anglo-Saxon presence in Northumberland before the formal founding of the Kingdom of Bernicia.

Perhaps more striking than the early date of the brooches is the proximity of Coria to the likely sites of several of Arthur’s battles. The River Dubglas seems likely to have been the Devil’s Water, a river that flows into the River Tyne a few hundred yards from Corbridge. The Devil’s Water is first recorded as the Diveles and its name is generally acknowledged to reflect an earlier Dubglas. There is also a settlement called Linnels on the Devil’s Water whose name seems to be related to Linnuis, the name of the region where the Dubglas lay according to the Historia Brittonum. It is no wonder that so many historians have concluded that Arthur’s battles mainly occurred in the north of England, and that his later connection with Wales is not historically reliable.

Later Welsh sources agree that Arthur had some sort of connection with northern Britain. In the eleventh-century poem Pa Gur yv y Porthaur? (Who is the Gatekeeper?) Arthur recounts that he and his companions had travelled north to Edinburgh to fight cinbin or ‘dogheads’ and that they had fought against Garwlwyd, a figure otherwise known as Gwrgi Garwlwyd ‘Mandog Roughgrey’.

Gwrgi Garwlwyd was an infamous villain who medieval Welsh tradition held “used to slay one of the Britons every day, and two every Saturday so as not to slay one on the Sunday”. The death of Gwrgi Garwlwyd was accorded one of the “three fortunate slayings” in the medieval Welsh Triads, short, threefold summaries of traditional British lore. Two Welsh Triads record that Gwrgi Garwlwyd was slain by Diffeidell son of Dissynyndawd, one of three chieftains of Bernicia and Deira. Gwrgi Garwlwyd seems to have been thought of as an enemy of the Britons who lived in the “Old North”.

Arthur was held to have undertaken adventures in the “Old North” in medieval Welsh tradition and many of the battles he is recorded having fought in the earliest sources seem to have occurred in northern Britain. But does that necessarily make Arthur a northern Briton who was later “Welshified”? Or did he just journey there, as later Welsh tradition maintained?

Arthur is also recorded to have led the Britons to victory at the Battle of Mount Badon. Mentioned both by Gildas and in the Welsh annals, the Battle of Mount Badon is usually assumed to have occurred somewhere in the south of Britain. It is the site of King Arthur’s most famous victory and it has long been thought to have been won against the West Saxons. But where Mount Badon was located is not entirely clear. Archaeological evidence indicates that the early kingdom of the West Saxons was located in the Upper Thames Valley, and Badbury Hill in Oxfordshire seems a likely-enough location for the battle.

So it could be that King Arthur had a connection with Wales or the West Country of England. But just a connection does not seem to be enough for many historians. Attempts to prove that Arthur was not a northern Briton continue to appear, as if the evidence recorded in the earliest sources is somehow not reliable. It could be that King Arthur fought battles in both the north and south of Britain – he could even just have headed north when he was a young man to make his name fighting the English before later returning south. But despite all the denials, the suspicion will continue to persist that Arthur was essentially a northern British figure who was only later “Welshified”. The weight of historical evidence has long been thought to point to Arthur being a northern Briton who was only adopted secondarily by the Welsh as the great British king who defeated the Saxons at the Battle of Mount Badon.

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From now on, I will be sending out an additional post each month that will be behind a paywall. I’m doing this partly to say thank-you to paid subscribers, but also to foreshadow research I’ve undertaken that I’d like to share, but that hasn’t appeared in print yet. Here’s the first one — on the name of my grandfather’s old town.

It is often asserted in history books that London was founded by the Romans. Archaeologists have never found evidence for a settlement in the centre of London older than the Roman period. But the location of London is so ideal for a port where goods from the continent could be traded it seems strange that Roman London was the first settlement built in the location. The place-name London is not derivationally Latin either – it is generally accepted to be Celtic in origin. So why would the Romans have called London by a Celtic name if they founded the city? And what did the name London originally mean?

Early Roman accounts refer to London as Londinium. The name is first recorded on a writing tablet excavated in London during the Bloomberg excavations. In 2010, the American financial firm Bloomberg wanted to develop a site in London for its new European headquarters. But it was in the old Roman section of London and they had to pay archaeologists to excavate the site before going ahead.

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The Old English poem Beowulf is widely considered to be the greatest literary work to have survived from the Anglo-Saxon period. It is only known from an eleventh-century manuscript, but the poem records many linguistic signs that indicate when it was composed. The most recent linguistic analyses of the poem date it to the end of the seventh or the eighth century, the period in which it has traditionally been supposed to have been written. Some medievalists have argued that Beowulf is a more recent composition, closer in date to the eleventh-century manuscript in which it is recorded. But their arguments seem implausible from a linguistic and thematic perspective.

Beowulf depicts many aspects of early Anglo-Saxon society. The world of Beowulf is a heroic one, where warriors slay monsters, kings reward them with treasure, and ladies bring them wine. The poem also preserves Christian themes that may have been added to it as it was retold over the years, and it ends with a famous, final encounter between Beowulf and a fire-breathing dragon that has proved particularly popular among modern fantasy writers.

One of the many striking images of the poem is Beowulf’s discovery of a rune-encrusted sword in the underwater lair of the mother of the monster Grendel. Beowulf takes the ealdsweord eotonisc or ‘giantish old sword’ and later presents it to the Danish king Hrothgar who describes it in the following manner:

Hroðgar maðelode, hylt sceawode,
ealde lafe, on ðæm wæs or writen
fyrngewinnes, syðþan flod ofsloh,
gifen geotende, giganta cyn
frecne geferdon; þæt wæs fremde þeod
ecean dryhtne; him þæs endelean
þurh wæteres wylm Waldend sealde.
Swa wæs on ðæm scennum sciran goldes
þurh runstafas rihte gemearcod,
geseted ond gesæd hwam þæt sweord geworht,
irena cyst, ærest wære,
wreoþenhilt ond wyrmfah.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Hrothgar spoke, he examined the hilt,
the old relic, on which was written [a sign of] the origin
of an old war, after the flood had slain –
the rushing torrent – of the giant kin,
they fared perilously; they were a people estranged
from the eternal Lord; for this a final reward 
by means of the surging waters, the Almighty gave them. 
So, too, was on the coverings shining gold
with runes properly marked,
set and said, for whom the sword was wrought,
the best of blades, first among weapons,
with a wreathed hilt and serpentine ornament.

What Hrothgar was describing in this passage has been the subject of some dispute, but most interpreters have agreed that it includes an allusion either to the biblical flood or a similar one recorded in Old Norse mythology in which most of the giants perished, and that the runes on the sword’s hilt recorded the name of its former owner.

To understand the passage better, it is typically compared to the runic inscription preserved on an Anglo-Saxon sword or scramasax found in the Thames in the nineteenth century. The sword preserves an enumeration of the runic alphabet and a name Beagnoth inlaid on its blade, and it has been dated to the tenth century. From this perspective the description of the runic inscription in Beowulf does not seem to be recounting a particularly old practice.

But the runic inscription described by Hrothgar was clearly not inlaid into the blade of the sword rescued by Beowulf. The poem records that Hrothgar looked at the hilt and saw a runic inscription inscribed among the golden coverings of the sword fitting that reminded him of an ancient battle that occurred shortly after the time of the giants. The way the sword is described, it appears to have been thought to be very old, manufactured centuries before the period in which Beowulf is set. It is as if Hrothgar saw an inscription comparable to one of those found on the oldest surviving Anglo-Saxon sword fittings, such as that recorded on a silver-gilt sword pommel discovered in the nineteenth century at Guilton in Kent.

In Anglo-Saxon times, giants were thought to have built the many ruined buildings of Roman origin that were still standing about the English countryside. The sword found by Beowulf is described as being giantish as if that was another indication that it was very old. Swords of Roman manufacture may have still been known at the time Beowulf was composed and Roman swords sometimes bore inscriptions indicating who had made them. But the earliest inscriptions found on Anglo-Saxon sword fittings are often more difficult to make sense of than those preserved on Roman swords. Like Hrothgar’s description of the sword found by Beowulf, they need more context for their inscriptions to be properly understood.

The inscription on the sword-pommel from Guilton is particularly difficult as the runic characters recorded on it are somewhat worn and idiosyncratic. It is generally accepted that the Guilton inscription records a name, but how to read the rest of the runes preserved on the pommel has long been disputed. The Guilton pommel is conserved in the World Museum in Liverpool, although it is not currently on public display. It has been dated to the fifth or sixth century and its inscription is generally accepted to preserve the name Sigimer.

Who Sigimer was is not made clear by the inscription, but some interpreters have seen an s-rune after the name which would mean that the runes record a possessive ‘Sigimer’s’. Following the rather dubious s-rune, three more characters can be made out that seem to read nem, followed by several more characters that are even less clearly preserved. It has been proposed that this sequence may have been part of a word nemde ‘named’, but a more plausible explanation is that nem is just an early English term that literally means ‘a taking’.

Rather than an indication that Sigimer owned the sword, the Guilton inscription appears to indicate that the sword was Sigimer’s ‘taking’. But what would ‘taking’ mean in this instance?

The proposal that the word preserved on the Guilton pommel was meant to be read as nem seems to be confirmed by an inscription on a brooch from West Heslerton in Yorkshire. The brooch is of a similar date to the Guilton pommel, but it was discovered in the 1980s by an archaeologist who is self-employed and he has only ever published a grainy black-and-white photo and a sketch of it. Inscribed on the foot of the brooch, the inscription clearly reads neim, but it was not obvious to the archaeologist who published it what neim meant.

A runic inscription from Yorkshire should be expected to preserve a text written in the Northumbrian dialect of early English and neim is the expected Old Northumbrian equivalent of Kentish nem ‘a taking’. The Greeks are similarly called Greicas in Old Northumbrian where they are called Grecas in other Old English dialects. The West Heslerton inscription seems to record that the brooch it is preserved on was also a ‘taking’ of some sort, but what sort is not made clear by the inscription.

More context may be provided by another early runic inscription discovered in 1996. It is preserved on a scabbard fitting found at Bergakker in the Netherlands that is conserved today in the Valkhof Museum in Nijmegen. The inscription appears to be written in Frankish and the scabbard fitting has been dated to the fifth century. But the Bergakker inscription is much longer than those from Guilton and West Heslerton, and it also seems to record a name inflected as a possessive.

The Bergakker inscription includes an idiosyncratically shaped u-rune, much as some of the runes on the Guilton pommel seem rather odd, and it records a ligature of a w-rune and an a-rune as its seventh character. The individual words in the inscription are separated out by punctuation marks and they appear best to be read as haþuþuwas : ann : kusjam : loguns. The Bergakker inscription evidently begins with a name Haþuþuwaz, inflected as a possessive, and then a sentence that seems best understood to mean ‘(he) granted the chosen ones a brand’.

The term loguns literally means ‘flame’ and swords are often referred to poetically as ‘flames’ or ‘brands’. The Bergakker inscription appears to record that a man called Haþuþuwaz gave swords to people described as kusjam ‘chosen ones’. So little is known of the Frankish language, the Bergakker inscription is difficult translate surely, but it seems to preserve a record of a lord called Haþuþuwaz giving a sword to one of his most favoured retainers.

The reference to ‘taking’ in the inscription on the Guilton pommel seems likely to reflect a similar kind of expression. Yet where the Bergakker inscription appears to record the name of the person doing the giving, the Guilton pommel seems to record who took or received the sword.

The West Heslerton inscription provides even less context than that on the Guilton pommel. The brooch it is preserved on was discovered in a woman’s grave and the inscription may, accordingly, record a woman’s ‘taking’. But the Guilton and West Heslerton inscriptions both seem to indicate similar things – that the objects they are preserved on were gifts. The Guilton pommel was presumably part of a sword given to Sigimer by his lord and the West Heslerton brooch appears to also have been a gift of some sort. The two objects were both presumably ‘takings’ in the sense that someone presented with a gift takes or receives it. Sigimer and the unnamed woman from West Heslerton seem to have been the functional equivalents of the chosen ones mentioned in the Bergakker inscription, people endowed with gifts of swords and jewellery that have runic inscriptions preserved on them that record that they were received from someone else.

The Guilton and West Heslerton inscriptions do not make much sense if they are not provided with more context. But Hrothgar’s description of the rune-encrusted sword found by Beowulf is not very clear at first either. It is not immediately apparent why the inscription on its hilt should have reminded Hrothgar of an age-old battle from the time of the giants. Hrothgar’s comments are made much clearer, however, when the reader of the poem is informed of the necessary context – that the giants were damned long ago by God in a great flood and that the earliest-known Anglo-Saxon swords sometimes preserve runic inscriptions on their fittings. Similarly, early runic inscriptions are often difficult to understand when they are not considered in their fuller context. The reference to ‘taking’ on the Guilton pommel does not make much sense all by itself – it can only be clearly understood when it is compared to the similarly-dating West Heslerton and Bergakker finds. The inscriptions from Guilton and West Heslerton are so brief it at first seems that little can be gleaned from them. Yet both preserve indications that they were gifts, presumably from the lords the two owners of the objects served, unlike the more fantastic treasure rescued by Beowulf from the watery lair of Grendel’s mother.

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The strangest of the early accounts that have survived from the Arthurian period is that of the Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea. Writing just before the middle of the sixth century, Procopius describes an island called Brittia that was ruled by kings of the Britons, Angles and Frisians. It is usually thought that Procopius meant Saxons by his reference to Frisians, although his description of Brittia is otherwise strange. Not only does he claim that the lands beyond the long wall that divided the island were uninhabitable, but also that Brittia was a place to which the souls of the dead migrated.

Procopius worked at the court of the Byzantine emperor and heard tales about Brittia from Frankish and Anglian ambassadors. He alludes to migrants travelling to Brittany and that the Angles owed allegiance to the Franks. Procopius also recounts at some length a story about a niece of the king of the Angles who led an army against a people called the Varni after she was spurned by their king. But the most remarkable story Procopius records is one he himself thought a bit incredible: that dwellers on the Frankish coast near the mouth of the Rhine were obliged to transport the souls of the dead at night to Brittia:

At a late hour of the night they hear a knocking at their doors and a muffled voice calling them together for their task. They rise immediately and go to the shore, not understanding why, but compelled to nevertheless. There they see empty boats – not their own boats, but different ones – and they go on board and take to the oars. When the boat is under way, they notice that it is fully laden, with its sides and oarlocks hardly a finger’s breadth above the water. Yet they see no one, and in an hour’s time they arrive at Brittia, completing a voyage that in one of their own craft, not using sails but rowing, would take a day and a night. Then when they have reached the island and have been relieved of their burden, they depart with all speed, their boats now becoming light and rising above the waves, for they sink no further into the water than the keel itself. Neither on the voyage nor at landing do they see anyone, but they hear a kind of voice from the island which seems to announce to those who take the souls in charge. Each name of the passengers who have come over with them is called out, the positions of honour which they formerly held are recalled, and their fathers’ names are announced as well as their own.

The origin of the story of the spectral ferries to Brittia is unclear. Thanet in Kent was formerly an island and its name sounds similar to the Greek word thanatos ‘death’. But it has also been contended that the story related by Procopius may reflect an aspect of the cult of the goddess Nehalennia.

Nehalennia has long remained a controversial figure, with all sorts of theories arising over the years regarding her origin and how she is depicted. Yet the latest research indicates that Nehalennia was a Germanic goddess who had a particular connection with Britain.

One evening in 1647, violent storms struck Domburg, on the island of Walcheren in the Netherlands. In their wake, the ruins of an ancient temple were revealed that had been obscured by the dunes at Domburg for centuries. Altars raised in honour of Nehalennia were discovered in the ruins, near the mouth of the river Scheldt in Zeeland.

In 1970, the first of what turned out to be an even larger trove of ancient altars dedicated to Nehalennia was discovered in the Eastern Scheldt near Colijnsplaat, on North Beveland, about 25 kilometres east of Domburg. Many of the altar stones can be seen today in the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and a replica of a temple of Nehalennia was erected in 2005 at Colijnsplaat. Yet how the cult of the ancient goddess should be understood has long been the subject of considerable disagreement.

Hundreds of fragments of altars were rescued from Domburg and Colijnsplaat, with many of them recording inscriptions. The altars have all been dated to the late second and early third century, and they clearly indicate that Nehalennia was a goddess of the sea. They tend to record quite formulaic inscriptions, a typical example reading:

Deae Nehaleniae M Excingius Agricola cives Trever negotiator salarius CCAA VSLM

To the goddess Nehalennia. Marcus Excingius Agricola, a citizen of the Treveri, a salt merchant from Cologne. Fulfilled his vow, willingly, deservedly.

The altars were raised by merchants with Germanic, Celtic and Roman names, evidently after swearing vows to do so if the goddess granted them a safe voyage. Some of the dedications include pleas for the safekeeping of merchandise and give thanks for a prosperous journey, and the dedicators include merchants who the inscriptions record traded salt, fish oil and pottery. One of the merchants, Placidus son of Viducus, is also recorded as the commissioner of an altar dedicated to local spirits and the cult of the emperor that was found in 1976 in York. The traders evidently transacted most of their business with Britain and had the altars to Nehalennia erected after making successful return voyages.

Many of the altars dedicated to Nehalennia also feature depictions of the goddess seated or standing in her temple. She is dressed in what appears to be a local manner, wearing a short cape, sometimes with her foot on the prow of a ship, holding a fruit basket, with a dog sitting alongside her. Dedications to Roman gods such as Neptune and Hercules were also found in conjunction with the Nehalennia altars. But the most mysterious decoration on the altars is a curtain depicted on the rear of some of them, and it suggests something more about the cult of Nehalennia than just a connection with seafaring.

It has long been disputed whether the cult of Nehalennia was of Celtic or Germanic origin. But the latest linguistic analysis of her name indicates that it is etymologically Germanic, a compound of elements related to Old English nēah ‘near’ and linnan ‘to cease’. Her connection with the sea suggests that Nehalennia was a goddess who was invoked by seafarers as a calmer of the seas, although it has also long been thought that there may have been another, less quotidian aspect to her cult.

The depiction of Nehalennia with a dog by her side has been claimed to symbolise the protection not just of living travellers. The dog has been supposed to be akin to Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded the underworld in Greek and Roman mythology, the dog-headed Egyptian funeral god Anubis, and Garm, the hound that guards the gate of Hel in Norse mythology. The curtains depicted on some of the Nehalennia altars have similarly been compared to those sometimes represented on Roman sarcophagi and they have been explained as indicating the veiling of the future that awaits the souls of the dead. Nehalennia may have been understood to be a goddess who led the souls of the dead on their last voyage, into the afterlife, and this aspect of her cult may be remembered in the story of the ferrying of the souls of the dead to Brittia recorded by Procopius.

No suggestion of an otherworldy aspect to the veneration of Nehalennia is recorded in the inscriptions on the altars that have survived, and the connection of the goddess with the story recounted by Procopius has been disputed. The dedicators of altars to Nehalennia are recorded coming from far and wide – from Rouen, Cologne, eastern Gaul and as far afield as Basel – and many may have only visited Zeeland for business purposes. Colijnsplaat seems to have been known as Ganuenta in Roman times and the local people in Zeeland appear to have been the Marsaci, a Germanic tribe who are also known from altars found in Cumbria. A group of Marsacian soldiers was stationed in Old Penrith during the Roman period, as members of what seems to have been a detachment of Marsaci associated with the First Cohort of the Batavi, one of the empire’s most formidable units.

So could the story recorded by Procopius reflect a memory of the cult of Nehalennia? It is difficult to determine now what the curtain on the altars indicated symbolically or whether the dog pictured with the goddess was supposed to indicate a connection with the afterlife. The temple to Nehalennia in Colijnsplaat seems to have been destroyed at the end of the third century by a storm flood that hit the mouth of the Scheldt, causing the altars to fall into the estuary, and the temple at Domburg is likely to have been abandoned at a similar date. By the time Procopius was writing, all that may have been left of the cult of Nehalennia was a distant memory of a pagan cult connected with voyages to Britain. But a trace of the cult of the goddess of sea voyages could well have survived in Procopius’s account of ghostly crossings to Brittia in the years that followed the fall of the Roman empire.

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My most recent book King Arthur and the Languages of Britain is due out in paperback in August (see bloomsbury.com/9781350443099) – and not only has the cover price come down to a more reasonable level, the publisher has sent me a flyer with a discount code for 20% off (GLR BD8). I’ve appended the flyer to the end of this post for anyone who may wish to use it.

Substack encourages authors to write posts on any books they publish, so I thought I’d spend a bit of time explaining why I wrote a book on a topic like King Arthur. These days almost no one makes a profit from writing books of the kind academic presses issue. A typical academic book sells several hundred copies and the author receives several hundred dollars or pounds in royalties. But I think I’ve discovered something too important to be buried in the pages of an academic journal.

In 1966, British archaeologists began to investigate the hillfort of Cadbury Castle in Somerset. The team was led by an archaeology lecturer from the University of Wales and it was supported by a team of volunteers, most of whom were Arthurian enthusiasts. The excavation was premised on the idea that Cadbury Castle may have been the site of King Arthur’s capital Camelot. It seems like a quixotic quest today, but the resultant book Arthur’s Britain, first published in 1971, quickly became a bestseller.

Yet not everyone was happy about the excavations at Cadbury Castle and the success of Arthur’s Britain. A lot of griping arose about what was going on at the time, both from professional archaeologists and historians. Wealthy Americans were partly funding the dig in Somerset, and anti-American sentiment in Britain was just as strong then as it is now.

Then in 1973, Kathleen Hughes, a history lecturer at Cambridge University, presented a paper at the British Academy that criticised the main historical source that mentions King Arthur. The work is usually called the Welsh annals – or the Annales Cambriae in Latin – and it mentions Arthur twice, in entries for the years 516 and 537. The entry for 516 claims that Arthur led the Britons to victory at the Battle of Badon, an encounter also mentioned by the sixth-century cleric Gildas, while that for 537 records that Arthur died at a place called Camlann along with another figure.

Hughes’s paper was published in 1974 and since that date it has served as the key study of the Welsh annals relied upon by Arthurian sceptics – those who claim that King Arthur was not a historical figure. The oldest surviving copy of the Welsh annals includes entries from the fifth to the tenth century, and the work is often, accordingly, called a tenth-century chronicle. Hughes thought that the entries in the Welsh annals that mention Arthur were retrospective concoctions – that it was not likely that they stemmed from the sixth century. But had she really demonstrated that?

Hughes was not an expert in Welsh history – she specialised instead in the study of medieval Ireland. She also lacked the linguistic skills to analyse the Welsh annals properly. She recounted in her paper that she had asked a professor in Edinburgh who specialised in languages for advice, and ploughed on with her analysis of the Welsh annals based on what he (apparently) told her.

As a result, Hughes’s analysis passes over the linguistic evidence in the Welsh annals that betrays how old they really are. I still find it hard to believe that a paper that was so methodologically flawed could have proved so influential. But Hughes’s analysis was seized on by sceptics and her judgement is now still widely touted as evidence that Arthur, somehow, cannot have existed.

There had always been some historians who were not willing to allow that King Arthur was historical – or at least not certainly so. In 1969, the Welsh linguist Melville Richards claimed:

most of us would now tend to agree, some more grudgingly than others, that there was an historical person bearing a name of Latin origin, namely Arthur from Artorius.

But by the end of the 1970s, scepticism seemed to have taken over – all because of Hughes’s study of the Welsh annals.

I had first read Hughes’s paper when I was a student, but looking at the matter again after thirty years researching historical linguistics, I could see that the early entries in the Welsh annals were full of unexplained behaviour. Hughes’s study provides little help to a linguist trying to determine how old the entries that mention Arthur are – if anything, her analysis is misleading.

So had anyone else noticed this? I read all the literature on the Welsh annals written since that date and found that none of it seemed to address the linguistic evidence either. No one with the appropriate background in linguistics had bothered to publish anything on the Welsh annals.

There are two basic forms of medieval chronicle. One is traditionally known as annals and they include mostly year-to-year records of historical events, made more or less at the same time as they occurred. In the copies that have survived, this type of chronicle is often prefaced by earlier material, such as summarises of events from the Bible or the time of the Roman empire. But annals mostly feature records of medieval events that are historically accurate.

The other type of chronicle is a composite work. Chronicles of this type may include some entries that reflect year-to-year records of events, but they will also tend to feature entries that are derived from what is recorded in early historical works such as Gregory of Tours’s History of the Franks or Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The Welsh annals contain no entries that record information obviously taken from works such as the histories of Gregory of Tours or Bede, although they do have many entries that record events mentioned in other sets of medieval annals.

Sometimes medieval chronicles borrow records from each other and Hughes claimed that the Welsh annals had many borrowed entries, including several of those dating from the sixth century. But a chronicle with many borrowed entries normally preserves telltale linguistic signs of borrowing, indications of anachronism and confusion that Hughes was not able to show are present in the Welsh annals.

So what do the Welsh annals reveal when they are analysed from a linguistic perspective? The first of the sixth-century entries records the death of someone called Ebur in an entry for AD 501. It took me a while to realise it, but Ebur is the figure called Ibar who is recorded dying at the same time in Irish annals. But Ebur is a linguistically earlier form than Ibar. Ibar is the Old Irish name of St Iberius of Wexford – it’s what he was known as in the seventh century and more recently.

But linguists can reconstruct what St Iberius would have been called during his lifetime because earlier forms of Irish are recorded in ogham inscriptions. In the early sixth century, St Iberius should have been called Ebur, and in the fifth century Eburas. The spelling of St Iberius’s name recorded in the Welsh annals is exactly what you would expect to find in a record of his death from AD 501, not a much more recent account.

It is not just the record of the death of St Iberius that preserves a linguistic form typical of the sixth century. Similar evidence is preserved in many of the sixth-century records preserved in the Welsh annals. That makes it likely that all the sixth-century entries in the Welsh annals are reliable historical records, including those that mention Arthur.

The Welsh annals show clear linguistic evidence of preserving year-to-year records of events from Wales, Ireland, Scotland and northern England reaching back at least as far as the beginning of the sixth century.

But there is other evidence that the sixth-century entries in the Welsh annals are reliable. The entry for 537 that records the death of (King) Arthur mentions that it was also a time of mortalitas or ‘dying’ in Britain and Ireland. Since the late 1990s, this event has been linked by climate scientists with the effects of the volcanic winter of 536, a time when dust emitted by erupting volcanos played havoc with the weather, causing famines to break out right across Europe. The scientific evidence for the volcanic winter supported my linguistic analysis – Hughes seems to have gotten things quite wrong.

There is even some linguistic evidence for archaism in the entries that mention Arthur. The other person who died at Camlann in 537 is called Medraut in the oldest copy of the Welsh annals that has survived, but he is called Modred in the two more recent ones. Copyists of medieval manuscripts sometimes scrambled names they found in them, and it had first been noticed in the 1950s that the variation of Medraut and Modred only made sense if the vowels of the two forms had been accidently reversed by a scribe. An older form of Medraut (spelled as Medrot) could have been the origin of the variant spelling Modred. A copyist of the manuscripts may have gotten the order of the vowels confused, turning Medrot into Modret, an early form of the name later spelled Modred.

I also began to notice telltale signs of archaism in the Latin employed in the sixth-century entries. Sometimes the Latin phrases found in the Welsh annals seem odd. The death of St Iberius, for example, is recorded as ‘Bishop Ebur rests in Christ’ which is not what would be expected in a record from the tenth century. Similarly, the term mortalitas employed to describe the loss of life that occurred in 537 is typically used to refer to plagues in medieval Latin. But after examining the records carefully I began to realise that they were just very old. The entries use expressions paralleled in records such as inscriptions on tombstones from the fifth and sixth centuries, and other early sources such as similarly dating entries in other sets of annals. These tell-tale signs of archaism had also been ignored by Hughes who, as a historian, did not recognise them.

It became increasingly clear to me that the Welsh annals were a set of year-to-year records, the earliest of which could be dated to the sixth century. The sixth-century entries mentioned King Arthur and they preserve all the linguistic signs that they reasonably could to show that Hughes’s analysis of them was wrong.

So what did other specialists in the area think of my analyses? I approached the publisher Bloomsbury and their commissioning editor soon informed me that he was interested in seeing a book-length study. I put together a draft of what later became King Arthur and the Languages of Britain, and after my manuscript was reviewed by professors from leading universities in the US and the UK, the hardcover and ebook versions eventually appeared last year. But Bloomsbury put very high prices on them, ones that they charge to universities. Now after a break of eighteenth months, they are releasing a much more reasonably priced paperback edition.

As I wrote in the introduction to King Arthur and the Languages of Britain, I don’t expect that closed-minded types will agree with what I’ve written. I know how historians behave – many will never admit they were wrong. But after thirty years working in the field, it’s very unlikely that there is anyone out there with a stronger understanding of the linguistic evidence. It may be that someone in the future will come up with a better way of assessing the sixth-century entries in the Welsh annals. But until that time sceptics will have to deal with the clear evidence that Hughes’s analysis was misleading and that it was not an acceptable basis to ground their scepticism on.

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The origins of the English language were first set out in the nineteenth century by German linguists such as Jacob Grimm and Eduard Sievers. Most people have heard of Jacob Grimm because of the collection of fairy tales he and his brother Wilhelm published in 1812. But Sievers also made many important contributions to the history of the English language. Not only did he publish an influential grammar of Old English, a revised version of which is still in print today, he was the figure most responsible for transforming linguistics, turning it into a science of language.

Sievers’s contribution to our knowledge of early English was particularly important. He was the first to analyse the metre of Old English poems such as Beowulf, and the five types of scansion he deduced are still learned by students today. Sievers was also responsible for first discerning the development known as Sievers’s law that explains why Old English here ‘army’ has a genitive herges, but ende ‘end’ has a genitive endes (with no g).

A professor of philology at the University of Leipzig, all the brightest linguistics students of the day flocked to Sievers’s lectures. He was the leading figure among the generation of German linguists known as the Neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker) – originally a term used to mock them. Neogrammarian linguistics developed later into structuralism, the main approach to understanding language still current today.

In his grammar of Old English, Sievers was the first to set out how the early English language developed, step by step, from its Common Germanic ancestor, or what linguists usually refer to now as Proto-Germanic. But Sievers principally relied on correspondences in the medieval Germanic languages to explain what occurred. Sievers compared Old English to Old Norse, Old High German and Gothic, and projected back what they had in common. He reconstructed the development of Old English from Proto-Germanic; he did not employ direct evidence such as that available today in the form of runic inscriptions.

Yet the number of runic inscriptions from Britain unearthed by archaeologists has increased substantially since Sievers died in 1932. Tests of the DNA in bones found in cemeteries from the Anglo-Saxon period have also shown that many of the people who migrated to Britain during the fifth century came not just from northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, but also from the Netherlands and France. There seems to have been a substantial number of Franks among the early migrants to Britain, and many objects of typically Frankish design have been found in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries.

The Frankish settlers do not seem to have been able to establish any significant towns or kingdoms or to have had much other clearly noticeable political influence. Yet the presence of people from France among the fifth-century migrants may explain unexpected features in two of the earliest runic inscriptions from Britain.

The first example appears in an inscription discovered on the fitting of the sheath of a sword, excavated in 1855 at Chessell Down on the Isle of Wight. The scabbard fitting is silver-gilt and it formerly served as the mouthpiece – the top part of the scabbard where its owner would have inserted his sword.

The fitting appears to date from the fifth or sixth century, and given where it was found, its inscription would be expected to record a linguistically Jutish text. The runes on the Chessell Down scabbard mount are quite clearly executed and they have most recently been read as æko : cœri. The runes employed in the Chessell Down inscription seem to date from the sixth century and the meaning of the second term is disputed, but the first is clearly a name, presumably Æcco. No comparable later Old English name is attested, but a similar name Acco is known from medieval Germany.

Other names recorded in early runic inscriptions from Britain have a slightly different ending. In 1985, an inscription on a mounting from an old purse was recovered from a man’s grave at Watchfield in Oxfordshire. Its inscription reads haribœki : wusa, and the second element seems to be a name Wusa. The grave in which the inscription was found has also been dated to the sixth century, and the two names, Æcco and Wusa, both seem to be those of men, but with different endings, -o and -a respectively.

The alternation of the endings -o and -a is not expected from a Neogrammarian perspective. In medieval German and Frankish, men’s names of a similar type are characterised by ending with -o, for example in the man’s name Otto, and the other ending -a is reserved for the names of women, like Helga and Hilda. But in Old English, men’s names of this type, including Horsa, Penda and Offa, always end with -a.

According to the developmental scheme established by Sievers, the ending -a characteristic of Anglo-Saxon men’s name arose because the old -o retained in German and Frankish developed to -a in Old English. The name Wusa on the Watchfield purse mount shows the expected early English development, but Æcco does not. But is the variation significant? Objects of Frankish design have been uncovered in the area, so could Æcco be a Frankish name?

Similar evidence of linguistic behaviour not expected from a traditional Neogrammarian perspective is recorded in an early runic inscription from Loveden Hill in Lincolnshire. It was discovered in the 1950s during the excavation of a large Anglo-Saxon cemetery and it is preserved on a burial urn conserved today in the British Museum. Over 1,800 graves were found at the Loveden Hill site, most of them preserving objects made in manners typical of those found in Anglian settlements, but some objects made in typically Frankish manners were also discovered at the site.

The rune-inscribed urn from Loveden Hill also contained tweezers and a bone gaming-piece, and it has been dated to the fifth or sixth century. The inscription on the urn is written from left to right, but its characters become less well formed as the inscriber continued.

The first sequence recorded in the Loveden Hill inscription is a name sïþæbæd which seems to consist of two elements. The first appears to be Old English sīþ ‘way’ and the second Old English beadu ‘fight, war’. But a name of this sort would be expected to become Sīþbeadu in Old English, with no vowel connecting sīþ and beadu, but with one retained at the end of the name. Anglo-Saxon names beginning with sīþ are also very rare, much as Æcco seems not to have an obvious later reflection in Old English. So what has gone on?

There are three unexpected aspects of the spelling of the name Sīþæbæd recorded in the Loveden Hill inscription, and of these, the vowel in the second element -bæd is the simplest to explain. The development of the diphthong ea recorded in Old English beadu occurred at a relatively late stage in the history of early English, and the Loveden Hill inscription may simply predate it.

The loss of the final vowel of Sīþæbæd can also be explained by the late date of the emergence of compound stress. In Old English, both elements of compounds were typically accented, as if the two elements were still recognised to be separate words. But some Old English compounds are recorded that were evidently formed before the development of dual stress in compounds and that behave, phonologically, like single words. The loss of the final vowel of Sīþæbæd can be explained as a sign that the name was only accented on its first element, not both.

The vowel between Sīþ- and -bæd is another matter, however. The equivalent vowel is always lost from Old English, Old Saxon and Old High German names when the first element has a long vowel in its root, and it would be expected to have also been lost from English before the Anglo-Saxon migrations occurred. But comparable Frankish names dating from the fifth and sixth century such as Chlōdomēr retain the vowels that connect their two elements that were regularly lost in English, and it appears that the name Sīþæbæd has developed in a similar manner.

Both Æcco and Sīþæbæd preserve linguistic features not expected in Old English and the most obvious way to explain the two names is to assume that they are not regular Anglo-Saxon coinages. Æcco and Sīþæbæd retain features that are typical of fifth- and sixth-century Frankish names, not those employed by speakers of early English. It may be that Æcco and Siþæbæd spoke dialects that just developed in similar manners to Frankish and later died out. But the most obvious explanation is that Æcco and Siþæbæd were both Frankish speakers or were the children of speakers of Frankish.

The many Frankish migrants who crossed the English Channel during the fifth century were first revealed in recent DNA testing of skeletons from early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries. But their participation in the wave of Anglo-Saxon settlement after the collapse of Roman rule in Britain is indicated by both the presence of objects of characteristically Frankish design among goods uncovered from fifth- and sixth-century cemeteries, as well as, apparently, also, names preserved in early runic inscriptions. They may not have had any obvious political influence in the early development of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but the presence of many Frankish migrants may still be detected among the material remains from that crucial period.

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Stories about King Arthur and his knights are the most important Welsh contribution to world literature. During the Middle Ages, tales about him were told as far afield as Italy and Germany, and he has remained a popular figure down until the present day. But it has long been disputed when he first became a literary as opposed to a historical character. Some sceptics claim that he was never historical, but the most recent analyses of the historical evidence make their suspicion seem quite unreasonable.

The most detailed early account of Arthur is preserved in the Historia Brittonum, a ninth-century collection of what are sometimes clearly much earlier traditions. Arthur appears in a section of the Historia Brittonum that does not call him a king, but that does detail twelve battles he was held to have been victorious in.

Early Welsh poems sometimes record similar enumerations of battles won by sixth- and seventh-century British kings and it has long been supposed that the compiler of the Historia Brittonum took its section on Arthur’s battles from a list of the kind sometimes found in medieval Welsh poetry. It has also been noted that the section on Arthur preserved in the Historia Brittonum has a chiastic quality to it, a characteristic that allows historians to analyse how it was composed.

Chiasmus is a literary device perhaps best known from a speech of President Kennedy: “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”. Chiasmus literally means “crossing”: a chiastic expression starts off in one direction (“your country can do for you”) and then repeats itself, but in the reverse order (“you can do for your country”).

The chiasmus in the section on Arthur’s battles in the Historia Brittonum is more sophisticated than that used by President Kennedy as it involves multiple forms of “crossing” – or what is usually called “ring composition” by literature scholars.

The ringing can clearly be seen the section on Arthur’s battles if it is set out into its logical sections:

Then Arthur fought against them in those days, together with the kings of the Britons; but he was their leader in battles.

The first battle was at the mouth of the river that is known as the Glein; the second and third and fourth and fifth on another river that is known as the Dubglas, and it is in the region of Linnuis; the sixth battle, on the river that is called Bassas. The seventh was a battle in the Forest of Celidon, that is Cat Coit Celidon.

The eighth was a battle at Fort Guinnion in which Arthur bore the image of Holy Mary, the perpetual virgin, upon his shoulders; and the pagans were put to flight that day, and there was a great slaughter upon them through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and through the power of Holy Mary his mother.

The ninth battle was waged in the City of the Legion. He waged a tenth battle on the bank of a river that is called Tribruit. The eleventh battle took place on the mountain that is known as Agned. The twelfth was a battle at Mount Badon in which in a single day nine hundred and sixty men were felled in one attack by Arthur.

And no one achieved this but he himself alone. And in all wars he emerged the victor.

The ringing in the Historia Brittonum is not immediately obvious, but the battle list is clearly structured. Arthur leads the Britons into battle and he leads them to victories at four locations. Then after a key victory at a place called Fort Guinnion, he repeats his earlier feats by winning four more battles and leads the British (again) to victory. Accordingly, the structure of the Arthurian section may be represented as:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

A: Arthur leads the British in battle
B: Arthur fights battles at four locations
C: Arthur wins a battle due to the intervention of Mary and Jesus
B': Arthur fights battles at four locations
A': Arthur leads the British to victory

So why does the section on King Arthur in the Historia Brittonum preserve ring composition?

Ring composition is a device that is employed in medieval poems such as Beowulf and the Song of Roland. It is not as commonly employed in Welsh verse, but one of the early Welsh poems that features an enumeration of battles won by the king it praises preserves a form of ringing. It celebrates the victories of Cynan Garwyn, a sixth-century king of Powys, and it records him winning battles right across Wales and Cornwall.

The main difference, however, between the list of Arthur’s battles and the enumeration of the victories of Cynan Garwyn is that the latter is preserved in a linguistically Welsh poem, not one written in Latin. But does the list of Arthur’s battles come from a vernacular Welsh or British source? Or it was composed when Latin was still widely spoken in Britain?

Evidence that the battle list was originally composed in Latin is preserved in the text recorded in the Historia Brittonum. It has long been recognised that the opening lines scan as a form of Latin verse:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Tunc Árthur pugnábat / contra íllos in íllis diébus
cum régibus Brittónum, / sed ípse dúx erat bellórum.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Then Arthur fought / against them in those days,
together with the kings of the Britons; / but he was their leader in battles.

The verse seems to be of a metrical type known as rhythmic hexameter, a poorly understood form of poetry that was employed during the late Roman period and the early Middle Ages by the composers of popular songs.

The list of Arthur’s battles seems to come from an old poem or song, composed at least partly in a metre only recorded otherwise in Britain during the sixth century. A memorial inscription from Ffestiniog, in northern Wales, records the only other example of rhythmic hexameter known from Britain.

The Ffestiniog inscription records that the man it commemorates was a magistrate, a citizen of Venedotia (Gwynedd), and it seems to have been composed as two lines of accentual verse:

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Cántiorì hic iácit / Vénedòtis cíve;
fúit cónsobrìno / Mágli mágistràti.

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Cantiori here lies, / a citizen of Venedotia;
he was for his cousin / a magistrate of Maglo.

The use of a Latin metre usually employed only in popular verse makes it likely that the list of Arthur’s battles was composed well before the Historia Brittonum was compiled. Widespread use of Latin seems to have died out in Britain over the course of the seventh century, and the composition of poems and songs using rhythmic hexameter would not be expected to have continued after that date. After that time, Latin was employed only as a clerical and learned language, and use of the type of verse recorded in the opening lines of the section on Arthur’s battles in the Historia Brittonum does not seem likely to have survived in Britain in later centuries.

The list of Arthur’s battles seems to be a much earlier composition than it has long been thought to be. But could the list preserve a record of actual historical events, or is it just the invention of an early bard, composing verses about Arthur in Latin?

Studies of historical memory show that following generations are particularly likely to remember details about events such as wars. They can recollect things that their grandparents did up to a century or more ago.

The list of Arthur’s battles in the Historia Brittonum appears to be a poem composed within living memory of Arthur’s reign, and given how old it seems to be, it is not likely to have misrepresented his main achievements in a substantial manner. People who came to hear the poem performed by the bard who composed it may have been descended from the hundreds of warriors who fought with Arthur in his battles, and the poem is unlikely to have survived long if it was widely considered to misrepresent the great sixth-century king’s most glorious achievements. The account of King Arthur’s victories preserved in the Historia Brittonum is likely to be reasonably accurate, even if the tradition it records may have been subjected to some poetic license.

The poem that recounts Arthur’s battles preserved in the Historia Brittonum is the oldest surviving literary work from Wales, and it seems especially fitting that it records the deeds of Wales’s greatest literary hero. It represents the first contribution to what is now one of the world’s most famous literary traditions and it deserves much more respect than it has usually been given by sceptics.

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In 2013, the “Red Wedding” episode of the HBO series Game of Thrones shocked a lot of viewers. The massacre of Rob Stark and his entourage at the wedding, however, would not have been as much of a surprise to students of early Anglo-Saxon history. The scene was clearly modelled on one from the story known as the “Treachery of the Long Knives” recorded in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum. The expression “Treachery of the Long Knives” was also adopted in 1934, changed to “Night of the Long Knives”, to describe a murderous purge of a faction of the Nazi Party. But the German usage was clearly based on the similarly bloody scene from the story recorded in the Historia Brittonum.

The medieval story recounts how Hengist and the Saxons met with Vortigern and the elders of the Britons to discuss a peace treaty. But Hengist had hatched a dastardly plan. Hengist arranged for each of his men to hide a knife in their boots and to draw it after he called out a watchword. Hengist calling out the watchword would be the sign for the Saxons to capture Vortigern and to begin killing the elders of the Britons. Some 300 British leaders were slaughtered during the massacre according to the Historia Brittonum.

Whether the massacre occurred or not has long been unclear. But the story presumably had a considerable impact on medieval Welsh audiences, confirming their suspicion that the Saxons were perfidious brutes. The Historia Brittonum is largely a compilation of early accounts of Welsh and British history, and the stories it preserves stress how the Britons resisted the fiendish Saxons, if not always successfully. For a Welsh audience, the Treachery of the Long Knives was presumably a moral tale – never trust an Englishman.

From a linguistic perspective, the most remarkable feature of the story of the Treachery of the Long Knives is the watchword recorded for Hengist. It is scrambled slightly in most of the surviving copies of the Historia Brittonum, but the German philologist Theodor Mommsen reconstructed it as eu Saxones eniminit saxas, an early English phrase recorded in an otherwise Latin work.

Later editors have usually agreed that eniminit saxas is a slightly miswritten form of an English expression enimit saxas ‘draw knives!’. But enimit saxas does not quite make sense from the perspective of Old English. In Old English, the phrase would be expected to be written animaþ seax. So was Hengist’s watchword just mistakenly transcribed by the compiler of the Historia Brittonum? Or has something else occurred?

There are two especially odd aspects of the watchword. The imperative verb enimit appears to be a compound of the Old English prefix a- ‘out’ and the verb nimaþ ‘take’, and it literally means ‘take out’. But the spelling -nimit is closer to the Gothic imperative nimiþ ‘take’ than Old English nimaþ ‘take’. The Gothic imperative is generally accepted to have retained the original vocalism in nimiþ, while Old English forms such as nimaþ appear to have only developed the vowel a in their ending -aþ at a later date. That makes the form of the verb recorded in the Historia Brittonum seem older than the Old English period – as if the tale of the Treachery of the Long Knives was first written down sometime before the oldest surviving English manuscripts.

The linguistic evidence for archaism is more widespread than just appearing in one word. The form of the noun saxas is also remarkable. In Old English, seax ‘knife’ is a neuter and should not be expected to be inflected the way it is in Hengist’s watchword. But the grammatical ending of saxas would be quite expected if the verb enimit could take a genitive object – that is, if enimit saxas literally meant ‘take out of knife!’. The watchword may preserve what is known as a partitive genitive, indicating not all of their knives. Partitive genitives are a grammatically archaic feature preserved in Gothic, but that had died out in English sometime before the eighth century.

The spelling saxas for ‘of knife’ also appears to be archaic. The Old English form seax has been influenced by what is known as “breaking” – an older vowel a evidently “broke” to ea at an early stage in the development of English. The development can be seen by comparing Old English wearp ‘threw’ to its German cognate warf ‘threw’, and, of course, the Saxons are called Seaxan in Old English. Breaking is usually thought to have been a very early development and the lack of breaking in enimit saxas also makes it seem likely to be a very early phrase. “How early?” seems to be the key question, not “if”.

So how old was breaking? It is usually hypothesised to have occurred in English during the sixth century, so Hengist’s watchword appears to be very old. Breaking is not clearly recorded in any of the earliest runic inscriptions from Britain to have survived, although relatively few inscriptions of sixth-century date have been recovered yet by English archaeologists.

But did the Treachery of the Long Knives really occur? Linguistic analysis of Hengist’s watchword suggests that it may have first been recorded in the sixth century and that the account preserved in the Historia Brittonum is centuries older than is usually recognised. The watchword does not seem to be archaic enough to be sure that the massacre did actually occur, but it does suggest that a core element of the story was first written down centuries before the Historia Brittonum was compiled in the ninth century.

The link between the Saxons and their knives, however, has the appearance of what is known as etymological aetiology. Medieval thinkers such as St Isidore of Seville stressed the importance of etymological knowledge and it is clear that some of the stories recorded in medieval sources were informed by explanations of the etymologies of the names of people they describe. This is presumably why a similar story to the Treachery of the Long Knives is recorded of the Saxons by Widukind of Corvey, but placed in a different setting. Widukind was a Saxon himself, a tenth-century chronicler from northern Germany. But in Widukind’s story it is Thuringians who are massacred by Saxons in a similar manner as Hengist’s men slaughtered the elders of the Britons.

It is obviously no coincidence that both stories have the Saxons drawing out knives called seaxes to massacre their enemies. The connection of Saxons and drawing knives in both of the two stories seems to reflect knowledge of the origin of the name of the Saxons. The term seax, earlier sax, originally appears to have meant ‘sword’ in the Germanic languages – it is related to English saw. But over time the term was increasingly used specifically to refer to a long knife or short sword that became particularly popular during the early Middle Ages.

The story of the massacre of the Britons by the Saxons preserved in the Historia Brittonum is likely to be much older than it is usually recognised to be and it appears to have been influenced by the etymology of the name of the Saxons. As the Saxons were named after their knives, anyone who knew about the etymology could have introduced it as a theme into a tale that did not originally feature knives. That must make historians cautious about the story of the Treachery of the Long Knives, but given how old Hengist’s watchword seems to be, not dismissive of it.

Whether or not a real incident lay behind the account of the Treachery of the Long Knives remains unclear, although there could well have been one. A fight that broke out during negotiations between the Britons and the Saxons may have led to the slaughter of many on the British side. The watchword recorded in the Historia Brittonum does not seem likely to have accurately reflected words used by Hengist in the fifth century – it may have some truth to it, but it seems likely that the story of the massacre was influenced by an understanding of how the Saxons received their name. The story of the Treachery of the Long Knives is likely to have been one told after living memory of the events of the fifth century had begun to fade and all manner of colourful tales had come to be told by poets and bards about the famous early struggles between the Britons and the Saxons.

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In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Northumbrian monk Bede records that the English were descended from three peoples: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. Led initially by the brothers Hengist and Horsa, the Jutes settled in Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, and the English spoken in Kent came to form a separate dialect from those that developed elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon Britain. But it has long been unclear why the Jutes received their name. The peninsula in Denmark that is called Jutland today was known as the Cimbrian Peninsula in Roman times. It is first recorded being called Jutland in English translations of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the peninsula may only have received its modern name because of the deeds of Jutish leaders such as Hengist and Horsa.

In Roman times, the peninsula was named after the Cimbri, a Germanic people most remembered for having ravaged southern Europe from 113-101 BC. After terrorising Gaul and ancient Spain, the Cimbri were defeated by a Roman army near what is now Vercelli in northern Italy, between Turin and Milan. It is not terribly surprising, then, that the Romans called the peninsula that the Cimbri came from after the northern barbarians who had so famously threatened the emerging Roman empire at the time.

The name of the king of the Cimbri defeated at Vercelli is recorded to have been Boiorix. His name literally means ‘king of the Boii’ as if the Cimbrian leader had adopted it to indicate that he had overcome the Boii, the leading Central European Celtic tribe whose name is remembered in that of Bohemia (Latin Boiohaemum). Many Roman generals were given the names of peoples they had defeated, perhaps most famously among them Drusus, the stepson of the emperor Augustus. Drusus was given the name Germanicus as an honorific after his death while on a campaign that had seen him lead Roman forces as far into Germany as the River Elbe. A monument built to honour Drusus can still be seen in Mainz today, and his title was inherited by both of his sons, the emperor Claudius and the general Germanicus.

Roman accounts record that the Cimbri later apologised for the deeds of their ancestors, sending the emperor Augustus an elaborate drinking vessel or cauldron as a token of their friendship. The Cimbri are still commemorated in Denmark by the name Himmerland in northern Jutland (formerly Himbersysel) and they seem to have remained an independent people until the kingdom of Denmark was founded at the end of the fifth century. The founder of the Danish kingdom is called Scyld Sceafing in the English poem Beowulf which is largely set in Denmark. Scyld is called Skjǫldr or Skioldus in later Scandinavian accounts and he seems very likely to have been a real person.

But the Jutes are not mentioned in Roman sources. The closest they come is a reference by Tacitus to a tribe called the Eudoses – and another people called the Juthungi are recorded in Roman accounts as a tribe of the Alemanni or Swebians. Danish archaeologists associate the Jutes with archaeological remains from central Jutland, but it has never been clear whether the Jutes are the same people as the Eudoses or were related to the Juthungi somehow. Even the linguistic origin of the term Jute has long been obscure.

The closest word to the name Jute recorded otherwise in a Germanic language is the Old Norse term jóð ‘baby’. A Gothic prince from Spain called Eutharic is known from a history of the Goths written by the Byzantine writer Jordanes, and Eutharic’s name seems literally to mean ‘Jute-king’. Eutharic served as a Roman consul at the time of the reign of Justin the Thracian, a Byzantine emperor who ruled from 518-527. But why would the name of the Jutes appear in that of a Gothic leader?

There is no record of the Goths ever defeating the Jutes, so the most likely answer appears to be that the name of the Jutes meant something in Gothic. The term also appears to be recorded in the name of the Eudoses and the Juthungi. But what did it literally mean? It can scarcely have meant ‘baby’ as its apparent cognate jóð means in Old Norse. And the Jutes are called the Jótar in Old Norse, and Jutland is called Jótland – with a t, not a ð.

The Old Norse term jóð ‘baby’ seems to be related to the Sanskrit participle ūta ‘favoured, protected, helped’ and its like-meaning Latin cognate iūtus ‘helped, aided’. Babies evidently need a lot of help – infants can’t be expected to fend for themselves. But the semantic connection of jóð ‘baby’ with ūta ‘favoured’ and iūtus ‘helped’ appears more likely to reflect the idea that children are a blessing. It seems likely that the tribal name Eudoses means ‘the favoured, the helped, the blessed’ and that the name of the Jutes originally had a similar literal meaning. It also makes sense to interpret the Gothic name Eutharic as literally meaning ‘blessed king’ rather than ‘Jute-king’. But how might the Jutes have been considered ‘favoured’ or ‘blessed’?

Writing at the end of the first century AD, Tacitus recounts that the Eudoses were part of a broader Germanic group called the Ingvaeones. He also includes the Angles in this group and reports that they all worshipped a goddess called Nerthus, a form of Mother Earth. Tacitus describes the cult of Nerthus as being centred on an island in the North Sea in which there was a consecrated chariot, sacred to Nerthus, that only her priest was allowed to touch. The chariot was drawn by heifers or cows and no one went to war when the goddess’s sacred chariot was brought out during religious festivals. After the return of her chariot to the island, the slaves who aided the priest were ritually drowned, keeping the cult of the goddess mysterious. If the Jutes were considered ‘favoured’ or ‘blessed ones’, their name may reflect an association with the cult of Nerthus.

Tacitus’s description of the island of Nerthus and the procession of her ritual chariot has led to all sorts of conjecture among historians of religion. Nerthus seems to be reflected in Norse mythology as Njǫrðr, a male god associated especially with the sea. It has been assumed that Nerthus somehow changed sex in later pagan belief as if a grammatical change turned Nerthus into a male divinity or Njǫrðr was originally Nerthus’s husband.

The name of the Ingvaeones has also been linked with that of the Old Norse god Ingvi, the Old English hero Ing and the Swedish kings known as the Ynglings. Ingvi is even accounted the father of Njǫrðr in a medieval Norwegian account and it is clear from Anglo-Saxon tradition that the rune for the sound ŋ was named after Ing. It seems likely that the Ingvaeones shared a common religious cult and that some sort of reflection of Nerthus worship is preserved in the later traditions surrounding Njǫrðr, Ingvi and Ing. But how their relationship may best be explained remains unclear.

The Jutes seem to have received their name in the same manner as the Eudoses – as if they were also considered favoured or blessed in some manner. But the name of the Jutes does not seem to derive directly from the form Eudoses recorded by Tacitus. The change of Eud- to Jut-, however, can be explained by two linguistic developments.

A change of eu to iu appears to have been characteristic of some early English dialects seen, for example, in the name of the Frankish bishop Leudardus whose name is recorded in that form on an early pendant from Canterbury, but who is called Liudhard by Bede (with eu changed to iu).

The other development, d to t, is less well understood. But one of the effects associated with what has been traditionally been called Kluge’s law by linguists is a strengthening or fortition of d to t. It is seen in cognates such as the root of Old English cradol ‘cradle’ and Old High German kratto ‘basket’, and a similar development may explain the relationship of jóð and Eudoses to Jute.

The name of the Jutes can be explained, then, as a derivative of a term meaning ‘favoured’ or ‘helped’ and to reflect the participation of the Jutes in a religious cult. Their name seems to be related to that of the Eudoses, worshippers of the goddess Nerthus, and it may be that the description Jute arose originally as a variant of the name of the Eudoses, an ancient tribe from the Cimbrian Peninsula that is not otherwise mentioned in historical accounts.

It seems very likely that the Jutes and the Eudoses received their names in similar manners and that both peoples were originally considered to be ‘favoured’ or ‘blessed’ in some sense. The Juthungi are likely to have received their name in a similar manner, but the only early evidence that might connect any of these tribes with blessing is Tacitus’s description of the cult of the goddess Nerthus. It is not known how long veneration of the goddess lasted – her cult may have long been forgotten by the time of the Anglo-Saxon migrations to Britain. Yet a linguistic trace of the veneration of Nerthus may be reflected in the name given to the peninsula that was originally named after the Cimbri, but that was later most strongly associated with the people who founded the early Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent.

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The German physicist Max Planck is best known for his contributions to quantum mechanics. In 1900 he advanced a law of radiation that included the assumption of what has become known as “Planck’s constant”. His discoveries saw him win the Nobel Prize for physics and a series of German research institutes are named after him today.

Yet Planck is also known for a principle of the history of science. It is usually expressed as “Science progresses one funeral at a time” and it is a reflection on how stubborn experts can be. What usually happens in science, Planck asserted, is that a new theory does not usually catch on because everyone acknowledges that it is likely to be true. Instead, the opponents of the new theory gradually die off and younger generations of scientists prove to be less stubborn.

Planck’s principle may seem overly cynical, but a similar problem is common in other academic disciplines, including in history. Historians tend to cling on to explanations they learned when they were much younger, even when new evidence comes along that is not compatible with older theories. It takes more effort to shift the opinion of many historians than you might at first think should reasonably be required.

In 2009, a British research student published a new assessment of the Welsh annals – or the Annales Cambriae as they are known in Latin. The Welsh annals are preserved in three different manuscripts, and in the earliest version its entries begin in the fifth century, but end in the tenth century. Doubts had long been expressed about how reliable the earlier entries in the Welsh annals are. The entries for events occurring in the eighth and ninth centuries seemed reliable enough, but what about the earliest ones? Two of these mention King Arthur, fighting at the Battle of Badon in 516 and dying at a place called Camlann in 537. But are these entries reliable, as reliable as those from the eighth and ninth centuries?

The historian decided to go through all the eclipses and similar natural events recorded in the Welsh annals to see if their dates aligned with those accepted nowadays by astronomers and climate scientists. Scientists have long been interested in events such as eclipses and changes in the climate, and have developed calendars reaching back centuries in which you can look up when they occurred. The historian discovered that all the mentions of natural phenomena recorded in the Welsh annals appear to have occurred at the times scientists had calculated corresponding events did – and these events included one mentioned in an entry that also names King Arthur.

The 2009 study of natural phenomena in the Welsh annals made it very likely that the entry for 537 was a contemporary record of events. The record in the Welsh annals reads in translation:

Year of the Strife of Camlann in which Arthur and Medraut fell. And a mortality occurred in Britain and Ireland.

The “mortality” recorded in 537 is paralleled by an entry for 536 in the Annals of Ulster that records there was a “shortage of bread” that year. Similarly, the Roman historian Cassiodorus recounts that Italy was struck by famine in 536 and 537, and his Greek contemporary Procopius describes what caused it. In 536, Procopius records that:

during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed.

Since the 1980s, scientists had been trying to explain the reason for the strange weather event recorded by Procopius. By the 1990s it had become clear that the year 536 was an especially cold one. Studies of tree growth from the period indicate that a prolonged period of abnormally cold weather occurred in 536. Similarly, samples of ancient ice taken from Greenland and Antarctica recorded high levels of volcanic dust in the atmosphere at the time. Scientists had rediscovered the volcanic winter of 536.

The obvious consequence of the volcanic winter is that it caused famines to break out in Italy, Britain and Ireland. Crops were severely affected by a cloud of dust that had been thrown up into the atmosphere by erupting volcanoes, causing the light of the sun to dim. The lack of sunshine seems to have proved particularly dire in Scandinavia where archaeologists have found evidence for the widespread abandonment of villages at the time. The volcanic winter of 536 was such a shock to the agricultural societies of sixth-century Europe that an American historian has dubbed 536 the worst year to be alive.

The volcanic winter may also explain two unexpected inclusions in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People written in the eighth century by the Northumbrian monk Bede. Writing almost two centuries after the volcanic winter, Bede records two astronomical events, one in 538 and another in 540. His records were later copied into the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and they provide the following information:

A.D. 538. This year the sun was eclipsed, fourteen days before the calends of March, from before morning until nine.

A.D. 540. This year the sun was eclipsed on the twelfth day before the calends of July; and the stars showed themselves full nigh half an hour over nine.

Why Bede recorded these two eclipses in his Ecclesiastical History has long been unclear. But according to modern astronomical calculations, neither eclipse could be seen from England – they could only be seen in Asia Minor and Spain, Italy or the Balkans respectively. Accordingly, it has been proposed that Bede put a reference to them into his work because he was trying to find an explanation for the strange weather event that occurred at the time which, as Procopius recounted, “seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse”. Bede evidently found what he thought explained the phenomenon in two entries from a Roman chronicle that recorded two eclipses happening at about the right date.

Bede seems to have copied the entries from a now lost source, thinking that the eclipse of 538 could be linked with the dimming of the sun during the volcanic winter two years previously. His inclusion of the entry for 540 also makes sense because scientists have determined that another especially cold year occurred at that date. The second cold year may have been caused by more volcanic dust thrown up into the atmosphere at the beginning of the period from 536 to around the year 660 that is now known as the “Late Antique Little Ice Age”.

Why Bede included the two eclipses in his Ecclesiastical History would otherwise be quite unclear. But it is more obvious what the importance of the entry for 537 in the Welsh annals means for historians. The entry that mentions King Arthur is at least partially reliable – there clearly was a famine that year. But is that enough evidence to change the minds of sceptical historians?

Given the scientific evidence, it seems very likely now that Arthur and Medraut did die at Camlann in 537. Both Arthur and Medraut (the Modred or Mordred of the later romances) have derivationally Roman names, and the use of Roman names was much more common in the sixth century than it was in later periods. Since the 1970s, it has also been clear that Camlann is probably the Roman fort at Castlesteads in Cumberland which still seems to have been inhabited during the sixth century. Who Medraut was is less clear, however, as the entry for 537 does not indicate explicitly whether he fought on the same side as or against Arthur in the “strife” that year. Medraut may have been a northern British king, just as Geoffrey of Monmouth makes Modred the son of Loth, King of Lothian – one of the Gododdin.

But mother nature was not yet done with Britain. In 541, plague struck the island. Recent scientific testing has revealed that an outbreak of bubonic plague, known today as the Plague of Justinian, arrived in Britain that year. With the famine of 537 followed shortly by plague, it is no wonder that King Arthur’s death was later seen as a disaster, the end of a British golden age. Yet it now seems clear that the record of Arthur dying in 537 along with Medraut at Camlann is historically reliable, no matter what reservations Planck had about how science progressed in his day.

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The Welsh epic the Gododdin recounts that a great feast was held at Edinburgh Castle before the assembled warriors rode out to meet the Saxons in battle. The warriors came from all parts, including Aeron (Ayrshire), Al Clut (near Glasgow) and Elmet (near Leeds), and they seem to have been spear-throwing and sword-wielding light cavalry. Yet the name of Edinburgh recorded in the Gododdin is not etymologically clear. The site that the feast was held at is called Eidin in the Welsh poem, a form that seems quite odd from a derivational perspective. The Celtic name of Edinbugh was coined in one of the dialects formerly spoken in northern Britain that are often grouped together as “Cumbric”, but its etymology has long been disputed.

The Gododdin is preserved in two versions in a medieval Welsh manuscript known as the Book of Aneirin. The second version of the poem is evidently much older than the first, and some of its sections seem to preserve the names of lords of the people the poem was named after. A particularly clear example is that of Yrfai, son of Wolstan, whose father seems to have an Anglo-Saxon name:

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Gnaut i ar fisciolin
amdiffin Gododin
im blain trin terhit rei.
Gnaut i lluru alan buan brithei.
Gnaut rac teulu Deor em discinhei.
Gnaut mab Golistan cennei bei guletic
i tat indeuit a lavarei.
Gnaut ar les minidauc scuitaur trei
guarud rac ut Eidin Urvei.

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It was usual for him to be mounted on a high-spirited horse
defending Gododdin, 
at the forefront of the men eager for fighting.
It was usual for him to be fleet as a deer.
It was usual for him to attack Deira’s warband.
It was usual for Wolstan’s son – although his father was no sovereign lord –
that what he said was heeded.
It was usual for the sake of the mountain court that shields be broken through,
reddened before Yrfai, the lord of Eidin.

The Gododdin indicates that the Saxons were from Deira, the kingdom to the south of Bernicia that appears to have originally encompassed the East Riding of Yorkshire. The Deirans seem to have seized modern Catterick in North Yorkshire and the Gododdin rode over 120 miles south to the site of the battle which is called Catraeth in the poem. The Gododdin were defeated at the battle, however, in a loss that seems to have presaged the later collapse of their kingdom. In 638, the Anglo-Saxons of Bernicia appear to have taken Eidin from the last of the Gododdin chiefs, renaming it Edinburgh, and the fate of its former rulers passed into Welsh lore.

The date at which the battle at Catterick occurred has long been disputed, but the Cumbric name of Edinburgh is first recorded in the Annals of Ulster in an entry for 638 that records a siege at Eten. The place-name recorded in the Gododdin is spelled slightly differently, as if it may be a more recent spelling, although the date of the composition of the Welsh poem is not entirely clear. The Gododdin may have been composed shortly after the battle at Catterick as the older version of the poem features many linguistic and thematic archaisms – the Gododdin reads very much like a work that was originally composed in the late sixth or early seventh century.

Yet the Old Welsh form Eidin is not the expected reflex of an earlier Eten. The diphthong in the first syllable of the Welsh name appears to be irregular and it is not preserved in Kair Eden, the oldest recorded spelling of the name of Carriden. Carriden is the site of an old Roman fort, 17 miles west of Edinburgh, whose name seems to mean ‘the fort of Eden’.

It seems likely that the name Eden was used to describe the region about Edinburgh originally, but what it signified in Cumbric has often been disputed. Edinburgh Castle was clearly the site of the les minidauc or ‘mountain court’ mentioned in the Gododdin where the northern heroes all gathered before riding out to battle. But all sorts of unlikely explanations have been advanced over the years for the origin of the form Eden, from the suggestion that it reflects the English man’s name Edwin to the Welsh term eidion ‘beef’ or ‘ox’. Linking the name of Edinburgh to an English man’s name seems rather strange for the capital of a Celtic tribe, and in the early seventh century, the Welsh term eidion should have been spelled odion, not Eten or Eden.

The diphthong preserved in the first syllable of the spelling Eidin in the Gododdin is not reflected in any of the names recorded for Edinburgh other than those found in Welsh sources and it appears to be a secondary development. The Welsh spelling Eidin may reflect influence from the Middle Welsh term eidio ‘defence, fortress’.

But what about the Cumbric name Eden? Its root is most likely to be the same as that of Old Irish ette ‘wing, fin, wing of an army, feather’ and Welsh edn ‘bird’. So was Edinburgh originally known as the ‘place of the wing’ or ‘place of the bird’? A place-name that refers to a ‘wing’ seems unlikely at first, but a fortress in northern Scotland called Pinnata Castra ‘the winged fort’ is recorded in Roman sources. It is not clear exactly where Pinnata Castra was, but its name may reflect a physical feature of the fort. It is possible that the court of the Gododdin at Eden was somehow thought to be physically ‘winged’ in some manner too, although archaeological investigations of Edinburgh Castle undertaken in the 1980s only found evidence for early medieval refuse and Iron Age huts, with habitation of Castle Rock seeming to date back as far as the Bronze Age.

The name of Pinnata Castra has long intrigued historians. The Romans called the upright projecting parts of battlements pinnae or ‘wings’, and it has been supposed that Pinnata Castra ‘the winged fort’ may have received its name because its walls featured battlements.

Accordingly, it might be supposed that both Pinnata Castra and Eden received their names in a similar manner. The Romans knew the Gododdin as the Votadini, a derivationally Celtic name that seems to mean ‘the smelters’, and members of the northern tribe may have served in the Roman army. Members of the Votadini serving in the Roman army could have learned that battlements often included projections called pinnae ‘wings’ in Latin and applied the equivalent term in Cumbric to refer to the court of the Gododdin kings at Edinburgh Castle.

But rather than being named for battlements, Eden seems more likely from a grammatical perspective to have received its Cumbric name from a reference to a single ‘wing’ or ‘bird’, not a description comparable to pinnata ‘winged’. The ending -en does not appear to be adjectival – it is more likely to reflect an old genitive inflection, comparable to that preserved in Welsh adain ‘wing’. The place-name Eden appears more likely to reflect a meaning ‘of the wing’ or ‘of the bird’, not to describe battlements.

So how did Edinburgh receive its name? It may be that Edinburgh Castle was just named for its altitude – as a place so high up that it was associated with birds. Castle Rock was formed from a volcanic intrusion or “plug”, its summit towering 80 metres above the surrounding landscape, and a connection of the site of the old court of the Gododdin kings with birds may be the best explanation for the old place-name Eden. Edinburgh has been English-speaking since it was conquered in the seventh century by the Bernicians, but its name preserves an important trace of the language of its former rulers, the kings of the Gododdin.

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My 2023 book the English Language Before England tries to answer the question “where did the English language begin?” It does so using the direct evidence of inscriptions, something that had never been attempted before. Most histories of the English language avoid the early direct evidence. Instead, they rely on a series of assumptions developed from comparative studies of Old English, Old Norse, Gothic, Old Frisian, Old High German and Old Saxon, many of which do not make much obvious sense.

Most books on the history of the English language claim that English was first spoken in the middle of the fifth century – after the migrations of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes to Britain. Often the language first spoken in Britain by the Anglo-Saxons is referred to as Prehistoric Old English, although some linguists have even taken to calling the language Pre-Old English. They don’t seem to be able to make up their minds what to call the language of Hengist and Horsa or to justify why they have chosen a mid-fifth century date for the beginning of English.

Linguists usually designate the earliest stage of a language with the modifier Proto-. The earliest Norse is usually called Proto-Norse, the earliest Germanic is Proto-Germanic. So the earliest English should be called Proto-English. But when was Proto-English first spoken?

It is sometimes assumed that Proto-English arose from an admixture of the various dialects spoken by the Anglo-Saxon migrants, not long after they got off the boats that brought them across the sea from Northern Germany and Denmark. But that is not what the earliest runic inscriptions suggest. The oldest runic inscription from England was found in the 1930s in an early Anglo-Saxon graveyard near Caistor St Edmund – or Caistor by Norwich as it was then known – and it suggests a different picture.

The Caistor St Edmund inscription is recorded on a deer’s ankle bone, but the first expert in Old English to try to analyse it did not know how to make any sense of its text. He read the Caistor St Edmund inscription as rah(w)han, transcribing the third rune as if it had the same phonological value as the Gothic letter 𐍈. The Gothic letter 𐍈 was called ƕair and it represented the sound h^w still used in some dialects of English to distinguish the pronunciation of words such as whine and whet from wine and wet. But no one could make any sense of rah(w)han.

In the 1970s, a new reading of the Caistor St Edmund inscription emerged. The inscription is now read by linguists as raïhan and it appears to record an inflected form of the word written as raha in an early Old English-Latin glossary. Early Old English raha has now become roe in English, the name of a small type of deer.

So it is evident that the Caistor St Edmund inscription refers to the deer anklebone it was found on – raïhan presumably means ‘from a deer’. The deer anklebone, an astragalus, was discovered in an urn with thirty-odd sheep astragali and a similar number of black and white gaming pieces. Animal astragali were often used as dice in ancient times, and the black and white gaming pieces from Castor St Edmund seem to be the oldest recorded evidence from Britain for tafl, an early board game similar to chess that simulated the siege of a castle.

But is the Caistor St Edmund inscription the oldest Proto-English inscription? It has been dated by archaeologists to 425-450, a time when the Anglo-Saxon migrations were still ongoing. But what about all the early runic inscriptions that have survived from Northern Germany and Denmark? Just because people like Hengist and Horsa got on boats and sailed to Britain doesn’t mean they stopped speaking the language they grew up with when they landed and suddenly started speaking English instead.

Proto-English developed out of an earlier language usually called Ingvaeonic or Anglo-Frisian. But for linguists, Proto-English should have first emerged when sound changes exclusively reflected otherwise only in Old English begin to appear in inscriptions. You don’t start speaking a new language the minute you get off a boat, the emergence of a new language occurs when new pronunciations and usages develop that are not found in other, related languages. Yet the Caistor St Edmund inscription is very brief and it does not record any sound changes that are distinctively English. From a linguistic perspective, raïhan is no different from what would be expected of a fifth-century inscription written in a language ancestral to German, Frisian or Dutch.

The Caistor St Edmund inscription could be either Proto-English or Ingvaeonic. Its diphthong ai is older than the monophthong recorded in early Old English raha and the development of ai to (long) a is one of the oldest sound changes that distinguished Proto-English from the other early Germanic languages.

Yet runic inscriptions from Northern Germany or Denmark that evidence sound changes only known otherwise in Old English would be considered linguistically Proto-English. So is there any evidence for this? Could some distinctively English sound changes predate the Anglo-Saxon migrations?

Evidence for Proto-English evolving in Northern Germany before the time of the Anglo-Saxon migrations was first discovered almost a century ago. In 1927, the overseer of the public baths at Brake in Lower Saxony approached the Natural History Museum in Oldenburg with some pieces of bone that he claimed had been found during dredging on the lower course of the River Weser. The bone pieces were decorated with pictures and what appeared to him to be runic inscriptions.

The discovery of the Weser inscriptions was widely reported in Germany. A professor of German at Hamburg studied them and proclaimed them to be linguistically Saxon, written in an ancestor of the Low Saxon dialects spoken in that region of Germany. But by the 1930s doubts had been raised about the Weser inscriptions. By that time, the overseer had presented more inscribed bones to the museum at Oldenburg and they were suspected to be forgeries.

In the 1980s, however, a German criminologist was investigating forgeries of archaeological finds as part of his doctoral studies. He examined the Weser bones, expecting them to preserve clear evidence of forgery. To his surprise, all he could determine was that the Weser inscriptions appeared to be genuine. He dated the bones they are preserved on through amino acid analysis to about the year 400 – just before the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon migrations to Britain.

The most important of the Weser inscriptions appears to have been found at a site near Sandstedt on the Harrier Sand, an island in the River Weser, and it preserves three lines of runic text. The first reads latam : hari, followed on the second line by kunni : and a character much like a letter Y followed by an e-rune; and then on the final line just hagal. What the letter shaped like a Y represents is not immediately obvious – suggestions have included a local variant of a k-rune, a w-rune or a z-rune.

Except for the sequence with the Y-like letter, the words in the Sandstedt inscription are fairly simple to make out: they say ‘(we) let (the) army-kin … hail’. The verb latam ‘(we) let’ can also mean ‘(we) leave’ and the term hagal means ‘hail’ in the meteorological sense, perhaps used as a collective such as ‘hail of spears’ or ‘hail of arrows’. Early runic inscriptions typically do not indicate the distinction (known as definiteness) between ‘a’ and ‘the’ that we do in Modern English. But what does the unclear word read variously as ke, we or ze indicate?

The most obvious analysis of the difficult sequence is we ‘we’. The verb latam is inflected with a first-person plural ending -m and it should have a similar first-person plural subject. The Sandstedt inscription seems best understood to mean ‘leave (the) army-kin (do) we, (a) hail (of spears/arrows)’.

Why the inscription was written on the bone from Sandstedt is not clear. It has been suggested that the bone may have formerly been hung up in a religious sanctuary of some kind, and that the inscription was meant as a warning: that anyone who approached the temple it was found in would be hit by a hail of spears or arrows – or even just by hail of the regular meteorological kind.

The main significance of the Sandstedt inscription for the history of the English language, however, is that Old English is the only one of the Germanic languages that has a pronoun we ‘we’ with an e rather than an i and no final r. The equivalent pronoun in Old High German is wir, in Old Saxon, Old Frisian and Old Dutch it is wi, in Old Norse it is vér, while in Proto-Norse it is wiz and in Gothic it is weis. The Sandstedt inscription appears to record a distinctively Old English linguistic development in its pronoun we.

So when did Proto-English first develop out of its Ingvaeonic ancestor? The Caistor St Edmund inscription indicates that most of the distinctively English sound changes that occurred before the advent of the Old English period developed after the Anglo-Saxon migrations. But the earliest evidence for what seems to be a distinctively English sound change appears to predate the migrations to Britain. The runic inscription from Sandstedt preserves the earliest evidence for a Proto-English sound change and it may accordingly be considered the oldest English inscription.

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In September 2011, a collector purchased a golden pendant from a car-boot sale in Berinsfield, Oxfordshire. The buyer later recalled that the seller told him that the pendant had been discovered by a metal detectorist, but that he knew little else about the find. The pendant is a characteristic artefact of a type known to archaeologists as bracteates (cf. Latin bractea ‘gold leaf, gold foil’), and the decoration of the pendant bought at Berinsfield is typical of bracteates made in the period between the years 475 and 500 in Scandinavia. The decoration even includes a sequence of letters which run about the circular edge, just like a modern coin. The letters don’t make much obvious linguistic sense and some of them appear to only mimic the shapes of Roman characters. This is typical of bracteates from the late fifth century, however, and it is often reasonably clear what the inscriptions were meant to record.

The bracteate bought at Berinsfield is the third early Saxon pendant of this type known from the Upper Thames Valley. In the spring of 1992, a metal detectorist discovered a similar golden pendant at Kingston Bagpuize, and an earlier find discovered at St Giles’ Field in Oxford has been known to antiquarians since the seventeenth century. Three golden bracteates all unearthed in the same area is remarkable in the UK and it indicates a concentration – a concentration of wealth usually associated with kings.

The three pendants are each decorated with profiles of the heads of men with likenesses that are not otherwise recorded, although all three are modelled generally on those depicted on Roman coins, as is typical with the earliest bracteates. Both the Kingston Bagpuize and Berinsfield finds include an inscription, the Kingston Bagpuize text reading C S N A V. The sequence C S N is presumably a shortened form of the name of one the fourth-century emperors who bore the name Constantinus or Constantius, and A V appears to be an abbreviation of augustus ‘emperor’.

The inscription on the Berinsfield bracteate is longer, but its letterforms do not make much sense either at first. They read ? I ? O C N I V ? X O ? V S I ? I I O and seem to reflect an attempt by an illiterate craftsman to copy the inscription of the Roman coin the bracteate was modelled on. The sequence O C N I V ? seems to be an erroneously written form of Con … ius ‘Constantius’ and ? V S I may be a slightly scrambled form of the imperial epithet pius ‘pious’ that is often found in Roman coin legends.

Each of the three bracteates from the Upper Thames Valley is decorated with a bust, as is typical of Roman coins. The head on the find from St Giles’ Field is represented most clearly, the man wearing a diadem and other imperial regalia. Yet what the heads that appear on bracteates represent has long been disputed. Some historians have argued that they are busts of the god Woden, while others, pointing to the variation in the way the busts are represented, argue that they are more likely to be those of local kings. The bracteates from Berinsfield, Kingston Bagpuize and Oxford may preserve images of early kings of Wessex.

Yet who were these early kings? According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first king of Wessex was called Cerdic (pronounced Cherdich), and later medieval tradition records that Cerdic was King Arthur’s opponent at the Battle of Mount Badon. The Battle of Mount Badon is recorded by the British cleric Gildas and in the Welsh annals, so it is clear that it was a historical event, a significant victory won by the Britons. The earliest sources do not indicate which early Anglo-Saxon people the Britons defeated in the battle, but it is generally thought to have been the West Saxons.

In the fourteenth century, Ranulf Higden surmised that the battle of Mount Badon was fought between forces led by King Arthur and Cerdic of Wessex, and that the two must have entered into a treaty after the battle. The Welsh annals record that Arthur’s great victory occurred in 516 and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle attests that Cerdic founded the Kingdom of Wessex in 519. The two kings seem likely to have been contemporaries, but is there any truth to the tradition recorded by Higden?

Like Arthur, Cerdic of Wessex is a controversial figure, some historians doubting whether he even existed. But most of the sceptical assessments of Cerdic rely on approaches to historical records that are quite eccentric, and when new evidence is discovered, the sceptics are usually shown to be wrong.

Cerdic is first mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in an entry for 495 that records him apparently arriving on the shores of the Solent in Hampshire:

Her cuomon twegen aldormen on Bretene, Cerdic ⁊ Cynric his sunu, mid .v. scipum in þone stede þe is gecueden Cerdicesora ⁊ þy ilcan dæge gefuhtun wiþ Walum.

In this year two chieftains, Cerdic and his son Cynric, came to Britain with five ships, (arriving) at the place which is called Cerdicesora, and they fought against the Britons on the same day.

But can this record be trusted? All sorts of doubts have arisen concerning the early entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, including those that mention Cerdic. The description of Cerdic landing at Cerdicesora (‘Cerdic’s shore’) seems to be stereotypical – the early Anglo-Saxon kings are all described arriving in similar manners. But that does not mean that the early kings whose names are recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle never existed. The linguistic, historical and archaeological evidence seems to indicate that Cerdic was a historical king who lived during the late fifth and early sixth century – at the same time as the bracteates from the Upper Thames Valley were manufactured.

It has long been considered likely that the early kingdom of Wessex was ruled from Dorchester on Thames. In the late nineteenth century, several early Saxon burials dating from the fifth century were discovered nearby at Dyke Hills, and the first bishopric in Wessex appears to have been founded in the seventh century at Dorchester. The West Saxon capital moved later to Winchester, but Cerdic’s kingdom is most likely to have been centred on the Upper Thames Valley.

It is usually accepted that Cerdic was a historical king because of the linguistic derivation of his name. Since the 1920s, it has been generally acknowledged that Cerdic has an etymologically Celtic name, cognate with the ancient British form Caraticus recorded for another man on a Roman pot from Richborough in Kent. Cerdic’s name has undergone linguistically Celtic development that seems to have occurred during the fifth century (Caraticus first developing to Caradic) and the loss of the second syllable (Caradic then becoming Cerdic) indicates that his name was borrowed into English before the seventh century.

So Cerdic’s name checks out as a genuine fifth- or sixth-century linguistic form. He seems to have been a British figure (wholly or partly) who joined up with a warband of Saxons and was later treated as if he was an Englishman himself.

Cerdic is also recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle winning battles at places called Cerdicesford ‘Cerdic’s ford’ and Cerdicesleaga ‘Cerdic’s field’. These Old English place-names are reflected in those of the contemporary villages of North and South Charford in Hampshire and the name Chardele recorded as the birthplace of a servant who is recorded as the victim of an assault in 1338 at Fordingbridge, also in Hampshire. The account regarding Cerdic in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle features several names of places apparently called after him that later evidence demonstrates did actually exist. It may reflect Cerdic’s conquest of Hampshire, striking out south from Dorchester rather than arriving by ship.

The story of the founding of Wessex recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is also preserved in a slightly different form in a document known as the West Saxon royal genealogy. This document records Cerdic coming to Hampshire by ship in much the same manner, but it also records how long Cerdic and all the kings who descended from him reigned. Rather than the entry for 495 representing a contemporary record, it seems very likely that the date given for Cerdic’s arrival in Hampshire was calculated during the ninth century by the compilers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle employing the list of the reigns of the kings of the House of Wessex preserved in the West Saxon genealogy. But were their calculations reliable?

The reign lengths given in the West Saxon genealogy vary somewhat in the various versions of the text that have survived. Yet the uncertainty regarding the lengths of the reigns can be resolved statistically. Ancient Greek historians calculated that kings tended to reign on average for 27 years and used this number to estimate the length of reigns of kings when not enough historical records had survived to be certain how long they had lived. The same numbers (or slightly higher) are usually accepted to be applicable to the reigns of early medieval kings, and when all the reign lengths of the early members of the House of Wessex are added up and averaged, it seems very likely that the year recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the arrival of Cerdic and the foundation of his kingdom are broadly accurate.

Arthur and Cerdic were probably contemporaries, but the evidence that links the two early kings goes further than that. The Battle of Mount Badon has long been connected with one of the sites called Baddanburg in Old English and one of those sites, Badbury Hill, lies only ten miles west of Kingston Bagpuize. The hillfort at Badbury Hill has never been excavated, but it makes the Battle of Mount Badon seem very likely to have involved the early West Saxons.

It is not too difficult to think of reasons why forces led by Arthur and Cerdic may have clashed at Badbury Hill. Not enough evidence has survived, however, to clearly connect Badbury Hill with the location of Arthur’s most famous battle. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not even mention the battle, although the early clashes it does name are usually Saxon victories, so the omission from the chronicle of a reference to the great English loss to the Britons at Mount Badon should not be surprising.

Yet it is clear that the famous British victory occurred at a time that saw West Saxon expansion halted for over 30 years. No battles with the Britons are recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle after Cerdic’s reign ended until the year 553. This period seems to correlate with the extended period of relative peace mentioned by Gildas as occurring after the Battle of Mount Badon, the ‘peace of Arthur’ as the historian John Morris characterised it. The archaeological and linguistic evidence all seems to confirm that Cerdic truly was the first recorded king of the West Saxons, and his face may even be recorded on one of the bracteates from the Upper Thames Valley. Higden may well have been correct to see Cerdic as the main opponent of Arthur at the time of the famous British triumph at the Battle of Mount Badon.

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Since the 1960s it has become increasingly common to see the historical reality of Hengist and Horsa questioned by English historians. Several early sources record that the two brothers led the first Anglo-Saxon migrant…

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In the early nineteenth century, the German linguist Jacob Grimm set out for the first time the formal historical relationship between German, English, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. He analysed the earliest records of each language and compared them to the language of the ancie…

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