The Mystery Of The Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon Helmet | King Arthur's Britain | Timeline

The conventional story about the making of England describes how the Britons sunk into a state of lethargy after the departure of the Roman troops. They were only revived by a massive infusion of Anglo-Saxon blood from the other side of the North Sea. These robust tribesmen arrived in boats along the eastern shores of Britain. It was a brave new world in which dark forests are felled and England is born. The trouble is, there is no archaeological evidence for the Anglo-Saxon invasion. The traditional story of the making of England is completely wrong. The real story will reshape our future and rewrite our past. As an island people, we Brits have been obsessed with the idea of invasion. And the story of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons has long been accepted as a part of our history. I'm going to show you that the myth of the Anglo-Saxon invasion is just a tale. Leading-edge archaeology is beginning to re-examine the dramatic changes that took place in this country in the centuries after the Roman troops departed. And a very different story to the one which we have become accustomed is emerging. Just before World War II, archaeologists in Suffolk uncovered one of the greatest discoveries of our time, the Anglo-Saxon burial mounds at Sutton Hoo. Helen Geek explains. Mrs Pretty decided to investigate the burial mounds that were on her property. She rang up Ipswich Museum and asked for advice on a freelance archaeologist. It seems like another world where a landowner can simply employ an archaeologist to open their burial mounds. But that's what happened. In mound one over there, he discovered an intact ship and a burial chamber. When news of this got out, archaeologists from Cambridge University and the British Museum came in to help and the most fabulous, extraordinary archaeological treasure was discovered there. Excavations revealed the burial chamber of a person in a wooden ship. He was accompanied by a wealth of fabulous objects. This was the grave of a very rich man. Helmets are incredibly rare. Special headgear seems to be appropriate for a king, as it still is today. He's got other things like this strange wet stone that's made into a sceptre. It's got polish in the middle where your hand could have held it and a little cup which could sit on your knee so you can hold your sceptre like a modern king. Some people see a very strong Swedish influence. Some people see a very strong classical Byzantine influence. Other people say that he's got a bit of everything. He's trying out a lot of different methods of making us see that he's an important ruler of the East Angles. By the 7th century, parts of Britain had become a series of politically powerful kingdoms, later to be known as England. Do you suppose a boatload of Anglo-Saxon royal family came sailing up the Deben and thought, whoopee, this is the place for me, got off the boat and set up their kingdom here? The origin myths that we have, recorded by people like Bede, do seem to indicate that in the 5th century, boatloads of royalty did row up and think, well, I will create my kingdom here. But we just don't have any archaeological evidence to back that up at all. What seems much more likely is that by some process of internal social development, kings arose at some point in the late 6th century and then decided to kind of create this origin myth to explain where they'd come from. Probably they'd just murdered and fought their way to the top, but they wanted to say that they'd always been royal. In fact, they're descended from the gods, you know. Sutton Hoo is the most elaborate of a number of rich Anglo-Saxon burials over the south and east of Britain. Archaeologists are divided about where these powerful new leaders came from. Heinrich Harker favours the idea they were invaders. Until Sutton Hoo was found, Tablo was the richest Anglo-Saxon grave in England. These big Anglo-Saxon burials of the 7th century were very often located on the tops of ridges. Taking up a dominant position in the landscape demonstrates who you are, who your family was. Heinrich Harker believes an invasion is the best way of explaining the changes in culture that took place after the Romans left. Why do we have to have migrations? It's very difficult to prove that people came here in large numbers from abroad. Francis, I believe you can demonstrate that this is still, given the evidence, the best possible explanation. Your argument is we do not need migrations to explain culture change. This is essentially the underlying argument. I agree with that. And actually, if at the moment you look to Russia, post-Soviet Russia, you see a huge culture change, but it is not brought in by immigrant Westerners. It is marketed there. Of course, you can say there is no proof that they came here, and I accept that. We cannot trace them across the North Sea. But it is still the best explanation. Heinrich, I'd love to agree with you, only I can't see any outsiders would have come here without there being one hell of a fight. And there is no evidence for a struggle. If people move onto my land, I'm not happy about that. If you're there, you are not. Right. So you think that people would actually have moved out? Because there isn't much evidence for that. After the collapse of a civilization, you do have population decline. If there is population decline, there was also space, more space in the landscape than there was in the Roman system. I don't believe that there was a hole in British society. If anything, you know, the taxes were removed. I would have thought people said, whoopee, it's Christmas, I don't have to pay taxes, I'm much better off. And so when the Romans left, people actually probably got more prosperous. Very much a farmer's view. I would have thought. I like that. Farmer's view or not, the invasion explanation just isn't enough. Whenever archaeologists can't explain a period of social change or innovation, they reach for the catch-all explanation. New people, invasion. But there isn't actually any evidence to support this story. We just can't prove it. Science, however, is trying to. At University College London, Professor of Genetics Mark Thomas and his team have conducted a survey of the DNA in the British Isles. The male genetic marker is known as a Y-chromosome. A father passes a largely unchanged copy of his own Y-chromosome to his son. It is a very good way of tracing ancestry through history. By comparing Y-chromosome information from different populations, Mark has tried to establish how closely the populations are related. He discovered that there was an unusually high similarity between DNA from Britain and parts of Holland. Within England, all the towns look very similar but different to the Welsh towns. And the second, the more remarkable feature, was the incredible similarity between the English towns, genetically, and the Frisians. In fact, we couldn't statistically tell any difference between them. This suggests the native British Y-chromosome has, at some point in history, been mixed with that of people from northern Europe. Complex statistics were used to work out when this genetic mix might have happened. We conclude we would need the mass migration in the last 2,500 years that was 100% replacement, or if it was less, it would have to have been more recently. And if we assume that that mass migration was the Anglo-Saxon mass migration, then we estimate that that replacement must have been between 50% and 100%. The sheer completeness of this population change really does conflict with the archaeological evidence. Three million people shoved out. Well, they don't show that. Now, we can't say anything about the exact... about what the process was. As I said, that could be pushing or it could be slaughtering, or it could be something much more benign, like just economic differences between the different populations and, over time, a gradual replacement. We can't really say how it happened. But another team of geneticists in the same department as Mark have conducted a similar survey and come up with very different results. They conclude that the native British Y-chromosome has not been largely replaced in southern and eastern England. Furthermore, they stated that it's not possible to distinguish between the genetic influence of the Anglo-Saxons and that of the Vikings, who definitely did invade Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries. I just don't think that we should rely on these genetic versions of history on their own, especially when two similar studies produce such different results. I'm also pretty suspicious of simple explanations in complex times. The dramatic changes that took place in the 5th and 6th centuries laid the foundations for the modern identity of this country. I'm going to show these changes were not the result of mass invasions. And in revising this powerful origin myth, I will discover who we, the English, really are. On the south coast of Hampshire, at the entrance to a natural harbour, is one of the best-preserved Roman buildings in Britain. This is Portchester Castle. It's one of a series of coastal forts built by the Romans in the 3rd and 4th centuries. They're known as Saxon shore forts because it's still widely accepted that they were constructed to keep out marauding Anglo-Saxon bands from the other side of a channel. But in actual fact, they may have been used for a very different purpose. In total, 11 shore forts skirt the southern and eastern coast. From Portchester in the south, around the coast, these shore forts have been taken as an imposing reminder of the Anglo-Saxon thread, all the way up to Brancaster in Norfolk. One of the most easterly of these forts, Burr Castle, still commands the landscape. All of this, all of the green fields over there... ..would have been what was termed the Great Estuary, a combination of open water and marsh and intertidal creeks, that kind of thing, probably until the 10th, 12th century. Andrew Pearson has been re-examining the forts and has come to the surprising conclusion that they may have nothing to do with Anglo-Saxons. I think the traditional view of these sites is that they are a defence against pirate raiders from across the channel, from Saxony, from Frisia, from Jutland, basically from the peoples who are, in later periods, going to colonise Britain. The name Saxon shore fort actually comes from a Roman military list which was translated in the 16th century by the famous antiquarian William Camden. What the term Saxon refers to is unclear. What Camden said pretty much went as archaeological fact for many centuries to come, really. I think also what he hit on was a very evocative idea. It's very dramatic. It's also very simple that these forts are put up as a defence against the Saxons. The count is called the Count of the Saxon Shore. Now, whether that means it is the shore being attacked by the Saxons or settled by the Saxons, really, we just don't know. Andrew has found that the huge walls are actually better suited to protecting goods kept inside the forts rather than attacking enemies from outside. Well, I think these sites are doing much more than defending the coastline. If the Saxons came raiding, it wouldn't have been monthly, it may not have even been every year or every ten years. So, in terms of what these forts do, I think it's much more likely that they have a major economic role or perhaps a supply role rather than this kind of defensive function that's ascribed to them normally. So, what you seem to be suggesting, then, is that these forts could have been used actually to help trade from out of Britain rather than stop people coming in. Yes, I think rather than trying to block access to the interior, as is perhaps traditionally thought, in fact, these are quite the opposite insofar as materials and goods are coming here and then being shipped outwards and beyond into the empire as a whole. Andrew has found no archaeological evidence that these forts were built to defend against an Anglo-Saxon invasion. So, what is the evidence for invasion? The Yorkshire Wolves are the last of a series of chalk downlands which spread east across Britain. And it's here that Anglo-Saxon invaders are supposed to have settled 1,500 years ago. In these fields, one of the most extraordinary archaeological investigations is being carried out. 30 years ago, archaeologist Dominic Powslett was asked to excavate some 5th-century burials that had turned up in a quarry site near the village of West Hesleton. Dominic has conducted one of the largest archaeological surveys in the world here, scrutinising every inch of a landscape for traces of its ancient past. Such a comprehensive survey should confirm the conventional view of the 5th and 6th centuries as a time when invaders took over. Except it didn't. This is a tremendous settlement that may be as early as the Bronze Age. Dominic discovered the remains of miles of farms and villages. The settlement began life 4,000 years ago and continued through to the 8th century, spanning the crucial Anglo-Saxon invasion period. Dominic calls this discovery the Ladder Settlement. We've got the ladder running straight through, following the edge of the field where we've been digging. Yeah. It runs straight through here. So those crop marks there, that's the trackway down the spine of the settlement. It basically comprised a series of farmsteads or even small villages following the trackway, hugging the very edge of the wetland. We've traced the settlement for 15km. We've surveyed in detail about 7.5 to 8km. I'm sure it goes all the way to the coast. This is a new kind of archaeology, dedicated to understanding the long-term life and meaning of an entire landscape. I've had a team out there walking from dawn till dusk for three years and the results are absolutely staggering. It's a long walk. I have walked, personally, further than from Land's End to John O'Groats. I mean, that's just in these little fields up and down here. This is a fluxgate gradiometer which measures minute variations in magnetic signal under the soil. Imagine this field was untouched by human hand and someone comes along and digs a ditch across it. And then that ditch fills in with various forms of material. Stubble getting into the ditch. Then it all gets filled in again and it looks like this. You can't see the ditch. When we come along, we walk over it and we read the signal. So we'll get zero all around it. Then suddenly it'll go up. One, two, three, four. Two, three, one, zero, zero, zero. And we just walk backwards and forwards across that and build up this picture as we go. The gradiometer picks up soil disturbances which were made hundreds, even thousands of years ago. How much more have you got to do, do you reckon? Too much. We're over halfway there. Having said that, where's the end? Printed out, this is what the geophysics looks like. That must be the biggest geophysical survey in the country. I believe it's now the biggest in the world. Good grief. This massive evidence, Dominic, surely tells us a different story about population in the area, doesn't it? Yeah, it must mean we've got a high population. The idea that hardly anybody living here is completely unsustainable. We end up with the same sort of density of settlement as we would have had 100 years ago. Once the surveys are done, Dominic and his team go to work. 4,000 years of history lie beneath the soil, just waiting to be uncovered. We're just coming out of the foot of the world. It runs, in fact, quite steeply down to the wetland and the main area of occupation throughout later prehistory. The geology of this part of the country is unique. A thick layer of windblown sand protects ancient remains, which in other areas of Britain the modern plough has destroyed. Dominic and his team were about to start digging an archaeological gold mine. Now, the first time we looked at the ladder settlement, we opened a 15-metre area, and there were 35,000 finds. This is a bit sort of like an archaeological gold dust because we have archaeology we can't see, but we know it's well-preserved. And that is very rare. In Britain, there are probably a few square kilometres of archaeology that's that well-preserved in the countryside. Dominic's excavations uncovered what the ghostly patterns of a geophysics survey had hinted at, the actual remains of houses, trackways and settlements which spanned 3,000 years of ancient history. This is the field we're working in at the moment, and the ladder settlement comes through here. We can magically put layers and layers of the past on the top of this air photography. There is the line of the ladder settlement going right the way through the field there. So what can the ladder settlement tell us about the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons? The archaeological remains of invasion are usually clear enough to spot. The Roman army in the 1st century and the Viking invaders of the 8th century both left their archaeological mark in the shape of war cemeteries and deliberately destroyed houses and religious sites. But Dominic could find no such evidence. What he did find was a village and a cemetery full of people who looked like Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxon cemetery was located here underneath the main road. We've got the cemetery. So we set off in search of the settlement and we found the whole of the Anglo-Saxon village, 49 acres. The shadow of the balloon is now entering the site of the early Anglo-Saxon village, which extended right up into the foot of the hills. Absolutely huge, much bigger than the present village. Dominic's meticulous surveys would have been able to pick up the massive disruption that an invasion causes on a landscape. But all he could find was evidence of peaceful and continuous settlement. Anglo-Saxon people there, Roman people there, Iron Age people, Bronze Age people, and, of course, move into the field next door and things go absolutely crazy. We can't argue that this is a farm. This has got to be sort of a small village. Oh, yeah. And, of course, just to the south of it, all these little blimps here, this is another cemetery. Well, it's sort of a little lost for words. I mean, you have got a long-term settlement, you've got the cemetery here, you've got a complete way of life, and it's vanished. It's flat, dusty, sandy, and it looks like there's nothing here. And it goes on for kilometre after kilometre. I think that's fantastic. Dominic discovered that the site had been occupied from pre-history until the middle of the eighth century. Neolithic cemeteries, Bronze Age barrows. Roman settlements, Anglo-Saxon villages were all part of this continuously occupied landscape. There were no gaps of occupation, no war cemeteries. There were no dramatic changes in the layout of the villages. In short, there was no invasion. What there was, however, was a change in fashion. Clothing, pottery, weapons and burial practices underwent a dramatic change in the centuries after the Roman government collapsed. These new fashions are very similar to styles found on the continent. And this change in fashion did not just happen at West Heslet. For decades, these burials have been taken as the key piece of evidence that a new set of people had taken over. But what were invading Anglo-Saxons doing in Dominic's peaceful landscape? Could it be that they weren't actually invading? There'll be one here in this field somewhere. Dominic gave some of the skeletons from his Anglo-Saxon cemetery to Paul Buck at Durham University. Paul has pioneered a new form of biological research called stable isotope analysis. What we're really interested in, actually, is the teeth, and particularly the tooth enamel, because tooth enamel is formed in childhood and, unlike any other tissue in the body, it's not remodelled during life. It's giving you a little window, a little microcosm of what was happening in your diet, what you were eating, at the time of your childhood when the tooth was formed. Paul has discovered that tooth enamel has within it materials specific to the person's location of birth. One of these materials contains oxygen isotopes. Your main source of oxygen is the oxygen that you consume as water. Because you're eating local foods, this signal will find its way into your bones and into your teeth. By measuring the oxygen isotopes in a person's tooth enamel, Paul is able to tell what climate and in what part of the world they were born. This is a technique which offers the opportunity of identifying first-generation immigrants, specifically, because you can look at people... You are going to see people who grew up somewhere different. Paul successfully analysed 24 of the bodies from Dominic's cemetery and a few of these were indeed foreigners, but the other results were surprising. The things that we expected that we might see would be some continental immigrants that were hesitant. And, in fact, we did see four individuals from the site who have drinking water which you can't really find in the UK. So were these rich, swaggering, warrior-type people? No, the interesting thing about those four is that they're all females. They're very poorly furnished graves. And, in fact, they're the only four females that essentially don't have any dress fittings at all. Household servants or something like that? Well, it certainly seems to be the lowest status of people, yeah. The most likely candidate is going to be Scandinavian, Norwegian coast up here, or possibly Sweden over here. What about the remainder of the population? Presumably they were all Yorkshiremen, were they? Well, you would think so. But the surprises didn't stop there. We did indeed find that about roughly sort of half the sample did look like they were sort of local to the West Heserton. And then we had another half of the population who are associated with the western side of the country. Early East Yorkshire seems to be occupied by a large proportion of Cumbrians, as far as I can tell. You've got a big immigrant component to the West Heserton population, but not coming from the east, coming from the west. So the foreign bodies in the cemetery weren't continental warriors, but visitors or economic migrants. The results did not surprise Dominic at all. There's a small number of newcomers. There are a small number of continental Saxons, Jutes, Prussians and so on and so forth in different parts of the country. But the majority of the population are exactly the same. It's a continuously evolving and cared-for landscape. We see Roman sites with Anglo-Saxon components. We see Roman activity underneath the Anglo-Saxon settlement. There is no gap between the two. If there were, then we would have had a huge wodge of nice red ochre, red sand sitting between the two. And it doesn't happen. Historians tell us that the Anglo-Saxon invaders came to a society which had been severely weakened by the collapse of Roman rule. But Dominic's vast excavation had found no such evidence. People are coming to appreciate that the picture that we've thought was genuine for so long is seriously flawed. And our population, we can prove, includes one or two people that come from Scandinavia. But this isn't an invasion. There is always resistance to change. Once people are happy with an established understanding, they do not want to change it. It is actually much more exciting to find that it's all wrong. The people of the 5th century cemetery at West Heslerton looked like newcomers from the continent, and yet most of them were born in Britain. If this change wasn't the result of invasion, what was going on? There were profound cultural changes in the 5th century. And perhaps the most significant was language. There is no doubt that spoken language changed from native British, sometimes called Celtic, to English, which was a descendant of German. Surely this, if anything, has to be proof of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Modern linguistics, however, are beginning to question this assumption. Katie Lowe has been looking at the traces of native British grammar in modern English. It's come down to us that we simply know as a fact that the Celtic languages just didn't really affect modern English. And I think that's basically stopped people looking. They just thought, well, there simply can't be any influence at all. But linguists have discovered a hidden code in our language structure which shows a strong influence from the Britons. If you're a Celt and you're trying to learn Old English, just like any second language acquisition, you're going to make mistakes. I mean, if you go to France today, you're bound to make mistakes, mistakes which really show structure from your own language. So, for example, you might make mistakes in syntax, you might make mistakes in vocabulary. Of course, your accent will be very strange as well. And it's thought that perhaps some of the Celtic structure of the language affected English. In the process of learning English, the native Britons retained the structure of their own languages and these ancient patterns are still visible in the grammatical structure of modern English. Old English was really rather like German in structure and the way you constructed a sentence was based largely on endings that indicated what a word was doing within a sentence. Nowadays, word order is all-important. If I say, the cat chased the man, it does not mean the same as the other way round. In German, word endings and not word order would have told us who was chasing who. So why did the English language undergo this strange mutation? We've moved, we've shifted to a different kind of word order within the sentence. Where's that come from? It doesn't seem to have happened quite so much within any of the other Germanic languages. Recent research has shown that the Celtic languages had a part to play in this. There has to be contact. There has to be contact over generations. There's no other way of doing it. The rise of English in these islands came not from a tidal wave of invaders but from a prolonged period of contact during which the native Britons chose to adopt a new way of speaking. But why did this happen? Archaeologist Sam Lucey has been examining graves from the period to understand why this dramatic cultural change took place. So this would be similar to some of the graves they found at West Heslington? Yeah, very similar. Up by his head, you've got the metal tip of a spear and the wooden shaft has rotted away. You've got down over his hip the metal centre of a bigger wooden and leather shield. Just as the language of the native Britons changed in this period, so too did their style of clothes and weapons. At the end of the Roman period, a lot of objects that you find changed. Why was that? I mean, it's traditionally been attributed to Anglo-Saxon migrations or Anglo-Saxon invasions. You do certainly start to get different burial rites. Women tend to get buried with a much greater variety of dress furnishings. This is a brooch type that's known as a cruciform brooch, a cross-shaped brooch, and this brooch isn't a continental import. Its idea came ultimately from the continent, but it is a British product. The people living in Britain are perhaps aligning themselves more to a continental style and continental ideas, so I think it's that sort of process that's going on rather than population replacement, which is what the traditional idea of Anglo-Saxon migrations involves. The mistake has been to take cultural artefacts as evidence of racial origin. If I were wearing American jeans, that doesn't make me an American. If I'm driving a German car, that doesn't make me German. It doesn't work like that. There can be no doubt that a trickle of warriors and families on the move were coming into Britain from the countries of northern Europe in this period, but the traditional picture of invasion and population replacement is unsustainable. The people of Britain learnt a new language, adopted new fashions and shifted their political allegiances because they knew from experience that this was the best way to keep up with the rapidly changing times. It was only in later centuries that the complex details of this process were transformed into a captivating story. History books can be dangerous things, especially when they're brilliantly written. In 731, a Tyneside monk named the Venerable Bede finished his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which still forms the basis of modern history lessons. But Bede, like all historians, had his own particular axe to grind. According to Bede, the origins of the church in England lie in 6th-century Rome, where Pope Gregory the Great spotted some beautiful fair-haired slaves for sale. Upon being told that they were Angles from the pagan island of Britain, he famously replied that to him they looked more like angels. According to Bede, Gregory immediately makes arrangements for St Augustine to sail to Britain and convert these heathen creatures to Christianity. To make Augustine's mission more significant than it actually was, Bede portrays Britain as a country populated by heathen unbelievers. He calls these pagans the Anglo-Saxons and describes their conversion as a glorious achievement. In creating this story, Bede gives the church a fresh start in Britain. The newly converted Anglo-Saxon English are depicted as proper Christians, unconnected to the murky Celtic Christianity of the native Britons. Bede is writing this story 200, 300 years after it happened, so he's trying to present it as a coherent process. Therefore, it's in his interest to make things tidier and more organised, perhaps, than they really were. In fact, Christianity is big by the late Roman period. Augustine arrives in the end of the 6th century. He's already stepping into a country that knew all about Christianity. And when Augustine arrives, by invitation, he finds an island where there are already Christians and bishops and organised church life exists in parts of the island. So there are different streams of Christianity. The conventional wisdom would have it that the Anglo-Saxons brought with them paganism from abroad and that Christianity wasn't introduced to England until 597 when St Augustine arrived in Canterbury. What do you say to that? I don't believe a word of it. The British church survived intact and it was flourishing. The missionaries thought they were coming to Barbary and Ruritania. And when they got here, here was a church with its own traditions intact from antiquity. Men who knew how to operate ten different computational cycles for the reckoning of Easter, they could write classier prose and verse than the Roman missionaries were capable of. So the Roman missionaries found intact a church completely self-possessed. They were so dumbfounded by this that they just blanked it out. They pretended that it had never existed. They pretended that it didn't exist. In order to gloss over the messy origins of English Christianity, Bede invented a new race of people, the Anglo-Saxons, who came to be known as the English. Bede has an agenda to present the Anglo-Saxons as a coherent body of people and their predestined to inherit southern Britain. Rather like the children of Israel inherit the Holy Land, and they inherit it from the British, according to Bede, because the British are unfit to live here. So the English are a chosen people. Bede's influence is all the more extraordinary when you realise that he never ventured out of the monastery in Tyneside where he was brought up. We know that Bede had particular reasons for writing his history. One of them was really to create a sense of the English. In doing so, he gave us an origin myth. Do you think that Bede did invent England? He certainly invented the notion of an English people. What you have to realise is that England doesn't exist before perhaps the 9th, 10th century. It's only later on that you can actually call it a single political nation, if you like. Before this point, you're looking at much smaller, territorially-based groupings, largely. And so Bede, in writing that ecclesiastical history, is creating that sense of the English, or starting to create that sense. In telling the story of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, Bede laid the groundwork for an English identity. But I don't believe this version represents who we are as a nation. My journey into the story of Britain AD has uncovered a very different picture of the people of this island. So who are we really? Whether we hark back to Arthur or the Anglo-Saxons, we Brits have always used history to create a national identity for ourselves. The trouble is, these are identities based on a wholly imagined past, so we end up not knowing who we really are. Go to the heart of our democracy and you see what I mean. When the Victorians decided to decorate the robing room here in the House of Lords, they chose to use the figure of King Arthur. The Victorians had revived the Anglo-Saxon invasion myth with vigour. The invasion identified the noble English as descending from pure Teutonic stock, as distinct from the irrational, undisciplined Celts. In the paintings, King Arthur, a native British warrior from our Dark Age past, had to be made to fit the Anglo-Saxon virtues of the Victorian age. The result was a ludicrous conflation of two very separate aspects of our national identity. British identity just wasn't that simple. In the 19th century, at the same time that Anglo-Saxon archaeologists, Anglo-Saxon historians are writing the history of the English, you get, if you want to call them that, Celtic historians doing the same for the Welsh and the Irish and the Scottish. And it's actually in direct opposition to each other. They don't happen in a vacuum. They're done in direct consequence of each other. You see very deliberate manipulation of historical sources and archaeology to try to create a sense of history. The early centuries of Britain AD were formative years in the making of this country's identity. It is not just the British who are being exercised by their early medieval past. It is the Germans, it is the French. It is right across Europe. If we are now looking to find our roots, who are we? What is our identity? We almost invariably end up in the early Middle Ages, in the immediate post-Roman period, which removed a common culture and created little groups of smaller groups, smaller units, to which we can look and say, this is where I'm coming from. And perhaps you will agree, in my view, what the past is all about is identity. Our ancestors were not brave Anglo-Saxon supermen nor mysterious Celtic warriors like Arthur. These origin myths, tying us to one pure race or another, do not do justice to our culture. We were not a weak and disorganised society overpowered by the Romans, nor did we dissolve into chaos when they left. We did not suffer a period of Dark Age confusion and we never needed to be saved by the tribesmen of Anglo-Saxon legend. The real people of Britain AD did not only survive an influx of foreign influences, but actually flourished because of them. We absorbed Roman and later Byzantine and North European culture without losing a sense of our own identity. It is this ability to absorb and adapt, this creative plagiarism, which has always been at the heart of British identity. And this diversity is not just a feature of our distant past. It's a trait that can still be seen in every aspect of our life, even our food. Robin Cook, former British Foreign Secretary, famously selected chicken tikka masala as Britain's national dish. I believe that our national identity itself is the result of a blending of an enormous number of different inputs over the centuries. Different ethnic groups who have come here and settled here have become not so much absorbed but have made their contribution become part of the resultant mix, what we now recognise as our own national identity. I think, actually, what makes Britain great, what makes us strong, is not purity, it is diversity. It's all those many different influences that have shaped our language, shaped our history, shaped our culture and shaped our character. We Britons are striding into the 21st century with all the confidence of our Victorian ancestors. But in planning the way ahead, we must keep an eye on the past, because if we discard our sense of history, we'll be like people with no memory who don't know who they are. So to find the true origins of Britain AD, I've had to look beyond the headline-grabbing figures, the Romans, King Arthur and the Anglo-Saxons, and instead I've turned to the real heroes of these lands, the ordinary Britons in their millions who invented our diverse and resilient culture. One final thought. This could be Indian or China tea, and it says on the packet it was grown in Kenya. Yet despite, or maybe because of these obvious foreign origins, this is still the best-known symbol of Britain.