Anyone here interested in Early Dark Ages Britain?

Yeah fairly. I'm an Archaeology student at Edinburgh, and I've taken courses in Medieval Scottish History and the history of Christianity.

>For some reason it's overshadowed in British education.

Because we know fuck all about it.

Yeah i've hit the same problem. Its like that period you mentioned is left blank on purpose

Did someone similar to King Arthur really exist? I mean not in the fairy tail sense, but some king/lord that did similar stuff so that his story got decorated more and more until it became the story of Arthur.

Isn't the new theroy that english born roman commander artious (not sure the correct spelling) is the best fit

That's my Jam!

Like I said, because we know fuck all about it.

Was there a Briton lord who fought against the Saxons? Yes absolutely. Could he have become a figure in folklore, and had various other older myths associated with him? Quite probably. Was he called Arthur? Possibly.

I believe he existed, but what's odd is that the decoration comes LATER. The earliest references are pretty limited: Arthur is a general, in service to kings, who manages to rout the Saxons in a series of battles.

It's only a couple centuries after that that you start seeing Arthur as a King at all, and everything there, the story is made up out of whole cloth rather then simply embelished.

Yes.

Civilization collapsed. Cities were abandoned for centuries, trade and production diminished, raiding became endemic, it wasn't just a case of an invader razing a few cities only to set themselves up as the new leaders and rebuild everything, it was an apocalypse.

The few literate people with leisure time would read about Romans in the bible, visit the ruins, maybe travel to Constantinople and wonder what the fuck happened. It left a lasting impression. 1000 years later when Europe finally became relevant again they started to feverishly imitate the Romans, they did not feel like they had accomplished anything, only crawled their way back to civility.

Wasn't a roman mosaic found in
Spain with the latin name arthur?
Is arthur even a name or a perhaps a title

Saxon art in britain seemed to be taking on it's own identity

Artorius doesn't fit.

The best fit is a Northern British King.

To be fair, roman buildings and latin were still in use for a while up to the 600's.

Definitely a name, hundreds of Celts have had it through history. It means "Bear Man" and comes from Proto-Celtic "Artoswiros".

riothamus is a compelling candidate, pic related In many places, but early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were pagan and performed human sacrifice, christianity had to be reintroduced and it wasn't until King Alfred that they moved into Londinium's city walls. The 6th century was crazy.

I find the Celtic -> Anglo-Saxon transition so interesting. Do we have any sources besides Bede?

We know enough, we know the Saxons started to invade once Rome left, we know the Britons managed to repel them long enough, the Arthur legend springs up based on whoever held the Brits together, we know that the Brits ended up inviting Saxons to fight Picts but the Saxons just turned on the Brits anyway, we know that they overcame the Britons very fast culturally and genetically with perhaps 300,000 Anglos Saxons and Jutes migrating over once the defences were down.

There's 0 evidence they performed human sacrifice.

Also, Christianity in Britain was a failure to begin with. Only the Irish bought into it, and two british kingdoms, a couple of picts.

Archeology helps. There were already Saxons as of the 390's, who had been hired by Romans as laeti, or mercenaries, alongside the shores. Some of them settled down, like the Gewisse and what would later become the Westseaxe/Wessex. Possibly the Bernicians too.

Then, later on, a King called Vortigern invited two Jutish warlords, Hengest and Horsa over, and shit went very wrong. Bubonic plague, terrible weather and famines meant they couldn't farm anymore, had no more money or lands. So the Saxons took it by force, which led to war.

There weren't even 300,000 people in Northern Europe.

The Population of Britain was at most 50,000 before the Saxons came. 100,000 Saxons arrived OVER THE COURSE OF FIVE HUNDRED YEARS. The initial "onslaught" was about a hundred people.

Hell, the population of Britain still was only barely 100,000 by the Early Middle Ages.

Of course there was.

A farm was excavated, in 500 the family was Celtic, and it gradually got more and more saxonised. First the daughters of the family started wearing some Saxon-like jewellery, then the next generation started wearing Saxon clothes and were buried with a Seax and other Saxon weapons, and finally by 600 they were indistinguishable.

DNA shows the family was entirely Celtic. The Burial itself started changing to represent the Saxon-style burial (decapitate the corpse, with the head facing to the east, bury with posessions) rather than the Celtic style (bury with no posessions, only a horse if you owned one).

Okay. That paragraph tells just about everything we know about England and Wales in the Dark Ages. Scotland, particularly, is still a question waiting to be answered for the most part, despite some fairly inspired scholarship in the field since the 80s. That said, that scholarship is only just starting to be taught in universities, and frankly is highly complex even at an undergraduate level, let alone for school children.

I don't have the faintest clue about Ireland at that time.

Everything you said is factually incorrect and totally outlandish. Populations got low but no fucking way it was 50,000.

That paragraph was almost completely incomplete or wrong.

how the fuck is this awful history still circulating?

the "english are genetically anglo" meme died fucking years ago.

The anglo saxons were a culturally influential ruling class, and little more.

My nigga the Domesday book records 2 million English in 1086 alone.

Yes it was.

The entire northern army by 600 AD was about 1000 people. That's every able bodied man and woman in five different kingdoms spanning just south of Hadrian's Wall to the Forth of Firth.

I don't have the faintest clue about England and Wales in that period either.

I... didn't say anything about genetics? Are you mad?

300 years after the early middle ages. Not... not strictly relevant, is it?

Justinian's plague killed HALF OF EARTH in the 430's.

What's your source on that? Because recreating past populations is, frankly, a fucking joke. We aren't even able to do it particularly accurately for Rome, despite the unimaginable amount of documentation we have for them, compared to Dark Ages Britain.

Hengest and Horsa arrived with three boats, which cannot possibly exceed 100 people.

Most scholars agree almost every battle apart from the bigger ones (Mount Badon) were fought with perhaps sixty vs sixty men.

It's agreed that 100,000 Saxons arrived in Britain from 300-800 AD. Most of them after 500 AD.

Nigga is a population growth of over two million IN 300 years even POSSIBLE?

Contemporary sources of battles and events. Like the Treachery of the Long Knives. Vortigern's entire army was 300 people, they all got slaughtered by the army of 300 Saxons. They weren't dicking about, both armies contained every able-bodied man.

I am it sounds like a very exciting period desu.

Yes it is "nigga".
If you have ten kids, who have ten kids, who have ten kids, who have ten kids, you've already had 10,000 descendants alone in a hundred years.

And you're one guy. Those 10,000 descendants have 10 kids, who have 10 kids...

You quickly get to about a billion descendants. A lot of them died at childbirth, and you have to take into account pedigree collapse (interbreeding), but you can easily make a lot of humans quickly.

In 70 years we've gone from 1 billion to 7,5 billion humans, "my nigga".

Contemporary sources such as...?

And who's doing that?

This thread is going well no landwaster unfurled yet

That still sounds like you're pulling figures out the air, nigga.

>They weren't dicking about, both armies contained every able-bodied man.

And do you know this for a fact, or is it just assumption?

Middle ages armies are notoriously small but it doesn't represent the population size. The battles of the Hundreds year War were fought with like 10,000 men, when England and France had at least 1.5 million men. Army size doesn't relate to population size in a time when soldiers are gained from influence men and specific feudal levies.

And you are still wrong and have no sources on those insane population figures.
50,000 to 2 million in a few centuries it too great a leap. Justinians plague did not kill half the world...

Can you stop talking such utter shite?

They have 10 kids and 7 of them die. You have no idea how populations work.

Y Gododdin, Gildas...

>In 70 years we've gone from 1 billion to 7,5 billion humans, "my nigga".
You cannot compare the modern age to the middle ages. Modern medicine is the reason for our population boom.

It's not too great a leap. To great a leap is trying to vault over your mother. Let me remind you population has grown 6,5 billion in under a century.

see

Good thing modern medicine predates the population boom.

And who else?

And which academic is doing all this?

What, in short, are your sources?

500 AD =/= Middle Ages.

Every reliable source, including wikipedia for once, supports the fact that justinian's plague killed half of the known world at the time. :)

Actually it corresponds directly to the late 19th and early 20th century, when modern medicine and medical practices really got going. It's also to do with the industrial revolution making agriculture so much easier meaning there was a lot more food so less people starved.

So the modern population boom has absolutely no relation to the demographics of the middle ages.

John Morris, Geoffrey of Monmouth, etc...

Of course it predates the population boom, you dumb fuck, hospitals can't give away antibiotics like candy if they haven't been invented yet.

Yes 500AD is the middle ages. I'm starting to think you actually don't even know the basics of medieval history.
So show me these sources :)

You're a dumb nigger.

John Morris who? Which university is he at? What are his qualifications?

Britain was ostensibly christian from the time of Constantine onwards. I remember reading something about human sacrifices in saxon burials, but maybe it was infrequent.

I've named some authors, go read them yourself. Almost all of them have thousand page books, enjoy reading them, and shove them up your arse when you're done. It'll replace the shit your spewing while portending it to be "history".

500 AD is not the middle ages. It's the Dark Ages, or better yet the "Migration Period". Most sane people start the Middle Ages in 800 AD when Charlemagne is crowned, where they become the Early Middle Ages. Then the High towards 1000 AD, and the Late towards the thirteenth-fourteenth century.

Learn to use google. He even has a wikipedia page.

I can't find him on Google you dumb shit if I know fuck all about him other than his name.

It was nowhere near "ostensibly christian". Gododdin was Pagan. Rheged was Pagan. Elmet was Pagan. Pengwern was Pagan. Caer Lundein was Pagan. Dumnonia was Pagan. The Picts were Pagan, some of the apostates who had decided jesus was a Sun God. Shall I go on?

Here you go, pleb.

google.fr/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwidlMH5j5bOAhVBPRoKHVedDuQQFggeMAA&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Morris_(historian)&usg=AFQjCNGOsFCTN4wO6ArdJjM80vFcAjcCYA&sig2=CfZ9-KZFmACV_mB2sRgqQA

>I've named some authors, go read them yourself. Almost all of them have thousand page books, enjoy reading them, and shove them up your arse when you're done. It'll replace the shit your spewing while portending it to be "history".
So what you mean is, you don't have any source, but you want me to go and look for it. You know if you were writing an academic paper, you'd have to cite the author, book, publication version, and specific page, you couldn't simply tell the reader to go find it and shove it up their arse. This may just be a Inuit Ice Fishing Congregation but you needed sources to back up your facts all the same to be taken seriously.

You are the worst kind of debater.

And yes, 500 is the middle ages.

>Image result for middle ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted from the 5th to the 15th century
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages
>Middle Ages, the period in European history from the collapse of Roman civilization in the 5th century CE
britannica.com/event/Middle-Ages

Deal with it.

Gildas, De Excidio, his only work
Nennius, his only work
Bede, his only work
Geoffrey of Monmouth, his only work
John Morris, the Age of Arthur,

You are the worst kind of debater, and a shitty human being. I hope ISIS kills you.

Yes please point out where in these works they give specific numbers to the population of the British isles...
You need to prove your claim of 50,000 people living in Britain around 500AD

...are you actually using research from the fucking SEVENTIES?

You dumb shit, was there even any archaeology in there to begin with?

>Although popular with the public, the book was heavily criticized in professional historical circles, severely damaging Morris' academic reputation in the eyes of many of his peers.

You're a fucking moron, kid.

WAS. Past tense. Now it's being heralded as one of the best historical works of all time. People are admiring John Morris.

Appeal to authority fallacy

In John Morris? Of course.

It's an accurate estimate by Morris. No idea which page, I read it in one of those google book things. Buy the book and read it.

You're a moron fallacy. Oh wait, that's not a fallacy.

Only shit debaters try and discredit opponents with fallacies. Sounds like rather than a fallacy you need a phallus, see?

SHOW ME YOUR SOURCE FOOL

Or actually i have a source which says the population was 300 million just go find the book and read it yourself

>Now it's being heralded as one of the best historical works of all time.

No, they aren't.

>People are admiring John Morris.

Morons like you, you mean?

Well guess what?

It's fucking irrelevant, because now there's been FORTY YEARS of research that Morris, the old hack, doesn't have the faintest clue about having been dead since '77.

>Only shit debaters try and discredit opponents with fallacies
Right and only good debaters use endless fallacies to win an argument, like calling their opponent nigger.

>historical discussion
>it devolves into 'your sources are shit!'

Everytiem

>accurate estimate

Considering I'm actually studying this shit I can tell you right now there is no such thing as an accurate estimate when recreating past populations. And the idea you can do it by reverse engineering a figure from literary sources is laughable.

Well to be fair, the guy doesn't even have a source.

You called me a nigga.

You're not studying "this shit". You're probably some pleb studying the colour of Napoleon's spats, and you think that qualifies you to talk about all historical matters.

No historian would call what he studies "shit".

Yeah, that tends to happen when amateur morons use shite sources.

I've named six sources. I'm sorry you can't read.

obviously pagans and christians lived side by side, all I said was "christianity was reintroduced", I never said it was 100% pure christian, what the fuck is your problem? did I trigger you or something?

>Wall-painting from Lullingstone Roman Villa, Kent, showing Christians at prayer
here is my proof

I wanted to discuss riothamus, his death at avallon and how that is close to the legend, how camulodonum might be camelot and interesting shit not quibble with a fedora

fucking Veeky Forums

They aren't shit sources, they're the only sources.

Christianity was barely there to begin with, you unclefucker.

You listed some books, but you were asked to prove your claim of 50,000 people, you need to go into more detail than listing 6 entire books. You might as well say "My source is the internet", Besides, i bet those books don't even say 50k once.

Why would they say "50K once"?

The k abbreviation for thousand didn't even exist, you nignog.

I am doing a degree in Ancient Mediterranean Civilisations at Edinburgh University, which comprises of a joint degree between Classics and Archaeology. As such not only have I been studying the archaeology of the prehistoric British Isles but also Ancient History where I have come across attempts to recreate ancient populations from the wealth of contemporary documentary information given to us by Athens and Rome.

Even with this wealth of information, NO ONE has been able to accurately estimate the population. The idea you could do it from Medieval chronicles is absolutely fucking laughable.