Gone Medieval - Britain’s Lost Kingdoms

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

Britain was once a mosaic of small kingdoms, some of which have vanished without a trace. In his new book Lost Realms, Thomas Williams, uncovers the forgotten stories of nine kingdoms that fell while others - such as Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria and Gwynedd - prospered.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman talks to Thomas Williams whose close scrutiny of Britain’s ancient landscape has resurrected a lost past.This episode was edited by Thomas Ntinas and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit. To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. At the end of the Roman period, what is now Britain transformed into a mosaic of little kingdoms? Some, like Wessex and Mercia, survived for centuries right up until the modern countries that make up Great Britain today were formed. others were gradually absorbed by their neighbours and some were lost without a trace

in a brand new book entitled Lost Realms Histories of Britain from the Romans to the Vikings Dr Thomas Williams goes on the hunt for these lost and forgotten kingdoms Thomas is also the author of the bestseller of Viking Britain and the book Viking London Thomas thank you so much for joining us on Gone Medieval Today it's really great to have you here

It's wonderful to be here thank you for having me And a huge congratulations on your new book that's just out now. Well done. This took you a while to research, I think. Is that right? Yeah, it did take a long time. Certainly longer than I ever would have imagined. I actually pitched it to the publisher back in 2017 at the same time that Viking Britain was put into the work. So I was imagining it would probably be finished in 2019 or 2020. But of course, the world had different ideas about how things were going to go. And the pandemic just screwed up everyone's plans. And so trying to get access to libraries, museum collections, all the resources that one would need to write the book like this became basically impossible for the best part of 18 months, two years. And I struggled on and got there in the end. Yes. That's fair enough. And actually, as we'll talk about in a moment, this is actually a really difficult book to write as well. And I'm very impressed with all the sources you managed to pull together because the whole concept of this book is actually writing about these kingdoms that we actually don't know very much about. So to be able to

to succeed and write so much about them is quite a feat at any point in time, I think. But we're going to get back to that a little bit in the moment, but I want to just sort of start. So previously you've written about the Viking Age and you've written about things that we do know an awful lot about. And there is something very intriguing about these lost kingdoms that sort of just vanished. And I have to say that even reading this myself, there are a few of these kingdoms, why knew nothing about at all, despite researching similar periods? So because the key here really, is that we might be familiar with the so-called Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, these sort of early medieval kingdoms in schools. Kids tend to learn about the heptarchies or these seven kingdoms. But actually,

there were an awful lot more out there originally, which is exactly what the book is about. How many kingdoms are we actually talking about in total in this period, do you think? That's a really good question. It sort of depends on how you define kingdom. That's an important point. It's not one that I addressed directly in the book because I think all those that I deal with were at some point in their lifetime. We know that there are a huge number of political units. Some certainly became kingdoms. They have people who were named as kings in historical sources leading them. And others, we just don't know. They appear as just names or peoples in lists or in historical narratives, most of which post-date the period that they're describing. But the overall

impression is of a very large number, a real patchwork of small groupings all across the island. I think that's such a key point that those definitions, because I think sitting here in the 21st century and even, you know, previous researchers, historians and Deguarians, we've been so keen to try and fit our template and what we think of as territories and kingdoms onto the past as well. So it's a case that actually there wasn't really a definition in that same way, and you do have different types of territories existing at the same? time? Yeah, I think so. And archaeologists, anthropologists tie themselves and not trying to make these distinctions. And they're largely semantic. We have tribal group or chiefdoms or when does the

chiefdom become a kingdom and when does the kingdom become a proper state. And these are quite quite categories. But I do think that certainly the beginning of the period of the book covers, so the period immediately after the collapse, withdrawal of Roman administration, you have a huge range of different types of political unit. You have migrant conditions. communities who probably don't have very much of a hierarchical structure. They haven't really had time to develop one. But you also have vestiges of the old Roman administration that have clung on in parts of the island, have a more elevated sense of authority or power structures. There are other parts of the island that have very, very old systems of tribal government

in the north, in what's now Scotland, for example. We don't really know what they were or how they worked, but they've had centuries to develop them. So they were certainly more sophisticated than some of the ad hoc arrangements that were probably forming on the eastern side of England, for example. So yeah, it's a really mixed bag, actually. So that then makes it very difficult to do what you've done here. What sort of sources have you been able to use? Are there some that have come back again and again to have been really useful for you in your research? Oh, absolutely.

The thing that really defines this period, particularly the 5th and 6th centuries, is the absence of contemporary written sources, which is one of the reasons it is known to some as the Dark Ages. It's dark because we can't really see what's happening. There are a few. There's a servant written by a Welshman called Gildas, writing fairly near the time that he's describing towards the beginning of the 5th century about what he sees as a sort of genocidal migration

of Germanic people across the North Sea and into Britain where they engage in sort of wholesale slaughter and destruction of the native Britons, driving them into the western parts of the island. The problem with Gildas, although he's a good source in the sense that he's quite contemporary, is that he's making a moral point about the iniquity of the rulers of the Western Pass of Britain in the time he's writing, and that all of their fortunes are bound up with their own failure to properly do the business for Christianity in the right sort of way. So we have to take what he's saying with a grain

assault. And you certainly get the sense that yes, there is this migration, and yes, it's throwing things into an upheaval, and yes, that immediate post-Roman aftermath was very difficult for a lot of people. But the detail of what he's talking about, which is compounded by the fact he doesn't really give us any names or dates or places in his narrative is very hard to tease out. We have that, and that's the foundation for the parts of later sources that describe the same period. And the most important of those is the ecclesiastical history of the English people, written by the Northumbrian monk Beed in the 8th century. Now, Beed is writing 300 years later the earliest part of this narrative,

even further away from the very early parts of the narrative, which go back into the Roman period. And so whatever he says that isn't directly lifted from Gilvas is very difficult to assess because we don't know where he's getting his information from at all. That said, as we start to progress past the 6th century, into the 7th century and beyond, then Bede is certainly the best, often the only source that we have to give us any sense of the political developments that are going on in Britain at the time. So Bede is absolutely key. There are many others.

I mean, there are chronical sources from Wales and England, which have serious problems of reliability. There are fragments of poetry, which are frankly even harder to assess. So it's difficult, but the sources that we do have crop up over and over again. And so you made a choice in this book to focus on nine different territories or kingdoms. What made you pick those particular nine out of all of them? So I wanted to create a balance between those kingdoms that we traditionally regard as Anglo-Saxon in inverted commas and those that are not. In other words, those that are relics of the older

Romano-British political geography of Britain, or even beyond the Romano-British into the northern parts of Britain. So that was one aspect of it. Trying to create this, I loosely describe as an ethnic balance between the realms that I covered. They have enough material to actually be able to talk about them, but not having so much that it was unwieldy. There are a number of kingdoms of this period about which a decent amount is known, and which are, if not in sort of common usage or other sort of not even popular consciousness, to any great extent, are still sort of numb. And I'm talking about Northumbria, West End, East Anglia, Mercia, sort of the bigger, more long-lived realms of England, as well as parts of Wales like Gwyneth

that had a much longer lifespan, had a much greater impact on later in national history. So finding that sort of middle ground, that Goldilocks zone was one aspect of how I came up with the nine that I've chosen. What's so fascinating with this is actually seeing what else is there, what we can add to those more traditional narratives, because they are so easy to forget about. But I wanted So just pick on a few of these rounds that you've talked about. And actually, you start with one that I knew very little about at all, I have to confess, when I started reading the book.

And that's the nickname of Elmette. Where are we in the geography of the country now? Essentially, we're in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The Kingdom of Elmette, as far as we know, was based around Leeds, in Riggio-Loydus, as B puts it. And we also get the sense of it being in that neck, that was from the tribal hideage document, which is a list of tribal groups and minor kingdoms that was put together in the 7th or 8 centuries probably.

And it situates the Elmette dwellers between the people of the Peak District and the people of Lindsay in Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire. So that again puts it squarely in the West Riding in that vicinity of Leeds. There have been attempts to try to demarcate where did Elmette begin and end. It's proved very, very difficult. I don't actually talk about this in the book, but there are earthworks that have been conjected to be something to do with the boundaries of Elmette. I'm not personally convinced by that. There's no archaeology to prove that either way. The one thing that is quite useful is a spread of place names that include the word Elmette that are quite old.

So they date back to the early medieval period. These sort of follow a north-south line roughly along Great North Road, the old Roman road, Hermann Street. And the theory is that you don't need to specify that something's in Elmet, if you're already in Elmet. And that these are names that were coined by people coming from the east to describe. the territory that was to their west. I'm over here, not in Elmette, this place, Barwick in Elmette, he's in an Elwet. So Elmette's over there. So that gives us a sort of a sense of frontier, at least on the eastern side of what may have been that particular kingdom. So that's a really intriguing way of thinking about it, because actually how people name their

environment does relate a lot to that sense of belonging and all of that. So that's a really nice way. I also noticed that when you were writing about Beed mentioning it, he doesn't really say much at all, but he talks about a forest. Is that a similar bit of geographical evidence we can get about it there? Yeah, that's the thing. So Bebe does mention Elmette being a place, but he never describes it as a kingdom. He only really talks about this forest of Elmette, which he implies, again, it's very indirect, he's in the vicinity of Leeds. There are place names south and west of Leeds that suggest are greater than average coverage of forests. So they're old English names, but they have a lot of words that imply the presence of forestry. So you can build an idea that that's the forest that Beed is talking about.

But it's not concrete stuff. It's all quite vague, isn't it? It's all just sort of trying to filling out. Okay, so let's move on now to a different kingdom. So one that's a bit closer to whom, for me at least, in the southwest. And this is one that I struggle a lot with the pronunciation of wicker or wicker. How would you pronounce it? I've heard it's pronounced in different ways.

I think quichia is probably the most common pronunciation or a quichure. It's a possibility. Frankly, I'm not sure that anyone really knows. But I think something along those lines is pretty close. Fantastic. Well, let's go with that then. So where in the country are we talking about now? So Huichet essentially a kingdom based in Gloucestershire and Bustershire that encompasses the Cotswarns, most of the full range of Cotswold Hills, the Seven Valley, the Vailavis, and then probably up to the foothills of the Morgans as well. Goes a little bit further into Warwickshire. It may have had a little bit of itself in Wiltshire, but that's the core of it, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire.

Now, one of the quite interesting things here that you write about in the book as well is that this is a territory that has a really quite significant Roman legacy, especially in the presence of some quite significant Roman towns. Yeah. How did that legacy affect it, well, maybe you could also explain a little bit what that legacy was in terms of those cities? Yeah, so the three very major Roman towns are Gloucester. Byroncester and Bach, revealed an extraordinary amount of wealth in this part of Britain. Elaborate townhouses, mosaic floors, craft specialists, underfloor heating, well-maintained roads, impressive walls, hot baths. Beyond that, of course, there are a large number of very, very

high-status villas in the countryside of Gloucestershire in particular. So we get the sense that of all the parts of Britain that were Roman, what became Creechier was perhaps the most Roman of them, very Romanized in that classic sense that we might imagine. What's extraordinary is how quickly that world seems to have fallen apart in the decades following the end of the 5th century. And so by the mid-fifth century, somewhere like Cyrus Sester, for example, was effectively already a waste act. And this is a phenomenon that happened within the space of a single generation. So someone who was born in Cyrus Sester at the end of the 4th century, for example, would have died in a world that was radically changed. It would have grown up.

in a coin-based economy. By the time they died, no Roman coin had been imported for decades. They would have grown up in a world where they could commission fancy pottery or expect to be able to buy imported Mediterranean goods at a local market. They died in the world where none of those things were available. And in fact, people riveting together fragments of fine Roman table where just to cling on to a vestige with this world that had sort of slipped out of their hands. Even the burial of someone who'd lived through this would have been radically changed from the

one that they might have expected when they were growing up. The Roman cemeteries largely fell out of use entirely. And we have bodies that were buried in roadside ditches from around cyrencester, for example, or out in the countryside, people who are buried underneath walls or in holes in the back garden. It takes quite a dark picture of the nature of the economic and social collapse that was experienced by people who had wealth and who expected a kind of lifestyle that we associate with the late Roman Empire. And when do we hear about this refer to as a kingdom then after that point? We don't hear about a kingdom exactly

until Debeath starts writing about Quechair in the 8th century, but he's talking about the 7th. He refers to a princess Aeufa, who is married off to a South Saxon king by the overlords, the Mercians, a sort of a diplomatic deal. So the first time we hear about Quichair is already under political domination

from this larger neighbour to the north-east. where the royal dynasty came from, the kings and queens of Huicche is very, very obscure. They only really appear already under the thumb of the Mercians, and their authorities undermined as the generations go by. It seems likely that the dynasty may have originated around Wincham, but whether they were native to the old Romano-British communities of the Severn Valley, or whether they were incomers, the more sort of Mercyan parts of Worcestershire to the north is very difficult. to be turned about. Hello everyone, James Rogers here, the host of the warfare podcast by History Hit.

I'm a war historian who works with the UN, NATO and governments around the world. Twice a week, every week, we bring you the defining wars of history and learn about the history of emerging wars. The passengers and crew of 149 were trapped, trapped and delivered into the hands of Saddam Hussein. We hear from the veterans who served. Guards there would grab a machine gun and fire had us. as we went over and could see the spinner flying in all directions. Through to world-leading historians providing context to understand current conflicts.

Finland obviously couldn't join NATO, which makes the two Finnish leaders' statements about Finland deciding for itself whether it will join NATO. That makes those statements even more important. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hits on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and join us on the front lines of military history. seems like this is one gap right in between that post-Roman and that heyday of these bigger kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex that encroaching it really quickly. And you have something happening there, some of the small kingdom, but it's just quite tantalising because we have a royal family or some sort of princess, certainly. But then that's kind of it. I find that quite fascinating.

Yeah, it is. And I always find myself drawn to these sort of black holes, desperate to dive in there and find something that you can hold onto. But very often they're just simply nothing whatsoever. We have a story that's recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which is purported to describe events of the 6th century that talks about West Saxon kings, going and defeating all of these British kings at Gloucester, Cyrus, Esther and Barth. In doing so, they took over this area and it all became part of the patrimony of the West Saxon kings. But, I mean, if you look at the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in its whole, the whole thing is really an exercise in propaganda and back projection from the time of Alfred to justify his claims

to all sorts of different parts of England and other things as well. this sort of legitimising process for him and his descendants. So I don't think we can take that story terribly seriously. I think it's entirely possible that there were British rulers in these places for some time. But what they were ruling over and what the nature of their authority was is very difficult to reconcile with what we see in the archaeology, which is pretty shambolic. No, absolutely. And I just really pinpoints, doesn't it?

How difficult from an archaeological perspective it is to try and separate out any delineations, any territories, any groups because even if the material survives, there's just not that sort of expression is there really at all. Yeah, I think that's one of the challenges of writing about this period is that you're looking at a very, very small palette of colours to work with. From the point of view in archaeologists, you have some fantastic archaeology, which is very, very difficult to reconcile with what we think we know from the historical record, but also we have equally large and glaring gap. So, for example, the presence of British people who are neither Romans, in inverted commas, being buried in Roman cemeteries, or Anglo-Saxons, in

Adverticomers being buried in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, don't exist. Where are they? We don't know, because they don't appear in the burial record. To caveat this, we don't think they appear in the burial record. But of course, if they're wearing, in inverted commas, Anglo-Saxon jewellery, and being buried in in inverted-comas, Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, we wouldn't know. I mean, there's an interesting work that's been done actually at Castleford, in it would have been the Kingdom of Elmette, which is redated a number of what were supposedly late Roman burials to the 6th century. So that opens a window to one possibility is that actually, because we've been working on these assumptions that Roman cemeteries fall out of use, it's just been generally assumed that everybody in them must have died before the year 400.

Actually, look, well, no, they didn't. So now what? And that forces a kind of fundamental rethinking about what's actually going on in the world of these. It is really good. And I think we are still living with the legacy of what. previous historians have tried to project and how they've tried to use those early sources. And I think we're coming around to quite a much more sophisticated viewpoint of this whole idea of identity. And eventually, hopefully, things like genetics might be able to contribute

a little bit more. I think we're not quite there yet, but eventually. I hope so. Actually, this is really interesting now because we've got into the archaeology, which is obviously my comfort zone. And I wonder if we could move to one of the other kingdoms where we actually have a really rich range of archaeological evidence available to us, and that's Essex. So again, can we just start? Is this Essex that you're right about? Is that the same as the modern county of Essex? What sort of territory are we talking about?

Yes and no. So Essex, the county, always formed the core of the East Saxon Kingdom as far as we can see it. But it also encompassed Middlesex through the West, where it's now greater London, probably also included Surrey, or at least parts of Surrey, and it probably also included parts of southern Hartfordshire as well. It didn't cover that whole territory the whole time. And that's the real story of the Kingdom of Essex, is how it really could have been a heavyweight.

Yes. But somehow managed to blow it. It starts out really well, doesn't it, with all of that and with London. And it's got that eastern coastal side to it as well, which obviously is important because you've got the English Channel, you've got all that contacts across the NLC. So yeah, it should have gone well for a section, technically speaking. But let's go on to these sites, because I think what's so interesting there is there's a couple of sites that actually do tell us an awful lot.

And one of those is the site of mucking. Can you tell us what was found there and why that was important? The cemetery at mucking is one of the most sort of comprehensively excavated Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in England and was excavated over more than one generation of archaeologists has worked on that cemetery to fully comprehensively. reveal what it contains. And what we are left with basically two cemeteries or twin cemeteries, one of which is a very large, mixed right cemetery, by which I mean it contains both inhumation graves and intertremated remains in very characteristic funerary urns, of a particular type associated with Northern Europe and Southern Scandinavia,

and increasingly with the parts of England that received the greatest amount of migration from those areas. The other cemetery, by contrast, is exclusively an inhumation cemetery. And unlike the other, its graves are laid out much more coherently on east-west axis, specifically with the feet at the east end and the head at the west end. Both of them seem to have the graves that sort of grouped together in what may be an indication of different kin groups, but in essence they're quite different in their form. I should also say that the second of these cemeteries that I'm describing is truncated. So there's a lot of it's been lost to gravel digging. We don't actually know how big it may have been originally. Now, the very

earliest of the graves in both of these cemeteries contain objects which are entirely consistent with late Roman material culture. There's nothing about the objects themselves that you wouldn't expect to see on high status Romano Britain of the year 400. And they appear to have been buried at some point in the mid-fifth century, perhaps, or maybe a little bit earlier, even. What's different about both the cemeteries is their location. So these are new cemeteries that have been set up somewhere other than where Romano-Britons were traditionally being buried in these urban cemeteries outside the city walls. And so despite the fact that the objects themselves regard as late-Roman artifacts or consistent with late-Roman artifacts,

they are not typically seen as being late-Roman graves. They're seen as being the graves of new communities. and because of the presence of these cremation urns, so they are classic Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in that sense. The problem really is that there's nothing very Anglo-Saxon about the earliest graves. So the foundational graves are not the graves of migrants, as far as anyone would,

if you were to excavate these graves without their context, no one would assume that these were the graves of migrants. This whole picture raises a lot of questions about why are there two cemeteries, why are they laid out differently, lie are their mixed rights in this century? Are the people who are being buried rather than cremated indicating an ethnic difference?

Are the people who are being buried still using a more Romano-British burial right because they believe themselves to be Romano-British? Are they making a distinction from the people who are being buried or being cremated and buried? If so, why is there a distinction being made with the people who are being buried

in this other cemetery in a slightly different way? Is that a religious distinction? Are the people who are being buried on this east-west axis? Christian, in which case that raises questions about the Christianization or how many people were Christian in Essex? This is long before we see Christian culture in an Anglo-Saxon context. So it's very, very puzzling. And there aren't any answers, frankly. There are just lots and lots of questions and lots of very good useful speculation that we can kind of spin out from it.

But what it does show is that identity in these areas that were experiencing, undoubtedly experiencing migration, was not a simple matter. It was not a question of a load of blocs turned up in a few boats across the North Sea, killed all the natives, brought their families over and set up Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. That's not what we're seeing. What exactly we are seeing? What the balance is the people who thought of themselves as Roman, people who thought of themselves as British, people who thought of themselves as Danish or Saxon or whatever, it's harder passed from it, whether they thought they were Christians or not Christians or aggressively not Christian or whatever. That's the tricky part.

But we can certainly say that this is not a straightforward process. This is a long-winded, difficult negotiation of identity. I think that's a really nice way of putting us in negotiating identity. We have to remember that these are people, as you said earlier, you know, somebody who has experienced that end of Roman period and then into post-Roman period, whatever you want to call it. You know, we are talking about a few generations here and so many different individual, unique,

people have to make things up and add and combine in all sorts of funny ways. And I think we tend to forget that a little bit and just think we have the categories, but actually it was probably far more confusing than we'd like to think. That's it. And people are trying to work this stuff out. And, you know, memories are faulty. If somebody thinks it's a really great symbol of how Roman you are,

to a late Roman, what are you doing? Why are you wearing that? What are you put that on your head? It's not at all clear that people were trying to signal some affiliation to, you know, a Germanic heritage by wearing a Suttonhoe helmet, for example. They may well have been thinking that this makes me look like a Roman boss. We don't know because we don't know what was in their head. Precisely. I think that's a really, really good example of then showing their general people and identities and, you know, how confusing it was.

But the other example that you bring out in this chapter as well, I think is quite important because going from that general population to the more specific, the more high status, because what we're seeing, what's emerging is elite groups and elite societies, which presumably become these royal families, again then create these kingdoms, I suppose. And I think that that example that you use is the grave at Prittlewell, which was one that was found relatively recently in the early 2000s, I think. Can you tell me a little bit about Prittle Well and why that was so significant? Prittle Well is extraordinary, mainly because no one expected to find it when they did find it. It was known that there were burials from that region near south end and excavation took place. But what was discovered was this chambered tomb, wooden lined box. Box doesn't really do it justice, more like a room, more like a sort of living room or bedroom, sunk into the ground with a cute. earth mound piled over the top of it. So what they found in the tomb was not a body or not a

complete body at any rate, I think they found a bit of tooth, which was enough to sort of date and suggest that it was an adult grave. But a huge array of very, very high status grave goods. So there was a golden buckle, weapons, a cauldron, coloured glass, musical instrument, really wonderful, glorious artefacts. And probably most interestingly of all were two foil gold crosses, which were found roughly where the eyes should have been. The suggestion being that these were perhaps placed on the eyes of the dead person when he was laid in the grey. All of this sort of brings to mind other similar burials of a similar period. So dated to, I think, the end of the sixth century, similar period to the Sutton who Mount One burial and others across England.

This is the time when you're starting to see increased stratification within burial archaeology. as you say, this is the birth of you like of royal families or people who wielded authority and possessed wealth that others didn't have. What's really fascinating to me about the nature of these graves, though, Prittlewell, Sutton & others is the diversity of the stuff that you find in them. They're not provincial artefacts. They're not all local workmanship. So he's found with coins from Francia. He's found with a bronze-coptic bolt in North Africa. He's found with a Byzantine flask from the Eastern Mediterranean. There's a delicate, silver spoons, again, that were probably produced in the Mediterranean. So this isn't a provincial

identity that's being expressed in this grave. This is an identity that wants to associate itself with things that are going on right across Europe and beyond, and drawing links to the North Sea world and Northern Europe, but also to the remains of the Roman Empire way out east in Greece and Syria and the Levant. So you have to look at these things, not as local expressions of power necessarily. There's ways of expressing aspirations towards a world that lives way beyond the local boundaries. It's a way of associating oneself, one's departed loved one, with ideas that are much bigger than a Kingdom of Essex, if such a thing even existed at the time. I think that's fascinating. And of course, it resonates also with Christianity and with ideas. It's new religion,

although of course it's not a new religion, but new expressions of this religion and the resonance that has with a wider world. That grave, Prithelwell, was just such a spectacular one, wasn't it, for understanding those connections. As you've so well pointed out, those local but also international connections that would have been important in these kingdoms. And actually, we don't have time to really go through many more of the examples, but you give so many other really intriguing ones, so places that you might not expect to have international connections like Devon and Cornwall having connections to the Mediterranean continuing beyond the Roman Empire. for example. So there's so much, isn't there, in both the archaeology that we perhaps haven't picked up on yet. Yeah, I think that's one of the main themes of the book actually is how keen

a lot of these communities were to maintain a sense of Romanness or not just Romanness, but also of being a part of a wider world. It wasn't just an isolated provincial outposts for a lot of these kingdoms. They had aspirations to still be a part of something bigger, whether that was the Roman Empire, whether that was a Christian community or something else entirely. trading network or whatever it happened to be. So I think that's one of the things that you do put across so well in the book. And the other thing, which again, we don't have time to talk about today, is so many of these stories and legends of the kings and the rulers and, you know, how those narratives

have been passed on to us. But I'm going to leave that to your readers to people to go out and buy your book and read about that. Otherwise we'll be here all day. It's been brilliant talking to you today. And I would absolutely recommend to our listeners, check out your book for the rest of those stories. The book is called Lost Realms, Histories of Britain from the Romans, to

the Vikings and thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to talk about it. Thanks for having me. And thank you all so much for listening to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. And don't forget that you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. So you get brand new medieval information and special offers and all sorts of interesting things directly into your inbox every Monday morning. Just look in the episode notes or where you found this podcast.

for instructions for how to do that. Thank you so much again and we hope to have you with us again next time.