Unintelligibly illiterate BBC News article link text

[LarsMac]

I'm sure that someone will come looking for that stray and return it to its herd, soon.

[spot]

No no - it isn't spare, it has to move one letter to the right.

[spot]

‘Stunning’ Anglo-Saxon burial site found along HS2 route

“The fifth and sixth centuries are not ones we know a lot about, and all the objects we found will be able to tell us a lot about these people. It gives us a great snapshot of society.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... -hs2-route

Fifth and sixth centuries? Between 400 and 599? There wasn't an Angle or a Saxon anywhere on the island, much less on the HS2 route. How is this Anglo-Saxon?



eta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Sax ... %80%93660)

Okay, I recant, retract, submit. It's not what I'd call Anglo-Saxon though. 5th century migration apparently qualifies.

Most modern scholarly consensus now regards Hengist and Horsa to be mythical figures, and much scholarship has emphasised the likelihood of this based on their alliterative animal names, the seemingly constructed nature of their genealogy, and the unknowable quality of the earliest sources of information for their reports in the works of Bede. Their later detailed representation in texts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle can tell us more about ninth-century attitudes to the past than anything about the time in which they are said to have existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hengist_and_Horsa

Bah.

[LarsMac]

So, A-G moved in after the Romans left - Give or take a few decades.

[Bryn Mawr]

So, A-G moved in after the Romans left - Give or take a few decades.

Pretty much - the romans left in about 410 and the raids started soon thereafter.

[LarsMac]

Yeah, I thought that the Romans lasted into the mid century, in some facsimile of an empire, but they lost the British area after they withdrew their troop.
It is interesting how much longer, after the Roman collapse that people began to realize just how inefficient hereditary rule really was, and yet it was not until the 20th century that it really was actively replaced in most civilized countries.

[LarsMac]

So, the Anglo-Saxons were basically the descendants of Saxons who had found there way to the British isles after the Romans retreated back to the "Continent"
And from what I have read, lately, the Celts seem to have originated in the Sub-Alpine regions of Austria and Germany.
So, who were the people in Britain prior to the Romans?

[spot]

Until 6000 years ago the island of Britain was part of mainland Europe, before sea levels dropped and the wide landbridge Doggerland sank into the North Sea. That was all pre-farming Northern European Homo Sapiens.

Then you get stone age farming, which implies either a cultural or a physical migration from mainland Europe and an ability to cross the English Channel in boats. The lowland forest was cleared for agriculture.

Then the iron age, with your Celts turning up and pushing the first farmers west, just as the Anglo Saxons later pushed the Celts west - either culturally or physically. The Romans didn't push anyone, they just taxed and administered and educated and provided long-term infrastructure and stability. If only America could actually live up to that standard one might welcome its interventions.

[Bryn Mawr]

So, the Anglo-Saxons were basically the descendants of Saxons who had found there way to the British isles after the Romans retreated back to the "Continent"
And from what I have read, lately, the Celts seem to have originated in the Sub-Alpine regions of Austria and Germany.
So, who were the people in Britain prior to the Romans?

You forget the Angles and the Jutes who were separate tribes to the Saxons. The Jutes settled in Kent, the Saxons in Essex, Middlesex, Sussex and Wessex and the Angles in most of the rest before the Danes pushed them over.

Before the Romans there were the Celts who ended up in Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and Ireland and before them the Picts who were pushed into the remoter corners.

As Spot says, the originals who came in at the end of the last ice age were the northern hunter gatherers and their last holdout appears to be the Basque lands.

[LarsMac]

It's not just the BBC, or even the British news outfits,

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/21/politics ... index.html

I got a kick from this statement:
The Point: Moss' life -- and that of her mother -- is unalterably changed by Trump's unwillingness to accept that he had lost an election. And that's a damn shame.

[spot]

Maldon crematorium plans to be carbon-neutral

https://www.maldonandburnhamstandard.co ... l/?ref=rss

That's so unambitious. A well-designed modern crematorium should be supplying the electricity grid, not just breaking even.