Historical Introduction

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION: ROMAN, CELTIC AND GERMANIC KINGSHIP.

When a band of forty Roman missionary monks landed in England in 597, they were renewing what had already been a most important element in British history – the relationship with Rome. Since Julius Caesar’s abortive invasions of 55 and 54 BC, and the Emperor Claudius’ successful invasion of 43 AD, two-thirds of the island of Britain had been incorporated into the Roman empire. This had paved the way for the coming of the apostles: no less than three of the sacred band of the twelve Holy Apostles – Peter2, Paul3 and Simon the Zealot4– are said to have evangelized in Britain, and Peter and Paul, of course, are the “Roman” Apostles par excellence. It was from Rome that the Apostle Paul sent the first missionaries to England – the holy Apostle Aristobulus, first Bishop of Britain, and, probably, St. Joseph of Arimathea.5

Christianity expanded slowly in Britain after the apostles. In the year 156, writes the Venerable Bede, the first-known British Christian King, Lucius, known in the Welsh sources as Lleuver Mawr, “the Great Light”, was forced to send beyond the seas for missionaries to restore the Apostolic Faith – and it was to Rome that he appealed. The missionaries established churches in London, Gloucester, Glastonbury and Llandaff.6

By the beginning of the third century, according to Tertullian, Christianity was established in the British Isles. And it was probably to this period that we owe the first native British saint – Martyr Alban of Verulamium. The Turin MS of Constantius’ Life of St. Germanus says that after St. Alban’s death, “the evil Caesar [probably Septimius Severus], aghast at such wonders, ordered the persecutions to end, without the orders of the emperors, setting down in his report that the religion actually prospered from the slaughter of the saints…”

According to St. Gildas the Wise, writing in about 540, the British Christians “received the faith without enthusiasm”, but nevertheless kept it “more or less pure right up to the nine-year persecution by the tyrant Diocletian” in the early fourth century. He goes on to describe that persecution, when lack of enthusiasm turned into great zeal: “Before ten years of this whirlwind had wholly passed, the wicked edicts were beginning to wither away as their authors were killed. Glad-eyed, all the champions of Christ welcomed, as though after a long winter’s night, the calm and serene light of the breezes of heaven. They rebuilt churches that had been razed to the ground; they founded, built and completed chapels to the holy martyrs, displaying them everywhere like victorious banners. They celebrated feast days. With pure heart and mouth they carried out the holy ceremonies. And all her sons exulted, as though warmed in the bosom of the mother Church.7

However, other ancient historians imply that Britain was spared this persecution because of the pacific policy of its governor, Constantius, the father of the great St. Constantine. And there are remarkably few surviving chapels that are dedicated to the martyrs8, or even names of martyrs.9

However, we do know that apostolic succession survived: in 314 three British bishops attended the Council of Arles in France at the invitation of St. Constantine and with his financial support.

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The distant province of Britain was in a sense more committed to the new order of Christian Rome than any other for the simple reason that the first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great, had been proclaimed emperor for the first time precisely in Britain10, and had taken the title Britannicus Maximus, “the greatest of the Britons”, in 315. However, in spite of some impressive architectural remains at Bath, York and Hadrian’s Wall, signs of Romanization are fewer in Britain than on the continent even after four centuries of Roman rule. Romans writing about Britain exhibit a certain antipathy towards this province. And the Britons retained, with the Jews, the reputation of being the least assimilated people in the Empire.11

Perhaps for that reason Britain became the platform for several rebellions against the central authorities in the late Empire. Thus in 350 a British officer called Magnentius donned the purple and was acclaimed by the army at Autun, only to be defeated the next year. Again, in 383 Magnus Clemens Maximus, leader of the army in Britain, seized power in the West and killed the Western Emperor Gratian. Now Maximus, unlike Magnentius, was an Orthodox Christian, a champion of the Church and a fine defender of the Western frontier against the Germans. Moreover, his usurpation of the empire should not have debarred him from the throne: many emperors before and after came to the throne by the same means. Nevertheless, he is consistently portrayed in the sources as a tyrant; and Sulpicius Severus wrote of him that he was a man “whose whole life would have been praiseworthy if he could have refused the crown illegally thrust upon him by a mutinous army”12.

St. Ambrose of Milan rejected Maximus and remained loyal to Gratian’s co-emperor Valentinian II (in spite of the fact that his mother, Justina, was an Arian and his resolute enemy). He travelled to Trier in the winter of 383-4 to meet Maximus, but refused to give him communion, warning him that “he must do penance for shedding the blood of one who was his master [the Western Emperor Gratian] and… an innocent man.” Maximus refused, and according to Paulinus “laid down in fear, like a woman, the realm that he had wickedly usurped, thereby acknowledging that he had been merely the administrator, not the sovereign [imperator] of the state.13

In 388 he was defeated and executed by the Eastern Emperor Theodosius.

The way in which Ambrose could reject the British usurper Maximus, although his credentials were as good as many a pagan emperor, was a tribute to the way in which Christian Rome had transformed political thought in the ancient world. In early Rome a “tyrant” was a man who seized power by force; and in Republican Rome tyrants were those who, like Julius Caesar, imposed one-man rule on the true and only lawful sovereigns – Senatus PopulusQue Romanorum, the senate and people of Rome. During the first three centuries of the empire, many generals seized power by force and the senate and the people were forced to accept their legitimacy. However, this changed with the coming of St. Constantine, who became the source and model of all legitimate emperors. Constantine, of course, had seized the empire by force; but he had done so against anti-Christian tyrants and was therefore seen to have been acting with the blessing of God. Now legitimate rulers would have to prove that they were in the image of Constantine, both in their Orthodoxy and in their legitimate succession from the previous emperor. As for who the real sovereign was – the emperor or the senate and people – this still remained unclear.

In the fourth century British Christianity developed rapidly, and there are reports of British pilgrims consulting St. Symeon the Stylite on his pillar in Syria, while St. Jerome, on seeing the crowds of British pilgrims in Jerusalem, said: “It’s as easy to find the way to Heaven in Britain as in Jerusalem.”14

Politically, however, the British continued to be a rebellious people. Thus in the years 406-410, British troops attempted to place the “tyrants” Marcus, Gratian and Constantine III on the throne of the Western Empire. Gratian was even given “a purple robe, a crown and a body-guard, just like an emperor,” according to the fifth-century historian Zosimus.15

The Romans, already overstretched, lost patience: in 410 the Emperor Honorius withdrew his legions from Britain, and the British found themselves orphaned, outside the Roman Empire. As Procopius wrote: “The Romans never succeeded in recovering Britain, but it remained from that time on under tyrants.”16 St. Gildas the Wise, writing in the 540s, blamed his countrymen, saying that they had “ungratefully rebelled” against “Roman kings”, and had failed in their “loyalty to the Roman Empire”.17

It is difficult to argue with that judgement: the British began as they continued to be thereafter – innovators, even revolutionaries, in political theory and practice. The land formerly known as “the Roman island” became, from the beginning of the fifth century, “a province fertile in tyrants” (St. Jerome)18, thus reverting to its rebelliousness under Carausius and Allectus in the late third century.19

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“One such ‘usurper’,” writes Fry, “was Vortigern, a shadowy figure whose name was in fact a title, High King. This ruler probably rose to power c. 425 and was to govern at least part of southern Britain for about three decades. This is the Vortigern of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (he appears first in the entry for 449), the ‘superbus tyrannus’ of the British historian Gildas (sixth century) and the Vortigern of Nennius (ninth century). Vortigern sought the aid of Germanic tribes to help him beat off the Picts rampaging down from the north. It is probable also that he wanted their help to discourage attempts by Rome to recover Britain. Nennius notes that Vortigern was driven by fear of Roman attack. We do not know how far Vortigern’s sway extended, but he evidently had the authority to offer lands in Kent and East Anglia to the Germanic tribes as payment for their military assistance. The sequel to his appeal to Hengist and Horsa, the Germanic Jutish leaders, was (as in most cases where barbarians are enlisted to beat off other barbarians) that they turned on their employer…”20

It was at about this time that the British Christians invited St. Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre in Gaul, to visit their island. They wanted him to help them against the heretical teaching of the British monk Pelagius, who denied original sin. St. Germanus came twice, in 429 and 447, and was victorious in his public debates with the Pelagians. Intriguingly, he also helped the Britons on the battle-field: as a former general he successfully organized an ambush of Pictish invaders, using “Alleluia” as the signal to attack. St. Germanus’ victories, both spiritual and military, indicate the close links that still existed between the British and the Continental Church – but also the vacuum of authority that required a bishop to put on his battle-gear again…

St. Gildas the Wise, the father of British history, wrote in the 540s that his countrymen had “ungratefully rebelled” against “Roman kings”, and had failed in their “loyalty to the Roman Empire”.21 He, too, distinguished between true kings and tyrants. Among past rulers in Britain, Diocletian, Maximus, Marcus, Gratian, Constantine, Constans and Vortigern were all “tyrants”. After that, however, there had been legitimate rulers, such as Ambrosius Aurelianus, “a modest man, who alone of the Roman nation had been left alive in the confusion of this troubled period… He provoked the cruel conquerors [the Anglo-Saxons] to battle, and by the goodness of our Lord got the victory”. His parents, according to Gildas, even “wore the purple”.22

The distinction between true kings and tyrants was made by other distinguished British Christians. Thus St. Patrick, the British apostle of Ireland, called the Scottish chieftain Coroticus a “tyrant” because he did not fear God or His priests; “for the sake of a miserable temporal kingdom [regnum]” he would face God’s judgement on “wicked kings” [regibus].23 Patrick’s use of the terms “king” and “tyrant” is not clear; his definition of the word “tyrant” seems to be a mixture between the old, secular meaning of “usurper” and the newer, more religious, Ambrosian meaning of “unjust or immoral person in authority”.

Then, at the turn of the century, came the famous King Arthur. He won twelve victories over the Saxons, fighting with a cross or icon of the Virgin Mary on his back, and halted the pagan advance westwards for at least a generation, until his death in 519. David Miles writes: “It is possible that Artos/Arthur – ‘The Bear’ in Celtic, was the signum, or nickname, of Aurelianus himself. A bearskin cloak would have been a distinguishing element of his uniform as a Roman general.”24 In any case, Arthur of Britain, with Clovis of France, was the first great king of the post-Roman West, and became the stuff of innumerable medieval legends.25

However, Gildas was withering about the kings contemporary with himself: “Britain has kings [reges], but they are tyrants [tyrannos]; she has judges, but they are wicked. They often plunder and terrorize the innocent; they defend and protect the guilty and thieving; they have many wives, whores and adulteresses; they constantly swear false oaths, they make vows, but almost at once tell lies; they wage wars, civil and unjust; they chase thieves energetically all over the country, but love and reward the thieves who sit with them at table; they distribute alms profusely, but pile up an immense mountain of crime for all to see; they take their seats as judges, but rarely seek out the rules of right judgement; they despise the harmless and humble, but exalt to the stars, as far as they can, their military companions, bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God… They hang around the altars swearing oaths, then shortly afterwards scorn them as though they were filthy stones…”26 These kings were both Christian and “anointed”. But they did not fulfill their vows; they were a terror to good works, but not to the evil – and by that criterion they were not true authorities (Romans 13.3), being linked rather with the tyrants of old, the Ahabs and Magnus Maximuses. So the break with Rome was still keenly felt. Celtic Britain had many great monks and hierarchs, but very few great, or even powerful, kings…

In about 540 there is intriguing evidence that the Emperor Justinian was sending subsidies to the kingdom of Gwynedd.27 However, after the great plague of 547, links between Britain and the East appear to have been cut off. The major exception was the Church, which was Orthodox and stronger now than it had been in Roman times. Thus Simon Young writes that “in the west… there are various Celtic successor states but those too have left Rome far behind them. No surprise there. The west had, after all, always been the least Romanised part of Britannia and it was the very fact that they had primitive tribal societies instead of sophisticated urban ones that allowed the Celtic kingdoms to come through the storm in one piece. They were better able to fight off the barbarians. Indeed, the only Roman thing that survived there was Christianity – that had been the official religion of the later empire – and, closely connected to Christianity, Latin writing…”28

However, as Chris Wickham writes: “Fewer and fewer people in the West called themselves Romani; the others found new ethnic markers: Goths, Lombards, Bavarians, Alemans, Franks, different varieties of Angles and Saxons, Britons – the name the non- Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain had given themselves by 550, the Romani having left, and a word itself due soon to be replaced by a Welsh term, Cymry, ‘fellow countryman’. Even in a part of the former empire unconquered by invaders, that is to say, the Romans were not the Britons themselves, but other people, earlier invaders, who had come and gone. And although of course the huge majority of the ancestors of all these peoples were men and women who would have called themselves Roman in 400, the Roman world had indeed gone, and Roman-ness with it.”29

Did the invading Saxons exterminate the Romano-British population in England, or was there a kind of merger? Much light on this question has been shed recently by a genetic survey of the Peoples of the British Isles (PoBI). Judith Keeling writes that “the PoBI evidence points firmly to a large influx of Anglo-Saxon DNA but also the presence in modern descendants of a substantial amount of an ‘ancient British’ DNA which most closely matches the DNA of modern inhabitants of France and Ireland.

“This led the researchers to conclude that there had been an intermingling between the existing Romano-British population and the newcomer Anglo-Saxons, rather than a full-scale population wipe-out.”30

However, that there was great destruction and carnage cannot be denied. Gildas describes the sacking of a British city: “All the columns were leveled with the ground by the frequent strokes of the battering-ram, all the husbandmen routed, together with their bishops, priests, and people, whilst the sword gleamed and the flames crackled round them on every side. Lamentable to behold, in the midst of the streets by the tops of lofty towers, tumbled to the ground, stones of high walls, holy altars, fragments of human bodies, covered with livid spots of coagulated blood, looking as if they had been squeezed together in a press…”31

Archaeological evidence – for example, at the great British city of Wroxeter near the Severn – confirms a drastic fall in the standard of living and of building construction in the second half of the fifth century.

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When the pagan advance resumed in the second quarter of the sixth century, some of the British were still able to put up a stiff resistance. David Starkey writes: “The area around Luton and Aylesbury in the modern Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire did not fall till 571 AD and Bath did not till six years later, after the Battle of Dyrham in 577 AD. And there were pockets of resistance even in the east – like Verulamium, the site of the death of the proto-martyr, St. Alban, and the principal cultic centre of British Christianity or the little British kingdom of Elmet in the modern Yorkshire – which held out longer still.

“By the end of the sixth century, however, the future political geography of Britain was becoming clear. The Britons held on to the territories to the north of Hadrian’s Wall, to Cumbria and to the west of the Severn and Wye valleys, while the Anglo- Saxons had conquered everything to the east and to the south.”32

Now Arthur of Britain, like Clovis of France, was considered a Roman leader of the post-Roman West. And yet by this time Old Rome was well on the way to resurrection in a new form. Under the leadership of the popes it had been restored to ecclesiastical and political unity with the New Rome of Constantinople, and was recovering much of its power and influence among the western peoples. The crucial figure in this revival was Pope Gregory I – “the Great”. As well as restoring the power and influence of the papacy throughout continental Western Europe, he determined on recovering Britain, “the Roman island”, where the heirs of Christian Rome in Britain had been driven to the West by the pagan Anglo-Saxons. And so, being unable to go himself, he sent his disciple, Abbot Augustine, to England with orders to link up with the British Christians and convert the Anglo-Saxons.

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Thus Rome was back. Only this time, as J.M. Roberts remarks, “it was another Rome which was to convert the English nation, not the empire,”33  which had first brought the island within the scope of Roman civilization, but the Church…

What kind of state or states did the missionaries sent to Britain by St. Gregory encounter? The Anglo-Saxons were not town-dwellers, but lived in villages whose houses were well separated from each other. They tended to return to them even after wars had destroyed them. And so “the pattern of rural settlements,” writes Martin Wainwright, “established between AD 410 and 1066 survives to this day”.34

“Fertile, level and well-watered ground was reserved for grazing domestic animals or growing crops, so the land chosen by the Anglo-Saxons for their dwellings was often inferior. Architecture was similarly practical. Most villagers lived in modest two-room huts or cabins, half for the family, the other half as a byre for their animals, with a 16- foot opening to admit a pair of yoked cattle…

“… The God-fearing culture of the Anglo-Saxons was reluctant to challenge the Lord’s house by erecting some more magnificent secular buildings. The thane would have his hall, and some of them were relatively imposing, but the best craftsmen were always directed to the church and the priest. Their work was modest was compared to the glories of church architecture to come, but it was so sound and well executed that more than 400 churches with Saxon work survive…”35

At the political level, the society of the Angles and Saxons in their continental homeland was what Tacitus called an “armed democracy”: they appear to have had no kings. “But England, in the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Saxon conquest,” writes Starkey, “offered special circumstances which encouraged the development of kingship beyond anything the Germans were familiar with back home. Most important was the long, hard-fought nature of the conquest itself. For the Anglo-Saxons’ more-or-less permanent state of war to the death with the British required equally permanent leaders. Moreover, war in a prosperous country like Britain produced booty, which made the war-leaders rich. From this new wealth they could renew their followers. This attracted fresh followers and consolidated the loyalty of the old, which made the leaders more powerful still. And so. Finally, the power and the permanence coalesced into kingship…”36

The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms all – with one exception – claimed to derive their origins from the god Woden. (The exception was the kingdom of the East Saxons, in which London was situated, and whose founder was said to be the god Saxnot.37) Now this was, of course, a pagan superstition. And yet there was an important Christian truth hidden in this superstition: the truth, namely, that “all power comes from God” (Romans 12.1), for it is God – the true God, Jesus Christ – Who gives kingship to men.

If God is the Giver of kingship, then it is inseparable from God’s Kingdom on earth, the Church. However, Orthodox Christians believe that although the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of men should be united, they are still in principle distinct: “My Kingdom is not of this world,” said the King of kings to the representative of Caesar. The ideal relationship between the two is one of harmonic “symphony” that makes for their close cooperation while preserving the distinctiveness and autonomy of each, as described by the Emperor Justinian in his Sixth Novella: “The greatest gifts given by God to men by His supreme kindness are the priesthood and the empire, of which the first serves the things of God and the second rules the things of men and assumes the burden of care for them. Both proceed from one source and adorn the life of man. Nothing therefore will be so greatly desired by the emperors than the honour of the priests, since they always pray to God about both these very things. For if the first is without reproach and adorned with faithfulness to God, and the other adorns the state entrusted to it rightly and competently, a good symphony will exist, which will offer everything that is useful for the human race.”

For the Germanic tribes, the king was sacred, being seen as seen as the “warden of the holy temple”.38 But he was not a god-king on the Asiatic model. “For the Indo- Iranians the king is a divinity, and he has no need to attach legality to his power by using a symbol such as a sceptre. But … for the Germans the king’s power was purely human.”39 This meant that although Germanic kingship might in practice combine political and priestly roles within itself, these roles could in principle be separated. In fact, with the coming of Christianity, writes Chaney, there was “a separation of royal functions, the sacrificial-priestly role of the Germanic tribal monarch going to the Church hierarchy and that of sacral protector remaining with the king. This separation of power manifested itself not in the obliteration of the religious nature of kingship but in the establishment of a sphere of action by and for the ecclesia apart… from that of the regnum.”40


2 The Church historian Eusebius, writing in about 315, said that “the apostles went beyond the ocean to the islands that are called British”. According to The Great Synaxarion of the Orthodox Church (June 29), it was while St. Peter was in Britain that an angel appeared to him and told him to go to Rome to suffer.

3 According to Venantius Fortunatus (c. 580), St. Paul himself “visited Britain and furthest Thule”. St.Clement of Rome (first century) says that Paul taught “the whole world and to the limits of the West”. And Blessed Theodoret of Cyr (c. 415) says that “on being liberated from his first captivity in Rome, he preached the Gospel to the Britons and others in the West”. See R.W. Morgan, St. Paul in Britain, London: Covenant Books, 1948.

4 Hieromartyr Dorotheus of Tyre (fourth century) and St. Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople (ninth century), assert that St. Simon the Zealot, one of the Twelve and the bridegroom at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, preached the Gospel in Britain and was crucified here. The fact that he was crucified suggests that he was working in Roman-occupied part of the island; for crucifixion was a specifically Roman method of execution; and according to local tradition, this took place in Caistor in Lincolnshire, well within the Roman zone of occupation. However, the Russian Lives of the Saints edited by St. Demetrius of Rostov, while agreeing that St. Simon preached in Britain, claims that he was martyred in Abkhazia. This is geographically closer to the Persia mentioned by the Roman Martyrology, Bede’s Martyrology and the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Coming of the Apostles, all of which make no mention of any visit to Britain. Moreover, the famous monastery of New Athos in Abkhazia is dedicated to St. Simon the Zealot, and the locals are able to point to his tomb.

5 Hieromartyr Hippolytus, Bishop of Rome (third century) links St. Joseph with Britain (http://www.stjosephorthodoxchurch.ca/default.cfm?module=%2747%29%20FH%2A%2D7%20%20%20 %0A). William of Malmesbury (twelfth century) claims that St. Philip sent twelve missionaries from France to Britain, including St. Joseph. See Rev. L.S. Lewis, St. Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury, Cambridge: James Clarke, 1922. For archaeological evidence of a first-century church at Glastonbury, see Jean and Harold Taylor, “Pre-Norman Churches of the Border”, in N.K. Chadwick and others, Celt and Saxon. Studies in the Early British Border, Cambridge University Press, 1963.

6 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, I, 4; William of Malmesbury, De Antiquitate Ecclesiae Glastoniensis, 2; The Triads of Britain, 35. Many consider that there was no British King Lucius, and that he was confused by Bede with a king in Syria. However, as against that opinion, see H.M. Porter, The Celtic Church in Somerset, Bath: Morgan Books, pp. 125-127, and Protopresbyter James Thornton, “Saint Lucius, King of Britain: An Historical Enigma”, Orthodox Tradition, no. 2, 2010, pp. 17-22.

7 Gildas, On the Ruin of Britain, 9; translated by Michael Winterbottom, Chichester: Phillimore, 1978.

8 Lichfield, near Birmingham, may be the site of one such martyrdom. St. Martha’s church near Guildford (originally called “Holy Martyrs church”) may be another.

9 Among those we know, including the dates of their commemoration, are Martyrs Aaron and Julius of Caerleon in Wales (July 1), Socrates and Stephen of York (September 17) and, possibly, Bishop Augulus of Augusta and those with him (February 7). Augusta may possibly have been another name for London.

10 In York. The place under York Minster where this hugely important event took place has now been excavated by archaeologists.

11 Michael Jones, The End of Roman Britain, Cornell University Press, 1998.

12 Sulpicius Severus, Dialogues, I (2, VI).

13 Paulinus, Life of St. Ambrose, chapter 19, in the translation by E.R. Hoare.

14 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography, London: Phoenix, 2012, p. 185.

15 Zosimus, New History, 6.2.

16 Procopius, The Vandal War, 3.2.38.

17 St. Gildas, On the Ruin of Britain, 4.1, 5.1, 15.1.

18 Christopher Snyder, An Age of Tyrants, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998, chapters 2, 8 and

19 Kevin Butcher, “The First British Empire”, BBC History Magazine, June, 2016.

20 Fry, op. cit., p. 267.

21 St. Gildas, On the Ruin of Britain, 4.1, 5.1, 15.1.

22 St. Gildas On The Ruin of Britain, 25. Bede interprets this to mean that they were “of royal race”.

23 St. Patrick, Letter to Coroticus, 21, 19.

24 Miles, The Tribes of Britain, London: Phoenix, 2006, p. 162.

25 Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman (King Arthur: The True Story, London: Arrow, 1993) have made an excellent case for the historicity of King Arthur.

26 St. Gildas, On The Ruin of Britain, 27.

27 Michelle Ziegler, “Emperor Justinian and the British Kings, c. 540”, Heavenfield, https://hefenfelth.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/emperor-justinian-and-the-british-kings-c-540.

28 Young, “Apocalypse then circa 410”, BBC History Magazine, March, 2010, p. 48.

29 Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, London: Penguin, 2009, p. 200.

30 Keeling, “What Makes the British?”, Oxford Today, vol. 25, no. 2, 2013, p. 27.

31 St. Gildas, On the Ruin of Britain.

32 Starkey, The Monarchy of England, vol. 1, London: Chatto & Windus, 2004, p. 16.

33 Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon Publishing, 1992, p. 237.

34 Wainwright, The English Village, London: Michael O’Mara Books, 2011, p. 16.

35 Wainwright, op. cit., pp. 16-17, 46.

36 Starkey, op. cit., p. 25.

37 Sir Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971, p. 54.

38 Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England, Manchester University Press, 1970, p. 14.

39 Benveniste, Slovar’ Indoevropejskikh Sotsial’nikh Terminov (Dictionary of Indo-European Social Terms), Moscow: “Univers”, 1995, quoted in Sergius Fomin and Tamara Fomina, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. I, pp. 48, 49.

40 Chaney, op. cit., p. 259.