Hello everyone and welcome to episode 1.2 of the History of England, Adwentus Saxonum,

the coming of the Saxons. According to Gilderson Bede, the coming of the

Saxons, even to Bede, was accompanied by fear and destruction. The Saxons brought

with them violence, despair and death, fire and sword. It was a vision of wholesale slaughter

of Britons fleeing to the hills, the catastrophic fall of a civilisation. Some of the

wretched remnant were consequently capped on the mountains and killed in heaps. Others,

overcome by hunger, came and yielded themselves to the enemy, to be their slaves forever if

they were not instantly slain. Others, repaired, departs beyond the sea with strong

lamentation. Public and private buildings were raised, priests were slain at the altar,

bishops and people alike were destroyed with fire and sword. A few wretched survivors were

butchered wholesale, and some eaked out of wretched and fearful existence.

So this old law essentially tells a tale of wholesale devastation, and driving out of

the British inhabitants of the islands. Now at the history of England, we've become

accustomed to using ten sixty-six and all that by Seller and Yatman, and they give

us the guts of the story, thus. The brutal Saxon invaders drove the Britons

westward into Wales and compelled them to become Welsh. It is now considered doubtful whether

this was a good thing. So we're going to spend today's episode

looking at England's very own creation myth, the legend of where we've come from,

our birth, as it were. Because the traditional story does indeed have

it that the monoliths that stand silently on Salisbury plain, though part of our history

of course, are left by a lost and forgotten race, not by our forefathers. That those people

were driven out to the west by a mass migration of Germanic tribes, pushed out Cornwall and

...