Welcome to the British History Podcast. My name is Jamie and this is episode 148, Social

Mobility, Getting Arrays and Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms.

Alright to start with, I posted something to the Facebook community that I wanted to

share with you here because hopefully, having a behind the scenes view of the show might

help you understand how and why things are the way they are. So here we go. So on occasion,

I get negative reviews, emails and comments online regarding the speed of the show. And generally,

the comments complain that things are going too slow and that I need to hurry up and get to

whatever the writer's favorite area of history is. And I have a lot of sympathy for comments

like that, since I'm quite eager, despite my fear of covering it, to get to the wars of the

roses. However, I think they betray a common misunderstanding of history and demonstrate why it's

so important to handle the story in a way like this. The thing is, I'm really not going that slow.

For example, the BHP has already covered more time in less episodes than Mike Duncan's history

of Rome. People forget that the history of Britain is substantially longer than the history of Rome.

Further, because of the way that history was taught for a very long time, people expect that

the period between Rome and the Norman Conquest to be covered in at most eight episodes. And that's

due to several issues, and here are a few that jump out of me. First, it's because the Victorians

kind of ruined history for generations through their obsession with Rome, the great man theory,

and also their general whitewashing of what came afterwards. So thanks for that guys.

In fact, they hated the period after Rome so much that they gave the era horrible nicknames,

the dark ages, and the middle ages. A second reason for why this era is generally skipped over

is because covering it is difficult, largely because of the lack of sources,

combined with the lack of coverage in the Victorian era that resulted in a positive material to be

...