Welcome to the British History Podcast. My name is Jamie and this is episode 232,

5th Century Britain with Dr. Catherine Hills. As always, this show is ad-free due to

member support and as a way of thanking members for keeping the show independent, I offer

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for about the price of a latte per month. And thank you very much to Anne, Chris and Heather

for signing up already. Okay, this is another interview we did in Cambridge and actually

it was done on the same day as Rory's interview. So if you listen to that, you might remember that we

were really jet lagged running on what was it like less than four hours of sleep in 36 hours.

By this time I think we'd had fish and chips and it wasn't helping. Yeah, yeah. So we were

even more jet lagged at this point. It was it was getting a little bit rough but Catherine Hills

was very polite and very kind and she put up with the fact that once again I was a little bit punch

drunk. So see, why don't you set the scene for what this was all like? So Dr. Catherine Hills

picks us up at the lobby and we meet her and she's this old school academic. She's very

prim and put together and just sharp as attack and you can tell by every movement she makes.

And she starts leading us down this rabbit warren of hallways that just seems to never end. I

think it took us 15 minutes to get to her office. But finally when we get there and this is Cambridge,

so everything is so old and rickety. But we go into her office and it's like it's beautiful.

There's Florida ceiling windows and it's I want to see there 12 13 feet high. And there's this

big fireplace. If you want a good idea of how strange it was to go through all of these different

hallways, it felt a little bit like Hogwarts where you're just going through this this complete

labyrinth of a building with no windows, no nothing. And then all of a sudden through this little

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