Welcome to the British History Podcast. My name is Jamie.

We've got the hundredth episode coming up here pretty quick, so I think that what we're

going to do is we're going to have another Q&A session. So if you have any questions

you want to ask me, please send them my way. I'm also going to be looking into finding

a way for you to send me voice files. So if you like to hear your voice on the show,

that might be a way to go about it. But anyways, if you have any questions, you can submit

them on Facebook, you can submit them via Twitter, or you can always email me at the

British History Podcast at gmail.com Okay, when we last left off, we were talking about

a new class of elites in sub-Roman Britain. A group of individuals we identify now as

Anglo-Saxons and kings. We also mentioned the class of nobles that was growing up around

them. And we talked about how that change, the increase in social stratification, might

have come about. Well, this week, we're going to talk about the impact that the stratification

would have had on the culture that was growing in Eastern Britain. And as a way of opening

up this discussion, I thought we could talk about what we've been speaking about on Facebook.

I posted the community a question that I was certain would result in a pretty large debate.

Essentially, the question was this, do the wealthy members of our society have a disproportionately

large impact on our culture relative to their numbers? To my surprise, there really wasn't

much of a debate. A lot of people responded, but the vast majority of them seemed to

agree that, yes, the wealthy have a disproportionate impact. Now, naturally, I agreed, but I'm

a dirty Portland hippie, so of course, I think the cultural influence of the wealthy

is supersized. What surprised me, though, was the level of broad agreement from people

from all over the place. Though I think that might be because we have been living with

...