No Saxon invasion?

[Robert Vermaat]

The Justinian plague in mid 6th century may be a factor. Contemporary accounts suggest that it did arrive in the west of Britain and Ireland and, if the two communities did keep separate, it may have affected the romano british communmity more than the anglo saxon community.

I think there is no case to be built on the assumption that this plague affected the Britons more than the Anglo-Saxons on the basis of 'the communities being separate'. There is, I think, enough evidence to show that this cannot have been the case across the whole of Britain, and I've always felt that this ideas served more as an explanation of the question 'why did the Britons lose'? Which, of course, is a very old question, first asked during the early Middle Ages, but never really answered.

One of the more remarkable interpretations of Anglo-Saxons living side-by-side with a 'native' British community, is that the latter community seems to 'vanish' after some time, the interpretation often being that the natives moved away or something more sinister. I wonder whether these past years the possibility of the Britons adapting to the customs of their new neighbours and thereby vanishing from the archaeological record, is accepted as a possibility? Did the British simply stop burying their dead at their old graveyard at Queenford Farm and move to the new one, or were they all exterminated or driven off, after which their cemetary became derelict? At Berinsfield, where a small overlap in use occurred, showing that the two communities did live side by side even if only for a short time, does that mean that the British continued eating differently, with more child deaths, until they vanished? Or did they, after that short time, convert to the ways of their neighbours?

The question is: are there signs of British communities living side by side with Anglo-Saxons, continuing their different practises for a long time? Comparing this to the Roman occupation of Britain, how long did the British natives continue in livving according to their Iron Age diets and burial practises, until they 'vanish' from the archaeological record - but which is not interpreted by any archaeologist as a wholesale Roman extermination of the natives, even locally?

But since we have 'moaning Gildas' who (in the best Late Antique tradition I must add) wrote about the whole nation being a slaughterhouse/funeral pyre, we have looked upon the process of Britain becoming England, as one continuing story of murder and ethnic cleansing. I doubt that this Gildensian picture is correct.