Appearence and tactics of early 5th century Saxons.

[Robert Vermaat]

Okay Robert. You live in Holland. So please tell me what
'higher ground' you see out of your window right now. :lol:

Lots of it. it's just so you folks who are spoilt with hills and stuff don't recognise it over here. D

Right. We have Frisians, Angles, Jutes, having their coastal farmland
flooded by the sea. Up until the 450s, they are also feeling the push of
refugees being forced West by Attila the Hun. Yet you are suggesting
that they might have migrated South East, inland, into the teeth of the
Huns and the flood of refugees trying to escape them. I doubt it.

Well, some flooding, by no means all, and over more than a century.
And the Huns never made it that far north, either. As if they would. 8)

Can you not simply accept that perfectly respected Germanic
(for want of a better word) migration-period scholars like Heinrich Harke
and Michael Gebuhr have no problem with seeing the only logical route
of migration for Frisians, Angles & Jutes as being across the North Sea
and to Britain? As for the migrants arriving at their leisure, that's not
a problem.

Well, that my problem - why can it be the only logical explanation? As a scientists, I would have a problem with that - so many variables, uncertainties, possibilities, and that's the only logical solution? Why Britain? Why not Belgium, France, Spain, North Africa - lots of folks went there, did they not? If Härke and Gebuhr really thought that way (which I doubt), I'd call that tunnel-vision (no, I don't think they saw mass-migration to britain throough the Channel Tunnel!! :evil: ).

You know I think that there was an attenuated migration over
maybe 150-200 years. But that doesn't mean it wasn't hostile

Sure, that could've been the case. And yes, a slower and smaller migration might still be hostile. Why not - pirates/traders were a normal sign of the time, and raiders and petty chiefs might be hostile to their neighbours, sure. I never claimed all had to be peaceful. I'm just againt the mass-migration (over a short time) and a massive displacement of the natives - I still see no signs of the native farmers being forced away in large numbers, leaving the land just for immigrants to start anew.

It's certainly illogical to assume that when the first Anglo-
Saxon weapons burials appear in Kent c. 450 that 400 years of Romano-
British burial culture goes out the window and Romanized, Christianised
Britons suddenly swap all their jewellery and clothing for Anglo-Saxon
styles, and revert to pagan weapons burials. You are always exhorting
people to use Occam's Razor. Well, please try it yourself, now. What's
the simplest and most logical explanation for these weapons burials
suddenly appearing? That they are Anglo-Saxon imigrants, or that they
are Romanized Britons pretending to be Anglo-Saxons, just to fool us?

I have no doubt that such reasoning lies behind the current thought - stuff's Anglo-Saxon, so the owners must be Anglo-Saxons. But isn't that a trap that archaeologists contantly warn about? That the fibula can't tell you anything about the ethnicity of the owner? [color=red]Isn't that, too, not the reasoning behing the Germanic belt-sets etc. found in Britain - whose owners 'can't be Germanics' because those very same experts say they can't? So who's fooling who? If the one Germanic style must be worn by a germanic person and the other Germanic style can't be worn by a Germanic person around the very same time, then I don't know what to argue anymore. But if Germanic buckles could be buried with british soldiers, than Germanic swords and jewellery could also be buries with British persons, surely?

As for any cultue, of whatever type, it would be a very strange thing
for them to prefer someone else's culture to their own so completely
and so immediately. The Britons took decades - if not centuries - to become Romanized (so people keep telling us). Why would they take to Anglo-Saxon culture so much more readily?

Not completely and not suddenly. Britons took centuries to be Romanised, but not all - some earlier, some later. And so it is with the acculturisation to Germanic stuff. Some went ahead (like I keep saying, fashions already started to change all over the Empire, from the 3rd c. onwards), some came behind. Kent was of course among the earliest, due to the closest contacts with germanic influences and no doubt (due to the distance to the continent), the heaviest traffic. And I kinda like Pryor's speculation (nothing more than that) that those parts of the island that took to Roman styles the earliest and the most thorough, the Southeast, also may have been easier to influence by the new Germanic styles. Not a matter of superiority, but of availability. And of course, some parts of Britain never took to Germanic styles at all.