Sub-Roman Britain (Cavalry etc)

[dashydog]

That means folk with advanced "better" weapons.

No it doesn't, it means people armed with weapons that they know how to use properly. It's just as likely that any success on the part of relatively small numbers of Germanic incomers was due to their military experience as Federated troops (which is why they were draughted in in the first place). A small number of well disciplined, well drilled warriors can overcome a much larger armed rabble. A good sword doesn't make a good warrior.

And, of course, not everyone agrees with Harke's 'old fashioned' ideas about the extent of a physical Germanic conquest and subjugation of the Britons. Have you read Pryor's 'Briton AD' for the extreme end of contradictory opinion? I think he's mad meself, whereas I have huge respect for Harke, especially for his work on Anglo-Saxon burials and what they really tell us.

Typed a reply before and then promptly lost it....... hell.
Pryor really makes me snigger but he is fine entertainment all right! What the Scots call a bahmpot! Harke is very good and, right now, is awaiting his stuff to be reviewed by the Royal Society in London. I think he is right. I think there was an Apartheid enforced by the saxons in the early days and probably as part of and following enforced subjugation in some places. I envisage a scenario where local foederati who stayed on (to collect their arrears in pay) contacted their mates in Frisland and Germany to come on over and get stuck in. Some of these also would have been professionals..either as mercenaires or pirates. It meant swords and metalware...what with their being Pros and all that. Wooden spear points might have been effective and date back to the paleaolithic but they didnt stop the Romans.

Harke is weak in one respect, I feel, because he does bones and graves and not social and business structures. That is because he has no choice. Our Saxon louts are pre Christian (many still are, oop ere in Northumbria!) and didnt read or write. So..no records. But, these Saxons were mighty traders..really big time. They were also mighty ship owners and builders, some of them. We always hear about the Norsk later on but the Saxons were more than a match for them.

I see the Apartheid as starting off as brutal and real as the immigrant minority of thugs takes over but softening out of necessity as people slid into a rut and the local girls seemed prettier (they always do after a while). Once the Saxon wars start in the mid 600s the apartheird, per se, is dead and more so than ever when the Danes turn up.

But, that apartheid would have been there de facto. Language, contactsk knowledge of the law and access to it. Celto Brits would have had to marry up to get into that.

Later on we saw how the Normans set us up with Solicitors (local thickoes who deal with the Brit customers and Frenchified Barristers who speak french and English and can conduct the case for the thicko solicitor in the french speaking court itself. How little we change, eh! Scots dont have it. Anyway, that is still apartheid.

And, of course, Britain was a divided country in so many ways. One truth in one place would not be mirrored by others in other places.