When you imagine life for ordinary people in ancient Britain, you’d be forgiven for picturing quaint villages where everyone looked and spoke the same way. But a recent study could change the way historians think about early medieval communities.
Most of what we know about English history after the fall of the Roman Empire is limited to archaeological finds. There are only two contemporary accounts of this post Roman period. Gildas (sixth century) and Bede (eighth century) were both monks who give narrow descriptions of invasion by people from the continent and neither provide an objective account.
My team’s study, published in Nature, changes that. We analysed DNA from the remains of 460 people from sites across northern Europe and found evidence of mass migration from Europe to England and movement of people from as far away as West Africa. Our study combined information from artefacts and human remains.
That ...
