The Historical Research section of this website offers details of some of my research into the history of early medieval Britain. This research tends to be interdisciplinary in nature, making use of the available archaeological, historical, literary and linguistic evidence. The main focus is on post-Roman period, and in particular on the question of Anglian-British interaction in eastern Britain, a topic that is dealt with in detail in my forthcoming monograph, Britons and Anglo-Saxons. However, I am also interested more generally in the place-names, archaeology and history of pre-Viking Britain, and in the medieval literature which purports to tell of events in this period. A selection of the topics that I have worked on recently are outlined below.

A British Polity in the Lincoln Region

There is now a significant body of evidence to suggest that the former Late Roman provincial capital of Lincoln retained its centrality into the post-Roman period, becoming the focus of a British polity known as *Lindēs. This polity was eventually taken over by the Anglo-Saxon immigrants to this region to become the seventh-century kingdom of Lindissi (a name that derives from *Lindēs), but as a British political territory it probably survived right the way through the fifth century and at least some way into the sixth. There is, for example, a remarkable quantity of British high-status metalwork of the fifth and sixth centuries now known from Lincolnshire, and the old Roman forum at Lincoln looks to have been used as the site for a British Christian church during the fifth and sixth centuries. Most importantly, this fifth- to sixth-century British polity appears to have been able to control the Anglo-Saxon immigrants who arrived in its territory, with this control only seeming to break down after the early sixth century.
See further: T. Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons: A Study of the Lincoln Region, AD 400-650 (forthcoming, 2012), especially chapters two and three; T. Green, 'The British Kingdom of Lindsey', Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 56 (2008), 1-43.

The Origins of Lindisfarne and the Kingdom of Bernicia

A variety of Archaic Irish, Archaic Welsh and Old English etymologies and interpretations have been proposed for the place-name ‘Lindisfarne’ (Old English Lindisfarena ea). There are, however, sound historical and linguistic reasons for dismissing all of these solutions except for the most obvious, that Lindisfarena ea is an Old English place-name meaning ‘the island of the Lindisfaran’. The most credible interpretation of this etymology for Lindisfarne is that the island was originally settled by Anglo-Saxon migrants from Lincolnshire (the Lindisfaran were a major Anglo-Saxon population-group based in the Lincoln region), and such a scenario can be shown to have a good historical and archaeological context in the region and more widely. Moreover, it can be argued that the arrival of the Lindisfaran here could well be identical with the arrival of either the founders of the kingdom of Bernicia or the ancestors of the same.
See further: T. Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons: A Study of the Lincoln Region, AD 400-650 (forthcoming, 2012), especially chapter six; T. Green, 'Lindisfarne and Lindsey', Anglo-Saxon, 2 (2008), 1-19.

Imports and Romanitas in South-Western Britain and Scandinavia

The archaeology of both post-Roman western Britain and southern Scandinavia in the Late Roman Iron Age reveals a degree of continuous directed trading taking place between these areas and the Roman Empire. Whilst there are significant differences between these two regions and in the nature of their Roman trade, in both cases the goods involved are clearly luxuries for the cultures in which they are found. Moreover, this trade and its imports appear to have been securely in the control of the highest elites in the respective regions. These seem to have been consciously trying to appear Roman in their usage of these items (thus securing their position in society), and the general distribution of the imports in both regions implies the redistribution of these items by the elites to their retainers, in an attempt to secure and consolidate their control over a wider region. The political importance of the imports is potentially demonstrated by the collapse in the social structure of the kingdom of Dumnonia when the trade in these items suddenly ceases.
See further: T. Green, 'Trade, Gift-Giving and Romanitas: A Comparison of the Use of Roman Imports in Western Britain and Southern Scandinavia', The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe, 10 (May 2007).

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