Author: Purple Brolly

Neighbours of the Angles, the Saxons’ own land, Old Saxony, was in north-east Germany. Their settlement of England in the mid-5th century, known as Adventus Saxonum, possibly occurred for a combination of reasons:-

• major flooding events swept away many of their waterside villages;
• mass migration from the east was putting pressure on their resources; and
• a beleaguered British warlord called Vortigern foolishly asked for their armed assistance against the Scots and the Picts, and rewarded them with land in Kent, thereby sparking their ideas of widespread invasion.

Saxon pirates had begun making raids on the inviting flatlands of eastern England in the 3rd and 4th centuries. This led to the building of fortifications (or, in fact, trading posts) along that stretch of coastline, nicknamed ‘Saxon Shore’. Evidence is scant but some say that Saxon immigration, from 449 onwards, was a vicious, tyrannical, barbaric occupation, while others portray a more peaceful infiltration.

Nevertheless, many Britons moved west to Wales and Cornwall to avoid the new folk with their Germanic paganism, class structure and brutal punishments. In spite of this, the Sutton Hoo artefacts encourage us to believe that those early medieval additions to the British ancestral family were not entirely brutish.

(Image: Adrian Cable at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Richard Cox Gough (1826-1902) discovered the cave, now named Gough’s Cave, which yielded many human remains, including the 10,000-year-old ‘Cheddar Man‘ skeleton. This was found by Gough’s sons in a side fissure called Skeleton Pit in the year following their father’s death. The family’s aim had been to open up the cave for tourists visiting Cheddar Gorge in Somerset and it is still the most visited show cave in the UK.

‘Cheddar Man’ is the country’s oldest near-complete skeleton. His age was deduced from examination of a molar. An attempt to determine his eye colour, skin tone and hair colour was made in 2015, but the technology is not yet advanced enough to produce definitive results. However, the suggestion is that he had green eyes, a swarthy complexion, dark wavy hair and that he is genetically linked to modern-day ethnic Britons.

He died either from a blow or infection and was spared the hunter-gatherers’ cannibalistic rituals that scientists have surmised went on. Instead, his skeleton was preserved under a slowly-forming layer of stalagmites. Much of the other archaeological material from Gough’s Cave was discarded, but bone fragments up to 14,700 years old indicate that red deer, horses and arctic hares were also present.

(Top image (cropped): Abhi Here at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)