Chris, two of your previous books, An Age of Tyrants and The World of King Arthur, focused on Britain after the Romans and about a third of your new book on The Britons discusses the same period. Why do you find sub-Roman Britain so interesting?

Because we know so little, and have dreamt so much! For this period (I prefer “Brittonic Age” to “sub-Roman Britain”) there are as many historical theories as there are legends, and sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. Like so many people, I was first drawn to the period by the Arthurian legends. But as I became an academic historian I came to think of the many challenges (e.g. the relative lack of written records and material remains) and of the need to say something in my writing that was both positive (i.e. not merely skeptical) and methodologically sound. That’s when I discovered that the vivid and diverse society of the actual Brittonic Age was every bit as interesting as that evoked by later medieval bards.

The question of ethnic identity underlies much of your book and you discuss this issue extensively. Do you think Boudica (who appears on the cover of your book) or King Arthur would have referred to themselves as Britons? Is self-identification the crucial issue or is ethnicity about something deeper?

Boudica would probably not have thought of herself as a Briton, though she may have expressed to the Romans some sense of common insular identity by using the Latin term Britannus. Arthur, if he was indeed an historical king or military figure of the fifth/sixth centuries, would most likely have described himself as a Briton, as did his near contemporaries Patrick and Gildas. This was, in my opinion, a very important period for the formation of a strong British identity among the elites, who used it to express their differences from the Saxons (as they would similarly use the Christian/pagan distinction). Self-identification is important, if often hard to get at, but so is identification by neighbors, even if those neighbors used broad and sometimes misleading stereotypes.

The publicity on the jacket of The Britons suggests that you propose a new theory on the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain and the establishment of separate Brittonic kingdoms. Could you enlarge on this?

While Gildas and Bede have given us a “burn and slaughter” model of the Saxon advent, archaeologists have been pointing out the lack of evidence for violent death and destruction in fifth-century levels of British towns and villas. My explanation for this is that many towns of lowland Romanized Britain were evacuated in the face of the Saxon rebellion of c.450, and that this evacuation was organized by bishops who led their fellow-citizens to “lands beyond the sea” (to use Gildas’ phrase), especially to Brittany and Galicia. This scenario would explain the absence of destruction levels and the fact that we know more names of Britons living on the Continent in the fifth century than we do those living on the Island. Most of these expatriate Britons who appear in contemporary records are churchmen.

You suggest that the story of the Britons ends with the Norman Conquest. What do you mean by this?

Well, the Britons’ story doesn’t fully end at this point—I did manage to squeeze out a few more pages in the book for later years! But there are some indicators that after the conquests of the Norman, Angevin, and Capetian monarchs, the story becomes that of the Welsh, the Bretons, and to a lesser extent the Cornish as opposed to the Britons. Welsh chroniclers, for example, start preferring the term Cymry to Brittones or Brythoniaid.

In producing this survey of the period from the 2nd Century BC to 1000 AD you have clearly done wide-ranging reading. What books have particularly influenced you? Are there any recent studies you have particularly enjoyed?

Indeed, for such a wide-ranging study I am deeply indebted to the scholarship of many specialists in many fields. For the Iron Age, for example, I turned to the works of archaeologists like Barry Cunliffe, John Collis, J.D. Hill, and Simon James.

Cunliffe’s Iron Age Britain and Facing the Ocean got me thinking in terms of trade and culture zones, while James’ iconoclastic The Atlantic Celts challenged me to tread carefully in constructing a case for Brittonic identity. I think Ken Dark has made a strong case for Roman survival in post-Roman Britain in his Civitas to Kingdom and Britain and the End of the Roman Empire. The most important archaeological sites — South Cadbury, Tintagel, Whithorn, and Wroxeter — are featured in recent monographs by Leslie Alcock (1995), Charles Thomas (1993, out of print), Peter Hill (1997, out of print), and Philip Barker (1997) respectively. Later medieval British and Welsh identity, in relation to their Anglo-Roman neighbours, has been discussed by John Gillingham and especially by Rees Davies, as in his The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr and The Matter of Britain and the Matter of England.

Your book features many larger than life characters; from Boudica to Merlin, from St Patrick to Owain Glyndwr. If you were able to meet one character from Brittonic history, who would you want to encounter and why?

Of the figures whose historicity we are certain, I think Patrick would be the most fascinating to meet and chat with. He was a witness to so much: the declining years of Roman Britain, aristocracy and slavery, Irish princes and pirates, high church politics, British tyrants. He would certainly be able to instruct me about British identity in the fifth century, and we could even ask him if he’d ever heard of a chap named Arthur!

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