Quotes About History

twenty years since the arrival of the great heathen army that had destroyed three of the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

elements of Roman social organization may have been adopted by the Saxons

Wessex alone had survived, and Alfred had done his best to repair the damage it had suffered.

Remarkably, this Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (as it was later known) was written not in Latin, as was the practice in virtually every other literate corner of Europe, but in the everyday language that people spoke. By the end of the tenth century, this language had a name for the new state: it was 'the land of the Angles', Engla lond.4

As Bede explains in his book The Reckoning of Time,

Monasteries had been targeted by raiders from the very first because they were easy prey,

in English.

explaining how he and his wife bought it back from a viking army with a payment of gold,

Even when the libraries had been full of books,

he travelled through the lands of Charles the Bald,

Æthelwulf decided to marry Charles' daughter, Judith

In 686 Cædwalla invaded the Isle of Wight,

after the conquest he received 300 of the island's 1,200 hides for the use of the Church.

The likeliest answer is that, by the time the Saxons came to settle in Britain, they found little that was worth preserving.

It was not only the Saxon's ferocity and fearlessness that perturbed his opponents, but his paganism.

Charles the Bald, however, insisted that his daughter should receive the full royal honours.

life in Britain before the arrival of the Romans was not necessarily any nicer,

The king of Wight, Arwald, appears to have been killed in the course of the invasion,

But Æthelstan was less fortunate in death than Cuthbert, and during the Reformation his remains were destroyed

The conqueror's only concession was to allow them to be baptized in their final days,

her the title of queen, which was something not customary before then to him or to his people'.

the king had a royal residence there, and happily this is another occasion where history and archaeology touch hands,

William was a monk at Malmesbury and had evidently seen inside the king's tomb.

A visitor in the seventh century could still see triumphal arches, baths, palaces, theatres, bridges, aqueducts and fountains,