ABSTRACT
There are several good reasons why Britain in the first millennium ad should provide a rewarding case-study for the themes with which this book is concerned. The island conveniently forms a discrete study area whose limits are unambiguous, so that procedural choices which could seriously affect the study of heterogeneity within some other nominated unit, like ‘Germany’ or ‘Scandinavia’ or ‘Eastern Europe’, pose no problem. The important relationship (according to modern conceptions) in geographically large-scale cultural systems between centre and periphery is represented on the island, by an agriculturally rich South which historically has repeatedly integrated and re-integrated itself with the dominant cultural trends of adjacent Continental Europe, and a North and West that seem equally ready to persist in being different. In the first millennium ad Britain moved from the prehistoric Iron Age to the historical Middle Ages, and at the same time passed under the successive dominance of three major ‘powers’: that is, of the Celtic, the Roman and the Germanic cultural identities that dominated late prehistory, ancient history and early medieval history in Western Europe.
