Meeting the Anglo-Saxon Danny La Rue

ANTHROPOLOGIST Richard Rudley did a spot of grave-robbing as he continued to find out the truth about the so-called barbarians - the invaders that followed the Romans - in our history books. His mission, in this three-part series, is to discover if they arrived armed to the teeth as an army of invaders or rowed over, a few at a time, as migrants over a longer period of time.

An Anglo-Saxon cemetery, discovered in a North Yorkshire sand quarry, provided plenty of clues - although, as he told us, when you're dealing with people who never wrote anything down, you have to look for clues wherever you can.

For some time, early Anglo-Saxon England was generally seen as a primarily pagan society living in scruffy little farmyards, eking out a living on the land. The pointers now indicate huge villages populated by relatively well-off people with links to people not only in this country but abroad.

Some 220 burials, covering four centuries of Anglo-Saxon settlement, were found at the cemetery at West Heselton. The evidence challenged conventional ideas. A female was found buried with two spears, and a male with brooches and beads in an intriguing reversal of what you'd expect. Clearly the Anglo-Saxons had their own versions of Xena Warrior Princess and Danny La Rue.

Rudley's historical trail took him to archaeological ironsmith Hector Cole to learn the Saxons were doing things with sword blades 600 years before the Samurai. A blade could literally cut a man in half.

"They would take arms off and legs off. There's a recorded incident of someone cleaving his opponent from shoulder collar to the hip," said Cole. "So they worked," observed Rudley, a man not given to much levity.

This was a terribly serious history lesson despite the director's insistence on cutting to black-and-white inserts and wobbling the camera around from time to time. Peeling away the myths and legends surrounding the Dark Ages, Rudley decided that the Anglo-Saxons' greatest legacy was the English language.

Not something everyone would agree with, given the plethora of four-letter Anglo-Saxon words banded about these days.