The number of native Britons, and their role, in Anglo-Saxon England has been hotly debated for generations; the English were seen as Germanic in the nineteenth century, but the twentieth saw a reinvention of the German `past'. Today, the scholarly community is as deeply divided as ever on the issue: place-name specialists have consistently preferred minimalist interpretations, privileging migration from Germany, while other disciplinary groups have been less united in their views, with many archaeologists and historians viewing the British presence, potentially at least, as numerically significant or even dominant.

The papers collected here seek to shed new light on this complex issue, by bringing together contributions from different disciplinary specialists and exploring the interfaces between various categories of knowledge about the past. They assemble both a substantial body of evidence concerning the presence of Britons and offer a variety of approaches to the central issues of the scale of that presence and its significance across the seven centuries of Anglo-Saxon England.

NICK HIGHAM is Professor of Early Medieval and Landscape History at the University of Manchester.

Contributors: RICHARD COATES, MARTIN GRIMMER, HEINRICH HARKE, NICK HIGHAM, CATHERINE HILLS, LLOYD LAING, C. P. LEWIS, GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER, O. J. PADEL, DUNCAN PROBERT, PETER SCHRIJVER, DAVID THORNTON, HILDEGARD L. C. TRISTRAM, DAMIAN TYLER, HOWARD WILLIAMS, ALEX WOOLF