Lesson video

Hello there.

So welcome to the next lesson in our inquiry, how dark were the dark ages? So we're exploring what this term, the dark ages, mean.

And is it right that we call these ages the dark ages? And in the last lesson, we looked at what happened when the Roman Empire abandoned Britain.

And today, we'll be looking at the next part of the story, which is the arrival of groups of people, called the Anglos and the Saxons and a few dukes as well.

And what actually happened in those years after.

Clue, we don't know much.

So what I'd like you to do, as always, get a pen, piece of paper, and then I'd like you to write the title and the date of whatever day it is that you're doing this lesson on.

And then to underline both because we know it's important to keep our notes tidy.

Also hide your phone.

I've hid my phone, because if it vibrates, then I'll be distracted and not teaching you.

So off you go and then restart when you're ready.

So if you could just make sure that you have this title in your books, your sheets, The Arrival of the Anglo-Saxons.

You can put the date as well, whatever day you're doing this.

And then when you're ready, restart the video and we will continue with this lesson.

So I'm going to start with telling you about something that was found in the town of Canterbury.

Canterbury is a town inside the orange circle on the screen.

So right on the tip of Southern England, close to France, just across the channel.

Now, a few years ago, there were a group of archaeologists who were digging up an area in the centre of Canterbury.

If you look at the screen, you'll see a purple circle.

So the site was in the middle of the circle, and you can also see that there is a darker line surrounding the inner circle.

And then the lines are the remains of the Roman town wall.

So this was a site that was dug up and that the archaeologists knew that this was inside the city where- inside the Roman town, basically.

And obviously over time, this was many thousands of years.

We're talking about 1500 years later.

We have various buildings that have been built on top.

So they dug down and this is what they found.

So the archaeologists dug down several levels into the ground and they came across this.

Now you might not be able to see what it is exactly, but in this here and therefore they've taken, they've made this picture to give you a better idea, the remains of four people, four people.

And you can also see that you've got the largest skeleton with the bit, the largest girl.

And then in the middle top left, actually there's the skeleton of a dog.

So they found a dog, they found the skeletons of two children, a man, and a woman.

And surrounding these four people were all these interesting precious objects here.

So we have gemstones, we have beads, keys, bracelets, and a knife.

Now, what's interesting about this was where- what level the family is built on.

So as time passes, I'll just return here.

As time passes, layers of rubbish and rubble and earth build up.

So the lower down you dig, the further back in time you go.

So the archaeologists, they dug into the ground and what they found and not just in Canterbury, but all across England, they found a layer of black dirty earth.

Now, beneath this layer, you find Roman ruins.

Above this layer, you find ruins that are, or remains that come after Roman Britain.

And what archaeologists believe is that this layer of darker earth is where, is evidence of the collapsing towns, the breaking, the towns that were breaking down.

Now, this family was found above the darker earth.

In the darker earth.

And this tells us that they were buried after the Roman town of Canterbury had fallen about.

It had collapsed.

Now, the other interesting thing is in the grave, they found both Roman objects and Anglo-Saxon objects.

So this family, living in Canterbury, about 1,500 years ago, were wearing and using both Roman and Anglo-Saxon objects.

Now what this tells us.

Well, it's a story that we can't be sure, because we don't know who this family were, but there's a story here.

And the story that archaeologists think or some archaeologists think, is that this shows that rather than the Anglo-Saxons, this group of people, which we'll be looking at today, coming to this country and killing all the people in this country, actually, what this shows is that there was peaceful interaction and that the fact that this family were buried with both objects means that the story that has been told by historians for a long time is maybe not that clear.

Maybe it wasn't as clear as historians have been arguing.

Maybe actually what happened? The Roman empire left Britain.

We have this very, very difficult period of time for everybody involved.

We have new people arriving, some people remaining, and the relationship between the British, the local British population and the arriving barbarian, the arriving tribes was much more complicated.

And this is what we're going to be exploring in today's lesson.

So actually I want you to have a go at this.

Pause here.

Think about these four points.

In this grave, a family of four, including two young children and a dog were found, buried in the middle of the ruins of Canterbury, a Roman town.

They're surrounded by grave goods, which Romans didn't do.

So Romans when they were buried, they were usually cremated.

So they were put on a, they were burnt, whereas Anglo-Saxons were buried and they were surrounded with grave goods and they were buried with both Roman and Anglo-Saxon goods, like beads and bracelets.

So pause here and just write down maybe what you think might have happened.

I've given you a suggestion, but maybe what was their story? What do you think happened to this family, living in the middle of this town? This collapsed ruined town, not clearly Roman, not clearly Anglo-Saxon.

Not sure what happened to them, buried with two children and the dog, 1,500 years ago.

So just to remind us the period of time that we're talking.

So last lesson we talked about Roman Britain.

So the blue, the darker blue line just there.

And we're now moving into the Anglo-Saxon age.

So this is just to give you an idea of the timeframe that we're talking about.

And we're going to be having- one of the challenges that we face when we're looking at the Anglo-Saxon period is that we don't know.

there's a lot we don't know.

And this is why often historians have called this the dark ages, where we have- it's the darkness, because we don't know what happened for sure, but also the darkness, because there was this collapse in the way people lived.

So what do we rely on as historians trying to work out what happened in this period? A period of many hundreds of years.

So before 600 A.

D.

we rely on archaeology because very little was written down during this period.

After 600, and we'll look at why a bit later on, we have both archaeology and things that were written down at the time.

So the period that we're looking at today is this period where we rely almost completely on archaeology, so the remains of what's found in the ground, to understand what happened in these 200 years.

And this is one reason why we can call this period the dark ages, because we simply do not know what happened.

People stopped reading and writing.

They stopped putting things down in books.

And so instead, we rely on archaeologists telling us, like, for example, this family that was found in Canterbury, what was going on in this period.

And we call it the dark age, but actually, we find some really, really spectacular objects.

And one kind of object that we find a lot of, between at the time when the Romans left Britain and when people started to write down, are brooches.

Now, we have lots of different brooches.

Typically these brooches, they would have been a fastened to a cloak, and they were typically worn by women as well.

And what's interesting about these brooches, and I'm going to show you something about now, these brooches, they came in lots of different styles, lots of different images.

And they tell us a lot about who the people were who wore them.

They tell us where they came from, because we find similar brooches in similar places.

And sometimes, and this is what's really interesting, we find a brooch in one place that looks very similar to a brooch many, many, many hundreds of miles away.

And that tells us that there's a relationship between these two brooches.

So on the screen, we have one such brooch that was found by archaeologists.

And this tells us the skills that these people had, and you might be able to see the faces.

There are actually six faces.

I wonder if you just pause here and see if you can work out where the faces are.

So pause here and then restart when you've done that.

We then have these beautiful stars.

Again, these are quite neat.

So these brooches, archaeologists see them.

There are lots of similarity with the Roman brooches.

So these were actually made many years after the Romans left, but we have styles that would be familiar to the Romans.

So this tells us that whoever made these brooches remembered or had seen Roman brooches.

So they may well have been people that lived while the Romans were still part of Britain.

We then have a particularly beautiful pendant.

So this is a necklace that have been worn.

Now what's really special about this? So the red stone, on the stone, there's a god and a goddess, a Roman god and a Roman goddess.

So this pendant, the red thing, was made when Britain was still part of the Roman empire.

And then this was then turned into a necklace.

Many hundreds of years later, the gold was added by someone living during the Anglo-Saxon period.

So why? Pause here.

The carved red stone was made by Romans before 400 A.

D.

but the gold was added several hundred years later during the Anglo-Saxon period.

What does this tell us? What's the story of this object? Pause here, and then have a think and then restart when you're ready.

So I think, well, one idea is that maybe an Anglo-Saxon family or some people living in Roman Britain, it was a family heirloom, this red object, and it was looked after for hundreds of years, like a family heirloom that was passed down, passed down, passed down, and then eventually someone decided to cover this, to turn it into a necklace.

Who knows? We just don't know.

But what it tells us is there is some- that yes, there was this collapse.

Yes, there was this big chaos that happened when the Romans left Britain, but actually there's evidence like this, that shows there was continuity.

Things continued in some way.

Then we have another very special brooch.

This was made in the sixth century.

So maybe a hundred years after the Romans had left.

We're actually going to zoom in a little bit closer here.

So I don't know, first of all, if you can see the style, any images on this brooch.

Pause here, then restart when you've had a look.

So this is actually something that the British museum has done.

So if you look on the left, you've got the top of the brooch.

On the right, the different images have been taken out.

So what we see, if you look at on the right, are pictures of animals, and there's some pictures of animal-human hybrids and mixtures of the two, and there's a face mask.

Now what's really special about this? These kinds of images are very common in Scandinavia.

So across the North Sea, not in Britain.

So the fact that this was made, A, it tells us that the Anglo-Saxons were able to make very beautiful jewellery, so they had that skill.

Secondly, the images that they wanted to wear and show off were not local to Britain.

They came from elsewhere.

And this tells us that whoever made this brooch came from elsewhere, it came from a different part of Europe.

The lower part here, we have another face mask.

We have more animals' heads.

We have face masks on either end.

So again, we have very, very beautiful images.

We would call these pagan, so not Christian.

There's no, and this is something that we'll explore in a later lesson, but again, these would have been very familiar in Scandinavia.

So outside of Britain, not local to Britain.

And this is the story.

So we have a map on the screen.

We have the British Isles.

We then have arrows pointing to the British Isles.

And that is the direction that archaeologists and historians think people came from.

So remember from the last lesson, the Romans left Britain and then Britain was left exposed.

And then suddenly we have these different groups of people travelling across the sea from these different areas over to Britain.

So we have the region of Jutland.

If you see the blue area there.

And then if you look down where Canterbury is, we have the blue area there.

We have Anglia, so the orange.

Here's also there's orange spots there.

We have the Saxons, the red, also some red spots on Britain.

And then we also have some grey around Scandinavia.

Now, so when we think about where these people come from, we note there's similarities between what is found in Britain, in particular parts of the British Isles and what is also found in the places they came from.

Say, for example, in Anglia, the orange areas, if you were digging into the ground and you found a brooch there, you would find a similar kind of brooch in Anglia across the sea.

And that tells us that they were from the same culture.

They were from the same people.

So this is very, very difficult.

It's very hard to recreate what happened because we don't have written written sources from the time.

We have written sources, written several hundreds years later, but they're not- they're often based on memory or stories.

So archaeology is much more important for this period of history.

And then we have four more types of brooches.

Now, each of these brooches is a different style or different kind of brooch.

And we see them in different parts of Britain.

And they are related in style to brooches that we see elsewhere in Europe.

So the first one here was found in the South of England.

Now this is actually a style that would have been familiar to the Romans.

So this is a Romano-British brooch.

So again, we see a mixture of these two styles.

We have a Kentish, a brooch found in Kent.

So again, this would have been familiar in different parts of Europe.

And some similar brooches have been found elsewhere in Europe.

We have another style of brooch that was found in the North of England.

Now this style would have been common in Scandinavia, so a different part of Europe.

And this tells us that whoever made this brooch knew or had family members, or grandparents, great grandparents, perhaps who had come from across the sea, from that part of Europe.

And then interestingly, we have this kind of brooch, which is found, this style of brooch, which is found all over England.

Now, the interesting thing about this kind of brooch.

It is found all over England, after about 600 A.

D.

Before 600 A.

D.

, or maybe a bit earlier, actually, before this period, they're found in one part.

After this period, they spread everywhere.

And this tells us that this style became popular everywhere.

And this tells us, therefore that people in Britain, were starting to interact more with each other.

They were starting to talk to each other.

They were seeing things that they liked the look of.

They started to copy each other.

So when we start to see English styles, rather than more local styles, that's actually telling us a lot.

It's telling us that Anglo-Saxon England was becoming more of people were moving around more.

They weren't living in these small isolated towns and villages as they had done for hundreds of years.

So what I'd like you to do now, I'd like you to pause here.

And then for each of these sentences, I'd like you to work out what the mistake is.

And then I want you to write down what the correct statement should be.

So there are five of them and I'd like you to have a go each sentence.

There's a mistake in it.

And therefore, what I'd like you to do is find the mistake and then correct it.

So have a go.

Pause now.

Don't take more than five minutes and see how you do.

So first one, between 400 and 600 A.

D.

, we know very little about what happened in Britain.

So we don't know much.

The original sentence said we know exactly what happened.

Actually, we know very little about what happened in Britain.

And this is partly because, sentence two, very few people living at this time in Britain could read or write.

So not lots of people could.

We say very few people could read or write.

So this is one of the reasons we can call this period the dark ages is that even though they were making these beautiful things, most people couldn't read or write.

And therefore we don't really know what was going on.

Three archaeologists have dug up lots of Anglo-Saxon graveyards and have found lots of jewellery.

So the thing that has been found a lot has been these things like brooches, necklaces, beads, the things that women were wearing.

Four, one of the most common things found in Anglo-Saxon graves are brooches.

So we have this particular style, this particular thing that women often wore, and this isn't found in Roman graves, and it's not found after the Anglo-Saxon period, either.

So this kind of thing is very much what Anglo-Saxon women would have worn.

And many types, five, many types of Anglo-Saxon brooches have been found by archaeologists.

Lots and lots of different types.

In 400, sorry, in 500 A.

D.

there were loads of different styles.

By 600 A.

D.

there were fewer styles and this shows that people were copying each other more so that there were less, there was one style for a big region, rather than lots of different styles for one region.

So what I'd like you to do five questions.

So you've hopefully done this a few times before.

Pause the video, go to the close the video, go to the next part of the lesson, read through the slides and then answer these five questions in full sentences.

And when you've done that, come back to the video and we'll go through the answers together.

So pause now, read the slides, answer the questions and then restart the video when you're ready.

It shouldn't take more than 10 minutes, hopefully.

So first question, where did the Anglo-Saxons come from? Acceptable an answer, North Germany.

Good answer, the Anglo-Saxons came from Northern Germany and other parts of Europe.

Just to be clear if you don't have exactly the same words that you've written down as what I put on the screen, that's fine.

This is just to give you an idea of the difference between an acceptable answer and a good answer.

A good answer is always a full sentence.

That's the most important thing.

Two, what were important Anglo-Saxons buried with? Acceptable answer, bracelets.

Good answer, important Anglo-Saxons were buried with lots of different things, like jewellery, weapons, and other precious objects.

So a clear difference between an acceptable answer and a good answer, the good answer includes more details.

So this the main difference between the two.

Three, what did historians think happened to the local British population when the Anglo-Saxons arrived? Acceptable answer, they were all killed.

Good answer, historians used to think that the local British population was killed.

Sorry, that should be was killed, not were killed, by the Anglo-Saxons when they invaded.

So this is what historians used to think, but archaeology is telling us something different.

How do we know that the Anglo-Saxons came from Northern Germany? The acceptable answer, the styles of jewellery.

So we talked about brooches already in this lesson.

The good answer, we know that the Anglo-Saxons came from Northern Germany because archaeologists have found similar styles of jewellery in both England and- I'm sorry, that should be Britain and Germany.

That's my mistake, in both Britain and Germany.

So because they're similar, we can therefore- therefore, they were communicating with each other, or they came from the same place because they brought the styles with them.

Five, Why do historians now think that the British and the Anglo-Saxons married each other? Acceptable answer, there's a mixture of types of jewellery in graves.

Good answer, historians now think that the British and Anglo-Saxons married each other because of what has been found in their graves.

The jewellery from the fifth century is a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and British styles, which shows they learned from each other.

So if the Anglo-Saxons had arrived and got rid of all the local Brits, then there would have been, sorry, British people, there would have been no sign of British jewellery because the Anglo-Saxons wouldn't have seen any.

They would have just got rid of them all.

The fact there's a mixture shows that these different people were looking at each other and they were saying, "I quite like that brooch.

"I think I want to make a brooch like that." And that only happens if you've got people sat down talking, or maybe looking at each other or respecting each other in some way.

If they were fighting, they would have wanted to have destroyed the other side.

So writing activity, historians, we read and we write, so you've done the reading.

Now we're going to do a little bit of writing.

Do not worry.

It won't take too long.

We're going to answer this question together.

What does archaeology tell us about who the Anglo-Saxons were? Sorry, that is very embarrassingly.

My alarm just went off.

Make sure you put your phones far away from you.

So that doesn't happen to you.

Very, very silly of me.

So the archaeology, what does the archaeology tell us about who the Anglo-Saxons were? So don't panic.

Eight sentences on the screen.

What I want you to do is to pause the video now, and I want you to write down the sentences below, which will help you answer a question about who the Anglo-Saxons were.

So some of these sentences are, they're all true.

They're all useful bits of knowledge, but not all of them are going to be useful for you writing about who the Anglo-Saxons were.

So go through each sentence and see, and think very carefully, is that going to help you write about who the Anglo-Saxons were? If not, do not write it.

If yes, write it down.

So pause now and have a go.

So I've crossed out the sentences, which are not, which are true.

They're very interesting, but they're not useful for this particular task that we're doing.

So in your, in your notes, your books, you should have written down and do this if you haven't done it already, and you can pause the video to do so.

The second sentence, the third sentence, the fifth sentence, the sixth sentence and the seventh sentence.

So they're five sentences in total.

The ones, you don't need to write down the crossed out ones, because they're about the Roman empire, not about the Anglo-Saxons.

So it's definitely want to get these five sentences down.

So do that now, if you haven't already and then restart when you're done.

And the last task.

So on the screen, the question, what does archaeology tell us about who the Anglo-Saxons were? So when we write these paragraphs, we do the same thing every single time.

And the first part is to answer the question into a single sentence clearly.

So the first sentence I've done for you says, archaeologists tells us, oh, sorry.

Archaeology tells us that the Anglo-Saxons came from other parts of Europe, often long distances from Britain.

So that sentence is a clear, is clearly answering the question.

And then what we need to do is to explain what we mean by that sentence.

So in this lesson, we've looked at various different things.

There are different objects that tell us a lot about the Anglo-Saxons.

I've put two sentence starters there that will help you complete that part of the paragraph.

So the clear sentence, the first sentence answers the question.

Second sentence, this is because.

Explain to me why archaeology is telling us that the Anglo-Saxons come from different parts of Europe.

An example of this is a brooch, for example.

Or whatever else we've been talking about.

Then we can say another point that archaeology tells us about who the Anglo-Saxons were.

So if we look further down, halfway down the screen, archaeology also tells us that the Anglo-Saxons were different to the Romans.

And then we do the same thing.

This is because.

An example of this is.

So if you find this difficult, do not worry.

This is quite difficult stuff.

I do the same thing with my L-level students, 17, 18-year-olds still struggle with this kind of thing.

So the reason that practising is now is because we want to practise and get the quality of your writing, your historical writing, better.

Learning dates, and interesting things about what happened in the past is yes, of course, part of being a historian, but also a big part of it is being to write well.

So don't spend more than five or 10 minutes on this, simply write five or six sentences, based on all that we've been doing in this lesson today.

And then when you've done that, restart the video.

So pause now and then restart.

And that brings us to the end of the lesson.

So if you would like to, not compulsory at all, but if you'd like to, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, tagging @OakNational and #LearnwithOak.

I would love to see the work you're producing, but don't worry if you prefer not to.

That yeah, just because I'd love to see the work you're producing.

And that brings us to the end of today's lesson.

So I hope you found it interesting, and that you'll be tuning in for our next lesson, which will be on Anglo-Saxon society.

Do not forget to do the quiz and I will see you next time.