Lesson video

Hello.

This is our last lesson.

It's six of six lessons on our inquiry: How dark were the Dark Ages? Hopefully, you're starting to get an idea of how to answer that question.

It's not entirely dark but it's dark in some ways.

Well, it's not simple and history, actually, is very rarely simple.

So, today we're going to be doing our last lesson which is on the rise of towns or the return of towns.

If we think about what happened way back when the Romans left, lots of Romans lived in towns.

Those were emptied because things got a bit nasty when the Romans left.

So, we will be covering that in today's lesson.

What I'd like you to do- same as ever.

Piece of paper, date of whatever day it is you're doing this lesson on, title, and then underline both.

Hide your phone.

Put it somewhere far away.

I certainly have.

And when you're ready, restart the video and we'll get going.

So, if you could make sure that you have the title, "The Return of Towns," underlined with the date of whatever day it is that you're doing this lesson, that would be great.

And when you've done that, please restart the video and the lesson will continue.

So, on the screen you will see what looks like a building site.

It is not a building site.

It is in fact a dig, an archaeological dig, in the middle of a town called Ipswich in Suffolk.

Now, this is not a common site but it does happen.

So, whenever there's something big being built in a town or a city- for example, there's a new Underground line being built in London or there's a new railway line that's being built or actually connecting London and Birmingham- you have a team of archaeologists who will go in and they will dig into the ground to see if anything is there.

You might be able to spot in the middle of this what looks like a building site the outlines of buildings.

Now, these are ruins.

Now, the deeper you dig, the further back in time you go and what has been found in this particular site is very, very important of the understanding of what was going on in Anglo-Saxon Britain.

Remember, we don't have a lot written down so we have to rely on the work of archaeologists to understand what happened.

What we do know happened is that when the Romans left, people stopped living in towns.

The Roman towns were abandoned; they were left to fall into ruin.

And for several hundred years, people did not live in towns.

So, when we talk about the Dark Ages, one way that we can say, "Yes, they were very dark," was that people stopped living in towns.

They moved out of the towns.

This started to change and this lesson is going to explain to you why that happened.

Why did people start living in towns, having abandoned them for so long? Now, one of the most interesting things that we find in these places, in these towns, when we dig deep, deep, deep down, is pottery.

Now, pottery might not seem that special.

We use pots and pans and plates and bowls without really thinking about it now, but to make these things requires a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of money.

So, a very good way of understanding how advanced a society is, how advanced people are living, is whether or not they use pots like this.

Now, you're looking at this pot and you might think, "It's not been made very nicely," but actually, if you look closely, there's a lot of skill that's gone into this.

Now, the shape is very beautiful, we have patterns on it, and we see the curve is very beautifully made.

Now, this pot was found- I believe it was in York and we'll talk a little bit about it in a moment but what was really important about this- It comes from the Anglo-Saxon era but it was not made in England.

It was made somewhere else.

It was made in Europe.

And what this tells us is that somebody made this pot in a different country and then it was transported across the sea to England.

And what this tells us is that there were people buying and selling things.

And what we see happening in these towns is the people coming together to buy and sell things.

So, when we talk about the return of towns, we're also talking about the return of trade, the return of people buying and selling things.

And just to remind us once again, we're talking about the period from about 400 A.

D.

until 10- Well, 1066 is when the Norman conquest happens, but we're at the moment talking around 500 to 7 or 800.

This is when we see towns starting to come back.

And we rely, again, on archaeology, especially archaeology for this particular issue, because there are not many written sources.

We have written sources about religious things.

We have Ine's laws, for example, but we don't have many descriptions of people living in towns so we really do rely on the work of archaeologists to understand what was happening at this time.

Now, here is a map and this map is of Britain and you might spot there are lots of black dots in the east of England.

Now, each of these dots represents a place where pots have been found, pots in- it's called the middle Saxon period, but we're actually talking about the period 600 to 800.

Now, we don't find pots before.

Well, we find Roman pots and then there's a period of about 200 years where we don't find any pottery and then we start finding pottery again.

And what's interesting is that the pottery is all very close to these four places: Eoforwic, Gippeswic, Lundenwic, and Hamwic.

Now, wic is the word for a trading centre.

It's the Old English word for trading centre.

So, by the time we get to about 800 A.

D.

, we have four major trading centres.

Now, they're all at modern-day towns and cities- York, Ipswich, London, and Southampton- but what's really very interesting about this is, if you look at this map, the pottery is found in very similar places to where these trading centres were.

I'd like you just to pause briefly and think, "Why is there a link between towns and pottery?" Why is there a link between towns and pottery? Why do we find pots in these towns? Well, the answer is especially the case in Ipswich.

To make pots, you need lots of people and for there to be demand for pots, you need for there to be lots of people.

So when we see these two things coming together, we see, actually, that with the return of towns, there's a link between the return of towns and the use of pottery.

We're just going to zoom in a bit more to Ipswich because Ipswich is especially interesting here.

Now, one of the reasons it's interesting is because a lot of pottery has been found and not only that but a lot of pottery has been found that was not made in Ipswich.

It was made outside of Britain.

So, what archaeologists think this shows is that Ipswich- or as it was called, Gippeswic- During the Anglo-Saxon period, it was a trading centre.

So we have people from all over Europe coming to this place in England to sell things.

And actually, one thing that the archaeologists found in addition to these pots, is the remains of a trader who was clearly from Germany.

He was buried with all these very German-looking objects and clearly he lived in Ipswich but he was from somewhere else.

Now, when we're talking about the Dark Ages, we might think, "Oh well, nothing was really happening.

It was people living in huts and having a really rough time." Partly true, partly true.

But what we see with these discoveries is that there were connections between different places, different countries.

And we have pottery like the pottery on the screen starting to be made in big numbers.

And this here is the area when we talk about the return of towns, we talk about.

We have the four trading centres in Britain, but we also have these other trading centres inside this orange circle.

Quentovic, Dorestad, especially, are these very important trading centres as well.

And the reason we know they were connected is that we find pottery made in Ipswich in these other towns and then vice versa.

So clearly, there were people making this journey across the sea to buy and sell things.

Another very interesting thing that was in Ipswich.

Not only did Ipswich buy pottery from elsewhere, but Ipswich, there was clearly a particular type of pottery made in Ipswich that was then sold everywhere else.

This particular picture on the screen is called glazed pottery and it was a type of pottery that was covered in something to make it shiny.

And what's interesting about this- This was found in Ipswich and this was found in York, in Eoforwic.

And this is actually the lid of the pot and actually the pot, they think, was carrying wine.

So, this shows that people were living quite well.

But especially what's interesting- Again, if we look at this map, the purple arrow is pointing at the location of Ipswich and the dots all represent the location of pottery of the same type.

So clearly, there was something or somebody happening in Ipswich making the same king of pottery that was then sold all over Norfolk.

And this not only tells us that there was clearly connections between these places, but also that Norfolk was part of the same kind of kingdom or country because they all kind of were trading with each other in that way.

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

Six words in the box and what I want you to do is to put the words in the correct place so you might want to copy out the paragraph and then fill the gaps once you've done that.

So, pause here and have a go at doing that now.

So, this is the completed paragraph.

There were four important trading centres called wics in Anglo-Saxon England, including Lundenwic, Hamwic, Gippeswic, and Eoforwic.

Over time, the towns became more organised, larger, and richer.

We know there was lots of trade there because archaeologists have found high-quality pottery while digging up the ground.

Some of the pottery was made in the towns but lots was made in other parts of Europe.

So, make sure you've got that down and then when you've done so, restart the video.

So, we're going to do the same thing we've done many times before which is pause the video, go to the next part of the lesson, read through the slides, and then at the end of the slides, you will find these five questions that I would like you to answer in full sentences.

Really important that you write some full sentences to get the full benefit of doing this exercise.

So, have a go now.

Write these five answers and then we will continue with the lesson.

So, that brings us to the end of lesson six of this inquiry looking at Anglo-Saxon Britain.

I hope you found it interesting and I hope to see you again.

If not, have a lovely day wherever you are.