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mercenaries did
     indeed come to Britain to help the Britons, but it would take a prodigious number of
     ships to bring enough people to repopulate a whole island; did the Saxons also
     improvise, with the help of the British women? The best estimate is that there were
     two million natives at the time, and at the most a very few hundred thousand
     newcomers, and more likely tens of thousands. 44
    If the Britons were driven out, why is
     it that archaeologists look at the human remains through this period and find so
     little change? 45 Of course, the survival of bodies to check is an arbitrary
     business, and it is almost always easier to study the remains of someone rich and
     powerful, the kind of person who can afford a visible tomb full of famous riches.
     But even so: check the enamel on teeth, and the isotopes will tell where the
     deceased grew up, and it doesn’t seem to have been in Saxon territory; measure
     skulls and they start to getbigger only
     after the Norman Conquest; the DNA is such a muddle that the main movements of human
     beings must have taken place long before.
    If bodies didn’t change, did
     language? Such a rush of new people, all speaking Germanic languages, might explain
     why Anglo-Saxon became the base and root of English; but it seems there were
     Germanic-speaking peoples in England already, the Belgae. During Roman rule, there
     was a ‘Count of the Saxon Shore’ in Britain, as there probably was
     across the Channel in Gaul, with nine shore forts to defend the coastline, 46 but
     was it the ‘Saxon’ shore because it had to be defended against Saxons or
     because the Saxons were already there? The
Gallic Chronicles
mention a
     Saxon territory in England in 423, two decades before Bede says Kent had its first
     Saxon king. If you choose to trust Bede’s careful collection of other
     people’s stories, these questions don’t matter; but if you start to have
     doubts, they begin to seem important enough to change history.
    Bede insists on a new world in England –
     Saxon, Christian, with the old pagan Britons swept aside. The trouble is, the record
     of physical remains shows that not even the place, let alone the people, was
     reinvented. Roman sites were used again, new buildings sometimes raised over baths
     and basilicas. Sometimes the buildings themselves remained in use, which we know
     from the late Anglo-Saxon coin found on the steps of a Roman basilica in Caerwent.
     The Romans left resources, after all. Stone buildings do seem to have come down,
     replaced by wooden structures or nothing at all, but that may have been the
     aftermath of sixth-century plague and war, and their dire economic consequences. Old
     Roman towns – Dorchester, for example – were used as churches and monasteries. The
     sunken buildings that look like novelties in the landscape, and were still being
     used in medieval times, can sometimes be dated all the way back to the second
     century AD . The evidence for sudden change is very hard to find. And
     yet Bede gave the English a story we seem to have needed: the English as the new
     Israelites, crossing the North Sea instead of the Red Sea into freedom of a
     kind.
    Our very separate identity turns out to
     be an error, even a lie.
    Mind you, all the connections across
     Europe, the links that crossedreligious
     and official and language frontiers, can also be celebrated in very dubious ways.
     The Vikings are hailed as the first Europeans, at least by some French scholars,
     breaking cultural divisions as well as breaking heads, 47 and made into a
     foundation myth for our flabby, neo-liberal Europe. In this version of history
     Charlemagne, autocratic, imperial, a tycoon of the slave trade and aggressively
     brutal to his neighbours, becomes the patron saint of a fairly quiet customs union
     because at least he tried to rule both North and South. I do not think he would be
     flattered. The easy flow of ideas between individuals, the shared