CLOUD DISPELLED

Waipa Post, Volume 51, Issue 3694, 6 December 1935, Page 3

CLOUD DISPELLED

BRITAIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES,

ELUCIDATION BY THE MAP MAKER.

From the withdrawal of the Roman legions in A.D. 410 to the accession of King- Alfred in A.D. 871, a great cloud hangs over the history of Britain. Many generations of scholars in the library and archaeologists in the field have laboured to pierce this cloud, and now a concentration of all their labours so arranged that it is applicable to a map of 1 in 1,000,000 scale, published a few weeks ago by the Ordnance Survey at the very reasonable price of half-a-eroWn, says a correspondent. It shows the England which was invaded by successive waves of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians—each in turn destroying more of the structure of law and society wdiich it had taken the Romans over four centuries to produce in their most northern colony. The names and symbols cn the map 'show how Wales and Cornwall were never submerged by these invasions, and how they remained, as they do %o this day, essentially Celtic, while the eastern half of the country shows only too well, by its place-names how complete was the disintegration of the old civilisation in these parts, and the pagan graveyards of the early Saxon invasions contrast with the Christian memorials of the Celtic west.

The later Saxon bishoprics, churches, the great dykes, like Wansdyke, Offa’s Dyke, and the Fleam Dyke; the relics of the Roman roads, still in use, such as the road between London and Canterbury and the Icknield Way; the cemeteries, burial and memorial stones; the earth-houses and lake dwellings, are all shown against a physical background of forest marsh, and ancient river courses which are known to have existed at that time. This is the third of the “Period Maps” of England and Wales issued by the Ordnance Survey; the first two were Roman Britain and seventeenthcentury England. The next map in the series will be the northern half of this Dark-Age map, embracing Scotland.