 In the sixth century England's divided into lots of small communities and these gradually coalesce into larger kingdoms. Different kingdoms are powerful at different times. BOTH the Sutton Hoo treasure from Mount One and the Staffordshire Horde are incredibly rich objects full of precious metals and gems and so on. An incredible workmanship. That shows us that the people who commissioned them had access to huge resources. They were very wealthy people. a rheswm yn y cyfnod ag ymgyrchu Llywodraedd Yng Nghaerhau a'r adegau ynghyrch, gan y gallwn gwahanol am y dyfodol. Y dyfodol yn y deall sydd gennym i gyfnogrefu cyfnograffai, cyfnograffau cyfnograffau mewn cyfeisio mewn cyfrannol. Yn rhoi'n gwneud o'r bwysig, yn ymgyrch yn twfynol, rydych chi'n gwneud gwahanol i'r gwahanol. Ac mae'n angen i'r cydweud i'r gwahanol, maen nhw yw'r angen i'r gwahanol, ond we can only see it now because we can understand those symbols. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms happened through external missions primarily. So Kent was converted by missionaries who came from Rome. Augustine came to Canterbury with a group of missionaries sent by Pope Gregory the Great right at the end of the 6th century. Northumbria on the other hand was converted by Irish missionaries who came from the monastery on the island of Iona off what is now the western coast of Scotland. Toward the second half of the 7th century Northumbria has this amazing flowering with incredible intellectual life, masses of monasteries and manuscripts and so on. Political power is always a driver for the production of great art and Northumbria is no exception and what we have in Northumbria is a coming together of Irish influence and Roman influence to produce something that is uniquely identifiable as Northumbrian. What's remarkable is how much contact there was between continental Europe and Ireland and the British Isles in general. There's lots of ideas travelling to and fro. The two most important centres of learning in Anglo-Saxon England in the early 8th century were at Canterbury and at Weermouth Jarrow. Canterbury was the centre of a school that had been set up by Theodore and Hadrian and it was there that Anglo-Saxons came to learn to be priests and bishops and at Weermouth Jarrow there was probably one of the most exceptional libraries in the whole of Western Europe at the time and it was there that Bede spent his entire life and his whole learning and scholarship was based on the resources that were available at that monastery at that time.