 I will think carefully for taking my paper. It's one I've had in mind for a very long time. This image is believed to represent King Ethelbald of Mercia, who died in 757. The Biddles have argued that it shows him mounted in the pose of a late Roman emperor with a Roman haircut, diadem and military skirt, with a Celtic moustache and with a Germanic male shirt, Mae'r ddweud y ddymarthol yn edrych cyfnodol yn gyfnodol o'r Llywodraeth Cymru yn ddechrau'r ddechrau'u cyfnodol ymlaen, yn ddylchol'r pethau ar gyfer y ddysgu sydd wedi'u ddysgu. Mae'r cyfnodol yn cyfnodol ar y 5th a 6th Cymru a'r mynd i fwyloedd i'r Rhwyth West Europe yw'u wath o'r dyfodol yw'r lleigiaeth lleidol yn sefydlu'r ddechrau yn dyfodol i Romain-Brytyn. The first section of this paper begins with a re-examination of the premises and arguments underlying that discourse. The second explores its relevance in interpreting the early medieval history of the East Angliau and Finland landscape. Although most modern scholars recognise the diverse origins of early medieval immigrants into Britain, acknowledge the influence of Romano-British traditions in the material culture of the period, discuss the scale of the Adventus in relatively limited terms, and accept the impact of indigenous languages on Old English. The principal historiography of the period remains based on three premises. The first is that the cultural traditions of Romano-Britans and Anglo-Saxons could be and were distinguished at the time. The second is that the latter, the Anglo-Saxons, seized political and social ascendancy over the Romano-Britans. And the third is that the newcomers were able to achieve that dominance because their cultural characteristics, their ethnicity fitted them better for leadership than those whom they supplanted. So part one of this section of my paper makes a critical evaluation of two sets of arguments. The first is the appropriateness for early medieval England of analogies of 20th century South Africa. And the second discusses evidence for ethnicity as a social value in early medieval England. Well now, as far as I can establish, social relations between Romano-Britans and Anglo-Saxons were first described as apartheid-like by Nikolas Heim in 1992 and most recently by Heinrich Herker in 2011, and it's an argument that consistently bubbles up. Now apartheid was a system formally imposed in South Africa between 1948 and 1994. It was based on the plainly wrong and deeply pernicious belief that cultural characteristics could be identified with visible biological characteristics. Yet a comparison of the wording used by Heim and others with that of the International Criminal Court suggests that they intended the term as a precise description. Now then apartheid depended on extensive detailed discriminatory legislation enacted to control all practical aspects of an individual's life including legal rights, place of residence, personal relationships, employment, access to amenities and public behaviour. It was supported by highly complex state institutions themselves underpinned by an extensive administrative and technical bureaucracy that included large numbers of informers. And it was enforced through institutionalised state violence, a police state that employed amongst others in definite detention without trial, torture, isolation and banishment, terror and murder. There is simply no evidence for any semblance of apartheid in early medieval England. The term is moreover laden with further meanings which cannot apply here. Its use is as inappropriate, offensive and tasteless as any analogy with discrimination against Jews under the Third Reich might be. And it should permanently be discarded. I hope I never hear of it again. Now three sets of evidence are conventionally cited for the importance of ethnicity in early medieval England by both archaeologists and historians. There are terms in the late 7th century laws of King Ena of Wessex interpreted by modern historians as ethnic descriptors. The dominance of the old English language and attempt to reconstruct the history of post Roman migration into Britain from modern DNA. So I'm taking each of those in turn. How solid is that evidence? Well now Ena's laws are considered to offer definitive proof of ethnicity in 7th century England. There are one of four law codes all based on elements of Romano-British customary law. Yet only nine of the 119 clauses in his code use two terms that may refer to ethnicity. Neither is found in the three Kentish laws and it's thus difficult to argue for their centrality to identity. The origins and meanings of the contested terms English and Welsh are obscure. Descriptions of the whole population of England as Angli English are common from the mid 6th century and the English language was already fully formed by 600. Willys is believed to describe cultural traditions explicitly acknowledged as derived from the empire. Well now historians make three assumptions about the nine clauses that mention Willysc. That they are definitions of ethnicity. That they are intended as exceptions to the other 110 clauses which thirdly refer only to English. There is nothing in the code to support any of those assumptions unless one also believes that it was drawn up solely by and for Anglo-Saxons and there is no evidence to support that belief either. So how might the laws be interpreted? Well firstly perhaps English were higher in status than Willysc. So maybe English lives were worth more following the principle that economic value reflects social value. Or maybe the laws were instrumental intended to deter discrimination against English just as for example UK annual rate tax links pollution from cars with protection of the environment by offering financial inducements for good behaviour and punitive payments for recalcitrance. Or maybe references to Willysc makes reference to the restatement of long standing Romano-British customary law. So for example compensatory payments for Willysc were explicitly related to the size of an individual's land holding. So Willysc is for land holding while in nonspecific causes they reflect an individual's social status. So maybe those for Willysc land holdings were based on Romano-British tradition while others relating to status were adaptations of customary law to post-imperial times. We simply don't know which if any of those interpretations is correct. There is however no good evidence in the laws themselves to support arguments for the importance of ethnicity in early medieval English society. So what about language? Well now linguists explain the early medieval dominance of English from the premise of ethnicity. They suggest that first subordinate Romano-British adults speaking British Celtic as a first language learned English as a second language from the immigrants. And then their children in the second phase now speaking it in perfectly as a first language attempted integration with the world of the new Germanic warrior elite. That model is based on four assumptions. The first is the premise that ethnicity structured early medieval social relations, highly questionable. They assume too that British Celtic was the principal language of late Roman Britain. However place names and other evidence indicates that late spoken Latin was probably most spoken in the fifth and sixth centuries especially in regions in which the Anglo-Saxons are supposed to have settled. Thirdly they assume that Old English was the earliest Germanic language to be spoken in Britain. But Shriver however has suggested that a Western Germanic dialect was spoken in Roman Britain and that controversial suggestion has some limited support from the equally controversial proposition that inscriptions on pre-Roman Isenian coins make more sense when interpreted as Germanic rather than Britannic. For example Nash Briggs suggests that Ekhen is unintelligible in Celtic but immediately translated as Oak Tree if treated as Germanic. And fourthly they make the assumption that language is necessarily an index of ethnicity which is a self-evident fallacy. Not everyone who speaks English today shares a common ethnicity. Vidae this room. Whether they are citizens of different countries or citizens of one. And it seems that most early medieval Britons were bi or even multilingual. So how then does language indicate their ethnicity? So genomes. The analysis of modern genomes is often reduced as evidence of early medieval ethnicity in England and is similarly premised on ethnicity. Yet the findings cannot identify areas of Germanic settlement. The red can't identify areas of Germanic settlement and analytical models conclude on the left there that North West European DNA was not assimilated into British populations until the mid 9th century and that presents a problem since the Anglo-Saxons are supposed to have arrived three or four hundred years earlier. 2016 saw two significant critiques of that work. Geary and Virama pointed out a number of flaws in its underlying assumptions. For example, they suggested, if more than 50% of the DNA found in 9th century Icelandic Viking burials more than 50% of Viking DNA is not represented in the modern Icelandic population. How solid is the fundamental premise of the experiment that ancient population history can be identified from modern genomes? Second, Kershaw and Roveck have pointed out that the mid 9th century admixture of North West European DNA is a better match against Danish invasions of that period than of the Adventus between four and six hundred. So there is then no solid evidence for ethnicity in early medieval England in documentary, linguistic or genomic sources. Cleding to the primacy of the Anglo-Saxons as the agent of cultural change in post Roman Britain is fundamentally problematic. Ethnicity is a profoundly challenging concept. Each individual formulation is almost impossible to define because it's socially constructed from an almost infinite range of variables and it leads inevitably to interpretations based on cultural stereotypes that are themselves deeply inappropriate. So if you were to replace the Anglo-Saxons in my title there with say Welsh or I don't know Icelanders or any other term you like, you would find yourself stumbling over that list. And this application to early medieval English history is based on a fundamental misconception of Susan Reynolds' absolutely marvellous bit of writing. And finally it places such a strain on the relationship between evidence and interpretation. These are real quotes but I've anonymised them because it doesn't seem fair. This is an argument about the argument, not an argument about people. So they're anonymised. But this is basically fiction. So it places such a strain on the relationship between evidence and interpretation that scholars are forced to develop explanations of such complexity that in the last analysis they border on fiction. And this seems to me to signal a discourse at its last gas. Right, the end of my barrage. So let's explore another approach through the East Anglian coast fin basin which at the time supported the largest area of peat wetland in England protected from the North Sea by a substantial band of shingle and salt. Well now archaeological evidence shows continuous settlement across the fin basin from the Roman and throughout the early medieval period. And there is no evidence of ethnic divisions in the material culture or in isotopic analyses of burials in the region. Place names tell the same story. Old English, late spoken Latin and Bretonic place names were uniformly distributed across the fins. Palinological and other evidence demonstrates long term stability in the region's wetland ecology across the Roman and early medieval periods and longer and that environmental stability combined with a steady growth in numbers of cattle suggests similarly long term deliberate management of the landscape in support of grazing for derying. By the early medieval period most cattle were cows who lived into their fourth and fifth years while their calves rarely survived as long as 18 months. It's generally accepted that clusters of medieval vills which shared rights of common in specific areas of the fin so the black heads of the pins are where the settlements are and the sharp ends are where they do the grazing. Those clusters are believed, why be believed, to preserve the territories of fifth and sixth century polities and place names and early documentary evidence enables their identification in the later seventh century. Their names reveal identities based on a strong sense of locality rather than any sense of ethnicity because their collectivity was focused on the fin pastures that they were entitled to exploit under shared rights of property The survival of these territorial units over the next 1500 years albeit in changing contexts indicates their well ordered and stable systems of governance. There is little evidence to support the proposition that ethnicity was a fundamental value around which early medieval society, political authority or economic production was structured in the Finland. Here, evolving post-imperial conceptions of territory status and cultural identity were instead articulated in terms of rights of property in the landscapes on which livelihoods depended. So this is not to argue that the political transition of the fifth century was without turmoil that there was no change or that ethnicity was never an aspect of identity nor does it mean that cultural change could never have been stimulated by population mobility never the expression of conquest or elite replacement and was never structured around inequity based on ethnicity. In the absence of evidence to the contrary however I suggest that the default position should exclude the unsupported presumption of its agency to do otherwise may reveal more about ourselves than we do about the past. And that's it.