Abstract

Rural settlen1ent patterns in the Early and Middle Anglo-Saxon periods Martin G. Welch an aristocratic takeover by Anglo-Saxons in Bernicia INTRODUCI10N to all the areas of eastern England to its south? The female inhumation burials of Early Anglo-Saxon There is a substantial and ever-growing literature on cemeteries were mostly deposited fully-dressed the definition of Anglo-Saxon settlement patterns. In with brooches and other ornamented fastenings of this paper I shall limit myself to discussing the north German or Scandinavian types. Yet some seem period between the fifth-century English settlements happy to argue that most of these women were in and the ninth-century Viking incursions and I shall fact British natives married to Anglo-Saxon men, consider the information available from excavated who wore, and were therefore buried with, the settlements, cemeteries and other burial sites, from distinctive dress and rites of their adoptive place-names, from written sources, notably charters, and from parish and manorial boundaries. community. On this basis, scholars willing to assume that Anglo-Saxon cemeteries actually indicate the At. the very outset I feel it is essential to refute the extreme case put fo.Ward by some archaeologists, regions settled by Germanic-speaking migrants in who seem to view this period as