Has King Arthur been discovered at Tintagel? Tintagel, on the North coast of Cornwall, is famed in legend as the home of King Mark (of Tristan and Isolde fame) and the possible place where King Arthur was conceived.

In the 7th century AD, a King – it was surely no less – received a magnificent burial at Sutton Hoo, in East Anglia. A ship was hauled up from the river, a burial chamber was erected in the middle of it, and a stupendous collection of magnificent objects – gold and silver brooches and […]

What happened to London after the end of Roman rule? Bede calls it a ‘mart of many nations’ yet for long the archaeologists could find no trace of this early Saxon London. Then, suddenly, they found it. Not where they expected it, in the ruins of Roman London, but on an entirely new site a […]

Perhaps the biggest disruption in the  Hebrides was the advent of the Vikings. But what remained of them and what trace did they leave in the archaeological record? The most remarkable discovery was what appeared to be a Viking fort.

On Christmas Day 886, King Alfred, exasperated by the attacks of the Danes, finally decided to abandon the undefended ‘open’ site of Lundenwic, and to return to the safety of the old Roman walls. At Bullwharf, evidence of this very first return has been discovered, on a site already recorded in the documents as ‘Queenhythe’. […]

When did the typical English village begin? That is, when did the outlying farms join together to become a nucleated village? Professor Mick Aston has been finding out.

A major Anglo-Saxon cathedral has been revealed – directly under the flagstones of the nave of Canterbury Cathedral. To everyone’s surprise, the Anglo-Saxon Cathedral was almost as big as its Norman successor.

Norwich was the second largest city in Medieval Britain: why? In recent years a number of major sites covering more than 20 acres in all have been excavated in medieval Norwich, which between them have revolutionised our knowledge of this crucial medieval city. Let us take a look at these excavations in order to throw […]

In the Middle Ages, life was communal, and the basic building structure was the open hall. Even comparatively grand structures, such as manor houses, consisted mainly of a large open hall with a fire at the centre, where the smoke escaped up to the rafters and through the thatched roof. A good example of such […]

The medieval castle is one of the great glories of British archaeology. The finest are those in North Wales, the products of the conquest of Wales by Edward Ist, in the years just before 1300. One of the most majestic is Conwy (or Conway), and here Arnold Taylor, the former Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments […]