The Ghost Kingdoms of England ....... on the wireless

This is one to listen to.

 Replica of the helmet from the Sutton Hoo 

It is the first of a series of four on the old English Kingdoms. This Union: The Ghost Kingdoms of England is on Radio 4 and broadcast over for the next three Wednesdays.

"With current debate about the stability and durability of the United Kingdom, Ian Hislop felt it was a good time to explore how it was that England, the core of that union, came to be. In this series he tells the story of four great Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex, celebrating their golden ages and trying to understand their journey from groupings of assimilated peoples from across the North Sea to powerful kingdoms, and ultimately a single entity.

In spite of a relatively limited written record, it's a period of history that is being constantly re-written, thanks to the impact of new archeological techniques and the rise of the amateur detectorists. Ian hears from authorities on the early medieval period including Michael Wood, Marc Morris, Janina Ramirez and the British Museums curator of Medieval coinage, Gareth Williams, as well as talking to people with local interests in the Anglo-Saxon story.

Sutton Hoo Gold Shoulder Clasp

He's on the look out for ways in which these regional identities have left a mark beyond the occasional use of their names for utility companies or railway services, and he explores the factors that kept the Kingdoms apart but eventually drew them together; common enemies, a unifying language, the church and the residual aspiration to be as the Romans once were.

In today's programme he begins in Colchester, a Roman stronghold which the arriving Angles and Saxons chose to leave alone. But not far up the coast is the place that revolutionised the study of Anglo-Saxon history when it was excavated just before the 2nd World War - Sutton Hoo. Was this the burial of one of the earliest of the great Kings of the Anglo-Saxon period in East Anglia's golden age".

Picture; Photograph by Gernot Keller,2008, of the replica of the helmet from the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, produced for the British Museum by the Royal Armouries, I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license, and Sutton Hoo Gold Shoulder Clasp, https://www.flickr.com/people/robroy/ or http://www.roblog.com

*This Union: The Ghost Kingdoms of England, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000ydlb