Professor Rob Collins

And it's a speculation, but I think that actually that sense of a Roman frontier identity, those limitinae,

I wonder if that pervades much longer, is a sense of identity, this proud warrior tradition.

They don't need to look to the incoming Germanic migrants for a new warrior tradition because the men here already had it.

Compared to, say, the former villa owners in the south of England who maybe were not proud warriors.

Very potentially.

I mean, York is a triple threat in the fourth century and around 500.

It's the seat of the Roman governor, the civilian Roman governor of Britannia Secunda.

It's the seat of an archbishop, of a Christian bishop.

And it's also, we presume, the seat of the duke's Britanniarum.

So it's got civilian authority, military authority, and religious authority.

So York is a really significant location.

And the fact that York retains its significance through the ages, I think, shows that enduring investment in the place.

You could very much have a Dukes Britannia arm figure in that power sustained in York.

And I think there are kind of, you could say, three or four key early medieval kingdoms that we should mention.

One we've already mentioned is Dera, and that does seem to be centered broadly in York and in the greater Yorkshire region.

The other is, we call it Bernicia.

That's kind of the Anglo-Saxon name, but like Dira, it's derived from a British linguistic term, Brenech.

We don't know exactly where it is, but we tend to think of it as Northumberland, but it could be the east end of Hadrian's Wall.

We don't really know.

We tend to associate it with Bambra, but Northumbria is the coalescence, the unification of Dira and Bernicia.