I'm exploring one of the most mysterious and misunderstood periods in British history.
For 200 years after the Romans left our islands in 410 AD,
our country was plunged into what became known as the Dark Ages.
The turmoil transformed the nation,
but we know almost nothing about it.
The legends tell of a lawless land, warring tribes and a legendary leader -
King Arthur.
But how much truth is there in the stories?
And what was Dark Age Britain really like?
Now, new discoveries promise to transform our understanding of the Dark Ages.
That is Tintagel,
an island sticking out on this wild remote Atlantic coast of Cornwall.
Archaeologists are now finding evidence that up on the top of Tintagel,
there was not just a settlement during the Dark Ages, but a seat of power.
I'm going to discover what we really know about Dark Age Britain.
I've got exclusive access to the Tintagel excavations, combined with
the latest scientific analysis,
including pioneering landscape archaeology...
It's just absolutely phenomenal.
We've got continuous occupation all along this strip, which is immense.
..genetics...
It was one of those total wow moments that was really exciting.
...and even a spin-off from particle physics...
And that, of course, is the power of archaeology.
..revealing just how pivotal the fifth and sixth centuries were
in creating the Britain that we know today.
We're not looking at an abandoned landscape of desperate poverty.
It's not necessarily the truth.
It's about as far removed from history as you can get.
Modern archaeology is finally writing the true history of King Arthur's Britain.
This is what we think we know.
In 410 AD, Britain suffered a cataclysm.
After nearly 400 years of Roman rule, the aristocracy,
troops and bureaucrats simply upped and left.
Dies tenebrosa sicut nox.
It's a brilliant, evocative way
of saying, "Welcome to the Dark Ages".
Without Roman money, the economy collapsed.
The roads and towns of Roman civilisation were abandoned.
That's a massively dramatic change in the British landscape.
Politically, economically - everything.
Native Britons who had lived to serve the Empire for four centuries
now had to fend for themselves.
There is a real sense that there is no one state authority
controlling everything.
And that's about it.
The period is called the Dark Ages because, after the Romans left,
recorded history stopped.
Records of who lived in Britain are blank.
For the period 400-600, that's 200 years,
that's eight, ten generations,
we know the names of...
You can kind of count them on two hands.
And the written records we do have are badly damaged and hard to read.
For the whole of the period 400 to 600, in the British Isles we have
two or three people whose writing we have fragments of.
According to the fragments, within a decade, Germanic invaders -
the Angles, Saxons and Jutes -
swept into our islands from Northern Europe,
destroying everything in their path.
When the Romans go, it is just chaos.
There's plagues, there's civil war -
the Saxons are just slaughtering everybody.
So it's real blood and thunder stuff.
SCREAMING
CLASHING METAL
In those early writings, a British hero, the great King Arthur,
emerges to unify his people and repel the invaders.
But the challenge for historians is how to know if there's any truth to
the written evidence.
The written histories are patchy and unreliable. Instead,
it's archaeology which is uncovering the hidden secrets in our
landscape and revealing the story of Britain in the Dark Ages.
On the dramatic Cornish island of Tintagel,
a new excavation looks like it will provide important answers -
perhaps even a breakthrough.
This rocky outcrop also happens to be the very place where King Arthur
is supposed to have been conceived.
Over the centuries, the stories of King Arthur's Britain
have filled the gap in our Dark Ages history.
But no physical evidence for him has ever been found.
Now, discoveries being made here might finally help to separate
hard facts from the fragments of fiction
to reveal the truth about Dark Age Britain.
Win Scutt is the curator of this iconic site.
So, Win, introduce me to Tintagel from the air, then.
What are we looking at? It's fantastic.
You can already see one of the rectangular buildings dates to the fifth,
sixth century. So this is the period you're specifically interested in here? Absolutely,yes.
There are at least 100 stone buildings.
They've left simple rectangular footprints.
Is that more? Some more over there, absolutely.
They must have had to have occupied the whole island.
So it's a settlement of hundreds of people. Yeah.
These simple buildings were first excavated in the 1930s but, last summer,
the archaeologists were surprised to uncover what looks like a much grander complex.
We're excavating behind these cliffs on... These are the southern cliffs,
and there we are. It's coming into view.
Oh, there are the trenches. There are the trenches.
Fantastic. Fantastic, yes. And they're at work.
We can spy on them. That's brilliant. It's really exciting.
What a stunning location,
perched here high above the crashing Atlantic waves, buffeted by the wind.
And this is where the archaeologists are at work on the southern slopes of Tintagel,
so they can look at those buildings in detail,
try to understand why they were built here,
how they were built - and, crucially, what they were used for.
The archaeologists will dig for five weeks,
gathering the evidence to make a detailed reconstruction of life
on this site.
We're going to build a virtual 3D model of this citadel back in the
fifth century. We're going to bring Tintagel out of the Dark Ages, back to life.
Jackie Nowakowski is the excavation director.
Once we started taking off the turf,
the stone walls started to appear quite quickly.
So it's been buried over 1,400 years ago,
and now we're uncovering it for the first time.
So are these buildings different from the ones that have been found elsewhere?
Absolutely. On the island, they're completely different in terms of build, character,
and the amount of sheer investment that's gone into their build.
And they're substantial, well-built walls, aren't they?
Yeah, they're extraordinary. They're over a metre wide,
and you can see that they're made of large blocks of slate.
Yeah. Very blocky material, and you've got them laid horizontally,
forming a really nice coursed wall.
These buildings were built to impress, I think.
Right, yeah. And they're part of this larger complex of other buildings
that go off in that direction, and in that direction,
so you can see we've got our work cut out.
The buildings occupy a natural terrace with a stunning vista,
and the layout and style of construction strongly suggest
that the inhabitants were not ordinary people.
They do look like they're high status.
This isn't people eking out an existence up here on top of Tintagel.
This is people living well.
This is people living very well, I think.
It's all got the feel of an extraordinary large, densely populated
settlement which is maybe the place where the most powerful person who's
living in this area was resident at the time.
This eroded piece of rock known as Arthur's chair gives me a fantastic view
of these excavations, showing that there was a large,
high-status settlement here.
This was a seat of power back in the Dark Ages.
Someone important lived here.
But it's a huge leap to say that this person was King Arthur.
There's no actual proof that he lived at Tintagel.
But he's become synonymous with the site because of one important legend.
According to the story, in the fifth century AD,
Tintagel was the castle of the Duke of Cornwall, Gorlois, and his wife, Igraine.
But Igraine had another admirer -
a local warlord named Uther Pendragon.
And such was Uther's desire for Igraine that he enlisted the help of
Merlin to gain access to Tintagel and to Igraine's bedchamber.
The result of that night of deception was a child,
and the child's name was Arthur.
I've come to the British Library in London
to examine the written sources we have for the period,
including the first-ever reference to a king called Arthur.
Julian Harrison is the Curator of Medieval Manuscripts.
Here we have one of the earliest copies
of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain.
That's amazing.
There's something quite powerful about the kind of physicality of these books.
Oh, they're beautiful, aren't they?
I just love the fact that every element of this page is handmade.
Yeah. That's lovely.
Absolutely gorgeous, isn't it?
It's a copy of a 12th-century bestseller.
The writing on the tough animal skin parchment is still crystal clear.
The script is so beautiful, it's so regular.
That's fantastic.
900 years ago,
the Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth set out to write a comprehensive
history of Britain, including the reign of a King Arthur,
600 years before his own time.
Here we are. Here's the page I want to show you.
It's on the top line there.
That looks like "deci" to me.
It says "day", and then there's a new word. "Tintagel".
Tintagel. Exactly.
Is this the first association of Tintagel as a place with Arthur?
It is indeed.
I can recognise the odd word here.
My kind of schoolgirl Latin.
I can see "concepts".
And then "eadum nocte". "Eadum nocte".
So this is the...it tells you that on this night, on that night,
the celebrated King Arthur, Arturum, was conceived there.
That moment as those words appear on the page,
that's the beginning of King Arthur as we know him.
According to Geoffrey, then,
Tintagel is where the legend of King Arthur begins.
This is the reason so many people believe he comes from Cornwall.
Geoffrey tells us that Arthur is conceived when his father,
Uther Pendragon, seduces Igraine, the wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall.
Full of sex and violence,
Geoffrey's account plays out like a Hollywood action movie.
It's full of excitement, it's full of horror,
it's full of lots of things that an audience would love.
Every great story needs a villain, and Geoffrey has the perfect bad guys.
The Romans leave a power vacuum,
and Britain faces a grave threat from a new wave of invaders.
Anglo-Saxons swarm in from across the North Sea...
..ready to kill everything in their path.
CLAMOURING AND SHOUTING
But Arthur comes out of the west,
unites the Britons and leads the resistance.
The result is a country divided.
Embattled Britons in the west, the new Anglo-Saxon overlords in the east.
This is King Arthur's Britain.
You get this sort of frontier line.
This is some kind of demilitarised zone between these two constantly warring factions.
It is us against them.
It is Britons against the Anglo-Saxons.
The Britons are the ones who are defending everything that is right and good.
The Anglo-Saxons are the forces of evil that need to be destroyed.
Britons and Saxons are killing one another, and that's Arthur's world.
That is where he existed.
Here it talks about his sword, "gladio optimo".
The best sword. And that was called Caliburno.
Caliburno. Is that Excalibur?
This is Excalibur. Yes! But in the original, it was called Caliburn.
Arthur's sword is a weapon of mass destruction.
It tells you that with Caliburn alone,
Arthur killed some 470 men single-handedly.
He went berserk, essentially.
470 victims in a single rush.
I mean, that is... It's too extraordinary to believe, obviously.
I mean, he's being portrayed here as...
He's superhero, essentially. Yeah, yeah.
Geoffrey of Monmouth's Arthur isn't the Arthur that we know and love today.
There is no sword in the stone, there's no round table,
there's no Holy Grail.
I mean, all that really gets added to the Arthur story later
in the sort of 14th, 15th centuries to make Arthur a more likeable person.
Geoffrey was the first to make that connection between Arthur and
Tintagel, but the story of the Anglo-Saxon invasion goes back even
further. The earliest account was by a monk called Gildas,
and a few fragments are still legible.
He's writing in the sixth century,
and he isn't writing so much a work of history,
it's more a polemical text criticising the Britons and blaming their evil ways,
their bad ways of living with... That's why they were conquered by the Saxons.
So the Saxons are a punishment from God?
Precisely. That's how Gildas portrayed it.
Although Gildas makes no mention of anyone called Arthur,
he does talk about Britons versus Saxons.
But it's all very political,
and we just don't know how accurate these written historical sources are.
It's not necessarily the truth.
It's not necessarily the objective history,
and it didn't have the sort of academic approach that we would now.
I had hoped to find something dependable,
especially in those earlier sources.
But it turns out there are problems with all of these accounts.
They are ALL just so subjective.
But I think that there is a better,
more objective way of getting to the truth of the Dark Ages -
and that is archaeology.
So I'm going to use archaeology to test these early historical sources.
Geoffrey of Monmouth describes a frontier between King Arthur's Britons
and the invading Anglo-Saxon armies.
If great wars were fought,
then surely we should find some archaeological evidence of them
along this line that runs from the south-west up to East Yorkshire.
Archaeologist Dominic Powlesland has been flying,
digging and mapping a vast area around the East Yorkshire end of the line
near the village of West Heslerton for the last 40 years.
Clear prop.
OK, ready, Dominic? Yeah, I'm ready.
Hold on tight, here we go.
North Romeo, Romeo rolling.
Does his work provide any evidence of an invasion?
These fields underneath us are entirely filled with archaeology.
There is archaeology in every single one.
Dominic saw, in a big landscape, you needed big technological solutions.
You needed geophysics, you needed air photography,
you needed a totally different approach.
Dominic's vision was to use modern technology to map the Anglo-Saxon
landscape over 70 square kilometres.
It took 40 years.
But with an army of volunteers,
Dominic was able to reveal the ancient secrets hidden in this landscape.
His own little private air force handled reconnaissance.
Geophysicists surveyed and scanned the fields
while ground troops dug into the detail.
We've surveyed all these fields.
The surveyors have walked the equivalent from Land's End to John O'Groats.
Over the years, West Heslerton became the training ground for an army of archaeologists.
They're on every corner.
Many people started their archaeological careers there.
I started my archaeological career there.
I first came to West Heslerton in 1978.
Everybody quite enjoyed it, I think, all these weird hippy students
suddenly descending on the village
and camping in a field next to the sand quarry.
The dig changed my life completely.
I met my wife here and moved into the village.
My children were both born here in Yorkshire.
I came here 27 years ago.
I think I was about 15.
I came here for three days and ended up staying six weeks.
Ended up falling in love with archaeology,
and now I'm a professor of archaeology at York.
Dominic's idea of mapping an entire landscape through time,
the idea that you would individually 3D-locate every single artefact...
..it's almost madness, but it's brilliant madness!
Key to the process was geophysical survey using techniques
like ground-penetrating radar to map traces of buried structures.
So every single spot here is a feature?
Yeah, so all those dots are individual features.
You can zoom into this area here, click on that - we get all the finds, information.
Oh, wow. That's the plan.
This is the distribution of finds within it.
Oh, it just goes on and on.
So you've got thousands of finds coming out of every single one of
these features, and hundreds of these features.
I mean, that's a phenomenal amount of data.
Yeah. About a million finds altogether.
Dominic has been across this landscape with a fine-tooth comb.
What he's found is extraordinary.
But even more amazing is what he hasn't found.
There are no graves of defeated warriors.
No signs of a battle or conquest.
In the idyllic rural landscape in the Vale of Pickering,
life just seemed to carry on without a break.
I have never seen any evidence of an invasion.
Dominic's findings seem to be at odds with the traditional view
that the Britons were routed by an Anglo-Saxon invasion force.
Once you start killing people in large numbers,
they leave themselves lying around. You can't avoid them.
So we don't see lots of Anglo-Saxons with massive injuries.
When you look at their bones, you find a very,
very low incidence of weapon injuries, sword cuts.
This is a society that is playing with the idea of a military world,
but doesn't actually seem to be engaging with physical conflict to a huge degree.
It's such a departure from the written history which gives us
this idea of an epic battle between native Britons and invading Saxons,
and the results from West Heslerton are echoed elsewhere.
Here's a very, very good piece of science -
of all the dead bodies dug up that may belong to the period 400-600,
and we have thousands of them - men and women, children, old people,
young people - of all those thousands of bodies,
if you ask the number of those bodies that have sharp-edge weapon
injuries, it's less than 2%.
Where do battles fit into that?
First of all, we don't know how many people were involved.
Are there 30 blokes and their mates
against 30 other blokes and their mates?
So some local argy-bargy, but the archaeology brings into
question any idea of a countrywide conflict.
The data comes together in what Dominic calls the wallpaper...
..and it shows exactly what people were doing here in West Heslerton
during the Anglo-Saxon period.
It's just phenomenal,
because all of that work comes together to give you a picture of a
landscape which is so densely settled.
Yeah. Whoever lived here in the fifth and sixth centuries,
they weren't rampaging warriors.
They were farmers.
We've got settlements here, there's one here, there's one here.
Then, of course, there's this large one at West Heslerton.
We've identified 14, probably now 15 settlements.
And a completely new style of building appears in the landscape.
They're very different to the buildings at Tintagel -
not made of stone.
These grubenhause, or grub huts, were thatched wooden buildings,
and they're a style of construction that's seen right across northern Europe at this time.
So these blobs here were the grubenhause.
All of these little blobs?
You see big houses there, big houses here, lots of these grubenhause.
You also see this hamlet here, a hamlet there.
A load of buildings there.
A load here. You see, it's all joined up. There's stuff everywhere.
We know that in the Anglo-Saxon period, this was densely settled.
Dominic tells me there were 60 to 70 buildings just here,
another 270 over there,
14 settlements within 11km of where I'm standing.
Stand by to land.
I think that might be Alice down there.
Dominic's research suggests a very different story to the violent
Anglo-Saxon conquest described in the histories.
Oh, a bit of a bumpy landing there.
That's OK. Are you all right? Yeah, I'm fine.
So we've got this version of events from the histories,
but it just doesn't match up with what we find on and in the ground.
In the east, then,
there's not much evidence of an invasion and any conflict,
but what about the west?
Jackie Nowakowski and the team are now four weeks into their five-week dig.
In this remote corner of south-west England,
the team are also unearthing a peaceful lifestyle,
but one that's far more extravagant than in the east.
Ah, that's a good piece.
Oh, nice.
That is a nice, high-quality piece of tableware, I'd guess.
The rim on the bottom, that sat on the table - beautiful.
We've been finding a lot of the fine tablewares,
and even some of the dinner plates and the storage vessels containing
the wine and olive oil are being broken and just discarded around here.
Whoever they were, the people who lived here were rich.
This is the largest quantity of high-quality pottery found at any
Dark Age site.
That is really beautiful.
This was certainly not a backwater.
The culture here is clearly different from that in the Anglo-Saxon east.
This new excavation is really adding to what we already know about
Tintagel, and it's showing us that there was indeed a huge settlement
here, a high-status settlement,
and it's something that seems to be very different from what's happening
right across the rest of Britain at this time.
It seems to be the case that those settlements and burials that we
associate with Germanic culture occur
primarily to the south-east of that line,
but there are always pockets and patchworks within that zone,
and that west of that stays largely British-speaking.
Archaeologically, fifth-century Britain looks like a divided country,
but if the Anglo-Saxons didn't arrive en masse and kill the locals in the east, what did happen?
Why did the culture change?
Surprisingly, new evidence is emerging from research being conducted here.
This is Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire,
the UK national facility for synchrotron radiation.
This looks like a very strange place to be doing archaeology, and it is.
Beneath me, and shielded from me by two metres of concrete,
a beam of electrons is travelling at almost the speed of light,
and as they spin around here, they're throwing off X-rays,
and I'm particularly interested in the beam of X-rays that exits here at beamline 18.
This is where physics and archaeology collide.
Here, scientists are penetrating deep into the structure of archaeological
finds using X-rays focused to a sixth of the width of a human hair.
The evidence under scrutiny is grave goods from an Anglo-Saxon cemetery
first excavated in 1926,
in the village of Oakington in Cambridgeshire on the east side of the Dark Age divide.
Over 100 skeletons were discovered under a primary school playground,
including one woman's grave, which had been disturbed,
but miraculously not entirely destroyed, by a modern power cable.
Duncan Sayer has been leading the most recent investigation.
These are all the photographs from the excavations.
His team found what looked like distinctive Anglo-Saxon objects in many of the graves.
So we've got an adult in the middle... Yeah. ..with two brooches on her shoulder...
Yeah. ..and a load of amber beads.
And next to it is an adolescent. Yeah. And we have a child. Yes, a small child.
A small child, yeah, yeah. Makes you wonder what happened that they ended up in the same grave.
Well, it does, doesn't it?
And we've got round brooches, and we've got long brooches,
we've got cruciform brooches - we've got all the works, really.
All what you'd expect from an Anglo-Saxon cemetery - no surprises there?
No surprises, absolutely typical in every way.
But archaeological evidence, just like written history,
is open to misinterpretation.
Duncan was reluctant to jump to an obvious conclusion.
One of the problems that archaeology does have is when we find people
buried, we have tended to associate the artefacts with them.
We read those things as a sort of biography of that person.
Even your typical Anglo-Saxon brooch, the cruciform brooch,
you can't just take an item of material culture
and assume that you know what it means.
Duncan decided to analyse the brooches using the synchrotron.
The high-energy X-ray beam is focused on a tiny but unusual feature
that he's spotted on the classic Anglo-Saxon cross.
So, do the blue areas and green areas represent different elements?
Exactly. The green bits highlight iron, and the blue bits highlight lead.
The lead tells us that this is glass.
And this is a very particular type of glass working.
It's not typically Anglo-Saxon.
It's British. What you're doing is you're taking out
the glass, grinding it up and grinding into it the scrapings from the inside of a crucible,
and then you bake it into the holes, into the object, and it makes enamel.
Enamel, like this, was a local technique,
not something normally found in continental Angle and Saxon culture.
So this is fascinating, because it means that this is not an import
from the continent - it's an imported idea,
it's an imported style, but it's a locally made object. Exactly.
So the archaeology is telling us that what looks typically Anglo-Saxon
is actually much less straightforward.
It means we can't just assume that these skeletons belong to Anglo-Saxon incomers.
Something more complicated is going on.
Duncan wanted to understand where the skeletons came from,
so he turned to another modern technology - ancient DNA analysis.
Skeleton 82 turned out to be a close match with Dutch and Danish genomes.
Her DNA fits the traditional idea of what an Anglo-Saxon should be.
But skeleton one is genetically closer to earlier Iron Age Britons.
Skeleton 96 is an even bigger surprise,
with mixed Northern European and native British ancestry.
The cemetery at Oakington shows that there were some incomers then,
but they didn't suddenly replace the Britons in the east -
they mixed with them over time.
This is not a period when people would have known that they were
members of a particular nation state.
Nation states didn't exist.
People didn't have passports -
they weren't citizens of one country or another.
People would probably not have thought of themselves as Britons or
Anglo-Saxons. They would probably have thought of themselves in a much
more local way than that.
Jeffrey's account of Arthur defending the ancient Britons
against an invading army needs a rewrite.
The archaeology is telling us that there wasn't a sudden huge influx of
Anglo-Saxons resulting in mass conflict.
Instead, there was always contact and migration.
So not invasion, but settling and farming.
There are people coming across the North Sea,
but they're not entirely replacing the group that are here.
They're bringing new styles, new ideas,
new ways of talking, new religions,
which are adding to the mix that's already here.
It's not a full-scale, you know, replacement of one culture by another.
People are trading, intermarrying, even swapping fashions.
We're seeing Britons adopting Saxon-style brooches,
we're seeing Saxons adopting Roman-style brooches.
These things wouldn't have been these very clear-cut identities that we ascribe to today.
It would have been much, much more complex than that.
Eastern Britain is trading with the Germanic world, with the Saxon world,
with Scandinavia. That's where their fashions,
that's where their trade is being connected to.
In a time of great change, new settlers were perhaps welcomed,
People live in settlements -
whether you want to call them villages or hamlets or farms -
going about their business,
collecting eggs from their chickens, telling their children off,
trying to keep the pigs away from the fields, and look after their cattle,
doing the things that people do,
finding appropriate marriages for their children.
This is a radically different view of life after the Romans left Britain
from that painted by the historical sources.
Far from being conquered or driven out,
the native Britons in the eastern half of the country seem to have
absorbed the northern European incomers,
as they'd been doing for centuries, integrating over time.
I suppose if you think of a sense like - take America, as an example,
you've got African-Americans, Italian-Americans,
people are adding things to the various pot that is America.
That's what's happening in Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries.
And evidence of that melting pot can still be detected in Britain today
in our modern DNA.
Researchers at the University of Oxford collected DNA samples from
thousands of people across Britain whose families had a long-standing
connection to their local area.
We tried to focus on individuals,
all of whose grandparents were born in the same area, so in that sense,
their DNA had been there at least for two generations,
and probably quite a long time before that.
Peter's team mapped regional variations in our 21st-century
genomes in greater detail than ever before.
So what do we see on this map, then?
What do the different colours and different shapes represent?
So each circle or square or triangle represents one of the 2,000
individuals we sampled,
and then the combination of colour and shape represent a genetic group.
What you see is there's one group in Cornwall,
there's another group in Devon,
there's a large group across much of central and southern England,
groups in South Wales, North Wales,
and so on as we look through the country.
And what I find utterly extraordinary about it is
that you've got all of these different-coloured clusters,
which do seem to be quite localised,
and I would just have expected the whole thing to be much more homogenous.
It was one of those total wow moments that we don't have too often
in our career, but it was really exciting.
So why is there this great mass, this great swathe across England,
of these red squares? What does that represent?
I think the main thing it represents is homogeneity.
That's fascinating, so we're looking at a well-mixed area of Britain,
compared with not-so-well mixed, historically?
Yes, these are areas that have stayed relatively isolated,
and here, there's been rather more movement.
Peter even has an explanation for why this area has such well-mixed DNA.
So when the Romans were here, they were largely concentrated in this area of England,
and one of the things they did was to improve transportation -
Roman roads and so on.
So we think what probably happened is that the Romans put down the
infrastructure, which meant that in the 1,500 or 1,600 or 1,700 years since,
there's been rather more movement of people in this area, which homogenises the differences.
So these groups have remained relatively intact and coherent,
whereas here, there's been so much movement that it's mixed all those genes up?
That's absolutely right.
But has Peter identified any genetic evidence of the arrival of newcomers
in this big red area in the east of the country?
Do you think this pattern of red squares is explained by a massive
Anglo-Saxon invasion replacing everything that was there before?
That's absolutely not the case.
What's interesting is that if you take a typical person in central and southern England,
that accounts for about 10% of their DNA,
so we do see evidence of the Anglo-Saxon migration -
I think clear evidence of that -
but it certainly wasn't the case that they replaced existing populations.
They contributed to the DNA of modern English people,
but in a minority of the DNA that's there now.
The genetic picture complements the archaeology.
We're not looking at an Anglo-Saxon invasion and takeover,
but ongoing migration.
They're coming in and mingling.
Correct, they're mingling,
and they probably didn't mingle immediately. They probably came in and had their own communities,
and then, over hundreds of years, intermingled, and that DNA got spread.
So we've got a clearer picture of life in the east of Britain
during the Dark Ages, but what about the west?
Why does Tintagel seem so special,
and why is King Arthur so strongly connected with the place?
This is Fort Cumberland.
Built in the 18th century to protect Portsmouth Docks,
it's now the home of Historic England's archaeology labs.
Many of the finds from Tintagel will end up here to be analysed.
As with all archaeology, the excavation itself is really just the start,
and it's the post-excavation analysis when we really start to get some answers.
There's a huge wealth of finds.
Here, we've got the pottery, the glass, the animal bones,
the plant remains, and all the specialists who can unlock their secrets.
The fort is a scientific production line,
turning the spoils of excavation into information.
From the new excavations at Tintagel,
over 500 litres of soil will be filtered through flotation tanks.
And now, perhaps we have a chance of filtering out the Arthur legend
from the archaeological facts.
Pottery specialist Maria Duggan is one of the experts who's been
looking at clues hidden in the most basic of items - pots and plates.
So this is our really characteristic fineware form for that late fifth
century, early sixth century, and we've got about
14 vessels of the same form, all slightly different.
So that's a bowl, is it? Yeah, it's a big dish,
so it's actually quite big. It's probably about 30 centimetres.
The distinctive shape tells Maria that this bowl is far from local.
So that's coming from Turkey? Sort of western Turkey, yeah.
Yeah. It's come a long way.
This fragment of pot is connecting Tintagel to what would then have
been the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire.
And there are many hundreds more pieces to examine.
The vast majority of the finds are amphorae,
so they're storage vessels for transport of wine or olive oil,
things like that. Yeah.
Also, other fineware, so we've got some North African material,
and also from South West France, so from the Bordeaux region.
Right. So it's coming in from all over the place? Yep.
When you find a blooming great sherd of Roman amphora -
and not just one sherd of amphora, but buckets of the stuff -
that tells you that there is trade and diplomacy and interaction,
and people are moving across the European landscape and seascape.
The picture emerging shows that Tintagel was well connected with
communities all over the Mediterranean, and along the Atlantic coasts.
It's a dangerous coastline, but when it wasn't too stormy,
seagoing vessels could have come into this bay,
bringing goods from the Eastern Mediterranean, from North Africa,
from France and Spain, here to Tintagel in the fifth and sixth
centuries, and going on beyond that.
The Tintagel that is being unearthed was clearly an international port of call.
So what would it have looked like in its heyday?
Co-director of the site James Gossip
has been making a detailed survey of the dig.
OK, can we have a spot height on the hearth, Martin?
Combining these measurements with thousands of photographs creates a
perfect record of the new site.
So this is... This is towards the sea, isn't it?
Yep, you can really see how
the buildings are part of a planned design, with shared spaces.
The complex is laid out over upper and lower terraces.
The other building has a ten-metre-long room,
with a five-metre annexe.
There's a smaller building next door, and a large open courtyard...
..all connected by a central trackway.
This new data is used to create the first 3D model
of the whole Tintagel site.
The complex may not look that opulent to our eyes,
but it's among the most substantial set of buildings
that's been found so far in post-Roman south-west Britain.
But people weren't just sailing to Tintagel to sell exotic goods.
Tintagel must have had something worth buying.
For the people who were coming up the Atlantic seaboard,
they would see Tintagel in the distance -
that is the place they are aiming for, that is their destination.
It's an important harbour that will
give them the resources that they want.
Whoever controlled Tintagel had access to a rare commodity,
in high demand across Europe.
This feels like a rural idyll, a quiet country lane,
winding its way through beautiful, ancient woods.
But, in fact, just over this bank and hedge lies the secret
to Cornwall's wealth and power in the Dark Ages.
This was a major production centre, just 15 miles from Tintagel.
Exploited by the Romans,
it was still in business at the beginning of the 20th century.
The secret to Cornwall's success was tin.
What looks like a natural gorge was actually once the massive
Mulberry Hill mine, 120 feet deep, 130 feet wide, and 900 feet long.
Cornwall's unique geology meant that it was one of only three sources of
tin in Western Europe.
It's one of the reasons the Romans came to Britain in the first place.
Whoever's been mining that stuff for hundreds of years is going to get
rich, because the Mediterranean needs those resources -
they will come to you to get them.
The Roman Empire needed tin to make bronze...
..and even after the Romans left Britain,
Europe still needed Cornish tin.
Whoever controls Tintagel is the head of a large financial empire,
and Tintagel is one of the big political players.
We mustn't think of them as being on the margins of anything -
they are at the centre of a very sort of dominant,
successful political world.
Trade in the west doesn't collapse after the Romans leave.
The connections to the continent remain strong,
but there's another astonishing side to life at Dark Ages Tintagel.
The evidence emerges on the very last day of the dig.
Jackie Nowakowski's team make the most exciting discovery of all.
It's a stone used to make a windowsill in building 94,
There's at least three lines. See there, an "a" with a hat on.
I think it's OK, actually.
I'll wrap it up as this.
It's very heavy, yeah.
This is an incredibly rare and precious piece of evidence.
So this is it? This is it.
It's really clear. Yeah.
That's amazing.
The letters are scratched with a sharp tool -
roughly, as if for practice.
It's not in its original position.
Probably only ever a trial piece, anyway.
Just somebody practising their inscription. Yeah.
So, presumably, once this was created as a trial piece,
it wasn't that important any more,
and was incorporated into this wall where we found it.
James deciphers the text.
There's a distinct flavour of Latin.
So the top line is here, possibly "Tito", which could refer to Titus.
So that's a Roman name.
That's a Roman name. Yeah, popular in the Roman and post-Roman world.
What does this say here?
We think this is perhaps "Budic".
B-U-D-I-C.
There's a word that's common in Welsh, Breton and Cornish contexts.
So this isn't Latin? That is not Latin, no.
That's Bretonic, or, you know, it's the Cornish word form, basically.
It's something like, "From Titus to Viridius, the son of Budic Tudor."
It looks like the inscription for a monument.
This is a lovely A. That's a really nice style.
This is the style of lettering that they're using in manuscript at the
time. It might even have been designed to be a deliberate biblical connotation.
While it might look like a stylistic flourish,
the design of the A suggests that the writer may have been Christian.
And this coming out of the Dark Ages,
when we used to think people were living in hovels, scratching around, illiterate.
Yeah, but actually created by a literate Christian elite at Tintagel.
I wonder who did it. I want to know.
Perhaps Titus.
That stone is just incredible,
and it has this almost mythical origin story of its own.
They only discovered it on the last day of excavating,
and it so nearly could have been left in the ground.
And what we've got on it, even though it's fragmentary, is Latin words,
British words, people who are literate, in the Dark Ages.
This new archaeology has revealed so much about Tintagel and the people
who lived here.
And this evidence may also help to explain another mystery -
a connection to Geoffrey of Monmouth's King Arthur.
Geoffrey of Monmouth chose Tintagel for a reason, and I suspect that was
because even by his time, it was remembered as a site of critical
importance. This is where an important individual lived -
a powerful individual lived.
So I think that's a reflection of the importance of that site.
Its political dominance in the fifth and sixth centuries AD is what
Geoffrey of Monmouth is tying into.
And that, in a way,
is what we're talking about when we're discussing Arthur.
He is the literary creation based on that kind of primary evidence.
Geoffrey's Arthur was a myth -
a construct created from fragments of a half-remembered past.
Basically, I think we have to say that Geoffrey of Monmouth is making it up.
You can think about it as being essentially the creation
of origin myths for the English people.
He doesn't exist.
He's a literary invention,
a romantic hero who embodies the ideal of kingship and not a real
historical figure.
But I think I've found something much more interesting -
and that's what archaeology is showing us -
the real Britain of the fifth and sixth centuries.
Whether or not he was real, I think, is irrelevant.
It's the period itself that is essential.
That's what draws archaeologists and historians to it.
It's so important for understanding what made Britain and what makes us
what we are today.
The biggest revolution in Dark Age archaeology has been this recognition
that Britain is fully connected to the continent all the way through.
One of the things that we've always struggled with in thinking about the
past is this concept that we're divided by water rather than united by it.
The archaeology forces us to change perspective.
The maritime connections are absolutely crucial here.
Tintagel is connected down to France and Spain and up to Wales,
Scotland and Ireland.
It's right at the centre of this Atlantic trading network.
But in the east of the country, the connections are to Northern Europe.
All the archaeological evidence points to a divided Britain.
Not fighting on a frontier,
but with distinct cultures in the west and the east that reflect their
connections across the seas.
It's an economic divide between two halves of Britain,
two distinct trade outlooks.
It's not a picture of conflict.
The two halves of Britain are looking in different directions -
going outwards rather than clashing in the middle.
I think if you look at the sea instead of the land,
and the rivers instead of the land,
I think you have a much better chance of understanding where people are coming from.
At Tintagel, the excavations are complete.
I came here to understand what really happened in Dark Ages Britain,
and somewhere amongst the archaeology and genetics, history and myth,
a new truth is emerging.
We can't treat archaeology as being completely factual,
neither can we treat history as being completely fantastical.
There are elements in there that all feed into one another and will help
us to understand the past,
and you've got to try and master all these things to really get a clear
understanding of what's going on,
especially something like the fifth or sixth century.
But the myth of King Arthur lives on.
Arthur is a fairy story who might have been a real person.
It's a myth. But it's such a wonderful myth.
It's still something that resonates today, because we all sort of need
an heroic character to defend what we think is right and good,
and it's Arthur who sort of fills that void.