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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

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The Essay: Anglo-Saxon Portraits

The Essay: Anglo-Saxon Portraits: Episode 1: Vortigern

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Anglo-Saxon Portraits

Episode 1

Episode 1: Vortigern

Vortigern

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Discussion on Vortigern, the king often blamed for inviting the first Anglo-Saxon invaders

Professor Barry Cunliffe discusses Vortigern, the king whom history has often held responsible for inviting to the British Isles the first Anglo-Saxon invaders.

Portraits of thirty ground-breaking Anglo-Saxon men and women.

The Anglo-Saxons are somewhat out of fashion, yet the half millennium between the creation of the English nation in around 550 and the Norman Conquest in 1066 was a formative one.

This major new series for BBC Radio 3 rediscovers the Anglo-Saxons through vivid portraits of thirty individuals. 

Contributors include Nobel prize-winner Seamus Heaney on the Beowulf bard; departing Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams on the first Archbishop of Canterbury, St Augustine; writer David Almond on the oldest surviving English poet, Caedmon; Michael Wood on King Alfred; Martin Carver on Raedwald; Richard Gameson on Eadfrith the Scribe; Helena Hamerow on the peasant-farmer; Geoffrey Robertson QC on the law-makers. 

1.Vortigern: Barry Cunliffe on the king whom history has often held responsible for inviting in the first Anglo-Saxons.

Vortigern is one of the few Britons known to us by name from the transitional period between the end of Roman rule in around 400 AD and the consolidation of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the early 6th Century. 

He has traditionally had a bad press, having apparently invited in the legendary Anglo-Saxon brothers, Hengist and Horsa, hoping they would protect the country from barbarian attack. Of course his plan of containment failed. The rest is history. 

But Barry Cunliffe, Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford, believes Vortigern has been unfairly demonised. Against a backdrop of fading Roman rule, papal attempts to enforce a single version of Christianity, and coastal raids by migrants from across the North Sea, he paints a vivid portrait of a dynamic and individualistic king battling against the odds as one era of British history drew to a close and another began. 

Producer: Beaty Rubens.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Portraits of ground-breaking Anglo-Saxon men and women from the era between 550 and 1066AD

Series of portraits of ground-breaking Anglo-Saxon men and women from the era between 550 and 1066AD

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Episode 1: Vortigern

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