Hengest, Gwrtheyrn and the Chronology of Post-Roman Britain

In this book, the author makes use of the methodology he developed in Origins of Arthurian Romances (McFarland 2012) in order to reevaluate the post–Roman history of Britain. He begins by delving into the historical contexts of the key traditional players of the fifth century—Hengest and Gwrtheyrn. A better understanding of these two characters allows for a reexamination of the persons and events of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. The text that follows entirely realigns how those centuries can be seen from a chronological as well as a military and political standpoint. The fifth century was not a time of British and Germanic fragmentation as they separated from Rome, but one of slow integration and the formation of kingships that were a result of the economic realities of surviving without the dying giant.

Flint F. Johnson is an independent scholar whose academic areas of interest include post–Roman British history, Heroic Age Greek and Norse history, and the cultures existing before the first river valley civilizations. He lives in Hudson, Wisconsin.

Flint F. Johnson
Format: softcover (7 x 10)
Pages: 264
Bibliographic Info: 79 photos, appendix, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2014
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7819-4
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1338-3
Imprint: McFarland

Preface 1
Abbreviations 2
Introduction to the Source Material 3
1. The Traditional History of Britain: 350–700 9
2. The Primary Sources 16
3. The Secondary Sources 35
4. Guessing Date Ranges 47
5. Saints and Nobility in the Sources 54
6. Reconstructed British History 59
7. Reconstructed Anglo–Saxon History 66
8. The Kentish Source 74
9. Ansehis, Hengest and the Kentish Line 82
10. Gwrtheyrn, Vortigern and Outigern 86
11. Ambrosius and Guitolin 93
12. The Fifth Century 96
13. A Reevaluation of Key Post–Roman Figures 100
14. Applying Lesser Figures to the New Framework 104
15. Pertinent Facts Drawn from the Primary Sources 106
16. Celtic Genealogies and Date–Guessing 131
17. Germanic Genealogies and Date–Guessing 144
18. Pertinent Facts Drawn from the Secondary Sources 153
19. Chief Interactive Peoples 165
20. The Revised Celtic Genealogies 183
21. The Revised Germanic Genealogies 198
22. The Ecclesiastics 201
23. The Other Figures and a Sequence of Historical Events 202
24. The Heroic Age in Britain 207
25. The Age of Saints 210
26. Conclusion 213
Appendix 215
Chapter Notes 231
Bibliography 243
Index 253