Historical perceptions of post-Roman Britain: A stud

This survey investigates how historians viewed the events that transformed Roman Britain into England and what influenced those perceptions. The survey does not focus on what happened in fifth-and sixth-century Britain because, with few extant reliable sources, the actual events remain obscure. How scholars from the fifth to the fifteenth-centuries viewed post-Roman events has been analyzed, but historians' views from the sixteenth-century to the present have been neglected and the literature is meager. Through an examination of histories of Britain published from the late sixteenth to the twentieth-centuries, major influences on historians' perceptions of fifth-and sixth-century Britain can be identified and the strength of those influences determined. The survey identifies two dominant themes: myths of national origin and archaeology. It begins with Raphael Holinshed and ends with archaeological and historical investigations to determine the extent of deurbanization and depopulation in the fifth and sixth century.