Early England through silver spoons, marsh saints and omens
Anglo Saxon England Podcast works through early English history in numbered series, from the Fens and Sutton Hoo to the old calendar and Cerdic of Wessex. It quotes chroniclers such as Bede, asks what the Wessex chronicles gained from their founding story, and finds room for a joke about larder cake.
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Anglo Saxon England Podcast is a history series on early medieval England, its episodes numbered by series and part. What it offers is texture. Episodes settle on a find, a landscape, a custom or a contested founder and work outward from there. The Sutton Hoo material turns on a silver platter and a pair of silver spoons found in 1939, one inscribed in Greek letters with the name Paul and the other with Saul. It then moves to Rendlesham, where archaeologists in 2022 uncovered the foundations of a timber building 23 metres long and 10 wide that may have been a royal hall. Bede supplies the human detail: a king who hedged his bets with one altar for Christ and another for his old gods, while his unnamed wife led the opposition to the new faith. In the Fens the story follows Guthlac, a warrior who gave up the world for a hermitage and was remembered for battling monsters and demons in the marshes. The narrator suggests local wildlife may be the likelier explanation, and leaves the demons to anyone who prefers them. Then the Viking great heathen army sacks the three Fenland monasteries in 870, the abbeys return a century later as Benedictine houses, and Hereward the Wake makes his rebel base on the Isle of Ely as the Fens hold out against the Conqueror. The seasons episode is lighter. It notes that New Year's Day fell on 25 March until 1752, that New Year superstitions drew mockery as far back as an Anglo-Saxon monk, and that a sunny second day of Christmas promised easy gold. A vow to give up larder cake, the narrator predicts, lasts until about the third of January. Source criticism runs under the storytelling. The Cerdic episode, credited to Paul Harper, airs the view that the Wessex chronicles wanted an earlier start so the kingdom would not look like a laggard beside Kent and Sussex. It also asks why Cerdic's son Creoda is named in some records and ignored in others, and follows place-name research tying a Mercian Creoda to Penda. The episode titled '2.9 Norman Transformation?' turns to Wulfstan, whose Sermon of the Wolf read the Viking invasions under Svein and Cnut as God's judgement on the English. His lament that the old ways had been lost gets glossed, drily, as a longing for the good old days. Others are credited by name: Marie is thanked for the Fens episode, her material runs through the Sutton Hoo one, and her Facebook group, Anglo-Saxon History and Language, gets a recommendation. Paul Harper's book on Cerdic is recommended at the close of his episode, and an editor's note sends listeners to a Rendlesham episode of the sister series, The History of England podcast. What a listener gets is early England at close range: a spoon, a marsh, a sermon, a calendar quirk, each held still long enough to be looked at.
Made for: Suits a listener who likes early medieval history tied to specific finds, places and texts, and who enjoys a narrator willing to question a chronicle and slip in a quiet joke in the same stretch.
What sets it apart: It stays with a single find, landscape or custom, from a pair of engraved spoons to a Fenland hermit, and reads its sources for motive as well as record, asking what a chronicle gained from telling a story its way.
Series 1 is a concise social and political history of England from the 5th to 11th centuries. Series 2 is a social history how society and lordship worked during and directly after the migration period. It then looks at how that culture evolved, as the impact of economic development and the Viking invasions wrought changes in lordship and political structures. It looks also at the landscape - how it affected peoples' lives, how the Anglo Saxons shaped it in turn - and some of the marks ordinary people left for us to see today. And lastly, it considers whether the Norman conquest effected deep change or merely accelerated processes already underway. Sister series of The History of England pod…
Two altars in one temple: just the sort of royal hedge you'd want explained.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A shadowy founder, a rival kingdom, and a possible ring ditch burial make Wessex's origin story intriguingly unstable.
The episode treats Churdick as a half-lit sixth-century founder whose role in Wessex's beginnings may owe as much to later record-making as to anything he did.
A marshland history where Guthlac's hermitage and Ely's resistance turn geography into legend.
Fenland history lands here as a marshbound chain of hermits, monsters, monasteries, and resistance. Marie Hilda follows Guthlac from a wilderness hermitage troubled by demons into the later shocks that reshaped the region: the Viking sacking of the Fenland monasteries and the…
A royal burial reveals Radwald's uneasy bargain between Christian allegiance, ancestral gods, and political power.
Sutton Hoo opens here as more than a spectacular burial. It becomes a route into King Radwald's divided world, where Christian silver, pagan ritual, royal authority, and Bede's later account sit in uneasy tension.
Wulfstan's anxious writings make social change feel like a crisis of authority.
English society under Danish pressure sits at the center of this episode, seen through Wulfstan's anxious moral and political writing. The discussion connects The Sermon of the Wolf to Viking invasions by Svein and Cnut, then moves into Jethuncthu and Institutes of Policy, where…
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Berlin history, fast banter, sharp human detail.
Paul Harper's Cerdic argument dates Cerdic's landing to 532 and his reign to 538, then ties that chronology to a 19-year Easter cycle and a 38-year backdating pattern.
Anglo-Saxon England Podcast episode 3.3 uses Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World to trace how Bede and later English writers divided the year into seasonal systems, from two seasons to four, and from winter centered on 7 November to 7 February.
Anglo-Saxon England Podcast’s “3.2 The Fens - Home to Monsters and Hermits” maps the Fens as a wetland of eels, lodes, and monastic power, using Peterborough, Ely, Crowland, and Thorny as concrete examples.
Series 3 of the Anglo-Saxon England podcast opens with Marie Hilder’s account of Sutton Hoo, framed through her Anglo-Saxon History and Language Facebook group and David’s visit to the British Museum treasures.
The episode argues that late Anglo-Saxon England was already moving toward intensified lordship, with Audgar in the Benson Hundred cramming five ploughs onto land meant for four and using Gangstown pasture to shift resources.
Episode 2.8 of the Anglo Saxon England Podcast contrasts central England's 'Planned Countryside' or champion land with the 'Ancient Countryside' on either side of it, using the Benson area of South Oxfordshire as a worked example.
The host traces how Anglo Saxon kings, pressed by the Viking wars and Alfred's burghal system of 31 burhs in Wessex, 'privatized' royal land by granting estates to servants called thegns.
Anglo Saxon England Podcast episode 2.6 contrasts the unfree tenants of 'inland' estates with free 'warland' holders, who owed the king three public services: military service, bridge repair and fortification repair.
A podcast episode about Anglo-Saxon England history, with a promotional segment for a 2025 history tour of Yorkshire.
This episode discusses the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, with a humorous introduction about the podcast's tour and a sponsor ad.
This episode continues the story of Penda of Mercia, covering his career and the political landscape of 7th-century England.
This episode begins with a promotional announcement for a 2025 history tour of Yorkshire, followed by ads, before presumably continuing the series on Anglo-Saxon England.