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work on Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and related topics. The price is rather high, even in 1984, for a thin volume; though we can hardly blame the author. Current concern with the period from 300 to 700 A.D. in England and Wales-late Roman, and then sub- or post-Roman, merging loosely into the age of the converted English and the eve of the first Norse incursions-probably took shape with the late Dr. John Morris's The Age of Arthur (1973). That vast and idiosyncratic tome revived, and apparently in a popular way, an interest that during the late 1940s and 1950s had been essentially mandarin; the H. M. and N. K. Chadwick books, single-author or symposia, from Cambridge assumed a familiarity on the reader's part with (for instance) Celtic languages and early literature that virtually no archaeologist then possessed. John Morris romped with equal abandon through fields of archaeology, history and language-rather less assuredly in the last field when he left Latin sources-and left behind him, probably unintentionally, the impression that the tale of the Lost Centuries could be written principally from documents known or unrecognised already to hand. Christopher Arnold has bravely set out to offer, by way of correction, another view of the late-fourth to the sixth centuries A.D. where conclusions and inferences must be made, of set purpose, from material remains; and where all that can be squeezed from annals, saints' lives, chronicles, the larger writings and the arguable literary remains is put aside and at most referred to by way of minor illustration. This approach requires a thematic rather than a chronological structure and the chapter-headings reflect that need: 'Population and Society', or 'The Fate of the Towns', or 'Industry and the Structure of the Economy'. It is a standpoint that has been gaining ground among younger workers in new interpretations of Roman Britain and, to the percipient, Dr. Arnold's preferences are revealed by his full and useful Bibliography (pp. 166-75). There is no 'Arthur' here, and there would be comparatively little of the Celtic world were it not that certain strands of discovery are principally from non-Anglo-Saxon areas. I found the book stimulating, brisk and sensible. There is not too much theorising, particularly not too much from what was once called the New Archaeology, and the author prefers throwaway lines and unusual alternative suggestions to dogmatism. One is bound to disagree with points of detail; against this, the treatment in the final chapter of a major unsolved problem (insoluble, possibly ?), the fate of our Roman towns and cities, must be commended as a first-class summary of all we really knew in 1984. The illustrations include many distribution-maps, histograms or 'pie-diagrams', and some plans of sites and features. They are hardly elegant, the book's format has induced some over-reduction and actual objects are not seemingly regarded as suitable text-figures to support the arguments. Well and good; at least there is consistency. It is now so rare to encounter independence among the far too numerous books on post-Roman Britain that any display of a fresh mind is welcome, and here we have such a display. Historians have rightly begun to moan about archaeologists who take up all the available funds and then