The events from AD 40 onwards cannot be properly assessed without a basic understanding of what preceded: the pre-Roman landscape and habitation of the lower Rhine delta, Rome’s conquest of Gaul and its struggles with the Germanic peoples from the right bank of the Rhine. AD 40-140 this first paper discusses the preceding era: the transition from the Late Iron Age into the early principate. Whereas the project was formally restricted to the period c. These questions were addressed by a team of researchers from diverse backgrounds: archaeology, geomorphology, palaeobotany and zooarchaeology. The project focused on the reasons for the establishment of these military installations and on the efforts required to build and maintain them. AD 40 on the southern bank of the Rhine between Vechten (prov. Tacitus could demonstrate the fixed and longstanding construction of hero- ism and of the cultural mores of Germanic society.This is the first of a series of three papers synthesising the results of an interdisciplinary study of the chain of small forts built c. This dependence, or at the very least this call to a Roman history to provide a sense of longitude and certainty to the construction of Anglo- Saxon heroic behaviour, offers scholars a kind of chronological certainty in their consideration of the Germanic tribes and their behaviours when they first migrated to England.

This convenient shorthand has been much used, beginning in the nineteenth century with such scholars of history as John Richard Green and John Mitchell Kemble, and largely continuing in a straight line - although with some changes in emphasis and occasional concerns about relevance - to the present day. The construction of the Germanic comitatus by Cornelius Tacitus in one of his early works, the Germania, offers scholars of Anglo-Saxon England an easy shorthand way to discuss the heroic code as it appears in an assortment of late Old English texts, notably including Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon.

Tacitus germania english