"I would be happy if the Staffordshire Hoard turned out to be as inscrutable a riddle as, say, Silbury Hill in Wiltshire — the spectacularly mysterious 500,000-tonne mound of chalk and turf that our Neolithic ancestors spent four million man-hours constructing 4,300 years ago, for reasons that have been obliterated by the march of millennia.
"But there’s another reason for joy about the Staffordshire Hoard. The sheer magnificence of those 1,300 objects presents the Anglo-Saxons, for once, in a benign, cultured light. What a bad press those Dark Ages tribes have had! Their very names — Goths, Huns, Vandals — are synonymous with barbarity. But that’s because they were enemies of Rome, and Romans wrote most of the chronicles that have survived."
Here, here! But that's not all. Mr Morrison goes on to say -
"It’s high time that we revalued the baddies of history, and particularly of British history.
"Just because none of these tribes wrote down as much as those fastidious control-freaks from Rome did — or coerced their starving serfs into building huge, vainglorious cathedrals, as the conquering Normans did — doesn’t mean that they should be eternally libelled as mindless louts."
