Historical Evidence
The late 9th- and early 10th-century writer Asser informed us that "there was in Mercia in fairly recent time a certain vigorous king called Offa, who terrified all the neighbouring kings and provinces around him, and who had a great dyke built between Wales and Mercia from sea to sea" (Asser, Life of Alfred, p. .14). The last four words are vital: historians and archaeologists coming to the Dyke have had Asser in their hand, and have been looking for an earthwork 'from sea to sea'. Sir Cyril Fox completed the first major survey of the Dyke (Fox 1955), and, in agreement with Asser, theorized that the Dyke ran from the estuary of the River Dee in the north to the River Wye in the south (approximately 150 miles, or 240 km). He observed that the dyke was not continuous, and thought it was built only in areas where natural barriers did not already exist.
Frank Stenton, the eminent Anglo-Saxon historian of his day, accepted Fox's description, and wrote the introduction to Fox's account of the Dyke. Though Fox's work has now been to some extent revised, it remains a vital record of stretches of the Dyke that still existed between 1926 and 1928, when his three field surveys took place, but that are now destroyed.
Read more about this topic: Offa's Dyke
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or evidence:
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“However backwards the world has been in former ages in the discovery of such points as GOD never meant us to know,—we have been more successful in our own days:Mthousands can trace out now the impressions of this divine intercourse in themselves, from the first moment they received it, and with such distinct intelligence of its progress and workings, as to require no evidence of its truth.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)