I saw this news item and thought what exciting possibilities it opened up in understanding how people travelled further than we realise in the past:
Fairford river skull ‘more than 1,000 years old’
Human remains found in a shallow river in Gloucestershire are more than 1,000 years old, police have said. A forensic anthropologist was asked to test a skull and a second bone which had been found in July by two teenagers playing in the River Coln at Fairford. Experts say the remains are those of a Sub-Saharan African woman and date from between 896 AD and 1025 AD.
Gloucestershire Police said the remains would be passed on to a university or museum as it was not a police matter. At the time of the discovery, the force said a Roman cemetery had been found near to the site which could explain the findings.
One of the boys who made the discovery, Christian, said: “I thought someone had got murdered and dumped in here, but then the police rang up said it was 700 years-plus old, so I wasn’t really worried then.”
The River Coln rises near Brockhampton, east of Cheltenham, and flows south-east into the River Thames at Lechlade, some 20m (32km) away.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-24106956
How exciting for those young boys – especially now that they know it wasn’t murder, as one of them sweetly explains. So what brought a woman from Africa to Gloucestershire in Saxon times? Was she the wife or daughter of a trader travelling maybe between Bristol and Oxford? Had she been captured by some Saxon adventurer, not necessarily in her birth land but somewhere else? Had she somehow met a man from Wessex and fallen in love with him and become his wife? Who can tell now? Who will ever be able to answer these questions?
Lois Elsden 