The valley7 of the Anchlome, a few miles east of Scunthorpe, in notthwest Lincholnshire, consists of a great stretch of flat, low-lying ‘Carrs’ between the Oolites of the Lincolnshire Cliff on the west and the Chalk Wolds on the east. The geological evidence suggests that in early times the river Ancholme was a tidal arm of the estuary of the Humber, being much wider than at present. Until the seventeenth century the area was flooded for several months in the year, for it was not until the sixteen-thirties that the first really serious draining operations were commenced, the main feature of this work being the construction of a ‘New Cut’, or New River Ancholme, which (together with the old river, now little more than a large drain) joins the Humber at Ferriby Sluice.

It is perhaps best at the beginning of this paper to clear away an illusion that readily I besets us, as we look back on the Dark Age that followed the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain-the illusion that there was something unique in the fate of our island. ‘The barbarians thrust us into the sea, the sea thrusts us back to the barbarians’,—and Aetius, the Roman Patrician, turns a deaf ear. As a matter of fact, Britain only suffered the fate that befell Dacia in the 3rd century, and Gaul, Spain, the Alpine and Balkan districts in the 4th to the 5th. One after another the provinces, once Roman, were overwhelmed under the barbarian tide. The only unique point in the case of Britain is her position as an island—twenty miles interval by sea may well be equated to a much greater distance by land. History, however, sometimes compenesates its blows. Britain, the lost island of the West, attracted the fatherly attention of the Popes of Rome earlier than some continental districts nearer home. She began to regain from Pope Gregory the Great what she had lost through Aetius.