The Druids and the Arthurian legends are all most of us know about early Britain, from the Neolithic to the Iron Age (4500 BC-AD 43). Drawing on archaeological discoveries and medieval Welsh texts like the Mabinogion, this book explores the religious beliefs of the ancient Britons before the coming of Christianity, beginning with the megaliths-structures like Stonehenge-and the role they played in prehistoric astronomy. Topics include the mysterious Beaker people of the Early Bronze Age, Iron Age evidence of the Druids, the Roman period and the Dark Ages. The author discusses the myths of King Arthur and what they tell us about paganism, as well as what early churches and monasteries reveal about the enigmatic Druids.

Beginning with a thorough survey of approaches to communicative syllabus design, Melrose deals with the early 1970s functional approach and subsequent criticism of it as well as the contemporary search for a process approach to language learning. It proposes a meaning negation model, which draws upon the seminal work of Halliday, Martin, Fawcett and Lemke, and is illustrated through their analysis of a unit from a communicative course book. Its topical-interactional approach is placed within the context of the current debate on language teaching and learning.

An exploration into the beliefs and origins of the Druids, this book examines the role the Druids may have played in the story of King Arthur and the founding of Britain. It explains how the Druids originated in eastern Europe around 850 B.C., bringing to early Britain a cult of an underworld deity, a belief in reincarnation, and a keen interest in astronomy. The work concludes that Arthur was originally a Druid cult figure and that the descendants of the Druids may have founded the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. The research draws upon a number of sources, including medieval Welsh tales, the archaeology of Stonehenge's Salisbury Plain, the legends surrounding the founding of Britain, the cult of the Thracian Horseman, the oracle of Dodona, popular Arthurian mythology, and the basic principles of prehistoric astronomy.

Magic, which is probably as old as humanity, is a way of achieving goals through supernatural means, either benevolent (white magic) or harmful (black magic). Magic has been used in Britain since at least the Iron Age (800 BC- AD 43) - amulets made from human bone have been found on Iron Age sites in southern England. Britain was part of the Roman Empire from AD 43 to 410, and it is then we see the first written magic, in the form of curse tablets. A good deal of magic involves steps to prevent the restless dead from returning to haunt the living, and this may lie behind the decapitated and prone (face down) burials of Roman Britain. The Anglo-Saxons who settled in England in the 5th and 6th century were strong believers in magic: they used ritual curses in Anglo-Saxon documents, they wrote spells and charms, and some of the women buried in pagan cemeteries were likely practitioners of magic (wicca, or witches). The Anglo-Saxons became Christians in the 7th century, and the new "magicians" were the saints, who with the help of God, were able to perform miracles. In 1066, William of Normandy became king of England, and for a time there was a resurgence of belief in magic. The medieval church was able to keep the fear of magic under control, but after the Reformation in the mid 16th century, this fear returned, with numerous witchcraft trials in the late 16th and 17th centuries.

The story of King Arthur has fascinated generations of readers, and this book is a follow up to the author's recently published British Religion from the Megaliths to Arthur. The new book explores how the story of Arthur evolved in England in the later Middle Ages, and depicts Arthur as a wilderness figure, the descendant of the northern Romano-British hunter/warrior god. The earliest Arthur was a warrior, but in the 11th century Welsh tale Culhwch and Olwen, he is less a warrior and more the leader of a band of heroes who live outside society. The story of Arthur was popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his Latin History of the Kings of Britain, and this was translated into Middle English in Layamon's Brut and the later Alliterative Morte Arthure. Both of these owed much to the famous Anglo-Saxon Poem ""Beowulf"", which draws on the Anglo-Saxon fascination with the wilderness. The most famous Arthurian tale is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which the wilderness and themes from Beowulf play a leading role. Three Arthurian tales set in Inglewood Forest, Cumbria, place Arthur and Gawain in a wilderness setting, and link Arthur to medieval Robin Hood tales.

In the Middle Ages Britain was a land teeming with saints and monasteries, which disappeared virtually overnight in the late 1530s when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and destroyed all the shrines to the saints and the Virgin Mary. In this book, I want to bring back to life all these forgotten saints, many of them dating to the Anglo-Saxon period in England, or to the long vanished Celtic kingdoms of Wales and Scotland. Before Christianity came to Britain in the 4th century, Britons often made offerings to goddesses in watery places like rivers, lakes or marshes, and many shrines of saints or the Virgin were associated with holy wells. Many people, including kings and queens, made pilgrimages to saints' shrines and drank water from the holy well, sometimes hoping for cures from crippling afflictions. And even when the shrines were destroyed, many holy wells survived, to welcome today's pilgrims.