Editing Battle of Deorham (section)

===Re-evaluation===
By the early 1980s, a new wave of [[Source criticism|source-criticism]] was underway regarding the fifth-to-seventh centuries in Britain, and the Battle of Deorham was prominently tackled by [[Patrick Sims-Williams]].<ref name=":0" /> He noted that the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'' shows no signs of being a contemporary record for the sixth century and many signs of being a later fabrication based on oral tradition and [[Folk etymology|folk-etymologies]] of place-names, and that its material for the sixth century may reflect later West-Saxon attempts to legitimise their politics in the seventh, eighth, and/or ninth centuries by circulating stories of an imaginary past.<ref name=":0" />{{rp|26–41}} Showing how the ''Chronicle''<nowiki/>'s 571 [[Battle of Bedcanford]] would have functioned to provide a West-Saxon [[right of conquest]] to much of the [[Chiltern Hills]] and the vale to their north-west following Mercia's conquest of that area in the eighth century, he noted that the Battle of Deorham too might have been used by West Saxons to counter Mercian claims in the Severn Valley.<ref name=":0" />{{rp|33}} But he thought more likely the possibility that the annal was based on a [[Welsh Triads|Welsh triad]], itself unlikely to be historically accurate, arising from a similar tradition to medieval Welsh literature which places an English-battling seventh-century king called [[Cynddylan]] in the [[Viroconium Cornoviorum|Wroxeter]] region.<ref name=":0" />{{rp|33–34}}

Scholars also argued that the importance given the towns more likely reflects ninth and tenth-century polities, of the time the ''Chronicle'' was given its present form, than the de-urbanised sixth century.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Wacher|first=John|title=The Towns of Roman Britain|publisher=Batsford|year=1995|location=London}}.</ref><ref>Simon T. Loseby, "Power and towns in Late Roman Britain and early Anglo-Saxon England" in Gisela Ripoll and Josep M. Gurt, eds., ''{{lang|la|Sedes regiae (ann. 400–800)}}'', (Barcelona, 2000), esp. pp 329f ([http://www.raco.cat/index.php/MemoriasRABL/article/viewFile/23771/23605 on-line text]).</ref>