Essex-Kent, and Updown Girl

I just got emailed this from a Times sharetoken. It builds off the Anglosaxon dataset from a fortnight back and, more so, from Carly. DIVERSITY! in post-"Jutish" Kent. ...but maybe not, exactly, Equity.

Updown Girl had relatives buried nearby so we know mostly she was Belgian/Picard. The Lancs article says early AD 600s for death so earlier 600s for birth. Grandma (I assume not Grampa) would be the Yoruban (or Esan). When Grandma became a Ma takes us to the late 500s. How'd she get to bear a halfrican?

Catholicism in the northwest was rapidly abandoning slavery. East Anglia was Catholic, in the Frankish orbit. Diverse Updown Girl was buried (surrounded by 459 skeletons of very little other Diversity, lest we forget) in Not-Anglia - at a young age, at that. Kent's king converted AD 597 but (with east-Saxon Essex) went "pagan" (again) right after AD 605.

We've centuries to go before the Norse reëstablishment of thralldom, owning trade-networks from Dublin through the Azores; but who needed the Azores, with non-Frankish kingdoms along the Atlantic. We can start with Cornwall [and Brittany], no friend to pro-Anglian Augustine; Kent had, perhaps, reverted to a Celtic form of Christianity.

Even where the hinterland was nominally Catholic - like Visigothic Spain - we have to ask about the port cities. It has never been easy for a corrupt port-authority to trammel what we're now calling "Human Trafficking". To that, er, you know... Jews. My pre-Norwich ancestors didn't keep slaves but we did sometimes trade 'em.