Anne,

"There had been many converts to Christianity in England after Pope Gregory 1st had sent Augustine to Canterbury, to found a mission in 597AD. Edwin, then King of Northumbria, was not one of these converts, but remained and continued to practice his own pagan rites."

The Synod of Whitby around 664 is a fact. The Christains bringing their practise from Ireland through Scotland met up with Christians from Rome, via Canterbury, and came to some agreements to turn "Britain" into a Christian country.

But I guess you know this. At that time most people in this country would probably now be described as "Pagan". King Aurthur is almost certainly fiction.

People choose to believe all sorts of stuff on a personal level and it probably doesn't matter. At the heart of understanding what has happened years ago, ie History, is understanding the difference between fact and fiction.

Allowing for around a generation every 25 years that means since 700AD or BCE, 52 generations have come and gone. how much evidence of pagan practices have survived?

It seems that much of the current belief in pagan stuff comes from writers like Frazer refered to by Sedayne above.

It's worth pondering the Great Grandmother paradox:

We get one mother, two grandmothers, four great grandmothers 8 gg grandmothers, 16 ggg, 32 ggg .....

This means we have a vast heritage of people to whom we are related. Dose this lend itself to the passing on of coherent information or the continual mixing and re-interpreting of information through 52 or generations and millions of people?

But still we have no traditional songs of the Winter Solstice.

Wassail

Les Jones