Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: [unknown]
Surnames/tags: Blood Bloud Blud

>>>>>Click here to return to the Blood Name Study Main Page<<<<<

Contents 1 Origins & Early Migration of R-A6093: Hypotheses 1.1 Background & Research Question 1.2 The Hypotheses 1.2.1 Hypothesis 1 - Refugees from Natural Disaster 1.2.2 Hypothesis 2 - Refugees from Roman Depredation 1.2.3 Hypothesis 3 - Refugees from Roman Occupation 1.2.4 Hypothesis 4 - Roman Army Auxiliary Soldiers 1.2.5 Hypothesis 5 - Roman Deportees 1.2.6 Hypothesis 6 - Anglo-Saxon Fellow-Travellers 1.3 Ranking the Hypotheses 1.3.1 Criteria & Scoring 1.3.2 Scoring Outcome 1.4 Tentative Conclusions 1.5 Sources

Origins & Early Migration of R-A6093: Hypotheses

Author: Garry M. Blood, 16 Jul 2024

Important Note: This analysis is unique to the Derbyshire Bloods and the people who descend from them, to include most of the Bloods of Ireland and North America. It would not, however, apply to Bloods who descend from independent origin events in other areas of England, such as the early Bloods of Kent, Herefordshire, and London. Even some of the other Midlands Blood populations may be from unrelated Y-DNA lineages. Please read Origins of the Bloods: Surname Distribution in England, 1100 to 1750 for a better understanding of Blood origins in various parts of England.

Background & Research Question

Background

Because R-A6093 arose within R-U106>L47>Z159 in about 200 BCE, and Z159 is a Continental Germanic haplogroup not believed to have been present in Britain in any significant numbers in the third century BCE, then we have to have a mechanism by which we can get a group of R-A6093 carriers across the North Sea and into the region that would later become North Mercia by about 600 CE.

Based on what we currently know of the Y-DNA of a decent-sized sample of Midlands Bloods from Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Staffordshire, combined with the history of the lands on both sides of the North Sea in the last few centuries BCE and the first few centuries CE, I've come up with a few hypotheses as to when and why members of the western branch of Haplogroup R-A6093 (also known as FGC17294) could have ended up on the island of Britain.

Note: The early Y-DNA events listed on the Timeline of Events should be reviewed in order to better follow these hypotheses.

Some caveats right at the beginning:

• Take all of what comes next with a grain of salt. To say I'm in the realm of speculation here would be an understatement of the highest order. But sometimes it's worthwhile to think through different scenarios and see how the evidence supports or undermines them.
• These hypotheses are based on the current state of our knowledge of the Midlands Bloods' Y-DNA profile. If that changes, then these hypotheses might have to be modified or abandoned, and perhaps others formulated.
• In hypothesis generation, we always strive for a set of hypotheses that are both mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (known as "MECE").

• Mutually Exclusive: No two hypotheses can both be correct. If any one hypothesis is proven true, then the others are at the same time proven false.
• Collectively Exhaustive: The set of hypotheses includes all possible answers to the research question, no matter how unlikely or improbable. Unless it's impossible, it should be included. 

While I believe the ones developed so far are mutually exclusive, I don't think they're yet collectively exhaustive. There are probably other scenarios I've missed. But I will keep at it.

• In terms of collectively exhaustive, however, I have elected to dismiss highly improbable "one-off" scenarios that could never be expected to reliably appear in the historical record. These would generally be individual R-A6093 carriers moving to Britain for very narrow and specific reasons, such as: merchants, traders, sailors, hired mercenaries, an elite marriage between a Continental Germanic tribe and a British Celtic tribe, and so on. Because such events are rarely documented in the historical record prior to the Roman presence in Britain, they cannot be used as a basis for a hypothesis because there could be none of them or thousands of them. We just don't know.
• I call these hypotheses, but a proper hypothesis can be tested, at least in science. It is extremely unlikely (in fact, we might as well say impossible) that any of these hypotheses could be rigorously tested, let alone proven -- although it might be possible to falsify one or more with further research. But, given the nearly opaque shroud of darkness that covers this period of European history, it is beyond reason that any hypothesis listed here could ever make it beyond the level of plausible, but unproveable. After all, this isn't science. This is genealogy.

Any hypothesis is constrained by certain factors that must be taken into account:

• R-A6093 originated from R-U106>L47>Z159, which broadly-speaking identifies the Germanic populations of Western Europe, at the very end of the third century BCE (circa 200 BCE).
• R-A6093 has a western branch (FGC17294), which has so far been found only in people who live in or whose ancestry is from the English Midlands.
• R-A6093 also has an eastern branch (FT40450), which was present in what's now Poland from sometime in the first century BCE.
• Western R-A6093 was present in North Mercia in the English Midlands from at least 600 CE.
• The North Sea coast of what's now the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany saw a serious population crash starting in the 2nd century CE, ending with the almost complete depopulation of that coastline by the mid-4th century CE. It would remain virtually uninhabited for the next two centuries after which Germanic tribes from the interior, unrelated to the original population, moved in. These later people became known as the Frisians, the ethnic group that exists there to the present day. That's a long way of saying that any hypothesis that occurs after this depopulation event can't be considered because the R-A6093 population native to that area was no longer there and the people who came in later weren't part of that original population.
• Finally, when looking for a specific North Sea coastal Germanic population in what's now the Netherlands and adjoining areas of Belgium and Germany, we must also take into account that, according to classical authors, the Frisii, unrelated to the later Frisians, were by far the most populous of the North Sea coastal Germanic tribes. Therefore, from a pure probability standpoint it's more likely R-A6093 arose in the Frisii population than in other Germanic coastal tribes, so any hypothesis that points to the Frisii has that bit of statistical advantage behind it.

Combined, these items of evidence give us our parameters:

• First, R-A6093 evolved in a Z159 (Western Germanic) population sometime around 200 BCE.
• Second, based on what we know of the demographics of the North Sea littoral from that period, the West Germanic population in which R-A6093 arose was statistically more likely to be Frisii than not.
• Third, that original R-A6093 population experienced a physical division early in its history, with some members migrating eastwards into what's now Poland and beyond, while others ended up on the island of Britain.
• Fourth, "Western R-A6093" was already established well inland on the island of Britain, in North Mercia, by the 6th century CE (circa 600 CE).
• Fifth, the population from which R-A6093 arose had effectively ceased to exist in its native area on the continental North Sea coast about a century prior.

For all this to make geographic and historical sense then, the most likely place for the R-A6093 founder population to have lived was on or near the North Sea coast of what's now the Netherlands, Belgium, or Germany, an area that in pre-Roman and Roman times was overwhelmingly populated by West Germanic tribes. From that location an overland migration to Poland and a seaborne movement to Britain are entirely feasible. So, what we're doing here is trying to work out a mechanism by which members of Haplogroup R-A6093 moved from the area of the modern Netherlands, northwest Belgium, or northwest Germany to the island of Britain, and when and why. We can refine this down to our research question.

The Research Question

Here's what we end up with for the question we're trying to answer:

>>> When and under what circumstances did the R-A6093 ancestor of the English Midlands Bloods migrate to the island of Britain? <<<

---

The Hypotheses

The hypotheses are potential answers to the research question. As I develop hypotheses, I will present them in chronological order based on the century in which the events described in that hypothesis would have taken place. 

Hypothesis 1 - Refugees from Natural Disaster

Epoch: Second Century BCE (ca. 200-150 BCE)

Narrative: This explanation for the presumed movement from the North Sea coast of Europe to the island of Britain was first proposed by Dr. Joe Flood. This hypothesis proposes that carriers of R-A6093 living on the coast of what's now the Netherlands fled the area as the result of a natural disaster. Even today, this part of the European coast is very vulnerable to sea flooding, and this has been the case for many millennia, at least back to the end of the last ice age. The most common flood mechanism in this region is extreme storm tides caused by cyclonic storms moving into the North Sea. These floods can be devastating. Just in the seven storm tides since 1953, surges of well over 5 meters have been routinely observed. Historic floods in the Medieval period are believed to have been occasionally far more devastating, and on the timescale of millennia it is not unlikely that relatively improbable "500 year" storm floods could have and probably were far more devastating than anything in the known historical record. A far less common but documented flood mechanism is undersea landslides resulting in tsunamis racing down the North Sea. These events could, depending on the location and orientation of the undersea landslide, be far more devastating than any storm tide and would have hit with even less warning.

According to this hypothesis, a catastrophic natural disaster, probably a flood event, caused the North Sea coastal West Germanic tribe in which members of R-A6093 lived to evacuate the area. This would have likely been the result of a massive seawater intrusion into their tribal area, which would have destroyed infrastructure and crops and drowned domestic livestock while also salting the soil and freshwater lakes and ponds on which the tribe would have relied. In the aftermath of a significant seawater intrusion on such a scale, the population's food supply and thus survival would have been at great risk. Relocation to an unaffected area would have been essential.

Pros of this hypothesis:

• This would plausibly place an R-A6093 population in Britain long before the 600 CE deadline.
• This postulated evacuation would have likely included multiple established family units, which would be essential to the survival and propagation of R-A6093 in Britain.
• Flooding is a known disaster mechanism that has affected the North Sea European coast up to the present and doesn't require the invocation of any outlandish weather or seismological events.
• It would explain the split in R-A6093 that occurs shortly after the haplogroup's formation; some carriers of R-A6093 evacuated west across the North Sea to the island of Britain, while other carriers of R-A6093 fled eastwards, inland and away from the North Sea. They became F40450 / eastern R-A6093.

Cons of this hypothesis:

• So far, no archaeological evidence of such a catastrophic event in the 2nd century BCE has been uncovered in the Netherlands or anywhere along the North Sea coast.
• The accepted academic view is that there was no Germanic settlement on the island of Britain until many centuries after this postulated event. If there was no Germanic population already present somewhere on the east coast of Britain for these refugees to head to, I don't think it likely they would have gone to a place controlled by Celtic tribes that likely would not have been very receptive to Germanic refugees moving from the Continent.

Hypothesis 2 - Refugees from Roman Depredation

Epoch: First Century BCE / First Century CE (ca. 12 BCE to 28 CE)

Narrative: This is the first of three hypotheses directly related to warfare involving Rome. In 12 BCE, Nero Claudius Drusus, governor of Roman Gaul, after repelling an incursion by the Sicambri and the Usipetes from the east side of the Lower Rhine, launched a retaliatory campaign against them. Crossing the Lower Rhine, he first attacked the Usipetes then marched south against the Sicambri. Travelling down the Rhine and landing in what is now the Netherlands, he subdued the Frisii, who he then forced to serve in his army as auxiliary troops. After the military campaign ended, Drusus imposed only a moderate tax on the Frisii and for the most part left them alone, although a Roman presence was established in their territory to monitor their compliance with their treaties with Rome as imposed on them by Drusus. However, a later Roman governor of Gaul raised the rate of taxation on the Frisii to a crippling level, first seizing their herds, then confiscating their lands, and finally taking from them women and children to sell as slaves. In 28 CE, the Frisii rose up in armed rebellion. They hanged the Roman soldiers acting as tax collectors and forced the local Roman administrator to flee to a nearby Roman outpost, which they then besieged. Roman forces dispatched from Germania Superior raised the siege and counter-attacked the Frisii, but the Frisii defeated them with heavy losses at the Battle of Baduhenna Wood. While the Frisii effectively won the short war -- the Romans decided to consider the matter over after Baduhenna Wood and didn't retaliate any further -- the decades of depredation at the hands of the Roman provincial administration could well have motivated some Frisii to leave the area. For Frisii living on the coast, the easiest and safest escape from the situation would have been over the North Sea to Britain. It is not impossible, then, that in the period between 12 BCE and 28 CE some Frisii crossed the North Sea to Britain to get away from the depredations inflicted by the Roman administration in their tribal homeland.

Pros of this hypothesis:

• This would plausibly place an R-A6093 population in Britain long before the 600 CE deadline.
• Fleeing refugees would likely include several family units, in which case multiple lines of descent of R-A6093 in Britain would have been more likely to assure the survival of the haplogroup to the present day.

Cons of this hypothesis:

• The most likely place to land would have been on the southeast coast of Britain, in what's today the counties of Kent, Essex, Suffolk, or Norfolk. This is nowhere near North Merica.
• As in Hypothesis 1, if there was no Germanic population established somewhere on the east coast of Britain for these refugees to head to, I don't think it likely they would have gone to there to begin with.

Hypothesis 3 - Refugees from Roman Occupation

Epoch: First Century CE (ca. 47 CE)

Narrative: After their negative experiences with predatory Roman governors and local administrators, the Frisii became disaffected towards Rome. In 47 CE, Gannascus of the Canninefates led the Frisii and the Chauci to rebel. They raided along the then-wealthy coast of Gallia Belgica. The Roman military commander in Gaul, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, campaigned successfully against the Germanic tribes, defeating them. For the Chauci and the Frisii this meant Roman military occupation, a Roman administration as overseers and enforcers, and, of course, heavy Roman taxation. In a very similar manner to Hypothesis 2, disaffected Frisii or Chauci, especially if members of the elite, might have been motivated to escape Rome. While the Roman invasion of Britain had started in 43 CE, by 47 CE the Roman Army was not yet to the area we now know as the English Midlands and these hypothetical refugees could have landed at a point north of the furthest Roman advance.

Pros of this hypothesis:

• This could plausibly place an R-A6093 population in Britain long before the 600 CE deadline.
• As in Hypothesis 2, fleeing refugees would likely include several family units, in which case multiple lines of descent of R-A6093 in Britain would have been more likely to assure the survival of the haplotype to the present day.

Cons of this hypothesis:

• I think it very unlikely that a population fleeing the Romans would have headed to an island currently being invaded by the Romans, even if they might have been able to land far enough north to be ahead of the Roman advance. "Out of the frying pan and into the fire" isn't a wise strategy.
• As for hypotheses 1 & 2, if there was no Germanic population in Britain for these refugees to integrate into, I don't think this scenario is at all likely.

Hypothesis 4 - Roman Army Auxiliary Soldiers

Epoch: First & Second Centuries CE (43 CE to ca. 130 CE)

Narrative: This hypothesis postulates that one or more R-A6093 carriers arrived in Britain while it was part of the Roman Empire, so sometime after the Roman invasion began in the mid-1st century CE. We know the Roman Army employed auxiliary infantry and cavalry units from what's now the Netherlands in the initial invasion of Britain in 43 CE, and auxiliary units from this region would remain in Britain for virtually its entire time as part of the Roman Empire. These auxiliary units, arranged by the tribes from which there were recruited, consisted of the following.

Tribes of Northwest Europe in the Early Roman Period

The Batavi:

The Batavi were from the western part of the modern Netherlands. They were not a coastal people -- their tribal homeland was an island formed by two branches of the river Rhine across from the modern city of Nijmegen, about 150km upstream from the North Sea. Their military involvement in Roman Britain was extensive:

• Eight regiments of Batavi participated in the initial invasion and were only withdrawn to the Continent in 67 CE.^[1] By the time of their withdrawal, the Roman front line had already passed through the Midlands^[2] and so it's entirely plausible at least one of the Batavi regiments would have conducted operations there.
• The Batavi were back in Britain by 84 CE when Tacitus reports four Batavi regiments fought at Mons Graupius under Agricola.^[3] At least two Batavi regiments remained as garrison units on Hadrian's Wall well into the 2nd century CE, the First Cohort of Batavi and the Ninth Cohort of Batavi.
• Batavi units were known to deploy to and from Britain at various times in its history as part of the Roman Empire. For example, Batavi regiments were part of a force sent to the island in 368 CE to support the Roman garrisons in Britain against an external assault by Picts and North Sea Germanic tribes.

The Frisii:

The Frisii were the dominant West Germanic tribe on the North Sea coast of the Netherlands in the 1st century CE, both in terms of geography and territory. They had a reputation as fierce fighters and had done serious damage to a Roman army sent to subdue them in 28 CE. A single unit of Frisii, Cunei Frisiorum, was known to have served in Roman Britain. Cunei Frisiorum was a mercenary cavalry squadron stationed at the forts of Aballava, Derventio, Vercovicium and Vinovia on and near Hadrian's Wall in the late 2nd and 3rd centuries. Given how far away from the Midlands this unit was garrisoned, we can safely discount it as being the mechanism for the transfer of R-A6093 to that region.

The Frisiavones:

The Frisiavones may have been an offshoot of the Frisii. The -avo- element in their name means of or descended from, so they were the people who "descended from the Frisii." In the Roman period their tribal territory was south of the Rhine on the North Sea coast and within the borders (limes) of the Roman Empire, so they can also be characterised as "Romanised Frisii," as opposed to the main Frisii tribes lying north of the Rhine and thus outside the Empire. The Frisiavones occupied a section of the coast from the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta south, in the area where the modern Dutch province of South Holland abuts the province of Zeeland. The Frisiavones tribal capital may have been at Markt Goedereede on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee. For our purposes, the one known Frisiavones unit stationed in Roman Britain is particularly interesting: Cohors Primae Frisiavonum (the First Cohort of Frisiavones). This auxiliary infantry unit constructed the second, stone-built fort of Ardotalia (the one of which there are still remains) near Glossop in the Peak District of Derbyshire in the very early 2nd centuries, with a date of circa 108 CE for its construction being proposed. This small fort was probably garrisoned by the Frisiavones until around 140 CE, with the First Cohort then being recorded at nearby Mamucium (Manchester) in about 160 CE. All told, we're probably looking at a period of about three decades during which the Frisiavones were stationed in this area of what's now north Derbyshire. This fort is confirmed to have had a vicus, a civilian settlement that grew up next to most permanent Roman forts in the Empire where locals set up shops to sell goods and wares to the fort and where soldiers kept their unofficial families, usually from unrecognised marriages to local women. Ardotalia is less than 6 kilometers north of where the first Bloods were recorded in the county in 1431. That is an interesting coincidence.

Pros of this hypothesis:

• This scenario has the potential (via the First Cohort of Frisiavones) to place a potential R-A6093 carrier in exactly the right place in what would later become North Mercia. If the R-A6093 carrier was a Batavi soldier, then while not as precise, the Batavi regiments would have operated in this same area during the initial invasion and possibly at later times in the history of Roman Britain.
• This scenario also works well in terms of time in that R-A6093 descendants would have already been in North Mercia long before the 600 CE deadline to get there.

Cons of this hypothesis:

• While it's no problem for a single R-A6093 carrier to father a male offspring with a local British woman, the likelihood of that single line of descent continuing to produce males every generation for the next 1,300 years doesn't seem very great. What we would need would be a more diverse group of R-A6093 carriers, each creating their own male lines of descent, to increase the chance that a male descendant would survive 1,300 years later. That sounds more like the migration of a kinship group than one or two army recruits every few years.

Note: While part of the same hypothesis, there are fundamental differences between the Batavi auxiliaries as the mechanism by which R-A6093 arrive in Britain and the Frisiavones auxiliaries as that mechanism. Therefore, in the later scoring and rank-ordering of these hypotheses the Batavi will be treated as sub-hypothesis 4 (B) and the Frisiavones will be treated as sub-hypothesis 4 (F). As noted previously, the lone Frisii mercenary cavalry unit was stationed so far away from the Midlands of England that it will not be considered any further.

Hypothesis 5 - Roman Deportees

Epoch: Late Third Century CE (296 or 297 CE)

Narrative: Speaking of the ancient Frisii, they're the main player in this hypothesis, set later in the existence of Roman Britain. In the late 3rd century CE, the emperor Constantius Chlorus campaigned successfully against several Germanic peoples during the internecine civil wars that brought him to sole power over the Roman Empire. Among them were the Frisii and Chamavi, who were recorded as having been forcibly deported from their historical tribal lands outside the Empire and resettled in Roman territory as laeti (Roman serfs) in either 296 or 297 CE. This information, from Manuscript VII of the Panegyrici Latini, is the final reference we have to the ancient Frisii in the historical record. After this the sources go silent concerning them and they fade into the mists of time. However, they appear once more after 296 CE, this time in the archaeological record, providing us a hint as to where in the Empire they were resettled. The discovery of a type of pottery unique to the 4th century Frisii, known as "terp tritzum" earthenware, shows that an unknown number of members of this tribe appeared at about this time in Kent, at the time part of the province of Maxima Caesariensis. There seems little other explanation for this sudden appearance of Frisii in a region of Britain still under direct Roman civil and military control than it was the Romans themselves that caused it.

Pros of this hypothesis:

• This would plausibly place an R-A6093 population in Britain long before the 600 CE deadline.
• We don't have to infer or hypothesise that Frisii were introduced to the island of Britain prior to 600 CE; here we have a documented historical event and the archaeology to prove not only that it happened, but where these Frisii were settled in Roman Britain.

Cons of this hypothesis:

• Kent is pretty far from the region of the English Midlands that would later be known as North Mercia, which is where we know the R-A6093 ancestor of the Midlands Bloods was living not more than 300 years later, in 600 CE.

Hypothesis 6 - Anglo-Saxon Fellow-Travellers

Epoch: Fifth Century CE

Narrative: The most obvious answer to our research question would be that the movement of R-A6093 to Britain occurred during the well-known and relatively uncontroversial Anglo-Saxon settlement of post-Roman Britain from the 5th century when, the mainstream academic position holds, diverse continental West Germanic population made up of representatives of multiple peoples and tribes moved to and settled in the eastern part of the island of Britain. In particular the Angli (Angles), migrating from the region of the Schwansen Peninsula on the Baltic coast of modern northwest Germany, possibly made their way to Britain via the former, now generally abandoned, Frisii territory on the coast of the modern-day Netherlands, where they finally took ship across the channel to Britain. It is not impossible they swept up small surviving pockets of the ancient Frisii population along the way.

Anglo-Saxon Migration to Britain, 5th Century CE

Pros of this hypothesis:

• Albeit there is still much controversy surrounding the extent, size, and nature of the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain in the 5th century, this is nonetheless a known historical event that, whatever its details, without question introduced new groups of North Sea coastal Germanics to the island of Britain in sufficient time to get R-A6093 carriers to the area that would later become North Mercia in the English Midlands.
• Specifically, as some groups of arriving Angli are known to have moved up the Trent River from the mouth of the Humber and eventually establish the Kingdom of Mercia, this hypothesis has in its favour the fact that it would plausibly place our hypothetical R-A6093 carriers in what would become North Mercia, the exact same part of the English Midlands that would much later be the main concentration of English Bloods.

Cons of this hypothesis:

• We have to assume the Angli moved overland from the Schwansen Peninsula to the coastal Netherlands instead of leaving directly by ship or going to some other section of the North Sea coast and leaving from there. On the other hand, the old Frisii tribal area on the coast was much closer to Britain. So, they might have done exactly this in order to minimise the risk of the crossing.
• We have to assume there was a remnant population of ancient Frisii still in the coastal region of the North Sea when the Angli moved through. This appears to go against the current academic view, based on archaeology in the old Frisii region, that the area was completely depopulated by the time of the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain. If there were no remnant Frisii there, then there wasn't any R-A6093 there to be swept along on the way to Britain.
• We have to assume at least some of these hypothetical remnants (if they existed at all) were willing to join up with the Angli, a foreign people speaking a probably unintelligible Germanic language, and migrate with them to Britain.

---

Ranking the Hypotheses

Having established a reasonable set of MECE hypotheses that are not contradicted by either the historical record or the DNA evidence, I will now endeavour to rank them according to a set of criteria.

Criteria & Scoring

I established five criteria by which to judge these and any future hypotheses and through the use of weighted ranking have assigned weights to each criterion.

The Evaluation Criteria

• Place of Settlement in Britain - Settlement can be where a family group likely ensconced themselves after arriving in Britain or, in the case of military units, where they were stationed. In some cases this is known to a reasonable degree of accuracy. In other cases the assumption will be they arrived in Britain at the closest point across the North Sea from their point of departure. (0 to 5 points)
• Time Period - To what degree does the estimated time at which the scenario took place match with what we know of both the historical situation and the DNA timeline? If the group likely landed far away from the region of North Mercia, was there a reasonable amount of time for normal internal migration over the generations to get them there by 600 CE? (0 to 5 points)
• Place of Origin on the Continent - Where was this group from in northwestern Europe? Hypotheses implicating peoples from securely Germanic regions would score higher than people from Gaulish or Belgic regions. Among the Germanics, groups closer to the North Sea coast would score higher than people from further inland. (0 to 5 points)
• Overall Plausibility - To what extent does the hypothesis pass the historical and demographic common sense test? People tend to select the easier course of action over the more difficult, and the safer option over the more dangerous. If forced to move, they tend to go to places they know, or where they know others, or where they at least know there's a shared culture. Especially when that option is easier and/or safer than the others. Hypotheses that assume people headed towards danger or towards lands of a different culture would score worse that hypotheses that assume they'll stick to what they know. Exception for deployment of military units, where these factors would not apply. (0 to 5 points)
• Ability to Explain Eastern R-A6093 - The hypothesis provides a plausible mechanism by which the eastern branch of R-A6093 came to be far away in central and eastern Europe. (0 to 5 points)

By performing a basic weighted ranking on these criteria, I came up with the following rank order from most important to least important, with accompanying weighting factors.

Criteria with Weighting Factor

• Ability to Explain Eastern R-A6093 - 0.35
• Overall Plausibility - 0.25
• Time Period - 0.20
• Place of Origin on the Continent - 0.15
• Place of Settlement in Britain - 0.05

Each hypothesis was then scored on a 0 to 5 scale for each of the five criteria and each score was then multiplied by the weighting factor to give the weighted score for each criterion.

Scoring Outcome

After assigning a value of 0 to 5 to each criterion for each hypothesis, it's then a process of weighting each individual score for each criterion for each hypothesis. The last step is simply adding up each individual value to obtain an overall final score for each hypothesis, then putting them in order from highest to lowest.

Note 1: All scores are out of a total possible of 5.0.

Note 2: For scoring purposes, Hypothesis 4 was split into two sub-hypotheses -- Hypothesis 4 (B) for the eight Batavi regiments in Britain and Hypothesis 4 (F) for the single Frisiavones regiment.

Final Scores:

Hypothesis 1 - Refugees from Natural Disaster -- Total Score 4.1 out of 5.0

Hypothesis 5 - Roman Deportees -- Total Score 3.05 out of 5.0

Hypothesis 4 (F) - Roman Army Auxiliary Soldiers (Frisiavones) -- Total Score 2.75 out of 5.0

Hypothesis 6 - Anglo-Saxon Fellow-Travellers -- Total Score 2.4 out of 5.0

Hypothesis 2 - Refugees from Roman Depredation -- Total Score 2.35 out of 5.0

Hypothesis 4 (B) - Roman Army Auxiliary Soldiers (Batavi) -- Total Score 2.1 out of 5.0

Hypothesis 3 - Refugees from Roman Occupation -- Total Score 1.1 out of 5.0

---

Tentative Conclusions

Hypothesis 1 is the current leading explanation for the movement of the R-A6093 ancestors of the Midlands Blood to the island of Britain, but hypotheses 5 and 4 (F) are strong contenders. Hypotheses 6, 2, and 4 (B) should be given further consideration. Hypothesis 3, however, can be safely dismissed.

Sources

1. ↑ M. W. C. Hassall, "Batavians and the Roman Conquest of Britain," Britannia, Vol. 1 (1970), pp. 131-136, Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. Online at JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/525836
2. ↑ Wikipedia article, "Roman conquest of Britain," at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_conquest_of_Britain
3. ↑ "Cohors Primae Batavorum Equitata," at https://www.roman-britain.co.uk/regiments/coh1bat/