Anglo Saxon England and the Norman Conquest

H.R. Loyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317897675
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This celebrated account of society and economy in England from the first Anglo-Saxon settlements in the fifth century to the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest has been a standard text since it first appeared in 1962. This long-awaited second edition incorporates the fruits of 30 years of subsequent scholarship. It has been revised expanded and entirely reset.

CHAPTER ONE

Settlement and Peoples

1. SOURCES AND POLITICAL OUTLINES OF EARLY SETTLEMENT

The centuries from the withdrawal of the Roman garrisons to the consolidation of Norman feudal mastery saw the making of England. In later centuries there were accretions of population from overseas, English institutions received profound modification, and the economy was transformed. Yet the Anglo-Norman England of A.D. 1100, for all its appearance of exotic alien culture at court and in the Church, contained the essential ingredients of England: a monarchy which had grown with the community, and a people compounded of elements drawn from the four major historic groups that had in their different ways contended for and with the soil of England – from the Romano-Britons, the Anglo-Saxons, the Scandinavians and the Norman conquerors. In the eleventh century the last successful hostile settlements were made in England, and even these were in a sense superficial. The main colonizing efforts were complete by mid-tenth century, and it is with the two chief settlements achieved, the Anglo-Saxon and the Scandinavian, that the present chapter is primarily concerned.

There is no single problem in English history more perplexing than that which surrounds the first settlement of the peoples who gave their name to the land. Enough written evidence has survived to make interpretation a possibility, though one studded with its own peculiar perils relating to reliability of sources such as Gildas, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Nennius, to say nothing of Frankish or Byzantine accounts which dismiss the settlement in a phrase, or embroider the story with fanciful tales of dragons or monsters. Bede himself, whose works provide the major source for the early period, had to rely on traditions of settlement not all of which were sound. Archaeological evidence is plentiful but one-sided, so much of it coming from grave-sites. We know more of the Roman living, more of the Saxon dead. Patient work on habitation sites such as Mucking in Essex, Chalton in Hampshire or West Stow in Suffolk is beginning to redress the balance, and acceptable archaeological evidence is now available to support the view that the Germanic immigrants came in substantial numbers and that they were used to a stratified society. The halls of West Stow stand side by side with the admittedly dominant sunken huts just as the jewels, weapons, and imported bronze and glass of the finest burials off-set the simple pre-Christian interments devoid of grave-goods. Yet it is increasingly recognized that the relationship between the archaeological and the historical record is complex and that much more careful local investigation is needed before firm conclusions can be drawn on the nature of the early Anglo-Saxon settlement.¹

The most helpful line of approach still comes from a field which, in spite of its somewhat treacherous nature, gives the firmest and most tangible evidence relating to some of the settlement problems: that of place-name study and the study of language. The references that will be made in the following pages to the work of the English Place-Name Society, and to the work of Professor Jackson on the language and history of early Britain, pay only too inadequate tribute to the help that is being given from these sources to all students of our early history.

In one respect, however, the writer whose concern lies in the social and economic aspects of history has an advantage. He is not bound to the worrisome discussion of minute detail that plagues the political historian. Disputes over the existence of Hengest and Horsa, or over the exact date of the Adventus Saxonum or of the battle of Mount Badon, are not relevant directly to his purpose. There might have been two Vortigerns, and then again there might not. He asks for a reasonable general framework in which to conduct a discussion of the nature of settlement, and there has emerged from the hard work of the last decades an agreed general picture of the political background sufficient for his needs.

There is one certain fact to start with: the withdrawal of the garrisons from Roman Britain in the first decade of the fifth century. This did not mean the end of Roman Britain, which still remained part of the Roman world. The provincials continued to regard themselves as Roman, though political predominance probably passed away from the more Romanic to the more Celtic elements in the population. The tyrants, of whom the sources tell, are likely to comprise tribal chieftains drawn from the more backward areas of the province, and brought into prominence by their success in resisting Picts and Scots. Ecclesiastical contact with the Continent was maintained. As late as A.D. 455 the Church in these islands was still in administrative and doctrinal touch with the Church in Gaul.

Then in the middle years of the fifth century heathen Germanic peoples, known generically to the British as Saxons, who had for long been troublesome pirates to the inhabitants of Britain, altered the nature of their intentions towards the island. The settlement proper began. By the end of the fifth century a firm foothold had been established along the eastern shores of Britain from the Humber and the Wash to the Thames Estuary and Kent. Sussex became a Saxon kingdom in the last quarter of the century. The whole movement was bound up politically with the slow consolidation of Frankish power in the north-east of Gaul, and possibly with the failure to set up a Saxon Normandy.

This initial advance was halted. At the battle of Mount Badon, fought at some time between the years 490 and 516, the invaders received a serious check. The first half of the sixth century was a time for consolidation. There was no hard and fast political frontier, and to talk in such terms is misleading. Perhaps the true significance of this period of uneasy balance is missed without an appreciation of the magnetic attraction of the coast in troubled times for Celt to the west as well as for German to the east. On the eastern coastal settlements, however, the Germanic peoples intensified their hold, welcoming new immigrants from the Continent and spawning off important new secondary settlements such as that of the Jutes in the Isle of Wight and South Hampshire, or that of the ‘Men of the March’ in the Middle Trent, the nucleus of historic Mercia, which appeared to gain coherence in the middle of the sixth century. In the Upper Thames valley the Saxons held their ground to form the main spearhead for political advance in the succeeding half-century. In the valley of the Warwickshire Avon there survived another important early sixth-century Germanic settlement which was to prove an important base for fresh advance.

Meanwhile in the west, Celtic tribal kingdoms sorted themselves out uneasily, losing their Romanic features though retaining, or possibly in many instances acquiring, the Christian faith. The intensification and consolidation of Christianity among the Celtic peoples under the impulse of a strong ascetic movement is a major characteristic of the whole period of political disaster. Nor were these kingdoms without political energy. The slowness of the Saxon advance and the tangled violence of the Celtic scene itself contradict such a view. It used to be held that the complex systems of earthworks known as Wansdyke (Woden’s dyke) were the work of British communities facing the pressure of thriving Saxon populations from the Upper Thames. These fortifications, with their ditches to the north, stretched, impressively if intermittently, from the Kennet valley to near the Bristol Channel. Archaeologists now attribute the two major sections of Wansdyke to the pagan Saxons, probably in the later sixth century,² but it is evident that the British communities were quite capable of such effort. Gildas, writing to all appearance in the mid-sixth century, places the chief blame for the woes of Britain on the shoulders of the quarrelsome princes, on their lack of discipline rather than on their lack of resource or on their timidity.

Conditions in these islands cannot have been easy during this period. Procopius tells of reverse migrations back to the land of the Franks from the mysterious island of Brittia.³ Traditions among the Old Saxons on the Continent deal with a movement of Angli from Britain to the Cuxhaven district about A.D. 531.⁴ The colonization of Brittany by Celtic peoples from Britain was well under way by the end of the first half of the sixth century, and already by that date coherent groups from Devon and from Cornwall constituted an important element in the new Breton population.⁵

In the succeeding century, A.D. 550–650, occurred the main political advance, marked traditionally by the triumph of the West Saxons at the battle of Dyrham near Bath in 577, and by the battle of Chester, which was fought between 613 and 616, when the dwellers north of the Humber announced their political maturity. Under Penda (632–54), the settlers in the Midlands achieved similar consolidation. By the middle of the seventh century the England of the Heptarchy had received its major bold outlines. With Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, the kingdoms which could still expand against the independent Celt, lay the political hope of the future. The achievements of St Augustine and his successors and the energy of the Celtic missionaries, particularly in the north, brought it about that most of the kingdoms of this new England were Christian, or subject to Christian influence, though Penda of Mercia himself remained a steadfast heathen.

Such in brief outline appears to be the accepted political pattern for these centuries. It is naturally subject to modification year by year as scholars throw emphasis on this or that facet of the evidence. At the moment the tendency is, if anything, to antedate the coming of the Saxons, to stress the fact that in Britain, as elsewhere in the Roman West, Germanic federate troops had settled, and that from their settlements around York, Lincoln, Cambridge, Caistor-by-Norwich, or Canterbury they prepared the way for slow infiltration by their countrymen quite early in the fifth century. Be this as it may, from the general picture there emerges one firm and undisputed fact that is of fundamental importance to a discussion of early Anglo-Saxon England. The Anglo-Saxon conquest and settlement of the lowlands of Britain was slow. The implications of this fact are great. If there is added to it the further fact that over much of England the Anglo-Saxons were agriculturalists rather than mere tribute-takers, a basis is given for understanding why these centuries saw the true foundation of England.

Yet vast problems remain. What happened to the native inhabitants, to the Romano-British as they may be called? Who were these newcomers that are labelled Anglo-Saxons? Why did they come? What stage of economic development had they reached, and what form of social organization did they bring with them? Is generalization possible at all about social structure or economic wealth in the kingdoms of the Heptarchy? Are the sweeping generalizations, Germanic tribal communities to the east, Celtic tribal communities to the west, no more than masks for ignorance? In fact the outlook is not as despairing and dark as we might think in face of the difficulties. A surprising amount of evidence is accumulating which enables something to be said of the variety of life and institutions in early Anglo-Saxon England.

2. THE CONTINUITY QUESTION

(a) Survival of inhabitants

There is first the question of the survival of native inhabitants. This is a desperately contentious problem, but on its solution rests a satisfactory interpretation of the institutions of early Anglo-Saxon England.⁶ On one extreme it has been argued that the Anglo-Saxons came in great numbers, exterminating or at best driving westwards the unfortunate natives whom they met in the course of the migration. On the other extreme it has been argued that the Anglo-Saxons were few in number, consisting of aristocratic warriors and exalted free tribesmen, accompanied by few women, and imposing upon a large subject population of slaves and rustics the language, institutions and customs of a new military aristocracy. Neither of the two arguments is convincing in its entirety for the whole of England, though truth lies nearer to those who favour substantial Germanic migration with all its consequences than to those who stress the social importance of British survivors. The case against wholesale extermination rests primarily on interpretation of archaeological and place-name evidence. The case against wholesale survival of Britons in coherent social groups rests primarily upon the formidable evidence of the Anglo-Saxon language itself, which is singularly free from British influence. The smallness in number of words of British origin relating to agriculture or to domestic economy, to general household goods and services, is strong evidence against a substantial survival of British peasants and womenfolk in Anglo-Saxon England. Peasants in the North Riding at the end of the seventh century were accustomed to sing, and presumably to think and talk, in the English tongue. Felix in his early eighth-century account of the Life of St Guthlac emphasized that Guthlac did not learn his Celtic speech among the East Angles, nor by inference among the Middle Angles where he was brought up.⁷ Much of the most interesting work of the last decades has helped to emphasize regional differences and to fill in the picture of Britons surviving in greater number to the west of England than to the east, possibly in enclaves in the east, certainly as slaves throughout the island. It has not dislodged the traditional picture of a new society formed by Germanic migrants who were primarily interested in good land for permanent agrarian settlement.

Yet valuable conclusions have resulted from modern examination of British survival. For example, recent intensive concentration on the classification of place-names is making it clear that the predominant German did not set up his settlements, his -hams and his -tons, and possibly a shade later his -ingas and -ingahams, on an empty board. It is hard to find a single district of size without names, if only of large rivers, prominent natural features, hills or forests, or above all of Roman towns, that go back well beyond the fifth century. Towards the west names bearing a Celtic origin increase in number up to the true Celtic fringe on the Cornish boundary, on the borders of Wales and in the Cumbrian uplands. A purist indeed will justly object to the use of the term ‘Celtic’ in relation to these names: non-Germanic would be safer, and in regard to the Celtic world itself Brittonic or Goidelic more precise. Perhaps the homelier word ‘British’ is adequate in this context to describe the inhabitants of Roman Britain who spoke an Indo-European tongue which was already in the fifth century undergoing changes that were to lead to the evolution of Early Welsh, of Cumbrian, of Cornish and of Breton. It is clear enough that in English England the degree of such British survival varied from district to district. The problem is to arrive at some criterion by which the intensity of settlement and of native survival can be judged. In this respect the evidence of river-names is particularly helpful. Names of large rivers are among the most conservative of all place-name elements, and even in the areas of heavy and early Anglo-Saxon settlement big rivers such as the Thames and the Trent preserve their pre-Saxon names. On the other hand names of small rivers and above all names of streams are not so conservative. A new language-speaking group, if settled in strength, will quickly rename minor water-ways. The river-names can therefore, if handled with care, tell much about the settlement of the newcomers and about the survival of the former predominant language-group. Professor Jackson has constructed a map, based on this evidence, which enables three principal areas in the histo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Abbreviations
• Introductory Note
• Preface
• Prefatory Note to the Second Edition
• 1. Settlement and Peoples
• 2. The European Setting and Overseas Trade
• 3. Internal Trade: the Coinage and the Towns
• 4. The Land
• 5. Kingship and Nobility
• 6. Church, Learning and Literature
• 7. The Major Social Changes
• 8. The Norman Conquest
• 9. England at the End of the Eleventh Century
• Bibliography
• Index