The Anglo-Saxon Age

An Alternative History of Britain

Timothy Venning

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781781591253
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783468942
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Taking a similar approach to his successful If Rome Hadn't Fallen, Timothy Venning explores the various decision points in a fascinating period of British history and the alternative paths that it might have taken.Dr. Timothy Venning starts within an outline of the process by which much of Britain came to be settled by Germanic tribes after the end of Roman rule, as far as it can be determined from the sparse and fragmentary sources. He then moves on to discuss a series of scenarios, which might have altered the course of subsequent history dramatically. For example, was a reconquest by the native British ever a possibility (under 'Arthur' or someone else)? Which of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms might have united England sooner and would this have kept the Danes out? And, of course, what if Harold Godwinson had won at Hastings? While necessarily speculative, all the scenarios are discussed within the framework of a deep understanding of the major driving forces, tensions and trends that shaped British history and help to shed light upon them. In so doing they help the reader to understand why things panned out as they did, as well as what might have been.

Chapter One

Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms to c.800

Part I

The Setting: An Era of Personal Leadership and Creation of New Kingdoms

But what if the fortunes of war and politics had turned out differently?

(a) The problem of the sources

It has become the fashion in recent decades to emphasize the development of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of early England in terms of social and economic factors as opposed to their leadership. The nineteenth century historians’ enthusiasm for history focusing on the lives of ‘kings and queens’ has been downplayed, and in school education the old system of learning the names of rulers by rote has been replaced by ‘empathizing’ with the lives of their subjects – the ordinary peasant-farmers and their families. Assisted by a concentration of resources on archaeology and the excavation of homesteads, the basic details of everyday life have been the mainstay of pre-1066 studies. The complicated details of politics and battles have been neglected, with the additional factor that greater modern understanding of the meagre literary sources poses new questions about them. Just how accurate and reliable are the surviving – often non-contemporary – narratives? To what extent were they written to record details that had been faithfully remembered over generations – and how much were they works of literature and propaganda with a contemporary political purpose?

The issue is particularly acute for the era of ‘conquest’ – itself a problematic concept at variance with basic archaeology – and settlement, the fifth to seventh centuries. The main semi-contemporary British (Welsh) source, the De Excidio Britanniae of Gildas (540s), deals in lurid generalizations of mass-slaughter and polemic about the sins of the British, and its author clearly saw himself as a latter-day Jeremiah inveighing against the moral failings of his sinful countrymen that led to merited punishment. He was not writing as an objective ‘historian’ in the modern sense (or even as a Roman writer such as Tacitus did), but as a polemicist looking to the Old Testament for inspiration. The post-Roman British of his era had lost the greater part of their land to heathen invaders, just as the Jews of Jeremiah’s time had lost Israel and were in the process of losing Judah. The parallel was obvious; the cause of this punishment of God’s people must be their sins, and thus Gildas, a devout monk probably writing in southern Britain or Brittany, was bound to play up the extent of the disaster.

But his claims of disaster for the British, with towns sacked and farms abandoned in a systematic and countrywide reign of terror by Germanic invaders, are not backed by the evidence on the ground. The amount of fire-related destruction in towns is limited, and it has been pointed out that not every fire can be attributed to attackers as opposed to accident (which applies to burnt Roman villas too).

Pioneering work on the rural landscape shows a major degree of continuity in occupation from post-Roman to Anglo-Saxon settlement and little sign of devastated farms¹ left vacant for decades.

The first English source, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, was written by another monk, the Venerable Bede, in isolated Northumbria c.731 and sought to describe the inevitable triumph of the Roman Catholic missionaries in converting the English. Bede’s monastery of Jarrow on the Tyne in northern Northumbria around 700 was not that remote from events elsewhere despite the geographical location. The kingdom had many contacts with the other English states and bishoprics and the nearer Continent, playing up its role as part of Christendom and its links with the papacy in Rome – particularly under the late seventh century bishopric of the energetic ‘Romanizer’ St Wilfred. Its elite under King Oswy had made a conscious decision to adopt the Roman religious customs (e.g. in celebrating Easter) at Whitby in 664 to fit in with the Continent, and the Church kept up its international links. Indeed, from 669 the Church in England uniquely had a Greek leader from St Paul’s home-town in Cilicia, Eastern Anatolia – Archbishop Theodore from Tarsus. Bede was an assiduous collector of facts and emphasized his use of reliable witnesses. But he had a religious purpose in his writing as much as Gildas had, though he seems to have been less credulous about early history and better informed. His account downplayed both the work of ‘Celtic’ missionaries from Iona – the defeated faction in 664 – in the conversion of northern Britain and the survival of the post-Roman British Church. If he is to be believed, preconversion England was entirely pagan, with no mention of the possibility that Christians using churches (e.g. that of St Martin at Canterbury) had survived in the kingdom of Kent into the sixth century. No Christians were referred to in the British kingdoms of the Pennines annexed to Northumbria in the early seventh century. Nor did he point out that before his hero, St Augustine, and his missionaries arrived from Rome to convert Kent in 597 that King Aethelbert’s Christian Frankish wife already had an attendant bishop, Liudhard.

Both Kent and Northumbria were presented as a pagan tabula rasa when their Roman Christian converters arrived – Augustine in Kent and Paulinus in Northumbria. In secular matters, Bede’s list of the major ‘over-kings’ in England in the seventh century² – the ‘Bretwaldas’ – notably left out the pagan Penda, ruler of the Midlands from c.625 to 655 and probably more powerful than his Northumbrian contemporaries.

The major secular source for pre-900 history, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was not compiled until the later ninth century, 400 years after the early settlements, and concentrates on events in its ‘home territory’, Wessex. It was probably commissioned by King Alfred’s court, at a time of renewed threat from the Vikings, to present an inspiring picture of the struggles of the English peoples against the British (and each other) and to play up the role of Alfred’s own dynasty. Much of its early detail is formulaic, with the sparse account of the conquest of Wessex suspiciously similar to that of Kent. The only other southern kingdom covered in any detail is Kent – and that mainly at the time of its conquest in the fifth century and the conversion in the sixth century. Sussex, adjacent to Wessex, so presumably reasonably well known to the latter’s annalists, is only mentioned during its conquest in the fifth century and later when its history impinges on Wessex. East Anglia – an important realm, holder of the ‘bretwaldaship’ in the 620s and location of the major archaeological find of royal treasure at Sutton Hoo – is hardly mentioned, as is Essex. Mercia, crucial in the seventh and eighth centuries and arguably the most powerful kingdom south of the Humber from its unification c.630, is neglected except when its history impinges on Wessex or Northumbria. As with Bede, the career of the pagan Penda is downplayed compared with that of his Christian foes in Northumbria – because Alfred or other ‘editors’ regarded him with disapproval?

The annals are very much history from a West Saxon point of view – and we must bear in mind that they may have been collected to inspire the readership and listeners about past heroic successes in an era of Viking attacks. As has been pointed out, there is no mention of apparent Saxon disasters such as their defeat by the British at ‘Mount Badon’ around 500. There is merely a suspicious lacuna in the list of Saxon military successes for the period from 491 to 560, except in Wessex. Again, there are contradictions with the archaeological record – particularly over the early settlement of Hampshire,³ the alleged cradle of Wessex. There is no archaeological record of a Saxon settlement in Hampshire around 500, when the ‘founder’ Cerdic was apparently active. The majority of sixth century settlements are in the upper and middle Thames valley, an area whose warfare is not covered in the Chronicle except for a few references in the 570s.

For that matter, even the early Welsh sources have been shown to have contemporary political purposes – as with the History attributed to ‘Nennius’ (c.829), commissioned for a new dynasty in Gwynedd to play up its predecessors’ heroism, and the tenth century Annales Cambriae compiled at Hywel Dda’s court.⁴ Sceptics have accordingly had a field day minimizing the reliability of all these sources and limiting the amount of written evidence for the period that can be deemed reliable.⁵ It is likely that the sources are not as useless as some historians have implied, and that much detail was copied from non-surviving records without much amendation even if a political ‘spin’ was put upon it and inconvenient facts were dropped from the record. But it still provides a major note of caution when any assessment of the era of settlement is considered. And for that matter the first, nineteenth century, modern historians to interpret this evidence had their own agenda too. Great ‘progressive’, ‘Whig’ historians such as Freeman and Stubbs had a motive for presenting a picture of ‘free’, racially Germanic Anglo-Saxons creating a distinctly ‘English’ society, without inconvenient ‘Celtic’ elements. They looked to emulate their nineteenth century German contemporaries across the ‘German Ocean’ (North Sea), whence the Anglo-Saxons had come, and to create a founding saga for the British Empire and its democratic institutions. In this respect, the ‘Celtic’ element in Britain was an irrelevance and any notion of non-Saxon survival in England to be ignored; the argument sometimes took on ominous racial overtones about the innate superiority of the Germanic Saxons to other peoples. In this interpretation, the seventeenth century ‘left-wing’ notion of the post-1066 ruling class as alien Frenchmen imposing a ‘Norman Yoke’ on freedom-loving Saxons was revived. A typical interpretation was that of the historical novelist Charles Kingsley of the career of Hereward the post-1066 ‘freedom-fighter’ as ‘Last of the Saxons’, the epitome of manly English resistance to tyrannous French invaders. Kingsley and Freeman were as much polemicists as Gildas or Bede were.

(b) The importance of leadership – and a culture of Germanic military leadership

The various small kingdoms in post-Roman, Germanic England of the sixth and seventh centuries owed their names to the assorted divisions of the ‘Anglian’, Saxon, and Jutish peoples settled in the Danish peninsula and the swamps of north-western Germany in the fifth century⁶ – the three invading peoples of the mid-fifth century as recorded by Bede. In fact, it is not clear whether there was a clear genetic or geographical distinction between them – did the Jutes come from Jutland, and where precisely was the Angles’⁷ homeland? Was it the geographical ‘Angle’ between Germany and the Jutland peninsula, i.e. modern Schleswig-Holstein? What of the sixth century Eastern Roman account that the ‘Frissones’ – presumably from the Frisian islands off Holland⁸ – were involved in the conquest? Was this another name for one of Bede’s peoples, or for those ‘Saxons’ – not genetically or culturally distinct from the mainlanders – who happened to live on the Frisian islands? Were a distinct ‘Frisian’ people ‘swamped’ by numerically superior and more culturally aggressive Saxons and forgotten about by later writers? What of the archaeological evidence of close cultural links between the Jutes of Kent and the Franks, seemingly ignored by Bede?

The question arises of whether the names that we know the new kingdoms by are an accurate memory of the genetic or cultural ‘make-up’ of the inhabitants, or just ‘short-hand’ for the self-perceived allegiance of their leadership. The names may reflect the self-perceived identity of the dominant ‘people’ in an area by the time of Bede, not that of the real-life fifth and sixth century settlers. What he recorded may be myth as much as accurate fact, and at least be distorted by simplification by later generations after the (alleged) settlement. Given the recent discoveries about the makeup of English ‘DNA’, of which more later, the extent of an influx of settlers from across the North Sea has been questioned. So has the dating of any influx of ‘German/Low Countries’ DNA – how much of what has been traced was pre-Roman, from the so-called ‘Iron Age’ when Caesar testifies that some of the tribal ‘Belgae’⁹ from northern Gaul moved into southern Britain.

Did the identity of ‘Angles’, ‘Saxons’, and ‘Jutes’ reflect the chosen ‘creation myths’ of the ruling families of family, as recorded by their poets, at the expense of a more muddled and multi-ethnic origin for their followers? So-called ‘tribal’ identities in post-Roman Europe were sometimes not ethnically monolithic, but consisted of a mixture of warriors and their womenfolk from different regions coalescing around a successful leader – Romans and Germans served in the ‘Asian’ elite around Attila, for example. Did this apply to England too? Were all the emergent ‘kingdoms’ as ethnically muddled as that of Attila, which was once assumed to be monolithically of ‘Mongolian’ stock that had migrated all the way from the borders of China?¹⁰ It is not now certain that they were the ‘Hsiung-Nu’ Mongolian raiders of Han China in the second and first centuries BC, who had been defeated by the Chinese and were assumed to have migrated all the way to the Black Sea by the time they defeated the Goths there in the early 370s.

By the same definition, some of the ‘German’ groups in south-eastern England may have been partly British – hence the Romano-British names of the West Saxon ‘founder’, Cerdic, and some of his kin and of the royal house of Lindsey in Lincolnshire. Both kingdoms had ‘capitals’ – that is, principal royal residences and bishoprics – in former Romano-British regional capitals, Winchester and Lincoln.

Fifth and sixth century ethnicity is a historical and political minefield, and all that can be said is that the initial approaches of nineteenth century historians were too simplistic and were often influenced by their own contemporary notions of nationhood. Indeed, nowadays some historians even think that the long-cherished differences between archaeological finds for ‘Romano-British’ and ‘Germanic’ peoples (grave-goods and methods of burial in particular) reflect cultural fashion as much as ethnicity. Given the likely mixture of ethnic origin for the populace of some kingdoms, were the so-called ‘Saxon’ territories ever settled ‘exclusively’ by people from ‘Saxony’ that is ‘Old Saxony’ in lower north-west Germany? Or the ‘Jutish’ territories from Jutland? And how and why did the name of the ‘Frisians’/‘Frissones’ become submerged in those of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes?

Creating a sense of identity was important, and the emergence of ‘patriotic’ legends of identity focussing on a dynasty can be seen in the example of the most successful people of the later fourth and fifth centuries, the Goths; the Gothic History (Getica) of Jordanes reflects their self-image by c.500 and is centred on the Amal dynasty. The semi-Romanized Goths in conquered Italy are the most visible sign of this tendency, but it seems to apply across many other peoples – as in England with the ‘founding myths’ of Kent (centred on Hengest) and the Anglian Mercians (centred on their Continental ancestor-king Offa). Crucially, when all this dynastic mythology was created no ambitious literary ‘spinner’ for a new post-Roman kingship could create a history of ancient ruling royal families who had held power for centuries, giving an impression of antiquity and stability. The post-Roman kingship of the Germanic states in ex-Roman lands was new, and everyone knew it – though some lengthy dynastic ‘history’ was to be created for non-Roman Denmark by Saxo Grammaticus. The creation of any similar ‘foundation myths’ and heroic sagas for the English states is more problematic, but it would seem that Hengest in Kent (not even a definitively historical character) benefited from this (see next section). Possibly the arrival and battles of ‘Cerdic’, founder of the West Saxon kingdom, had a similar heroic saga created about it and this was used by the compilers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle nearly 400 years later. Given the limited extent of lay literacy in sixth to ninth century England, these stories may have been orally preserved (and possibly embellished). The contrast between post-Roman Britain and post-Roman Gaul is unclear, but the survival of ‘sub-Roman’ Latinate names for the local Gallic sixth century aristocracy (and its control of Church offices) is apparent. So is literary culture – for Gaul we have the detailed and erudite historical work of Bishop Gregory of Tours but for Britain we have the vague and often obscure ‘jeremiad’ of the monk Gildas (whose personal data and location are uncertain). The degree of historical knowledge of the Later Roman period displayed by Gildas is restricted – he mixes up the time and purpose of the building of Hadrian’s Wall and thinks that Magnus Maximus, the Western Imperial usurper from Britain who was killed in 388, not Constantine III (407) was the man who took the last Roman troops from Britain.

So clearly the degree of survival of literary history books in his region, as opposed to Gregory’s, was limited; he had no access in monastic libraries to fifth century Roman sources such as Orosius and Olympiodorus.

At least in the Mediterranean countries, there was a substantial survival of the Roman population – and even of their urban civilization and traditions, now centred on the Catholic Church. The extent of Romano-‘Celtic’ survival in ‘English’ south-eastern Britain has long been disputed, and it cannot be linked conclusively to the eclipse of the Roman ‘lingua franca’, Latin, as we cannot be sure that all the post-Roman populace spoke that tongue rather than one or more ‘Brittonic’ languages (presumably including proto-Welsh). There were identifiable people of British origin in Wessex in the 690s as seen from Ine’s law-code (though they were treated as second-class citizens and not given the sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms to c.800
• Chapter 2: The Post-Roman British Kingdoms
• Chapter 3: Which Anglo-Saxon State could have Triumphed Long Term in the Seventh to Ninth Centuries?
• Chapter 4: The Vikings and After: 866 and All That
• Chapter 5: The Kingdom of Wessex/England from the Reign of Alfred
• Chapter 6: 1066: The Fall of Anglo-Saxon England and its Aftermath
• Notes
• Bibliography