A Short History of the Anglo-Saxons

Henrietta Leyser

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781780765990
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786721402
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

'Here lies our leader all cut down, the valiant man in the dust.' The elegiac words of the Battle of Maldon, an epic poem written to celebrate the bravery of an English army defeated by Viking raiders in 991, emerge from a diverse literature – including Beowulf and Bede's Ecclesiastical History – produced by the peoples known as the Anglo-Saxons: Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain from Lower Saxony and Denmark in the early fifth century CE. The era once known as the 'Dark Ages' was marked by stunning cultural advances, and Henrietta Leyser here offers a fresh analysis of exciting recent discoveries made in the archaeology and art of the Anglo-Saxon world. Arguing that the desperate struggle (led by Alfred the Great) against the Vikings helped define a distinctively English sensibility, the author explores relations with the indigenous British, the Anglo-Saxon conversion to Christianity, the ascendancy of Mercia and the rise of Wessex. This vivid history evokes both the emergent kingdoms of Alfred and Offa and the golden treasures of Sutton Hoo. It will appeal to students of early medieval history and to all those who wish to understand how England was born.

1

AFTER THE ROMANS

As the Romans went back home, there eagerly emerged from the coracles that had carried them across the sea-valleys the foul hordes of the Scots and Picts, like dark throngs of worms who wriggle out of the narrow fissures in the rock when the sun is high and the weather grows warm … [then was] devised [a plan] for our land … that the ferocious Saxons … hated by man and God should be let into the island like wolves into the fold, to beat back the peoples of the north. Nothing more destructive, nothing more bitter has ever befallen the land.

(Gildas, The Ruin of Britain)1

‘410: In this year the Goths stormed Rome and the Romans never afterwards reigned in Britain.’ Thus did the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, first compiled in the ninth century, recount with unwavering certainty the abrupt end of Roman Britain. The urgent need for troops to withstand barbarian attacks on the continent had indeed led to the sudden withdrawal of the Roman armies stationed on the island and, in many parts of the country, the economic consequences were swift, devastating and remembered as such. In 418, continued the Chronicle, ‘the Romans collected all the treasures which were in Britain, and hid some in the ground, so that no one could find them afterwards, and took some with them into Gaul’.2 The reference is enigmatic but telling: with the withdrawal of the army, and the need to pay its soldiers, the monetary economy and the urban life of Roman Britain had swiftly collapsed. For the better part of 200 years, no new coins were minted. Meanwhile, the nearest contemporary record, from the sixth century, entitled The Ruin of Britain, was unsparing in its description of the chaos and internecine fighting that was to follow the aftermath of the Roman departure: ‘fragments of corpses, covered (as it were) with a purple crust of congealed blood, looked as though they had been mixed up in some dreadful wine-press’.3

The Ruin of Britain was the work of Gildas, a scholar, possibly a monk, who was most probably based in the south-west of Britain. In The Ruin, Gildas describes how after the departure of the Roman legions, Scots and Picts from the north of the island relentlessly pushed southwards, whereupon the Britons beseeched the Romans to return and come to their aid, but the Romans refused; in their despair the Britons turned for help to pagan mercenaries, the Saxons, from across the sea. Through this act of ‘crass stupidity’, as Gildas saw it, Christian Britain became ravished and plundered by these Saxon barbarians: ‘All the major towns were laid low by the repeated battering of enemy rams; laid low, too, all the inhabitants – church leaders, priests and people alike, as the swords glinted all around and the flames crackled.’4

Historians have long been wary of prose as colourful as Gildas’. But Gildas was no tabloid writer. He was a learned and a brilliant writer, well-schooled in Latin oratory.5 Uncertainties as to exactly when and where he was writing continue, however, to puzzle historians and make it difficult to use his work to establish any kind of chronology of events. He himself tells us that he took up his pen 44 years after a spectacular British victory over the Saxons at the Battle of Mount Badon (Mons Badonicus). Gildas’ target was the five British kings whom he castigates for indolence, complacency and the squandering of the opportunity which this great battle had offered them. The dates of at least one of Gildas’ kings can be calculated with a reasonable degree of confidence and on this basis it would seem as if the famous battle took place sometime near the end of the fifth century, with 530–50 as a likely time then for the composition of The Ruin.6 Such a date, well over a hundred years after the departure of the Roman legions in 410, together with the very western setting of Gildas’ work – the kings he addresses ruled in what is today Wales and in the West Country – means that there is every reason to read his narrative of the fifth century with caution. The scenario he painted may have seemed plausible to his own contemporaries, and no doubt it satisfied his own rhetorical needs, but it is now clear that, however closely it depicted events in his own locality, there was never any one story which could have been applied to the whole of the country. With that proviso in mind, let us, nonetheless, take a closer look at Gildas’ Britain.

Excavations make it clear that in some areas of the west of Britain the departure of the Romans was followed by a notable revival of earlier ways of living. Precisely in those areas where there is no evidence of early Saxon settlement there is, by contrast, considerable evidence of British hill-forts being restored and re-occupied – and in style. South Cadbury (in what is now Somerset) provides just one example of how, in the fifth century, such places gained a new lease of life. Here, major new building works were undertaken, trade with the Mediterranean was maintained and, to judge by the quantity of pottery, wine and glass that was imported, life continued to be enjoyed and celebrated in (to follow Gildas) a spirit of hedonism, dangerously oblivious of the advance westwards of Saxon conquerors. When, at last, the Britons awoke to the perils confronting them and their way of life, the one victory they then won (at Mount Badon) only lulled them into a false sense of security.

Fans of the ‘real King Arthur’ have long been tantalized by the failure of Gildas to mention their hero by name, all the more since Gildas attributes the victory at Mount Badon not to Arthur, but to a certain ‘Ambrosius Aurelianus’, whom he described as ‘the last of the Romans’. Valiant attempts to prove that Ambrosius and Arthur are one and the same notwithstanding, it is more fruitful to widen the Arthurian search and to accept that, rather than one heroic figure, it is more likely that there were indeed many such, of whom Arthur, ‘real’ or not, became in time the totemic leader. Thus, the long-cherished suggestion that South Cadbury was the original Camelot should be abandoned; but the possibility that every restored hill-fort (and the sites stretch from the south-western peninsula of Britain up to modern-day Scotland) had its own collection of ‘Arthurian’ figures seems highly likely.7 These are the figures long remembered in heroic poetry, not least in the battle poem, The Goddodin.8 This poem, in the form we have it, is usually dated to c.600. It is thought to have been composed somewhere near Edinburgh, in a northern dialect of Brittonic, a language cognate with Welsh. The poem records an epic battle, seemingly fought at Catterick in Northumberland, between a carefully picked troop of native Christians against a much larger force of Saxon ‘heathens’. The heathens annihilate the Christians – there are only three survivors (of whom one is the poet), but nothing is allowed to dull the excitement of the preparation for the battle, nor the heroism of the fight:

The men went to Catraeth, they were famous; wine and mead from gold vessels was their drink for a year, according to the honourable custom; three men and three score and three hundred wearing torques. Of those that hastened forth after the choice drink none escaped but three … the two battle-hounds of Aeron and Cynon … and I, with my blood streaming down …9

In one verse, the hero is explicitly described as brave, generous and fearsome, ‘though he was no Arthur’ – a reference which has caused much spilt ink.10 It is very probably an interpolation. The Goddodin was at first an oral poem and, since the earliest manuscript is thought to date only from the ninth century, the reference here to ‘Arthur’ may do no more than add to the evidence, by then plentiful, of the legendary Arthur, victor of Mount Badon, a figure of whom any Saxon should beware.

But Mount Badon, with or without an ‘Arthur’, was undoubtedly a telling British victory. That it was (as Gildas feared) only a pause in the advance westward of the Anglo-Saxons seems confirmed by the entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 577, which reports:

In this year Cuthwine and Ceawlin fought against the Britons and killed three kings, Conmial, Condidan and Farinmail, at the place which is called Dyrham; and they captured three of their cities, Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath.11

‘Dyrham’ is six miles north of Bath along the A46 and the annal can reasonably be suspected of reflecting West Saxon claims to the three named cities, and not a report of an actual battle, but nonetheless it clearly mattered in the annals of Anglo-Saxon history that these particular cities should be recorded as having been captured. Even if these cities were derelict, they still represented the grandeur of Rome and a very different way of life from that of the nearby (and newly restored) British hill-fort Cadbury Congresbury.

The years after 577, and after the supposed battle at Catterick, witnessed new, shifting alliances. Linguistic evidence, the survival notably of both Welsh and of Cornish, makes it plain that despite any victories they may have had, nonetheless there were limits as to how far west the new immigrants were prepared to venture, so much so that it has even been suggested that it is only with Edward I’s defeat of the Welsh in 1282 that the final collapse of Roman Britain should be dated.12 That the fate of post-Roman Britain has so often been simplified must of course be attributed in large part to the master narrative presented by the Northumbrian monk Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed c.731.

It was once said that:

if one were given the chance to interview any character in English history in the hope of increasing the sum total of our knowledge, one would be likely to obtain more really significant information from an hour’s talk with the Venerable Bede than with any other figure at any period.13

Bede certainly had further material at his disposal than had Gildas and, in any case, his magisterial style and didactic purpose gave his account a credibility which Gildas’ rhetoric had forfeited. Thus it was Bede’s History which soon came to be seen as authoritative. As Bede told the story, after the failure of the British appeal to the Romans to return to come to their aid, it was a certain king named Vortigern who suggested that the Britons should seek help from nearer home.14 And so it was that in 449 three warships, bearing ‘Angles or Saxons’, arrived on British shores. So successful seemed this scheme (and so astute were the Saxons who spotted both ‘the fertility of the island and the slackness of the Britons’) that before long more and more Saxons and their allies arrived, coming, according to Bede, from ‘three very powerful Germanic tribes, the Saxons, Angles and Jutes’. Their leaders Hengist and Horsa (now thought to be no more than mythical founding figures, whose names mean ‘horse’ and ‘stallion’) were, Bede assures us, of royal stock, descended from the pagan god Woden. But before long, ‘hordes of these peoples’ began to crowd into the island and to settle it.15 The Jutes took Kent and the Isle of Wight; the Saxons occupied what is now Essex, Sussex and the South-West, while the Midlands and the North went to the Angles. But far from defending the Britons, the Angles now allied with the Picts so that the British position was even worse than it had been before, and then, when the Britons failed to provide the provisions the newcomers demanded, a mutiny followed. The Britons were shown no mercy. Some were massacred; some fled overseas; others died of starvation or at best were condemned to a life of slavery.

In his description of the years of terror in post-Roman Britain, Bede’s debt to Gildas has long been recognized and for some years now Bede’s knowledge, as well as his purposes, has been subjected to ever closer scrutiny and many new approaches have been adopted towards his work. Questions which had once seemed relatively simple to answer now appear to be considerably more complex. Could it really be possible, for example, to accept that the newcomers belonged to groups as distinct as the three which Bede had named? Material culture (such as the brooches men and women wore; their pots; their dress fastenings and the remains of their burial rites; and notably whether they practised inhumation or cremation) had once seemed to hold all the clues necessary to decode tribal identities and had made it possible for the historian to colour in his or her map of England accordingly and to adorn it with arrows to show the relationship of the newcomers to their continental homelands. Closer analyses have shown how highly problematic such uses of the evidence can be. In the light of World War II, moreover, historians, increasingly wary of concepts that smacked of ‘racial purity’, began to question the beguiling simplicity of such arrows and labels and to wonder whether Bede’s tribes had any objective reality: might these not simply be useful names acquired by heterogeneous peoples after they had settled their new lands? Could it not be that the people of Kent became notably ‘Jutish’ only after their arrival on the Isle of Wight and in Kent, and not before? Was it not possible that particular fashions signalled aspirations rather than inalienable birthrights? In much the same way, the Britons, it was suggested, could easily have become assimilated into the families of the incomers. Dressed, housed and buried according to the fashions of those who had conquered them, the Britons thus became in no time every bit as ‘German’ as their new masters. (‘Masters’ who in turn would soon be doing their very best to appear ‘Roman’.) No need, then, to believe in the labels provided by Bede, nor in the massacres of Britons both he and Gildas had described. All that is needed instead is some understanding of ethnogenesis.16

Ethnogenesis notwithstanding, questions relating to the fates of the Britons and to the original homes of those who came to be known as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ have failed to go away. Not so long ago, a flurry was caused by the possibility that DNA testing would reveal all. Doubts have now been cast on the viability of this evidence and yet another method (the analysis of isotopes) has been suggested instead. Such work is still in its infancy, and cannot help, for example, with the analyses of cremated bodies, but it seems likely to support the conclusion that the particular interest of the fifth century may we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps, Tables and Illustrations
• Preface
• Timeline
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: After the Romans
• Chapter 2: The Arrival of Christianity
• Chapter 3: Monks and Mission
• Chapter 4: A Mercian Century
• Chapter 5: King Alfred, the Vikings and the Rise of Wessex
• Chapter 6: Godes Rice: God’s Kingdom
• Chapter 7: The Viking Return
• Chapter 8: England Tempore Regis Edwardi
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Notes on the Illustrations
• Select Bibliography
• Notes