A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (12 page)

That same year the eighteen-year-old Emperor Constans II had forbidden debate on the topic with an imperial
typos
, or edict. He was surely influenced by the advance of Islam. Five years before, in the second year of his reign, the teenage emperor and defender of the Faith had seen the Muslim armies conquer Christian Egypt and threaten Constantinople, capital of the Christian world. Islam’s unswerving monotheism was a direct challenge to the Christian idea of a Three-in-One deity – it would seem even more of a challenge to the concept of a Trinity not united by a single Divine Will. Islam was triumphing.

The bishop of Rome, the pope, condemned the doctrine on theological grounds. In 649, twelve months after the imperial ban on the debate, Pope Martin I presided over the Lateran Council that repudiated the monothelete doctrine. Emperor Constans ordered
Martin’s deposition and exile. Theodore of Tarsus had been party to the Lateran deliberations; some twenty years later that fact would shape a decisive moment in his career. Vitalian, the pope at that time, had been ratified in his position by Constans, following his election in 657, only on condition that he swore not to raise the issue of monotheletism. But the pope’s theological objections remained. Then, with tension between pope and emperor still high, Wigheard, the Anglo-Saxon archbishop of Canterbury elect and Deusdedit’s successor, arrived in the Holy City to receive his pallium (the scarf-like vestment of office worn by senior members of the church hierarchy), but died of plague. Theodore was, by chance, also in the city at this time.

Rather than send to England for another candidate to be elected, Vitalian decided to seize the moment and promote his friend and champion of orthodoxy. In March 668 Theodore, having had his hair tonsured in the Roman manner, was consecrated and left for England in the company of the Anglo-Saxon nobleman Biscop Baducing, a frequent visitor to Rome and patron of the church in Northumbria (see
chapter 3
). For the pope, the moment was opportune. With Theodore at Canterbury, Christendom’s newest province was secure in the faith and Rome’s influence strengthened. That year Emperor Constans died.

Installed at Canterbury in 669, Theodore launched a programme of change and centralization in the English church. A number of bishoprics were vacant; these he filled. He convened the first nationwide synod of the English churches at Hertford in 672 or 673. This provided for regular synods in the future at a place called Clofesho. We do not now know where this was: the case has been put for, among others, Brixworth in Northamptonshire, where there is still what is arguably the finest seventh-century church north of the Alps, and Hitchin, in modern Hertfordshire. Both exhibit the topographical feature indicated by the name, ‘a cleft or cloven hill spur of land’.

The second general synod of the English church, convened by Archbishop Theodore for 17 September 679 at Hatfield, was a great occasion on the international stage. It was a decade since the death of Emperor Constans but the monothelete controversy was still unresolved. No one was better qualified than Theodore to bring matters to a head. Hatfield was convened specifically to endorse the decrees against the heresy. The ceremony was designed to impress. Following the practice of the early Church councils, the proceedings were presided over, so to speak, by a great illuminated Gospel book ‘enthroned’ on a special book stand and displayed to the synod as the assembly affirmed the decrees of five previous oecumenical councils. The following year the Sixth Oecumenical Council of the universal church adopted those
acta
against monotheletism so solemnly promulgated at Hatfield with full papal approval.

Theodore created new dioceses in the English church, which meant reduction in powers for bishops and brought him into conflict with the brilliant and powerful bishop of Northumbria, Wilfrid of York, whom he deposed and who promptly appealed to Rome. He won his case, retained his see at York and was reconciled with Theodore. Nevertheless Bishop Wilfrild’s see was reduced in size and the first archbishop of York was not consecrated for another sixty years.

Wessex and her first Christian kings

It is obvious that the sequence pagan England–Augustine of Canterbury–Christian England is hardly an approximation to the reality of seventh-century history, even to the events as we know them. But it is easy to forget how unsteady the early decades were. In Kent Queen Bertha had been celebrating mass for the best part of a generation in her chapel at court before her husband followed suit; and when he died their son relapsed to paganism for a time. A similar relapse befell Essex on the death of its king Sæberht,
at about the same time. To judge from the grave furniture at Sutton Hoo, Rædwald of East Anglia was planning to keep his options open at his death in the 620s and the Christian cause was to suffer a serious setback in the Northumbrian kingdoms within its first ten years.

But this was the world of the warrior code and of ring-giving lords: for the fighting men on all sides, Christian or pagan, British or Saxon, the struggle was as important as the outcome. The year that Oswald of Northumbria stood sponsor at his baptism, Cynegils of Wessex led a victorious campaign into the recently Christian kingdom of Essex (according to Bede, the East Saxons had relapsed into paganism and this was their punishment).

When Cynegils died in 643, Wessex once again found itself under pagan rule as his son Cenwalh flirted briefly in alliance with Penda of Mercia, taking the pagan king’s sister as his queen and then, for reasons best known to himself, separating from the queen; her furious brother drove him from his throne. Cenwalh found exile with the East Angles where he reconverted to Christianity. When he recovered Wessex in 648 he founded the minster of St Peter’s, Winchester, and, with the installation of the Frankish churchman Agilbert, seemed to have secured the new faith in Wessex.

Cenwalh (
d.
672) continued to ply the royal trade of war leader. Success in the 650s against the Christian British/Welsh near Bradford on Avon and the annexation of areas of what is now Wiltshire and Somerset, was followed (661) by humiliation at the hands of Mercia as its new, now Christian, king drove a triumphant campaign south to occupy the Isle of Wight. The West Saxon dynast seemed in eclipse. His widow Seaxburgha, the only queen regnant of the Anglo-Saxon period, held the centre until her own death in the early 670s. In the next decade the throne was seized by a pagan warrior claiming descent from the royal house, despite his apparently Celtic name of Cædwalla. In three ruthless years (685–8) he conquered the kingdoms of Kent, where he installed his brother Mull,
later burnt alive in a general uprising, and Sussex, recently converted by the exiled bishop Wilfrid of York. He, it seems directed Cædwalla to Christianity; he certainly received large estates in the Isle of Wight, which the king also conquered. Cædwalla’s origins are obscure, his military success indisputable. It guaranteed him the spoils of war and the kind of fame as lord and ring-giver that in turn guaranteed followers. (We shall meet another such, St Guthlac of Croyland, in
chapter 4
.) Like Guthlac, Cædwalla adopted the life of faith. He had lived as a pagan warlord but his return to the new religion confirmed it in Wessex beyond further question. In 688 he abdicated the throne he had seized and went, a pilgrim, to Rome; one of the first of the many English kings to do this. There he accepted baptism and, ten days later, died.

Weapons – the honoured tools of war

Thanks to the archaeologist, the early medieval king-warlord and his war band of companions or
gesiths
stand before us as men of extreme wealth and extravagant display; ostentatious on the battlefield and in the pomp of death. The largest pieces of equipment, helmet and shield, are at the same time the most majestic emblems. (Though even here makers might attempt to cut corners. King Æthelstan’s Grately code (c. 930) warned shield-makers not to use sheepskin, in place of true leather.) Made of wood and covered with tan-toughened leather, the heavy round shield, up to three feet (91 cm) in diameter, mounted with a central boss to deflect blows or be used as a bludgeon at need, could be a weapon of offence as well as defence. It was also a platform for display. Relief ornaments, in copper with applied silver-sheet embellishments, are exquisitely worked in animal forms – birds of prey, for example, or reptilian bodies – reminiscent in shape of the creatures that inhabit the scrolls and tendrils of the monks’ illuminated manuscripts, and mounted seemingly at random for maximum decorative effect, but almost
certainly in arrangements that conveyed symbolic meanings to the initiated.

For the fighting man himself the sword was surely the most valued tool of his trade in practical, but also in almost mystical, terms. The
Beowulf
poet writes of a sword treasured from the days of the giants, the envy of warriors, that only the hero himself could wield. As in the
samurai
culture of Japan, such high-status swords might pass through many hands, possibly as a gift from lord to
gesith
, possibly from father to son, certainly at the highest social level. They might be embellished, sometimes by successive owners, with gold fittings or other rich ornaments.

The sword-smith was highly rated in this warrior world: a craftsman of the highest calibre and respected social status. In the law code of Æthelberht of Kent the killing of the king’s smith commands special compensation. As in many African traditions, the ironworker as such was held to be under divine patronage and, like the Roman god Vulcan, the legendary Weland the Smith of the Anglo-Saxons was lame. But whereas Vulcan was born so, Weland, it was believed, had been crippled deliberately by a king to prevent his escape from the royal smithy.

In the early centuries, the finest swords were produced by ‘pattern welding’. The process, as depicted by Kevin Leahy,
¹⁵
begins by twisting strips of iron of the required length and then hammering them into flat ribbons. Four such ‘ribbons’ are next fire-welded onto an iron core and hammered out so that the twist marks, flattened into oblique lines, may create a chevron or ‘herringbone’ pattern. A strip of steel is next welded to either side of the core unit to provide the cutting edges. These are now ground and the whole polished to bring out the chevron effect – the blade’s badge of fighting quality and inherent value. By the mid-ninth century, though, furnace improvements and refinements of the smith’s technique made possible the production of quality blades without the need for pattern welding.

Weapons of all kinds, such as spears, light throwing axes or short single-edged dagger-swords (
seaxes
), which according to one tradition gave the Saxons their name, and, less frequently, swords, are excavated as grave goods and it seems reasonable to assume that the bones with which they are found are those of a warrior whose social status and fighting specialisms can be deduced from their presence. But, by an extensive analysis of some 1,660 male burials in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, concentrating on sword-bearers, Heinrich Härke of Reading University concluded that this does not necessarily follow. For example, some ‘weapon burials’ were those of children aged as young as twelve months, and some of men too severely disabled ever to have seen action. Then there were skeletons presenting combat wounds but not accompanied by weapons of any kind.

Such facts and others have long persuaded scholars that weapon burials had a largely symbolic meaning. But Dr Härke has proposed a further hypothesis. Analysis shows that those adult males buried with weapons tended to be up to two inches taller than those without – more or less the height difference revealed, by other studies, as that between the Anglo-Saxon and Romano-British populations. Härke has argued that the [taller] immigrant Germanic [community] ‘used weapons in the burial rite . . . perhaps . . . to demonstrate that they were ruling [the land] by force; a material culture version of the conquest myth’.
¹⁶
But it could be that these opulent inhumations, which would have had to be highly public events to make such an aggressive demonstration, were, rather, exclusive family memorials to kinship solidarity. The ceremony attending the baby boy buried with the family sword ‘that any warrior would envy and only a hero could wield in battle’ would, surely, have been one of howling private grief, not of ethnic triumphalism.

Eighth-century Wessex: the first West Saxon law code and the first shires

It was the view of Bishop Stubbs, the great nineteenth-century scholar of medieval studies in England, that when the House of Commons appears it is largely as an assembly of representatives of other, older assemblies. (He was writing at a time when the House of Commons was of some consequence.) He traced this in part back to the shire courts of Anglo-Saxon England. Nearly all were in place by the year 1000 and some, as Professor Campbell has pointed out, were much older: ‘At least three were former kingdoms. Such a shire as Hampshire is much older, as a unit of government and authority, than is France.’
¹⁷

The eighth century opened promisingly for the kingdom of Wessex. The name was coming into general use for the territory stretching from the lands of the Gewisse people, around the upper Thames, southwards to the coastal lordship established by the semi-legendary Cerdic two centuries earlier. It is not clear how or by whom the two regions were united, but the ruling dynasty held to the title of the Cerdingas. With King Ine (688–726) the historic heartland kingdom of the later Anglo-Saxon period secured its own core territories. The men of Kent were forced to pay compensation for the killing of Mull; Surrey was effectively a frontier province (bordering on Essex); while Sussex, it seems, was generally a biddable ally helping Ine in a campaign against the British king Geraint of Dumnonia.