A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (5 page)

It was to prove an epoch-making decision in the literal sense of the term. According to Bede that papal letter was given on ‘15 May
AD
719’. The system was becoming generally adopted in western Europe within a century of his death, thanks to the wide diffusion of his writings and to the English missions on the Continent. When Boniface himself came to promulgate the decrees of the Synod of the German Church of 742, the
Concilium Germanicum
, he dated them in Latin, ‘
anno ab incarnatione Christi septingentesimo XLII
’ (‘the
year from the birth of Christ 700th 42’).
¹⁰
The fact that today’s international dating system, the Common Era, is the Christian era calculated from the supposed date of Christ’s birth, is largely due to Bede. No historian could boast a more lasting memorial to his work.

From Beowulf to bureaucracy

Pioneer of the modern world’s dating convention, a historian in the sense that we understand the word as one who endeavours to weigh evidence on its merits of probability, a good son of the church, Bede was also a member of the establishment of his own day and surely familiar with bardic traditions and epics of the warriors’ mead hall. Scholars still debate the date of the manuscript of
Beowulf
, but most seem to agree that some form of the epic itself had long been part of the oral tradition. The ideals of loyalty to king or lord, courage in the face of monstrous danger, the warrior worthy of the gifts of the arm-ring giving lord were assumptions that formed a social fabric. It was a fabric where over all and behind all looms the undefinable presence of ‘
wyrd
’. It is associated with the ideas of fate (Latin
fortuna
), the destiny that shapes and informs human affairs, a space–time warp to which in the ancient Greek world even the gods were ultimately subject. In the pre-Christian world of northern Europe it was the continuum in which the ‘Norns’, the three Fates of Norse legend, cradle and determine human affairs. The word, but not the presence, survives in modern nursery English as ‘weird’. As late as Shakespeare it still held something of its dread: not for nothing did he dub the three witches in
Macbeth
the ‘Weird Sisters.’

Be that as it may, for both cleric and lay this Anglo-Saxon world of rival kings and conflicting ecclesiastical jurisdictions, where Canterbury and York would first try conclusions and where Christ the King of Heaven triumphed over the heathen gods and their attendant ‘devils’, ‘lordship’ was the core value. As John Blair notes in
The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society
(2005), the monk’s obligation of obedience to his abbot chimed with the secular value of imperative loyalty to lord or kin. This loyalty to the lord could even override obligations to the king. A man who remained at home, rather than accompany a lord condemned by the king to exile, could expect disrespect from his peers. In 675 King Ecgfrith of Northumbria ordered Bishop Wilfrid of Ripon into exile, but the cathedral’s clergy refused to follow him to ‘realms across the sea’. When news reached St Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborne in Wessex, he wrote a contemptuous letter. If even laymen, ignorant of the divine knowledge, despise men who abandon a good lord when he falls on hard times and is exiled, what was one to say of clerics who protested love of their bishop when he fostered them in the good times but let him go into exile alone?

But a puzzling paradox will emerge in the course of this book: this world of
Beowulf
, heroism and legend also produced a state structure of closely organized authority. So that in that area east of Wales and south of the rivers Tees and Ribble (the area surveyed by the Domesday Book commissioners) England’s pre-Conquest kings exercised a system of government more substantially uniform and extensive than any other European ruler. ‘There is no question of there having been anything comparable to the English state in France.’
¹¹

And yet, equally, we can say that England did have a political society that had many points in common with Continental ‘feudalism’. In England, as in Europe, men knew ‘a form of lordship in which a tenant could owe “rent” in many forms’, and had ‘obligations to provide all sorts of service, including military service.’ With the Norman Conquest, the elimination of the Old English social elite and its replacement by a new, alien landowning class resulted ‘in a tightening of the bonds of lordship to a degree which was even more foreign to France (including Normandy) than it was to England.’
¹²
In other words, the essential elements of ‘the feudal system’ were present in England prior to 1066, and the Battle of Hastings merely intensified them.

But there was the English dimension – the courts of the shire and its subdivisions, all part of a system of royal justice that was in a significant sense popular, attended by and presided over by men residing in the locality. A principal key to the long success of the English state, it has been said, was ‘the development of [local] loyalties to local units which had been created for the purposes of the central authority’.
¹³

Living as we do in times when the encroachment of the state upon the liberty of the individual is increasing, and that state is becoming at the same time ever more remote and less accountable, it may seem somewhat perverse to laud the efficiency of the Anglo-Saxons’ government apparatus. But at that time the idea of local loyalties in counterbalance to the central authority provided a useful buttress against autocracy. And there could be practical advantages. On his long forced march north to confront and defeat Harald Hardrada of Norway at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in September 1066, King Harold II of England, writes Emma Mason, was ‘joined on the way by contingents from the regions through which they passed, which in itself indicates both the efficiency of his courier and also the national respect for Harold’s authority’.
¹⁴
It is an example of a centralized state able to work for the benefit of its people. But that state would seem to have been ahead of its time; M.K. Lawson has commented on ‘the slow decline under William [the Conqueror] and his successors of the powerful system of government developed by the late Anglo-Saxon state’.
¹⁵

In the 400s the former Roman province of Britannia, that is the southern half of the island of Britain, was a zone of authority in disintegration; a century later the hazy idea of an
Imperium
(Bede’s term), wielded by a ‘high king’ or ‘bretwalda’ (the term used in the Anglo-Saxon Chonicle to translate Bede’s ‘
Imperium
’) had emerged. Such an idea was known also in Ireland but no Irish ‘high king’ (and there might be more than one at any one time) ever achieved full recognition, so that even after Brian Boru’s victory over the
Norsemen at Clontarf in 1014 successive high kings continued to rule only ‘with opposition’: that is, contested by minor ‘under kings’.

In England, by contrast, the notion of a single ‘over king’, present from the very early days of the Anglo-Saxon settlement, evolved into reality. In 1065, the last full year of the Old English State, rebel leaders in Northumbria, discontented with the earl appointed by the southern-based court of Edward the Confessor, did not set up their own candidate but asked the king to appoint as their new earl a man with close links in the south. In years gone by Northumbria had had its own king but now its great men were content to accept as lord an appointee chosen by the king of all
Engla lond
, as the country had become known.

At the time of its conquest by William of Normandy, Anglo-Saxon England, including the increasingly integrated eastern regions known as the Danelaw, was subject to a fairly uniform administration that was unmatched in France, Spain or Italy; it was a government that wielded more effective central power than even the mighty German emperor, Henry IV. Overrun and plundered by its Norman conquerors though it was, this English state provided them with the wealth for a building programme of churches and castles unmatched in scale in any other comparable area, and the means to consolidate their power and build the foundations of dominance in the islands of Britain and beyond. I hope to suggest how it all started.

1

INVADERS AND SETTLERS BEGINNINGS TO THE EARLY 600s

Anglo-Saxons who knew their history believed that their ancestors had come to Britain from parts of northern Europe after the Romans had left the island, and that the leaders of these invading war bands and kinships had defeated British inhabitants and displaced them. Sagas and legends declaimed to the sound of harp or lyre at banquets and aristocratic assemblies recounted the deeds of kings and warriors from a heroic past and
Beowulf
, Europe’s oldest pagan epic poem in any Germanic language, told a story set in southern Scandinavia of ancestral heroes and kings of the Geats (of whom Beowulf becomes king), the Danes and the Swedes.

The poem as we have it is in a manuscript, also known as the Nowell codex, dated according to scholarly opinion somewhere between the 990s and 1050s; the poem itself may have originated between the years 600 and 900, but apparently ‘there is no current critical consensus’.
¹
The work, by an anonymous Christian poet, presumably derives its materials from a pre-Christian oral tradition. It has been attributed to a Northumbrian king, the court of East Anglia in the early seventh century and the West Saxon court in the ninth century – some of the legends, characters and literary motifs are known to have been familiar in Wessex,
²
especially around the monastery at Malmesbury, in the time of King Alfred.

There are signs of links between East Anglian ruling families and Scandinavia at the extensive seventh-century site surrounding the famous ship burial of Sutton Hoo. Bede, however, named three peoples – Angles, Saxons and Jutes – and Frisians also contributed to the ethnic mix. (In his
Gothic Wars, c.
550, the Byzantine historian Procopius wrote that Britain was inhabited by Britons, Angles and Frisians.) In general, Bede distinguished between the Saxons who settled the southern parts of Britain, principally Essex, Sussex and Wessex; the Angles who settled East Anglia, Mercia and comprised ‘all the Northumbrian race’; and finally the Jutes who settled Kent and the Isle of Wight. Archaeologists have found that around the year 500 Anglian, Saxon and Kentish women’s styles of dress were quite distinctive.
³
Yet Bede sometimes seems to use ‘Saxons’, ‘Angles or Saxons’ and then ‘Saxons’ again interchangeably

The details of how and when the migrations occurred are obscure. However, whereas about 400 Britain was a place of diverse non-Germanic populations, some two hundred years later, south of the Firth of Forth and east of the line of the River Severn, new Germanic kingdoms were emerging and at least one of the Kentish kings used Old English to record laws. This chapter deals with how the newcomers are thought to have arrived and their impact on the native inhabitants of Britain. But we start with the place itself and the British world they encountered.

The place

The term ‘Pretanic Islands’, the oldest version of the name ‘Britain’, is to be found in the work of the Greek historian Polybius, writing in the second century
BC
and recording the notes made by Pytheas, another Greek writer, navigator, geographer and astronomer, who explored the island about a century or so earlier but whose works are lost. ‘The form’ we are told ‘implies for the name of the inhabitants, “Pritani” or “Priteni”.’ The form ‘Prydain’ for the island as a whole
long continued in Welsh, as for example in the title of the early tenth-century Welsh heroic poem
Armes Prydein
(The Prophesy of Britain).

Following the Roman conquest under the Emperor Claudius in
AD
43, the people of the province the Romans dubbed ‘Britannia’ came to call themselves Brittones. However, in the second century
AD
Ptolemy, the most famous Greek geographer of the ancient world, enumerated some thirty-three groups or tribes, those in the region we now call England and Wales included Iceni (Norfolk), Cantiaci (Kent), Dumnonii (Devon), Silures (Gwent and Powys) and so forth. From the late third century, it seems the island was under sporadic attack from Germanic sea raiders commonly grouped under the general designation of ‘Saxons’, with ports of origin along the Frisian, German and Danish coastline. A series of imposing Roman structures from Brancaster on the Wash to Richborough in Kent and Portchester in Hampshire would seem to be the remains of a defence system to protect what one source called the ‘Saxon Shore’.

From the 360s the country was subject to sporadic raids from the Picti and the Scotti as well as Saxon sea rovers. A group of these, we noted, may have settled as early as the 360s, others perhaps a little later, possibly as mercenaries or
foederati
in traditional Roman manner. Excavations between 1965 and 1978 at Mucking, Essex, on the north bank of the Thames estuary revealed scores of sunken huts (German:
Grubenhäuser
) and two cemeteries, in occupation from the early 400s to the early 700s. The pioneer settlement may have been of such Germanic
foederati
brought over to defend the estuary.

The empire in Europe was under general attack and in 410 Alaric the Visigoth actually occupied Rome; Britain’s military garrison was soon called back to Rome leaving the defence of the embattled province to the local Romano-British population and its civic leaders, the
civitates.
The Western Emperor Honorius sent word that thenceforward they would have to fend for themselves. (Recent
theory argues that the late fourth-century empire was still a going concern and the end when it came was not so much a decline, the conventional view, as a collapse).
⁴