A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (59 page)

1
Robin Fleming, ‘Harold II’,
ODNB
, 2004.

2
Gillingham, ‘Britain, Ireland and the South’, 2003, pp. 206–7.

3
Campbell, ‘The United Kingdom of England’, 1995, p. 36.

4
Stafford,
Queens, Concubines and Dowagers
, 1983, pp. 82 and 76.

5
Lawson,
Battle of Hastings
, 2002, p. 136.

6
Barlow,
The Godwins
, 2003, p. 67.

7
Ibid., p. 75.

8
Stafford,
Queens, Concubines and Dowagers
, 1983, pp. 97, 134.

9
Lawson,
Battle of Hastings
, 2002, p. 36.

10
Barlow,
The Godwins
, 2003, p. 98.

11
Ibid., p. 99.

12
Lawson,
Battle of Hastings
, 2002, p. 45.

13
Mason,
The House of Godwine
, 2004, p. 161.

14
See Lawson,
Battle of Hastings
, 2002, p. 160.

15
Walker,
Harold:The Last Anglo-Saxon King
, pp. 188–9.

16
Mason,
The House of Godwine
, 2004, p. 194.

17
Barlow,
The Godwins
, 2003, pp. 251–2.

18
Mason,
The House of Godwine
, 2004, p. xi.

19
Davis,
From Alfred the Great to Stephen
, 1991, p. 56.

20
Gillingham, ‘Britain, Ireland and the South’, 2003, p. 215.

21
Prescott, Andrew,
The Benedictional of St Æthelwold
, 2002.

22
Davis,
From Alfred the Great to Stephen
, 1991, p. 62.

23
Campbell, ‘The United Kingdom of England’, 1995, p. 37.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

In a ‘Brief History’ an exhaustive bibliography of the subject is neither possible, given the constraints of space, nor appropriate. What follows aims to give an idea of the range of works available as well as details of the works I have consulted.

Selected Primary Sources

The starting point must be the two volumes of
English Historical Documents:
I:
c. 500–1042
, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, 2nd edn, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1979, and, covering the last generation of Anglo-Saxon England, ii:
1042–1189
, ed. D. C. Douglas and G. W. Greenaway, 2nd edn, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1981. Together they constitute the most extensive selection available of documents of every kind, all in translation.

There are various editions of Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
The English language edition by Leo Sherley-Price, Penguin Classics, 1955, has been reissued in a revised edition by R. E. Latham and D. H. Farmer (1990). For the Latin text, annotated and with an English translation on the facing page, the standard edition is by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, OUP, 1969.

In the case of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, probably the most accessible is the edition by G. N. Garmonsway, Everyman’s Library, 1953, revised 1972. The most recent annotated edition is that translated and edited by Michael Swanton, Routledge, 1996, revised 2000.

The best recent translation of Asser’s ‘Life of King Alfred’ was published by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge in
Alfred the Great:Asser’s ‘Life of King Alfred’ and Other Contemporary Sources
, Penguin Classics, 1983. Other contemporary biographies include the text and translation of the life of Queen Emma, edited by Alistair Campbell as
The Encomium Emmae Reginae
, CUP, 1949, reprinted with a new introduction by Simon Keynes, CUP, 1998; and Frank Barlow’s
Edward the Confessor
, Eyre & Spottiswood, 1970, 2nd edn OUP, 1992. The
Life of St Wilfrid
by Eddius Stephanus and other basic texts by Bede may be found in
The Age of Bede
, translated and edited by J. F. Webb and D. H. Farmer, Penguin Classics, 1965, revised 1983. For the Anglo-Saxon missions in Germany, a wide selection of Boniface’s letters as well as biographies of St Willibald and St Lioba and others appear in C. H. Talbot’s
The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany
, Sheed and Ward, 1954, revised 1981. The standard edition of the Boniface letters in English translation is by Ephraim Emerton in
The Letters of St Boniface
, Columbia UP, 1940, reprinted with introduction by Thomas F. X. Noble, 2000). For Alcuin the most accessible text is probably the selection from the letters and ‘The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York’ in Stephen Allott’s
Alcuin of York: His Life and Letters
, William Sessions, 1974, reprinted 1987.

There can be a temptation to regard 1066 as a cut-off point – before, everything was Anglo-Saxon; after, everything was Norman. Of course, we know this is not so. Domesday Book, the culminating achievement of Anglo-Saxon government, was produced twenty years after the defeat. The great visual primary source, the Bayeux Tapestry, is superbly reproduced in full and with an authoritative commentary in David M. Wilson’s
The Bayeux Tapestry
, Thames & Hudson, 1985, revised 2004, while the Domesday book has been the subject of a magisterial facsimile edition.

Then there is what one might almost call a school of Anglo-Norman historiography. It is led by four writers, all writing in Latin, who it has been said ‘brought to the study of the past a professionalism hardly equalled in England since the days of . . . Bede.’ John of Worcester, whose chronicle was formerly attributed as by Florence of Worcester, and who may have been born as early as 1095 and died no later than 1143, based his work on various sources, including versions of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, and made numerous, sometimes extensive, additions to it. In addition we owe to him bishop lists for all the Anglo-Saxon sees, which are of great importance to the historians of the English church, and royal genealogies for the various kingdoms. He was probably at his most productive between about 1120 and 1132/3 and born (a contemporary tells us) of English parents. He was a clear partisan of King Harold and proud of his Anglo-Saxon past. William of Malmesbury (d. c. 1143), son of a French father and an English mother, and who considered Hastings a fateful day for England, ‘our sweet country’, was also a considerable Latin stylist and scholar during what is known as Europe’s ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’ of classical learning. He was also a notable historian in the modern sense, using administrative documents as well as many narrative sources and boasting that his
Gesta Regum Anglorum
(‘The Doings [i.e. History] of the Kings of the English’) was the first Latin history of the English since the days of Bede. William also wrote the
Gesta Pontificum
, a history of the English church. Henry of Huntingdon, the son of the archdeacon of Huntingdon and an English mother, began his
Historia Anglorum
(‘History of the English’) at the suggestion of Alexander, bishop of Lincoln. By the standards of the day Henry’s book, in ten fairly short books and in straightforward Latin, with a number of battle scenes in verse, was light reading. It was certainly very popular. Bishop Alexander also commissioned the Oxford-based Welsh clerk Geoffrey of Monmouth to write a book on the prophesies of Merlin, which, with its diverting tales of King Arthur and under the sober-sounding title
Historia Regum Britanniae
(‘History of the Kings of Britain’), was to become one of the most influential works of fiction in the history of Europe and Hollywood. Orderic Vitalis (1075–c. 1142), born near Shrewsbury, was the son of a French priest by his English ‘hearth companion’. He wrote a
Historia Ecclesiastica
(‘History of the Church’) in which features his description of the Battle of Hastings. Despite its title, the
Historia Novarum in Anglia
(‘A History of the Recent Events in England’) by Eadmer (c. 1060–c. 1128) is largely an account of Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury’s role in those events and carries anecdotes about the recent past as they touched on his subject. It seems that Eadmer, the son of a rich English family impoverished by the outcome of the battle, had spoken with veterans of Hastings.

Wace (
b. c.
1110), a native of Jersey, then part of the duchy of Normandy, is known for his
Roman de Rou
(‘The Story of Rollo’, the first duke of Normandy), and the
Roman de Brut
, an unfinished verse history of Britain. Important French historians for the later period include William of Poitiers, writing before 1077, whose
Gesta Guillelmi
(‘The Deeds of William’[the Conqueror]) was a considerable work of classical Latin, and William of Jumièges, author of the
Gesta Normannorum Ducum
(‘Deeds of the Dukes of the Normans’), written about 1070.

Books and Articles

Anonymous, ‘New Saxon Horse Burial in Suffolk’,
British Archaeology
, L/5 (1999)

—, ‘The Origin of a London Dock’,
Medieval Life
, V, PP. 14–25

Abels, Richard P.,
Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England, British Museum Publications, 1988

—,
Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England
, Longman, 1998

—, ‘Alfred the Great, the
micel hæthen here
and the Viking Threat’, in
Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences
, ed. Timothy Reuter, Ashgate, 2003

Adam, A. J.,
A Conquest of England:The Coming of the Normans
, Hodder & Stoughton, 1965

Ahrens, C., ed.,
Sachsen und Angelsachsen
, exh. cat., Helms-Museum, Hamburg, Nov. 1978–Feb. 1979

Alexander, Michael,
Old English Riddles from the Exeter Book
, Anvil Press, 1980

Allott, Stephen,
Alcuin of York: His Life and Letters
, William Sessions, 1974, reprinted 1987

Attwater, Donald,
The Penguin Dictionary of Saints
, Penguin Books, 1979

Audouy, M., ‘Excavations at the Church of All Saints, Brixworth, Northamptonshire, 1981–2’,
Journal of the British Archaeological Association
, CXXXVII, pp. 1–44

Ayerst, David, and A. S. T. Fisher,
Records of Christianity
, II, Basil Blackwell, 1977

Backhouse, Janet,
The Sherborne Missal
, British Library, 1999

Backhouse, Janet, D. H. Turner and Leslie Webster, eds,
The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art, 966–1066
, exh. cat., British Museum, London, 1984 [published on the 1000th anniversary of St Æthelwold’s death]

Barbaro, Alessandro,
Charlemagne: Father of a Continent
, U. California Press, 2004

Barlow, Frank,
Edward the Confessor
, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970

—,
The Godwins:The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty
, Longman, 2003

Bassett, S. R., ed.,
The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms
, Leicester UP, 1989

Bately, Janet, ‘The Alfredian Canon Revisited: One Hundred Years on’, in
Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences
, ed. Timothy Reuter, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 107–20