A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (9 page)

Set in legendary pagan times, the poem is nevertheless shot through with Christian sentiment and imagery. For all the killing, no feud is set off. The poet uses more than twenty synonyms for the word ‘king’ or ‘lord’, among them
frea
, which is thought to be connected with the name of the god Frea or Frey, in turn associated with the Swedish royal dynasty at Uppsala; but
frea
is also used in other poems in the sense of ‘lord of mankind’ and directly for the Christian Lord. Pagan and Christian mesh at the most basic levels. The
Beowulf
poet sets the scene of the heroes drinking in the royal mead hall; in the 1960s archaeologists excavating at the site of King Edwin of Northumbria’s royal seat of Yeavering in Northumbria revealed a great hall of dimensions and plan to match the poet’s description – but it also showed a close match to the great Northumbrian churches of the period.
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The house of the king and the house of God were of like dignity. The merging of the concepts of kingship and godhead found in Christianity helped in promoting the new Faith among the heathen tribal folk once the king had decided to adopt it: as William Chaney claims, ‘the most fundamental concept in Germanic kingship is the indissolubility of its religious and political functions.’
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However charismatic his semi-divine aura might be, to his followers the early Germanic king in his capacity as warlord was the fount not so much of honour as of wealth. Since the days of Beowulf, generosity as ‘ring giver’ was the foundation of royal prestige. The ambitious young chief had to secure companions to stand by him and men to serve him when war comes. The warrior strove to win renown and honourable reputation summed up in the words
dom
and lof, words with no exact equivalent in modern English though perhaps most nearly equated to the French
la gloire.
When the hero slew Grendel, King Hrothgar rewarded him with a gold standard, a richly embroidered banner, a fine helmet and a sword of state, an emblem of honour but precious in its own right.

Pagan imagery seems to thread through the verse of the saga in a tapestry to counterpoint the Christianizing elements. Bede speaks
of the banners borne before the Northumbrian kings; from
Beowulf
we know such banners, with boar emblems, have their antecedents in the pagan world. The hero wears a boar helmet, and grave goods from Sutton Hoo and Benty Grange include helmets adorned with boar crests that protect not merely by deflecting the enemy’s sword or axe, but also by divine potencies, the boar having sacred associ-ations.
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The stag or hart commemorated in
Beowulf
at Heorot (Hart Hall) is echoed by the royal stag-shaped standard at Sutton Hoo. It seems that the monster’s of Beowulf’s world lingered on in the mind of Christian Anglo-Saxon England – and beyond. At Queen’s College, Oxford, they celebrate the famous
Boar’s Head Carol
at Christmas time; at Abbot’s Bromley in Staffordshire the annual horn dance seems a link with the ancient cult of the royal stag and, of course, in the Middle Earth of
The Lord of the Rings
, J.R.R. Tolkien (re)created Smaug the very dragon on his treasure hoard. But then Tolkien was a professional in this world and his articles on
Beowulf
were rustling the groves of academe long before the Nazgûl hissed along the banks of the Brandywine.

Kings and ‘bretwaldas’

In the ninth–tenth centuries the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
added the name of King Ecgberht of Wessex to Bede’s list of the rulers with
imperium
, giving him the English title ‘
bretwalda
’, which perhaps equates to ‘
brytenwealda
’ (literally ‘broad ruler’), an ancient Germanic term for the Latin
imperator
(‘emperor’). But was it an honorific title or, as is the view of Eric John in his
Reassessing Anglo-Saxon England
, ‘an office that clearly mattered’ and which, in his view, came to involve the taking of tribute and to entail, for a Christian
bretwalda
, ‘important ecclesiastical power’.

Either way, it seems hard to see how the ‘supreme rule’ in Britain could belong to the first name on Bede’s list, Aelle, king of Sussex, the pocket coastal monarchy well south of the Thames, flanked to
the east by Kent, to the west by the burgeoning realm of the West Saxons, and hemmed in to the north by the Weald. We do not know whether the later kings of Sussex claimed him as ancestor. Even so, it is possible that Bede considered him the senior ruler of the Saxons in Britain at that time. Within the territory of ‘Sussex’ itself there seem to have been a few autonomous kinglet states – for example that of the Haestingas in the hinterland of Hastings, while to Aelle’s west the territory that would become all-powerful Wessex had yet to evolve.

The fact that Bede calls him ‘King’ Aelle does not necessarily mean that he was a king before he came to England. Kingship proves a slippery concept if we try to define it among the Continental Saxons. According to the eighth century
Life of St Lebuin
, ‘in olden times’ the Saxons had no king but village ‘rulers’ and ‘noblemen’, who held an annual meeting in the ‘centre of Saxony’ where they confirmed the laws, gave judgement on outstanding cases and by common consent drew up agreed rules of action both in peace and for the coming year.
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The first-century
AD
Roman historian Tacitus reported that the Germanic peoples in his day took or chose their kings (
reges
) for their noble ancestry and their war leaders (
duces
) for their courage and skill in war. But one assumes that a successful war leader would have little opposition if he claimed the kingship; was the word ‘king’ connected with the word ‘kin’ and did it refer to the head of a kin group rather like a clan chief? And what did ‘choosing’ a king involve? Not so much ‘election’ in the sense of selecting between rival candidates but ‘acclamation’ rather: the public approval as leader by the followers, kin or war band of some nobleman or warrior who had won his ascendancy by a successful campaign or consistent display of leadership – or by force. Some form of public ceremony would have confirmed the elevation of the individual to his new status. Possibly the elevation was literal – a leader being raised on a shield and then paraded through the assembly of the
people to shouts of acclaim. But it is also possible that it consisted of a the placing of a piece of ceremonial headgear, crown or helmet, on the head. As kings converted to Christianity, ritual was developed and Christian religious elements became central.

Pagan kings too had enjoyed spiritual legitimacy. ‘The primal leader of the tribal religion was the ruler. The king . . . stood between his tribe and its gods. . . .’
²⁷
He was, in the German term
heilerfüllt
, ‘filled with salvation’. Generations before Clovis, king of the Franks, converted to Christianity, his dynasty, the ‘long haired’ Merovingians, enjoyed a pagan charisma that endured long after they had lost all power in the state. When Bede described King Oswald of Northumbria (killed in battle only thirty years before the historian’s birth) as ‘the most holy king’, the phrase would have resonated with overtones of the ancient heathen sacral kingship for some of his older listeners. That Oswald himself, a Christian of only twenty years standing, harked back to the old thought ways, seems to be revealed by his last words, dedicating his soldiers to the divine protection, which entered into the folk memory. ‘“God have mercy on their souls,” said Oswald as he fell, is now a proverb,’ Bede tells us. Now, proverbs embodied folk wisdom: the same words that one man might interpret as a Christian soul commending the souls of his fellows to their common lord, would, for a traditionalist, recall the king as the

sacral figure which held the tribal world together and related it to the cosmic forces in which that world [and its gods] was enmeshed . . . [and] . . . that ‘saved’ his folk as much as did the gods themselves.
²⁸

Whatever form his inauguration took the ruler would later be expected to show that he could trace his ancestry to a hero or god; preferably the pagan figure of Woden.

In the ninth century, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
speaks of ‘Woden from whose stock sprang the royal houses of many provinces’ and a Northumbrian addition confirms ‘from this Woden sprang all our
royal family as well as that of the peoples dwelling south of the Humber.’ At about this time, too, king lists, supposedly drawn up by the royal scops (the equivalent of the poet chroniclers that formerly recorded the oral traditions of the African kingdoms) purport to demonstrate the descent of historical figures from this mysterious personage. In the case of the kingdom of Lindsey (approximately modern Lincolnshire), which in Bede’s time was a province of Mercia, the king list is one of the few pieces of evidence of its one-time independent existence. At some later date a Christian gloss on an already fanciful lineage added an ancestor called ‘Scaef’, supposedly descended from Adam.

As always with oral traditions, the ear of faith is needed if one is to detect the ‘truth’, but it seems probable that the warrior aristocracies of eastern England may have believed this figure to be the father of Scyld, or Shield Scaefson, ‘the great ring giver’, whose ship burial forms the opening episode of
Beowulf.
The poet tells us that his warrior band, following the orders he had given them in life, bore the body out to the princely craft riding at its buoy in the harbour and there laid him out, by the mast, amidships. Then they piled his treasures around him, stepped a gold standard above him and launched him out on the waves alone in the sadly freighted vessel. ‘No man might tell who salvaged that cargo . . .’ The Sutton Hoo ship burial might have been a dry run for the scene – miraculously, over thirteen centuries were to elapse before it was recovered and in all that time it would seem ‘no man had salvaged the cargo’.

After ten years research on Saxon ships, Edwin and Joyce Gifford concluded that the original, 90-foot (27-metre) long Mound 1 ship, powered by sail and 38 oars/sweeps, could have had ‘a remarkable . . . sailing performance’.
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A half-scale model indicated the ability to reach and run in winds of Force 4 on the Beaufort Scale and of speeds of up to 10 knots sailing, or 6 knots rowing. A journey time of three days from Suffolk to the Jutland peninsula would have been quite feasible, apparently. The shallow 2-foot (60 cm) draft would have ensured sailing manoeuvrability in shallow coastal waters and the ability to ‘beach-land’ in conditions of high surf. A full-scale craft would have been well adapted to the waters of the east coast of England, the southern North Sea and the coasts of north-west Europe. Such craft as these could have brought the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons on the great raid of migration across the ‘gannet’s bath’.

2

SOUTHERN KINGDOMS AD 600–800

It has been a convention to describe the political map of England south of the Antonine Wall and east of the Welsh Marches, between the seventh and ninth centuries, as the ‘Kingdoms of the Heptarchy’ (Greek
hepta
, ‘seven’, and
archy
, ‘rule’). But historians did not always agree as to which were ‘the Seven’ or just when the ‘Age’ might be said to have begun and when it ended. Some even contested the use of the word ‘kingdom’ at all. In the view of Geoffrey Elton, these ‘kings’ where little better than ‘princelings’ – the Anglo-Saxons themselves distinguished between kings (regi) and sub-kings (
reguli
), and which term should be applied to any given individual could depend on who was writing the story. South of the Humber, the people of what is now Lincolnshire surely considered their rulers as ‘kings of Lindsey’ and their territory a kingdom; Bede on the other hand considered it a ‘province’ (of Northumbria), co-extensive with a bishopric of the same name.

During those centuries we find many kingdoms, sub-kingdoms and tribal territories and regions south of the Humber. It may be helpful to list the most prominent: Lindsey as mentioned; East Anglia; Essex, which in addition to the modern county of that name also included parts of Hertfordshire and most of Middlesex and Surrey; Kent, comprising virtually the modern county (though early east and west Kent may have been independent, and the later
kingdom encroached on the kingdom of Essex); the midland kingdom of Mercia; Wessex; the kingdoms of the Magonsæte and of the Hwicce that lay along the western frontier of the Saxons with the British/Welsh; Middle Anglia, a congeries of once independent tribal peoples; and finally the kingdom of Sussex. Westward lay the British/Welsh kingdoms such as Powys and Gwynedd and to the southwest the British kingdom of Dumnonia, roughly equivalent to the modern counties of Devon and Cornwall. North of the Humber lay the Northumbrian kingdoms Bernicia and Deira and in the northwest the British kingdom of Strathclyde. North again we come to Scotland, at that time divided between the Scoti of Dál Riata and the kingdoms of the Picts, or Pictland.

The pagan regions of northern Britain first received the Christian message from the Irish Scoti, and they had been sent a missionary from Rome by 431. In that year Pope Celestine sent ‘a certain Palladius to the Scots believing in Christ to be their bishop’ (Bede I.13). But it was the mission by St Patrick, a Romano-British nobleman’s son seized by pagan Irish raiders and taken as a slave to Ireland, that really began the island’s conversion and particularly the lands of the far west, ‘in the lands controlled by the Connachta’.
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