Empires and Barbarians (52 page)

This explanation of the break-up of lowland Britain’s villa estates makes excellent sense in the broader context of what we know about the patterns of development prevailing in the Roman and Germanic worlds by the end of the fourth century. Although both were thoroughly agricultural, the two economies were operating at substantially different levels of development. The Roman world, including its British provinces, was dominated by a relatively small, relatively rich elite, whereas the Germanic economy supported a less rich, but numerically broader (freeman?) elite. The Anglo-Saxon migration flow brought this second type of elite into the socioeconomic context that sustained the first, and something had to give. Given the political necessity for Anglo-Saxon leaders to reward the loyal military service of their retainers, it was the old socioeconomic order that had, eventually, to
be remade. The detail of when and how this happened is not clear. Some Roman estates seem to have remained active at the beginning of the Saxon period, which is what you might expect. Initially, immigrants may have been willing to live off the distributed production of existing estates. But once they became more numerous and/or developed a sense that their control of the landscape was permanent, prompting them to demand a share of its capital resources, existing estate boundaries had to be redrawn, and overall output headed firmly downwards.
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The partition of the ‘white’ farms in Zimbabwe in recent years, where the sum of the parts has proved unequal to the whole, gives something of an analogy here.

Exactly how much larger this new Anglo-Saxon elite was than its Roman predecessor is difficult to say. The proportion of landowners to landless peasants in both the Roman era and the manorialized Middle Ages has been estimated as at most about 1:10, and was probably substantially less. Few would now share Sir Frank Stenton’s vision of an early Anglo-Saxon society composed almost entirely of free peasant warriors, but social and economic power was quite widely distributed, as we have seen, among continental Germani of the late Roman period. Manorialization and the generation of a more restricted social elite – recreating something much more like the socioeconomic set-up that had sustained the narrower Roman upper class – unfolded only from the eighth century. One interesting line of argument has suggested that the presence of weapons in graves of the fifth to seventh centuries might actually reflect those making a claim to free status, since it was demonstrably not simply a means of distinguishing warriors. If so, the free class of the early Anglo-Saxon period may have represented something closer to half the male population, since up to half of male graves contain weaponry of some kind. Such evidence as there is from the sixth-century continent, however, suggests that the free class there was perhaps more in the region of one-fifth to one-third of the total population, making a half look rather high. Perhaps social structures among the Anglo-Saxons were more egalitarian, or possibly the intermediate semi-free class, which also had some military obligations, buried its dead with weapons too.
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Either way, the disparity in scale between Roman and Germanic elites is clear.

This still makes the Anglo-Saxon takeover of lowland Britain a kind of elite transfer. One recent estimate, for instance, calculates the maximum possible ratio of immigrants to natives – even after Romano-British
demographic collapse – at no more than 1:4, and Victorian-style ethnic cleansing out of the question.
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In numerical terms, substantially fewer immigrants than indigenous natives were caught up in the total genetic mix of the new Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that had come into existence by the year 600. The comparison with the Norman Conquest, however, is highly instructive. Unlike its Norman counterpart, the new Germanic elite of the fifth and sixth centuries was too numerous to be accommodated within the existing socioeconomic framework, so that a fundamental reordering of the basic means of production had to follow. The situations generating these profoundly different outcomes must be carefully distinguished, no matter that the immigrants were in the minority in both. To classify both under the same heading of elite transfer is confusing in analytical terms, as it leads you to miss some key points of particularity and difference.

But what can be said about the other key issue, the kinds of relationship operating between immigrant and native? How free were indigenous Romano-British to choose their own fate, as Anglo-Saxon kings took control of the countryside. No one would now suppose that there had to have been hostility between native Romano-British and incoming Anglo-Saxons simply by virtue of their different ethnic backgrounds, and some voluntary renegotiation of identity on the part of the indigenous population is certainly possible. More specifically,
Ine’s Law
, the seventh-century law code, shows that there was a Romano-British component within the landowning elite of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex as late as the 690s, as we have seen, and there is no obvious reason why at least some Romano-British landowners should not have become valued members of the entourages of earlier Anglo-Saxon kings as well. When thinking about how much of this went on, though, it is important to bear in mind the basic purpose of the Anglo-Saxon migration flow. Developing from raiding and mercenary service into outright annexation of landed assets, it did, by its very nature, put Anglo-Saxon immigrants into direct competition with the surviving landowning elites of sub-Roman Britain for control of the means of wealth production. We don’t have to suppose, necessarily, that all Romano-British landowners were wiped out in an initial apocalypse, but neither is Gildas’ image of violence and terror likely to have been pure imagination. Land seizures do not tend to go pleasantly: even that of the Normans, relatively antiseptic in some ways, was thoroughly brutal in places, not least in the infamous
Harrying of the North in winter 1069/70 when food stocks were deliberately destroyed and tens of thousands died.
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It is also important to look at the terms under which native landowning elites continued to hold their positions within seventh-century Wessex. Who these non-Saxon landowners were is itself an interesting question. Wessex was expanding westwards into a still British West Country in the seventh century, and some have wondered whether these British landowners were recent additons to the kingdom rather than long-term survival artists from Hampshire or Wiltshire, but there is no way to be certain. Either way, even if their lands had not been taken from them immediately, Ine’s law accords these men only half the social value – as expressed in their wergild or life price – of an Anglo-Saxon of equivalent wealth. This was a highly significant proviso. The wergild was a crucial element of social status, the basis on which all kinds of compensations were calculated when it came to resolving disputes. As one recent study has pointed out, the difference in wergild between immigrant and native landowners of equivalent wealth might even provide the key to the eventual disappearance of any non-Anglo-Saxon landowners who did survive the violence of initial contact. Because of the difference in wergilds, then, if a hypothetical immigrant and a hypothetical indigenous landowner got into a dispute, and even if a court judged fairly – giving an equal number of verdicts in either direction – the net result over time would still have been a transfer of wealth from native to immigrant. The latter’s higher wergild would always mean that the compensation settlements he received were twice as high as he had to pay out for any similar offence.
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This more specific evidence is really only confirming what we might anyway deduce from the political context. As the Anglo-Saxon immigrant flow established its dominance over different parts of the landscape of lowland Britain, indigenous landowners will have had every reason to want to cross the political-cum-ethnic divide and become Anglo-Saxons. That was the only way in the longer term that they could hope to hold on to the highly unequal property distribution that had made them so powerful in the Roman era. Just because they wanted to, however, doesn’t mean that they were able to. Incoming Anglo-Saxon migrant leaders (in so far as they could control the process)
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had every reason not to allow them to – not, at least, in large numbers, since they had their own warrior followings to reward.
And these followers were much more politically important to the new kings than any Romano-British landowners, because it was they who had put those same kings in power. As has shown up in so many contexts, unfortunately,
Homo sapiens sapiens
really is predatory enough to want to seize the wealth of others and to organize and perpetrate any violence that might be necessary in the process. And even if, as an indigenous landowner, you did manage not to lose your estates immediately, then as Ine’s law emphasizes, you were still not certain of a secure future.

Relations between incoming Anglo-Saxons and the non-landowning elements in Romano-British society, by contrast, would not have been so competitive, since the latter did not own the assets that the immigrants were trying to seize. It is also true (even though I don’t believe in a peasants’ revolt) that these non-landowning classes will not have had any great community of interest with the villa owners, since the latter formed a highly privileged elite who were living off the fruits of their labours. There is every reason again, therefore, why indigenous non-landowners would have wanted to win acceptance as newly recruited Anglo-Saxons. Whether they would have been likely to succeed in significant numbers, however, is again doubtful. As was true of our Roman merchant in the Hunnic Empire, allowing someone of subordinate status to move into the dominant group necessarily involves treating them better: that is, self-evidently, why people always want to move across such divides. But by the same token, dominant groups lose the capacity to exploit promoted subordinates as thoroughly as before, and this always imposes limits on such promotions. In this instance, having just taken ownership of the excellent arable land of lowland Britain, Anglo-Saxon immigrants had great need of a mass of subordinates to do all the heavy manual labour that arable agriculture always involved before the invention of tractors. While the interests of the non-landowning classes of former Roman Britain were not so diametrically opposed to those of the immigrants as their landowning compatriots, therefore, there were still excellent reasons why the immigrants would not have been ready to allow them wholesale access to the new elite of lowland Britain. Laws and charters demonstrate, in fact, that large numbers of slaves and semi-free were central to the social structure of the new Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that formed, and I would suppose that much of the indigenous non-landowning population of lowland Britain found itself consigned to
these subordinate classes, even if there were occasional success stories, similar to that of our Roman merchant turned Hunnic warrior.

Viewed from this perspective, the lack of indigenous influence on the Anglo-Saxon language acquires yet greater significance. Since language was taught within families and not through formal education, the lack of any detectable British influence on the Germanic language of the new dominant elite from c.600 onwards is very suggestive. Had this elite encompassed large numbers of Britons-turned-Saxons, you would expect a fair amount of indigenous linguistic influence to show up in its lingua franca. That there should be so little demonstrates that the new elite was substantially dominated by the immigrant component.
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Unless you come to the subject with a predetermination to prove that migration is never an agent of significant change, it is difficult to avoid the overall conclusion that Anglo-Saxon migration played a huge role in remaking the social, political and economic foundations of lowland Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. Decoupling this landscape from the Roman imperial system, which had profoundly shaped it up to 400
AD
, was bound to push its history in new directions. The relatively small, relatively rich class of villa owners owed their prosperity to that system, and became instantly vulnerable once their ties to it were broken. In my view, like their peers elsewhere in the Roman world, they are likely to have had sufficient social power to maintain their position if their only problem had been social subordinates within the British provinces. They were not, however, the only problem. Britain’s wealth was well known to its neighbours, who had been raiding it for centuries, and once central Roman protection was withdrawn the villa owners were always going to struggle to hold on to their thoroughly unequal share of its assets, in the face of Picts, Scots or Anglo-Saxons.

Even if better dating evidence for the collapse of villa society were eventually to lead to the conclusion that Roman society fell apart before Saxon assault became significant, moreover, this would only partly alter the picture. For one thing, as we will examine in more detail in the next chapter, Romano-British landowning society was cast adrift by its Roman mother ship only because of the damage inflicted upon central imperial structures by other immigrants into the continental territories of the western Empire after 405. More specifically, it was also the Anglo-Saxon migration flow that dictated what happened
afterwards: the fact that a relatively small dominant elite was replaced by a relatively large one, and that major cultural changes, linguistic and others, moved lowland Britain in a decidedly Germanic direction. Everything suggests that the indigenous population had only a limited capacity to decide its own fate in these centuries.

Fundamentally, therefore, a combination of elite transfer followed by cultural emulation cannot satisfactorily explain the transformations observable in lowland Britain between 400 and 600
AD
. But nor was the Anglo-Saxon takeover a mass replacement of the existing indigenous population. In deciding how we might usefully recategorize it, it is helpful first to explore the analogous transformations unfolding simultaneously in northern Gaul, where the largely more recent archaeological evidence allows us to look more closely at the response of an indigenous society facing, in circumstances similar to the Romano-British, the arrival of land-grabbing outsiders.