The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (6 page)

History tends to be the story of the successful, but for two centuries the Anglo-Saxon conquerors were incapable of recording their actions. The fair-haired, pale-eyed Angles, Saxons and Jutes were illiterate north German tribespeople from the neck of the harsh windswept Cimbrian peninsula, the modern-day Denmark, Schleswig and Holstein. Unlike the Germanic peoples taking over the territories of the former Roman Empire in France and Italy, most of these bloodthirsty invaders of Britain had never felt its civilizing influence: though a number of Saxons from the German Bremerhaven coast were to be found in the Roman armies, more of them were pirates and enemies of the empire. These peoples’ remote northerly geographical position (Jutland is on the same parallel of latitude as Aberdeen in northern Scotland) ensured that most of them had escaped contact with the Roman Empire, which had educated their fellow Teutonic tribes from further south.

Moreover, the Teutonic tribes such as the Burgundians, Visigoths, Vandals and Franks, had been deeply affected by Roman civilization when they had settled within the empire. As their power grew and that of the empire weakened, the civil administration of the Roman government on the continent tended to remain in place and was taken over wholesale by the new rulers. In Britain, on the other hand, the expulsion of the Roman government left no proper central political or economic structures for the Saxons to adopt. The wild Germanic tribes arriving in Britain were quite unaffected by the already withering Roman civilization they encountered. In addition, the transition to Anglo-Saxon rule was brutal, bloody and sudden. Most of England would be depopulated or her inhabitants slaughtered or subdued, so no classical influences modified the Anglo-Saxons’ savage ways. In Britain there was no time for a considered handover. The small individual kingdoms of Saxons established their own unadulterated institutions.

We do not know how the Romano-British reacted to the German peoples setting up homes at such bewildering speed on their fertile lands in the south and east while many were even forced to live in caves in Wales or Cornwall. The few contemporary references are mainly glancing asides by foreign historians, like the sixth-century Byzantine writer Procopius. For the most part, therefore, English history of this very early period has to be deciphered from the physical evidence of settlements unearthed by archaeology and from references to ancient practices preserved in the Anglo-Saxon laws which began being written down in the seventh century. It can be augmented by hearsay and folk tales handed down over the centuries, and sought out by the Venerable Bede. It was only with the reconversion to Christianity of the Anglo-Saxons at the end of the sixth century that learning returned to England, though it had meanwhile continued in Wales and Cornwall. Anglo-Saxon monks and priests then began writing down accounts of life in their new country which would be collected in the late ninth century as their official record,
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
. The nearest Briton we have as an eyewitness of the horrors his country endured at the hands of the pagan Anglo-Saxons is the mid-sixth-century Romano-British monk Gildas, who recounted the story in his book
Of the Destruction of the British
. But even he is writing a hundred years after the first Anglo-Saxon invasion.

By about 460, the deRomanization of Britain had become very noticeable to contemporaries abroad. Much of the country had been entirely taken over by the Saxon tribes, and all feared the worst for its former inhabitants. Some of the British community still considered themselves Roman enough in the late 440s to send a plea for help to the ruler of what remained of the Roman Empire, the great general Aetius, who was trying to keep Attila the Hun and his horde out of Gaul. They headed their letter to him, ‘The Groans of the British’. ‘The Barbarians drive us to the sea,’ they wailed; ‘the sea throws us back on the Barbarians: thus two modes of death await us; we are either slain or drowned.’ But Aetius had too much to handle nearer home to think of Britain. It was not until 451 at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains that he was able to halt Attila decisively and drive the Huns out of France. One Roman who did return to help was St Germanus, who led the Britons in battle and told them to shout ‘Alleluia!’ as they fought the enemy. But it was not enough.

Under the onslaught of the Germanic tribes the only hope for the Romano-British was to abandon their villas and their cities. As the Saxons set fire to their houses and murdered those who fled, some Roman Britons buried their family silver beneath their cellars, thinking that one day when the invaders had been expelled they would be able to come back for it. Some of that silver may now be seen in the British Museum, having been found centuries later, for its original owners never returned. The solid Roman British citizens, able to dispute legal points with the best lawyers in Rome, were forced to take refuge behind the palisades of the ancient hill forts which their far-off primitive ancestors had built in the Iron Age 400 years before. Now they had to refortify them with timber as so few of them knew how to work stone, thanks to the rapid decline in the art of Roman stonemasonry.

Everywhere fanatical barbarians with their manes of long hair–a mark of their warrior caste–fell on the British and put them to the sword. Invoking the names of Thor and Woden, whose ravens fed on human blood, they went on the rampage. Priests, women and children were all horribly murdered, often before the very altars where they had sought sanctuary. So many were killed that there were not enough people left to bury them. Those making for the Welsh hills were butchered in heaps, and even those who surrendered had no guarantee of mercy. Thus in the first years of the Saxon invasion the old population of England was very nearly destroyed.

Many fled to the British colony of Armorica in Gaul, which had been established at the time of the pretender Magnus Maximus in the late fourth century. They found some comfort in a country by the sea which so nearly resembled the one they had left behind. So many Romano-British made their home in Armorican Gaul, and so powerful were they, that to this day their descendants speak a version of the ancient British tongue–and that piece of France, Brittany, is still named after them. Britannia, the name of the Roman province, disappeared from people’s lips and was replaced by the word England, as in Angle-land, until the anglicized name Britain was revived in 1707 to describe the union between England, Scotland and Wales.

Writing a century after the first invasions, Gildas would note that all the Roman cities remained abandoned: ‘our cities are still not occupied as they were; even today they are dismal and deserted ruins’. Having become a literate people, highly educated by the Roman curriculum and trained to be clerks and administrators in the Romano-British towns, accustomed to underground central-heating systems, with glass in their windows and pavements at their feet, the Britons had lost the hardy spirit which Roman commentators had so admired. After 400 years of Roman occupation, the wild Celts whose ancestors had been those fierce, half-naked charioteers had been replaced by courteous Latin-speaking Roman settlers. As Romano-Celts worshipping the gentle God of the Christians who abhorred violence, they were helpless against the Angles and Saxons.

Fortunately two outstanding leaders appeared on the scene to transform the British into an army of resistance between the first onslaught of the Anglo-Saxons and the end of the century. The first was a high-born Roman, perhaps an ex-general, called Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom Gildas calls ‘a modest man who of all the Roman nation was then alone in the confusion of this troubled period left alive’. The second, a Romano-Celtic leader who arose in the west in the late fifth century after the Saxons had been in Britain for a generation, and who may have been Aurelianus’ son, managed to hold the Saxon foe at bay for thirty years. He pushed the West Saxons back out of Dorset into the middle of Wiltshire in a series of clashes culminating in the critical Battle of Mons Badonicus (which may now be marked by the town of Liddington) in about 500 or 516. This leader, whose beginning and end are wreathed in fantastic mystery, and whose tomb has never been found, is believed to have kept the west a separate British kingdom until a new wave of Saxons in about 550 finally completed the takeover of England. He may have been the original of the great Celtic leader now known as King Arthur, about whom by the ninth century very many stories were circulating, and he may have lived in the large Iron Age fort at South Cadbury in Somerset, which was heavily refortified during the fifth and sixth centuries (remains of its kingly hall have been found).

What can be said for sure is that the myths and legends which have inspired the writers and poets ever since cluster the most thickly in those parts of Britain which became the refuge of the fleeing southern British–that is, in Cornwall and Wales. The tales are curiously uniform in suggesting that King Arthur is not dead but merely sleeping, perhaps in a cave in Wales, perhaps in the fairy isles of Avalon, and would one day awaken to help Britain in her darkest hour. Apart from their obvious Christian symbolism, they imply that the Romano-British Celts were a desperate but not yet despairing people who believed that they would one day return to their homes. But it was not to be.

Thanks to the victories of the Romano-Celt ‘Arthur’ there was peace for about fifty years from Mons Badonicus until the mid-sixth century–we know that because Gildas was writing in a time of peace. But only ten years later, in about 550, a new invasion of the Saxons began, so that by the end of the sixth century Saxon kingdoms were permanently established throughout most of England up to the Scottish Lowlands. Two tribes of Angles colonized eastern England from the Humber northwards. The southern kingdom called Deira approximated to Yorkshire; north of it stretched the kingdom of Bernicia, which ran from the Tees to the Firth of Forth. By the early seventh century Bernicia and Deira had been combined in the kingdom of Northumbria. Below spread the kingdom of the middle English or Mercians, which ran from the northern border of Wales in the west to the kingdom of the Angles in the east. At its foot began the kingdom of Wessex or the West Saxons, which, thanks to the valour of its chieftain Ceawlin, by the early seventh century reached as far as the lower Severn. Only Wales and the west country held out against the Saxons, Cornwall resisting until the mid-ninth century. Meanwhile in the north the Irish tribes had taken advantage of the Roman absence to establish a kingdom of Scots to the west of the Picts above the northern Roman provinces. Thanks to the impact St Patrick had made upon Ireland, in 563 a monk from one of the monasteries he had founded there, St Columba, would finish the work of St Ninian, converting the Scots and Picts to Christianity from his island of Iona off the west Highland coast.

In Wales, Cornwall and Ireland the Christian Celtic Church preserved some of the classical habits. Thanks to the Church and the education perpetuated by the new monasteries, writing in Latin continued and manuscripts were copied for wider circulation. But, burning with hatred for their oppressors, the Romano-British kept themselves to themselves and refused to have anything to do with converting their Anglo-Saxon neighbours to Christianity. Its civilizing influence would have to come from abroad. Fortunately for the future of England the Angles and Saxons were not to remain in a state of savagery for long.

In the last years of the sixth century, it is said (this is reported as a national tradition by Bede in the eighth century), the powerful new pope Gregory the Great was reminded of the lost Roman Christian province of Britannia when he saw some handsome slave children, blond and blue-eyed, in the market at Rome. On asking who they were and being told they were Angli or Angles, the pope is said to have remarked thoughtfully, ‘Non Angli sed angeli’ (Not Angles but angels). What is certainly true is that in 597 Pope Gregory, who was breathing new life into the papacy, despatched a slightly reluctant mission to convert King Ethelbert of Kent to Christianity. The pope suspected his legate Bishop Augustine might obtain a hearing because the king was married to a Christian Frank, the former Princess Bertha. Thus began the reconversion of England to Christianity and the country’s return to a higher form of civilization. It would bring England back into the fold of a Europe where for the next thousand years a common religious culture called Christendom took the place of the Roman Empire, unifying the whole.

When the papal mission arrived on the Island of Thanet in 597, its leader St Augustine was extremely nervous about meeting the Saxons. If King Ethelbert of Kent resembled any of the other German barbarians such as King Clovis of Gaul, his wife’s grandfather, he would be a fierce, soldierly type. King Clovis had said that if he had been present at Christ’s crucifixion he would have avenged it, which was rather missing the point. Despite Augustine’s fears Pope Gregory was insistent in a series of letters that the mission be accomplished. At the end of the sixth century Ethelbert was the most important king, the bretwalda, of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into which England was divided. If Ethelbert’s country was converted to Christianity he might influence the other kingdoms to copy him.

King Ethelbert lived up to expectations. Though the small group of forty travel-weary monks were unarmed and wearing homespun brown habits bearing before them a silver cross of the suffering Christ, he treated them as if they were wizards or magicians. He insisted on meeting them in the open air where their magic would be less potent to prevent them casting spells, and he would not allow them to leave the island. However, one of the conditions of King Ethelbert allying himself to the powerful royal house of the Franks had been that his wife Queen Bertha was to be allowed to practise her religion. So, living among the worshippers of Woden and Thor, she did not forget her faith. An old Roman church to St Martin was still standing on the eastern side of the king’s capital of Canterbury, and there she and her spiritual adviser Bishop Luidhard were allowed to pray.

After a while, having observed that the monks, who had brought him a richly decorated Bible and jewels from the pope, were quiet and well behaved, King Ethelbert allowed them off the island to worship in the queen’s church. Soon Ethelbert would be so impressed by their preaching of a future eternal life at a time when even a king could do little against illness, by their reading and writing and by their care of the poor, that he himself was baptized. By the end of the year, 10,000 of his people had been baptized as well.

Under the influence of the Roman missionaries, who received regular advice in letters from Pope Gregory, for the first time in the England of the Anglo-Saxons a code of laws was written down in 616. But this time it was in English, not Latin. Unlike the Romano-British the Anglo-Saxons could understand only their own language. These first English laws of Ethelbert’s, which were much influenced by the Franks, protected the new clergy and the land the king donated to them for church-building. By the end of the seventh century the churches would be free of taxation. Augustine built the monastery of St Augustine (which became the burial place of the early Anglo-Saxon kings of Kent), as well as founding the church that became Canterbury Cathedral. In the monastery the letters from Pope Gregory would be preserved, as well as other precious written materials. The Roman missionaries built further monasteries, which developed into centres of learning for the people of Kent. A fashion developed for wealthy noblemen to have their sons taught to read and write in monasteries for whose foundation they gave money and land. In 602 the pope created the archbishopric of Canterbury for St Augustine.

Pope Gregory had intended there to be twin archbishoprics in England, at Canterbury and York, because he still thought of England as the Roman province–one of whose centres would be the important Roman city of Eboracum, or York. But York was now part of the kingdom of Deira, which was entirely separate from Kent even though Ethelbert’s lands stretched as far as Deira. York and its environs would therefore have to be converted separately, as would all the other kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England. Another bishopric was created in 604 at nearby Rochester, whose ‘chester’ or ‘ceaster’ suffix denotes in the Anglo-Saxon way an old Roman city; a further bishopric, for the East Saxons, was created the same year at the old settlement of Londinium, known to the Saxons as Lundenwig.

Though he knew that Ethelbert was the most important king in the country, Pope Gregory was unaware of the extent of the changes that had taken place in England since the departure of the Romans. As we have seen, England had long ago lost all vestiges of her Roman national administration. The country was now divided up into the separate lands of small tribal peoples who themselves were in the process of being subsumed by the more warlike kings. Thus the heads of the small tribes became underkings or what the Anglo-Saxons called ealdormen (the word for military leader) of the larger kingdoms. By the end of the seventh century there were seven kingdoms altogether, known as the heptarchy; they were Sussex, Kent, Essex, East Anglia, Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria. Historians have to make educated guesses about these tribal peoples because they were not literate. But surviving references to ancient practices in later documents, literary fragments and law codes have brought them to the conclusion that the early Anglo-Saxons still shared many characteristics with their Germanic ancestors of the first century
AD
, characteristics which had been observed by Roman commentators.

The most important feature of the social organization of the Germanic peoples was the family, or to use an Old English word the kin. Loyalty to one’s kin was a key concept. The kin had an obligation to kill the murderer of one of their own. Even by the first century, however, this had been commuted to a money payment, the so-called wer-gild or price of a man (literally man-gold), which had the effect of making society more peaceful. If payment was not made, the custom was that the victim’s kin must either kill the perpetrator or be paid not to do so. In addition a man’s kin were expected to swear an oath to support him in court if he was accused of a crime. By the tenth century the kin was responsible for a criminal family member’s future behaviour. Over the centuries kings and their nobles, who began to take charge of the village courts, would accept the evidence of the community to balance the evidence of the kin when it came to establishing the facts about a crime. By the ninth century kings like Alfred the Great would be changing the law to make sure that duty to one’s lord took precedence over duty to one’s kin. But, with these shifts of emphasis, loyalty and the sacredness of oath-taking continued to form the bedrock of Anglo-Saxon society.

Most of the Angle and Saxon invaders settled in England in tribal groups of free peasants under separate leaders, not under one national king; over those separate peoples overlord kings and bigger kingdoms would arise. This can be seen by the many place names in England that end in ‘ing’, which means ‘people of’–thus Hastings signifies ‘the people of Haesta’ and Woking ‘the people of Wocca’. A famous tenth-century document drawn up for taxation purposes, the so-called Tribal Hideage, identifies many of these peoples and the amount of land they held in ‘hides’, the Old English unit of landholding and assessment for taxation. Depending on which kingdom you inhabited, a hide consisted of between 40 and 120 acres.

King Ethelbert’s law code reveals that the people of Kent were used to discussing local affairs in popular open-air assemblies under the direction of the more learned or wealthy. Since the late sixth century there seems to have been a tribal court for every hundred hides, about 4,000 acres or more. They were probably the origin of the ‘hundred’ courts to which there are documentary references by the tenth century. By then the courts of the hundred were held on a monthly basis to sort out breaches of the customary and Church law and to adjust taxes, reflecting the fact that all the English kingdoms were now divided into administrative units called hundreds. For many centuries the judges were chosen by the local people rather than by the king. In contrast to the Roman way of life, early on among these primitive Anglo-Saxon peoples there were genuinely democratic customs, even though they themselves had slaves.

A small class of nobles formed the wealthiest level of Kentish society, but the most numerous element in that kingdom at the end of the sixth century was the free peasant or ceorl (churl), whose rights were protected by law and whose immediate overlord was not a noble but the king himself. In Kent the ceorl was worth a hundred golden shillings to his family: that was the price of killing him, the wer-gild. The disruption caused by the ninth-century Viking invasions ruined many of these people, so that they had to labour for the local lord to pay the swingeing tax bill of Danegeld, or to pay for the protection of the lord’s soldiers when war threatened his home and crops. At the same time many Anglo-Saxons managed to cling to the financial autonomy of their distant ancestors, valuing the independence of mind it allowed.

The late-seventh-century laws of King Ine of Wessex give us further information about the western cousins of these men. They were required to serve in the fyrd, the Anglo-Saxon militia which was called out against national enemies at times of crisis; and there was a special law imposing heavy penalties on anyone who penetrated the hedge around another’s property when the fyrd was out. With their fellow villagers they had to support the king by paying a feorm–that is, an ancient royal food rent, originally a certain amount of ale, oxen, honey and loaves which was later commuted into a money rent or tax. With a contribution assessed by hideage, it seems that from the earliest times the Anglo-Saxons were expected to help build local bridges and walls and the king’s fortresses if called upon. By 700 the kings of the separate kingdoms of England each had their own council of wise men called the Witan. Members of the Witan, who tended to be the great landowners of the kingdom, witnessed the king’s acts of state, whether it was giving land to a noble, or declaring that a monastery need not pay rent. They could elect a king from a royal line if they chose, but their chief role was to advise him.

Just as they had settled England in tribes, the Anglo-Saxon peasants tended to live in small villages. Their fields were quite different from the rectangular ones of the Celtic Iron Age, being laid out in long curving strips. In some kingdoms some land was farmed in common, in strips scattered over open fields. In others, such as Kent, land was organized in a more self-contained way. All over England woods on the outskirts of villages tended to be held as common land where everyone could put their pigs, sheep and cows out to pasture.

These blond, big-boned Angles and Saxons had heavier, stronger ploughs than the ancient Britons, whose lighter ploughs had led them to prefer high ground and lighter soil. So the Anglo-Saxons were unafraid of the richer, heavier, alluvial valley soil of the midlands. Increasing numbers of them therefore began to spread along the Ouse towards the Tyne and Tees, enlarging the kingdoms of Mercia, Deira and Bernicia. By the early seventh century the latter two would be united by the powerful King Ethelfrith into the kingdom of Northumbria (the people north of the Humber).

The Anglo-Saxon peoples regarded the ruins of the vast Roman buildings they came upon with wonder. They were primitive builders themselves who could handle only wood and brick. The skills required to build the towering marble temples, the immense stone Roman baths, the aqueducts that littered England were so far beyond them that they could not believe they had been constructed by humans. ‘The work of giants’ is how their literature repeatedly describes Roman architecture. It used to be thought that the Anglo-Saxons avoided Roman cities because they believed superstitiously that they contained ghosts. But the latest research suggests that, while at first the Saxons and Angles may have preferred to carry away superior Roman bricks to build their own settlements, by the end of the seventh century the old Roman cities were beginning to attract a new population of Anglo-Saxon city-dwellers. These cities, such as York and London, never contained more than a few thousand people, as most Anglo-Saxons preferred to live in the country as farmers. However, the farmers would build a king’s hall, a royal manor or tun, which survives in the place names Wilton, Walton and Kingston. These edifices were impressive (if crude) wooden buildings which functioned as administrative centres and which had to be large enough to receive the local hundred when they brought their goods to support the king.

But the king’s hall, whether it was the home of a king’s ealdorman or the king himself, was also a warm cheerful place where mead was passed round in a horn from person to person at a vast log table, with a fire burning in the enormous hearth and clean green rushes on the floor to sweeten the air. Although most Anglo-Saxons had settled down to farm they still retained a folk memory of their ancestors, the north German warriors, which found expression in the vigorous songs which bards sang for them in the great hall, recounting the exploits of Beowulf for example.

Loyalty, revenge and death were some of the favourite themes of Anglo-Saxon literature, but perhaps most popular of all were poems about the loyalty between the king and his men, the devoted noblemen known as thanes. Like the bond between kin, the bond between a king and his bodyguard was sacred. It was a disgrace for a man to allow his lord to fall in battle without avenging him by his own death. The early history of England is full of heroic examples of thanes who refused to change sides even if their lord was dead, like those of the eighth-century King Cynewulf of Wessex who avenged his slaying by laying down their own lives.

As the seventh century dawned in England, outside Kent most of the country remained wedded to the heathen gods and pagan way of life. It would take men of tremendous conviction to woo them from the powerful deities after whom they had named many features of the landscape–Thundridge in Hertfordshire meant Thunor’s or Thor’s ridge, and so on. The Church would become one of the pillars on which the English kingdoms were built, the essence of the civilization of the middle ages. But the raw material the Church was battling with was rough, pagan and insensitive. The monks seeking to convert the Saxons to Christianity often had to adapt their prayers and stories to attract an audience which admired strength and found it hard to admire the Christian reverence for suffering.