A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  ‘There are in Britain today’, he writes, ‘five languages and four nations: English, British, Scots and Picts; each of these have their own language but all are united in their study of God’s scriptures by that fifth language, Latin.’ Thanks to archaeology we know today that each also had their own dress fastenings, so that a warrior’s jewellery like the British ring brooch or the Anglian square-headed brooch may, it has been suggested, have proclaimed his identity.8 Bede tells us that the only original inhabitants of the island were the Britons – who gave the place its name – and who, he thought came over Armorica i.e. Brittany. In fact, the name almost certainly derives from British emigrants who crossed the Channel in the fifth and sixth centuries, fleeing Irish raiders operating along the coasts of Wales, Cornwall and North Devon.

  According to Bede, the Pictish inhabitants of northern Britain were descended from a party of sailors from a remote land he calls ‘Scythia’, who, blown off course, made landfall off the northern coast of Ireland. They begged the Scots then living there for a grant of land so that they could settle, but were told to move on and recommended to try the island not far to the east. The Picts did so. Bede claims that Pictish royalty descended in the female line because, so went the tradition, the Irish Scots had provided the allmale pioneers with womenfolk on condition that, in the event of a disputed succession, the new king should be chosen from the female royal line. Sometime in the fifth century, at about the time the Saxons were crossing over from the Continent, a chieftain of the Irish Scoti in what is now County Antrim established an enclave across the North Channel in Argyll. In the course of time, and after war, betrayal and intermarriage, some time between the 830s and 850s the rival houses of Picts and Scots merged so that the Scottish kingdom of Dál Riata (Dalriada) and the Pictish realm began to come together under Kenneth MacAlpin (Kenneth I), who died in about 858 and was buried on the island of Iona.

  Like modern Britons, Bede and his contemporaries recognized ethnic diversity as part of their countries’ characters and also had doubts about the geographical origins of the invaders and their ruling families. Modern archaeology also questions the extent of the population displacement caused by the invaders in the south as well as the north. In its most extreme form it seems to question whether there was any significant Germanic invasion at all.

  The Anglo-Saxons themselves had no doubt. Centuries later, celebrating the great English victory over Vikings, Scots and British at Brunanburh in 937, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle hailed it as the greatest victory since the ‘Angles and Saxons arrived . . . invading Britain across the seas from the east’. Following Bede, it also gives the year 449 for the landing of the first boatloads of settlers as distinct from raiders. A library of books has been written on the dating of the adventus Saxonum (‘the arrival of the Saxons’). In one of his letters Alcuin of York, who had read his Bede, described the Viking sack on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in 793 as happening ‘nearly three hundred and fifty years’ since ‘our fathers [came] to this fair land’9 and historian Paul Battles is convinced that the time of their arrival was ‘essential to a Migration Myth and so was central to the Anglo-Saxon definitions of themselves as a people’.

  English origins and traditions

  Given the various opposing views as to the Anglo-Saxon settlement – if indeed the word ‘settlement’ is not too strong – it seems that the one view that no one contests is that they came by sea! But here agreement ends. Were the ships powered by oars, by sails, by paddles or by a combination of these means? In his Dark Age Naval Power (1999), which reassesses Frankish as well as Anglo-Saxon naval activity, John Haywood points out that, like the Vikings after them, Saxon pirates raided from Orkney to Spain and, like them, they struck from the sea without warning. He believes that all the probabilities point to the use of a sail on long-range ventures, though paddles could have been used up river reaches. He cites the Gallo-Roman historian Sidonius Apollinaris, writing in the 470s, who says specifically that the Saxons raiding the Gallic coast used sailing ships. A simple rigged sail could have made up to 100 miles (160 km) possible in a twelve-hour day with a following wind on a calm sea, three times the distance possible for a team of rowers, who would in any case have had to rest up from time to time in similar conditions.

  Haywood considers that the archaeology points to two phases of settlement, at first in the early 400s between the Humber and the Thames, with a notable cluster in the Upper Thames Valley, and then in far greater numbers in Kent and along the south coast from the 450s to the early 500s. He finds conclusive evidence that at this time there was a massive population movement out of the area between the River Weser and the Jutland peninsula. There is no doubt in his mind that in its early stages the Anglo-Saxon settlement represented a mass folk migration, not an aristocratic or political takeover. Given a sailing time of three to four days and skilled crews, several return voyages could have been made in a season. The early kingdoms certainly exploited naval power: the Northumbrian kings, for example, held the Isle of Man for a time and took Anglesey.

  In fact, the attitudes of historians to the coming of the Anglo-Saxons and the formation of their settlements and kingdoms have ranged from dismissing the newcomers’ leaders as ‘flotsam’ on the tide of history to describing them as judges who superimposed leadership in war on peaceful functions, and from deriding their followers as a riff-raff of settlers to rating them at fairly large tribal units ‘whose commanders knew what they were doing’.10

  According to the ninth-century version in the West Saxon Chronicle, in the south the first three, in supposed order of arrival, were Hengest of Kent (about 450), Aelle for Sussex (470s) and Cerdic for Wessex (about 500). Historians consider most of the detail of these early years as a matter of creative tradition. For example, archaeologists in Sussex unearthed Germanic cemeteries of early – rather than late – fifth-century date and at an inland location, which may suggest territory there had been ceded to incomers by the indigenous Romano-British population well before the ‘first’ arrivals. But the stories were accepted by later generations of educated Anglo-Saxons as reliable accounts of their origins and are in any case of considerable interest in their own right.

  In the talk of kings and kingdoms that follows it is worth remembering that scholars often use the term ‘extensive lordships’ to describe the structures for exploiting the people and resources of post-Roman Britain. In such a system, powerful self-established elite groups, perhaps warlords and their entourages, exacted services and renders of food and other materials in kind from the population under their sway, rather than by the actual ownership of land. Given the logistics of transport, for centuries the king and his retinue of servants, clients and advisers moved to consume the ‘renders’ at points of assembly for the produce, perhaps a fortified royal residence or ‘vill’, which over the years might acquire some of the functions of a regional market town, perhaps the residence of a great man at the heart of his estate. About the development of these estates and their organization virtually nothing is known.11 Sometimes a religious estate, or minster, might entertain the court: in 765, for example, Offa issued a charter in the presence of the abbot of Medeshamstede (later called Peterborough). One hopes the place got off more lightly than when, in the reign of King Edward II (1307–27), an eight-week stay by the king’s favourite Piers Gaveston cost the then abbey of Peterborough more than a year’s revenue.12

  South of the River Humber

  It is possible that Kent, where we start the survey, may have developed an exception to this pattern of itinerant courts and had a capital city. Apart from London, Canterbury is the only place in Britain known to Bede as a ‘metropolis’. About 600 the Christian queen of Kent had had her private chapel just outside the place for the best part of twenty years. This suggests that her court, at least, was fairly sedentary. The name of the kingdom and its capital derive from the tribe of the Cantiaci who inhabited the area in Roman times. Archaeology has revealed traces of Germanic settlers in Cant
erbury in the late 300s but the main settlement is supposed to have occurred in the 450s, under the leadership of the warlord brothers Hengest and Horsa. Bede, who, it has been suggested, was probably using a Kentish source, says they were Jutes, a people whose origins have been much discussed but who are now generally assumed to have come from Jutland in Denmark.

  Bede and the Chronicle tell us that they arrived with three boatloads of followers, to serve as mercenaries at the invitation of a King Vortigern to help him against the Picts. It seems it was Bede who gave this ‘king’ a name, though he may have invented it from a word meaning ‘chief lord’ as a loose translation for the term ‘superbus tyrannus’ used by Gildas.13 Where, in Britain, did this ‘Vortigern’ have his palace? Was it in the northwest, as one might expect if his enemies were indeed the Picts, or in the south? Did he really reward Hengest with what is now the county of Kent? Or did the mercenary leader fall out with his employer, call in reinforcements and carve out a kingdom by conquest? Certainly, the king lists for Kent, drawn up probably as late as the 800s, give Hengest as the first king (later dated as reigning from 455 to 488). But the royal dynasty, the Oiscingas, is called after neither him nor his father, Whitgils the Jute, but after Oisc or Aesc, son of Hengest. The written record does not give Hengest the title of ‘king’ before his arrival in Britain – though Sir Frank Stenton thought it ‘best’ to regard him as a chief of ‘very noble descent’ who brought his retinue from over the sea to Britain. Intriguingly, however, he shares his name with a hero mentioned in Beowulf – Hengest of the Eotan tribe (translated as ‘the Jutes’ by Seamus Heaney).

  This famous story of English origins, as told in Bede’s Latin, was translated with particular fidelity in the ninth-century Old English version of Bede’s history, suggesting to one historian of the migrations that it may have acquired ‘canonical status’.14 It certainly has its fair share of mythic associations. The fact that Hengest and Horsa were brothers recalls the twin brothers that feature in other Germanic origin myths: Ybor and Agio for the Lombards; Ambri and Assi for the Vandals. Romulus and Remus, twin founders of ancient Rome, feature on early English coinage, for example that of East Anglia in the eighth century. Also from East Anglia comes a scene of a pair of dancing warriors on one of the ornamental panel types of the Sutton Hoo helmet.15 Then there is the association of the names with the words for horse – ‘stallion’ (hengest) and ‘horse’ or ‘mare’ (horsa) – and the suggestive fact that the horse played an important part in the cults and belief systems of the Germanic invaders of England. (The Roman twin gods Castor and Pollux, the ‘Gemini’ of the zodiac, were often portrayed as young horsemen.)

  Set against such mythologizing theories are convincing historical details. In the version as told in Bede’s source, the Historia Brittonum, the war leader Hengest springs his attack in the hall of Vortigern with the cry ‘Eure nimath seaxas’ (‘draw your [hidden] knives’).16 (The Latin source drops into the language of the invaders for a more ‘faithful’ rendering of the traitor’s cry. And it is the more telling for those who knew that the Saxons supposedly were named for their characteristic short knife, the seaxa – and who did not know that Hengest and his men were supposed to be Jutes.) Then there is the fact that the historical King Æthelberht (d. 616), who brought Christianity to Kent, was unquestionably the son of Eormenric, who in turn was Hengest’s grandson or great grandson. The balance seems to tip in favour of Hengest also being a historical figure and a distinguished ancestor.

  That the Jutes of Kent had fairly extensive Continental European contacts is suggested by the fact that ‘Eormenric’ is the Anglo-Saxon variant of Ermanarich, the fourth-century Ostrogothic ruler of a vast territory in the Ukraine and a figure of Germanic lore and legend. It has even been suggested that Kent had a substantial percentage of Franks in its population and was subject to a Merovingian paramount power. But the Merovingians were Christian, whereas Kentish paganism seems to have flourished well into the reign of Æthelberht. Place name evidence indicates cult centres of Woden in the Canterbury region and the king remained faithful to paganism for at least twenty years after his marriage to a Merovingian Christian princess (chapter 3).

  Next we come to Sussex, where paganism lasted fifty years longer. Today divided from Kent only by the county line, then it was separated from it and the Thames Valley basin by the no man’s land of the Weald (Anglo-Saxon, ‘forest’). In this isolated territory, perhaps in the 470s, a certain Aelle, accompanied by his three sons and three boatloads of followers, landed ‘at the place called Cymen’s Shore’ (probably Selsey Bill) and forced a landing against a British defending force, which they drove back. Following the Chronicle account we learn that the intruders maintained themselves for more than a decade, facing down a British counter-attack in 485, before in 491 overrunning ‘Andredesceaster’, the Roman fort of Anderida, near Pevensey, and slaughtering all the inhabitants.

  By the year 500 then, the family of Aelle seem to have established a viable territorial presence – call it a kingdom. Bede considered it so important that he described Aelle as the first English king to hold ‘imperium’ (i.e. ‘rule’) over all the kingdoms south of the River Humber. If this sequence of annals bears any relationship to actual historical events it opens another field of speculation. How big was a force of three boatloads? Did it comprise exclusively fighting men and did families follow on? Why did the British not make a second counter-attack? What was the population in Anderida doing all this while? Perhaps it was less pivotal an event than Bede would have us believe. Professor Susan Reynolds wrote

  A kingdom was never thought of merely as the territory which happened to be ruled by a king. It comprised and corresponded to a ‘people’ [gens, natio, populus] which was assumed to be a natural inherited community of tradition, custom, law and descent.17

  Finally there is the case of Wessex. Here there seem to be at least two foundation myths. Bede has its kings begin as rulers of a people established in the Upper Thames Valley region under the legendary founder ‘Gewis’ (the Old English translation of Bede, done at the court of King Alfred, always calls ‘the Gewisse’ the ‘West Saxons’). An eponymous Gewis does feature in the sixth generation from Woden in the West Saxon genealogy drawn up much later. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle opens the story of Wessex with a landing of five boatloads that sailed up the Solent one day in the year 495 under two princes, Cerdic and his son Cynric, and landed in the face of armed British opposition at a place called Cerdic’s Shore; where this was we do not know.

  Over the next forty years, other episodes in this mythic account of early Hampshire and the region speak of the arrival of ‘Port’ and his two sons at Portsmouth, ‘where they slew a young Briton, a very noble man’ (it is hard not to think of the comment by the Greek historian Procopius that ‘the noblest sacrifices’ in Thule (the remote north) is the sacrifice to Ares the war god of the first captive in a war).18 The defeat by Cerdic and Cynric of a ‘Welsh’ (i.e. British) king is followed by their kinsmen Stuf and Whitgar with three more ships who also won an opposed landing battle against Britons at Cerdic’s Shore. The Chronicle marks the beginning of the ‘rule of the West Saxon royal house’ in the year 519, when Cerdic and Cynric won another victory over the Britons at ‘Cerdic’s Ford’. Some ten years later they took the Isle of Wight and in 534 Cerdic died, to be succeeded, we are told, by Cynric.

  The terse annals, though written centuries after the events they purport to record, can be revealing. At his first appearance Cerdic is not only given no ethnic origin, he is not even given a Saxon name, but rather a Germanic version of the British-sounding ‘Caraticos’. Arriving with a son of fighting age he dies forty years later, clearly a venerable patriarch. He acquires royal status years after his arrival in Britain. His kingdom is established through years of victorious struggle against the ‘Welsh’ and, with the Isle of Wight, which he takes with his son or grandson Cynric about 530, he makes a successful conquest ‘across the sea’.

  After Cerdic’s de
ath the story of steady conquest continues with Cynric (d. 560) and his son Ceawlin (d. 592), who win important battles against the British in the 550s. At this point the writer of the Chronicle gives us the royal ancestry, listing Cerdic as the great grandson of Gewis. Ceawlin, listed as the second bretwalda, defeated Æthelberht of Kent in the 560s and won a great victory over the British in the 570s – three of their kings were killed and three towns, Bath, Cirencester and Gloucester, taken. Extending from the Solent northwards to the River Thames and west to the estuary of the River Severn, Ceawlin’s kingdom now divided the British of Wales and the Welsh marches from the British of Devon.

  Moving northwards from Kent and Wessex, we come to Essex, with the complex of Roman London, East Anglia, the Thames valley and the Midlands. Written records for Essex are virtually non-existent before the reign of Sæberht (d. 616/17), Æthelberht of Kent’s nephew. His father, Sledd, was acknowledged as the family ancestor by all subsequent kings, but a genealogy drawn up about 800 traces the legendary descent not from Woden, claimed by most Anglo-Saxon royal houses, but from the Old Saxon tribal deity Seaxnet. It seems that the Essex kings were also unusual in their frequent practice of joint, usually dual, kingship – two brothers or king and son, for example. There is also a hint that paganism was strong in the kingdom at the time of King Sœberht’s conversion to Christianity. Mellitus, the first bishop of London, consecrated at the start of the reign of King Sæberht in 604, was to have a rocky ride in the next few years as the region reverted to paganism.

  As in Essex, so in East Anglia written records, such as they are, begin after the year 600 in the reign of King Rædwald, grandson of Wuffa, founder of the Wuffinga dynasty, which claimed Caesar among its ancestors. One historian called this period ‘the lost centuries’; traditionally it is part of ‘the dark ages’ – dark because they lack the illumination of records.