A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  But if these are virtually non-existent, archaeology has told a tantalizing and now astonishing story. Early in 2004 excavations were under way by the Museum of London Archaeology Service (at the invitation of the Borough of Southend-on-Sea) that were to reveal a find still being assessed as this book goes to press. The site was for proposed roadworks to ease traffic congestion near the suburb-village of Prittlewell. Since the 1860s the construction of roads and railways to open up the London commuter belt have led to ad hoc excavations producing grave goods – swords, spears, shields, jewellery – which suggest that five acres were in use from around AD 500 to 700 as the cemetery of the elite of a warrior society. The new find at Prittlewell, as reported in the journal British Archaeology (May 2004), dates from the same pagan/Christian transition period in eastern England as Sutton Hoo. Two small gold crosses suggest a Christian involvement and links with the southern German region where they are common. Like Sutton Hoo Mound 1, its only rival in the archaeological record so far, it is a breathtaking glimpse into the warrior society in those ‘lost centuries’.

  The body of the great man had been laid in a wooden box or casket in a wood-lined ‘burial chamber of the highest status’. The timber panelling had long since perished, but wood fibres were still attached to a great copper bowl, which had originally hung against it from an iron hook. The body was surrounded by ritualistic and luxury objects. Hrothgar had rewarded Beowulf with a standard of gold, a fitting emblem of honour for the hero who had slain Grendel the monster; the lord of Prittlewell had an iron standard buried with him. In addition were his weapons (sword, spear, shield), a solid gold belt buckle, drinking horns and a folding camp-stool. As at Sutton Hoo there is a lyre (see chapter 9 below). The excavators found dice and fifty-seven gaming pieces, a Byzantine drinking flagon and a Coptic bowl, evidence of the international trade of the time.

  From East Anglia and Essex we move into the English Midlands, home-to-be of the central kingdom of Mercia (the theme of chapter 4). At its largest extent Mercia stretched from East Anglia westward to Wales, from the Thames northward to the Humber. In other words it was the heartland of Anglo-Saxon England.

  North of the Humber

  Finally, in this sketch survey of Anglo-Saxon origins during the invasion/settlement period, we come to the lands north of the River Humber, which was apparently considered the great divide of their territory by the Anglo-Saxons themselves. Someone, Bede most likely, coined the name ‘Northumbria’ for the kingdom that dominated the country here, between Humber and Forth, in his day. In fact the term subsumed two distinct kingdoms, each with its own royal house and each with a name that proclaimed British antecedents. The larger, to the north, bordering with the Picts and Strathclyde Britons, was ‘Bernicia’ with its main centre at Bamburgh; the smaller, with its northern frontier on the River Tees and its chief centre at York, was ‘Deira’.

  We do not know when the first Germanic settlers in the region arrived nor where they landed. Bede’s account could be interpreted as linking their story with the first settlers in Kent. The author of the Historia Brittonum, his principal source here, was probably a Welsh/British scholar, like Gildas, though working later. He composed his account of history from the Creation to the 680s about the year 829 at the court of Gwynedd, although it survives only in a number of manuscripts from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, among them one by a certain ‘Nennius’. The Historia also includes extracts from a Kentish Chronicle, lists a number of Anglo-Saxon genealogies and seems to have known Bede’s History.

  Simplifying the Bede/Historia account, we learn that the Britons of those days, including their king Vortigern (whether he ruled in the north or south of the island), called in Saxons against the ‘northern nations’, which suggests we are dealing with the settlement of the north and not the south country. Three shiploads of ‘Angles or Saxons’ arrived. They win their first engagement against an enemy attacking ‘from the north’ but then sent messengers back to their homelands describing the fertile nature of the land and the lazy ways of the natives. More shiploads followed. All the newcomers soon turned on their employers and one group, making a truce with the Picts, went on the rampage – pillaging the land, slaughtering priests before their own altars and ravaging city and countryside before returning to their base. If the group allied with the Picts were the people led by Hengest and Horsa, it would mean that the Picts themselves, with their home base in modern-day Scotland, had penetrated Roman Britain as far south as the Thames. Of course, this is not impossible. But it seems to make better sense if the unnamed invaders who allied with the Picts were, instead of the Kent-based Hengest and his followers, the first Germanic settlers in the region of ‘Northumbria’ – leaders unknown.

  Three models have been proposed to suggest how the transformation from British to English came about for, in the words of David Rollason, ‘it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the population [of “Northumbria”] came to regard itself as predominantly English and was principally English speaking.’19 First, the Roman or Romano-British regime, having called in the barbarian mercenaries against the incursive Picts, decided on a peaceful handover. In other words there was a simple change of elites. York, the Roman Eboracum founded about AD 71, had been a major military and administrative centre, the capital so to speak of the province of Britannia inferior (‘Lower Britain’). It was here, in the year 306, that Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, was raised on the shields of the legionaries before beginning his march on Rome. It was here too that towards the end of the Roman period the dux Britanniae, head of the British military defences, had his headquarters. Here, if anywhere, an orderly handover of power to barbarian federate troops could have been made. But such an idea is speculative in the extreme. There is some archaeological evidence for Germanic settlements in Deira before the year 500 and the Historia Brittonum (written, remember, in the 830s), hints at a shadowy Anglian ruler of Deira in the 450s – and that is all.

  The second hypothesis is that British kings, operating either from Iron Age hill forts or previous Roman power centres, having displaced the imperial administration in the early fifth century, conceded power to the invading Germanic elite after only a brief resistance. David Rollason finds that the proposal for such a handover from a ‘sub-Roman’ authority is difficult to sustain. Dating of archaeological finds, such as barbarian burial sites scattered along the routes of Roman roads is problematical, since it can depend on keyins to written records that are themselves open to dispute. If such finds can be shown to be early, then we may be looking at the graves of federate troops posted to defend the road by their Roman or sub-Roman employers; if they are later, then it is probably a case of invaders who literally fell by the wayside as their companions raided by forced marches into the interior. In other contexts he seems to suggest that archaeology can be inconclusive:

  . . . a very small quantity of pottery of ‘Anglian’ date found on a site could as easily have been dropped accidentally on a ruined site as have been actively used in a building which continued in full use.20

  Excavations at York Minster unearthed foundations of the impressive headquarters building of the Roman military administration of Eboracum. The great cross-hall or basilica would certainly have provided a fine palace for British kings of Deira, but there is no proof, archaeological or otherwise, that it did.

  Both these models for British to Anglo-Saxon transition postulate a large majority British population in the subsequent ‘Northumbrian’ state, its native culture and language anglicized by the incomers. The third model proposes an Anglian Northumbria as the outcome of conquest combined with ethnic cleansing, either by massacre or expulsion, its culture owing little to either native British or imperial Roman antecedents.

  An argument for cleansing by mass slaughter would be supported by some evidence in the archaeological record of mass graves; alternatively the natives were subjugated to slave status en masse, and slaves there certainly were in Anglo-Saxon, as in Romano-Br
itish, society; thirdly the Britons may have headed westward in ragged refugee columns before the advancing alien armed bands. But maybe they just stayed put, accepted their new Germanic masters, and simply assimilated to their ways and adopted their language. John Blair reckons that by the early 700s most of the inhabitants of Britain from the Pennines to the south-west of the country had acquired what he terms an ‘English’ political and linguistic identity adopted from the ethnic minority of intruders.21 As to the north: ‘throughout Northumbria the dominance of English place names is extremely striking.’22

  Place name evidence is always subject to caveats. Maybe the local invading lord gave a British village an English name and forced the locals to adopt it. Maybe the local peasantry not only adopted the invader’s language in their dealings with him, but jettisoned their own for the sake of fashion (as has been suggested). In any case, it seems we can conclude with Professor Rollason that Bede was essentially right to consider that by his time that part of the Roman empire south of Hadrian’s Wall and native areas to the north of it, both inhabited by the British, had been welded into a kingdom which was regarded by the English as inhabited by the ‘people of Northumbrians’, one of the other lands in which lived ‘the people of the English’.23

  The first king named for Bernicia is Ida, reigning in the sixth century (d. ?559) and followed by a confusion of names. For Deira the first name we have is King Ælle (d. 590s). If we can believe the punning anecdote by which Bede was to explain Pope Gregory’s decision to launch the Roman mission to England, it seems that Ælle of Deira ruled a kingdom of Angles and lost at least one battle. One day in the 570s (that is, before he became pope), Gregory, so goes the story, was walking through the Roman slave market when he caught sight of two blond-haired youths for sale. (Christian Europe was no different from any other contemporary culture in accepting slavery, though dealing in Christians was forbidden.) On being told that they were ‘Angles’, from a kingdom called ‘Deira’ ruled by a king called Ælle, he quipped in Latin a pun that William Shakespeare might have envied, with the observation that they should be called ‘not “Angles” but “Angels”’ (‘non Angli sed Angeli’), that they should be delivered from the wrath (Latin, ‘de ira’) [to come] and that ‘Alleluiah’ should be sung in their land when they were converted. The unfortunate boys may have been picked up by Frisian merchants at a clearance sale, following some battle between Deirans and Bernicians. The internecine warring came to an end under the Bernician king Æthelfrith, who emerges about 592 as the first known ‘ruler of Northumbria’. He was a pagan king in the heroic mould, with a pedigree going back beyond Woden to Geat, a name mentioned in Beowulf.

  Beowulf the hero – Beowulf the king

  The poem of Beowulf opens in ‘Heorot’, the splendid mead hall of King Hrothgar, a Danish king. For twelve years the monster Grendel has terrorized the place, raiding at night and killing warriors as its food. A stranger arrives, a prince of the court of King Hygelac of the Geats of southern Sweden, his name Beowulf. He offers to rid Heorot of its terror. That night Grendel breaks down the door of the mead hall but Beowulf fights it to the death, ripping off its arm and driving it out into the darkness. The next day the hall carouses in triumph, but that night Grendel’s mother takes vengeance, killing one of Hrothgar’s men. Beowulf slays her and then, feted by Hrothgar and showered with gifts, returns to the land of the Geats. There King Hygelac, too, awards him the finest gem-studded sword from the Geat treasury and 7,000 hides of land, a hall and a throne. Shortly after, Hygelac dies and Beowulf reigns for 50 years. When his realm is ravaged by a fire-belching dragon, Beowulf rises to the challenge though all his men, save young Wiglaf, desert him. The dragon is slain but the hero is mortally wounded and the poem ends with his funerary rites and a threnody, a dirge of death.

  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.24 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.’25

  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.25 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 st
ates – 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.26

  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.