A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  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’.29 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’.1

  In 563 the Irish saint Columba founded a monastery on the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, in the territory of Dál Riata. (The story of how this Irish influence reached the Anglian kingdoms of Northumbria is given in chapter 3.) In 597 Roman Catholic Christianity arrived in the south, with the mission of St Augustine sent by Pope Gregory I to King Æthelberht of Kent and his Christian wife of long standing, Bertha of Paris. For any mission to succeed it would need support in the Frankish territories north of the Alps through which it would have to pass. At this time they were divided between the kingdom of Austrasia (roughly western parts of what is now Germany) and, to the west of that, a number of kingdoms, chief among them Neustria. Rome wrote to various rulers to solicit safe passage for the planned mission.

  These rival rulers were all descendants of Clovis of the Merovingian dynasty, the pagan chieftain of a confederacy of barbarian tribes known as the Franks (see chapter 5). Clovis had defeated the last Roman prefect of Gaul in the 480s (about the same time that Aelle of the South Saxons was carving out his kingdom). When he converted to orthodox catholic Christianity, as taught by Rome and Constantinople, it was a turning point in the history of the papacy. At that time the bishops of Rome, the popes, felt in danger of being marginalized in the west by Europe’s dominant barbarian rulers, Theodoric the Ostrogoth in Rome and the Visigothic kings in Spain who held to
Arian Christianity, which taught that Christ was not God’s equal and was heretical in Rome’s view. Thus the conversion of Clovis, the rising barbarian star, to their version of orthodox Christianity was an important gain. The marriage of the Roman Catholic Merovingian Princess Bertha, eighty or so years later, into a heathen ruling house across the Channel, opened the way to a further extension of the pope’s influence north of the Alps.

  Princess Bertha’s father, the Merovingian King Charibert I of Paris, had died, but a condition of the marriage had been that she should be able to continue to practise her religion – her entourage included her priest, bishop Liuthard – and a dilapidated Roman church dedicated to St Martin had been restored (probably in late sixth-century Merovingian style) for her use.2 Kent lay within the sphere of influence of the Merovingian rulers of northern Francia. The cultural ties were evidently close. Mercantile and political contact between Kent and Francia and the presence of Franks at Æthelberht’s court had familiarized some Franks with the language of the English and some of the Kentish court with Frankish.3 Augustine and his Italian companions were worried about linguistic difficulties. Pope Gregory had arranged for Frankish priests to accompany them to act as interpreters. The queen’s chapel meant that Latin, too, had a toehold. It also seems reasonable to suppose that these Latin clerics helped pioneer the adaptation of the Latin alphabet to the writing of Old English (see below and chapter 9).

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s entry for 597 tells us that Pope Gregory I ‘sent Augustine to Britain . . . who preached God’s word to the English nation’. The future founding archbishop of Canterbury landed on the Isle of Thanet (now part of mainland Kent, but then separated from it by a wide channel) with some forty men, monks and presumably support personnel early in 597.

  Augustine was prior of a Roman monastery that Pope Gregory had himself founded and many of his companions were from the same house. They were hardly willing recruits. Setting out in early 596, they stopped for some weeks in southern Gaul while Augustine returned to Rome hoping to persuade Gregory to recall the mission. He refused, but gave him letters of authorization and introduction to the secular and church authorities along the route. Rome’s authority was by no means absolute in Europe, even in church matters, at that time. For one thing, as Augustine discovered, churches in Gaul observed a ‘Gallican’ rite different from that of Rome.

  We do not know for sure why Gregory, pope since 590, decided to launch the mission. Jesus Christ had of course charged all true disciples to spread his message to all the world. But why to the English? Why now? In terms of church politics a new province owing exclusive allegiance to Rome and following the Roman rite would obviously be an advantage to the papacy. Possibly the famous episode in the Roman slave market triggered Gregory’s decision. But the fact that the pagan English had overrun most of the Roman Empire’s once Christian province of Britain was probably the underlying cause. Eric John has controversially argued that following the death, a few years earlier, of the powerful West Saxon king Ceawlin, who according to Bede was the second to wield the imperium, Æthelberht was already being accorded that status. To continue with John’s analysis, because this status represented real seniority among the English kings, Rome may have considered the time was now opportune to activate its long-standing presence at the court of Canterbury.4

  At all events, King Æthelberht formally received the Roman party a few days after their arrival, in an open-air ceremony. Maybe this was because he feared the newcomers could use sorcery against him in an enclosed space, as Bede believed; maybe because Anglo-Saxon pagan sanctuaries were generally in the open air; most probably because it was elementary PR to hold his first encounter with these important strangers in full view of as many of his council and people as possible. Before the end of 597 the king was converted and baptized.

  Gregory, who termed Æthelberht ‘king of the English’ (rex Anglorum) now addressed a solemn communication to him and Queen Bertha, in which he reminded them of the example of the first Christian emperor, Constantine. The ceremony was to be understood as his solemn enrolment into the family of Catholic kings, of which the present emperor (that is the east Roman, Byzantine ruler at Constantinople), the most ‘serene prince’, as Gregory called him, was the father.5 To be admitted as a member of this imperial family was probably the chief attraction of the new religion for Æthelberht. By this time, it has been said, it was ‘the aspiration of Germanic leaders all over . . . Europe . . . to emphasize their right to rule by looking like the Byzantines in their use of gold garnet jewellery.’6

  But we do not really know why the king took the new faith. Loyalty to his divine ancestors’ religion had served Æthelberht pretty well. He seems to have won recognition as overking without the aid of the new god. The kingdom of the East Saxons, ruled by his nephew Sæberht (d. 616/17), was a client state and further afield Rædwald, king of the East Angles, treated him with respect. Place name evidence indicates Woden cult centres close to Canterbury where Queen Bertha had her chapel. The pagan cult did survive the king’s conversion and in fact his son reverted to it after his death. So why the switch? Possibly the simplest answer is the right one. Had the king, perhaps, experienced a genuine spiritual epiphany?

  The mission proceeded apace. A second team from Rome, under the leadership of Augustine’s deputy Laurentius, arrived in England in 601; it brought the letters from Gregory and, for Augustine, the pallium of office as archbishop. He was duly consecrated and established himself – at Canterbury. Pope Gregory surely expected him to choose ‘Londinium’, a chief city of Roman Britain, as his metropolitan see. As surely, Augustine, the ‘man in the field’, must have found it impossible to present such an idea to the king of Kent. It has been argued that in fact, from the start, Christianity and Christian missions were tools of policy used and supported by kings as a means of extending their influence.7 The suggestion that the senior sanctuary of the new religion of the English be set up, not in his dominions, the dominions of the senior king, but in the territory of his neighbour and nephew, Sæberht, king of Essex, would not, one feels, have amused Æthelberht. Sæberht followed his uncle’s lead, being converted in 604, when London received Augustine’s helper Mellitus as bishop. Justus, another of the Roman mission, was already installed as bishop in the Romano-British walled city at Rochester. With three centres established in less than a decade and influence established north of the Thames, Pope Gregory’s plans seemed to be advancing well. In a letter to the pope, Augustine had been able to boast of no fewer than 10,000 converts in one baptism campaign.

  On a visit to the court of Kent, Rædwald of the East Angles next became a Christian. It was a celebrity coup for the fledgling Roman Christian settlement in England. As the grave goods unearthed at the Sutton Hoo ship burial demonstrate, the warrior aristocracy of the East Angles and their lord represented a realm of immense wealth. But the conversion may have been no more than a gesture of political deference to his overlord. Returning to his people, Rædwald permitted the practice of the pagan cult to continue, even sanctioning pagan and Christian altars in the same temple. Nevertheless Bede would list him as one of the holders of the imperium. The truth is Rædwald was to play a decisive role in the history of Christianity in Bede’s world when he killed Æthelfrith of Bernicia at the Battle of the River Idle in 616 and so opened the way for Edwin, who would become Northumbria’s first Christian king. The victory on the Idle left Rædwald the most powerful ruler in the England of his day, yet he receives scant treatment in Bede’s history, written a century later. In fact he presented Bede, historian of God’s providential purpose, with various problems. Praiseworthy as the patron of Edwin and as an early convert to Christianity himself, the East Anglian king proved ambivalent towards that religion and, worse still, evidently reverted to paganism. Yet a later kinswoman of his, the saintly Æthelfryth, founder of the abbey at Ely, was for a time the queen of Ecgfrith of Bernicia.

  The transition from pagan to Christian made for complicated alle
giances and was never smooth. There would be a momentary lapse back to the old ways even in Kent. Canterbury’s first archbishop was dead by the year 610. Thanks to him, Kent was to be the home of the metropolitan see of the church in England. He was succeeded by Laurentius.

  Kent: the first English government in action

  Kent was unusual in many ways. Alone among the intruder kingdoms, it took its name from the local pre-invasion population, the Cantwara. Local customs here would prove especially tenacious: the longest lasting, ‘gavelkind’, an almost specifically Kentish form of land-tenure, was not abolished until 1926.8 In Kent, local community divisions were different. Elsewhere there were ‘hundreds’ and, later, ‘wapentakes’; Kent was divided into ‘lathes’ apparently centred on royal manors or vills. The principal seat of the king of Kent was in a city, Canterbury (Cantwaraburh); it was in close secular contact with the Continent – archaeology has unearthed a profusion of Frankish luxury articles in Kentish graves of the sixth century; and now Æthelberht was to break entirely new ground for an English ruler: the promulgation of a written law code. It still survives.

  He enacted these ‘judgements’ we are told: (a) for his people, (b) following the example of the Romans, (c) with the counsel of his wise men and (d) had them written in the English language. They were still being observed, Bede wrote, in the early 700s. This all seems straightforward enough, but almost every item on Bede’s list presents problems. It is unlikely that ‘the Romans’ referred to are the lawgivers of ancient imperial Rome herself. Perhaps the allusion is to the great code produced a generation earlier at Constantinople by the Emperor Justinian. It seems more likely, however, that Bede has in mind the Germanic successors to Rome in the West. The Byzantines looked down on them as semibarbarians; Bede, a compatriot so to speak, would see in these opulent Germanic courts, with their garish trappings of would-be Latin gravitas, fit heirs to the Caesars, or at least to the Roman state in Gaul.