A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  T. D. Kendrick, in his classic work on Anglo-Saxon art, considered that, in the sixty years between the arrival of Theodore as Archbishop of Canterbury and the death of Bede in 735, learning and the arts ‘in the remote [Church] province of England . . . achieved a position that without exaggeration may be described as supreme in western civilization’.19 Today, majestic carved stone crosses from southern Scotland and northern England tell some of the story.

  When he was about three the future Northumbrian saint, Willibald, whom as a baby his parents had adored as a ‘loveable little creature’, was suddenly attacked by a contraction of his limbs. The illness made it almost impossible for him to breathe. Fearful that he was going to die, they offered their little boy up at the foot of the ‘Holy Cross of our Lord and Saviour’ – one of the crosses, ‘held in great reverence’, that it was the custom of ‘nobles and good men of the Saxon race’ to erect in a prominent spot on their estates so that their neighbours or travellers could make their daily prayers.20 Probably it was one of the many, more modest, wooden crosses, put up on their lands by prosperous gentry. Even so, the stone Bewcastle Cross has an Old English inscription in runic characters, now much defaced, that seems to commemorate some aristocratic patron. At all events Willibald recovered and went on to a missionary career in Germany, where the cathedral at Eichstätt in Bavaria is named after him (and which is about twenty miles from the birthplace of the opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck).

  The carvings on the cross at Ruthwell, Mediterranean in style, were no doubt brightly painted but their iconography is deeply sophisticated. They may have served a liturgical purpose or had a propaganda function to promote the Roman Catholic orthodoxy; certainly they are closely related to theological Roman developments in the late seventh century. An example is the panels depicting the ‘Lamb of God’ (‘Agnus Dei’), imagery expressing the chant of that name introduced into the service of the mass at that time. At Ruthwell passages from the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood, in which the Cross (‘Rood’) tells the story of the Crucifixion and laments its own fearsome implication in the killing of God’s son, is inscribed in runic letters on the edges of the cross. It also speaks of Jesus accepting the Cross by an act of his human will and so combats the heresy of monotheletism. Abstruse and irrelevant to our generation, it was, we have seen, highly topical in the 680s. This controversy between the Eastern and Western churches, the emperors and the popes had reverberated across Roman Christian Europe as far as Theodore’s Canterbury and up to the frontiers with the Irish/British tradition (see chapter 2).

  Ruthwell also has a scene of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, which was coming into the Roman liturgy from the East at this time. Was such a monument on the boundary between Northumbrian and the British kingdoms to the west erected as a triumphalist statement of Roman Christianity: an aping of the obelisks and triumphal columns of ancient Rome, consciously ‘appropriated [by Northumbria] . . . to its own imperial project’? On the other hand, Ruthwell also has important Irish non-Roman elements. It is part of a Bernician group of crosses, at Bewcastle, Ruthwell, Rothebury and Hoddom, that have certain similarities of detail – treatment of the vine scroll decoration, for example – which suggest a common centre of production and a common vocabulary. Painted in bright colours and possibly further embellished with glass and metal decorations, these monuments in the landscape would have been ‘highly visible’ and, to modern eyes, garish intrusions on the countryside.21 To contemporaries they and their inscriptions would have been religious statements to complement the superb manuscripts created in the monastic scriptoria.

  The art of calligraphy has been honoured in many cultures. In imperial China, a sample of the emperor’s own hand was treated with almost religious reverence; among the most valued treasures of Istanbul’s Topkap1 Museum is a remarkable series of Korans in the exquisite calligraphies of the sultans; in the Jewish tradition, the scrolls of the Holy Torah have been inscribed by calligraphers of artistic genius. In the mid-twentieth century the ‘white writing’ canvases of the Wisconsin-born US Baha’i artist Mark Tobey introduced a calligraphic-based style into easel painting.

  In Western Christendom from at least the fourth century the books of the Latin Bible, and above all the Gospels and the New Testament, were lovingly transcribed in monastery scriptoria on parchment or vellum in manuscript hands of immense beauty, clarity and, often, opulence of ornament. None outshine and few equal the work of the Northumbrian school of the seventh and eighth centuries with its crowning jewel the Lindisfarne Gospels, ‘. . . one of the world’s great books – a breathtaking artwork and symbol of faith’.22 Clearly modelled on an Italian model, indeed one scholar has called it ‘a complete sixth-century Italian Gospel Book in disguise’,23 it is as clearly in execution and invention a northern masterpiece.

  Remarkably for an artwork of its time, thanks to a note written into the manuscript some two centuries later (see chapter 9), we know the name of the individual who created it – Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne (d. 721). Working between 715 and 720 this artist–calligrapher of genius wrote the entire text and created the staggeringly inventive and intricate ornamental capitals and ‘carpet’ pages that embellish the book. The rich binding adorned with precious metals and gemstones was plundered centuries ago.

  Detail after detail proclaims the cosmopolitan inspiration of the work. Every ornamental framework element is occupied by a sinuous interlacing ribbon-like line, which in turn is inhabited by fantasy ‘birds’ and ‘dogs’ and ‘serpents’ seemingly biting their own tails, reminiscent of the ‘animal inhabited’ art of the Irish monks who were the founding brothers of Lindisfarne. A boldly drawn and coloured full-length ‘portrait’ of the Apostle, following early (Roman) Christian models, and an elaborate illuminated initial letter occupying a single page introduce each gospel. In the so-called ‘carpet pages’ (Bede tells us that prayer mats were sometimes used in Northumbria, as in the Byzantine church) the disciplined riot of ornament can be dizzying and seem, dare one say it, obsessive. A sixteen-page sequence running through the text comprises canon tables, based on the work of a Byzantine scholar, that list passages where the Four Apostles agree with or differ from one another. The first carpet page is ‘intentionally old fashioned’ in colouring and design, evoking the art style of Coptic Egypt, the home of the monastic desert fathers like St Jerome, whose Latin ‘Vulgate’ translation of the Greek of the original Gospels provides the text of the work. The saints’ titles use the Greek word ‘Agios’ for ‘holy’, not the Latin ‘Sanctus’. Even the technology is intriguing – Eadfrith may be the first to have used a lead pencil (after all, the world’s highest quality graphite would be mined near Kendal in Cumbria), while he was able to ‘recreate a . . . Mediterranean palette from local materials’.

  At its best, Northumbrian scholarship was fully in the classical tradition. Bede handled Cicero’s rhetorical stylistic devices with mastery,24 while the superb manuscript known as the Codex Amiatinus, the oldest extant complete Latin Bible of some 1,030 leaves, for long part of the collection of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, was a masterpiece of biblical scholarship learning and penmanship. A Vulgate Latin text of the Bible copied from a text brought back by Benedict Biscop, and with additional commentary, it shows the maturity of a tradition able to develop and not just reproduce the culture and learning it fed on. It was produced at Monkwearmouth Jarrow to the commission of Abbot Ceolfrith and was intended by him for presentation at St Peter’s, on a long-planned pre-retirement visit to Rome. When forced to resign by his fractious juniors, he was well prepared, having already commissioned not only the codex, but also two bibles, one for each of the monasteries. In fact he died on his way to Rome, at Langres in Burgundy in 716, so never presented the codex. It may have reached Rome nevertheless; for centuries it was held in the monastery of San Salvatore on Monte Amiata in southern Tuscany. At some point its dedication page was altered so that it now appeared to be the gift of: ‘I, Peter
of the Lombards (Petrus Langobardorum) . . .’ Careful examination revealed that parts of Ceolfrith’s dedicatory text has been erased and overwritten . . . for reasons no doubt best known to Peter of the Lombards!

  Like the age of Italian Renaissance humanism, which was founded largely on ancient classical culture archived in Europe’s monastic libraries, Northumbria’s Golden Age had derived much of its impulse from elsewhere – in this case traditions of Christian culture originating in the Byzantine east, Continental Europe and from other parts of the British Isles. But like the humanists, Northumbria’s scholars illuminated the Europe of their day and in institutions like the libraries at York, Hexham or Monkwearmouth-Jarrow boasted beacons of learning that would only be extinguished by the pagan depredations of the Viking raiders of the ninth century.

  4

  THE MERCIAN SPHERE

  If only because of Offa’s Dyke, the earthwork, immense in European terms, that will surely lie along the marches between England and Wales as long as the land lasts, King Offa is among the most familiar names from the Anglo-Saxon period. (The Danevirke, the early ninth-century rampart protecting southern Denmark from the East Franks, is just ten and a half miles (17 kilometres) long, running west from Hedeby, the settlement outside modern Schleswig.) Offa held such sway in the policies of the church, that most powerful international institution of the day, that for a few years England had a third archbishopric. Thus at the Council of Chelsea in the year 789 the king, ‘with all his chief men [principes]’ was among the distinguished guests at the episcopal assembly presided over by the archbishops of Canterbury and Lichfield. Offa was also the only European ruler of his day to be treated on equal terms by Charles the Great, king of the Franks. In a famous letter he sent to Offa in the year 796, Charles recognized ‘his dearest brother’ to be ‘a most strong protector of your earthly country’, as well as a defender of the ‘holy faith’.

  Offa may be said to have completed a process of Mercian consolidation begun by King Æthelbald (716–57). Writing in 732, Bede observed that all the peoples and church provinces south of the Humber were ‘subject’ (‘subiecti’) to Æthelbald of Mercia. Though he does not name him as holding the imperium, ‘subject to’ seems intended to convey the idea of an accepted, ordered authority. Bede’s assessment may have been based on men like Nothelm, bishop of London, apparently close in the councils of the Mercian king. Nothelm also had good contacts at Rome and, with papal permission, had copied letters in the archive there which he ‘brought’ to Bede as source material for the History. He was to become archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps through Æthelbald’s influence.

  The beginnings of the English midlands

  ‘Mercia’ (the name from the Old English ‘mierce’, ‘boundary’ [like the Slav ‘Ukraine’], means ‘the Marches’ or ‘Borderland’), that large area of fluctuating boundaries in central England between the Thames and the Humber, seems to have had its origins about the year 600 with a loose confederacy of Anglian tribes each under its own leader, who acknowledged as ‘king’ a single ruler drawn from one of their number, usually from the heartlands on the upper River Trent. Presumably the ‘boundary’ in question was the ever-moving westward frontier between the invading Angles and the native British – the ‘Wild West’, so to speak, as seen from East Anglia, the ‘Wild East’ as seen by the Romano-British Christian population.

  Mercia grew around the historic centres of Tamworth, Repton and Lichfield where St Chad established the Mercian bishopric in 669. (A recently discovered panel of a sarcophagus made for his relics and displayed in the cathedral from February 2006, depicts the archangel, Gabriel. This rare example of early Anglo-Saxon sculpture has traces of its original paint work.)

  Around this core we glimpse satellite peoples in tribal centres, under their own rulers or perhaps subjected by colonizing Mercian nobles, in names such as Wreocensætan (‘settlers’ round the Wrekin), Magonsætan (settlers west of the River Severn) and the Pecsætan of the Peak District in Derbyshire. In the area around Leicester and Peterborough (at that time called Medeshamstede), tribal groups (some, it has been suggested, little kingdoms) known collectively as the Middle Angles for a time constituted a kingdom and diocese. Its first bishop, Seaxwulf (d. c. 690) was closely involved in the foundation of the abbey at Medeshamstede. The kingdom of the Hwicce, occupying parts of modern Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire around the see of Worcester, was the most important constituent of greater Mercia. It may have been a fully functional British kingdom, with an existing British ecclesiastical centre, simply taken over by a small Anglian warrior elite expanding from a family base in Winchcombe, near Tewkesbury, in Gloucestershire and briefly centre of its own shire, rather than a territory occupied by a scattered settler population. Early tradition held that the great King Offa grew up among the Hwicce; it was probably during his reign that Winchcombe began to be developed as a royal minster-like complex of churches within a defensive enclosure. The place also seems to have held a document archive.1

  Although it was transcribed in the early eleventh century, a document known to historians as the ‘Tribal Hidage’ seems to offer insights into the early Mercian world. It is a list of some thirty-four kingdoms and tribal ‘mini’ kingdoms in ‘Southumbria’, each assessed by area according to its number of ‘hides’ (territorial units supporting a family farm). Peter Featherstone concluded that Mercia was at the forefront of the compiler’s mind, the opening entry being for ‘first Mercia’, that is the traditional heartlands, assessed at 30,000 hides, and proposed that the Tribal Hidage figures probably carried a symbolic significance. For example, the people of the Hwicce are accorded a territory of 7,000 hides, surely reminiscent of the ‘7,000 hides, hall and throne’ that Hygelac, king of the Geats, gave to Beowulf.2

  Penda the great pagan: father of a kingdom

  If it was the business of a king of the ‘heroic’ age to be a munificent ‘arm-ring giver’, to do honour to his lineage and so win followers to his banner, for none was success in the bloody business of war more important than for the leaders of the Mercians, ‘the men of the boundaries’, the ‘marcher lords’ of an ever-moving frontier. The seventh-century Mercian military establishment was well suited to the extortion of plunder and tribute, but ill adapted to sustained long-term conquest.

  They enter history with Penda who challenged the supremacy of Northumbria in a series of wars (see chapter 3). From a British perspective he appeared as the man who separated the central kingdom from the northern kings of Northumbria. The reach of Penda’s power was demonstrated by his widespread campaigns from Cirencester (628) in the south against Wessex to wars against East Anglia, which ended in the deaths of the kings Sigeberht and, in 654, Anna. In the 640s he drove Cenwalh of the West Saxons from his throne. Despite the disaster of Winwaed in 655, it was he, writes Nicholas Brooks, ‘who made the Mierce into a great kingdom’. He argues if events and his own paganism had not combined against him, Penda ‘might have been known to us in English poetry, as a great war leader, like some early El Cid.’3

  From the mid-seventh century to the turn of the ninth, the Mercians extended their sway to virtually all the lands between the Thames and Humber. Many a minor kingdom and principality was absorbed or lost status in the process. For example, in the 770s subkings of the Hwicce were replaced by ealdormen. The impression, then, is of patchwork ethnicity and tribally partitioned populations, each under its own leader – a kind of Anglo-Saxon federated superpower. Furthermore, enough fragmentary archival references survive, together with cultural artefacts, to show that during the eighth century and the early ninth this ‘kingdom of the Mercians’ developed a considerable cultural heritage, before inundation by Danish invaders. The Mercian bishop Plegmund would become archbishop of Canterbury, and was a prominent member of the team that helped King Alfred of Wessex to achieve his great Anglo-Saxon recovery programme.

  Mercian kingship might have had obscure origins but it would acquire for itself a serviceable genea
logy. The actual succession depended largely on the ability of one or another claimant to secure sufficient support. The contestants were great men, ealdormen, ‘princes’ or ‘dukes’ who could canvas support ‘from among their own number upon a king’s death’. From one reign to the next the same names of this establishment of the great are found witnessing to royal charters. How they achieved that status in the first place is not so clear. It is possible that it reached back to the earliest days and that ‘these principes or duces were themselves the hereditary or chosen leaders of different peoples within the extended Mercian world.’4

  The beginning of Christian Mercia

  We have seen Oswiu of Northumbria annex northern Mercia after his victory over Penda in 655, but he assigned a sub-kingdom of 5,000 hides in southern Mercia to the dead king’s Christian eldest son Peada. He survived little more than a year before being murdered. Brief though it was, his reign saw the initiation of the abbey of Medeshamstede, one of the first foundations of Christian Mercia.

  Northumbrian supremacy in Mercia lasted barely three years. In 657/8 a putsch by a group of ealdormen re-established the kingdom’s independence under Peada’s brother Wulfhere (d. 674). Acting on the advice of his sisters Cyneburh and Cyneswith, his brother the future king Æthelred (674–704) and of Archbishop Deusdedit of Canterbury, to name but a few, he confirmed the foundation of the minster at Medeshamstede. The Chronicle’s entry on these events has fly-on-the-wall accuracy about the loving exchanges between Bishop-Abbot Seaxwulf and the king, who approved not only all the things the abbot wanted but all the things the king knew that he wanted. All present wrote ‘with the finger’, that is traced the crosses on the parchment with their finger. How much if any of this happened we cannot possibly know for sure: such ‘creative accounts’ and dubious charters were to be expected in the archive of any well-managed church establishment; papal bulls confirming the events and affirming that the abbot owed allegiance to the pope alone are also recorded. The Peterborough scribe, purporting to write a national narrative, gives the national synod of the church convened at Hertford in 672/3 just one line. But the figure of Seaxwulf reminds us of the ‘veritable monastic empire’ that he traditionally is said to have founded and Abbot Hedda first ruled, with ‘colonies’ from Breedon on the Hill in Leicestershire to Bermondsey, now in London’s Docklands.