Barbarians- Secrets of the Dark Ages

by Richard Rudgley

  In one case, that of Ejsbøl Mose in southern Denmark, excavation has revealed a whole set of arms belonging to a third-century force estimated to consist of about 200 troops. Their equipment included spears, shields and lances and at least a quarter of them also had swords and knives. Many were also archers, as evidenced by nearly 700 arrowheads found by archaeologists. Twelve or more of the men had special equipment, and nine of these were on horseback. What emerges from this bog is a ghostly force that is clearly well organised, with a strict hierarchy and a wide range of military gear.

  Half a century after the Nydam boat was deliberately sunk, the archaeological remains from the Schleswig-Holstein region all but disappear. Half the peninsula seems to have been like a vast ghost town – almost no settlements or cemeteries belonging to this era have been found. There has been a great deal of debate about what this drying up of artefacts actually means. Some archaeologists have voiced the opinion that perhaps the people of the region simply built houses and buried their dead in a different way from their previous practice, and in a way that has made it hard for archaeologists to find them. Much more plausible is the common-sense idea that if there is little that had been unearthed from this era in the way of graves, dwellings and objects, then it is probably due to the fact that many of the people left the region at this time. The Anglo-Saxon historian Bede also tells us that the homeland of the Angles who came to England was 'the country known as Angulus [his Latin version of Angeln], which lies between the provinces of the Jutes and Saxons and is said to remain unpopulated to this day'. Where did they go? The obvious answer is that they went to England.

  The population starts to wane around 400, and traces of what appears to be the presence of Saxons and other Germanic tribes appear in England around the beginning of the fifth century. Michael Gebühr, the curator of the Nydam boat, believes that this vessel and others like it could have crossed the North Sea and reached England safely. Other kinds of boat would have been better for such a voyage across open seas, but the Nydam style of boat would have sufficed. Computer simulation studies that Dr Gebühr has overseen led to the conclusion that over a period of only nine years, even fifty such boats could have easily transported 30,000 people from Schleswig-Holstein to England. In just under a century the whole population could have been moved out using boats of this kind.

  Objections have been raised against this reconstruction of events. Placenames are often used as a way of discerning links between different regions or countries. In the part of Germany that includes the sites of Feddersen Wierde and the Fallward boat burial (Lower Saxony) there are many placenames that are similar to those in England. This has been used as evidence to suggest that people moved from there to England. In Schleswig-Holstein there are almost no placenames that correspond with English ones. This has led some to suppose that there was little migration from this region (usually believed to be the homeland of the Angles) to England. Dr Gebühr begs to differ. He argues that so many people left the region that it was almost completely abandoned and therefore the placenames given by them to their settlements in Schleswig-Holstein were almost all forgotten. They were replaced by new names, which seem to be of later, Viking, origin.

  If Dr Gebühr is right and a whole population of Angles left during these times, what was their reason for abandoning their homeland – a decision they would surely have not taken lightly? The reason may lie with climatic change. Not far to the south lay the marshlands dotted with Saxon villages such as Feddersen Wierde, which started to suffer environmental decline from 400 onwards (the same time as the exodus of the Angles seems to have begun). Did the Saxons' more northerly neighbours find they too could not grow enough to feed a population that was probably expanding rapidly?

  The vast number of weapons that were deposited not just in the Nydam bog but in many others such as those in southern Denmark tell us that these were difficult and violent times. The Ejsbøl Mose site mentioned above shows that these armies were full-time and organised hierarchically, so they must have had a considerable civilian population supporting them with food and supplies. Such armies could not have made up even 10 per cent of the total population. Counting up the weapons from the numerous bog finds makes one realise that tens of thousands of people at least were caught up in the war zone that affected much of the Baltic region.

  These wars could have been the result of there simply not being enough good arable land (and therefore food) for everyone when the population rose and the climatic conditions worsened. Migrations and warring parties further south in the Germanic world may also have cut the supply lines by which luxury Roman goods reached the region. Local chieftains and kings needed such goods not just for their own pleasure – their status depended on the ability to distribute largesse among their own entourages. The only solution was to get such goods from other tribal units, which meant a proliferation of local conflicts.

  This scenario of climatic decline followed fairly rapidly by social decline could have been the major spur to numerous chiefs to take their people to new lands. England was well known to many who had served in the Roman army there (among them perhaps the Fallward Saxon chief) and would have been an obvious choice. Being an island probably made it all the more attractive, in that those who went there would be more likely to be safe from their enemies on the mainland. Boats such as that from Nydam made it all possible.

  Another pointer to fairly large-scale migration to England is language. The Germanic tribes migrated all over the continent, yet nowhere did their presence have a fundamental effect on the indigenous language. Their effect on the language spoken in England was far more dramatic, suggesting that a major cultural transformation took place. Such a change would have needed significant numbers of immigrants to this new island home.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE LAND OF TWO DRAGONS

  The barbarians drive us into the sea, and the sea drives us back to the barbarians. Between these, two deadly alternatives confront us, drowning or slaughter.

  Bede, quoting a letter from the wretched remnant of the Britons' to the Romans

  As the Angles and the Saxons, leaving their environmental problems and warfare behind them, set sail for England, we go ahead of them to look at the Britannia on whose shores they will soon arrive. The Celtic world in what is often called the Dark Ages was very different to the Germanic world. And the archaic traditions of the Celts were tenacious – they were not to let either Roman or Germanic influences subsume their essential culture.

  We have the partisan account of a man named Gildas, who wrote his book On the Fall of Britain in Latin around the middle of the sixth century as a Christian priest and as a Briton (a British Celt). By the time he was writing, Anglo-Saxon power was in force over much of the island, and of the pagan immigrants he has, not surprisingly, little of a positive nature to say. Before assessing his and other early chroniclers' views about them, it is important to consider how Britain functioned once the Romans pulled out their troops, never to return.

  The Red Dragon's Story

  After about four centuries of Roman domination, the Celtic people were able to reassert their own cultural values. It would be wrong to think of this as merely a reversion to life as it was before the Romans. The world had moved on, and not just because of the changes wrought by Roman influences. Christianity took hold among the Celts at an early date and many of them had been converted by the time the Anglo-Saxons arrived. Long before the renowned community at Lindisfarne in the seventh century, the Celts were successfully establishing monasteries throughout the British Isles.

  One crucially important contributor to this was the son of a Celtic chieftain from Carlisle. This was Ninian, who, after being ordained by the Pope in Rome, returned to set up a monastery at Whithorn in Galloway, Scotland, which by his death around 432 was widely known. This is also the year in which St Patrick (himself probably a native of Carlisle) is believed to have returned to Ireland as a bishop to begin his successful conversion of its inhab
itants. He had initially gone to Ireland as a 'guest' of Irish raiders. It was through the Christian faith that Latin was kept very much alive. Christianity was second nature to the Celts, while the Saxons, Angles and other Germanic tribes were still wholeheartedly pagan.

  The departure of the legions inevitably made life easier for Saxon pirates and other barbarian marauders, whose raids were no longer intercepted by a strong defensive force. The other marauders were basically the Picts (Celts who lived in Scotland north of the Forth-Clyde line) and the Scots (who were actually inhabitants of Ireland). Yet, according to Gildas, the inhabitants of Britain enjoyed a time of prosperity after the Romans had left. There are few historical sources available concerning this time and so we can be sure about very little.

  It seems that the Celtic tribal system never really died out under the Romans – it simply lay under the grid of Roman administration that had been superimposed on it. Many chiefs and local kings of the British Celts were allies of the Romans and as such were tolerated. Peter Berresford Ellis, who has written a number of books about the Celts, has compared this to the state of affairs that existed under the British empire in India where numerous Indian princes who accepted British rule were tolerated.

  When the grid of Roman rule was removed, Britain became once more a cluster of interlocking petty kingdoms ruled by Celtic chieftains. It is sometimes claimed that there was an indigenous central authority that ruled at this time. The truth is that the evidence for this period is so scanty that we simply cannot be sure whether this was or was not the case. The sources, such as they are, mention one Ambrosius Aurelianus in respect to this question. Gildas tells us that his parents had 'worn the purple', a term that may suggest they had some kind of imperial status in post-Roman Britain. An early-ninth-century Welsh source, a work completed around 830 and attributed to a man named Nennius, says that Ambrosius was 'king among all the kings of the British people'. Some see in this shadowy figure the legendary King Arthur, a Celtic hero who fought against the Saxon invaders.

  Britain clearly did not fall apart immediately the Romans left. True, the use of coins all but died out in the 420s and the large-scale pottery industry set up by the Romans collapsed – people were forced to turn once more to their own resources and make their own pots at home. Villas and other substantial buildings continued to be built for a while but the trade routes with the European mainland were routinely cut by Saxon pirates who intercepted the shipping trade. Yet despite this the economy held together, and there is no evidence of agricultural chaos. Whatever system of government was in place after the Romans left was sufficiently well organised to defend the land against the various enemies from the west, north and east. This ability of the inhabitants of Britain to defend themselves single-handedly did not last long. The call for help was to end in disaster.

  Just how the Anglo-Saxons came to overrun a substantial part of Britain in the course of the next few generations is not known for certain. One explanation of the unfolding of events is given by Gildas, and further details are supplied by later sources such as Bede in the eighth century and Nennius in the ninth. The story is plausible and, while no doubt containing fictitious elements, may well be a fairly true rendition of what happened.

  According to these accounts, Vortigern became the king of southern Britain around 425 and reigned for some thirty years. This suggests that he was a popular ruler, but he has gone down in history as the Judas of the British Celts, the man who sold them out to the Germanic invaders. His task was not an easy one – he was fighting back the Irish raiders and the Picts as well as the troublesome continentals who had almost certainly started small colonies of settlers on the North Sea seaboard of England. He simply could not fight them all off at once, and decided to use a policy that had worked for the Romans under the empire: set one barbarian group against another. The fierce Germanic warriors would make fine mercenaries, and he decided to hire just such a force.

  The mercenaries he hired were led by two brothers named Hengist and Horsa. Bede tells us that they were Jutes rather than Angles or Saxons. The homeland of the Jutes is generally thought to be Jutland, directly north of Schleswig-Holstein. The exact date of their arrival is uncertain, but it was probably towards the last years of the 440s; their first down payment was the Isle of Thanet. The mercenaries proved to be effective against the Picts and Irish forces as well as their own Germanic brethren, the Saxons and the Angles. Everything seemed to be working out well for Vortigern, but he grew reliant on his mercenaries and as their number grew so did the cost of paying them. Overtaxing his citizens seems to have been the only solution he could think of, and this made him deeply unpopular.

  A rather tall episode of the story concerns the background to the Jutes' claim on the whole of Kent, their number having outgrown the Isle of Thanet. It is Nennius who tells us that Hengist managed to justify his claim through tricking Vortigern, organising a feast ostensibly in his honour. Having got the king drunk, Hengist's daughter – who was said to be very beautiful – began to weave her seductive spell on him. In his drunkenness he agreed, through his official interpreter Ceretic, to share his kingdom with her if she would be his wife. This is said to be how the Jutes justified their attempt to take Kent for their own. Interestingly, Nennius continues by saying that after the marriage Hengist sent for more ships to bring his countrymen over, so many in fact that the islands from which they came were left uninhabited. This seems to be supported by Michael Gebühr's idea that the inhabitants of Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland abandoned their homeland en masse around the same time.

  Vortigern's star was definitely on the wane: he was losing his grip on power as his mercenaries became increasingly dominant. Around 450 they are said to have turned against him, rallying their fellow Saxons and Angles and raising a rebellion. The result of this was widespread carnage and the destruction of many British towns, if we are to believe the lurid prose of Gildas:

  All their inhabitants, bishops, priests and people were mown down together, while swords flashed and flames crackled. Horrible it was to see the foundation stones of towers and high walls thrown down bottom upwards in the squares, mixing with holy altars and fragments of human bodies, as though they were covered with a purple crust of clotted blood, as in some fantastic wine-press. There was no burial save in the ruins of the houses, or in the bellies of the beasts and birds.

  The Germanic attacks were by no means a total success. Vortigern had his son Vortimer lead the counter-attack. We are told that he succeeded in pushing the Jutes back to the Isle of Thanet but only at the cost of his own life. The fate of his father is rather hazy. One version of events has the shadowy figure of Ambrosius Aurelianus deposing him and becoming the focus of British military resistance to the Germanic forces. Nennius says that there was a prophecy that the red dragon (representing the British Celts) would one day overcome the white dragon (the Anglo-Saxons). Many people would still argue that modern Britain is still a land divided between these two dragons.

  After this brief glimpse of the Celtic version of events, we can now turn to the story of the white dragon, although we will often have to lean on Celtic and hostile sources to do so. We can also temper these accounts with hard evidence from the ground in the form of early Anglo-Saxon burials and artefacts.

  The Story of the White Dragon

  Every English person must have heard the dismissive Scottish term 'sassenach', though not many may know how it originated. Variants of it exist in the different Celtic tongues: sasanach in Irish, sasunnach in Scottish Gaelic, sais in Welsh, saws in Cornish, sostynagh in Manx and saoz in Breton. In all these languages the word simply means Saxon. What the Celts meant by Saxon was, however, not exactly straightforward. For them it was a generic term for all the west Germanic peoples who came over to Britain. In addition to the Saxons themselves it was also used when referring to the Jutes, Angles and others – much as we do today when we talk about Anglo-Saxons in a historical sense. The people themselves certainly did not use that te
rm; it started to be used at all only in the eighth century. In a later period, the time of King Alfred in the ninth century, when the Anglo-Saxons were merging to become a cohesive whole, we can see it has become a word essentially meaning the English.

  When, where and who are the big questions concerning the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons on the eastern shores of Britain. Bede, writing in the eighth century about that earlier period, divides the colonisers into three: Saxons, Angles and Jutes (modern historians and some other early sources would add others such as the Frisians). The Jutes colonised Kent, but their descendants also lived in the kingdom of the West Saxons opposite the Isle of Wight and on the Isle of Wight itself. The Saxons (who Bede says came from Old Saxony) were the progenitors of the East, West and South Saxons. The Angles came from the country Bede calls Angelus, which according to him (as we have seen earlier) remained deserted from that time to the present. This country he places in between the land of the Saxons to the south and the Jutes to the north. Today this is the region that includes Schleswig-Holstein, where the absence of archaeological remains from this time supports his statement about its abandonment. These Angles are the direct ancestors of the East Angles, Middle Angles, Mercians and Northumbrians (by which is meant all those peoples who inhabit the area north of the river Humber).

  One of the best archaeological clues concerning the migration of the German Saxons to England is the style of pottery. In the fifth century, the two regions basically had the same kind. Pottery linked to that found at Feddersen Wierde has been identified at sites such as Mucking on the Thames, and also at West Stow (which is visited in the next chapter). The English form has been described as 'baroque' as it shows a degree of extravagance in decoration that is missing on the continental pots. It is often the case that when people leave their home and set up in new lands, they feel a need to assert their cultural values and, in doing so, often exaggerate them as if to underline their difference from the native people who surround them. It is a mechanism for cultural survival.