The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England

by Marc Morris

The first

The second

second half of the seventh century,

cutting-room floor,

Roman Britain

Norman Co...

Four are focused on individual kings,

two on individual bishops,

one on an individual family (the ...

This is not intended as a series of potted histories, but as an account of the emergence of the English and the development of England.

The Venerable Bede

As so often with golden ages, however, this picture rests on a selective reading of very limited and debatable evidence. One of its principal props is an account of German women written by the Roman historian Tacitus towards the end of the first century ad. These women, claimed Tacitus, were virtuous, frugal and chaste, and supported their sons and husbands by encouraging them to acts of valour. But this was simply a Roman praising ‘barbarian’ society in order to criticize his own.

The same is largely true in the case of Anglo-Saxon men. The argument that the pre-Conquest period was a golden age for people in general has an even longer history. When England broke with Rome in the sixteenth century, scholars sought to prove that the Anglo-Saxon Church had originally been a pristine, home-grown institution, unsullied by papal influence. During the Civil War of the seventeenth century, Parliamentarians argued that the freedoms and representative powers they were fighting for had once belonged to their Anglo-Saxon ancestors and been lost in 1066. Almost all of this was myth, but it was enduring and pervasive.

The reality, of course, is that they were very different, both to us, and to our more immediate forebears. In looking at their lives we will see many things that may strike us as admirable: their courage, their piety, their resourcefulness, their artistry, and their professed love of freedom. But we will also find much that is disconcerting: their brutality, their intolerance, their misogyny, and their reliance on the labour of slaves.

The less evidence, the more contention. The fact that so much is debatable means that the academic arguments are endless. Engaging with them is like navigating a huge, fast-flowing river, fed by a thousand streams of scholarship, and attempting to summarize them is as foolhardy as trying to freeze a waterfall. A definitive history of this period is impossible. What follows is the reading of the evidence that seems most plausible to me, and the arguments I have found the most persuasive. I have tried to show my reasoning whenever possible, without compromising the course of the story, because the story ought to seem remarkable. Like an old reciter of tales, called on by the king to relate the events of earlier times, I hope my audience will be entertained.

Julius Caesar had led the first military incursions in 55 BC, but had failed to annex any territory. It was not until nearly a century later, in AD 43, that a full-scale conquest was launched by the emperor Claudius, who obtained the submission of the island’s southern rulers, impressing them with the might of a military that could transport war elephants across the Channel. It took a further forty years of campaigning to subdue the remainder of the lowlands, interrupted by the famous revolt of Boudicca in AD 60, but by the end of the first century the contours of power in what was now Roman Britain had been established.

In that same period, and into the second century, all the familiar hallmarks of Roman civilization were introduced. Towns and cities appeared in Britain for the first time, laid out to rigid grid-plans, and within them bathhouses, theatres, temples, monuments and basilicas, all built expensively in stone, some of them faced with marble. The greatest city of all was London, founded soon after Claudius’ invasion to serve as an administrative hub for the newly acquired province. With walls some two miles long and enclosing an area of 330 acres, it was home to a population of perhaps 50,000 people, and its forum was the largest north of the Alps.

That said, for those at the bottom of the ladder, life in Britain before the arrival of the Romans was not necessarily any nicer, for slavery was an equally common condition in Celtic society. Moreover, other historians would argue that the immense sophistication and complexity of the Roman economy brought benefits to everybody, albeit not to the same degree.

The Britons had known coin before the coming of the Romans, but nothing like the volume that was in circulation afterwards. And this level of sophistication demanded literacy. At one time it was a requirement that every soldier in the Roman army should be able to read. That requirement was eventually dropped, but in order for international trade to flourish, and government to function, a great many people had to be literate.5

The Romans – and from the start of the third century, everybody living in the empire was considered a Roman citizen, whatever their ancestry – assumed all this would last forever, for the empire was eternal. And yet, within the space of a single lifetime, it was all gone. The towns and cities crumbled and fell into ruin, the coinage ceased to be minted, and the most basic commodities disappeared, leaving people to scratch and scavenge for a living, or to prey on the more vulnerable.6

The prosperity of the Roman Empire depended on peace, and that peace was provided by its army – a soldiery that was well trained, well paid, and well equipped, armed with mass-produced weapons and ingenious machines of war. In Britain, having quelled the population of the lowlands within a few decades of Claudius’ invasion, the army found itself permanently stationed against the...

Legionary fortresses, each capable of accommodating thousands of men, were established at Caerleon, Chester and York, and from these main bases an extensive network of garrison forts was spread through the hills and valleys beyond, in order to subdue or exclude the peoples that lived to the north...

In AD 122, the emperor Hadrian visited Britain and decided to mark the northern limit of the empire by building his famous wall, which stretched from the Irish Sea to the North Sea and was studded with forts along its seventy-three-mile length (colour picture 2). According to Hadrian’s contempo...

They came from Germania, which was the catch-all Roman term for the region of Europe that lay outside the empire, north of the River Rhine and the River Danube, and west of the River Vistula. The particular German people that were raiding Britain were known as Saxons.

emperor Constans

western half comprising Italy, Spain, Gaul and Britain,

eastern half that included the Balkans, Greece, Palestine and Egypt.

There is no single agreed explanation of what caused this colossal political system to unravel, but one factor generally accepted as a catalyst was the appearance of the Huns. A nomadic people who originated on the wide grasslands of central Asia, the Huns were, in the words of a contemporary Roman writer, a ‘wild race, moving without encumbrances, and consumed by a savage passion to pillage the property of others’. By 376 those others included the Goths, a more settled people who lived on the frontier of the eastern empire. That year, because of Hunnish attacks, many thousands of Goths sought and received permission to cross the Danube and settle in imperial territory. But relations between the refugees and their Roman hosts soon soured, leading to rebellion and eventually a full-scale battle at Adrianople (now Edirne in modern Turkey).

This attempt to reverse the direction of travel, however, was short-lived. Five years later Maximus was himself defeated and killed in battle by the new eastern emperor, Theodosius, and the western court was once again removed to Italy. The blow to Britain was compounded by the fact that, in order to effect his usurpation, Maximus had removed troops from the province, and they had either perished with him, or else stayed on the European mainland.

Theodosius,

Arcadius,

Honorius,

These tumultuous events must have had an impact on Britain, but precisely what that impact was we cannot say. What we do know is that 402 is the last year in which Roman coins appear in Britain’s archaeological record in any significant quantities. The minting of coins in London had ceased after the death of Magnus Maximus in 388,

Marcus

Gratian,

Now it was the turn of the rest of the population to rise in rebellion. According to the Greek historian Zosimus, writing in the early sixth century, the barbarian attacks drove the Britons ‘to revolt from Roman rule and live on their own, no longer obedient to Roman laws’. It was an extraordinary step prompted by the dire condition to which events of recent decades had reduced them. The whole point of the Roman state was to guarantee peace for its citizens with a well-trained army. If that army was absent, or so inadequate that it could not prevent the violent incursions of seaborne raiders, what was the point of paying taxes, or obeying a law that forbade civilians from carrying weapons? Self-defence was synonymous with self-rule. The Britons, says Zosimus, ‘armed themselves, and ran many risks to ensure their own safety, and freed their cities from attacking barbarians … expelling the Roman magistrates and establishing the government they wanted’.

This makes the revolt of 409 sound like a great success – plucky little Britannia throwing off Roman rule and beating the barbarians into the bargain. In fact, this was the event that tipped the province over the precipice. Once its economic and political links with the empire were severed, Britain went into free fall.

The further implications of this are appalling. The abandonment of towns and villas means huge numbers of people must have been on the move in search of shelter and food. The failure of normal trade and distribution networks indicates that food would have been in short supply. The absence of an army would have led to the rise of looting, pillaging and robbery.

was not only the Saxon’s ferocity and fearlessness that perturbed his opponents, but his paganism. The Romans had once worshipped a pantheon of different gods, but in the course of the fourth century they had abandoned them for Christianity. During the reign of Constantine the Great (306–37) the persecution of Christians had ceased and their creed had become the official religion of the empire.

First, that there were still some people in Britain in 429 trying to uphold public authority, sufficiently anxious about the spread of heresy to send for overseas help. Second, that these British authorities were engaged in an existential struggle against barbarian invaders, and – notwithstanding Germanus’ stalwart assistance – they were finding it increasingly difficult to

influential work of the whole Anglo-Saxon period. According to Bede, the Britons, ‘ignorant of the practice of warfare’, were reduced to such a wretched state by Pictish and Scottish attacks that they held a council, in which they decided to employ foreigners to fight on their behalf. At the invitation of their king, Vortigern, a force of Saxon warriors came to Britain in three ships and was granted a place to settle in the eastern part of the island.

The Saxons suddenly made peace with the northern peoples they were supposed to be fighting and turned their weapons against their British hosts, demanding greater rewards for their service, and threatening to devastate the whole island if their demands were not met. When no more supplies were forthcoming, the Saxons burned and ravaged Britain from sea to sea. ‘Public and private buildings fell into ruins,’ says Bede, ‘priests were everywhere slain at the altars, prelates and people alike perished by sword and fire regardless of rank, and there was no one left to bury those who had died a cruel death.’

But while bits of Bede’s account are clearly folklore, his main source was a written one. The story of the arrival of the Saxons was originally committed to parchment by a British author called Gildas, who wrote a tract known to posterity as The Ruin of Britain.

The main problem with The Ruin of Britain is that it is not really a work of history – it is an open letter addressed to the British rulers of the author’s own day, criticizing them for their manifold failings and sins, and exhorting them to mend their wicked ways.

And yet, when all these caveats have been lodged, The Ruin of Britain remains the most valuable account of the island’s fifth-century history, and the only one that can be regarded as even remotely contemporary.

Gildas, unlike Bede, makes no mention of the Saxons engaging the Scots and Picts – in his account they simply become ever more demanding and aggressive towards their British hosts, before finally revolting and ravaging the whole country, an event that Gildas describes in the same apocalyptic terms that Bede later borrowed.

decided to employ barbarians to fight on their behalf, because this was a long-established Roman practice. Throughout the fourth century such warriors had been routinely recruited into imperial armies, some of them rising to the highest rank.

Such was the situation in which the Britons eventually found themselves in the wake of their break with Rome. The country was in chaos and under constant assault from Picts, Scots and Saxons.

When did these events take place? Bede, who was much more concerned with chronology than Gildas, placed them during the rule of the emperor Marcian, whose accession he dated to 449, and eventually that date was adopted (and indeed celebrated)

After the Saxon revolt, therefore, Britain was evidently divided, with the newcomers in control of some areas and the pre-existing population in control of others.37