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

by Marc Morris

As we already noted, from around 430 we start to find archaeological evidence in Britain of new settlers from the Continent. Cremation of the dead is the most obvious and clear-cut example. It had not been practised by the Britons since the third century, but was typical among the Saxons.

The other new practice that suddenly reveals itself around this time is the inclusion of grave goods – personal items such as jewellery, combs or weapons that belonged to the deceased in life and were buried with them after death.

Both these two new funerary practices are found in eastern Britain from the second quarter of the fifth century, and their distribution seems to reveal a significant regional split.

Could these apparent cultural divisions reflect political ones? This is altogether more speculative, but there is one intriguing possibility. Late Roman Britain had been divided into four (possibly five) provinces, each with its own governor and capital city.

Highly speculative as it is, therefore, it could be that these provinces continued to have some sort of function after Britain’s break with Rome.

This reading of the archaeological record leads us to the vexed but crucial question about the scale of Saxon immigration.

Beginning in the 1960s, this view was subjected to a thoroughgoing re-evaluation.

The case for a substantial movement of people across the North Sea in the fifth and sixth centuries rests more on a reconsideration of traditional evidence. There is a strong argument, for example, based on language. It is inherently unlikely that the majority of people in Britain would have ended up speaking English – a Germanic language – had there not been a great many immigrants from Germania.45 Historians have also refuted the idea that a mass migration was technically impossible.

Such numerical speculation therefore still begs the question: why did British culture not triumph? Other parts of Europe – Gaul, Spain and Italy – were invaded by barbarian peoples, but in these provinces it was Roman culture that won out: the newcomers learned to speak languages based on low Latin, and quickly converted to Christianity. Yet in the parts of Britain settled by the Saxons, the direction of travel was all the other way. The Britons who remained in these areas adopted a new Germanic tongue, and began to worship pagan gods.

In French the days of the week mardi, mercredi, jeudi and vendredi are named after the Roman gods Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. In English Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are named after the Germanic gods Tiw, Woden, Thunor and Frig.48

The likeliest answer is that, by the time the Saxons came to settle in Britain, they found littl...

Some very basic elements of Roman social organization may have been adopted by the Saxons – the boundaries of existing fields, for example, would have survived the collapse and would have been laborious to alter. But the cities, the industries, the commerce and the culture – all these had already gone, or were wrecked beyond repair. The broken Britain that the Saxons found consequently had no allure, and in British culture they saw nothing they wished to emulate.

This is not to say that every group of Saxon settlers had nothing to do with the Britons. There cannot have been one single migration experience that applied across the whole country, and there must have been lots of regional variation.

So far we have spoken only of Saxons, the catch-all term used by Gildas and others to describe the immigrants who came to Britain. But when Bede came to retell Gildas’ story around two centuries later, he felt compelled to add more nuance.

Jutes,

Angles,

Sa...

Jutes

Saxons

A...

Britain was settled not by three separate ‘tribes’ who carefully maintained their identities during the migration process, but by a steady flow of peoples from all around the coasts of northern Europe and southern Scandinavia. Saxons, Angles and Jutes were certainly among their number, but so too were Frisians, Swedes and Franks, all mixing together, forming communities, and combining their artistic cultures to create new ones. Bede himself, in a later but less celebrated passage, acknowledged this point, saying ‘there were very many peoples in Germany from whom the Angles and Saxons, who now live in Britain, derive their origin’.53

Those who still wished to cling to the vestiges of the Roman past, and in particular to Christianity, would have had to head west. Here, in what is now Wales and Cornwall, were the hills and forests that Gildas said had offered the Britons refuge. Gildas himself is the best evidence that in these western regions there was still a literate, Christian culture, and that those at the very top of society were still striving to lead a Roman lifestyle.

But the amount of material being imported in this way was vanishingly small compared to the enormous quantities that had previously been shipped to Britain when it was an imperial dominion.

Cadbury was one of several hill forts reoccupied and refortified around this time, a reminder that the kind of basic security that the Britons had previously enjoyed was also a thing of the distant past.

Much of this world is already familiar to many of us through the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the films of those novels directed by Peter Jackson. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, and made his own translation of Beowulf in the early 1920s. Consequently, when he later came to write his famous books, he drew heavily on the poem for inspiration, reworking some of its scenes, borrowing ideas, themes and elements of plot. The people of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings, for example, are essentially Anglo-Saxons as Tolkien imagined them. Their king, Theoden, lives in a golden great hall, and the scene in which he receives Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas closely mirrors a similar scene in Beowulf. Meanwhile, in The Hobbit, Bilbo disturbs Smaug the dragon by stealing a golden cup from his hoard, and the dragon in Beowulf is woken by a thief who does exactly the same.

loyalty of warriors to their lord,

earthly renown.

Kent.

Sussex,

Wessex,