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

by Marc Morris

King Harold, who lived in a world of bishops, boroughs, shires and sheriffs, would probably have felt far more at home with the English of the later Middle Ages than the people who had buried their lord in a boat over four centuries earlier.

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.

The greatest city of all was London, founded soon after Claudius’ invasion to serve as an administrative hub for the newly acquired province.

Life for some in Roman Britain was therefore extremely good. In the countryside, and in the towns, the rich lived in villas that had dozens of rooms, frescoed walls, mosaic floors, indoor plumbing and underfloor heating.

We begin to hear about a warlike people in the north of Britain called the Picts, and as the decades progress we can discern a growing anxiety about their attacks. The defences of Hadrian’s Wall were repeatedly rebuilt, and in 343 the emperor Constans personally led an expeditionary force against the Pictish menace.

By 375 the occupancy of villas had fallen by a third, and in towns it had fallen by a half. Such figures suggest that the property-owning classes had indeed been hit hard by repeated barbarian incursions.10 But what really sealed Britain’s fate were similar attacks on the other side of the empire.

For the previous century, the western empire had been governed from the city of Trier, now in Germany, then in the Roman province of Gaul. But in 381 the emperor Gratian, probably because of the ongoing crisis in the Balkans, abandoned Trier for Italy, and removed his court to Milan.

These debates acquired added urgency after the end of 406, at which point a number of barbarian tribes – the Vandals, the Alans and the Sueves – crossed the Rhine frontier and invaded Gaul, reportedly causing alarm among the Britons that they might be next.

any voices had cautioned against his all-or-nothing strategy, they were soon proved right. Soon after his departure, probably in 408, the province was devastated by an invasion of Saxons.18

Once its economic and political links with the empire were severed, Britain went into free fall.

This brings us to the most well-known part of the story. It is well known because it was told by the Venerable Bede, whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People is without question the single most important and influential work of the whole Anglo-Saxon period.

The assertion, for example, that the initial force arrived in three ships, aside from being inherently improbable, is a common trope found in the origin stories of other northern European peoples.

After a time, he says, the Saxons went home – presumably meaning their original settlements in Britain, rather than their homelands on the Continent – and God gave strength to the Britons. Gildas names their leader as Ambrosius Aurelianus, who he indicates was a Roman of high birth.

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.

On the basis of the archaeological evidence, we would probably locate that area as the zone in eastern England where the evidence of Saxon culture is strongest – the province governed from Lincoln. The London province must also have received significant numbers of new settlers, but here the evidence for a wholesale Saxon takeover is not so readily apparent. In this region, at least some people of Romano-British ancestry remained in positions of social significance. They

Even if we take the lowest population estimate for late Roman Britain – 2 million – and imagine a fifth century so catastrophic that half the population perished, we are still left with a scenario in which Britons would have outnumbered Saxons by a factor of four to one. Such numerical speculation therefore still begs the question: why did British culture not triumph?

The likeliest answer is that, by the time the Saxons came to settle in Britain, they found little that was worth preserving.

But in Britain, as we’ve seen, civic life had collapsed completely in the early fifth century, before the earliest Saxon settlers had arrived. As for organized Christianity in Britain, the evidence suggests it had never been very strongly established in the first place.

North of the River Humber, where Saxon settlement was thinner, it may be that there was something like an ‘elite transfer’ model, with the settlers taking over a functioning society. In the Midlands, meanwhile, certain cemeteries suggest we might be looking at a migration of male warriors who married local British women, and in the south and south-east, as we’ve seen, there may have been interaction that went beyond one group slaughtering or enslaving the other.50

That they had little interaction with Britons is suggested by the remarkable fact that only around thirty words in Old English are reckoned to have been borrowed from Brittonic. Such a low figure makes it as good as certain that it was not just Saxon warriors who came to Britain, but whole communities of men, women and children, who did not mix and intermarry with the locals.51

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.

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.

The people of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings, for example, are essentially Anglo-Saxons as Tolkien imagined them.

This is, in short, a highly unstable world, full of betrayal, vengeance and violence – not just because monsters lurk on its cold, windswept fringes, but because of internal disputes that can be resolved only through bloodshed. The

But we search in vain within these regions for any evidence of elites. When we look at the remains of early settlements, for instance, what we find is all relatively modest.

seems that the earliest Anglo-Saxon settlers had set themselves up as free, independent farmers. They took – or were granted by whoever was in charge – enough land to support their family, an amount that they called a hide.

is impossible to say for certain why kings suddenly emerged in the later decades of the sixth century, but the middle decades had been notably catastrophic.

This last part is again legendary, and the West Saxons may have had more reason than most for wishing to obfuscate their past, for Cerdic is not a Germanic name. It appears to derive from the British name ‘Caradoc’, suggesting that the house of Wessex may have had mixed Saxon and British roots.

Bede, as we’ve seen, asserted that the region had been settled by a people called the Jutes, who came from Jutland in southern Scandinavia, and his statement finds some support in the archaeological record. Grave goods unearthed in the east of the modern county of Kent are quite different from the ‘Saxon’ items discovered across the rest of southern Britain.

order to meet Bertha’s spiritual needs, Æthelberht provided her with an ancient church that stood outside the ruined Roman city at the centre of his kingdom.

Æthelberht also stood above other Anglo-Saxon kings on account of his immense wealth.

At first his rule was restricted to the kingdom called Bernicia – he succeeded there around the year 592. The earliest Anglo-Saxon settlements in the region appear to have been around the River Tyne, but Æthelfrith’s ancestors had soon spread their power along the north-east coast, dominating the areas now known as Northumberland and County Durham.

Either way, the practice of using ships to bury the dead was virtually unparalleled in Britain, but was a fairly common practice in Sweden, suggesting that the Wuffings had ancestral connections to that region that they were keen to advertise.47

During the first decade of Eadwine’s reign, the Christian mission to Britain had been almost completely snuffed out. As soon as Æthelberht of Kent had died in 616, the other rulers he had persuaded to convert reverted to paganism.

Whether he was swayed by his wife’s words, the pope’s gifts, or the reassurance that beef was still on the menu, by 627 Eadwine was ready to take the plunge. At Easter that year he was baptized in York, in a wooden church that had been specially erected for the purpose amid the ruins of the Roman city.

In 633 he sought revenge, invading Northumbria and engaging its king in battle. The two armies met at a place called Hæthfelth, usually reckoned to be Hatfield Chase near Doncaster, and there Eadwine was killed on 12 October, dying at the age of forty-seven. With him perished many other Northumbrians, including one of his own sons. His severed head was brought to York and placed in the unfinished church of St Peter.64

Penda’s passing marked the end of an era. He was, in the words of one modern historian, ‘the last great pagan king of Anglo-Saxon England’. By the time of his death the royal dynasties of Kent, Wessex, East Anglia and Northumbria had committed to Christianity decisively, and it was only the small-fry kings of Sussex and Essex who wavered for another generation.

Oswald, however, had not been converted by the Roman missionaries, like Paulinus, who had landed in Kent with St Augustine almost forty years earlier. He had been baptized during his long years in exile, which he had spent among the Irish.2

His visit to Rome had a profound and lasting impact on Wilfrid, exposing him to a form of Christianity that was a world away from the kind he had experienced on Lindisfarne. This

In Gaul, it was the bishops who had in many cases filled the political vacuum created by the collapse of Roman civil authority. They were not simply spiritual advisers to secular rulers, or even administrators. Often they themselves were rulers, defending their cities during sieges, and sometimes called upon to lead armies.

Many early monasteries contained priests as well as monks or nuns. A religious retreat for some, for others they were more like a mission station, from which they could go out into the world to preach and convert. For this reason, to differentiate them from what came later, some historians avoid using the word ‘monastery’ to describe these early communities, and use its Old English equivalent, minster.35

And so, in the autumn of 684, Theodore – now in his early eighties – had been obliged to make his way laboriously northwards from Canterbury, across a plague-ridden country, to arrange for a replacement. Everyone agreed that the best man for the job would be Cuthbert.57

Thanks to Biscop’s generosity, Wearmouth–Jarrow was fantastically wealthy, and boasted perhaps the finest library in Britain.

But by the early eighth century, if not before, the struggle for London had been decided, and Mercia had emerged as the victor.13

The year 785 was the effective end date for Kent as an independent kingdom.

anointing him in Rome on Christmas Day 800.59 Offa had witnessed this revival of Romanitas and wanted the same. His coins, and the consecration of his son, show that he was already consciously imitating Carolingian practices that looked to Roman models.

Across Europe, wherever Germanic-speaking peoples encountered Roman communities, they called them walas, meaning ‘foreigners’ or ‘strangers’. In

In Old English, wealas meant all Britons, whether they dwelt in Wales, Cornwall or Cumbria. It was also applied to British enclaves within Anglo-Saxon areas, giving rise to the place name ‘Walton’,

At one time that frontier had been a more permeable affair, a zone where Germanic settlers and native Britons had overlapped. (The word ‘Mercians’ itself, it is pertinent to recall, meant ‘the borderers’.) But

Coenwulf dealt briskly with these challenges to his rule. Much of the hostility in Kent, he realized, was due to Offa’s dismembering of the archbishopric of Canterbury to create a new archbishop of Lichfield, so he quickly reversed the decision: Lichfield was returned to its former ordinary status, and the primacy of Canterbury was restored.