Great Tales From English History (5 page)

‘
T
HE DARK AGES’ IS THE LABEL HISTORIANS
used to apply to the centuries after the legions left Britain. With the departure of the Romans, civilisation literally departed as well. If any written records of this time were made, virtually none has survived, and to this day we can only guess at exactly who did what to whom from 410 until nearly 600. Unlike Julius Caesar, the Anglo-Saxons did not keep invasion diaries.

What we do know for sure is that the Angles, Saxons and other peoples of northern Germany kept on rowing across the water to the white cliffs and sheltered harbours of Albion. Their poems tell of their brave exploits cresting the waves in their oar-powered, plank-built boats. Within a century and a half of the Romans’ departure, the south-east corner of the island had indeed become the Saxon Shore. The newcomers had moved in and were busy creating their new kingdoms of Essex, Sussex and Wessex - the lands of the East, the South and West Saxons. They came, they saw, they settled.

The settlement extended widely. The Angles gave their name to East Anglia, and they founded more kingdoms up the coast - Lindsey (now Lincolnshire) and Northumbria, literally the land of the people north of the Humber, the wide estuary that separates modern Hull and Grimsby. In the Midlands lay the kingdom of Mercia, the people of the borders or boundaries. By the time this mosaic of little sovereignties was complete, the newcomers held most of the land.

But modern excavation has uncovered little evidence that this was a violent ethnic takeover. Hundreds of Roman villas and settlements have been dug up, with no severed skulls or suggestions of blood spilt on the tiles. No equivalent of Boadicea’s fire-scorched layer has yet been found in what was becoming Anglo-Saxon England.

It would seem that most of the people who were left behind by the legions - the Romano-Britons - made some sort of peace, more or less grudging, with their new masters. Settlements along one river in Sussex show the Romano-Britons on one side and the Saxons on the other. The earliest law code of the West Saxons, drawn up by King Ine in the late seventh century, allowed the British who held land in his domain to keep some of their own customs.

It was further west and to the north that the violence occurred, in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland - the great crescent of sea, moors and mountains later called the Celtic fringe. Roman influence had been relatively slight here and the Celts had preserved their traditional identity. There is evidence of fortification and battles in these border areas, drawing a bitter boundary of blood and language between Celt and Anglo-Saxon.
Wælisc
, from which we get the word ‘Welsh’, was an Anglo-Saxon term applied to foreigners and also to slaves. And when the Welsh talk of England today they use a word that means ‘the lost lands’.

It is from the so-called Dark Ages that some of Britain’s most potent legends have sprung. As later chroniclers looked back, they pieced together scraps of memory and folklore - like the tales of the Saxon warriors Hengist (‘the stallion’) and Horsa (‘the horse’), who were invited to Britain to help the locals and who then turned on their hosts. Did Hengist and Horsa really exist? The great modern expert on the subject was J. R. R. Tolkien, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University from 1925 to 1945, who, having soaked up the atmosphere of these mysterious years, made up some legends of his own: Tolkien’s tales of
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
resound with the clash of swords in dark forests, where fantastical characters flit half-seen through a vanished landscape.

It took Tolkien twenty years to create his epic saga - ‘saga’ is the Norse word for ‘tale’ - but England’s greatest Dark Age legend was generations in the making. In 1113 some French priests visiting Devon and Cornwall were astonished to be told of a great king - Arthur - who had once ruled over those parts and who would one day return from the grave to rule again. When the educated visitors laughed at the story, they found themselves pelted with vegetables by the irate locals.

The stirring legend of Arthur stems from fleeting references in a chronicle of around 829 - three or four centuries after he was supposed to have existed - attributed to a Welsh scholar called Nennius. There we read of a brave warrior who is said to have fought and won no less than twelve battles against the Saxons, and of that historical Arthur we know little more. But over the years, poets, painters, storytellers - and, in our own day, composers and filmmakers - have striven to embellish the Arthur of legend. Merlin, Guinevere, Sir Galahad, the Round Table, the Holy Grail, the Sword in the Stone and the Mists of Avalon were all later additions to the story. Tourist sites like Glastonbury, Tintagel, Winchester and the ancient hill fort of South Cadbury in Somerset have added their own local details as they have each staked their claim to having been Camelot, the seat of Arthur’s court.

The legend of Arthur has struck a chord with every age, but his tale is strongly tinged with melancholy. Though chivalrous and brave, the King Arthur of poem and fable is defeated in his final battle, surrendering his sword, as he dies, to the Lady of the Lake. His knightly Round Table was overthrown, just as Romano-British culture was swamped by the new realities of the fifth and sixth centuries. So both in history and legend Arthur embodies a theme that has proved dear to patriotic hearts over the centuries - the heroic failure.

C.AD
575

I
T IS EASY TO FORGET HOW MANY HAZARDS
life held in previous centuries. Nowadays, if you get blood-poisoning from a bad tooth or an infected cut, you take antibiotics. In those days you died. For that reason, outright death in battle was almost preferable to the slow, agonising end that came with a gangrenous wound. And there was another battle hazard - if you were captured, you could well end up a slave.

Imagine yourself living in a village in the fifth or sixth century and seeing a strange boat coming up the river filled with armed men. You would run for the woods at once, for fear that you might be taken captive, never to see your family again. That’s what happened to the young St Patrick, the son of a town councillor living on the west coast of Britain in the early fifth century. Kidnapped by raiders when he was sixteen, Patrick suffered six years of slavery in Ireland before he finally escaped.

Along the trade routes of Europe travelled merchants carrying with them the hot items for which the rich would pay good money - gold, jewels, wine, spices and slaves, a number of them captured in the battles between the Slavic peoples of the Balkans. The medieval Latin word
sclavus
(‘captive’) is the root of the modern words ‘Slav’ and ‘slave’. In the principal European markets there was a corner where you could buy yourself a maidservant, a labourer, or even a scribe to take care of your writing and accounting chores. Teeth were inspected and limbs prodded by would-be purchasers, just as buyers today kick the tyres of cars.

It was in such a slave market in Rome that Abbot Gregory, a priest well known for his piety, was strolling one day around 575. Though Gregory had been born into a wealthy Roman family that owned slaves, he had sold off his estates to found monasteries and had become popular for his good deeds and his sense of humour - he had something of a weakness for wordplay and puns. Struck by the unusual appearance of a group of young captives with fair complexions and golden hair, he asked where they came from.

‘From the island of Britain,’ he was told, and specifically from the kingdom of Deira in Northumbria, the moorland area around the town of York, roughly equivalent to modern Yorkshire. At the mention of Deira, Gregory was tempted to one of his puns. In Latin,
de ira
means ‘from wrath’.

‘Then let us hope they will be rescued from wrath,’ he said, ‘and that they will be called to the mercy of Christ.’

But it was the news that these captives were Angles that inspired the pun that has been polished and repolished over the centuries. ‘
Non Angli sed angeli,
’ Gregory is supposed to have said - ‘They are not Angles, but angels.’

In fact, Gregory did not say that. His wordplay was more complicated. ‘They have angelic faces,’ he said in the most widely circulated version of this story, recorded about a hundred and fifty years later, ‘and it is right that they should become joint heirs with the angels in heaven.’ They might look like angels, in other words, but they were not angels yet. Christian conversion of these Anglish was called for.

Abbot Gregory, who became Pope Gregory I in 590, was a major figure in the growth of the Catholic Church. He is revered in Catholic and Greek Orthodox history as Gregory the Great - and, indeed, as a saint. His keen political sense and the popularity that he cultivated with the people of Rome contributed greatly to making the popes more than religious leaders. In due course the papacy would take over the city of Rome and would rule all of central Italy. Gregory also reformed the Church’s services and rituals, giving his name to the solemn chanting inherited from Hebrew music, the ‘Gregorian’ chant or plainsong, whose haunting cadences could spread the faith across language barriers, making music possible without musical instruments.

But it is for his wordplay in the slave market that he is remembered in English history. The sight of the fair Anglish captives in Rome inspired Pope Gregory to send missionaries northwards. He made history’s pun come true - by giving the Angles (as well as the Saxons and the Britons) a chance to join the angels.

AD
597

I
N THE HIGH SUMMER OF 597 POPE GREGORY’S
missionaries landed on the Isle of Thanet in Kent bearing painted banners, silver crosses and holy relics. The man that Gregory had picked to lead the mission to the Angles was a trusted old colleague, Augustine - and his first target was cleverly chosen. King Ethelbert of Kent was a pagan, but his wife Bertha was a Christian, a Frankish princess who had brought her own chaplain from Paris. If Ethelbert was allowing his wife to practise her Christian faith in Canterbury, he must be a promising prospect for conversion.

Ethelbert greeted the missionaries with caution, insisting that their first meeting should be out of doors - he did not want to be trapped by their alien magic.

‘I cannot abandon the age-old beliefs that I have held,’ he declared in his speech of welcome. ‘But since you have travelled far, and I can see that you are sincere in your desire to share with us what you believe to be true and excellent, we will not harm you.’

In fact, the King let Augustine and his forty followers base themselves in Canterbury at an old church where Bertha worshipped - clear evidence that Christianity was by no means new to a country which had previously been a Roman province. Some time in the third century St Alban had become Britain’s earliest saint and martyr when he suffered execution for protecting a Christian priest - and after the emperor Constantine was converted in 312, Christianity had been tolerated across the empire. But then the Anglo-Saxons had imported their pantheon of Germanic gods, a collection of very human deities inspired by storms, victory in battle and the forces of nature. The word ‘pagan’ comes from
pagus
, Latin for a country district and its inhabitants. When the Anglo-Saxon ploughman went out to cut his first furrow of the year, he would kneel and say a prayer as he buried a fertility cake baked from the last harvest’s grain, asking the gods to allow the seed to germinate again.

Back in Rome, Pope Gregory had told Augustine to treat such pagan customs with respect. ‘For in these days,’ he explained, ‘the Church corrects some things strictly and allows others out of leniency . . . By doing so she often succeeds in checking an evil of which she disapproves.’