A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (6 page)

Nevertheless, the imperial administration in the West, harassed by barbarian incursions and the rising costs of defence, had been hampered by declining tax revenues. Prosperous local patricians had been increasingly reluctant to fund the financial burdens of their civic duties and obligations and had withdrawn to their estates. Great country houses, ‘villas’, mushroomed. Supported by the produce and rents of tenant farmers, and served by a full range of resident craftsmen, blacksmiths and so forth, villa estates became self-sufficient economic units. In France such estates often provided the growing point for future towns. This is also the source of the French word
ville
, meaning town. The main villa building of a Christian proprietor might become a church – such evolution could of course have taken place in Britain. Certainly, in Britain archaeology has unearthed or identified by aerial photography scores of villas, from the great coastal estate at Fishbourne in Sussex to Hinton St Mary in Dorset (with its Christian chi-rho symbol, the Greek letters that begin the name
Christus
, set in a mosaic floor) and northwards to Cheshire and Yorkshire. Since it is probable that they, like their Gallic counterparts, had not been paying their full imperial taxes for decades, Britain’s prosperous gentry could hardly object if the empire withdrew its soldiery. Perhaps, it has been suggested, they were glad to see the back of them. If so, they would soon have cause to think again.

Bede’s Britannia

In the year 429 Germanus, bishop of Auxerre, together with Lupus, bishop of Troyes, embarked at an unnamed port on the northern coast of Gaul on a rescue mission. Ahead, across the Oceanus Britannicus, lay the troubled land of Britannia – under threat not
only from barbarians but also, which was much more serious from the bishops’ viewpoint, from false teachings of the Christian Faith. Britain’s churchmen, alarmed by the threat of a heresy known as Pelagianism, had sent an appeal for help to the Continent and at a synod of the bishops of Gaul ‘the unanimous choice fell upon Germanus and Lupus . . . [who were] appointed to go to the Britons and confirm their belief in God’s grace’ (Bede I. 17).

From the British point of view the situation was not only dangerous, it was embarrassing. Heresy was not unknown in the Roman province. There is evidence to suggest that Gnosticism, based on the idea that knowledge of god came not only through the scriptures but through hidden ‘knowledge’ (Greek, ‘
gnosis
’) known only to initiates, had found adherents in Roman Britain. Gnostics believed, among other things, that the soul after death was purified by an ascent through seven heavens
⁵
(the ‘seventh heaven’, opening to the state of bliss) and in general had forced Christians to formalize their doctrines to defend the authority of the New Testament and define their teachings on paradise and heaven (see
chapter 9
). But Pelagianism seemed to have originated in Britain itself.

The British monk and theologian Pelagius had arrived in Rome in his mid-twenties about the year 380. His austere and ascetic lifestyle, a dramatic contrast to the easy-going morals of fashionable socialites and clergy in the capital, soon made him a cult guru among the trendy – both priests and lay people. He opposed the doctrine of divine grace, freely available to all, as proposed by his great contemporary St Augustine of Hippo. If people could be saved to eternal life whether with or without merit, but simply through the freely given forgiving grace of God, then, he argued, the whole moral code was sabotaged. Pelagius also opposed the orthodox teaching of original sin, that people are innately wicked, and argued for the essential goodness of human nature and its capacity, indeed obligation, to win salvation by free will. Such a theory seemed to subvert the charismatic power of Jesus Christ as the intermediary between humanity and the creator, God. Archaeology indicates that Christianity was favoured among Britain’s social elite from an early date. The church plate of the Walton Newton silver suite of early third century (among Europe’s oldest), found near Peterborough, the site of Roman Durobrivae, carries the chi-rho symbol of orthodox belief. But new heresy threatened.

Help was on its way. But, we are told by Bede, the demons raged against Germanus and determined to halt his mission. Halfway across the Channel a storm erupted that shredded the sails and sent the sailors to their prayers. Like Jesus on the Sea of Galilee, Germanus was sleeping peacefully through the commotion until the others woke him up. Sprinkling holy water and making an invocation to the Trinity he addressed a prayer ‘to the true God’ and returned to his bedroll. The storm, of course, abated and the wind veered to give them a fair onward voyage.

On landing, they were met by cheering crowds of British Christians and soon convened a debate with the heretical clerics. These were routed in the argument; Germanus and Lupus convinced any waverers among the crowd with their miracles and then journeyed to the tomb of Britain’s proto-martyr St Alban to thank him for his assistance. Germanus ordered the tomb to be opened and deposited in it relics of the Apostles that he had brought with him. The marvels witnessed that day swelled the local Christian community with new converts.

While all this was going on, Bede tells us, ‘the Saxons and Picts joined forces to make war on the Britons.’ (Were these Saxons some of the
foederati
already settled in Britain, rather than sea raiders?) A British Christian army, mustered to resist, called on the bishops visiting from Gaul for support. As Easter approached, they prepared for battle with Germanus at their head. He had the main force drawn up on the plain over which the enemy would advance, and stationed a large ambush in a valley out of sight on their flank. At an agreed signal the British troops, those waiting in ambush as well as the main body,
burst out in shouts of ‘Alleluia’ as the enemy began the advance. Thinking themselves surrounded, the enemy panicked and fled the field. But despite this ‘Alleluia Victory’ Britain remained under increasing barbarian threat. At some time in the 440s, according to the British scholar Gildas, writing about a century later, some leading Britons sent a desperate appeal for help to Aetius, the chief commander of Roman forces on the Continent. None was forthcoming.

Gildas, who seems to have been writing about the year 550, was another important source for Bede’s early chapters. His history
De excidio et conquestu Britanniae
(Of the Ruin [or overthrow] and Conquest of Britain) is about the incursion of barbaric Germanic tribes into the cultured Christian Britain he remembered. The first boatloads arrived by the invitation of a proud British tyrant (‘
superbus tyrannus
’) to serve as barbarians invading from the north of Britain. They were given lands in the eastern part of the island. More followed, but then the newcomers turned against their employers and ravaged the country. A British counter-attack under a leader called Ambrosianus Aurellianus had great success and, after further warfare, the Britons won a crushing victory over the Saxons at a place called Mons Badonicus or Mount Badon (of which neither location nor date are known, though
c.
500 seems likely).

According to Bede, the parents of Ambrosianus had been of royal blood, though perhaps his source had garbled a tradition that the great man was in fact of Roman patrician family. His name has been associated with the victor at Mount Badon. One theory has proposed that Ambrosianus, if a Roman then presumably also a Christian commander, had used Roman military methods including the use of cavalry to create a (possibly mercenary) force engaged by various British kings in various parts of the country. This may have given rise to the legend of Arthur and his knights. The theory certainly fits the image of a charismatic Christian leader of a mounted force recorded in many parts of Britain from Tintagel in Cornwall to the north of England.

There is no written record of a King Arthur and his exploits before the early ninth-century manuscripts known as the
Historia Britonnum
associated with the name of Nennius. Local oral traditions flourished in Wales and Cornwall but the fount of the Arthurian legends is the fertile imagination of the Welsh writer Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in Latin in the mid-twelfth century. His
History of the Kings of Britain
presented a compelling account of this ancient Christian hero, whom the Norman kings of England liked to see as their predecessor and whose deeds fired the imagination of all Europe.

A period of peace followed Mount Badon and this seems to have been the time when Gildas was writing. He deplores the ways of the corrupt priesthood and aristocracy of his day, who threw the triumph away and must surely suffer divine retribution for their moral turpitude. Little is known about Gildas, apart from his name and the fact that he was fluent in Latin and passed his life between Wales and Brittany, where he was honoured as a saint. He is said to have been the founder of the monastery there known as St Gildas de Rhuys (where Peter Abelard was abbot for a time in the early twelfth century).

Christianity survived in the west of Britain (and possibly as a minority cult in the main Anglo-Saxon territories), so that when St Augustine of Canterbury led Rome’s first official mission to the country in the 590s he was able to put out feelers to native bishops. In the year 603, ‘making the use of the help of King Æthelberht, he summoned the bishops . . . of the nearest British province to a conference.’
⁶
The meeting was held under an ancient oak, presumably a sacred site since the time of the Druids but soon known as ‘Augustine’s Oak’. It was inconclusive and the British asked for time to consult with their community. At the second encounter, Augustine opened the proceedings by urging the British to join him and the Roman church in brotherly relations. But arrogant body language seemed to belie the friendly words, as Rome’s envoy had
not risen from his ceremonial chair to greet the local deputation on their arrival. They refused to recognize him as archbishop.

Two words in Bede’s account catch the eye: ‘summoned’ and ‘nearest’. Then as now, Rome had no doubt as to her superiority in the universal church; she did not issue invitations. That can, perhaps, be taken as read. But the idea of a ‘nearest’ province of the British is revealing. Clearly there were others and hence a British Christian presence fringing the Anglo-Saxon world. Archaeological evidence bears this out. The hanging-bowls with cruciform mountings of clear Christian symbolism, such as the fish motifs flanking a pierced cross found at Faversham in Kent and other such pieces found in Anglo-Saxon graves, are mostly of British manufacture.
⁷
Bede estimated the great monastery at Bangor-is-Coed, Denbighshire, had some two thousand monks.

‘There are in Britain today’, he writes, ‘five languages and four nations: English, British, Scots and Picts; each of these have their own language but all are united in their study of God’s scriptures by that fifth language, Latin.’ Thanks to archaeology we know today that each also had their own dress fastenings, so that a warrior’s jewellery like the British ring brooch or the Anglian square-headed brooch may, it has been suggested, have proclaimed his identity.
⁸
Bede tells us that the only original inhabitants of the island were the Britons – who gave the place its name – and who, he thought came over Armorica i.e. Brittany. In fact, the name almost certainly derives from British emigrants who crossed the Channel in the fifth and sixth centuries, fleeing Irish raiders operating along the coasts of Wales, Cornwall and North Devon.

According to Bede, the Pictish inhabitants of northern Britain were descended from a party of sailors from a remote land he calls ‘Scythia’, who, blown off course, made landfall off the northern coast of Ireland. They begged the Scots then living there for a grant of land so that they could settle, but were told to move on and recommended to try the island not far to the east. The Picts did so.
Bede claims that Pictish royalty descended in the female line because, so went the tradition, the Irish Scots had provided the allmale pioneers with womenfolk on condition that, in the event of a disputed succession, the new king should be chosen from the female royal line. Sometime in the fifth century, at about the time the Saxons were crossing over from the Continent, a chieftain of the Irish Scoti in what is now County Antrim established an enclave across the North Channel in Argyll. In the course of time, and after war, betrayal and intermarriage, some time between the 830s and 850s the rival houses of Picts and Scots merged so that the Scottish kingdom of Dál Riata (Dalriada) and the Pictish realm began to come together under Kenneth MacAlpin (Kenneth I), who died in about 858 and was buried on the island of Iona.

Like modern Britons, Bede and his contemporaries recognized ethnic diversity as part of their countries’ characters and also had doubts about the geographical origins of the invaders and their ruling families. Modern archaeology also questions the extent of the population displacement caused by the invaders in the south as well as the north. In its most extreme form it seems to question whether there was any significant Germanic invasion at all.

The Anglo-Saxons themselves had no doubt. Centuries later, celebrating the great English victory over Vikings, Scots and British at Brunanburh in 937, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
hailed it as the greatest victory since the ‘Angles and Saxons arrived . . . invading Britain across the seas from the east’. Following Bede, it also gives the year 449 for the landing of the first boatloads of settlers as distinct from raiders. A library of books has been written on the dating of the
adventus Saxonum
(‘the arrival of the Saxons’). In one of his letters Alcuin of York, who had read his Bede, described the Viking sack on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in 793 as happening ‘nearly three hundred and fifty years’ since ‘our fathers [came] to this fair land’
⁹
and historian Paul Battles is convinced that the time of their arrival was ‘essential to a
Migration Myth and so was central to the Anglo-Saxon definitions of themselves as a people’.