A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (8 page)

After Cerdic’s death the story of steady conquest continues with Cynric (d. 560) and his son Ceawlin (d. 592), who win important battles against the British in the 550s. At this point the writer of the
Chronicle
gives us the royal ancestry, listing Cerdic as the great grandson of Gewis. Ceawlin, listed as the second bretwalda, defeated Æthelberht of Kent in the 560s and won a great victory over the British in the 570s – three of their kings were killed and
three towns, Bath, Cirencester and Gloucester, taken. Extending from the Solent northwards to the River Thames and west to the estuary of the River Severn, Ceawlin’s kingdom now divided the British of Wales and the Welsh marches from the British of Devon.

Moving northwards from Kent and Wessex, we come to Essex, with the complex of Roman London, East Anglia, the Thames valley and the Midlands. Written records for Essex are virtually non-existent before the reign of Sæberht (d. 616/17), Æthelberht of Kent’s nephew. His father, Sledd, was acknowledged as the family ancestor by all subsequent kings, but a genealogy drawn up about 800 traces the legendary descent not from Woden, claimed by most Anglo-Saxon royal houses, but from the Old Saxon tribal deity Seaxnet. It seems that the Essex kings were also unusual in their frequent practice of joint, usually dual, kingship – two brothers or king and son, for example. There is also a hint that paganism was strong in the kingdom at the time of King Sœberht’s conversion to Christianity. Mellitus, the first bishop of London, consecrated at the start of the reign of King Sæberht in 604, was to have a rocky ride in the next few years as the region reverted to paganism.

As in Essex, so in East Anglia written records, such as they are, begin after the year 600 in the reign of King Rædwald, grandson of Wuffa, founder of the Wuffinga dynasty, which claimed Caesar among its ancestors. One historian called this period ‘the lost centuries’; traditionally it is part of ‘the dark ages’ – dark because they lack the illumination of records.

But if these are virtually non-existent, archaeology has told a tantalizing and now astonishing story. Early in 2004 excavations were under way by the Museum of London Archaeology Service (at the invitation of the Borough of Southend-on-Sea) that were to reveal a find still being assessed as this book goes to press. The site was for proposed roadworks to ease traffic congestion near the suburb-village of Prittlewell. Since the 1860s the construction of roads and railways to open up the London commuter belt have led to ad hoc
excavations producing grave goods – swords, spears, shields, jewellery – which suggest that five acres were in use from around
AD
500 to 700 as the cemetery of the elite of a warrior society. The new find at Prittlewell, as reported in the journal
British Archaeology
(May 2004), dates from the same pagan/Christian transition period in eastern England as Sutton Hoo. Two small gold crosses suggest a Christian involvement and links with the southern German region where they are common. Like Sutton Hoo Mound 1, its only rival in the archaeological record so far, it is a breathtaking glimpse into the warrior society in those ‘lost centuries’.

The body of the great man had been laid in a wooden box or casket in a wood-lined ‘burial chamber of the highest status’. The timber panelling had long since perished, but wood fibres were still attached to a great copper bowl, which had originally hung against it from an iron hook. The body was surrounded by ritualistic and luxury objects. Hrothgar had rewarded Beowulf with a standard of gold, a fitting emblem of honour for the hero who had slain Grendel the monster; the lord of Prittlewell had an iron standard buried with him. In addition were his weapons (sword, spear, shield), a solid gold belt buckle, drinking horns and a folding camp-stool. As at Sutton Hoo there is a lyre (see
chapter 9
below). The excavators found dice and fifty-seven gaming pieces, a Byzantine drinking flagon and a Coptic bowl, evidence of the international trade of the time.

From East Anglia and Essex we move into the English Midlands, home-to-be of the central kingdom of Mercia (the theme of
chapter 4
). At its largest extent Mercia stretched from East Anglia westward to Wales, from the Thames northward to the Humber. In other words it was the heartland of Anglo-Saxon England.

North of the Humber

Finally, in this sketch survey of Anglo-Saxon origins during the invasion/settlement period, we come to the lands north of the
River Humber, which was apparently considered the great divide of their territory by the Anglo-Saxons themselves. Someone, Bede most likely, coined the name ‘Northumbria’ for the kingdom that dominated the country here, between Humber and Forth, in his day. In fact the term subsumed two distinct kingdoms, each with its own royal house and each with a name that proclaimed British antecedents. The larger, to the north, bordering with the Picts and Strathclyde Britons, was ‘Bernicia’ with its main centre at Bamburgh; the smaller, with its northern frontier on the River Tees and its chief centre at York, was ‘Deira’.

We do not know when the first Germanic settlers in the region arrived nor where they landed. Bede’s account could be interpreted as linking their story with the first settlers in Kent. The author of the
Historia Brittonum
, his principal source here, was probably a Welsh/British scholar, like Gildas, though working later. He composed his account of history from the Creation to the 680s about the year 829 at the court of Gwynedd, although it survives only in a number of manuscripts from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, among them one by a certain ‘Nennius’. The
Historia
also includes extracts from a Kentish Chronicle, lists a number of Anglo-Saxon genealogies and seems to have known Bede’s
History.

Simplifying the Bede/
Historia
account, we learn that the Britons of those days, including their king Vortigern (whether he ruled in the north or south of the island), called in Saxons against the ‘northern nations’, which suggests we are dealing with the settlement of the north and not the south country. Three shiploads of ‘Angles or Saxons’ arrived. They win their first engagement against an enemy attacking ‘from the north’ but then sent messengers back to their homelands describing the fertile nature of the land and the lazy ways of the natives. More shiploads followed. All the newcomers soon turned on their employers and one group, making a truce with the Picts, went on the rampage – pillaging the land, slaughtering priests before their own altars and ravaging city and countryside before
returning to their base. If the group allied with the Picts were the people led by Hengest and Horsa, it would mean that the Picts themselves, with their home base in modern-day Scotland, had penetrated Roman Britain as far south as the Thames. Of course, this is not impossible. But it seems to make better sense if the unnamed invaders who allied with the Picts were, instead of the Kent-based Hengest and his followers, the first Germanic settlers in the region of ‘Northumbria’ – leaders unknown.

Three models have been proposed to suggest how the transformation from British to English came about for, in the words of David Rollason, ‘it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the population [of “Northumbria”] came to regard itself as predominantly English and was principally English speaking.’
¹⁹
First, the Roman or Romano-British regime, having called in the barbarian mercenaries against the incursive Picts, decided on a peaceful handover. In other words there was a simple change of elites. York, the Roman Eboracum founded about
AD
71, had been a major military and administrative centre, the capital so to speak of the province of
Britannia inferior
(‘Lower Britain’). It was here, in the year 306, that Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, was raised on the shields of the legionaries before beginning his march on Rome. It was here too that towards the end of the Roman period the
dux Britanniae
, head of the British military defences, had his headquarters. Here, if anywhere, an orderly handover of power to barbarian federate troops could have been made. But such an idea is speculative in the extreme. There is some archaeological evidence for Germanic settlements in Deira before the year 500 and the
Historia Brittonum
(written, remember, in the 830s), hints at a shadowy Anglian ruler of Deira in the 450s – and that is all.

The second hypothesis is that British kings, operating either from Iron Age hill forts or previous Roman power centres, having displaced the imperial administration in the early fifth century, conceded power to the invading Germanic elite after only a brief
resistance. David Rollason finds that the proposal for such a handover from a ‘sub-Roman’ authority is difficult to sustain. Dating of archaeological finds, such as barbarian burial sites scattered along the routes of Roman roads is problematical, since it can depend on keyins to written records that are themselves open to dispute. If such finds can be shown to be early, then we may be looking at the graves of federate troops posted to defend the road by their Roman or sub-Roman employers; if they are later, then it is probably a case of invaders who literally fell by the wayside as their companions raided by forced marches into the interior. In other contexts he seems to suggest that archaeology can be inconclusive:

. . . a very small quantity of pottery of ‘Anglian’ date found on a site could as easily have been dropped accidentally on a ruined site as have been actively used in a building which continued in full use.
²⁰

Excavations at York Minster unearthed foundations of the impressive headquarters building of the Roman military administration of Eboracum. The great cross-hall or basilica would certainly have provided a fine palace for British kings of Deira, but there is no proof, archaeological or otherwise, that it did.

Both these models for British to Anglo-Saxon transition postulate a large majority British population in the subsequent ‘Northumbrian’ state, its native culture and language anglicized by the incomers. The third model proposes an Anglian Northumbria as the outcome of conquest combined with ethnic cleansing, either by massacre or expulsion, its culture owing little to either native British or imperial Roman antecedents.

An argument for cleansing by mass slaughter would be supported by some evidence in the archaeological record of mass graves; alternatively the natives were subjugated to slave status en masse, and slaves there certainly were in Anglo-Saxon, as in Romano-British, society; thirdly the Britons may have headed westward in ragged refugee columns before the advancing alien armed bands. But
maybe they just stayed put, accepted their new Germanic masters, and simply assimilated to their ways and adopted their language. John Blair reckons that by the early 700s most of the inhabitants of Britain from the Pennines to the south-west of the country had acquired what he terms an ‘English’ political and linguistic identity adopted from the ethnic minority of intruders.
²¹
As to the north: ‘throughout Northumbria the dominance of English place names is extremely striking.’
²²

Place name evidence is always subject to caveats. Maybe the local invading lord gave a British village an English name and forced the locals to adopt it. Maybe the local peasantry not only adopted the invader’s language in their dealings with him, but jettisoned their own for the sake of fashion (as has been suggested). In any case, it seems we can conclude with Professor Rollason that Bede was essentially right to consider that by his time that part of the Roman empire south of Hadrian’s Wall and native areas to the north of it, both inhabited by the British, had been welded into a kingdom which was regarded by the English as inhabited by the ‘people of Northumbrians’, one of the other lands in which lived ‘the people of the English’.
²³

The first king named for Bernicia is Ida, reigning in the sixth century (d. ?559) and followed by a confusion of names. For Deira the first name we have is King Ælle (d. 590s). If we can believe the punning anecdote by which Bede was to explain Pope Gregory’s decision to launch the Roman mission to England, it seems that Ælle of Deira ruled a kingdom of Angles and lost at least one battle. One day in the 570s (that is, before he became pope), Gregory, so goes the story, was walking through the Roman slave market when he caught sight of two blond-haired youths for sale. (Christian Europe was no different from any other contemporary culture in accepting slavery, though dealing in Christians was forbidden.) On being told that they were ‘Angles’, from a kingdom called ‘Deira’ ruled by a king called Ælle, he quipped in Latin a pun that William
Shakespeare might have envied, with the observation that they should be called ‘not “Angles” but “Angels”’ (‘
non Angli sed Angeli
’), that they should be delivered from the wrath (Latin, ‘
de ira
’) [to come] and that ‘Alleluiah’ should be sung in their land when they were converted. The unfortunate boys may have been picked up by Frisian merchants at a clearance sale, following some battle between Deirans and Bernicians. The internecine warring came to an end under the Bernician king Æthelfrith, who emerges about 592 as the first known ‘ruler of Northumbria’. He was a pagan king in the heroic mould, with a pedigree going back beyond Woden to Geat, a name mentioned in
Beowulf.

Beowulf the hero – Beowulf the king

The poem of
Beowulf
opens in ‘Heorot’, the splendid mead hall of King Hrothgar, a Danish king. For twelve years the monster Grendel has terrorized the place, raiding at night and killing warriors as its food. A stranger arrives, a prince of the court of King Hygelac of the Geats of southern Sweden, his name Beowulf. He offers to rid Heorot of its terror. That night Grendel breaks down the door of the mead hall but Beowulf fights it to the death, ripping off its arm and driving it out into the darkness. The next day the hall carouses in triumph, but that night Grendel’s mother takes vengeance, killing one of Hrothgar’s men. Beowulf slays her and then, feted by Hrothgar and showered with gifts, returns to the land of the Geats. There King Hygelac, too, awards him the finest gem-studded sword from the Geat treasury and 7,000 hides of land, a hall and a throne. Shortly after, Hygelac dies and Beowulf reigns for 50 years. When his realm is ravaged by a fire-belching dragon, Beowulf rises to the challenge though all his men, save young Wiglaf, desert him. The dragon is slain but the hero is mortally wounded and the poem ends with his funerary rites and a threnody, a dirge of death.