Empires and Barbarians (47 page)

Pretty well everyone would accept these three basic shifts in understanding. The beginning and end points of the process of Anglo-Saxonization are also clear enough. Lowland Britain (much of what is now England) was a highly developed part of the Roman world in c.350
AD
, but by 600 was dominated by Germanic-speaking elites who thought of themselves as having come from continental Europe in the intervening period. What role migration had played in all this, and how the indigenous population had fared, however, are matters of fierce debate.

That this much disagreement is possible tells you instantly that the available evidence suffers from serious limitations. A first key issue is what, exactly, was the state of Roman Britain by c.400
AD
? Few doubt that it had been flourishing fifty years earlier. Its towns, admittedly, were not showing the same degree of private investment in public monuments as they had in previous centuries. But this was a common phenomenon right across the late Roman world, and needs to be understood against shifting patterns of local elite life, and not as a simple economic phenomenon, as it tended to be in the past.

It is worth pausing a moment to explore the argument. In the fourth century, patterns of Roman landowning elite life shifted decisively away from their local home towns towards imperial service. The whole point of the private investments they had previously made in the public urban monuments of their local towns had been to win power there. But, by the fourth century, this was no longer such an attractive game to play. To deal with a series of problems collectively known as the Third-Century Crisis, above all the rise of Persia to superpower status, the Roman state had confiscated all the local funds that had previously made winning power in your home town such a worthwhile goal for local Roman elites. By the fourth century, exercising power in your home town involved great responsibilities, but much less spending power. The fun of spending taxpayers’ money
could now be experienced only by those operating in imperial rather than hometown service. Not surprisingly, local Roman elites right across the Empire shifted their spending priorities appropriately. Instead of trying to win power at home, elite investment was increasingly directed towards preparing their children for, and moving further up within, the bureaucratic structures of imperial service. The public face of towns suffered accordingly, but this was fundamentally a cultural and political phenomenon, and not a sign of economic crisis in any straightforward sense.
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The evidence from rural Roman Britain fits this broader pattern well. For in the fourth century, Britain’s villas were flourishing as never before. They show every sign of great wealth, with much remodelling, which saw, in particular, pictorial colour mosaics replace black and white geometric ones, and the appearance of private Christian chapels. In the old days this used to suggest a nice parallel with the arrival of colour TV, but that was so long ago now that most of my students have no idea that television ever used to be available only in black and white. The really big question, however, is how much of this rural prosperity endured to 400
AD
. Of the 135 excavated British villas that have produced some Roman coins, for instance, the sequence came to an end for sixty-five of them in c.360. Does this mean that the villa economy of Britain – a much better indicator of the general health of Roman provincial life than the towns – started to decline at that point, or just that coins – never a very central feature of Roman economic exchange – were not circulating in the same way?

Some have argued the case for major dislocation, a recent historiographical trend being towards what in archaeological jargon is known as ‘systems collapse’. This argues that Roman social, economic and hence political systems were all breaking down in Britain by 400, so that the end of properly Roman Britain had internal causes and that subsequent Anglo-Saxon migration wandered more or less into a power vacuum. The argument finds some further support in a seeming withdrawal of the regular Roman army from the Hadrian’s Wall line in the 390s. The forts were still occupied, but the kinds of metalwork associated with Roman regulars are confined after this date to lowland Britain, suggesting to some that independent local chieftains had taken over the frontier forts. The evidence from the forts is ambiguous, however, and the general state of Roman Britain in c.400
AD
does basically turn on when exactly the villa economy collapsed. Here the
lack of precise dates is a problem. If the villa economy was unravelling in the later fourth century, then the end of properly Roman Britain was nothing to do with Anglo-Saxon invasion. But if the villas ended anytime after 410, the Anglo-Saxons start to appear much more likely suspects.
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When it comes to working out how things developed from this disputed beginning, the evidence just gets worse. Historical sources are particularly thin on the ground. One alone –
The Ruin of Britain
by the monk Gildas – was composed by a British native who was a more or less contemporary observer. The precise date at which he wrote is much disputed, but it must have been somewhere between the late fifth and the mid-sixth century. The work’s big drawback, though, is that Gildas was not trying to write history, but putting together a moral tract for British kings of his own times, in which he occasionally drew on past events to illustrate points he wished to make about the present. A kind of narrative outline of the Anglo-Saxon takeover can be gleaned, but it is sparse and incomplete at best – and, in fact, some very different suggestions have been made as to how it should be read.
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To supplement Gildas, there are a few more or less contemporary references to events in Britain in continental sources, and some very late, wildly episodic materials gathered together in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
.

Some of the
Chronicle
’s stories may well reflect actual events. Its entries mostly refer to kings and their conquests, and some of this might have been recalled with a degree of outline accuracy. Sometimes, too, the events even make sense against the landscape, notably the battle of Deorham in 577 which is said to have brought Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath under Anglo-Saxon control. A visit to the site, now the grounds of Dyrham Park just outside Bath, is enough to show you why. Set on high ground, it dominates the territory around. But in overall terms, the
Chronicle
’s coverage is both limited and problematic. It really deals only with the three kingdoms – Wessex, Kent and Sussex – which later formed part of the ninth-century realm of King Alfred the Great, under whose auspices the text reached its extant form. Large areas of what became Anglo-Saxon England – from Essex to Northumbria – either receive little (Mercia and Northumbria) or no (Essex) coverage in an annalistic history which is anyway remarkable for its almost total lack of detail. Many years have no events ascribed to them, and those that do rarely get more than a couple of lines. For
teaching purposes, the modern English translation of its entire coverage of the fifth and sixth centuries can be conveniently photocopied on to two sides of A4, and even then the text is not exactly crowded. What it contains is a series of disjointed episodes, not a connected narrative. Moreover, the form and the chronological problems of the text both suggest that, at some point, someone had had to guess the dates at which events ascribed to great heroes of the past, probably in oral stories, had actually occurred. Such a process is discernable in some continental sources of the fifth and sixth centuries which were also drawing in part on oral materials, and these guesses were never completely uneducated. Some sense of chronology, for instance, could be deduced from the kinds of family trees and king lists that were the standard paraphernalia of royal dynasties, and could be used to order events of which the memory had survived attached to particular individuals, such as kings who had won various battles.
⁹
They were guesses, not certain knowledge, however, and that, combined with the sheer paucity of information, makes the
Chronicle
of only limited use.
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Our general knowledge of Anglo-Saxon history only starts to increase from c.600, with the arrival of the Christian missionaries. This marks the effective limit of detailed historical knowledge in Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History
. After this date, Bede preserves a great deal of independent information. Before it, he largely depended on Gildas, and so still do we.

Of archaeological material there is, it seems, a greater mass. The huge amount of information we have about Roman Britain sits alongside some thirty thousand burials which belong to the early Anglo-Saxon period. But these burials were the remains of some ten to fifteen generations, deposited between the mid-fifth and late seventh centuries, a time when even conservative estimates of the population of lowland Britain would reckon its total never less than a million. Even this many burials, therefore, represents no more than a tiny sample of the original population. Two further problems make their interpretation difficult. First, dating is far from precise. No more Roman coins were imported into Britain after c.400
AD
. Scientific dates (carbon-14 or dendrochronological) also remain rare since many graves were excavated before these methods had become available. So for the most part, dating has to be based on the stylistic development of the objects buried with the corpses. As we have seen in other contexts, this kind of dating can locate burials to within twenty-five years or so,
which is much better than nothing. But when a developing sequence of archaeological materials is being related to known history, such a window is sometimes too imprecise to be sure whether a set of burials preceded or followed a given set of events.
¹¹

The second problem is more fundamental. These early Anglo-Saxon burials take two basic forms. In central and southern England, archaeologists have uncovered a large number of quite small inhumation cemeteries, some of the burials being richly furnished with gravegoods. Further east, in parts of East Anglia and along the northeast coast, a smaller number of much larger cremation cemeteries have been excavated (
Map 11
). The cremation cemeteries raise few problems of attribution. A cremation habit was entirely foreign to late Roman Britain, and both the burial form and the identifiable objects that survived the cremation process have direct antecedents in fourth- and early fifth-century materials from south-eastern Jutland. There is not much doubt, then, that Germanic-speaking immigrants from the Jutland region generated the cremation cemeteries of eastern England.
¹²

The inhumation cemeteries are more problematic. For one thing, they contain a large number of burials without gravegoods. Who were these people? Were they poorer Anglo-Saxons, left-over Romano-Britains, whose standard burial rite had indeed been unfurnished inhumation, or people who just chose not to bury their dead with gravegoods? Likewise, while there is little doubt that many of the items found in the furnished graves (brooches, sleeve fasteners, weapons and so on) were first made and used by continental Germanic-speaking populations, this is not true of them all, and, more generally, it can be argued that their appearance and spread in England is not a safe guide to the extent of Anglo-Saxon immigration. Unlike the cremation rite of eastern England, the dress items found in the inhumation cemeteries were not lifted lock, stock and barrel from one particular corner of the Germanic-speaking continent. Particular combinations of items eventually became confined to specific corners of England, but many of these items originated in disparate areas of Germania. Sleeve fasteners, for instance, became a distinctive element in the dress of early Anglo-Saxons living just inland from the Wash, but whereas most of what they wore had disparate origins the fasteners themselves had only been found earlier in parts of western Norway.
¹³
It looks, in other words, as if the process that unfolded in lowland
Britain was similar to that underlying the so-called Danubian style of Attila’s Empire (
Chapter 5
). New and distinct Anglo-Saxon dress combinations coalesced out of a wide variety of sources in lowland Britain in the fifth century.

If dress items and habits were being passed around between different groups of Germanic immigrants, there is no obvious reason why they could not also have been passing from Anglo-Saxon immigrants to Romano-British natives. We are all now comfortable with the idea that under certain conditions new identities can be adopted. This tends to happen particularly when old identities are in flux, which was true both for Anglo-Saxon immigrants and Romano-British natives in the fifth and sixth centuries. The boundaries of the new Anglo-Saxon kingdoms differed from the pre-existing political structures of Britain, and there is no reason to suppose, either, that they had been transposed from the continent. Famously, individuals with British names – Cerdic and Cynric – appear in the ancestry of the ruling house of Wessex, and the late seventh-century law code from this kingdom, known as
Ine’s Law
, explicitly mentions the presence within it of substantial landowners of indigenous non-Anglo-Saxon descent. These are strong indications that Wessex may have been created by a complex Anglo-Saxon/Romano-British double act, rather than a simple Germanic conquest. The cemetery of Warperton in Warwickshire also provides a so far unique example of a chronological progression from late Roman to Saxon-style burials within the single graveyard. This too is suggestive of processes of cultural assimilation. Particularly since many of the inhumation cemeteries continued in use for two hundred years, from the fifth into the sixth and seventh centuries, by which time there must have been much intermingling between immigrant and native, it is perfectly reasonable to question whether continental dress accessories can really be used as a guide to the origins of the corpse found displaying them.
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