Empires and Barbarians (50 page)

It was not new geographical information about lowland Britain, then, that transformed Saxon raiding into Saxon migration as the fifth century progressed, but an increased understanding that the previous political and strategic situation had been transformed out of all recognition. As long as Britain remained part of the Roman Empire, any serious attempts by continental Saxons to annex its landed assets were doomed to failure. The forces of the
litus Saxonum
were more than powerful enough to deal with raiders not smart enough to beat a hasty retreat: exactly the fate suffered by those Saxon raiders who turned up in Gaul in the time of Ammianus. Once Britain fell out of the Roman system, however, much more than the odd hit-and-run raid became possible, and not only for ambitious Saxons. As Gildas reports and other evidence confirms, raiders and even immigrants from Ireland and Scotland – Scots and Picts respectively – were also queuing
up to feast on the remains.
³⁵
The pull of a developed, Roman-style economy underlay the entire sequence of events, and, as with the other migration flows we have examined, the intermixing of politics and economics could not be clearer. The wealth of lowland Britain could become available to Saxon migrants only if they took its political control into their own hands, and this only became possible when Britain lost its Roman umbrella. It took perhaps as much as a generation for the continental intruders to realize how vulnerable their preferred British targets now were. Raiding seems to have begun already, as we have seen, in c.410, but it was c.440 before the situation turned really nasty, at least according to continental observers. This is a plausible time lag for the Anglo-Saxons either to come to realize that the old blocks on full-scale expansion had been removed, or to develop a range of new ambitions that went beyond raiding to outright annexation.

Prevailing political structures also shaped the action on another level. Compared with contemporary migratory phenomena on the continent, what’s striking about the Anglo-Saxon case is how much evidence there is for small-scale activity. By 600, the end result of the migration flow was, as we have seen, a series of relatively small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The same is true of the Romano-British world, which, in the era after Aurelius Ambrosius at least, fragmented in political terms. Looking at this pattern, one recent study has questioned why there were so few examples from fifth-century continental Europe of the kind of local takeover of power evident in the person of Aurelius Ambrosius, or in the quite small kingdoms which dominated Cornwall and Wales in Gildas’ day.
³⁶

In part, this oddity was a result of transport logistics, whose impact went far beyond a possible skewing of gender ratios. Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain had to take the form of an extended flow of population rather than a single pulse of invasion because of the impossibility of transporting large numbers of people across the North Sea at one go. In one respect, the evidence is equivocal. We don’t know whether the population of Jutland customarily used ships with sails in the fifth century or not, and oar-powered vessels could have transported large numbers of passengers only on a one-way trip since there was little room in them for other than the rowers themselves. But sail-powered ships were available just a little way down the coast in Roman Channel ports, and there is no reason to suppose that their
captains were not being paid to carry Saxons in larger numbers to Britain (as their counterparts elsewhere carried Goths and others across the Black Sea in the third century, and the Vandal–Alan coalition across the Straits of Gibraltar in 429). Other Saxons, as we know, were making their way as far as the Loire at the same time, which would have been one hell of a row. More important than the sail issue, therefore, is the fact that the available ships were all small, and limited in number. Just as more modern migration across the Atlantic was limited to a steady trickle until the advent of transatlantic liners in the later nineteenth century, so it was logistically impossible for large numbers of Anglo-Saxons to arrive en masse on the British coast.
³⁷

But the political context, too, played a crucial role in shaping the British outcome. On the continent, migrants were forced to operate in large concentrations because they needed to put substantial military forces into the field, whether to survive in the face of Roman imperial power or to escape from Hunnic control. No such constraints operated in Britain. Local government in the Roman provinces, not least the raising of taxes, operated on the basis of the city territory – the
civitas
– and it was thus that sub-Roman Britain seems to have continued. It was the tax revenues of these city units, no longer handed over to the Roman state, which provided, it seems, the Anglo-Saxon mercenaries’ pay. The boundaries of some of the easternmost, therefore presumably the earliest, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms – East Anglia, Essex, Lindsey and Kent (
Map 11
) – roughly correspond to likely
civitas
boundaries, suggesting that they might have been founded by migrants taking over the relevant
civitates
(cities) as still-functioning entities. But these
civitas
territories were not very large, and could never have supported large armed forces. This state of affairs must have evolved in the time of Aurelius Ambrosius. From this point, perhaps, you did have to organize a larger migration force if you wanted to carve out a nice piece of lowland Britain from the now more organized Romano-British. Even so, no sixth-century Romano-British king could field anything like the armies available to the Roman state or Attila the Hun, so the difference in requisite magnitude was still enormous, and any British military-cum-political unity proved only temporary. One of Gildas’ main declared motives for writing was precisely the fact that the political leaders of his own generation (and he names five kings) were squandering the Ambrosian inheritance by petty internal squabbling.
³⁸

As far as we can reconstruct it, therefore, the Anglo-Saxon migration flow was no
Völkerwanderung
and little resembled the old culture-historical model of mass movement combined with ethnic cleansing. It was a long-drawn-out phenomenon, not an event as Bede’s single date for the
Adventus Saxonum
might lead you to think. Many of the groups involved were perhaps small, especially at the beginning, but probably increased in scale as obstacles were encountered. Women and children also participated. The motivation was a desire to profit from the wealth of lowland Britain’s developed agricultural economy, but secondary factors affected at least the speed of the flow at different moments, and there was also a strong political dimension, since the wealth of Britain could only be accessed fully by seizing control of the land. For all the shortage of information, therefore, the Anglo-Saxon migration into lowland Britain clearly took the form of a predatory population flow. And, as the comparative literature on migration would suggest, it is also fairly easy to work out the profound effect of factors such as the availability of information, logistics, and the evolving political-cum-strategic context in which it was operating.

But what about the question we have so far avoided? Was the Anglo-Saxon migration flow a case of elite transfer, or need we think in terms of a different migration model?

It’s worth considering what is at stake. In its classic form, the elite-transfer/cultural-emulation model would suggest that incoming Germanic-speakers represented only a small percentage of the total population that either partly or wholly replaced the indigenous Romano-British landowning elite. The bulk of the Romano-British population remained in place and massively outnumbered the immigrants, but, over time, absorbed the latter’s material and non-material culture until immigrant and native became indistinguishable. What you essentially see is an overwhelming majority of Romano-British voluntarily exchanging their group identities to become Anglo-Saxons. The underlying purpose of this model is specifically to show that massive material and non-material cultural transformation in a Germanic direction can reasonably be explained by only a limited number of Anglo-Saxon immigrants having come across the North Sea. More
generally, it is part of a broader argument downplaying the importance of Anglo-Saxon migration as an agent of major change. For in most of the variants put forward, what happens in Roman Britain before the Anglo-Saxons arrive (for example, the collapse of Roman structures), and the reaction of the natives to their arrival (their voluntary decisions to become Anglo-Saxons), are at least as important as the migration flow itself. As such, the model was originally, and in its variant forms has continued to be, framed in reaction to past overuse of the invasion hypothesis.
³⁹

The other side of the argument has become harder to define, since no one now believes that the incoming Anglo-Saxons wiped out or expelled virtually all the native population. Anglo-Saxon ‘mass’ migration just isn’t what it used to be. In a very real sense, it is now defined negatively, against the elite-transfer model. Fundamentally, it amounts to the proposition that there were too many Anglo-Saxon migrants for them to be categorized as just an aristocratic elite, and, more generally, that they – rather than the indigenous population by their own free choice – were responsible for the cultural and other transformations that unfolded in lowland Britain. So Anglo-Saxon numbers are at the heart of the argument, along with the overall nature of their relations with the indigenous population. Were the Romano-British free to respond to the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons as they chose, or were the immigrants aggressive and politically dominant? Of these two issues, the question of numbers is at first sight the more problematic, since it is precisely on this issue that none of our sources provides straightforward information. We have only very broad estimates of the native Romano-British population in c.400
AD
, and little of substance on the scale of the subsequent Anglo-Saxon migration flow. But if we don’t obsess about precise numbers, a more productive way forward begins to emerge.

The place to start is with the revolution in the organization of the countryside which unfolded in the fifth and sixth centuries. Late Roman Britain was divided into a number of large and medium-sized estates, many run from villas: substantial country houses-cum-estate-centres. Land, as in much of the Roman world, was unequally distributed, with large quantities in the hands of a relatively small landowning class. By c.600, this property distribution had been replaced with another, worked out on a very different basis. Not only had all the villa buildings fallen out of use, but the estate boundaries, too, had
failed to survive. In only one or two cases has it even been suggested that old Roman estate boundaries were still in use in the Anglo-Saxon period, and none of these has been convincingly proven. In effect, the economic map of the countryside had been totally redrawn. By 600
AD
, Anglo-Saxon kings had delineated larger zones for the purposes of taxation, but much of the farming was based on much smaller units than the old Roman villas, and it was not until the ninth century that large centrally organized estates began to re-emerge in the English countryside. These were the first of the manors, which went on to become a dominant feature of the countryside by the time of
Doomsday Book
.
⁴⁰

This shows us immediately that the Anglo-Saxon takeover was not a simple case of elite transfer after the classic pattern of the Norman Conquest, half a millennium later. By the time the information recorded in
Doomsday Book
was gathered, twenty years after Hastings, the indigenous Anglo-Saxon aristocracy had been swept away, its lands transferred to William the Conqueror’s chief henchmen: the so-called tenants-in-chief. The process reached down to more local elites, the gentry, because the tenants-in-chief in turn enriched their more important followers by granting them economic rights over large amounts of the land that they themselves had received. This secondary process was as much a political necessity as the Conqueror’s original gifts to his tenants-in-chief, because it was the loyal service of all these men that had made the conquest possible, and they were consequently expecting a share in the profits of their joint military enterprise. As a result, the Anglo-Saxon gentry as well as the aristocracy lost ownership of their land, even if some still survived as tenants on property they had previously owned.

But a central feature of the process was that none of this property-swapping disturbed existing estate boundaries, or changed the working pattern of the manorial economy. As functioning farming units, the manors continued to operate. There were some alterations in detail, and a convincing argument can be made that elements of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry suffered a considerable demotion. Fundamentally, however, manorial estate boundaries and the general working of the rural economy were left undisturbed by the massive transfer of property rights which resulted from the Normans’ great victory. This was the best possible economic outcome for the Norman conquerors. The main activity of a manor was arable agriculture – growing grain –
using a centrally directed labour force, but it still needed its pasture-lands and woods to provide for the animals and people without whom the estate could not function. Any disturbance of these arrangements would have lowered agricultural outputs and the new estate owners’ incomes.
⁴¹

The Anglo-Saxon takeover of the fifth and sixth centuries, by contrast, did not see anything like such a straightforward transfer of property. The new Anglo-Saxon landowning elites did not simply take possession of existing villa estates, even though this would, in economic terms, have been much the best option. Like the manors of the eleventh century, Roman villa estates were integrated farming units whose output had provided the wealth for a very prosperous class of rural landowners. Changing villa boundaries meant disturbing the actual functioning of the rural economy, and there is good evidence that this process, as you would expect, led to substantial declines in rural output. While the overall area under cultivation did not change markedly (this is shown by pollen analysis), even if some marginal areas were abandoned, more complicated estate structures fell out of use. Some of the Roman-era drainage mechanisms around the Thames at Dorchester, for instance, were not maintained into the Saxon period, and a less sophisticated ‘scratch plough’ generally replaced the heavy Roman ploughs previously in use. The latter were expensive items of capital equipment because of the costs incurred in generating enough spare fodder to overwinter the draught animals required to pull them. Presumably the smaller farming units of the early Anglo-Saxon era could not afford to maintain them, even if they had wanted to.
⁴²
This also goes a long way towards explaining why the old towns of Roman Britain lost what was left of their urban character. They had not been centres of industrial production, anyway, but, ‘agro-towns’, existing to serve certain functions in a relatively developed agricultural economy, in return for which some food surpluses found their way out of the countryside to feed the urban population. If you disturbed the organization of the rural economy, particularly by simplifying its functioning and reducing total output, you would be cutting away at the roots of this kind of urbanism, so that it is not surprising that the towns as such disappeared in the post-Roman period, even if they sometimes retained an administrative importance, with new Anglo-Saxon royal palaces being established within their boundaries.
⁴³
The next question, therefore, is an obvious one. Why did the Anglo-Saxon takeover break
up existing Roman estate structures, even though this brought with it substantial economic costs?