The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (52 page)

There are more links between the early East Anglians and the Swedes; but they are more in the realm of archaeology, which unlike king lists and histories is usually more even-handed, illuminating the lives of ordinary people as well as royalty. There is one English archaeological treasure, however, which concerns an actual Anglian king who not only has all the trappings of Norse splendour claimed in
Beowulf
, but who has a place in the East Anglian Wuffing king list. The weight of evidence is that the king buried in a ship in Mound One of the royal burial ground of the Wuffings at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk was King Rædwald, grandson of Wuffa. Rædwald, who died around 625, became High King of Britain, or Bretwald, after defeating Æthelfrith, King of Northumbria, at the Battle of River Idle, in about 617.
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As there is no inscribed tombstone, there is still justifiable doubt among academics as to whether this formal burial mound
held Rædwald or some other closely related contemporary, or indeed an actual corpse. That does not affect the point of the story, and, I shall call him Rædwald.

Like many, I have enjoyed the very accessible privilege of viewing the shimmering geometric inlaid gold designs, drinking horns with silver-gilt mounts and other fine pieces of Rædwald’s burial treasure at the British Museum in London, and on more than one occasion. The first time was when I went to speak at an archaeological conference there (Plates 14 and 15). I also took advantage of a coach trip and guided tour of Sutton Hoo arranged for delegates. The brilliant tomb reconstructions and cherry-picked jewellery displays in the National Trust’s museum there are a few minutes walk from the burial site, and screened by some trees. So when we came upon a collection of huge grassy mounds on the edge of a bleak plain looking down on Woodbridge and the River Deben, the extraordinary atmosphere we all felt was unalloyed by tourist trappings.

Ever since its excavation, the fact that Mound One and its neighbours contained buried, high-prowed longships has excited com parisons with southern Scandinavia (Plates 17, 18 and 19). There are a couple of other similar ship burials in this region of England, for instance at Snape, but ship burials are a rare and unique cultural practice, more generally associated with Scandinavia of the same period, in particular the boat-grave cemeteries at Vendel and Valsgärde in Sweden.
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Although many of the beautiful grave goods and coins in Sutton Hoo came from all over Europe, including Byzantium, a significant proportion pointed to Scandinavia. The style of the king’s helmet and shield seemed to confirm the Scandinavian connection
²²
though whether they were imported or made locally is not clear.
²³
The
grave goods also included a range of ornaments, including clasps and square-headed brooches, giving evidence for links between Anglia and Scandinavia during the ‘migration period’ of the fifth and sixth centuries.
²⁴
Multiple ship burials are also found in the Oslo fjord in south-east Norway.
²⁵

Some of the foregoing does seem to push the cultural centre of gravity of early East Anglians from Denmark and Angeln north across the water to Norway and Sweden – but these are not the only cultural links. Neither were East Anglian kings the only migrants to East Anglia. I have already mentioned the cruciform brooches, which point to links across the North Sea more to Angeln in Schleswig-Holstein than farther north (
Figure 9.3
). Other cultural links, including ceramics, ornaments and the practice of horse cremation, seem to link Norfolk and the areas of earliest English rune finds with Schleswig-Holstein and the neck of the Cimbrian Peninsula.
²⁶

Before moving away from English king lists and royal claims of descent, I should point out that the ethnicity and regional identity claimed by various early self-proclaimed ‘kings’ in England was not necessarily the same as was perceived by their ‘subjects’, nor even how other English ‘kings’ viewed them. There is a famous and mysterious Old English sheet document thought to have been composed originally in the seventh or eighth century called the
Tribal Hidage
.
²⁷
In the spirit of the Domesday Book, but compiled four hundred years before, the Tribal Hidage appears to be a summary regional administrative assessment of land size intended for use in exacting tribute or tax. It may have been drawn up in either the Kingdom of Mercia
or the Kingdom of East Anglia, depending on who was top dog at the time, and listed thirty-four political units south of the Humber, with an accountant’s roundings of land size in terms of
hide
(family) numbers or
hidage
.

The relevant point of interest in this document and its copies, apart from their intrinsic historical value, is that although the recognized half-dozen kingdoms of southern Old England are included as obviously big players, they are in a numerical minority: just six out of thirty-four. The kings of West Sexena, Sussexena, East Sexena, Cantwarena (Kent), East Engle and Mercia are accorded no special political status over the small fry. If that degree of political complexity was still present in seventh-century England, over two hundred years after the invasion, who were all those others, and how much more politically complex was England in the fifth century? This is hardly the sort of fragmentation expected if ethnic cleansing followed the ‘invasion’, as implied by the texts. Surely, the big kings should have finished their merger game and divided up the cake by that time. Were the small players all descended from other invaders, or was there, as with the Domesday Book, a great degree of administrative inheritance from the old Romano-British order?

The cultural evidence set out in this chapter, combined with the runes and distribution of cruciform brooches, argues much more strongly for Bede’s story of the elite Anglian invasion from Angeln, than for Gildas’ version, the Saxon Advent. However, in spite of their non-Scandinavian cultural background, the king lists of the Saxon regions of southern England claim Scandinavian
provenance and are all non-Saxon, with the exception of Essex’s. This deep division between Angle and Saxon will crop up again with the Vikings and the Danelaw line, but just how much of this division was an accident of a fifth-century carve-up, and how much was determined by pre-Roman relationships and long-term cultural continuity? Some archaeologists argue for continuity and others for wipeout, as we shall see next.

The Anglo-Saxon question I want to address in this book is how much population replacement occurred. It is clear that a dramatic cultural change got under way in England starting in the fifth century, and that north-west Europe is the likely source of that change. Was Gildas telling the truth? Was it a mass Anglo-Saxon invasion with slaughter and replacement of Britons, as former -ly claimed by archaeologists such as John Myres and Edward Leeds? Interestingly, some geneticists still believe in complete replacement, although few archaeologists do.
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Or was it an elite cultural and political takeover, with a degree of cultural consent
and local apathy, as argued by others such as Nick Higham of the University of Manchester?
²
Perhaps it was somewhere in between, with some population migration and some indigenous cultural developments set in motion by a small nucleus of Germanic overlords. But what a gap it would leave in English history never to be sure how much!

In a recent collection of essays on migration and invasion in archaeology, edited by John Chapman and Helena Hamerow, several authors attempt to get a handle on archaeological evidence that could help. The starting point is expressed by Sally Crawford: ‘Suffice it to say that few archaeologists today would agree with Freeman’s declaration [1888] that the Anglo-Saxons wiped out the native British in the south-east of the country, linguistic evidence notwithstanding…’
³
. Hamerow, who specializes in this transition in history, reviews the divide and argues that the polarization of
opinion
between archaeologists still holding the increasingly unpopular migrationist view
⁴
and those holding an essentially indigenous acculturation and local developmental view has ‘at times [amounted] to a veritable identity crisis’.
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She believes that to resolve this question of migration or acculturation requires a more systematic methodology for measuring and comparing detailed studies of individual communities and their change of land use over time.

It might be thought that we could dispense with archaeology and just concentrate on genetics, but that would be unwise – not least because the opinions of geneticists are highly polarized as well. One discipline cannot have all the answers; personally, I think that history and archaeology should and do offer some solutions, particularly for and against the extremes of opinion. History, naturally, includes
the study of administrative documents, and use of the historical demographer’s skill, and so has much to tell us. In the thousand-year period that brackets the Anglo-Saxon ‘invasion’ with its sparse documentation, there were four serious invasions of Britain, two of which even affected Ireland. Three of these invasions – by the Romans, Vikings and Normans – were all much better documented than the Anglo-Saxon one. For these three there is consensus among historians and archaeologists that in spite of the profound visible cultural change they each brought, there was substantial continuity in the indigenous population, and that some cultural practices and small-scale political units were preserved. The Norman invasion had the most political impact from today’s perspective, partly because it was the last.

Because of the paucity of documentary evidence that would allow us to analyse the degree of immigration over the Anglo-Saxon Advent, arguments of degree tend to revert to analogy. We have sufficient records in the form of surveys, civic and religious records and family names, not to mention place-names and the effective survival of the English language, for demographers to at least make estimates of real immigration after 1066. This sort of evidence suggests that the immediate intrusion of Norman people, at the invasion and in the few years following, amounted to no more than 1–5% of the total (see below)
⁶
– certainly much less than the psychological threshold of 50% semantically implied by adjectives (e.g. ‘most’ and ‘largely’) often used in the past by historians. As Jared Diamond has so effectively argued, the ability of one population rapidly to exterminate or completely displace another came to us only after the Medieval period, with the advent of ‘guns, germs and steel’.
⁷

I have already mentioned Francis Pryor, whose colours of continuity are clearly nailed to the mast. Given the genetic arguments I have put forward in previous chapters, I would be expected to agree with the long-term cultural and population continuity view expressed in both his popular books,
Britain BC
and
Britain AD
; and I guess I do agree, at least as far as the unlikelihood of extreme Srebrenica-style slaughter and ethnic cleansing is concerned:

The arrival of the Saxons, the
Adventus Saxonum
, is supposed to have happened around
AD
450. What caused a supposedly near-complete collapse in southern British elite and military circles in little more than a generation? If such a thing did happen, one would expect it to have left clear archaeological traces: massive war graves, settlement dislocation and ‘knock-on’ impacts … But so far they have not been found … if Anglo-Saxon people and culture displaced ‘native’ practices, one would expect the latter to have vanished completely. They did not. If people were not moving around in great waves of migration, how and why did the archaeological changes of post-Roman times happen? What was going on in Britain at the time?
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Helena Hamerow has reviewed both sides of the archaeological debate and its history, looking in particular at the cultural practices and material culture, to see what might help determine the impact of the Continent on England from the mid-fifth to the mid-seventh century. This is not an easy task, for a number of reasons. Styles of burial, building and ornaments, while clearly indicating profound change and outside influence both just before and after the Roman exit, do not give clear-cut answers. They suggest, rather than the extremes of all or nothing, a major degree of modification and hybridization and indigenous
switching of cultural affiliation. One exception she cites to this in-between world of similar yet different is the absence from England of the so-called Anglo-Saxon longhouse:

[N]owhere in England is the main type of farmhouse found throughout the continental homelands of the Anglo-Saxons to be found: the longhouse, in which the cattle byre and living room lay under one massive roof, supported on rows of internal posts.
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