Anglo-Saxons

I

Introduction

Anglo-Saxons, collective name for peoples speaking a Germanic language who migrated to Britain in the 5th to 6th centuries ad from the North Sea coastlands between the Netherlands and Norway. It is the accepted term used by historians since the 16th century to describe these peoples, who settled in lowland Britain and over many centuries conquered all of it, together with some upland regions, from the native British, creating England (land of the Angles) in the process. They brought with them their own language that is the basis for modern English, replacing earlier versions of Welsh in the process. The period of their dominance over Britain is known as the Anglo-Saxon period and begins within the first half of the 5th century and ends with the Norman Conquest of 1066.

II

Raids and Migration

Some of the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons, referred to in Roman sources as Franks and Saxons, had raided Britain as early as the 3rd century ad (see Roman Britain). A chain of Roman coastal stone forts was built in the 3rd and 4th centuries, and by the late 4th and early 5th century these were under the command of the Count of the Saxon Shore (Comes Litoris Saxonum). This implies a defence system established to protect Britain’s east and south coasts from Saxon piracy. The last major shipment of Roman coin to pay for the Roman army and administration of its British provinces arrived around ad 402. In 407 what was left of the Roman army in Britain crossed the English Channel to help defend the continental provinces of Gaul and Spain from invaders who had crossed the Rhine frontier. According to the British author Gildas, writing in the late 5th or the early 6th century, the first Saxons to arrive in Britain were hired for their military skills. They were required to defend the British from an immediate threat of seaborne invasion from the far north of Britain by the Picts. Their presence would also deter any attempt by a continental Roman army to reoccupy Britain. These Saxons were settled somewhere in the eastern part of the island, being billeted and provided with food and equipment by the British authorities, following standard Roman practice. The Saxons then took advantage of British weakness to rebel and seize territories for themselves. Thus began a long process of Anglo-Saxon settlement and conquest that continued up to the annexation of Cornwall in the 9th century.

A Gallic Chronicle composed in 452 in southern France informs us that in the early 440s Britain came under the control of the Saxons. This is the nearest we have to an acceptable date for the decisive Saxon rebellion. Archaeology has provided us with the graves of Anglo-Saxon warriors who were buried wearing 5th-century military belt equipment (cingulum) issued to Roman officers. This suggests that some of the Saxon mercenaries did indeed have Roman military service experience to offer their British employers. The origin myths of the earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms sometimes incorporate invitations from the British to settle in their own regions of Britain, but typically record warriors landing in ships and seizing territory in battles with the British. Unfortunately, these accounts appear in much later written sources, composed in the 9th century as we have them, and it is virtually impossible to create a meaningful history from them. It is only from the late 6th and early 7th centuries onward that we can reconstruct the history of these peoples from contemporary or near-contemporary sources.

In his Ecclesiastical History, written in the early 8th century, the Venerable Bede names the three principal peoples involved in the migration as the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. According to Bede, the Jutes originated from Jutland and settled in two rather small coastal regions: Kent, east of the Medway, and southern Hampshire with the Isle of Wight. The Angles came from Schleswig-Holstein near the base of the Jutland peninsular, and the Baltic island of Fyn. There is still today a district of Schleswig-Holstein called Angeln. Bede states that continental Anglia had been deserted ever since and archaeology has demonstrated that Schleswig-Holstein was heavily depopulated at this time. The Angles occupied most of the eastern side of Britain from East Anglia and the eastern Midlands, eventually as far north as Edinburgh. The Saxons originated from the region of Lower Saxony between the lower reaches of the Weser and Elbe rivers. Similar archaeological evidence for depopulation occurs inland to the east of the Weser estuary. The Saxons settled in southern England west of the River Medway, particularly along the south coast, the Thames valley, and the western Midlands around the Warwickshire River Avon.

It seems that Bede simplified a more complex situation, for archaeology suggests that the groups of migrants were already somewhat mixed, though most often they were Saxons or Angles. There is evidence from pottery urns containing cremations in urnfield cemeteries of the Weser-Elbe region that significant numbers of Angles were living and cremating their dead within 5th-century Saxon communities prior to the migration to Britain. The same mixture of Saxon and Anglian urns found side by side occurs in the earliest cremation cemeteries of eastern England, whether in Norfolk, Lincolnshire, or Yorkshire. There are sufficient items of south Scandinavian origin dating from the later 5th and early 6th centuries from sites in east Kent to confirm that some of its settlers may indeed have been Jutes. The overall impression from Kent, however, is of a mixed immigrant population, which also included Saxons and Angles. Placenames and archaeological evidence suggest the presence of other Germanic peoples among the Anglo-Saxon settlers of Britain, such as Frisians, Franks, and Thuringians.

There even seems to have been a significant and undocumented migration from western Scandinavia, and in particular from Norway, at the very end of the 5th century. This is evidenced in the cemetery archaeology by the introduction of new metal fittings for female costume. These are small metal clasps used to fasten narrow sleeves of an undergarment at the wrists. In Scandinavia these clasps were also used to fasten men’s trousers at the ankles and an example of this fashion has been found recently in a man’s grave in Lincolnshire. What Bede seems to have been describing were new regional identities that emerged in the early 6th century across Anglo-Saxon England. Around this time, mixed communities chose to adopt a Saxon, or Anglian, or Kentish (Jutish) identity. This was particularly signalled in their female “folk” costume, but could also be expressed in other aspects of their material culture, such as decorated pottery. This involved suppressing the alternative previous traditions. As these 6th-century folk costumes had disappeared by the 7th century, it is remarkable that Bede could still record the traditions of these regional ethnic identities well over a century later.

III

Religion

At the time of their arrival in Britain, the Anglo-Saxons were pagans who worshipped their own gods, such as Tiw, Woden (Odin, in Norse), Thunor (Thor, in Norse), and Frey, whose names are still enshrined in our days of the week as Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. The Christian faith of the existing British population made no significant impact on the Anglo-Saxons, though on occasion an Anglo-Saxon may have adopted Christianity. In the late 6th century, Ethelbert, an Anglo-Saxon king of Kent, had married Bertha, a Frankish Christian princess, while still a prince. This was probably on the understanding that he would convert to her religion. Ethelbert seems to have been reluctant to accept baptism from a Frankish missionary as this would imply subservience to Frankish kings across the English Channel. Instead, he proved willing to receive a mission from the Bishop of Rome led by St Augustine in 597. This began the process, documented by Bede and other sources, for the successful conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, led by missionaries from the Frankish kingdoms and from Ireland, as well as from Rome (see Conversion of Europe).

Archaeology provides us with the Sutton Hoo ship burial in Suffolk, which illustrates the power and wealth of a regional Anglo-Saxon ruler at the time of the conversion of the East Angles in the 610s and 620s. Before the end of the 7th century the conversion of England was complete and, in their turn, Anglo-Saxon missionaries now set out during the 8th century to convert their pagan cousins in the Low Countries and Germany east of the Rhine. Some correspondence between these missionaries and clergymen in England survives and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History may well have been written to guide their actions.

IV

Political History

Writers from the Mediterranean world in the 6th and 7th centuries referred to the Anglo-Saxons as Angles. So when the Bishop of Rome sent a letter to Ethelbert of Kent, he addressed him as king of the Angles. By contrast, commentators from the Frankish kingdoms closer to Britain usually referred to them as Saxons. Their Celtic-speaking neighbours also preferred to call them Saxons (Sais, in Welsh, and Sassanach, in Gaelic). In time, the term Angle tended to dominate and it changed to become “English”, just as most of Britain became England.

The names of many Anglo-Saxon kingdoms survive in county or regional names still used today. Examples are Essex (East Saxons), Middlesex (Middle Saxons), Sussex (South Saxons), Wessex (West Saxons), East Anglia (East Angles subdivided into a North and a South Folk), and Northumbria (Angles living north of the River Humber). Some of their kingdoms adopted British names, usually taken to indicate Anglo-Saxon annexation of viable British political units. Examples are Kent (from Cantium), Lindsey (in the northern part of Lincolnshire), and the Northumbrian kingdoms of Deira (later Yorkshire) and Bernicia (County Durham, Northumberland, and south-eastern Scotland).

The Tribal Hidage document survives in 12th-century copies, but seems to describe the political landscape within the 7th century. It lists some 30 kingdoms and peoples (tribes), revealing the co-existence of both substantial regional kingdoms and of much smaller political units on their margins. In that same century, a people occupying a region in the north Midlands centred on the Trent Valley rose to prominence. They were called the Mercians (the people of the March or frontier) and were contesting with the northern Angles of Deira and Bernicia for control over Lindsey, the rest of the Midlands, East Anglia, and southern England. By the end of the 7th century the Mercians had restricted their northern rivals to the lands north of the River Humber and this political reality was recognized when they called themselves Northumbrians from the early 8th century onward.

Throughout the 8th century and into the early 9th century, the Mercians were the dominant force in “Southumbria” under Aethelbald (reigned 716-757), Offa, and Coenwulf (reigned 796-821). Indeed, a case can be made for regarding Offa as the first king of England, who exchanged letters with Charles the Great (Charlemagne), king of the Franks, as if he was an equal. It was these Mercian kings who had constructed the great boundary earthworks known as Offa’s Dyke to separate Anglo-Saxon lands from those of the Welsh kingdoms to the west. Mercian power was to suffer two successive blows in the 9th century, however. In 825 a West Saxon army inflicted a decisive defeat freeing the West Saxon kingdom and south-eastern England from Mercian control, and then in the period 865-874 a Danish army in quick succession crushed the Northumbrian, East Anglian, and Mercian kingdoms. The Danish fortress at Repton, by the River Trent, in Derbyshire, incorporated a Mercian royal church into its defences and, occupied by the Viking army in the winter of 873-874, has been investigated by archaeologists. The east Midlands was annexed by the Danes, together with Northumbria and East Anglia, and these became the territories of the Danelaw.

Only the West Saxons held out against the Danes, and then under Alfred the Great and his successors in the 10th century, they set about the systematic conquest of the Danelaw. Ethelstan (reigned 924-939) held effective control of most of England within his reign and by the middle of the century a united kingdom was emerging. The shire (or county) administrative structure of modern England was largely the creation of West Saxon 10th-century rulers, and a sound silver coinage system was another significant achievement of this period. A further period of crisis occurred in the late 10th century with renewed Danish raids and invasions. This culminated in the reign of the Dane Cnut (Canute II), who was also king of Denmark and Norway. Nevertheless, the recall of Edward the Confessor in 1042 saw a member of the West Saxon house on the English throne once again. Edward had been in exile in Normandy and favoured Normans at his court. So when he died without heirs in 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, pursued a claim to the throne of England. The royal council (witan) appointed Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, as King Harold II, however, ignoring William of Normandy’s claim. If Harold had not had to fight two invasions in quick succession, defeating a Norwegian army at Stamford Bridge before marching south to meet the Norman force just north of Hastings, the outcome of the Norman invasion might have been different. As it was, Harold was the last Anglo-Saxon ruler of England.