The Myth of 'Saxon' England "For hundreds of years, the English have resented the fact that their cultural life began with the Scandinavians, and that has made them blind to their own heritage." - Frederick Hammerich in De episk-Kristelige oldkvad hos de gotiske folk, 1873 When I watched the BBC special, A History of Britain, I was amazed when the narrator Simon Schama described the Sutton Hoo helmet as belonging to a Saxon chieftain.  He used the term 'Saxon' throughout the broadcast without once mentioning the many other Germanic tribes that helped create the English nation.  The pre-Viking Age helmet that Schama was talking about belonged to a Swedish chieftain. He was a member of the East Anglian royal house that was established by Swedes in the 6th century.  The helmet was made in Sweden or by armourers from Sweden working in Suffolk exclusively in their traditional Swedish manner and with Swedish dies, moulds and other equipment.  There was nothing Saxon about it.   In his new book by the same name as the television production Schama writes that the three major tribes that invaded Britain were "the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes". Actually, there never was a race of people called the 'Anglo-Saxons'.   As historian Susan Reynolds has written, "The inhabitants of the kingdom of England did not habitually call themselves Anglo-Saxons (let alone Saxons), but English, and they called their kingdom England.  It was not a hyphenated kingdom but one whose inhabitants felt themselves to be a single people."  Even the West Saxon kings called themselves Rex Anglorum.  And yet to this day there is a 'Saxoncentric' or German bias that influences our perceptions.  This can be traced back to the very beginnings of English scholarship.  William Camden (1551-1623), an admirer of contemporary German humanism, was the first English scholar to concern himself with the national origins of the English people.  In Remains Concerning Britain, published in 1605, about the time Shakespeare was writing Lear and MacBeth, he stressed German descent:  "This English tongue is extracted, as a nation, from the Germans, the most glorious now extant in Europe...".  In the same year Richard Verstegen in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence wrote that the Scandinavian connection was irrelevant.  He explained that the Danish and Norman settlers were so few that they did not alter the original "Saxon purity".  In 1705, George Hicks wrote that compared to the 'pure' Saxons, the Danes were "a rude and an illiterate People in all Respects, and for the most part Pirates, [who] corrupted the Anglo-Saxon language."  Hicks evidently did not know that the name (Saxon) was originally a synonym for  piracy and barbarism and that the language that he spoke originated with the very people that he described as being 'rude' and 'illiterate'!  But modern English scholarship was born of the Romantic movement, at a time when Germany was the center of the world of German philology.  And it was felt that no tribe represented German superiority and purity better than the Saxons of England. The following is a list of facts concerning the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes: - The West Saxons of Wessex, the ones most associated with Saxon purity, may actually have been of mixed ancestry.  They may have had just as much Celtic blood as German.  Even the founder of the royal house of Wessex, Cerdic, had a British name and he may have been a British chieftain!  King Ine of Wessex (late 7th century) made a special provision for the British still living in his domain.  Another early king of the West Saxons was Cenwealh (643-672).  Cenwealh means "bold (or keen) Welshman".  The kingdom of Hwicce was the heartland of the British revival after the end of Roman authority and was the home of Ambrosius Aurelianus and possibly Arthur.  So, why did the Saxons always refer to Hwicce in special terms and seem to revere the memory of it? - Yet another 'Saxon' king with a British name was Caedwalla.  Under him Wessex became the third power in the land, after Northumbria and Mercia.  The West Saxons originally called themselves the Gewisse.  Gewisse is not a Saxon name. It is a Celtic name that came to mean the 'Confederates' (that is,  a confederation of Celts and English).  During this tribe's expansion they encountered the Jutes that inhabited the Isle of Wight.  The Jutes had always had their own independent kingdom and were not about to allow anyone to become their overlords.  In the struggle that followed, the Gewisse exterminated the Jutish ruling dynasty and slaughtered more than a thousand families!  After this horrific event the 'The Confederates' became known as the West Saxons (Westseaxna).  But the origins of the West Saxons were so obscure that its chroniclers felt the need to adapt for their own purposes the established traditions of the Jutes, including much of their genealogy.  Like all the other Germanic kingdoms in England, they began to claim descent from the Anglian dynasty that originated in Scandinavia.   All of these tribes traced their descent from the Norse God Odin (Wodan). - After the surviving Jutes were absorbed into the 'Confederation', they continued to form an important element of the Saxon tribes.  For example, a young woman of royal Jutish blood became Queen of the West Saxons c830.  This woman of Scandinavian descent gave her husband four sons.  The youngest she named Alfred, but we know him as King Alfred the Great.  Alfred proudly claimed to be descended from the Jutes and the Goths of Scandinavia. - The oldest written record in English, the laws of a 7th century West Saxon king, describes his subjects as 'Englishmen', and 'Welshmen'. He never called them 'Saxons'. Saxon only became a national name for the southern territories because it was the custom of their British neighbors to refer to all the English as Saxons. Saesnaeg and Sasanach are the modern Welsh and Irish words for "English". Even the Venerable Bede was under the influence of Celtic tradition when he referred to the 'Saxons' of southern England. Bede was also aware of how the Celtic peoples used 'Saxon' as a term of abuse and, in reaction, felt the need to emphasize their importance! - In his work Germania written in 98 AD the Roman historian Tacitus does not even mention the Saxons (he did, however, write about the Angles). - During the late 200s and the 300s AD, the Romans established forts in Britain along the Litus Saxonicum, or the Saxon Shore. Their use of the term Saxon in this case included all sea-faring Germanic pirates, not a specific Germanic tribe. Hundreds of years later the term Viking was used in the same sense and included not only Danes, but Norwegians and Swedes as well. - Writing in the mid-500s, the greatest of the later Greek historians, Procopius, tells us that the residents of Britain were the Britons, the Frisians, and the Angles. He never mentioned anything about a tribe called the Saxons. It is believed that he got this information from the English themselves! - Only one ancient authority indicated the continental territory of the Saxons.  In c150 A.D. Ptolemy wrote that the Saxons lived "on the neck of the Cimbric peninsula", territory that was actually part of Angeln. - After King Arthur (or perhaps Ambrosius Aurelianus?) defeated the Germanic tribes at Mons Badonicus, there was a reverse migration of the English back to the continent. Their new neighbors, the Romanized Franks, inherited from the Romans the same tendency as did the Britons, that is to call all the seafaring Germanics 'Saxon' regardless of their origin. German scholars believe that the duchy of Saxony was actually created by English immigrants that were thwarted in their attempt to expand their settlements in southern Britain. The area that they settled was eventually called Saxony. But these 'Saxons' left behind Anglian artifacts and place-names! Procopius wrote that the Angles were so prolific that every year the surplus of their population would arrive from Britain to be resettled by the Franks in northern Germany. He never called them Saxons, only Angles. - German archaeologists refuse to label any cultural complex in northern Germany as "Saxon". There were so many different tribes in this area during the Migration Period that they refer to these artifacts as belonging to a "Mixed Group" instead. Where a British archaeologist rubber-stamps an object as 'Saxon', a German archaeologist might see influences belonging to the Chauci, Suebi, or Frisian tribes. There were basically two types of Anglian settlers: those that came directly from their Anglian homes in Denmark and those that traveled first to the Elbe-Weser area to combine with other tribes such as the Frisian, Chauci, and Suebi. They were the hybrid people that have been rubber-stamped as 'Saxon'! - Finally, the 'Saxons' considered themselves to be of Anglian stock. No Angle considered himself to be of Saxon stock. The experiences of the Angles and their related Scandinavian tribes follow on the Next Page. Or, go to thePrevious Page.