Welch, Martin, Discovering Anglo-Saxon England, (Great Britain, 1992). Boat burials are found only in England and Scandinavia. They originated in Norway and then spread to Sweden and England. Although there are Frankish artifacts at Sutton Hoo, the helmet is definitely Scandinavian and does not belong to a continental type as found in Frankish and Alamanic graves. The author writes that the helmet was "of Scandinavian type, which in turn was based on a fourth-century Roman cavalry parade helmet form." In addition to the boat burials at Sutton Hoo, there are canoe burials at Snape in Suffolk. They are very similar to the 2nd and 3rd century canoe burials on the Danish island of Bornholm.
There is a growing belief among scholars that the number of Germanic settlers was small and the British natives formed the majority of the population. Regarding this ridiculous idea the author writes: "If only a few Anglo-Saxon immigrants actually crossed the North Sea, it is difficult to see why English became the dominant language in lowland Britain, replacing Celtic dialects there."...and..."Language history also suggests that the number of Anglo-Saxon migrants may have been considerable."...and..."It may be that both the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians in the Viking period settled in some numbers and as farmers working the land themselves rather than just as landlords. This may help to explain the renaming of the landscape and the triumph of English over Celtic dialects."
Higham, N. J., An English Empire, Bede and the Early Anglo-Saxon Kings, (Manchester, and New York, 1995). The author writes: "If any English community should be expected, c.700, to prefer 'Saxon' to 'English', it must surely be the West Saxons: that they had adopted 'English' by this date suggests that it was already the generally accepted term throughout English-speaking Britain."
Whittock, Martyn J., The Origins of England, (Totowa, New Jersey, 1986). Very well written. Whittock writes: "The general name 'English' is a better one than the more popular one of 'Anglo-Saxons'."..."If any form of national title is appropriate it is that of English (and England)."..."The collective name English is clearly much more appropriate than the alternative one of Anglo-Saxon."
Morris, John, The Age of Arthur, (New York, 1973). The following are excerpts from The Age of Arthur: "Bede's countrymen called themselves English from the 7th century onward, Angli when they wrote in Latin. Saxones and Saxonia were literary affectations, as common in Northumbria as in Wessex, and were never used to distinguish Saxons from Angles; the East Saxons felt no closer kin to the West Saxons than to the East Angles, and no individual Englishman is ever termed a Saxon in his own language."
"...no form of Engle-Sexe or the like ever took root in the English language. The whole nation was English, though the territorial name Engle Land did not come into general use until the 11th century and was then first used to distinguish the English from the Danish."
"These words are more than curiosities of language. They show what the early English felt about themselves. They sensed their national identity sooner and more keenly than the peoples of Europe..."
"...it was not until the 20th century that the unhappy hybrid 'Anglo-Saxon' altogether prevailed, under the influence of historians who pretended that English history begins with the Norman Conquest, and welcomed a word that divorced the pre-Conquest English from their descendants."
"The main direction of the migrations was from north to south; to later chroniclers in Italy, Scandinavia was the 'womb of nations', the original home of Goths, Langobards and others." Morris then implies that the Saxons may originally have been one of these tribes. The Saxons regarded themselves to be of Anglian stock, not the other way around.
"The early history of the West Saxons is disguised by the ingenuity of the authors of the Saxon Chronicle. They needed to pretend that their own royal house was as ancient, as venerable, and as coherent as the dynasty of the Mercian Angles whom they replaced. Their scholars did their best, but the evidence before them was stubborn and plentiful, and could not be compressed in the doctrine they proclaimed. Their own mutual contradictions, the numerous statements by Bede, and the evidence of the charters and many other texts disprove their thesis."
Reynolds, Susan. Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900 - 1300, Second Edition, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 266. "The Norman Conquest did not create a new kingdom and the modern use of the tautological expression 'Anglo-Saxon England' is misleading in its implication of a change of categories in 1066. 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 where inhabitants felt themselves to be a single people."
Musset, Lucien, The Germanic Invasions, translated by Edward and Columba James, (translation published by Elek Books Limited, and originally published by Presses Universitaires de France under the title Les Invasions: Les Vagues Germaniques, 1965) p. 109. The author writes: "The colonization of England stands out as a special case in the history of the great migrations...it was effected not by a military elite, as with most of the barbarian kingdoms of the continent, but by whole populations. In the British Isles the effects of the migraions of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries were at once much more deeply rooted and much more lasting than elsewhere in Europe."
Lacey, Robert and Danziger, Danny, The Year 1000, what life was like at the turn of the first millennium, An Englishman's World, (Boston, New York, London, 1999). The authors' have a bit of advise for us all: "What C.S. Lewis called the 'snobbery of chronology' encourages us to presume that just because we happen to have lived after our ancestors and can read books which give us some account of what happened to them, we must also know better than them."Previous Page......
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