ANGLO-SAXONS (450-1066 )
The enemies of the Romanized Britons
closed in upon them from every side. Fierce tattooed tribesmen rampaged down
from Scotland; other marauders sailed across the turbulent Irish Sea in their
light skin-and-wood boats called curraghs, massacring the farmers and fishermen
along the western coasts; while, surging through the waters of the North Sea,
came the shallow-draught ships of the Saxons, users of the seax or
short-sword, and their northern neighbours , the Jutes , who fished and farmed
in what is now southern Denmark, and the Germanic tribe, the Angles, who were
to give their name to the English people.
Fair
men with long hair and beards, clothed in thick, coarse shirts and trousers, in
cloaks to which skins were sewn by their women to give them extra warmth when
they were used as blankets at night, these raiders from across the North Sea
carried iron-spiked spears, battle-axes and round wooden shields covered with
hide as well as short-swords. Ruthless, violent men exulting in their animal
energy, driving their victims before them like terrified sheep, as their war
horns and savage shouts spread terror along the coasts, they pillaged and
looted, raped and murdered, then sailed home again to their homes on the Continental
mainland. But soon, tempted by the good farmlands of Britain, they began to
settle in the island, establishing small communities of rough huts around the
wooden halls of their thanes.
In
446 the Britons made a final, forlorn plea for help from Rome; then, since no
help was forthcoming, they turned —or so it seems from the confused and
incomplete records of these times — to a powerful chieftain, Vortigern, who proposed
bringing over as mercenaries a strong Saxon war party. These men, led apparently
by two Jutish chiefs named Hengist and Horsa, established themselves on the
Isle of Thanet, an area of rich farmland off the Kentish coast. At first all
went well; but then the settlers, calling over friends and reinforcements,
demanded more and more land and more generous payments until at length the
quarrels between them and the Britons flared into open war. The Britons were
defeated; the Saxons advanced; and, according to the Venerable Bede, the
Northumbrian monk whose History is our chief source of knowledge for
this period, the countryside and towns were alike devastated: ‘None remained to
bury those who had suffered a cruel death. A few wretched survivors captured in
the hills were butchered wholesale, and others, desperate with hunger, came
out and surrendered to the enemy for food, although they were doomed to
lifelong slavery even if they escaped instant massacre. Some fled overseas in
their misery; others, clinging to their homeland, eked out a wretched and
fearful existence.
This
description is probably too highly coloured in its picture of woeful
desolation; but certain it is that these were cruel times and that, rather than
endure them, several families escaped across the Channel to the old Roman
province of Armorica in the first of three stages of migration which eventually
gave Celtic language as well as the name of Brittany to this Atlantic peninsula
of France. Other families apparently escaped to the west of Britain where a
tribal leader named Ambrosius, evidently of Roman descent, offered shelter to
the fugitives and to all those prepared to take up arms in defence of the old
culture. While the invaders continued to advance — one band of immigrants
settling down in the kingdom of the South Saxons, which has given its name to the present-day county of Sussex,
others establishing the kingdoms of the East Saxons (Essex) and of the West
Saxons (Wessex) — further to the west along the borders of Wales and in
Dumnonia, the peninsula occupied today by the counties of Devon and Cornwall,
Roman Britain contrived to survive.
According
to Gildas, a sixth-century chronicler who emigrated to Wales from Scotland
where his father’s estates were being constantly overrun by Pictish marauders;
the Romanized Britons and British tribes threatened by the Saxon invaders
flocked to Ambrosius’s banner ‘as eagerly as bees when a storm is brewing’.
Presumably to protect themselves from the foreign marauders, and their cattle
from raids by other British tribes, they built a series of earthworks, among
them the Wansdyke, a massive ridge that stretches fifty miles from Inkpen in
what is now Berkshire, across Savernake Forest and the Marlborough Downs to the
Bristol Channel; and, behind this earthwork, they seem to have withstood attack
and even to have won the occasional battle. It was at this time that there
arose the legend of the mighty King Arthur, champion of the British, noble
knight and courageous warrior, who, as Ambrosius ‘s successor, stood firm
against his people’s enemies. He fought twelve great battles against the
Saxons, so the Welsh monk Nennius recorded, and ‘in all these battles stood out
as victor’.
Whether
or not King Arthur lived it is impossible now to say. But that there came to
the fore at this time a British cavalry leader of extraordinary prowess there
seems to be little doubt; and of the power and fascination of the Arthurian
legend and of his Round Table of heroic warriors there can be no doubt at all.
Places named after him can still be found the length and breadth of the
country: no other name in Britain is encountered so often, except that of the
Devil. And from time out of mind the site of Camelot, King Arthur’s court, has
been identified as that of a yellow sandstone hill, Cadbury Castle, which
rises in the heart of the quiet gentle countryside of Somerset. Here in recent
years have been discovered fragments of pottery similar to those unearthed at
Tintagel in Cornwall — where King Arthur is supposed to have been born — and
splinters of glass of a type imported from the Continent in the sixth century
as well as the outlines of what seems to have been a large feasting hall of the
same date.
The
last of the twelve victories ascribed by Nennius to King Arthur, ‘Commander in
the Battles’, was apparently fought between 490 and 520 at Mount Badon which is
believed to have been somewhere in Dorset or Wiltshire. This great victory, in
which ‘nine hundred and sixty men fell in a single onslaught of Arthur’s,’
apparently brought peace for a time. But the encroachment of the Saxons across
the island could not finally be resisted; and, before the end of the sixth
century, Roman Britain was all but forgotten as Anglo-Saxon England began to
take shape.
In
the north the kingdom of Nortbumbria — one of the seven kingdoms, or Heptarchy
established by the Angles and Saxons — extended its boundaries to the west;
while, in the Midlands, the kingdom of Mercia assumed control over tracts of
land so vast that by the end of the eighth century its ruler, King Offa — who
built the great earthwork known as Qffa’s Dyke along his western borders to
keep out the Welsh — controlled for a long time virtually all central, eastern
and south-eastern England. In the south the kingdom of Wessex took control of
Devon and Cornwall as well as the lands of the South and East Saxons; and, at
the beginning of the ninth century, under their King, Egbert, the West Saxons
defeated the Mercians and even laid claim to authority over the lands north of
the Trent. When the Northumbrians submitted to him and took him for their
master in 829, Egbert could reasonably consider himself overlord of all the
English.
The
confederation of the different kingdoms was a very loose one, though; and
Egbert’s dominion over it was far from secure. He had no central government and
no means of raising an army well disciplined enough to defeat England’s new
enemies from overseas. These were the Northmen, Norwegian Vikings and Danes,
tall fair warriors and pirates, as hungry for land as the ancestors of the
English had been four centuries before. At first they came as raiders in their
high-prowed ships, ravaging and looting along the coasts, sailing home to
winter in their fjords. But then they came to settle, sailing up the
Thames, wading ashore in East Anglia and on the coasts of Northumbria, pagan
men as ready to beat in the skulls of defenceless monks as to cut down the
English farmers who were assembled in their fighting forces known as fyrds to
resist the approaches of what the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers described as the
‘great heathen host’.
Christianity
had come to England long before. Towards the end of the sixth century,
Ethelbert, King of Kent, had ridden from his capital to the coast to meet
Augustine, the Prior of St Andrew’s Monastery in Rome, who had been sent by the
Pope to convert the heathen English to Christianity. Afraid of the stranger’s
magic, the King had received him in the open air but , soon persuaded by
his sincerity, he had allowed him to preach to his people and within a few
months Ethelbert had become a Christian himself. He provided Augustine
with a house for his followers in Canterbury and in 597 allowed him to
be consecrated Bishop of the English.
Seven
years later another missionary from Rome, Meltius , had been established as Bishop in London where King
Ethelbert had built for him a church which was dedicated to St Paul. But
Mellitus had found the staunchly pagan Londoners far more intractable than
Augustine had found the people of Kent and, after the death of his royal
patron, the men of London had driven their Bishop out of the city gates and had
returned to their old religion and their former priests.
Christianity,
however, was gaining a strong hold elsewhere in England where the gospel was
spread not only by missionaries from the Continent and their followers but also
by Celtic missionaries from Scotland and Ireland and from the holy island of
Lindisfarne which St Aidan, a monk from Iona, had been given by Oswald, the
Christian King of Northumbrja. The missionaries who came from Rome held that
the Pope’s authority was supreme, the Celtic evangelists that Christian belief
did not require a final earthly arbiter. There was little agreement between the
two factions who differed even upon the calendar that sealed the date for
Easter; so in 664 a conference was held at Whitby in Yorkshire where a house
for monks and nuns had been founded a few years before by St Hilda, great-niece
of the King of Northumbria. This Synod of Whitby decided in general favour of
the Roman missionaries, foreshadowing closer ties with the Continent as well as
the organization of the church into bishoprics, largely unchanged to this day,
by such Christian leaders as the Greek, St Theodore, who was appointed
Archbishop of Canterbury by the Pope in 668 and who called the first Council of
a united English Church in 672 at Hertford, a demonstration of ecclesiastical
unity that served as a model for a political unity not yet achieved.
As Christianity spread in England,
churches were built all over the island. Most were constructed of split
tree trunks which have long since disappeared but some were of stone, among
them the original church of All Hallows by the Tower, the Northamptonshire
churches of Brixworth and Earls Barton, and the little early eighth-century
church of St Laurence, Bradford-on-Avon. Monasteries and abbeys were also being
built, minsters, chapels and oratories; and as the Church received
bequests and grants of land so its riches and influence grew year by year.
It
was this increasingly Christian England, slowly evolving into a unified state,
which was threatened by the Vikings and the Danes who, well established in the
north, were by the middle of the ninth century posing a threat to the Saxon
kingdom of Wessex whose capital was at Winchester.
Here
a remarkable young man had come to the throne in 871. This was Alfred, scholar,
lawgiver, warrior and king, the first great statesman to emerge clearly from
the mists of early English history. Of his physical appearance little can be
said with confidence, but his biographer and friend, Asser, Bishop of
Sherborne, painted a portrait of a man of exceptional gifts, devout and humane,
devoted to the welfare of his people, as brave in battle as he was studious in
scholarship, always careful to make the best use of his time so that he could
continue with his studies and translations without neglecting the cares and
duties of government, even inventing a water clock to help him in this
endeavour.
In
battle against the Danes at Ashdown in the Berkshire hills Alfred fought ‘like
a wild boar’. But, although his enemies were here defeated, the Danish
incursions into England were soon resumed; and for a time Alfred, with a small
company of faithful followers, was driven into hiding from the invaders on the
Isle of Athelney in the Somerset marshes, moving ‘under difficulties through
woods and into inaccessible places’ and giving rise to the famous legend that
he sought shelter in a cottage where a woman scolded the unrecognized fugitive
for allowing her cakes to burn by the fire.
Gradually,
however, the number of his supporters increased; and by 878 Alfred was able to
bring the Danes to battle once more and to defeat them decisively. He obliged
them to remain within an area bound by Watling Street known as the Danelaw, and
persuaded their leader, Guthrum, and several of his leading warriors, to be baptized
as Christians. Taking advantage of the temporary peace, Alfred reorganized the fyrd,
satisfying the complaints of men who had had to leave their farms for
indeterminate periods to serve as soldiers; and he built up a strong navy to
patrol the English Channel, forcing many would-be invaders to turn their
attentions to northern France where their settlements became known as Normandy,
the land of the men from the north.
Alfred,
left for the moment in peace, turned his own attention to the restoration of
English Christian culture, repairing pillaged churches, founding schools,
setting scholars to work on the compilation of histories and the translation
of texts, himself translating Bede’s History — which celebrates the
English people as a chosen race — grieving that men ‘in search of learning and
wisdom’ had taken to going abroad ‘when once they had come to England in search
of such things’, and looking forward to the day when ‘all the youth now in
England, born of free men, who have the means they can apply to it, should
be devoted to learning’.
When Alfred died in 900 England was
united as never before. By saving his own kingdom from the Scandinavian threat,
he had given encouragement to others and had made the West Saxon cause the
cause of England. His successors did what they could to continue his work. His
son, Edward the Elder, as skilled a soldier as his father though not so
dedicated a scholar, and his formidable daughter, Ethelfleda, wife of Ethelred
of Mercia, who ruled that kingdom after her husband’s death as ‘Lady of the
Mercians’, kept the Danes at bay and constructed a system of defences by
building burghs or fortified settlements later to be known as boroughs,
at strategic points, including Bakewell in Derbyshire, Tamworth and Stafford,
Hertford and Warwick. Edward’s son, Edmund, and his grandson, Edgar, gradually
realized Alfred’s dream of a unified England. The Danelaw was reconquered and
in 973 Edgar was not only accepted as King of the English by S axons and Danes
alike, but also acknowledged as their overlord by kings in Scotland and Wales.
During the reign of King Edgar, ‘the Peaceable’, between 959 and 975 there
was a late flowering of Anglo-Saxon art and culture as well as an increase in
the number of monastic houses for both men and women under the direction of St
Dunstan, the scholar, musician and craftsman, maker of organs, bells and metalwork,
who became Abbot of Glastonbury in 940 and Archbishop of Canterbury twenty
years later.
King Edgar’s descendants were, however,
ill-suited to the task of defending England from renewed Viking invasions.
His eldest son, Edward, was stabbed to
death while he was still a boy; another son, Ethelred, who was crowned by St
Dunstan when he was barely ten years old, was to be nicknamed ‘the Unready’ or
‘the Ill-advised’. His willingness to buy off the invaders with bribes known as
Danegeld angered his own people — who were heavily taxed to meet the cost of
the payments — while failing to placate the Danes whose King, Cnut, took over
the throne in 1016, incorporating England into a Scandinavian empire which
included Norway as well as Denmark.
England
prospered under Cnut, a firm, just ruler who took pains to conciliate the
English, marrying Ethelred’s widow and becoming a Christian, much to the
pleasure of the monks of Ely who ‘sang merrily as the King rowed thereby’. In
his time Danes and Englishmen learned to live more amicably together — though
the riches and power of Danish earls were the cause of much jealousy — and
there began to emerge the counties of England as we know them today, an England
divided into shires with shire courts and shire reeves, or sheriffs,
responsible for administering laws as comprehensive as any in the early
medieval world.
Most
people still lived in country villages. But perhaps as many as ten per cent
were now town-dwellers; and several towns, notably Winchester, Norwich and
York, were growing fast, as were ports like Southampton from which the English
exported their textiles, metalwork and foodstuffs, as well as the slaves and
the hunting dogs for which they had long been celebrated. London’s population
had risen to about fifteen thousand.
It was natural that such a country
should continue to attract the eye of foreign adventurers, despite the strong
fleet that Cnut maintained by renewing the annual tax of the Danegeld. And
after the short reigns of his two sons and the accession to the throne of
Ethelred the Unready’s son, the white-skinned, white-haired Edward — known
because of his piety as ‘the Confessor’ — greedy eyes were turned to the
kingdom of this indolent man who seemed more concerned with the building of a
great Abbey at Westminster than with affairs of state.
As
soon as it was learned that Edward was dying no fewer than four men laid claim
to the English throne, the King of Norway, the Duke of Normandy, and two
brothers of Edward’s Queen, Edith, one of whom, Tostig, the deposed Earl of
Northumbria, was living in exile in Flanders. The other of these two brothers
was Harold Godwinson, the hereditary ruler or Earl of Wessex, who immediately
took advantage of his rivals’ absence from the country to have himself crowned
in the new Abbey of Westminster on the very day that its founder was buried
there.
Shortly
afterwards Tostig’s men invaded Kent, then sailed up the east coast to pour
ashore in Lincolnshire. Defeated by local levies, Tostig retreated north to
await the arrival of the King of Norway whose Scandinavian warriors were soon
sailing up the Humber towards York. Informed of this second invasion, King
Harold, who was in the south preparing to resist the expected attack from
Normandy, rushed north, won a brilliant victory at Stamford Bridge and, leaving
both his brother, Tostig, and the King of Norway dead, brought his exhausted
troops back to the Sussex Downs to face the army of the Duke of Normandy who
had landed his knights at Pevensey. On 14 October 1066 the two armies clashed
in a hard-fought battle north of Hastings at Battle. Towards the end of the day
Harold was killed, shot through the eye by an arrow as tradition supposes, then
hacked to death by Norman knights, one of whom cut off his leg, an unknightly
deed for which Duke William dismissed him from his service. Anglo-Saxon England
perished with Harold’s death.
NATIVES
ROMAN BRITAIN
NORMAN RULE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET
Crown and People Twilight of Middle Ages Tudor
England Early Stuart England
EMPIRE
AND INDUSTRY THE AGE OF REFORM 20th century