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

 

 

 

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