Anglo-Saxons is the collective name given to Germanics from the North Sea coast of Europe who invaded and settled in large areas of southern and eastern Britain during the first millennium C. E. As the imperial government of the ROMANS in Britain was waning during the late fourth and fifth centuries, Frisians living along the North Sea coast in present-day Netherlands, Angles of Schleswig, Saxons from the lower Elbe and Weser region and inland toward central Germany, and Jutes from present-day Denmark, partly because they were under pressure from other Germanic tribes on the move through Europe and partly because flooding had considerably reduced arable land acreage in coastal areas, began attempting to settle in Britain. In this process they contested for territory and displaced the native Britons, including the Cornish, many of whom fled to Brittany, where they became known as Bretons. The Saxons are most often mentioned in Roman contemporary sources, but this name was probably applied fairly indiscriminately to any raiders to Britain from across the North Sea. The Anglo-Saxons were mostly unsuccessful in invading the territory of the Welsh in western Britain, that of the PiCTS and Scots (ancient) in northern Britain, and that of the Irish across the Irish Sea, but they had established kingdoms in southern and eastern Britain by the sixth century.
The Angles, one of the many Germanic tribes whose distinct identity was largely lost after their migration, nevertheless have the distinction of giving their name to both a region of the British Isles and a language.
The name Angle had an even more exalted transformation when, in the late sixth century, Pope Gregory I the Great saw some Anglian slave boys for sale in Rome. Struck by their fair skin and blond hair, he asked what nation they belonged to. On being told “Angles,” Gregory, fond of punning, said they were messengers (in Latin, Angeli) of god. Gregory’s pun gave rise to the word “angel,” its variants in Germanic languages (such as the German Engel) used to connote the spiritual beings mentioned in the Bible as attendants and servants of God.
Origins
In common with the other Germanic people living in the northernmost regions of western and central Europe, inhabitants of the region where the tribes comprising the Anglo-Saxons would later emerge experienced the series of climatic and socioeconomic changes that moved through Europe after the end of the last Ice Age later than peoples farther south and east did. In addition they escaped the often disruptive effects of direct contact with the civilizations of the Mediterranean world until the beginning of the first century C. E.
On the other hand, the Angles, Frisians, Jutes, and Saxons were perhaps among the least isolated of all the Germanic peoples because of their coastal location on the North Sea, which had given them contact with the Atlantic coastal trading network already in the early
ANGLO-SAXONS
Location:
Northern Germany; coastal Netherlands; Denmark; Britain
Time period:
First to 11th century c. E.
Ancestry:
Germanic
Language:
Germanic
Bronze Age. Even among them, however, social stratification remained minimal, and society continued to be organized along familial and tribal lines.
When the Romans extended their empire northward to the English Channel coast, with its border along the Rhine, trade had the most impact on Angles, Saxons, and Frisians living along the Roman border. These groups began to develop a market economy in which coins were desired, not simply for the metal they were made of, but as a medium of exchange. An important component of this trade was in slaves from the Baltic regions. Social stratification began to increase and many market centers appeared and grew.
The experience of the Jutes, farther away from the border, was different. There a more archaic prestige goods economy was practiced, rather similar (although on a lesser scale) to that of the Celtic Hallstatt chiefs in southern Germany and eastern France of the mid-first millennium b. c.e. (see Celts). In this trade local chieftains, facilitating the flow of goods between the Romans and the hinterlands to their east, grew rich.
For some 200 years this situation remained more or less stable. Then the societies in the hinterlands inland from the North Sea coast Germanics by the middle of the third century C. E. began to impinge upon them. An aggressive warrior society had grown there, partly as a means to procure slaves and partly as a result of competition for the relatively few prestige goods from Rome that filtered in to them from afar. The inherent instability of warrior societies, coupled with population increases, seems to have encouraged tribal migrations on a par with
Those among the Celts nearly a thousand years earlier. Previous to the actual migrations, the rich trade along the North Sea coast had begun to suffer increasingly from pirate attacks during the third century, possibly by warrior groups from the hinterlands, including some among the Saxons themselves living inland from the coast. These raids may have disrupted the flow of goods significantly enough to destabilize the regional socioeconomy, and that destabilization may have contributed to the disrupting migrations of the fifth century.
The language of the Anglo-Saxons was Old English, part of the Anglo-Frisian branch of the West Germanic languages. There were four major dialects of Old English in the four major kingdoms: the Northumbrian, the Mercian, the West Saxon, and the Kentish. The first two evolved from the dialect of Anglia, the West Saxon from that of Wessex, and the Kentish from that of the Jutes. Most of the extant literature in Old English, including Beowulf, is in the West Saxon dialect. Until about the 12th century Anglo-Saxons in England used a form of the Germanic runic script called futhark from its first six letters, which may have been developed from the Etruscan alphabet of northern Italy (see Etruscans) and was perhaps also later influenced by the Latin alphabet.
Germanic peoples from northern coastal Europe had made themselves known in Britain centuries before they began larger-scale incursions. The Saxons, especially, had been raiding the south and east coasts of Britain since the third century C. E. The Romans in response built substantial coastal defenses and reorganized the military by creating an office called comes, or count, who was not permanently stationed in any one territory but had a mobile command. The count could take troops to any location along the coast that was being attacked. This office is mentioned in a contemporary document called the Notitia dignitatum (Latin, worthy of record). The Notitia records that the military commander known as the Count of the Saxon Shore controlled nine forts, the names of which are given as well as the units garrisoned in each. Coin hoards dating from 270 to 285 found in southeast Britain suggest growing concerns with local security.
The Romans in Britain and Gaul successfully contained the Germanic incursions of the third century with their defenses on the British coast and along the Rhine, and the situation remained stable for more than 100 years. Since the first century c. E. Germanics had been recruited into the Roman army, after their service receiving rewards of land in the many territories of the empire. In the fourth century Germanic foederati (federates), allied troops, were invited to settle in Britain as a reward for their service, a possible source for the early medieval tradition that the Germanic tribes, in particular those led by a Jutish leader named Hengist, had been invited in the mid-fifth century to Britain by a British leader named Vortigern, who needed allies in his war against the Picts and Scots.
The story of Vortigern, mentioned by the sixth-century British writer Gildas, served Gildas’s purpose as a cautionary tale on the iniquities of early British leaders and satisfied the taste for the dramatic of early medieval readers. However, although his account may have some basis in fact, the impetus for the Anglo-Saxon invasions was far broader than the actions of any single leader. In winter 406-407 Germanic peoples began a mass movement across the Rhine into Gaul, overwhelming the Roman defenders. In response, Roman troops were withdrawn from Britain (which had already been depleted of troops by a Roman general named Magnus Maximus in 383, who had withdrawn them in a failed attempt to conquer Gaul). In 410 the emperor Flavius Honorius issued an order to Roman Britons, presumably in response to a call for help, to take up arms in self-defense. Roman Britain was indeed being attacked by the Picts from the north and Scots from the northwest; for the heart of Roman Britain, which comprised the southeast, the most pressing need probably was help against the Angles, Frisians, Jutes, and Saxons. It seems likely that some of the socioeconomic pressures, outlined previously, which had caused Vandals, Burgundii, and Suebi to cross the Rhine, were instrumental in causing the migrations of the Anglo-Saxons as well.
The Anglo-Saxons may have been spared the most immediate cause of the mass movements to their south—the incursions of the Huns into eastern Europe—for they seem not to have had a major impact on Britain in terms of conquest and migration until the sixth century. It is possible that Romano-Britons were able to hold them off for about a hundred years, although this period is a Dark Age in terms of reliable historical sources (see Britons, Welsh). The Anglo-Saxons’ initial impact may have been similar to that of the Vikings 400 years later: coastal raiding leading to establishment of settlements used as pirate bases. They established some of these in Gaul, as well, by the mouths of the Garonne and Loire Rivers. in contrast to the situation in Gaul and Italy, however, there was no seamless transition from Roman to Anglo-Saxon governance, with the latter taking over Roman institutions. One exception may have been Northumbria, where the Angles’ seizing of the Romano-British palace of Yeavering suggests an acceptance of Romano-British institutions. The same may have been true in York. But in the south, Roman towns became deserted ruins (a process that had begun before the end of the Roman era) and the practice of Christianity disappeared. The native Britons probably were enslaved or reduced to servile status, but after several generations of intermarriage, at least among commoners, they seem to have been absorbed into Anglo-Saxon culture. After about the seventh century the term English began to be used for all of the people in Anglo-Saxon-ruled areas (see Britons).
By the end of the sixth century the core territories of the different tribes had been established: The Jutes settled in present-day Kent; the Saxons in Essex, Sussex, and Wessex; and the Angles in East Anglia, Middle Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria. The earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdom to emerge was that of Kent, where, according to tradition, the Jutish brothers Hengist and Horsa first landed. Kent reached its height under King Aethelberht in the late sixth century, but further territorial expansion, crucial for the maintenance of political power
I. ¦ ¦ . Ik
A Saxon king and queen, Sebert and Athelgoda, are buried in this tomb. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs [LC-USZ62-n3136])
Division
Alfred: Man of Action and letters
Alfred (or Aelfred), who came to be called Alfred the Great, was born in 849. As the son of King Aethelwulf, he succeeded his older brothers Aethelbald, Aethelberht, and Aethelred I, the last of whom he assisted as secun-darius (viceroy) in battles against the Viking Danes. In 871 C. E. he assumed the Wessex throne. In the 870s—880s, he successfully defended England against Danish armies, recapturing London from them in 886. As a result, he became king of all of England.
As king of Wessex, Alfred promoted education and literacy among the clergy and youths of the court. He was a thoughtful legislator who sought justice for the weak and established new legislative codes influenced by the old codes of earlier leaders, Aethelbert of Kent, Ine ofWessex, and Offa of Mercia. He, as did his father, defended Christianity and sought to preserve and integrate the faith into his centralized monarchy. He created a navy and, an effective diplomat, built alliances with neighboring Welsh kings.
A scholar in his own right, Alfred mastered Latin and translated many works. He has been called the presiding genius of Old English prose. He was a great champion of learning and believed that the depredations of the Vikings were a judgment sent by God on a people whose lack of learning prevented them from knowing the will of God. He deplored the decay of Latin and made its study mandatory for churchmen. On the other hand he was concerned with English literacy and wished all young freemen of adequate means to learn to read their native tongue. He thought it important that people have access to books in their own language. Another important contribution to knowledge was his sponsorship of the compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
Alfred had one daughter, Aethelflaed, and a son, Edward the Elder, who supported his father against the Vikings and inherited the Wessex throne upon his death in 899.
At this stage of Anglo-Saxon history, was blocked by the kingdom of Sussex to the west by the seventh century, and Kentish kings lost dominance. Sussex in turn was losing ground to the kingdom of Wessex, which during the sixth century had gained valuable territory in western Britain and north of the Thames.
In the seventh century Aethelfrith, the Anglian king of the former British kingdom of Berenicia, united his kingdom with that of Deira of the Britons to form Northumbria, exiling the Deiran prince Edwin, who sought refuge at the court of Raedwald of East Anglia. Aethelfrith offered Raedwald a bribe to murder Edwin; instead, Raedwald invaded Northumbria, killing Aethelfrith and installing Edwin as king. Thereafter Northumbria’s power grew as it expanded its territory northward—rivaled, however, by the growing power of the midland kingdom of Mercia, with which Northumbrian kings struggled for dominance. Mercian kings were able to expand their territories westward toward, but not into Wales, and they annexed territory from Wessex. Meanwhile the power of Northumbria suffered a disastrous reverse when in 685 King Ecgfrith and his army were annihilated by the Picts at the Battle of Nechtansmere, ending Northumbrian expansion.
The weakening of Northumbria allowed the rise of Mercia, which reached its greatest power under Offa in the eighth century An able leader, Offa was the first Anglo-Saxon king to take important steps to foster trade in his kingdom, including reforming his coinage. He turned away from the practice among Anglo-Saxon kings of bolstering their political power through warfare alone, as he gave up attempting to expand his kingdom into Wales and instead, in 780, built a defensive dyke along his border with the Welsh kingdom of Powys.
From the mid-eighth century a succession of able kings in Wessex gradually increased its scope of influence. Wessex kings won important military victories over Mercians. King Ecgberht (Egbert) gained all of Devon and Cornwall and put Surrey, Sussex, and Kent permanently under West Saxon rule. Kings of Wessex also were successful against the Viking Danes, who during the ninth century attacked Britain with ever larger forces. Of all Anglo-Saxon kings, only those of Wessex were able to stand up to the Danes. The Danish incursions were largely (although not completely) ended after 878, when Alfred of Wessex (Alfred the Great) (see sidebar) defeated a large Danish army at the Battle of Edington. After their surrender the Danish Viking king, Guthrum, was baptized, with Alfred standing as sponsor; the following year the Danes settled in East Anglia known as the Danelaw (Danish territory in England). In 886 Alfred recovered London and was accepted as overlord by all the English not subject to the Danes. Alfred reorganized his army; built ships and fortresses, planning to ring Wessex with them; and made the Welsh kings his allies.
In the 10 th century Wessex’s power continued to grow under Alfred’s son, Edward, who put down renewed Danish incursions into Wessex in the Battle of Tettenhall in 910 and moved against Vikings from Ireland who were attempting to conquer Northumbria. Edward also completed his father’s planned ring of fortresses. In 912 Edward and his sister, Aethelflaed, conducted separate campaigns into Danelaw and regained some lands. In 920 Edward received the submission of Raegnald, a Viking leader from Dublin who had conquered the city of York, along with that of the Scots and the Strathclyde Welsh, who were also campaigning in Northumbria, and of all the Northumbrians. In 927 Edward’s son, Athelstan, reconquered the remaining Danish-held territory and the kings of Wessex became kings of England as a whole. In the decades that followed, the last of the Hiberno-Norse forces were routed, and Northumbria was never in jeopardy again for the rest of the Anglo-Saxon period.
The unrest and political rivalries of the past resumed in the reign of Edward the Confessor, under whom powerful earls wrested de facto political power in England away from the Crown. Godwine, earl of Wessex and Edward’s father-in-law, together with his sons, was the chief of these. He and his family played a significant role in defending the realm and in pacifying the Welsh border but, in the old way, tried to use their success in war for political advantage, quarreling with Edward’s authority. Although Edward banished Godwine and his sons from England for defying royal authority in 1051, Godwine’s eldest son, Harold II (Harold Godwinson), invaded England the next year and forced the king to restore the family. Harold’s own power was weakened by rivalry with his brother, Tostig, who backed Harold III (Hardraade) of Norway as Edward’s successor.
The Arrival of the Normans
It was King Harold III’s and Tostig’s attempted invasion of England in 1066 when Edward died that, by distracting Harold from a far greater threat, abetted the victory of the Normans under William (William the Conqueror) at the Battle of Hastings. Harold was the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.
Although William was crowned king of England in 1066, this was just the beginning of his campaign to secure the country. Starting from his base in the southeast of England, William imposed Norman rule on the southwest, the Midlands, and Yorkshire in 1068, meeting little resistance and ordering castles built wherever he went. In 1069 multiple revolts culminated in an invasion by King Sweyn II of Denmark. William defeated the rebels and laid waste to the country between Nottingham and York, causing widespread famine in 1070. The last Anglo-Saxon rebel, Hereward the Wake, held out in the Lincolnshire fens until 1072.
In all about 10,000 Normans accompanied William and took over the country inhabited by about a million Anglo-Saxons. About 4,000 English earls were replaced by 200 of William’s barons. Not all Anglo-Saxons resisted; Edward the Confessor had many connections with Normandy, where he had spent time in exile and had Norman nobles in his court. Edward had at least considered making William his heir, and after the Norman Conquest, English church authorities accepted William as God’s chosen successor to Edward.
CULTURE (see also Germanics) Economy
Farming Crops of the Anglo-Saxons were little different from those of peoples of the Iron Age and Roman periods. Along with the bread wheat, spelt was still grown, as were barley and oats. Among the vegetables peas, leeks, and onions were grown. There were a black bean known as the Celtic bean and wild cabbage; also a white carrot and wild celery.
Fruits included gooseberry, currants (red, white, and black), wild blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, and elderberry. Crab apples, quinces, sloes, damsons, greengages, and pears grew wild or in orchards. Figs and grapes are known from the period. Reeds and sedges of various sorts and also the coppice strands of hazel and willow were all useful in the building industry, and flax could be used both for its oil and for the making of textiles. Woad, madder, weld, and other dye plants were then used to color the fabrics.
The farm animals of Anglo-Saxon England were, on the whole, smaller than modern varieties and less highly bred. Pigs, for example, were much shorter than the modern farm pig, with a more slender snout. We know from manuscript illustrations that the Anglo-Saxon pig had a curved back, the “hog-back” shape, showing its close relation to the wild boar.
Trade In the kingdom of Mercia, which comprised the whole of England south of the Humber Estuary, trade had became important by the early eighth century. Southampton and London were important trading centers, or wics, from the early 700s. Excavation has shown that defended settlements or prototowns developed also at Hereford, Worcester, Gloucester, Tamworth, Winchcombe, and elsewhere within the Mercian heartlands. Ipswich in East Anglia seems to have been fairly populous by the standards of the time, judging by the amount of seventh - and eighth-century pottery that has been found there; it was the only sizable town in the region. Much of the pottery was imported from the Rhineland, as well as glassware.
In the second half of the eighth century the Mercian king, Offa, further fostered trade by reforming the coinage, including minting silver coins, the first pennies, more useful in a market economy than gold. It is likely that Mercia’s towns were the focus of a new international market economy The weight and fineness of Mercian coins were comparable to those of coins made in mainland Europe during the eighth century, revealing a trade link. Certain Mercian goods, such as millstones made of volcanic lava, that have been found were traded across Europe from Tamworth to Poland.
Kings in this period who promoted trade are thought to have done so mostly to achieve a monopoly on the importation of prestige goods, such as wine or fine textiles, which they used to attract followers for their own political gain. The tolls they charged on imports were also an important source of wealth.
The Viking Danes, however, introduced trading on a large scale to East Anglia. After their arrival Ipswich was joined by two more cities, Norwich and Thetford. In the 10th century both cities quickly became huge by medieval standards.
Government and Society The Invaders The social organization of the invading Anglo-Saxons was simple. There was no centralized leadership; names that have come down to us, such as Hengist and Horsa, may be semimythical. Most of them arrived organized as small war bands and settler groups. The Anglo-Saxon invasion was not a wholesale migration like that on the mainland of the Visigoths or Vandals, but a more piecemeal process that took place over a longer period. The North Sea coastal zone, both in Britain and on the mainland, which had benefited greatly from trade with the Romans, changed considerably during the invasion period, with many settlements abandoned and never reoccupied. Many large cremation cemeteries fell into disuse after the mid-fifth century, attesting to large-scale population movements during this time.
Leadership among Germanic peoples before the migrations seems to have been organized into a hierarchy of tribal, provincial, and national leaders—high kings or overlords. The high king, in Old English the bretwealda, may have been elected only in times of emergency. The Anglo-Saxon scholar of the seventh and eighth centuries known as the Venerable Bede, describing Saxons on the mainland, said that they had no kings, but only “satraps,” and elected a war leader when danger threatened the whole people. Among the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, however, hereditary kings who ruled whole territories soon emerged and engaged in struggle with one another for ever larger kingdoms.
Developments in Britain The process of migration, which fractured old tribal groupings and was in general a tumultuous and probably traumatic affair, fostered the emergence of strong leaders whose power was mostly derived from their success in war. Such leaders were needed much more under the circumstances of invasion and conquest abroad than they were in the old homeland, where war had been no more serious than occasional cattle raiding.
The warrior in Germanic society began to attain a higher social status during and after the migrations than ever before, as attested by burials, which for the first time began to approach, in richness of grave goods, burials of the Celtic Hallstatt chiefs of south central Europe some 1,000 years before. The famous Sutton Hoo ship burial in Suffolk, for example, thought to be that of Raedwald, who was king of East Anglia in the early seventh century, is the richest grave ever found in Britain. The Old English poem Beowulf depicts the warrior’s life of fighting and feasting—fighting to achieve acts of heroism that could be celebrated while feasting—little different from the Celtic warrior ideal of the past. (Again we see the peoples of the north recapitulating social transformations that had occurred in central Europe centuries earlier, and in Homeric Greece, centuries before that.)
The Sutton Hoo burial gives a sense not only of the wealth of Anglo-Saxon kings, but of their wide-ranging cultural connections. The custom of ship burial is Scandinavian. The helmet and shield in the grave were made in Sweden; the sword may be of the Franks; some of the hanging bowls were British. Articles from Byzantium included silver bowls and spoons. The garnets that embellish the gold jewelry were definitely Frankish, as were the gold coins.
Symbiosis of Kings and Warriors Kings, to accumulate and retain power, had to attract the loyalty of warriors. They could do this with rich gifts (which in Germanic society imposed duties of loyalty and obligation on the recipient) and lavish feasts; perhaps most important was success in war, which provided both the wherewithal for gifts and feasts and, crucially, the opportunity for heroism. The inherent instability of this system lay in the continual need for war to gain both booty and lands, and only kings who were able to keep the cycle going prospered. The varying fortunes of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms illustrate the importance of this principle: Those who could continue to expand their frontiers were most successful. In the sixth century, before territorial boundaries had been firmly established, the southeastern kingdoms of Kent and Sussex had scope for military adventures and their kings remained powerful. By the seventh century they were hemmed in by Wessex and their power waned. Thereafter the kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria, which could expand westward and northward, were most successful.
Despite similarities between the Celtic and Germanic aristocratic societies, perhaps the essential difference between them was this expansionism of the latter, brought about by the social dislocations the Germanics experienced during their migrations. The difference is most clearly seen by comparing contemporary Irish and Anglo-Saxon kings. Although warfare was endemic in Ireland, it was on a much smaller scale than among the Anglo-Saxons. The different royal dynasties of Ireland, relatively unaffected by Rome or the turmoil caused by Rome’s collapse, had maintained a sort of equilibrium for centuries. (This situation was beginning to change, however, as some Irish dynasties took advantage of the demise of Roman authority to carve out territories in Britain, notably the DAl Riata in Scotland.) The primary role of the Irish king was not that of war leader, except for the purpose of protecting his people; rather, he was the spiritual leader and intercessor between his people and the gods. Irish society preserved many of the institutions that had existed in much of pre-Roman Europe. Anglo-Saxon society, however, was evolving the institutions of the future.
Evolution of Kingship Although a king’s political power was based on continual warfare, Anglo-Saxon kings after the seventh century, in part because of the growing influence of Christianity, began to assume a greater role than that of war leader. As elsewhere in Europe kings increasingly sought power without recourse to warfare and in fact were trying to stabilize their kingdoms and rein in the warrior class. Ine of Wessex and Offa of Mercia both promulgated law codes—Ine in 694—and
Offa’s building of a defensive dyke in 780 between his kingdom and the kingdom of Powys in Wales in all probability minimized friction between the kingdoms and stabilized his borders with minimal bloodshed. Alfred of Wessex was perhaps the greatest exemplar of this new type of king, successful in government as well as at war.
The Kin Group The kin group was an important social and legal institution; it had both rights and obligations that sometimes transcended those of individuals within the group. The kin group possessed certain rights in the land held by its members and also was responsible to any of its members who had suffered criminal wrong. In the case of murder, the kin had a duty to bring the guilty to justice, even in some circumstances to kill the wrongdoer. This was the practice of blood feud that Alfred sought to curb.
Social Stratification In common with that of other Germanic peoples, society among the Anglo-Saxons was strictly stratified into the aristocracy, each of whose members was termed an Aetheling (also spelled Atheling, or Etheling), free commoners called ceorls or churls, and slaves or semifree servants. Because the basis of justice in these violent societies was the “blood price” exacted from the kin of wrongdoers to be paid to the kin of the victims, on a par with fines for cattle stealing and the like, a man’s status in society was measured in pragmatic monetary terms startling to modern ideas. Each man had his “man price,” wergild in Old English. A free commoner was worth 200 shillings; an aristocrat was worth at least three times that. This valuation was even applied to the worth of a man’s oath in court, where the testimony of an aristocrat far outweighed that of a commoner.
After the Norman Conquest Many Anglo-Saxon political institutions survived long after the Norman takeover. Well into the 12th century, the whole structure of royal government remained fundamentally Anglo-Saxon: the king’s council, the royal seal and writing office, the shire system and the sheriffs, and the twofold royal revenue system consisting of the produce of royal estates and a direct tax levied on the landowning class.
The Norman Conquest affected the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy most immediately, but the process of turning free commoners into serfs— peasants bound to the land and a lord—accelerated under the Normans.
The Venerable Bede: Scholar and Saint
Born near present-day Durham in 672 or 673, the Anglo-Saxon historian and theologian Bede (also Baeda or Beda) was orphaned early in life and raised under the care of a Northumbrian nobleman, Benedict Biscop, who founded the Jarrow monastery where Bede spent his life. The library Benedict collected enabled Bede to study a broad range of subjects: Greek and Latin classics, Hebrew, prosody, mathematics, medicine, history, and what was known at the time of physical science. His greatest work was the Historia ecclesiastica gen-tis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation). Bede introduced the custom of dating events from the birth of Christ. He died in 735 and was canonized in 1899.
Dwellings and Architecture
A distinctive type of building in Anglo-Saxon England is the pit-type house. This is a simple structure raised over a pit excavated into the ground. Scanty evidence, with pits and postholes the typical remains found, has made it difficult to find out what sort of structure covered the pits. Formerly it was thought that people lived on the floor of the pit, the sides of which provided walls; the peaked roof of timbers and thatch rested directly on the ground above the pit. New evidence suggests that, instead, the house had wooden plank floors and the pit provided a cellar beneath. Houses were rectangular in plan, spacious and open inside, with wattle and daub walls over a timber frame—the mud-daubed parts whitewashed—and a thatched roof.
Art
Polychrome Ornamentation The metalwork of the Anglo-Saxons, in common with that of other Germanic cultures of the mid-first millennium C. E., is notable for the development of techniques to decorate metalwork with brilliant-colored gems and enamels. These included channel work to hold enamels, and techniques to encrust metal with semiprecious stones, among which garnet was most favored.
Manuscript Illumination In Northumbria particularly, Anglo-Saxons were inspired by the Irish manuscript illuminators who entered their midst with the foundation of the great monasteries on the island of Lindisfarne and at Wearmouth and Jarrow during the seventh century The ancient Celtic La Tene decorative tradition of curvilinear forms—scrolls, spirals, and a double curve or shield motif known as a pelta—was integrated with the abstract and geometric ornamentation of the pagan Anglo-Saxon metalwork tradition characterized particularly by bright colors and zoomorphic interlace patterns, thus producing a Hiberno-Saxon school of art. Among its greatest products were the Lindisfarne Gospels (early eighth century), the Book of Durrow (seventh century), and the Book of Kells (c. 800). The Hiberno-Saxon style had an important influence on the art of the Carolingian Empire.
Literature
With the advent of Christianity in England began the rise of monastic centers of learning, perhaps inspired by those of the Irish. Canterbury, the earliest religious center, became a famous center of learning among Anglo-Saxons as well. Benedict Biscop (Benet Biscop) founded both Jarrow monastery, where the historian and Benedictine monk known as the Venerable Bede (see sidebar) spent his life, and Monkwearmouth monastery in the seventh century Possibly because of Romano-British influences retained in Northumbria from the former British kingdoms of Berenicia and Deira, this kingdom early became the most culturally advanced in England. Benedict was a great builder of churches and monasteries, who imported craftsmen from the mainland to beautify them with frescoes and stained glass. Others were soon established, of which Jarrow and Monkwearmouth in Northumbria were preeminent. Another was the school of York, founded by Bede’s pupil Archbishop Egbert in the eighth century, which attracted students from the mainland and from Ireland. The scholar Alcuin was educated at York in the eighth century.
Anglo-Saxon as well as Irish scholarship was of first importance to the Carolingian emperor Charlemagne, who ruled what is present-day northern France and western Germany. Charlemagne surrounded himself with clergy from the British Isles. As the first non-Latin speakers in the West to have embraced Christianity, both the Irish and Anglo-Saxons had developed methods and textbooks for the teaching of Latin. Written Latin was important in eighth-century Gaul because spoken Latin was evolving into the French language, jeopardizing comprehension of the Bible and the liturgy The new Christians in Germany were in like need, and Anglo-Saxon and Irish scholars and teachers with their textbooks, as well as a new method of pronouncing Latin that they had devised, were in the forefront of Latin education.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a chronological account of events in Anglo-Saxon and Norman England. It began life in the reign of Alfred of Wessex, who had historical materials compiled into a single narrative; these included Bede’s Historia ecclesias-tica gentis Anglorum (known as Ecclesiastical History), genealogies, regnal and episcopal lists, some annals (year-by-year accounts of contemporary events) from northern England, probably some sets of earlier West Saxon annals, and a set of Frankish annals for the late ninth century. Copies of the Chronicle were soon made and obtained by courts and monasteries throughout England. New material, including yearly annals, was added to many of these copies; of the seven surviving manuscripts, the longest runs until the year 1154, well into the Norman period. The different versions contain different material, such as regional records, two of them evidently compiled in the north of England, for example, because they include interpolations of material of northern interest taken from Bede. These versions are known as the northern recension.
Alfred the Great King Alfred of Wessex had an important influence on Anglo-Saxon letters. He translated some books himself with the help of scholars from Mercia, Wales, and the mainland. Through his own and his scholars’ efforts, the works of Bede, Orosius of the fifth century, Augustine of the fourth and fifth centuries, and De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy) of Roman philosopher Boethius of the fifth-sixth century were translated. Alfred himself was a prose writer of note, contributing beautiful passages to the translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. He may even have translated Boethius’s Consolation himself as the title page states, or with the assistance of his court scholars. This work, which includes retellings of the Greek myths of Orpheus and Eurydice, and of Ulysses and Circe, had an enormous influence on later English literature.
Two preeminent Old English prose writers were Aelfric, abbot of Eynsham, and Wulfstan, archbishop of York. Their sermons in the 10th and 11th centuries set a standard for the art of preaching.
Poetry As the Irish had once they became Christian and literate, Anglo-Saxon scribes wrote their tales, annals, and poetry, hitherto transmitted only orally. In their homeland they had had professional bards called scops, “shapers” of song and story Many scops were attached to royal courts and served the roles both of entertainer and of historian, recorder of the heroic deeds of their patrons and keeper of the deeds of their patrons’ ancestors. Scops also kept alive the mythology of their tribe. The primary poetic form of the scop was the lay, a partly lyrical but mostly narrative work composed as the scop looks on the scene of battle and recounts it. Lays were delivered in a rhythmic chant without rhyme or fixed metrical pattern, with alliteration supplying the organizing principle. Lays made use of naive and simple metaphors called kennings, which interrupted or varied the narrative flow only a little. This was a poetry intended to be heard while feasting.
The heroic epic was a stringing together of many lays about a single hero. Although the Anglo-Saxons were the first Germanic people to commit their poetry to writing, beginning in the seventh century with a work known as Widsithis (The far journey), only one full-length heroic epic survives in Old English: Beowulf. Many more manuscripts were lost, and allusions in Beowulf to older Germanic heroes and battles of a deep and distant past give a sense of the scope of what was never written. The version of Beowulf that is extant was composed by a Christian poet, probably early in the eighth century. The Christian elements, however, are a thin overlay on an essentially pagan work. Beowulf was probably composed in Northumbria in the first half of the eighth century. Although the hero Beowulf possesses nearly superhuman physical abilities, most notably prowess at swimming and also gripping, it is clear that the author of the poem, or authors, used Beowulf as an embodiment of ideals of social and personal conduct— courage, honor, and loyalty—that his audience could and should strive to emulate. Many elements in the poem have striking parallels in 13th-century Norse sagas: male and female monsters, a giantess whose arm is cut off by the hero, and a cave behind a waterfall that the hero reaches by diving, with a marvelous sword hanging on its wall.
The lyric mood is reached in Old English poetry through what are called elegiac poems. In contrast to lyrical poetry of the later Middle Ages and beyond, lyric poetry among the Anglo-Saxons hardly touches on the passion of love or on mourning for personal loss. Instead the poet sings of the larger, more impersonal themes of the capriciousness of fate and the impermanence of existence, contrasting a happy past with a desolate present, possibly an expression of the great change that overtook the Anglo-Saxons when they embarked from their homeland to a foreign shore, never to return.
In the Christian era poetic narrative versions of biblical stories were composed. Only two poets are known by name. Caedmon of the seventh century, mentioned by Bede, who also records a few lines of his poetry, is the earliest known English poet, although the body of his work has been lost. The name of Cynewulf (ninth century) is given as author of the poems “Elene,” “Juliana,” and “The Fates of the Apostles”; no more is known of him. The finest poem of the school of Cynewulf is “The Dream of the Rood,” an early example of the dream vision, a genre later popular in Middle English literature. Other Old English poems include various riddles, charms (magic cures, pagan in origin), saints’ lives, gnomic poetry, and other Christian and heroic verse.
Pagan Belief The Germanic peoples had many gods in common, many of them projections of their ideals and of the character of their warrior society. Woden, Wotan, or Odin was the cunning war leader; Thor the powerful warrior; and Valhalla the reward of slain warriors. It was a councilor of Edwin of Northumbria, quoted by Bede, who made the famous analogy depicting the cosmological outlook of the Germanics, that human’s existence was like the flight of a bird from outer darkness through a bright, warm, and cheerful hall, back into darkness again. The councilor made this remark in the context of advising Edwin whether or not to embrace Christianity, going on to say, that if this new teaching brought more certainty it was worthy to be followed. The bleakness of this view of the beliefs of the pagan past may owe much to the fact that it was written by a fervid Christian.
Archaeological evidence of pagan Anglo-Saxon practices includes cremation urns in eastern and central England. Stamped and incised designs, and the size and shape of the pots themselves, may have reflected the age, gender, social status, and, in some cases, religious affiliation of the deceased. The runic letter for T, for example, may indicate the god Tiw, and the swastika may symbolize the god Thor.
The face-mask, a stamped representation of the human face, is commonly found on objects of the pagan period. It has been suggested that it was a symbol of Anglo-Saxon identity and may represent one of the pagan gods. The symbols are known on cremation urns from both England and the Continent, and on coins, drinking cups, brooches, and buckets. The Sutton Hoo full-face helmet has been thought to be a ceremonial mask, an indicator of the Saxon king’s mythological descent from the gods; face-mask decorations are also found on the Sutton Hoo ceremonial whetstone scepter.
Pendant triangles are the most common decorative motif on sixth-century cremation urns in East Anglia. The silver-gilt mounts of the Sutton Hoo drinking cups and the rim bands of some drinking horns are hung with pendant triangles, as were many buckets. Pendant triangles, always associated, aside from cremation urns, with eating and drinking vessels, may have been a symbol of the ritual consumption of food or drink, a practice that would later be forbidden by church authorities (discussed later).
Drinking horns in particular were probably intrinsically pagan objects. The goat was sacred to the Germanic goddess Freya. A burial site at Yeavering in Northumbria, thought to be of a pagan priest, contained a metal staff that terminates in what appears to be a stylized goat, and the remains of a goat’s skull were found at the foot of the grave. Yeavering, the most important royal and ceremonial center in the north of England in the sixth century, had the Anglo-Saxon name Ad-Gefrin, the Hill of the Goats. The Christian portrayal of the Antichrist was often a goatlike figure with cloven hooves and horns. This image is traditionally explained as a memory of the classical god Pan, but a reflection of an Anglo-Saxon veneration of goats is perhaps a more likely explanation.
Burials During their first centuries in the new land, the Anglo-Saxons often located their burials near the sacred sites of their predecessors. First British and then, by the seventh century, also Roman sites were being reused. The seventh century was a time of Anglo-Saxon kingdom formation and dramatic religious and social changes in lowland Britain, and the reuse of old sites may have been a means by which the new polities as well as practitioners of the new religion sought a sense of stability and continuity in a changing world. The Anglo-Saxons often preferred round barrows for burying their dead, yet burials are also found in or beside Roman villas (as at Orpington in Kent) and forts (Longthorpe in Cambridgeshire), or at temples, such as the single high-status burial at an isolated temple on Lowbury Hill on the Berkshire Downs. They are also found in Neolithic long barrows (as at Hampnett in the
Cotswolds) and in hill forts, such as Highdown Hill in Sussex.
Most famous of all is the Anglo-Saxon royal palace at Yeavering in Northumbria, where a line of timber halls and two cemeteries were centered on a single Bronze Age barrow and a stone circle.
Early medieval literature illuminates this practice. In Beowulf, in the Life of St. Guthlac, and elsewhere are references to people who traveled to ancient barrows to make contact with supernatural forces. Similar stories are found in Scandinavian and Irish literature. By burying the dead, depositing artifacts, and building religious structures at ancient monuments, individuals and communities were establishing and maintaining relationships with the supernatural world, perhaps as a source of spiritual and political authority. Social identity and status, control of land, and even the success of crops may have depended on the ritual veneration of these ancient sites.
This was only a temporary phenomenon, however. The subsequent history of the royal palace at Yeavering, as shown by archaeological remains, was one of abandonment. Yeavering is very possibly the place where in 627, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Christian Gospel was first preached to King Edwin of Northumbria by a priest from the Roman mission based at Canterbury. Edwin and his noblemen were converted, the latter baptized in a nearby river. Edwin, however, had a church built in York, the location of the former Roman diocese, and was baptized there. After Edwin’s death his successors reverted to paganism. Yeavering was destroyed by burning, probably by Mercian forces in the seventh century, after which, according to Bede, it was abandoned, perhaps because of associations with the unsuccessful first attempt to establish Christianity. Subsequently York, with its Roman associations, became the center of Christianity in the north of England.
Conversion to Christianity The first successful Christian mission to the Anglo-Saxons was to the kingdom of Kent. The Kentish king Aethelbehrt, who by 595 had become overlord of all the kingdoms south of the river Humber, had as his wife Bertha, daughter of Charibert, the Frankish king of Paris. Bertha was a Christian, and it may have been for that reason that Pope Gregory I sent Augustine on a mission to Aethelbehrt’s court in 597. Subsequently missionaries from Kent traveled to other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to spread the Gospel.
The actions of Raedwald, ruler of the East Angles at this time, illuminate the process of Christianization. Raedwald was under the overlordship of Aethelbehrt and accordingly converted when his ruler did, whether willingly or not. According to Bede, Raedwald, “seduced by his wife and certain evil teachers and perverted from the sincerity of his faith,” had both a pagan and a Christian altar in the same building. His son, Eorpwald, was not a Christian until he was converted in the late 620s by Edwin of Northumbria. After his short reign his successor was also pagan. Only under Eorpwald’s brother, Sigbert, did Christianity become more firmly established. Sigbert had been in exile in Gaul, possibly at the court of the Merovingian Frankish king Dagobert, where he would have experienced a higher level of civilization than had been achieved as yet in the rough-and-tumble warrior world of Anglo-Saxon royalty. Sigbert was accompanied by a Frankish bishop named Felix, who, noted Bede, brought the great happiness of the Gospel to the East Angles.
Despite initial successes the Gregorian mission to the Anglo-Saxons, especially in Northumbria, had no lasting impact, and the successors of Edwin of Northumbria reverted to paganism, so that Paulinus, Gregory’s last missionary, fled back to Kent. Instead the Irish missionary centers of Iona and Lindisfarne (see IRISH) were the driving force behind the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, perhaps because they represented a church that was such a product of northern barbarian culture, with its heroic “White Martyrs” such as the former warrior Columba, far closer in outlook to that of the Anglo-Saxons than the urban Greco-Romans sent by Pope Gregory.
In important doctrinal disputes between the Roman and Irish churches, however—most notably the method of calculating Easter, as well as tonsures (removing hair from the crown of the head) for Irish monks, which were thought to derive from Druidic practice—the fact that the Anglo-Saxons sided with Rome in 663-664 at the Synod of Whitby, where these issues were decided upon, illustrates Rome’s continuing importance for them. When Benedict Biscop wanted to found a monastic foundation, he traveled to Rome and to Gaul for its books. His double monastery of Jarrow and Monkwearmouth probably had the best-stocked library in northern Europe, a greatly enabling influence on one of its monks, Bede, the greatest scholar of his time in northern Europe.
By the 680s all of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been converted, at least nominally, and their kings began to enforce Christianity by law. After the seventh century the Catholic Church in England was vigorous and secure enough to send missionaries to pagans in Germanic Europe—in Frisia, Saxony, and central Germany. Many suffered savage martyrdom, but gradually, during the eighth century, particularly through the work of Boniface of Wessex, the establishment of Christianity began. Boniface was supported in his work by the Frankish rulers, Charles Martel and his son Pippin III, and the church organization he helped reform, with its firm ties to the Roman papacy, was an essential foundation for the rise of the Carolingian dynasty.
Survival of Paganism The historical literature makes it clear that paganism continued to flourish in Anglo-Saxon-controlled areas throughout the seventh, eighth, and even ninth centuries. In addition, seventh-eighth-century pottery made in eastern England may have been designed specifically for use in pagan ceremonies. The evidence perhaps suggests a greater de facto tolerance of paganism in this period than is suggested by church pronouncements alone, or by a literal reading of historians such as Bede.
The early church certainly made efforts to absorb paganism into its own ceremonies, as if in recognition of the strength of popular feeling. Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History, quotes Pope Gregory’s letter to Abbott Mellitus, an envoy sent to join Augustine in England in 601, in which the pope demanded that altars be set up in pagan shrines, and that pagan sacrifices and feasts be replaced by Christian festivals. Many scholars regard Christmas as one example of such a replacement for the Germanic winter solstice celebration called Yule.
We also know from Bede that idols were still being destroyed in Kent decades after the conversion of Aethelbehrt at the beginning of the seventh century. Moreover the traditional robes of the Christian cleric may reflect an adoption of the costume of pagan priests for, according to the Roman historian Tacitus of the first and second centuries, they dressed as women in Germany.
The seventh-century Penitentials of the seventh-century Greek prelate Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury, a list of proscriptions, attest to the continuing strength of paganism. They proscribed such practices as “sacrificing to devils,” augury (divination from omens), eating food offered as sacrifice, and burning grain for the well-being of the dead. Burnt grain is occasionally found in pagan Anglo-Saxon graves—for example in the cemetery at Portway in Hampshire. The Penitentials also required heathens to be baptized and existing pagan marriages to be solemnized by a Christian ceremony. Penalties were listed for Christian clerics who performed pagan divinations.
Documents continue to indicate the survival of paganism in the eighth century. In 747 one of the canons of the Synod of Clovesho—an unknown location somewhere in England— stated that every bishop should inspect his diocese each year and forbid pagan practices such as divination, soothsaying, and the use of omens, amulets, and spells. As late as 786 papal legates admonished the English for dressing “in heathen fashion” and slitting their horses’ nostrils in the pagan manner. Laws proscribing pagan practice were still being introduced in the ninth century, under Alfred, and again in the 10th century.
This determined effort against paganism seems, however, to have made an exception in the case of Ipswich Ware, pottery made in the important trading town of Ipswich in East Anglia. This type of pottery, first produced in Ipswich around 720, used stamped and incised decoration. Overtly pagan designs such as swastikas or runes were not used, but there is one Ipswich Ware vessel decorated with stamped face-masks. And pendant triangle motifs are common.
During the eighth century Ipswich may have been a center of pagan worship. No church of that date has yet been found in the town, nor have burials with Christian features or objects with Christian symbols. In addition Ipswich was the main redistribution center for imported goods on the east coast of England. The two other major ports of southern England, London and Southampton, were mainly supplied by Frankish merchants, who were Christian. Ipswich is likely to have been mainly supplied by Frisians, who were by and large pagan. Trading links with Frisians may have continued to foster paganism in Ipswich. At the least the lucrative trade with mainland Germanics may have induced East Anglian authorities, although Christian themselves, to turn a blind eye to the pagan motifs of Ipswich Ware.
In a sense the Anglo-Saxons began to lose their identity as a contentious collection of tribal invaders when, after about the seventh century, they began to refer to themselves as the English. This identification strengthened along with the process toward unification of the different Anglo-Saxon kingdoms under a single “king of England,” a process that was spurred by the incursions of the common enemy of the English, the Danes. The Anglo-Saxons conquered by the Normans had largely left behind their tribal past and were moving toward an early modern society.
Further Reading
C. J. Arnold. An Archaeology of the Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (London: Routledge, 1997).
Frederick M. Biggs, ed. Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture (Binghamton, N. Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1990).
James Campbell, et al., eds. The Anglo-Saxons (London: Penguin, 1991).
Roger Coote. The Anglo-Saxons (Hove, U. K.: Wayland, 1993.
Vera I. Evison, ed. Angles, Saxons and Jutes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981).
Della Hooke, ed. Anglo-Saxon Settlements (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
Gale R. Owen. Rites and Religions of the Anglo-Saxons (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1981).
David Mackenzie Wilson, ed. The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
World History
