Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (10 page)

Two memorials of his reign survive. Edwin’s fortress, Edwin’s burgh, is now known as Edinburgh. And, in recent years, evidence of Edwin’s palace has been recovered. At Yeavering, in Northumberland, have been found the traces of a great hall with other buildings clustered around it; this suggests the presence of a king with his warriors and councillors. A temple was later converted into a Christian church. Since the palace was built upon a Bronze Age cemetery, it must always have been considered a sacred site. An open-air wooden theatre or meeting-place, with concentric rows of seats before a raised platform, has also been recognized; this was used for regional assemblies where the over-king could address 300 of his followers. It was the place of public pronouncement and public judgment. There was a large enclosure, where animals were herded before being killed and eaten in elaborate feasts. Other such palaces, with the complex of attendant buildings, have been found in other parts of the country.

They represent a life of feud and warfare, of lordship and dynastic marriage. Young warriors would congregate around the king and enter his service; the good lord would distribute land and gifts. It was a rich and intense culture based upon violence and covered with a sheen of gold. The clothes worn by the noblemen were opulent in the extreme, and the men as well as the women were lavishly bedecked with jewels. The men wore linen tunics, fastened at the wrists and waist with shining clasps; their cloaks were ornamented with brooches. Gold was the key. In the early Christian Church statues of the saints, larger than life-size, were
covered in gold. There were thrones of gold, and great crucifixes of gold. It was in no sense a barbaric culture, but one based upon formal ostentation.

The territory of the East Angles also had great kings. Their land was large, taking within its compass what are now Norfolk, Suffolk and the Isle of Ely. It was all of a piece, the invaders having overlain the kingdom of the Iceni from which Boadicea had come. There are no annals of this people, but Bede records that one of their early kings claimed dominion over the whole of southern England. Redwald reigned in the early seventh century, and at a burial site in Sutton Hoo have been found relics of his magnificence. It is presumed to be Redwald’s tomb, based upon the elaborate funereal rites of the Germanic tribes of Sweden.

This was a boat burial. The boat itself was 90 feet in length (27.4 metres) and within its central space were found a helmet of Scandinavian style, a coat of mail, a battleaxe, a sword with gold fittings, several spears and a shield ornamented with the shapes of birds and dragons; there seems to have been a sceptre crowned with a bronze stag, as well as a great gold buckle. Relics were also found of a tunic with gold clasps in the Roman fashion, as well as silver bowls, coins, cauldrons and a lyre. This was the resting place of a king. We have the words of
Beowulf
as an epitaph. ‘There they laid the dear lord, the giver of rings, in the bosom of the ship, a marvellous prince by the mast. Men brought from distant lands a trove of treasure and ornament.’ In another mound upon the site (there are seventeen of them) were uncovered the skeletons of a warrior and his horse. They are the tokens of a society of force and conquest.

Yet no body was found within the boat. It may have been a cenotaph, an empty tomb erected as a memorial. But it is more likely that a wooden coffin and its occupant have been eaten by the acid sand all around. There is one memory of Redwald, however. It resides in the helmet; it is silver plate on a base of iron, with ornamentation of bronze. It is monstrous, savage, a thing out of nightmare.

The life of the people under his rule was harsh and unremitting. It was, for the poor, one of incessant labour; their food was coarse and their clothes were made out of rough woollen fabrics. They
lived in earth-floored cottages of wicker or wattle. They knew only the rake and the sickle, the plough and the pick and the spade. The rich engaged in a life of hunting and of warfare. They ate voluminous quantities of pork and venison. They drank to excess and were celebrated for doing so. Their faces were often painted or tattooed. Men as well as women dyed their hair; blue, green and orange were the colours favoured by the male. Both sexes were heavily adorned with gold bracelets. Young boys were trained in bravery by being placed on steep sloping roofs; if they held fast, without screaming out in fear, they were deemed to be fit for purpose. The sports were those of leaping, running and wrestling; at the age of fourteen a boy had the right to bear arms.

The kingdom of Mercia occupied what is now known as the midlands; the East Saxons gave their name to Essex, the Middle Saxons to Middlesex and the South Saxons to Sussex. The West Saxons created Wessex, of course, but that territory has not survived as an administrative entity. Mercia was until the time of Alfred always a mixture of kingdoms, and the tribal name of the West Saxons was Gewissae, meaning ‘confederates’. These allied tribes moved further westward, conquering Devon and Cornwall. But the Germanic tribes did not move against the native kingdoms alone; they fought among themselves, and there were some ferocious struggles between the tribes of Wessex and the tribes of Kent.

Kent offers an interesting case of continuity. It was the first part of England to be settled by Germanic mercenaries and traders, who may have obtained a permanent presence there as far back as the time of Roman rule. That is why the administrative structures set up by the Romanized English survived intact. The settlers and natives did not need to confront one another. So the native name for the area was maintained even after the Jutes and others had acquired supremacy. The people were known as ‘Cant-ware’, but the origin of ‘Cant’ lies somewhere in prehistory. The names of Canterbury and Dover date back at least to the Iron Age. There is abundant evidence for continuity of use, in settlements and in sacred sites, from the Iron Age to the Jutes; the churches of many Kentish neighbourhoods are linked by prehistoric roads. They are also characteristically associated with holy wells, springs and female saints, all of which point towards prehistoric worship.

Another continuity can be noticed. When the first Germanic settlers came they were planted as freeholders, following the custom of their country. That is why the land of Kent is marked by individual farmsteads and hamlets rather than manorial villages; no tradition of co-operative farming under a lord existed. There was no room in Kent for powerful magnates or great mansions. There are few of the ‘common fields’ found throughout the rest of the country. The county bears all the signs of the ‘free folk’ whom Tacitus recognized among the northern peoples.

That tradition was maintained over the centuries. In
The Perambulation of Kent
, written in 1570, William Lambarde wrote that ‘the Yeomanrie, or common people is no where more free and jolly than in this shyre . . . in manner every man is a freeholder, and hath some part of his own to live upon. And in this their estate they please themselves and joy exceedingly.’ In fact the legal custom of Kentish land tenure was not abolished until 1926, the only known example of specifically county law surviving into the twentieth century. That independence has taken other forms. In the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 ‘the men of Kent’ were the first to take up arms behind Wat Tyler. Seventy years later, under the leadership of Jack Cade, they provoked a popular revolt against unfair taxation; their petition was entitled
The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent
. The men of Kent were the first to rise against Richard III. In the miners’ strike of 1984 the miners of Kent were the most militant and vociferous. The old history still manifests itself. It still matters.

These continuities underlie the changing patterns of lordship. Small kingdoms gave way to greater kingdoms. The earliest fiscal document for the whole of England, dated to the early seventh century, lists nineteen kings and fifteen peoples. Yet even the great kingdoms were based upon English originals. The Jutes of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight took over the prehistoric lands of the Belgae; the East Saxons held the ancient territory of the Trinovantes; and the South Saxons established themselves within the prehistoric borders of the Regnenses. They even retained the same capitals. There are many other examples testifying to the fact that the roots of the country go very deep.

The great king of Kent, Aethelbert, who ruled from the end of
the sixth century to 616, is prominent in English history as the king who greeted Augustine and supported his Christian mission among the Germanic tribes. Aethelbert was aligned with the Frankish kings of the continent, and it may be that he welcomed Augustine in deference to them. He was in any case what the Venerable Bede called ‘
rex potentissimus
’, an over-king of English lands stretching to the Humber. He was also the first English king to become converted to Christianity; he was followed by the king of Essex and, more ambiguously, by the king of East Anglia. But his example was crucial to the success of Augustine’s mission. Augustine converted the king’s household, and thus the area under the control of Aethelbert’s lords. The people came creeping to the cross under the twin pressures of deference and emulation. They flocked to the rivers of Kent, where they were baptized en masse.

It should be remembered that this saint had not come to convert the native English, the large majority of whom were already Christian. He had not come to evangelize the whole island; he had come to baptize the Germanic settlers and their leaders. In 597 he landed at Thanet, and then led a solemn procession singing hymns behind a silver cross. Aethelbert duly obliged with his conversion. He could see the advantage of being associated with the institution that had succeeded Roman
imperium
. The important part of the Christian contribution to England was in fact the re-imposition of old forms of authority. After Augustine had converted Kent and Essex his fellow missionary, Paulinus, brought the gospel to Northumberland. With the conversion of heathen Sussex and the Isle of Wight, in the late seventh century, all England had entered the Christian communion. Many of the old native churches were extended or rebuilt in Anglo-Saxon style, and many large churches were erected in the walled towns inherited from Rome. The same sacred sites were still in use, with a continuity of worship that goes much deeper than the choice between a native or a Roman affiliation. Many of today’s cathedrals will retain at their core a small Anglo-Saxon church superimposed upon a temple used by the Romanized English.

The leaders of the native Church did not look kindly upon this usurper who had come to convert their Saxon-Jutish-Frisian oppressors. When Augustine summoned the Welsh bishops he did
not rise to greet them, and his arrogance struck them as characteristic of the old Roman ways. The native priests had in any case come to despise the Germanic leaders; they did not attempt to convert them. They were monks and missionaries who had been educated in the worship of the Celtic saints (think of all the small churches in Cornwall), and saw no authority or beauty in what was essentially a church of bishops and administrators – administrators, indeed, who were willing and prepared to work for the alien kings. Priests on the other side of the Severn would not eat from the same dishes as the Romanized priests; they would not even let their dogs lick them. Yet they lost the battle of faiths. The Roman Church became England’s Christian Church, and the old faith of the English withered on the vine. It is not the first, or the last, example of cultural amnesia.

For their part the kings were aware of all the advantages of the Roman faith. Christ was a more powerful support in war than Woden, and the Christian God offered more effective lordship than Thor. One hitherto pagan priest went to the trouble of destroying his own temple to prove the point. The Roman Church preferred the rule of strong kings and unified governments; it made the work of religious control much easier. The priests were the literate members of the kingdom and, at a time when legal documents and title deeds and proclamations of every kind were being published, they became the indispensable administrators of the state. Almost as soon as the first missionaries set foot on Thanet, the kings of the vicinity began to issue laws. ‘If anyone kills a man, he is to pay as ordinary wergild 100 shillings. If hair-pulling occurs, 50 sceattas [silver pennies] are to be paid as compensation.’

The kings were also happy to adopt a quasi-liturgical role as the embodiment of the people in public ritual. This was a way of enhancing authority. It was a way of enforcing respect and ensuring obedience. Kings and saints appear, in England, within the same period. And they are often the same thing. King Edwin and King Aethelbert are known to posterity as St Edwin and St Aethelbert. There were occasional reactions. King Sigeberht of Kent was killed by two of his kinsmen for the tiresome practice of forgiving his enemies.

Yet on the whole Christianity helped to bring unity to a kingdom. To adapt the old Catholic motto, a people who pray together stay together. The encouragement of moral discipline, by the priests, had a material effect upon the social discipline of the country. In the graveyard remains of great ladies in the seventh century, from Kent and Wessex, from Mercia and East Anglia, there is a much greater uniformity of ornament. The various regions of the country were slowly coming together. A single English Church seemed to require a single English nation as its stage. It was the time of the Christian conversion that turned all the people of the country, in the words of Pope Gregory the Great, into ‘Angelcynn, of English race’. Soon after a list was compiled of ‘the Saints of God who rest in Engla lond’. Bede wrote of ‘the Holy Church of the English nation’, implicitly excluding the Welsh and the Picts. England, as we understand it today, was created by the Christian Church.

So the Church was an essential aspect of government. That is why the boundaries of the dioceses followed the frontiers of the old tribal kingdoms. Worcester followed the same area as the district of the Hwicce, for example, and Hereford of the Magonsaetan. The lines of authority had been passed on. The diocesan synods were like parliaments, where laws were debated and where kinfolk could meet. Bishops were in any case aristocrats, members of the various royal families of the land. When the king called a Church synod in London, secular as well as spiritual lords would attend.