Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (9 page)

So the Germanic migrants kept on coming. Among them were four predominant tribes – the Angles from Schleswig, the Saxons from the territories around the river Elbe, the Frisians from the northern coast of the Netherlands, and the Jutes from the coast of Denmark. There were no such people as ‘Anglo-Saxons’ until the chroniclers invented them in the sixth century. The routes of settlement were already established by the river system. The settlers pushed along the Thames, the Trent and the Humber.

The Jutes settled in Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight; the New Forest was once Jutish land. The Saxons were established in the Upper Thames valley. The Frisians were scattered over the south-east, with an important influence in London. The Angles settled in eastern and north-eastern England; by the early sixth century the people of east Yorkshire were wearing Anglian clothes. These were small tribes, small communities under a leader or leading family. Some were resisted; some were welcomed. Others were simply accepted by a working population who had no real love for their earlier native masters. All were accommodated and, according to the best genetic evidence, eventually made up 5 per cent of the population we now call English; in the eastern regions it may have reached approximately 10 per cent, but there is no hint of deliberate genocide and replacement of the native population.

They came because they were being pushed by other tribes in the great westward migrations of that era, but they also came because their ancestral lands were in peril from the rising sea. This was the period in which the northern European coastline was sinking, as the archaeological evidence from Germany and the Netherlands testifies; there was urgent need to find land elsewhere.

The revolt of the Saxon federates was a decisive blow to the prestige and authority of Vortigern. He was overthrown by another Romanized English leader, Ambrosius Aurelianus, who led a counter-attack upon the Saxons and for ten years engaged in a series of strenuous battles. In 490 the English won a great victory at a place known to posterity as Mons Badonicus, believed to be near modern Bath. The leader of the English forces on that occasion is not
recorded, but in this period the name of Arthur emerges as over-king. He is a shadow in the historical record, known only as
dux bellorum
or ‘leader of warfare’. He is said to have participated in twelve battles against the Saxons, but the places cannot now be identified. In the pages of the medieval romances he is a great king with a shining court at Camelot, otherwise known as Winchester; in truth he may have been a military commander whose headquarters were within the hill fort of Cadbury. 18 acres (7.2 hectares) of that hill fort were enclosed in the period of Arthur’s supposed lifetime.

The English had survived but, as part of the spoils of war, the Saxons retained their control over Norfolk, East Kent and East Sussex. There was a division in the country, perhaps marked by the construction of the Wansdyke designed to keep the Germanic people from crossing into central southern England. On one side of that barrier were small English kingdoms; on the other, Germanic tribes with their warrior leaders. What had previously been some of the most Romanized parts of the country had become the home of ‘barbarians’. The town and villa life of these regions was, therefore, in abeyance. An English chronicler of the early sixth century, Gildas, laments that ‘the cities of our country are still not inhabited as they were; even today they are squalid deserted ruins’. This was the process of the Saxon ‘invasion’.

Yet some towns and cities were still in active use, as markets and places of authority. It is well known that the Saxons set up their own trading area outside the walls of London, in the district now known as Aldwych, but the old city was still a place of royal residences and public ceremonial. In the countryside, there is even greater evidence for continuity of settlement. It is not to be expected that any change in agricultural practice took place. The same field systems were laid out by the Germanic settlers; the new arrivals respected the old boundaries and in Durham, for example, Germanic structures were set within a pattern of small fields and drystone walls created in the prehistoric past. More surprisingly, perhaps, the Germanic settlers formed groups that honoured the boundaries of the old tribal kingdoms. They respected the lie of the land. The sacred sites of the Saxons, at a slightly later date,
follow the alignment of Neolithic monuments. All fell into the embrace of the past.

The Germanic settlers were kept within their boundaries by the English for two or three generations. It should not be forgotten that, in this period, the average life expectancy was thirty-five years. It was a country of young men and women, with all the energy and thoughtlessness of the young. The leaders of the country were brash, vibrant and energetic.

By the middle of the sixth century the Germanic people wished to move further west, and to exploit the productive lands that had previously been beyond their grasp. There are many reasons for this sudden efflorescence of activity, but one of the most convincing lies in the onset of deadly plague in the 540s. Bubonic, and perhaps pneumonic, plague spread from Egypt all over the previously Romanized world. It seems that it struck down the native English rather than the settlers, with a force and scope that rival the great plagues of the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some actuarial experts suggest that a population of 3 or 4 million now dropped to 1 million. The land was left vacant, and fewer men were available to defend it. So the Angles, and the Saxons, moved westward. Anglo-Saxon civilization was created by a pandemic.

One of the leaders of the Saxons, Ceawlin, had reached as far as Cirencester, Gloucester and Bath by 577; seven years later his forces had penetrated the midlands. The native kings were thereby deposed. This was the pattern throughout the country. The pressure was growing on the Durotriges of Somerset and Dorset and as a result there was an exodus of native people to Armorica, on the Atlantic coast of north-western France, where their leaders took control of large tracts of land. They may have been welcomed. They were perhaps part of the same tribe. So the region of Brittany emerged. The Bretons in fact retained their old tribal allegiances, and never really thought of themselves as part of the French state. Some of them came back. A Breton contingent was among the forces of William the Conqueror, which chose to settle in south-west England. They had come home at last.

In the end the natives would be so mixed and mingled with the new settlers that the term Saxon or Angle ceased to have any
meaning. All would become English. Yet it was a slow process. Much of western England was still under the rule of native kings 200 years after the first Saxons arrived; the native kingdom of Elmet, now known as the West Riding of Yorkshire, survived until the early seventh century and the ‘Anglo-Saxon invasion’ only came to an end with the capture of Gwynedd by Edward I in 1282. Celtic speakers were to be found in Cornwall at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and the language did not wholly die until the eighteenth century.

The settlements of the Germanic tribes took the form of small folk territories, made up of groups of warriors and marked off by river boundaries. So the followers of Haesta created Hastings and the followers of Gilla established Ealing. The people of the Peak district, the people of the Chilterns, and the people of the Wrekin, were all given distinct topographical names. Jarrow means ‘among the Jyrwe’, a small tribe found in the fen district as well as in Northumberland. The immense number of small tribes was gradually aligned for the purposes of defence or warfare. Over-kings emerged as the leaders and protectors of tribal chiefs, and by 600 the recognizable kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England begin to enter recorded history. The kingdom of the East Angles was formed together with those of the East Saxons and the Mercians.

These were societies of rank, based upon a structure of burdens and obligations imposed by the warlords and their entourage. There were slaves, there were landless workers, there were
ceorls
or free heads of households, and there were
thegns
or noblemen, with all possible divisions and distinctions within each rank. The financial penalties for murder, for example, were graded according to the ‘worth’ of the victim. It was a harsh and divisive society, only made possible by the continuous exploitation of the unfree. In that respect, it may not have differed very much from any previous English polity. There never was any Rousseau-esque state of equality in nature. There always was a system of lordship and vassalage.

And what of the native English? They endured the change of leadership. Most of them worked the soil, as before, and paid tax
or tribute to the local lord. The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience. The artisans and merchants were still here. It was in the interest of the Angles and the Saxons to utilize what remained of Romanized English civilization. They did not exterminate the native population because they needed it. They had no aversion to the practices of the open field and could quickly accustom themselves to working the land according to the traditional methods of the English.

In the first years, however, there may have been a form of separation or apartheid between settlers and natives. The Germanic
walh
means Celtic speaker or Latin speaker; it also came to mean a serf or a slave. The name of Wales derives from this. So we have Corn
wall
, and places known as
Wal
ton,
Wal
sall and
Wal
cot. We can also deduce the presence of native English in what is now north-east London in
Walth
amstow and elsewhere. The reader will be able to identify many other examples. The native population survived.

Christianity was not driven out of England by the invaders. Early churches have been found in London, embedded within Roman edifices, as well as in York, Leicester and Exeter. Churches were located in other towns, and of course in western England – beyond the reach of the Germanic tribes – the religion flourished with the appearance of small monastic communities. One was situated on top of Glastonbury Tor.

The eventual shape of England itself was becoming clear as the Germanic tribes continued their expansion. In the north the settlers were first confined to East and South Yorkshire; these areas may already have harboured Germanic troops, and may therefore have welcomed their arrival. They formed the kingdom of Deira, roughly comprising what is now Yorkshire from the Humber to the Tees. An Anglian community was established at Bamburgh, where the castle still stands. A great Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery is to be found by the village of Sancton, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and as late as the nineteenth century the villagers used pots and urns taken from the site. The native tribes, the Parisii and the Brigantes, tried to contain these powerful Germanic settlers, but they proved unsuccessful.

Under the leadership of their king, Aethelfrith, according to the history of the Venerable Bede, the settlers conquered many territories and many peoples by the end of the sixth century; they ‘either drove out their inhabitants and planted them afresh with their own people, or subdued them and made them tributary’. That was the familiar process of colonization. Aethelfrith became king of both Deira and Bernicia, the kingdom to the north of Deira that stretched from Durham to Edinburgh and from Derwentwater to Ayrshire. He can thus be truly considered the first king of Northumberland.

The native tribes and kingdoms were divided among themselves, and could not arrest the momentum of the invaders. The old kingdoms – Rheged (north-western England), Strathclyde (south-western Scotland), Gododdin (north-eastern England and south-eastern Scotland) – fell. The warbands slowly moved northward and westward. The Germanic settlers may have been few in number, but they eventually controlled a huge territory of moorland and hill with scattered farmsteads and cottages. Yet the old traditions survived in the fastness; that is why Yorkshire and Northumberland retained much of their ancient organization and custom.

Out of these battles between invaders and native tribes emerged the pure poetry of war. Aneirin’s poem
Gododdin
has made him the Homer of the north. Written in the language of the Britons, it records the defiance of the natives in stern cadences:

It records a world of warriors, wearing beads and collars of amber, and of councils of war; it is a world of battles, with banners held high by the opposing forces; of crows and ravens waiting for the slaughter, climbing like clouds in the sky; of feasting with cups of mead and sweet wine; of hounds and hawks; of drinking horns passed round in candlelight; of a landscape of wolves and seaeagles; of a lord, decked with jewels, sitting at the head of a table. It is a poetry of assonance and internal rhyme. It is avowedly and unrepentantly aristocratic. It is not as fearful or as mournful as
Anglo-Saxon poetry, with the latter’s longing for a haven and the safety of the hall against the forces of a wild world.

On the death of Aethelfrith his rival, Edwin, became the king of Northumberland. Towards the end of his reign he was powerful enough to conquer the Isle of Man, to invade North Wales and to occupy Anglesey. He aspired to over-kingship of the entire country, and according to Bede ‘in the days of Edwin a woman with a baby at her breast might have travelled over the island without suffering an insult’. Along the principal highways of the country he also instituted a system of stone cisterns, designed to collect water from the nearest fountains, together with cups of brass. The drinking fountain has a long history.