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História da Língua Inglesa   

The Anglo-Saxons and the Birth of England

The term “Anglo-Saxon” is a relatively modern one. In reality it means settlers from the German regions of Angeln and Saxony who made their way over to Britain after the fall of the Roman Empire around 410 AD. At this time, settlers from Denmark - the Jutes and the Frisians were also part of the rich European history making up the British Isles. The Roman armies were finally withdrawn from Britain early in the fifth century. They were needed back home to defend the crumbling centre of the Empire. Britain was considered a far flung outpost which was of little value.

So the new settlers were effectively their own masters in a new land and they did little to keep the legacy of the Romans alive. Stone buildings that were used by the Romans were replaced by wooden ones, they spoke their own language - the English spoken today and they brought their own religious beliefs. The arrival of Saint Augustine in 597 converted the large majority of the country to Christianity.

The Anglo-Saxon period stretched over 600 years - 410 - 1066 and in that time the geography of Britain underwent many changes. The early settlers kept to small tribal groups, forming kingdoms and sub-kingdoms. By the ninth century, the country was divided into four kingdoms - Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex. Wessex was the only one of these to survive the Viking invasions and in 954, Eric Bloodaxe, Viking ruler of York was killed by the Wessex army. England was now united under one single king - Edred.

Most of the information about the Anglo-Saxons came from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, a year by year account of all the major events - the rise and fall of the bishops and kings, the important battles etc. It begins its account with the story of Hengist and Horsa in AD 449.

Anglo-Saxon rule came to an end in 1066 when Edward the Confessor willed the Kingdom to William of Normandy as he had no heir. Harold Godwinson failed in his attempt to defend the Norman invasion at the Battle of Hastings.

The Birth of England

When was England, England? Some believe that the English identity was formed long after the Norman Conquest, others are not so sure. I think that the idea of England and the allegiance to the English crown and English law was created by the Anglo-Saxon successors of Alfred the Great - long before 1066. Let me give you an illustration, a snapshot from those days. It comes from a public speech by a bishop made in 1014. At that time England was in deep trouble. By the winter of 1013-14, the government of Anglo-Saxon England had almost collapsed and the King, Ethelred the Unready, had gone into exile abroad. The country had been devastated by Vikings and everybody complained about government inefficiency and failure to act and implement policy. Things could not really get much worse. It was at this point that Archbishop Wulfstan of York preached a sermon to the high-ups in the land.

'The devil has led this people too far astray... the people have betrayed their own country (literally their 'earth'). And the harm will become common to this entire people.

'There was a historian in the time of the Britons called Gildas who wrote about their misdeeds; how their sins angered God so much that finally He allowed the army of the English to conquer their land. Let us take warning from this ... we all know there are worse things going on now than we have heard of among the ancients. Let us turn to the right and leave wrongdoing ...Let us love God and follow God's laws.'

Archbishop Wulfstan, Sermon of the Wolf, 1014

Wulfstan was a leading member of what we might call the royal think-tank: the great and good who advised the king - big landowners, earls, royal kinsman and prominent churchmen. Archbishops were often the main motivators in policy: they told the kings what to do and Wulfstan did just that. We still have one of his notebooks where we can read for ourselves his thoughts, written in his own hand.

Wulfstan also talks about the English as 'one people under one law'.

Like the speech of any modern politician, of course, Wulfstan has to be taken with a pinch of salt. (Even then, some of his audience may not have followed his line that the Day of Judgement was nigh!) But this short extract tells us a lot about Anglo-Saxon England. It tells us that the English themselves had been invaders of Britain, many centuries before: that they were Christian; and that they lived under the rule of law - Christian law. And what is very interesting is that even with the government tottering and the social order cracking, Wulfstan also talks about the English as 'one people under one law' - even back in 1014 a leading member of the government takes it as read that we can refer to the English nation. So, in effect, we can see that an allegiance - between the people, the king and the law - is already in existence. This allegiance is an essential foundation upon which the identity of England rests.

Bede, Angles and Angels

That idea of one English nation is found in other writers of Ethelred's time, most notably the Anglo-Saxon chronicler who gives us a graphic account of England's decline. But it goes much further back. It comes first with the Venerable Bede. Bede was born around 672, near Sunderland. He lived as a monk at the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria and maybe never even journeyed further south than York in his entire life. But he was fantastically well read. He had wide horizons and even knew about the Muslim Advent in the Mediterranean. In his mind at least, he travelled far.

It was Bede who first articulated the idea of the English people. In 732, he wrote his History of the English Church and People, in which he treated the inhabitants of lowland Britain, whether Saxons, Jutes or Angles, as one English nation.

‘Not Angles but angels...’

Since then, the English have always been the English because Bede said so. He traces that name back to a tale from the 590s when Pope Gregory the Great sees some fair-haired and fair-skinned slaves in a slave market, in Italy, and is told that they are Angles. 'Not Angles but angels,' he replied. It was a lovely pun, and somehow it stuck, along with an idea which one senses in Bede, that somehow the English were a chosen race. I'm sure Bede felt that himself although, despite his faith in God, he was all too well aware of the unpredictable nature of history and the 'uncertainty of future time'.

A Ruler of Kingdoms

So there was an early idea of the unity of the English people even if 'England' then was many small regional kingdoms and numerous tribes. And there seems to have been some tradition, even before Bede's day, that there had been one ruler of the English peoples. Bede tells us that prior to his time there had been seven kings which held some kind of overlordship over the peoples of what we now call England, and, even more, an overlordship of the mainland of Britain. To express this he uses the Latin word imperium. This means overlordship. When this is translated in the 9th century in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle they use a different Old English word, bretwalda or brytenwalda, which originally means 'wide ruler', an ancient poetic title for a king, but which came to mean the ruler who held the overlordship over lowland Britain.

The Anglo-Saxon kings seized on...Bede's 'blueprint'.

Bede's theme was the English Church and people, but he was also saying that there was an early tradition of some kind of political overlordship. The Anglo-Saxon kings seized on this in the 10th century when they fulfilled Bede's 'blueprint': to unite politically and religiously under one church the peoples who lived within England. But the reason that this happened when it did was due more than anything else to the Vikings.

The Viking invasions changed everything. They destroyed several of the ancient kingdoms which had existed in England, the Northumbrians and the East Angles. This forced the defending English kingdoms to define very clearly what they were fighting for. One dynasty - Wessex - emerged as the winners in that military, political and ideological struggle. They were the ones who were able to defeat the Vikings and eventually, during the 10th century, to incorporate all the other areas into a kingdom of England under a king of all the English.

Alfred the Great

Before Alfred arrived on the scene, England had comprised a number of small kingdoms, but these were simply overrun and their royal families wiped out by the Vikings by the end of the 860s. At this point, the Vikings threatened to overrun the whole of England; the King of Mercia fled overseas, as did a number of well-to-do West Saxons. But on the verge of total disaster, something happened which became part of the English myth in the Anglo-Saxon period, and still is. In early 878, Alfred the Great was surrounded in the marshes of Athelney in Somerset, almost finished. 'England' was on the ropes before it had even come into being. This is the moment when legend has Alfred burning cakes in a peasant woman's cottage - a tale which was already in existence in the 10th century, by the way.

Alfred fought a prolonged resistance war and, by 899 when he died, he had become the most powerful regional king in Britain.

Alfred was able to claw back a victory that year at Edington in Wiltshire. Meantime, the Viking advance slowed down. They started to parcel out good settling land in East Anglia, in the East Midlands and in Northumbria - land for their armies, for the rank and file. This gave Alfred the chance he needed and he took it. Alfred fought a prolonged resistance war and, by 899 when he died, he had become the most powerful regional king in Britain. He was succeeded by his son Edward the Elder. By the 910s Edward was strong enough to embark on the military conquest of the Midlands and East Anglia, enforcing southern English rule over the lands up to the Humber. The tide had turned. Bede's blueprint was suddenly achievable.

The Wessex Dynasty

Edward died in the summer of 924. It appears that his son, Athelstan, was not intended to be king. Although he was the first born of Edward's many children, he seems to have been viewed as illegitimate. He was brought up in the Midlands and not as a member of the Wessex establishment. But as chance had it, in 925, he did become king, and he turned out to be one of the greatest of all the Anglo-Saxon kings. He embarked on a whirlwind campaign taking in the whole of England. He enforced the submission of the kings of the Scots, the Strathclyde Welsh, the Cumbrians, the north Welsh and even the Cornish - all within one year.

The English kings were now the rulers of Britannia.

By 928 suddenly a King of Wessex had not only become King of all the English people but 'Emperor of the World of Britain'. Continental rulers now queued up to marry their sons to women of the English royal family. England was suddenly sitting at the high table of Europe's political and intellectual elite. Continental writers talk of their bravery in driving out 'the pirates' (the Vikings) and praise their efforts to restore learning, 'making Britannia famous through the world of the liberal arts'. It is no exaggeration to say that a new phase in British history had been inaugurated.

Athelstan's half brothers followed his lead. By the mid-century, the existence of England as a unitary kingdom was no longer in doubt. The son of Athelstan's brother Edmund (hence the great-grandson of Alfred), Edgar became King of all England in 959. He enjoyed a balmy time in which tremendous wealth was ploughed into the monasteries, and a Golden Age of English art and culture ensued. The products of English manuscript painters in particular are among the great glories of insular art.

Edgar was known as pacificus, the Peaceable - or perhaps one should translate this as 'one who could impose his peace without having to fight'. There is very little known about Edgar's reign apart from administration - and perhaps that's a sign of how powerful he was. In 973, he was able to have a great imperial coronation in Bath in the presence of his subject kings. Bath was probably chosen because of its imperial overtones: an ancient Roman city with still-standing Roman walls and monuments, including the Roman baths. The English kings were now the rulers of Britannia, the most powerful rulers since the Romans, and they were aware of it. In less than a century, Alfred's dynasty had broken out from a few square miles of marshland to become Emperors of Britain.

King of the English

We should always be aware of where our history comes from. To use a modern analogy, this one comes from the spin doctors of Alfred's dynasty - specifically from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle produced in Alfred's Winchester. So it has to be remembered that we are telling this story from the point of view of the English, not the Celts, and from the point of view of the West Saxons, not the Northumbrians, Mercians or East Angles.

Just because Alfred wanted to be acknowledged King of the English does not mean that people in East Anglia, or the East Midlands, or Northumbria - or even the heartland of English Mercia in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire - were happy with that. Indeed there were those who were very unhappy about it. North of the Humber, one chronicler wrote feelingly, 'we had never before been subject to the South Angles' (the southern English). But pretty soon, the West Saxon kings of England won the allegiance of people south of the Humber, including those of Danish descent. By Athelstan's death, people in the East Midlands acknowledged their interests were best served by a southern king. Over the next century, many Northerners seem to have come to view things the same way.

The creation of this allegiance is the key factor in all this. And through it, the development of what we might call 'group feeling' - the essential glue in any state. And the creation of that allegiance is the product not of the Normans or the Tudors, but a product of the 10th century. That I think is what Wulfstan was talking about in his sermon. His complaint was that this allegiance had broken down, that group feeling has disintegrated, but he knew what it was to have them in the first place. The creation of that allegiance was what made England England and it was made long before the Normans came to stay.

Keeping Order

The Anglo-Saxon kings were adept at framing laws and minting coins which reflected their authority. But they were also flexible enough to placate regional sensibilities. In practice, this meant some coins did not bear an image of the king and most laws took local customs into account.

Regional Sensibilities

It's easy to forget, as we contemplate a British monarchy emptied of real power and drained of its magical aura, that kingship was one of the great medieval institutions. And English medieval kingship again was a creation of the 10th century (we even still use their coronation order!). This was the institution on which the ultimate responsibility for social order rested. And it was the kingship of Alfred of Wessex and his successors which gave substance to the English state.

The Anglo-Saxon kings who were most successful, most praised and best remembered were kings whose power base wasn't just in southern England. Athelstan grew up in the Midlands and presumably spoke with a Midlands accent, even though he was the son of a southern king. Although men like Athelstan and Edgar were Kings of Wessex, their interests and their friendships needed to be more national. Success as a medieval king depended on maintaining a delicate approach which paid close attention to local sensibilities. You can see this particularly well in the law codes. Edgar's code, issued in 962-3 for example, specifically talks about:

‘...measures common to all the nation, whether English, Danes, or Britons, in every province of my kingdom, to the end that poor man and rich may possess what they rightly acquire...’

Regional Customs

So we can see that, by the 960s, the Anglo-Saxon kings were taking into account several different linguistic groupings: the southern English, West Saxons, Mercians and East Angles, the Danes and the 'Britons' - speakers of Celtic languages (that is, Welsh speakers on the English side of Offa's Dyke, the Cornish speakers in the south-west and the Cumbrians in north-west England). And it is obvious in their legislation that they allowed for regional difference in custom too. At one point, Edgar actually says:

‘It is my will that secular rights be in force among the Danes according to as good laws as they can best decide on... Among the English, however, whatever I and my advisors have added to the customs of my ancestors for the benefit of all the nation.’

It was among the Danes that the 12-man jury system evolved...

For example, in the lands settled by the Danes, they had their own marriage customs. Their administrative practice and land tenure were different in practice and terminology. Up north, they had 'wapentakes' instead of hundreds; they counted in 'carucates' instead of hides. A hide was about 120 acres, the area traditionally believed to be adequate to support one family. And their legal traditions were different: it was among the Danes that the 12-man jury system evolved, to be borrowed by the English who exported it to the world, and now claim to have invented it!

Racial Tension

You had to be careful of local feeling, during these times, and good kings usually were. That's not to say that there weren't many tensions in the early English polity. We know that freedom of access across the Watling Street border between the English Midlands and the Danish Midlands seems to have been allowed from Athelstan's time onward, presumably for traders. But there are hints in the 960s that some people thought Edgar had allowed too many foreigners and foreign customs into the country. There is even a letter in which somebody in southern England complains about his brother adopting too many Danish customs and wearing his hair in an un-English style.

‘I tell you, brother Edward, now that you ask, you do wrong to abandon the good English practices of your fathers, and in falling in love with heathen ways… insulting your ancestors by dressing in Danish fashion...’

Letter from an unknown Anglo-Saxon (source: British Library)

Just as today, there were times when resentment against immigrants could create tensions and be exploited by politicians.

Which reminds us, as if we ever need reminding, that the people of the past are people like us; and it reminds us too that just as today, there were times when resentment against immigrants could create tensions and be exploited by politicians. It seems possible, for example, that at the height of the Danish attacks in 1002, Ethelred the Unready tried to fan racial hatred against Danish settlers in southern England. According to a later tradition, the paranoid Ethelred gave orders (sent by letter to all his agents in the towns) inciting the English to massacre Danish communities in southern towns. The grounds he gave were that they intended to depose and kill him, along with members of his council.

These orders do not appear to have been widely carried out - perhaps even then people saw through the spin and were reluctant to turn out at the exhortation of a manipulative leader. But there is a later tradition that the Danes in Oxford took refuge in the church of St Frideswide, where they were burned by a mob inflamed by anti-Danish rhetoric. That a late Old English government could try to harness this kind of hatred suggests the tensions which lay under the surface of their state. As their law codes reveal, they faced massive problems of social order, and on a smaller scale had to deal with many of the practical political problems that we do today. Perhaps that helps us to be realistic about the extent of their achievement, as well as the difficulties they faced.

The Oath of Loyalty

So how did such early societies create an allegiance? How do you create a sense of mutual obligation and responsibility? It is of course the perennial debate even today - the balance between rights and duties.

Crime is no longer only an injury to the victim, but a crime against society at large.

In any state you need law, a written statement of the social norms which society, or the government, seeks to enforce. And the Anglo-Saxon state produced lots of law - legal texts are among its most distinctive and most characteristic productions. Of course, to govern a medium-sized state (in early medieval terms) you had to meet rather different concerns than those for which law had previously provided. Early English law had been framed for tribal societies, and was based on the feud, on redress of injury, rather than a mutual sense of responsibility to the community. In the Viking era, law-making begins to change to reflect new social conditions.

Although no innovator himself, Alfred laid the foundation, making his principle parallel with the Biblical law of Moses. As he saw it, the English could - and should - be a chosen people, answerable to God. In the 10th century, when the English state was created, that perception became the underpinning of the king's law. Crime is no longer only an injury to the victim, but a crime against society at large, against the English nation - the same nation we read of in Wulfstan's sermons or in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Law and Order

The new conception of royal justice was aggressive. The Anglo-Saxons had brutal corporal and capital punishments at their disposal, including 'the ordeal' and grisly mutilations. And they also tried to persuade, cajole, or enforce allegiance with the common oath. Like many traditional societies, the Anglo-Saxons placed a high value on a person's word, their sworn promise.

At the heart of the 10th century state was the oath, taken by all freemen from the age of 12, to abstain from and denounce any major crime. This common oath enshrined the sense of social community and responsibility that underpinned the law. In this light, theft was seen as an act of disloyalty. If you had broken your oath and committed a serious crime your entire kin could be punished. In the old days, you had the local assembly or the king's court. Now, there was a hierarchy of courts in each shire and borough, and revamped local courts known as hundred courts.

The presiding officials of these courts were, in effect, local agents of the king-royal appointees. Local cases would be heard in the hundred courts and it was the obligation of the hundred to find the miscreant and bring him back to face justice and, if necessary, to punish the kin. The hundred would organise the pursuit of notable criminals who fled, and punishment could include exile - you could be transported with your kin group to a completely different part of the country. Harsh methods, to be sure, but these were harsh times.

‘The Christian king must severely punish wicked men... He must be merciful and yet austere; that is the king's right - and that is the way to get things done in a nation.’

Archbishop Wulfstan

Crime and violence were the central problem for the early English kings, all the more so as they were Christians who saw it as their job to be Christ's vicar on earth. In one of his law codes, King Athelstan is recorded apologising for the bad state of public order: 'I am sorry my peace is kept so badly: my advisors say I have put up with it too long'.

With brutal punishments at their disposal, it would have been easy for a king to respond with an iron fist. Which makes the mitigating touches of humanity that we occasionally find all the more touching.

King Athelstan... was concerned about the number of young people being executed under the death penalty.

King Athelstan, for example, is reported saying to his councillors that he was concerned about the number of young people being executed under the death penalty, 'as he sees everywhere is the case'. In his day, the penalty could be enforced on anyone 12 years old or over, but the king raised the age of criminal responsibility to 16 because, as he said simply, 'it is too cruel'. That, remember, is around 930, while as late as the early 19th century there are cases of ten, nine and even eight year olds being executed for sheep stealing! The story provides a salutary warning against patronising people in the past, or assuming our ancestors of 1,000 years ago were more cruel, or less civilised, than we are. This was a genuine effort to create a humane government, however unpalatable some of its methods may seem to us now, and however ineffectual the king sometimes admits they were at the time.

Coins

The 10th century sees the beginnings of a money economy in England, and coinage is one of the great achievements of the later Anglo-Saxon state. Indeed, it is one of our key pieces of evidence for the very existence of an Anglo-Saxon 'state'.

This amazingly sophisticated system was far more developed than in any other European country.

By Edgar's day, they had mints everywhere in southern England. You had to collect your new coins from a local mint and take them back to the local mint to be 'recoined'. By Edgar's day there was nowhere in mainland England, apart from the most mountainous rural areas, that was more than 15 miles from a mint. By then, the government could announce that they were going to recoin - presumably in response to inflationary pressures in the economy. The new coins would carry a new design so there was no confusion with the old issue. This amazingly sophisticated system was far more developed than in any other European country, and remained so for long afterwards. And to cap it all, they allowed regional variations in the coin design: some, for instance, dispensing with the king's head altogether, perhaps to appease regional sentiment - something which even today's devisers of the euro feel unable to do.

The way this was organised and executed is in itself a testimony to the success of the Anglo-Saxon state; the English monetary system of pounds, shillings and pence survived until the United Kingdom went decimal, in 1971. Even in 2001, the election opinion polls showed a residual reluctance, on the part of the British public, to part with the pound for the euro. And perhaps that is not surprising, for the pound is the last symbol of the royal currency put in place all that time ago. Today's pounds and pence, though now counted in decimals, are the lineal descendants of the silver penny minted by the kings of the English over 1,000 years ago, and we still have the name and bust of the monarch on every coin to prove it.

Source: BBC, London

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