Anglo‐Saxons

Anglo‐Saxons is the name collectively applied to the descendants of the Germanic people who settled in Britain between the late 4th and early 7th cents. Their backgrounds varied. Some came as mercenaries, others as invaders. They included, besides Angles and Saxons, Jutes and other groups. The eventual use of the name ‘English’ and ‘England’ for people and territory probably owes something to Bede, whose History of the English People dealt with the whole. He followed Pope Gregory I, who knew the people as Angles.

Much about the invasion and settlement is obscure, but for most of its history Anglo‐Saxon England is one of the best‐documented early medieval European societies. Besides Bede's History, historical sources include a number of saints' lives, and the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle. Many letters survive, those of the Anglo‐Saxon missionary to the continent, Boniface, of particular importance. A great body of evidence relates to royal ideology, government, and administration: vernacular law codes (beginning with that of Æthelbert of Kent), charters, writs, and wills. Historians also benefit from the study of the language of vernacular texts, from that of place‐names, of art (including sculpture), and of architecture. Archaeology, of burials, settlements, towns, kings' halls (Yeavering, Cheddar), monasteries, and churches, is critically important. Yet there are still uncertainties. Gaps in the evidence, problems of its interpretation and of reconciling different types, generate lively debate. Some may never be solved: it is salutary to realize how important subjects depend on chance survivals or discoveries—the ship‐burial at Sutton Hoo (mound 1) and the poem Beowulf for example.

From obscure beginnings the Anglo‐Saxons formed a number of kingdoms. The 7th‐cent. trend was a shift in the balance of power from south and east (Kent and East Anglia) to north and west (Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex), and the take‐over of smaller kingdoms by larger ones, the so‐called heptarchy. The 8th cent. was a period of Mercian dominance and Northumbrian independence, the 9th of the rise of Wessex, and of the threat of the Vikings. They established their own kingdoms (of East Anglia and Northumbria). In the 10th cent. Wessex united England.

To the forging of one people Alfred, Athelstan, and Edgar made significant contributions. Encouragement was to be found in the pages of Bede and in the needs of the church. But the England of 1066 was not inevitable. Quite different borders could have been established. In the late 7th cent. one kingdom south of the Humber and another north, including southern Scotland, was a possibility; in the 10th a kingdom pushing into Wales rather than the Scandinavian‐held north.

Society and culture changed over time. Anglo‐Saxon paganism is not fully known. The great period of conversion was the 7th cent., an age of saints, especially in Northumbria (the missionary Aidan, the home‐grown Wilfrid, Cuthbert, and others) and monastic foundations (including Lindisfarne, Whitby, Ripon, Hexham, and Monkwearmouth‐Jarrow). A stratified society, in which ceorls and gesiths (royal companions) had different wergelds, its political life was dominated by the aristocracy. Historical development brought a growth in royal power and authority in a society wherein the participation in government of free men had a long history. On some issues—marriage and war, for example—the new religion might conflict with traditional values. Some features of Anglo‐Saxon society seem alien, even incomprehensible, to modern eyes at first sight: the practice of blood‐feud, the institution of the retinue (war‐band), both of which contributed to a high level of violence in élite society, the combination of genuine piety with ferocity in warfare, and its condoning by clerics. Yet others seem modern: the status of women has been seen as comparatively high, some queens and royal ladies, particularly Æthelfleda, lady of the Mercians, and abbesses, notably Hilda and Ælfflæd of Whitby, playing an important part in political and religious life.

The Anglo‐Saxon arrival had ended Britain's involvement with Roman culture and institutions, but this was recreated in the late 6th cent. Christianity, purveyed to theAnglo‐Saxons almost entirely by non‐British teachers, from the Irish, from Frankish Gaul, and from Rome (beginning with the mission of Augustine), brought England into the Mediterranean, Christian, Roman world. Missionaries worked amongst the Anglo‐Saxons' still pagan continental kin. Boniface was prominent in Frankish church reform and functioned as representative of the pope to the Franks. Anglo‐Saxon veneration of the papacy was strong and contributed to the growth of papal authority. Alcuin of York was adviser to Charlemagne and a leading figure in the Carolingian Renaissance.

But England owed much to Europe. The books collected on the continent by Benedict Biscop, and the school of Canterbury, established by Archbishop Theodore, himself from Tarsus, brought her Christian culture and scholarship. From an early period Frankish support and influence were factors in English dynastic politics, most clearly visible in Charlemagne's support for some of Offa of Mercia's enemies. Carolingian ideas concerning church reform and kingship, Carolingian administrative and governmental institutions and practices, Carolingian coinage, and Carolingian art all had an impact in the 8th cent. Alfred learned much from Carolingian example. Government in the 10th and 11th cents. has much about it that seems Carolingian. Involvement with Normandy came in the late 10th cent. Trade, especially in slaves in the early period and wool in the later, brought great wealth, probably the main attraction for Cnut and William the Conqueror.

The Anglo‐Saxon achievement was cultural, religious, economic, and political. Art, architecture, vernacular and Anglo‐Latin writing, and scholarship are all remarkable. Not, originally, an urban people, Scandinavian activity and the development of Alfred's burhs lay behind their 10th‐ and 11th‐cent. towns. Coinage was firmly under royal control. Prosperity sustained the frequent collection of large Danegelds. By the 11th cent., with its hundreds, shires, ealdormen and reeves, law courts, and tax‐collecting, Anglo‐Saxon England was, by European standards, remarkably sophisticated and advanced. There was no capital, but Winchester was almost a capital city. The country was united, though it was not uniform in every particular. The compilation of William I's Domesday Book would not have been possible without Anglo‐Saxon administrative genius. This genius, largely West Saxon, is visible elsewhere, in the rational distribution of mints in the 10th cent., and in the shire system, almost unchanged until 1974.