Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy

Judging the writing of another age and in another language is always difficult. But this passage, though it may borrow from Classical models, is, to my ear at least, no mere rhetorical exercise but a piece of vivid war reporting. And it still chills.

As also does Gildas’s description of the consequences. The survivors, who had managed to flee, soon faced either starvation or death from the elements. In this extremity, some surrendered to the invaders, to be killed or enslaved at their pleasure. Others fled abroad. While others took refuge among the mountains, forests and cliffs of the west of the island.

Gildas’s account is, for once, history written by the losers. But the story did not change much when Bede came to rewrite it two and a half centuries later from the perspective of the victors. Bede supplies a date – ‘in the year of Our Lord 449, Martian being made Emperor with Valentinian’ – for Vortigern’s invitation to the Saxons. And he gives the names of the Saxon leaders: ‘Hengist’ and ‘Horsa’. But the date is clearly the result of intelligent guesswork while, with his usual scrupulousness, he qualifies the statement about Hengist and Horsa with the warning: these ‘are said to have been’ their names.

Where Bede is useful instead is in his account of the ethnography of the invasions. For he is clear that the Saxons were only one of several distinct German peoples to invade Britain, each of whom settled in a different part of the old Roman province.

Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany – Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West Saxons [Wessex] who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight. From the Saxons, that is, the country which is now called Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons [that is, the peoples of Essex, Sussex and Wessex]. From the Angles, that is, the country which is called Anglia, and which is said, from that time, to remain desert [i.e. unpeopled] to this day, between the provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, are descended the East Angles, the Midland Angles, Mercians, all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the River Humber, and the other nations of the English.

Bede’s account was a product of the best antiquarian scholarship of his own day. And it has been confirmed, in astonishing detail, by modern archaeology. Cremation urns of the same type, and probably indeed by the same potter, have been found in Wehden, Lower Saxony, and Markshall, Norfolk. Grave-goods discovered in both places, especially bracteates (decorated discs of gold), likewise confirm that there was a close connection between Kent and Jutland on the west coast of Denmark. The author is even right about the depopulation of Angeln, the homeland of the Angles. There rising sea-levels made long-established villages uninhabitable and their populations joined, almost certainly, in the emigration to Britain.

But, beyond these broad outlines, it is remarkably difficult to go. True, the much later compilation known as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does appear to give a detailed account of the conquest with dates and battles. But it is easy to show that the Chronicle narrative is riddled with repetitions, inconsistencies and glaring omissions. It is also shot through with formulaic foundation legends (the landing parties almost always sail in three ships) and mythical genealogies (almost all the royal houses spring from the Anglo-Saxon god Woden). In view of this, the best that can be said is that the invaders first settled on the coast and then penetrated inland along navigable rivers and Roman roads. The broad movement was from east to west and south to north. But it was patchy, often slow and faced occasional serious reverses, like the Battle of Mount Badon, in which the British, led by Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom Gildas calls the sole survivor of ‘the Roman nation’ in Britain, inflicted a heavy defeat on the Anglo-Saxons, probably in the ad 490s. The area around Luton and Aylesbury in the modern Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire did not fall till ad 571 and Bath not till six years later, after the battle of Dyrham. And there were pockets of resistance even in the east – such as Verulamium, the site of the death of the proto-martyr, St Alban, and the principal cultic centre of British Christianity, or the little British kingdom of Elmet in the modern Yorkshire – which held out longer still.

By the end of the sixth century, however, the future political geography of Britain was becoming clear. The Britons had held on to the territories to the north of Hadrian’s Wall, to Cumbria and to the west of the Severn and Wye valleys, while the Anglo-Saxons had conquered everything to the east and to the south.

Give or take a little, these are the approximate frontiers of modern England.

III

We tend to think of the Norman Conquest as the turning point in the history of England. But the Saxon Conquest was even more important, since it created both the reality and the idea of England itself. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the scale of the Saxon incursions. Perhaps 200,000 people flooded into a native population which by then had been reduced by raids, famine and disease to less than two million. Proportionately, it was the largest immigration that Britain has ever known. Moreover, as most of the incomers were men, it quickly turned from immigration into conquest. In the areas of densest Anglo-Saxon settlement, in the east and the Midlands, DNA evidence shows that up to ninety per cent of the native male population was displaced – they were driven west or killed – and their women, their villages and their farms taken over by the incomers. This was ethnic cleansing at its most savagely effective.

And it was not only blood that changed. The Anglo-Saxon immigrants imposed their own language: Old English. Most former places of habitation – towns, villages and villas – were abandoned and new ones established, to which new, English names were given. They also gave new names to natural features, such as mountains and rivers and woods. And they remade as well as renamed the landscape. In the fullness of time, they even gave the country they had conquered a new name: Britannia became the land of the Angles or Ængla Land.

This immigration at the point of the sword led to an outcome that was unique in the former territories of the Empire. For the sack of Rome in ad 410 had been followed sixty years later by the fall of the Empire itself in the west in ad 476. Nevertheless, in most places – in Italy and what were to become France and Spain – things continued pretty much as before. The cities with their bishops survived; ‘senatorial’ aristocrats continued to entertain each other in their opulent villas; the trade routes to the East remained open. The difference was that in place of the emperor, barbarian German leaders took over the imperial role. They divided it and localized it. But they kept all of the wealth, pomp and authority they could. For it was that which had made Rome such a magnet in the first place.

Even the Visigoths, who had sacked Rome, got in on the act. ‘At first’, Athaulf, the Visigothic king is reported as saying, ‘I ardently desired that the Roman name should be obliterated.’ But then he realized his mistake. ‘I have therefore chosen the safer course of aspiring to the glory of restoring and increasing the Roman name by Gothic vigour.’ Athaulf ’s lineage did not survive. But his aspirations did. The result was that, throughout the continental provinces of the Empire, a hybrid sub-Roman society continued to propagate Roman and Christian ideas of politics under the rule of Germanic kings; Roman buildings, such as churches and palaces, were still put up to enrich their capitals; their new Germanic nobility retained the names of the senior Roman military ranks – comes or count and dux or duke – as aristocratic titles; and, above all, Latin – if increasingly debased and diluted – continued to be the spoken and written language, used by the invaders and the native populations alike.

But in Britannia it was a different story. Here the fall of Rome really marked the end of Romanness. Despite their height and strength, the walls of Rutupiae (Richborough) and the other forts of the Saxon Shore were overwhelmed and abandoned. So were the walled towns. And their ruin marks the ruin of Britain. Or at least it marks the annihilation of everything that was Roman about Britain: the law, the language, the literature, the religion and the politics all vanished.

Quite why the Anglo-Saxons should have behaved so differently from their fellow Germanic tribesmen across the Channel it is hard to say. Perhaps the Britons, who, unlike the demoralized and by this time largely barbarian Roman field-army, were defending their own homes and families, simply fought too hard. Perhaps, in the fifty years since cutting off the imperial ties in ad 409, Romanized Britain had ceased to be a going concern, where, unlike the Continent again, there was nothing much for the barbarian invaders to buy into. Perhaps the Anglo-Saxons (and some of the Britons too) simply wanted to be different.

But the important thing is that in Britannia, uniquely in western Europe, there was a fresh start. For along with their new language, the Anglo-Saxons brought a new society, new gods and a new, very different set of political values. And from these, in time, they would create a nation and an empire which would rival Rome. A version of their tongue would replace Latin as the lingua franca; English Common Law would challenge Roman Law as the dominant legal system; and they would devise, in free-market economics, a new form of business that would transform human wealth and welfare. Most importantly, perhaps, they would invent a new politics which depended on participation and consent, rather than on the top-down autocracy of Rome.

It is a story to be proud of and, at its heart, lies a single institution: the monarchy.

Chapter 2

Christian Kingship

Redwald, Æthelfrith, Æthelbert, Penda, Offa, Egbert

THE ANGLO-SAXONS HAD BROUGHT MANY THINGS from Germany. But the idea of kingship was not among them. As late as Bede’s own day, the Anglo-Saxons’ ancestral people in the German homeland were kingless; likewise, the leaders of the first expeditions to Britain – Cerdic, Cynric and the rest – were called chiefs and never kings. Only in subsequent generations did their children and grandchildren begin to style themselves kings and invent impressive genealogies for themselves.

English kingship, that is to say, was a plant of English growth, developing in England out of the conditions which followed the Anglo-Saxon conquest.

I

The background was the peculiarly egalitarian nature of Germanic social structure and political values which the Anglo-Saxons brought with them to Britain. Since the Anglo-Saxons themselves, like other Germanic peoples, were illiterate, we have to depend for our knowledge of these on the account of a civilized Roman outsider, Tacitus. His Germania (Germany) has a double aspect. It was political propaganda, addressed to the Romans of his own day. But it was also a piece of serious ethnography.

Tacitus was a grand senatorial aristocrat, historian and biographer and son-in-law of Agricola, the conquering governor of Britain. He was born around AD 55 in the reign of the Emperor Nero and died c. AD 120 under Hadrian. Like many of his class, Tacitus was nostalgic for the Republic. So in Germania he turned its inhabitants into Noble Savages. They were physically handsome. They were morally virtuous. They remained uncorrupted by civilization and its delights. And, above all, they had preserved their manhood and their freedom.

Tacitus’s essay, as well as being a serious piece of ethnography, is also remarkably accurate as prophecy. For, three centuries before the barbarian invasions which overran the Western Empire, Tacitus proclaimed that the Germans were Rome’s most dangerous foe. Not even the great Middle Eastern empire of Parthia (in effect, the later Persia) presented such a challenge.

The Germans, Tacitus writes, have no cities and dislike close neighbours. Instead they live in separate dwellings in widely scattered hamlets. Their buildings are of wood and their dress is of the simplest, with both men and women, apart from the richest, wearing a simple one-piece garment held in place with a clasp. This clasp, elaborated into a brooch, was the most characteristic form of female adornment; for a man, however, it was the spear. Indeed, the spear was manhood and presentation with it was the rite de passage from a boy to a man: ‘up to this time he is regarded as a member of the household, afterwards as a member of the commonwealth’.

Happy chance has preserved the remains of a series of such communities in the Lark valley in Suffolk. They belong to the earliest days of the Anglo-Saxon settlement in Britain and their archaeology confirms Tacitus’s picture in striking detail. The hamlets were widely separated and the houses built of wood. They clustered in three groups, which probably formed the accommodation of three extended families. The larger building in the centre of each group was the hall where the family met, ate and caroused, and where, too, probably the young unmarried men slept. The immigrants depended on simple mixed farming, while their grave-goods suggest a remarkably homogeneous and egalitarian society. Each female grave contained a brooch and only a handful of males were buried with a sword rather than the ubiquitous spear.

For the right to bear arms was as important to the Anglo-Saxons as it was to the framers of the Second Amendment to the American Constitution. And for much the same reason: only a community that could defend itself was free and only someone who could share in that defence had the right to call himself a free man. ‘They transact’, Tacitus noted, ‘no public or private business without being armed.’ The result was a sort of armed democracy. ‘When the whole multitude think proper, they sit down armed … the most complimentary form of assent is to express approbation with their spears.’ This was participatory politics and the polar opposite of the imperial command model of Rome.

Nevertheless, such communities still needed leaders, especially in times of war. But how did they arise? Our earliest sources on the German people, Tacitus and Bede, offer the same answer: they chose or ‘elected’ their kings. And, as the kings were made by the people, they had, as Tacitus again emphasizes, neither ‘unlimited [n]or arbitrary power’ over them. This, then, is the idea of government by consent, in which the leader is chosen by the people, or at least is answerable to them. It was an idea taken by the Anglo-Saxons from their homeland in Germany and transplanted to their new home in England, where it flourished and remains an essential element in the monarchy to the present day.

The contrast with the Rome of Tacitus’s own day – where the emperor ruled and a fawning court adored; where the rich had sold their liberty for luxury and the poor for bread and circuses; where freedom was a memory and liberty an illusion – was all the stronger for being unspoken.

Meanwhile, England, in the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, offered special circumstances which encouraged the development of kingship beyond anything the Germans were familiar with back home. Most important was the long, hard-fought nature of the conquest itself. For the Anglo-Saxons’ more-or-less permanent state of war to the death with the British required equally permanent leaders. Moreover, war in a prosperous country like Britain produced booty, which made the war leaders rich. From their new wealth they could reward their followers. This attracted fresh followers and consolidated the loyalty of the old, which made the leaders more powerful still. And so on. Finally, the power and the permanence coalesced into kingship.

The clearest evidence of the change from the relatively egalitarian communities of the early conquest period to a more complex society with greater extremes of rich and poor, of haves and have-nots, comes from the graves known to archaeologists as Fürstengräber (‘princely graves’). They appear by the middle of the sixth century and have a distinctive style. A large mound or barrow was raised over the grave and a rich array and variety of goods placed within it, such as the silver-gilt-hilted sword, silver-studded shield, spear and knife, Kentish glass claw-beaker, Frankish bronze bowl and Frankish silver-gilt-and-garnet-encrusted belt buckle found under the largest barrow of the ‘burial field’ at Finglesham in East Kent.

We shall never know the exact names or ranks of the people buried at Finglesham. But the name Finglesham is itself a clue. Its earliest form, contemporary with the cemetery, is Pengels-ham: ‘the Prince’s manor’; while a couple of miles to the north-west is Eastry, a royal vil of the eventual kingdom of Kent. Almost certainly, therefore, the burials at Finglesham were those of Kentish princes. Were they cadets of an existing royal house? Or were they princes on their way to becoming kings? And what was the source of their wealth? From trade? Or war? Or both?

This halfway world to monarchy is also reflected in the great Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, which is written much later but appears to preserve folk memories of these earlier times. The poem’s hero, Beowulf, was a local war leader chosen by the people of his district on the mainland. Thanks to his prowess, he eventually became a king, reigned gloriously for fifty winters and was given a magnificent funeral.

The Geat People built a pyre for Beowulf,

stacked and decked it until it stood foursquare,

hung with helmets, heavy war-shields

On a height they kindled the hugest of all

funeral fires; flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house

burning it to the core … Heaven swallowed the smoke.

Then, after the body and weapons were consumed in the flames,

… the Geat people began to construct

a mound on a headland …

It was their hero’s memorial; what remained from the fire

they housed inside it …

And they buried torques in the barrow, and jewels

and a trove [of golden treasure] …

But Beowulf, impressive though it is, is only literature and scholars were inclined to dismiss its tale of lavish buried treasure as mere embroidery. Then, in 1939, archaeologists began to excavate a mound at Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge in Suffolk. It revealed a burial of epic magnificence. The largest Dark Age ship yet known – ninety feet in length and fourteen feet across at its widest – had been dragged from the River Deben to the top of the hundred-foot-high ridge and laid in an enormous, pre-excavated trench. Then a gabled hut was built amidships and the body, dressed in the deceased’s richest clothes, and surrounded with his weapons, insignia and treasures, was placed within. Finally the trench was filled in and a high mound raised over the ship and its precious cargo.