c.450. Traditional date for the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons to BritainThis
date, and the whole idea of a sudden onslaught of "Anglo-Saxons" on
post-Roman Britain in the mid-5th century, is a vast oversimplification. Saxon
pirates may have been raiding the shores of Britain already by 365; in 367 there
was a Roman military officer in charge of a series of fortresses along the south-eastern
coast, and by the end of the century the coast itself was called the Saxon Shore.
There may also have been Saxons among the defenders of late 4th-century Britain:
the German names of two of the Roman commanders (Fullofaudes and Fraomar) make
it clear that members of some Germanic tribes were on the Romano-British side.
Information
from the 5th century is scarce. Constantius's Life of St Germanus notes that the
saint helped the British to win a victory against a combined force of Picts and
Saxons, in a visit which Prosper of Aquitaine's Chronicle dates to 429. The Gallic
Chronicle, written probably shortly after 452, notes a severe Saxon raid on Britain
in about 410, and the fall of Britain to the Saxons, after many troubles, in 441.
It would be fascinating to learn what tidings reached the near-contemporary chronicler
in the south of France to make him believe that Britain had fallen: the tales
of refugees, perhaps, fleeing for their lives, or the sudden cessation of contact
or trade with Britain which might result if the Saxons took the coastal settlements
and blockaded the Channel. Without more details, though, this source is too far
away from events to be more than an index of how widely-known and serious were
the Saxon troubles in Britain.
For more discursive accounts of the Anglo-Saxon
arrival we must turn to later British and English sources. The earliest source
is Gildas, who wrote in the 6th century the De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae,
"Of the Ruin and Conquest of Britain"; this is primarily a lament for
the sins of contemporary British rulers, but it includes some historical background.
Gildas says that some time after an unsuccessful appeal for help to the Roman
consul "Agitius", the Britons, fearing a return of their old enemies,
the Irish and the Picts, agreed to give land to the Saxons on condition that they
beat back the raiders. The Saxons came first in three ships, landing on the east
side of the island, and later a second and larger group arrived. For a long time
they received their wages and did their work, but eventually they demanded greater
rewards, and plundered "the whole island" when they were refused. Gildas
pictures the Saxon conquest as divine vengeance for earlier sins of the Britons,
and is manifestly uninterested in names or dates or historical precision. It is
true that the Irish and the Picts, as well as the Saxons, did raid late Roman
(and presumably sub-Roman) Britain; it is also plausible that some Saxons may
have been employed as defenders of Roman Britain, as we know some other Germanic
peoples were. But elsewhere Gildas is clearly rearranging material to suit his
polemical ends (we know the Saxons were already raiding Britain in the late 4th
and early 5th centuries, but Gildas omits all mention of this to introduce them
as agents of divine vengeance in the mid-5th century), or straying into legend
(the arrival of the Saxon invaders in three ships parallels origin stories told
of the Picts, the Irish, the Goths and the Continental Saxons). His account, though
influential as narrative, cannot be trusted as history.
In the 8th century,
the English writer Bede added dates to Gildas's account. In his Chronica Maiora
of 725 he tried to put Gildas's events into a sequence of Roman imperial reigns,
and since Gildas notes that "Agitius" was thrice consul and there was
a Roman military leader, Aetius, who received a third consulship in 446, Bede
dates the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to the following reign, of Marcian and Valentinian
(450-57). Bede was using A.D. dating in his Historia Ecclesiastica of 731, but
instead of giving a specific year, he repeats his statement that the coming of
the Saxons happened in the seven-year reign of Marcian and Valentinian, which
he states (erroneously) began in 449. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at the end of
the 9th century repeats Bede's statement under its annal for 449, and it is a
simplification of that which has given us the supposed date "449" for
the coming of the Anglo-Saxons. But it seems that Bede was only trying to make
sense of Gildas, and since the result contradicts a nearly-contemporary source
(by which the Saxons had conquered Britain by 441, nearly ten years before they
were first "invited"), the date c.450 for the "Coming of the Anglo-Saxons"
has no real historical authority. Nonetheless, from the 8th century to the 20th,
c.450 was the approximate received date for the invasion. Bede himself is not
consistent: elsewhere in his History, he dates events with the phrase "about
[x] years after the English came to Britain", and in three cases he seems
to be calculating from a date of 446/47 rather than 449-56. The later Historia
Brittonum, on uncertain authority, notes that an Irish abbot who visited Ripon
in 753 discovered that there they dated the arrival to 453.
A recent and
skeptical review of the archaeological evidence (Hines, "Philology, Archaeology
and the adventus Saxonum vel Anglorum") notes that while the overall sequence
of the transition from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England is clear, it cannot
be dated with the precision historians would desire. It seems that there were
only a handful of sites containing "Anglo-Saxon" artefacts datable to
before the middle of the 5th century. There was then a considerable expansion
in the area covered by Anglo-Saxon sites and in the density of such sites over
the second half of the 5th century and the first half of the 6th. In other words,
Anglo-Saxon influence became much more visible on the ground in the second half
of the 5th century, and if the "Coming of the Anglo-Saxons" is defined
as the point where they achieve significant influence rather than their first
arrival, c.450 may be as good a date as any. It is still an oversimplification,
however, and "the second half of the 5th century" more accurately reflects
our current knowledge.
"Saxons", "Anglo-Saxons", and
"English" have been used interchangeably for the Germanic invaders of
England. In a famous passage towards the beginning of his History (I.xv), Bede
states that the people of the Angles or Saxons came from three strong Germanic
tribes, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. There were doubtless many other
peoples involved: Bede himself gives a longer list towards the end of his History
(V.ix), naming the Frisians, the Rugini, the Danes, the Huns, the Old Saxons and
the Boructari (probabaly Franks); a 6th-century Byzantine historian, Procopius,
thought that Britain was inhabited by Britons, Angles, and Frisians. But the fact
that contemporaries tended to refer to them indiscriminately as "the Angles"
or "the Saxons" suggests that these two groups were predominant. The
compound "Anglo-Saxon" appears in some Continental sources as a vague
synonym of "Angles" or "Saxons", or as a term to differentiate
the Saxons in Britain from those on the Continent (Pohl pp.21-2), but it is introduced
in England as a term meaning "all of the English" at King Alfred's court
at the end of the 9th century.
R. Burgess, "The Dark Ages Return
to Fifth-Century Britain: The 'Restored' Gallic Chronicle Exploded", Britannia
21 (1990), pp.185-95
J. Campbell (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons (London:
1982)
J. Cotterill, "Saxon Raiding and the Role of the Late
Roman Coastal Forts of Britain", Britannia 24 (1993), pp.227-39
S. Frere, Britannia: A History of Roman Britain, 3rd edn (London: 1987)
N. Higham, The English Conquest: Gildas and Britain in the Fifth Century (Manchester:
1994)
J. Hines, "Philology, Archaeology and the adventus Saxonum
vel Anglorum", Britain 400-600: Language and History, edd. A. Bammesberger
and A. Wollmann (Heidelberg, 1990), pp.17-36
W. Pohl, "Ethnic
Names and Identities in the British Isles: A Comparative Perspective", in
J. Hines (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century:
An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge: 1997), pp.7-32
P. Sims-Williams,
"Gildas and the Anglo-Saxons", Cambridge Medieval Celtic Society 6 (1983),
pp.1-30
P. Sims-Williams, "The settlement of England in Bede
and the Chronicle", Anglo-Saxon England 12 (1983), pp.1-41
F. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn (Oxford: 1971), pp.1-18
c.450
to c.550. Prehistory of Anglo-Saxon England
While it seems clear that
there was a strong Anglo-Saxon presence in Britain starting in the second half
of the 5th century, for the first hundred years or so it is impossible to put
together a detailed and reliable account of what was going on.
Gildas, writing
in the mid-6th century, provides a near-contemporary account, but few details.
He notes that after the initial Saxon revolt, which rampaged unchecked over the
whole island, some of the Britons surrendered, some fled overseas or into the
deep forests, and some eventually got together under the leadership of the Roman
commander Ambrosius Aurelianus. After this, victories went sometimes to the Saxons,
sometimes to the Britons, until the battle of mons Badonicus. This was pretty
much the last British victory, and Gildas seems to tell us it took place in the
year of his birth, 44 years before he wrote. Elsewhere Gildas tells us that access
to many of the shrines of British saints had been cut off by the "partition
with the barbarians", so it seems likely that large parts of what would become
England were already in Anglo-Saxon hands in his day.
This account is plausible,
but it must be remembered that at least in its earlier sections Gildas's history
is sometimes wildly inaccurate or deliberately changed to make his polemical points
more clearly (see entry on c.450). We have no independent evidence of the existence
or nationality of Ambrosius Aurelianus, though he may well be the historical model
for the legendary King Arthur. Since we do not know when Gildas was born or when
he wrote his De Excidio, we cannot date the battle of Mount Badon, nor can we
locate it. Archaeological evidence does however show that Anglo-Saxon artefacts
were found over much of England by the early 6th century, and in much greater
concentrations by the mid-6th century, which corroborates Gildas's statement that
several parts of Britain were inaccessible because of the barbarians. Gildas's
statement that some Britons fled overseas is also supported by evidence of British
settlers from Holland to Spain, though the densest area of settlement was the
peninsula of Armorica, which became Brittany.
Bede, from his vantage point
in the 8th century, repeats Gildas's account but otherwise adds very little between
the coming of the Anglo-Saxons in the mid-5th century and the coming of the Roman
missionaries to convert them at the end of the 6th. We can only imagine what Bede
might have told us about the pagan past if he had wished: his focus in his Ecclesiastical
History is almost exclusively on the English Church and on Christian English kingdoms.
The
9th-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives more dates, mostly of the arrivals of
Saxon war-parties, their fights with the British, and the succession to the new-founded
Saxon kingdoms of Kent, the West Saxons, and the South Saxons. While there are
details here, they cannot be accepted as reliable: since the Saxons would have
been illiterate from the invasions in the 5th century until their conversion in
the 7th century, the dates and details are at best a matter of traditions and
later guesswork. Very close parallels between the West Saxon and Kentish stories
(not only following the same framework, but allowing the same number of years
between events) strongly suggest that one was copied from the model of the other,
which would mean that almost half of this part of the Chronicle could be dismissed
outright. Further problems with the chronology of the West Saxon entries (which
suggest that a set of annals originally starting in the mid-6th century was rewritten
to begin in the late 5th) and the cast of characters of the Kentish entries (many
of whom seem to be semi-divine figures of myth rather than real people) will be
dealt with in separate entries on the legendary foundations of these kingdoms
(see c.450 to 512 and 495 to 594)..
Some other Chronicle entries, by which
arriving Saxons give their names to local settlements, look suspicious for another
reason. While it is possible that a chieftain called Port arrived in 501 and landed
at Portsmouth which was named after him, it is more likely that the name Portsmouth
derives from Latin portus, "harbour", especially since no other Englishman
was ever called Port. While there were other people called Wihtgar, the Wihtgar
who is said to have arrived in 514 and was eventually buried at Wihtgaraburg on
the Isle of Wight is most probably a later invention or misunderstanding, since
Wihtgaraburg does not in fact mean "Wihtgar's fortress" but "the
fortress of the inhabitants of Wight". A more prosaic explanation probably
also lies behind the name of the Netley Marshes, which are said to be called after
a British king Natanleod who was killed there in 508: since "Natanleod"
bears no relation to any known British personal name, the marshes are probably
so named because they are wet (OE n?t, "wet" + leah, "meadow").
Such invention of past heroes based on misunderstood place-names is not limited
to the Chronicle: Bede claims that Rochester was named for one of its chieftains
called Hrof (HE, ii.3), whereas in fact we can see that the English form of the
name is derived from the earlier British form which means not "Hrof's settlement"
but "the bridges of the stronghold". Not all of the characters in early
Chronicle entries can be dismissed as mistaken explanations of place-names, but
it is likely that Port and Natanleod and Wihtgar, at least, are figments of later
fiction rather than of 6th-century fact.
This leads inevitably to the question
of that much more famous shadowy 6th-century character, King Arthur, who is supposed
to have led the Britons successfully against the Saxons. His existence also seems
to be confirmed by chronicles: the Annales Cambriae state that he fought at Mount
Badon in 516 and died with Medraut (Mordred) at Camlann in 537. Further, the 9th-century
Historia Brittonum lists twelve of his battles, leading up to his victory at Mount
Badon. However, it seems that at least for the 6th century the Annales Cambriae
are no more contemporary than the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the two Arthurian
entries were probably added in the 9th or 10th centuries. The Mount Badon annal
seems to be based on the Historia Brittonum, and both are undermined by the fact
that Gildas in the 6th century attributes this victory to Ambrosius Aurelianus
rather than to Arthur. Gildas could have been mistaken, but a closer examination
of "Arthur's" twelve battles shows good reason to re-attribute another
seven to other people or situations, which suggests that famous battles came to
be attributed to Arthur regardless of who originally fought them. Two of the remaining
four "Arthurian" battles appear from other early sources to be entirely
mythical, one a fight against werewolves and one a battle in which trees are magically
animated to fight. It may then be that Arthur was originally a legendary hero
of folklore who fought supernatural battles, and came to be seen as the greatest
of heroes (a reference to a hero who strove valiantly "but was not Arthur"
in a poem about a 6th-century battle would make sense in this context), and eventually
had various "historical" battles attached to him. The Irish folk-hero
Fionn underwent a similar transformation, from a mythical beginning to association
with the defence against the Viking invasions of Ireland. [A thorough investigation
of the historicity of Arthur, with detailed bibliography up to 1997, appears at
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~tomgreen/arthur.htm.]
J. Campbell
(ed.), The Anglo-Saxons (London: 1982), pp.23-7
O. Padel, "The
Nature of Arthur", Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 27 (1994), pp.1-31 [more
comments and bibliography up to 1997 appear on Thomas Green's web page at http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~tomgreen/arthur.htm]
P. Sims-Williams, "The settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle",
Anglo-Saxon England 12 (1983), pp.1-41
B. Yorke, "The Jutes
of Hampshire and Wight and the origins of Wessex", The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon
Kingdoms (London: 1989), pp.84-96
c.450 to 512. Legendary foundation
of Kent
Bede names the British ruler who "first" invited the
English, Vortigern, and reports that the leaders of the Angles, or Saxons, were
called Hengest and Horsa. Bede adds that a monument to Horsa still exists in eastern
Kent, and that the kings of Kent were descended from Hengest's son ?sc, from which
it is normally deduced that Hengest and Horsa landed in Kent. In fact, Bede does
not say what land they held, and if they were imported to deal with Irish and
Pictish incursions as Gildas suggests, they might more plausibly have been settled
in the north of Britain. But later tradition claimed them as Kentish, and saw
them landing at Ebbsfleet in Thanet (so the 9th-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
and Historia Brittonum).
The Ravenna Cosmographer, writing perhaps at the
same time as Bede, says that the Saxons arrived in Britain led by their prince
Ansehis. This name looks like a blundered Continental form of ?sc and suggests
that in one version of the story it was ?sc, not Hengest and Horsa, who led the
Saxons to Britain. This raises the possibility that Hengest and Horsa were mythical
founding figures, divine twins like Romulus and Remus, rather than real people.
(Pairs of brothers with alliterating names also led migrations in accounts of
the Lombards and Vandals; see Turville-Petre, p.274.) The Old English poem Beowulf
includes cryptic references to a character called Hengest, perhaps a Jute, who
played a key role in a dispute in Frisia between the Danes and the Frisians. This
Hengest might afterwards have led his band of followers across the sea to Britain,
but the existence of an alternate tradition that the Saxons were led to Britain
by ?sc, and the fact that the kings of Kent trace their descent to ?sc, not to
his more famous father Hengest, suggests that Hengest and his brother Horsa (who
is not named in the Frisian conflict) were added on to the Kentish royal genealogy
to give the later Kentish kings a link with the legendary Germanic past. This
process of improving the king's pedigree can be seen at work in the West Saxon
royal genealogy, which in the 7th century probably went back to Woden (Bede, HE,
i.15); but by the 9th century had been extended back from Woden through several
other Germanic heroes and then into Biblical figures and finally to Adam (Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, s.a. 855; see further Sisam).
On closer inspection, ?sc seems
no more secure as a historical figure than Hengest and Horsa. Jordanes, writing
a history of the Goths, notes that the people at the head of the Gothic genealogies
are called demigods, that is Ansis, because of their victories. Ansis is another
Continental variant of ?sc, and if as seems likely "?sc" is a word meaning
"divine hero" rather than the name of a real person, we are faced with
the embarrassing possibility that ?sc might himself have been a later addition
to the royal genealogy, and that the first sixty years of Kentish history, from
the landing in about 449 to ?sc's death in 512, carefully recorded in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, are completely fictitious.
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
Hengest and Horsa landed in or shortly after 449, at the invitation of Vortigern.
In 455 they fought against Vortigern at Aylesford, and Horsa was killed and Hengest
and ?sc succeeded to the kingdom. In 456 Hengest and ?sc fought the Britons at
Crayford, and after a great slaughter the Britons deserted Kent and fled to London.
In 465 Hengest and ?sc defeated the Britons at Wippedesfleot (unidentified), and
in 473 again at an unnamed place. In 488 ?sc succeeded to the kingdom (and presumably
therefore Hengest died), and he was king of the people of Kent for 24 years.
It
should be noted that ?sc succeeds to the kingdom twice, once in 455 and once in
488: this rouses further suspicions that the account is an attempt to graft together
different origin legends. It is also unfortunate that the same pattern, a landing
(449) followed six years later by the establishment of a kingdom (455) and almost
forty years later by the death of the father and the passing of the kingdom to
his son (488), is repeated exactly in the account of the foundation of the West
Saxon kingdom (494/5, 500, and 534; for West Saxon complications see entry on
495 to 594). It seems unlikely that the two kingdoms developed at so precisely
the same rate, and one or both accounts should probably be dismissed as origin
legend instead of sober history. It is worth noting that a similar sequence of
four battles (three of them named, and one of these leading to Horsa's death)
appears in the account of the foundation of Kent in the Historia Brittonum, but
in that case the battles end not with the flight of the Britons but with the defeat
and flight of the English. The tradition that there were four battles in the early
history of Kent is thus well established, but already in the 9th century it has
been taken out of whatever historical context it may have had and used to support
opposing pro-English and pro-British views of the past. Eleven hundred years later,
we have no means of saying which interpretation is correct, if indeed the four
battles were ever part of history and not just part of origin folklore like the
arrival in three ships.
The history of Kent that we can actually recover
begins not with Hengest and his son ?sc in the mid-5th century, but with Irminric
and his son ?thelberht in the mid-6th (see entry on c.575).
N. Brooks,
"The creation and early structure of the kingdom of Kent", The Origins
of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (London: 1989), pp.55-74
P. Sims-Williams,
"The settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle", Anglo-Saxon England
12 (1983), pp.1-41
K. Sisam, "Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies",
Proceedings of the British Academy 39 (1953), pp.287-348
J.R.R.
Tolkien, Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode (London: 1982)
J.E. Turville-Petre, "Hengest and Horsa", Saga-Book of the Viking Society
14 (1953-7), pp.273-90
B. Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon
England (London: 1990), pp.25-27
c.450 to 651. Foundation of Northumbria
Bede
notes that Northumbria was originally two separate kingdoms (HE, iii.1), Deira
(north of the river Humber but south of the Tyne) and Bernicia (north of the Tyne).
Genealogies survive for both Deira and Bernicia, taking both royal lines back
to Woden. In the first half of the 7th century the two kingdoms became one, ruled
by descendents of Ida of Bernicia until the second half of the 8th century (see
entry on 759).
In the earliest dated reference to a member of either royal
family, Bede notes that Ida took power in 547 and ruled for twelve years (HE,
v.24). However, comments attached to earlier members of the genealogies of both
Bernicia and Deira suggest at least legendary beginnings back in the 5th century.
For the Bernicians, a 9th-century manuscript adds to a report of Ida of Bernicia's
accession in 547 that Ida's grandfather Oessa was the first to arrive in Britain
(Dumville, "Chronicle-fragment", p.314). A rough guess at two generations
back from 547 would put Oessa's arrival towards the end of the 5th century. The
Deirans claimed an even earlier beginning: the Historia Brittonum's version of
the genealogy of the Deirans (?61) states that Soemel, the great-great-great-grandfather
of ?lle of Deira (who was king in 597) separated Deira from Bernicia. Five generations
from Soemel to ?lle would probably put this division in the mid-5th century, before
the arrival of the English Bernicians, which would mean that Soemel separated
Deira from British control (Dumville, "Origins", p.218). Though the
exploits of Oessa and Soemel are not recorded before the 9th century and may well
be fictitious, archaeological evidence does confirm that there were already Anglo-Saxons
in Northumbria by the third quarter of the 5th century, long before Ida began
to rule (Hines, pp. 26-7).
Whatever the arrangements were before Ida, he
remains the first known Northumbrian king. There is a Bernician regnal list copied
into an early manuscript of Bede's History, which lists the kings from Ida to
Ceolwulf (729-37), and gives the number of years each reigned (see Hunter Blair).
From this list we can deduce the following reigns for the kings from Ida to ?thelfrith,
and these reign-dates are almost all that is known of the earliest Bernician kings:
Ida,
547-59
Glappa, 559-60
Adda, 560-8
?thelric, 568-72
Theodric, 572-9
Frithuwald,
579-85
Hussa, 585-92
?thelfrith, 592-616
There was probably a
similar list for Deira, but since the Deiran line came to an end in the 7th century
there would be less cause to preserve it, and all that remains is three entries
in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: that in 560 ?lle succeeded to Northumbria and ruled
for 30 years, that in 588 (not 590, as one might expect) ?lle died and ?thelric
reigned for 5 years, and that in 593 ?thelfrith succeeded to Northumbria. This
is clearly muddled, not only because ?lle should have died in 590 if he ruled
for 30 years from 560, but also because Bede states that ?lle and ?thelfrith were
both reigning north of the Humber when ?thelberht of Kent greeted the Roman missionaries
in 597 (Bede, Chronica Maiora, entry 531, extracted at Miller, p.41). Bede's authority
that ?lle was in power in 597 should be preferred over the Chronicle's assertion
that ?lle died in 588 (and, implicitly, also in 590). The Chronicle entries are
probably based on a regnal list which stated that ?lle reigned for 30 years, and
then ?thelric reigned for 5 years, and then ?thelfrith took over Deira, but without
knowing the date of ?thelfrith's conquest it is impossible to say when ?lle's
reign should begin. (For a likely explanation of how the Chronicle arrived at
?thelfrith's accession in 593, and so put ?thelric's accession in 588 without
recognizing the inconsistency with ?lle's accession in 560, see Miller, pp.46-7.)
All we can say for certain about the Deiran kings before Edwin is that ?lle (Edwin's
father) was ruling c.597.
The political situation in Northumbria was extremely
fluid in the first half of the 7th century, with sometimes two separate countries,
sometimes a united Northumbria under a Bernician ruler, and once a united Northumbria
under a Deiran ruler. ?thelfrith of Bernicia (592-616; q.v.) was the first known
ruler of all Northumbria, and Edwin of Deira succeeded him to the whole kingdom
(616-33; q.v.). Shortly after the division of the kingdom on Edwin's death (see
entry on 633) both kingdoms were reunited under Oswald of Bernicia (634-42); after
Oswald's death in 642 there were again separate rulers until Oswiu of Bernicia
ordered the killing of Oswine of Deira in 651. While there may have been sub-kings
of Deira for the next thirty years or so, Oswine was probably the last independent
king of a separate Deira, and so with hindsight we can say that Northumbria became
a single kingdom under Bernician control in 651.
Though Northumbria may
have been a single country from the mid-7th century, political fluidity remained
something of a Northumbrian characteristic, as can be seen in the rapid changes
of ruler (and dynasty) in the second half of the 8th century (see entry on 758),
and the freedom with which the Northumbrians seemed to choose between English
and Viking kings in the mid-10th century (see entry on 947-54).
J. Hines,
"Philology, Archaeology and the adventus Saxonum vel Anglorum", Britain
400-600: Language and History, edd. A. Bammesberger and A. Wollmann (Heidelberg,
1990), pp.17-36
P. Hunter Blair, "The Moore Memoranda on Northumbrian
History", in C. Fox and B. Dickins (edd.), The Early Cultures of North-West
Europe (Cambridge: 1950), pp.245-57
D. Dumville, "A new chronicle-fragment
of early British history", English Historical Review 88 (1973), pp.312-4
D. Dumville, "The Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal lists",
Anglo-Saxon England 5 (1976), pp.23-50
D. Dumville, "The origins
of Northumbria: some aspects of the British background", in S. Bassett (ed.),
The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (London: 1989), pp.213-22
M.
Miller, "The dates of Deira", Anglo-Saxon England 8 (1979), pp.35-61
477
to 491. Legendary foundation of Sussex
The foundation of Sussex is described
in the suspect 5th-century section of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, according to
which ?lle and his three sons (Cymen, Wlencing, and Cissa) land with three ships
in 477 at Cymenesora (near Selsey Bill), and in the same year fight the Britons
and kill many of them and drive others into the Weald. In 485 ?lle fights the
Britons near the bank of the river Mearcredesburna (unidentified), and in 491
he and his son Cissa besiege the Roman fort near Pevensey and kill all the British
inhabitants. Nothing more is told of ?lle or of his sons, though the place-names
Lancing and Chichester seem to go back to the names of ?lle's sons Wlencing and
Cissa.
The folkloric arrival in three ships, and the inclusion of people
whose sole function seems to be to give their names to local settlements, suggest
that these Chronicle entries should be treated as later fiction rather than recorded
fact (see entry on c.450 to c.550). However, archaeological remains do suggest
there were Anglo-Saxons at least in the eastern part of Sussex in the 5th century,
and Bede in the 8th century notes "?lle King of the South Saxons" as
the first of a list of powerful English kings (HE, ii.5). It is possible then
that ?lle was one of the early leaders of the South Saxons, and remembered as
such in Bede's day. However, there is no way of determining when the historical
?lle reigned or what his sphere of influence was. There is no surviving royal
genealogy for the South Saxons, and beyond a brief mention of a fight between
Ceolwulf of Wessex and the South Saxons in 607 we know nothing of their fortune
until their re-emergence into narrative history in the 660s (see entry on 661).
M. Welch, "The kingdom of the South Saxons: the origins", in S. Bassett
(ed.), The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (London: 1989), pp.75-83
495
to 594. Legendary foundation of Wessex
The very beginnings of the chronology
of Wessex present a puzzle, in that key events are recorded twice, under different
years. The West Saxons (once called "Cerdic and Cynric" and once "the
West Saxons") arrive at Cerdicesora in 495 and in 514. They found the kingdom
in 500 and in 519, fight against the Britons in 508 and 527, and Cerdic dies and
Cynric succeeds in 516 and 534. These duplicated events are all 18 or 19 years
apart, which may be significant because later Christian scribes sometimes recorded
annals on Easter tables of 19-year duration, and an obvious way of backdating
events would be to put them in an earlier 19-year cycle (see Harrison, pp.127-8).
That seems to be what has happened here, perhaps to make the West Saxon line seem
older and therefore grander, just as genealogies were sometimes extended backwards
by adding more noble ancestors (see entry on c.450 to 512). More recent work by
David Dumville, working from all the variants of reign-lengths given in the Chronicle
and elsewhere, suggests that immediately behind the sources available to us there
is a version which placed the beginning of Cerdic's reign in 527?540, most probably
in 537/8 (see Dumville, pp.50-51); since this is another 19 years on from 519,
the suspicion must be that the West Saxon entries in the Chronicle were in fact
backdated by 19 years twice, and the original dates were probably closer to:
Cerdic:
538-54
Cynric: 554-81
Ceawlin: 581-88
Ceol: 588-94
Ceolwulf: 594-611
After
Ceolwulf's reign the variations that exist tend to be limited to a year or two,
and this is probably because the next king, Cynegils, was baptized in 635 and
after that literate clerics will have been available to keep records from then
on.
What with all the chronological dislocation that seems to have gone
on, it seems a fairly hopeless task to put the Chronicle's catalogue of battles
from 508 to 592 into this revised and shortened framework. In any case, some of
them are probably later inventions to explain place-names (such as the 508 battle
when "Natanleod" was killed, although Netley Marshes are more likely
so named for OE n?t, "wet"), and some are at places which can no longer
be identified (such as Cerdicesleag, where Cerdic and Cynric are supposed to have
fought in 527). Others are fights against the Britons at times and places where
the archaeology demonstrates the Anglo-Saxons were already well established (such
as Old Sarum, where Cynric is supposed to have defeated the Britons in 552, though
Anglo-Saxon material appears in the area at least half a century earlier, see
Yorke, p.32). The battles dealing with the Isle of Wight are dealt with separately
(see entry on 514 to 544). Of the rest, Cynric and Ceawlin are said to have fought
the Britons in 556 at Barbury, Ceawlin and Cutha to have fought ?thelberht of
Kent in 568 at Wibbandun (see entry on 581?588), Cuthwulf (Ceawlin's brother)
to have fought the Britons in 571 and Ceawlin and Cuthwine (his son) to have fought
the Britons in 577 (discussed below), Ceawlin and Cutha (? for Cuthwulf) to have
fought the Britons in 584 at Fe?anleag (perhaps another battle invented for the
place-name, as it means "battle-field" or "troop-field"),
and a great (internecine?) battle to have been fought at Woden's Barrow in 592,
at which Ceawlin was driven out, a year before his death. Only two of these battles,
that between Ceawlin of Wessex and ?thelberht of Kent, and that at Woden's Barrow
in which Ceawlin was driven out, emerge unscathed from this sifting, and both
should probably be redated (the fight with ?thelberht to 581?588, and that at
Woden's Barrow to 587 or 588). (For a later battle at Woden's Barrow, see entry
on 715.)
The two battles placed by the Chronicle in the 570s are interesting
because they look as though they are deliberate inventions reflecting later political
realities. In 571 Cuthwulf fights the Britons at Biedcanford (unidentified), and
captures the four towns of Limbury, Aylesbury, Bensington and Eynsham. In 577,
Ceawlin and Cuthwine fight the Britons at Dyrham, and kill three British kings,
Conmail, Condidan and Farinmail, and capture the cities of Gloucester, Cirencester,
and Bath. These entries have been used to map the progress of West Saxon advance
against the Britons, but this is unsound because archaeological evidence shows
that most of these areas were already surrounded by Anglo-Saxons long before the
570s (see Sims-Williams, pp.31-2). Sims-Williams further notes that the use of
English (rather than British) names for the four places captured in 571 suggests
anachronism, and wonders whether the annal may have been fashioned by a West Saxon
chronicler some time after the later battle in 779 between Cynewulf of Wessex
and Offa of Mercia in which Offa captured Bensington (see Sims-Williams, pp.32-3).
A similar backdated pro-Wessex political statement can be seen in the annals dealing
with the Isle of Wight, in which the founders of Wight (Jutes, according to Bede)
are said to be nephews of the West Saxon Cerdic, which is extremely unlikely (see
entry on 514 to 544). The three British kings supposedly slain in 577 cannot be
identified as 6th-century individuals, though Sims-Williams points out that Condidan,
probably for Welsh Cynddylan, matches the name of a Welsh ruler in the Wroxeter
region who was killed in the mid-7th century, and suggests that behind the 577
annal there might be a Welsh triad naming British kings killed by the English
torn out of context (see Sims-Williams, pp.33-4). Gloucester, Bath and Cirencester
are in the territory of the Hwicce, which over the 7th and 8th centuries becomes
a Mercian province, but in 628 Cynegils and Cwichelm of Wessex fought Penda of
Mercia for Cirencester, and seem to have lost. The annal for 577, then, may also
reflect a West Saxon chronicler's belief of who should have owned the land at
some later point rather than a reflection of who actually held it in the 6th century.
D. Dumville, "The West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List and the Chronology
of Early Wessex", Peritia 4 (1985), pp.21-66
K. Harrison, The
Framework of Anglo-Saxon History to AD 900 (Cambridge: 1976)
P.
Sims-Williams, "The settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle",
Anglo-Saxon England 12 (1983), pp.1-41
B. Yorke, Wessex in the Early
Middle Ages (London: 1995)
514 to 544. Legendary foundation of the
Isle of Wight
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggests that Stuf and Wihtgar
fight the Britons in 514, that Cerdic and Cynric capture the Isle of Wight in
530 and kill some men at Wihtgaraburg, that Cerdic and Cynric give Wight to their
kinsmen Stuf and Wihtgar in 534, and that Wihtgar dies and is buried at Wihtgaraburg
in 544. This is almost certainly a tissue of later invention: written sources
for the verifiable history of the Isle of Wight only take up the story in the
660s (see entry on 661).
One problem with the story is that the name of
the character Wihtgar seems to be based on a misunderstanding of the placename
Wihtgaraburg (Wihtgaraburg, perhaps originally Wihtwaraburg, means "fortress
of the inhabitants of Wight", not "Wihtgar's fortress": see entry
on c.450 to c.550). Another problem is the genetic association of Stuf and Wihtgar
(using these probably made-up names as shorthand for "the Anglo-Saxon founders
of the Isle of Wight") with the West Saxon royal line, since Bede states
that the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight in his day are Jutes. Archaeology confirms
this association with Jutish Kent rather than with Saxon areas (see Yorke, pp.88-89),
as does the presence of what can only be the Latin name for the Isle of Wight,
Uecta, in the Kentish genealogy recorded by Bede (HE, i.15). So we might more
readily expect the founders of Wight to be linked with Hengest's line.
It
is very likely that the association with the West Saxons arose at some point after
King Ceadwalla of Wessex captured the Isle of Wight in 685, which Bede reports
somewhat disapprovingly (HE, iv.16, and see Yorke, p.89). The connection had definitely
been made by the late 9th century, when Asser notes in his biography of King Alfred
(contemporary with the first appearance of the Chronicle) that Alfred's mother
traced her descent to Stuf and Wihtgar. Asser (correctly) notes that they are
Jutes, but also (implausibly) maintains that they are the nephews of Cerdic. It
may be that the Jutish founders of Wight were "attached" to the West
Saxon royal house to give Alfred's mother Osburh higher standing, either during
the marriage or afterwards when Alfred's father ?thelwulf brought home a Frankish
princess as his second wife. The children of the first wife may well have felt
a need to bolster their claim by proving that they too were royal on both their
father's and their mother's side.
c.548. Frankish embassy to Constantinople
claims authority over Anglo-Saxons
Procopius notes that a Frankish embassy
to Constantinople of about this time included a number of Angles, as part of the
proof that the Franks ruled over Brittia. This is the most explicit evidence of
the Frankish claim to overlordship in England to have survived. Earlier, some
of the laws of the Frankish king Clovis (481-511) argue at least cooperation between
Frankish and Kentish systems, and the Frankish king Theudebert (534-48) claimed
jurisdiction over the Eucii (in this context, plausibly the Jutes of Kent) in
a letter to the Emperor Justinian. Some poems of Venantius Fortunatus and letters
of Pope Gregory suggest that claims continued to be made late into the 6th century.
(See Wood, "Before and After", p.47.)
That there was Frankish
influence on 6th-century Kent can clearly be seen in the archaeological remains
(see Brooks, p.64), and also in the way that one of the kings of Kent was given
a decidedly Frankish name, Irminric, and that his son ?thelberht married a Frankish
princess (see entry on c.575). ?thelberht's son Eadbald seems to have married
another Frankish noblewoman, and ?thelberht's daughter ?thelburh to have sent
her children into the protection of the Frankish king Dagobert I (629-39) on the
death of her husband Edwin of Northumbria (see Wood, Merovigian Kingdoms, p.177).
However, none of this clearly amounts to evidence of Frankish overlordship or
control. The fact that Frankish control is omitted from English written sources
is irrelevant, because the episode might be considered embarrassing and best forgotten
by English historians, but without clearer evidence it must remain an open question
whether the Franks actually controlled parts of England or whether they simply
claimed to do so.
N. Brooks, "The creation and early structure
of the kingdom of Kent", The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (London:
1989), pp.55-74
I. Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms 450-751 (London:
1994)
I. Wood, "Before and After the Migration to England",
in J. Hines (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century:
An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge: 1997), pp.41-64