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England: From the Fall of Rome History Medieval History
to the Norman Conquest

England
England: From the Fall of Rome to the Norman Conquest

From the Fall of Rome to the
Jennifer Paxton is a Clinical Associate
Professor of History at The Catholic University
of America. She received her PhD in History
Norman Conquest
from Harvard University. She lectures regularly
at the Smithsonian Institution and serves
as an expert on Scotland and Ireland for
Smithsonian Journeys. She is a highly regarded Course Guidebook
scholar whose research focuses on England
from the reign of King Alfred to the late 12th
century. Her other Great Courses include The Jennifer Paxton
Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur
to the Tudor Conquest and 1066: The Year That
Changed Everything.
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Sr. Writer/Editor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MARTIN STEGER
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Jennifer Paxton is a Clinical Associate
Professor of History at The Catholic University of America.
She is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies and
director of the University Honors Program. She was previously a
Professorial Lecturer in History at Georgetown University, where
she taught for more than a decade. Jennifer received her PhD
in History from Harvard University, where she also taught and
earned a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching. She is a widely
published, award-winning writer and a
highly regarded scholar, earning both a
Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities and
a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship.
Jennifer lectures regularly at the

Smithsonian Institution and serves as
an expert on Scotland and Ireland for
Smithsonian Journeys. Her research
focuses on England from the reign of
King Alfred to the late 12th century.
She is particularly interested in the
intersection between the authority of
church and state and the representation
of the past in historical texts, especially
those produced by religious communities.
She is completing a book that examines how monastic historians
shaped their narratives to project present polemical concerns
onto the past. She is also working on a project that examines
changing views of abbatial leadership across the Anglo-Norman
world in the 11th and 12th centuries.
Jennifer’s Great Courses include The Story of Medieval England:

From King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest, The Celtic World, and
1066: The Year That Changed Everything.
i
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
About Jennifer Paxton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i
GUIDES
1 Exploring How England Came to Be . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2 The Rise and Fall of Roman Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3 The Germanic Migrations to Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
4 The Britons Resist: The Legend of King Arthur . . . . . 31
5 Everyday Life in 6th-Century Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
6 The Birth of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms . . . . . . . . . . . 54
7 The Papal Mission to Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
8 Sutton Hoo and the Early Anglo-Saxons . . . . . . . . . . . 76
9 Irish Missionaries and Christianization . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
10 Kings of the North: Northumbria’s Ascent . . . . . . . . . 97
11 Northumbria’s Century of Renaissance . . . . . . . . . . . 108
ii
Table of Contents
12 Rise of the Midlands: Mercia’s Hegemony . . . . . . . . 118
13 Anglo-Saxon Law and Warfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
14 Fury of the Northmen: The Vikings Arrive . . . . . . . . 140
15 Alfred the Great: Defender of England . . . . . . . . . . . .152
16 Alfred the Great: Builder of Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . 163
17 Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
18 Together at Last: Wessex Unites England . . . . . . . . . 184
19 Monastic Reform: A Tale of Three Saints . . . . . . . . . 195
20 The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
21 Unfinished Business: The Vikings Return . . . . . . . . . 217
22 Cnut the Great and the Danish Conquest . . . . . . . . . 227
23 1066 and the Norman Conquest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
24 Aftermath: From Anglo-Saxon to English . . . . . . . . . 250
iii
ENGLAND: FROM THE FALL OF ROME TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST
iv
1
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Exploring
How England
Came to Be
T
he driving force of
this course’s story
are the Anglo-
Saxons, a people that
emerged out of the ruins
of Roman Britain and
dominated Britain for the
next six centuries until the
Norman Conquest. This
lecture provides a broad
overview of them and why
they are important.
2
Lecture 1 | Exploring How England Came to Be
A Political Success
The Anglo-Saxons have a unique story because of success.
There are two main areas where they excelled: government
and art.
In the area of government, at a time when much of Christian-

ruled Europe was absorbed with endemic local warfare, the
kings of what became England managed to create a unified
polity out of dozens of small, rival groupings. This unified
polity was able to establish a stable political system that
withstood repeated invasions.
Political unity and stability are extremely difficult to achieve

under the best of conditions, and the best of conditions were
not what the Anglo-Saxons faced. They were repeatedly
challenged by competition from Scandinavian raiders and
settlers as well as by their Celtic-speaking neighbors on the
island of Britain.
In 1066, the Anglo-Saxons did succumb to invasion in the end,

but their cultural triumph was impressive. They managed to
“convert” the Normans who conquered them, in a sense, by
causing them to adopt the English language and to take on
English identity. It is a testament to centuries of consolidation
that when the Normans faced a foe in 1066, it was a united one.
An Artistic Success
Anglo-Saxon literary and artistic productions are some of
the most impressive in the history of the world. The great
epic poem Beowulf rightly holds a place alongside the most
famous literary classics of any age.
3
Although the poem seems on the surface to be about

the struggle of the warrior Beowulf against monsters and
dragons, that is only part of the story.
Beowulf is a literary reflection of the difficult task of forging a

stable society in a world where personal rivalries, even within
families, constantly threatened to destroy the social order.
The entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature was instrumental

in the creation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s monumental work of
imagination in creating the world of Middle Earth. Modern
Western popular culture is very much indebted to Anglo-
Saxon England.
The visual arts were no less an area of Anglo-Saxon

excellence. From the beautiful artifacts preserved in the
mysterious burial at Sutton Hoo to the intricate illuminations
of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Anglo-Saxons showed a true
appreciation for artistic excellence, and they were willing to
spend their hard-won surpluses to foster it. This was certainly
a rough world, and in many instances a brutal world, but it was
a sophisticated one as well.
The Anglo-Saxons also made a significant contribution to

the intellectual and spiritual development of all of Europe
by exporting some of their best-trained scholars to the
continent. The work of missionaries and pundits such as Saint
Boniface and Alcuin of York helped to solidify the religious and
intellectual heritage of the Western world.
4
A Loaded Term
The term Anglo-Saxon is a loaded one, and to some extent it
always has been. The term itself was not often used by the
people it describes. It is more in retrospect that we’ve come to
apply the label Anglo-Saxon to describe the complex fusion of
Germanic and British cultures that emerged in the period this
course focuses on.
After the Norman Conquest, the Normans naturally had an

interest in denigrating and suppressing the Anglo-Saxon
identity, though ultimately, they would come to adopt and
contribute to English culture and language, rather than
displacing it. Nevertheless, for hundreds of years, the Anglo-
Saxon identity was relegated to history, just one of the many
that had once ruled over England.
But then there was a revival in the 17th century. Even later,
during the 18th century and the 19th century's Victorian era,
the Anglo-Saxons enjoyed a heyday.
There was a fashion for distinctively Anglo-Saxon names.

People began naming their children Etheldreda and
Ethelbert for the first time in many centuries.
The novel Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, is set a century after

the Norman Conquest, but it posits a society still divided
acrimoniously between Norman and Anglo-Saxon, with the
hero Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe representing the last gasp of
Anglo-Saxon resistance.
5
A few decades later, in 1866, the novel Hereward the Wake:

Last of the English romanticized the exploits of the most
famous anti-Norman rebel of the immediate post-conquest
period.
At the same time as the Anglo-Saxons were enjoying a

renaissance in popular culture, English academics were
embracing the serious study of the Anglo-Saxons more deeply
than ever before.
The Anglo-Saxons were also very popular in the United States,

and just as in Britain, this was true in different ways on the
levels of popular culture and of serious academic study.
Particularly in the antebellum South, many people saw the
Anglo-Saxon world as the root of their culture.
A very explicitly racial idea of Anglo-Saxon identity helped

inform the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that saw it as
inevitable that white European settlers should expand
westward. In England, too, the term Anglo-Saxon got tied in
with the chauvinistic race theories of the 19th century and
became a byword among some for the pedigree and supposed
supremacy of white English values, justifying colonialist
expansion over so-called uncivilized peoples.
Scholars have long since abandoned these racial views of the

Anglo-Saxons. It is a label for describing a particular culture
and period in English history—nothing more.
But the association of the term with a bigger agenda has stuck
in some circles. Anglo-Saxon identity has become politically
controversial lately because certain white supremacist groups
have appropriated the term Anglo-Saxon to designate a kind of
“pure whiteness” that they have idealized.
6
This is, of course, nonsense. There was no “pure” Anglo-

Saxon race, nor, for all their achievements, is there anything
inherently superior about Anglo-Saxon England that could
possibly justify these agendas.
Evidence for This Course

To examine the Anglo-Saxons, this course looks at many
types of evidence. The first kind is written sources. This is
a very broad category. It includes annals and chronicles as
well as legal documents like law codes and records of land
transactions. Literary sources like poetry enter the
picture as well.
The course also

examines the artistic
productions of the
Anglo-Saxons, including
architecture and
sculpture, metalwork,
and manuscript painting.
Textiles, too, provide
examples of important
artistic works.
Coins are another valuable

source. The study of coins
is called numismatics, and it
encompasses many aspects
of coins, from the composition
of the metal, to the techniques
of striking the coins, to the
7
specific uses of imagery and inscriptions on the coins. All of

these can provide precious information about the society that
produced the coins.
Naturally, archaeological evidence is vital for a period that

predates the widespread use of writing. Even toward the
end of the Anglo-Saxon period, writing was not nearly as
commonly used as it would be a few centuries later. Thus,
this course has much to say about material remains. Many
techniques have helped transform the picture of Anglo-Saxon
society, including aerial surveys, excavations, radiocarbon
dating, and DNA analysis.
Useful General Overviews

of Anglo-Saxon History
Leyser, A Short History of the Anglo-Saxons.
Naismith, Early Medieval Britain.
Reading
Hamerow, Hinton, and Crawford, eds., The Oxford Handbook
of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology.
Kaufman and Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians.
8
2
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
The Rise and Fall

of Roman Britain
W
hen the first
Germanic
settlers from
northwestern Europe
arrived in Britain, they
were officially landing in
the province of Britannia,
one of the far-flung corners
of the Roman Empire. These
were the waning decades
of Roman rule. It was in
this crucible of decline that
England would be forged.
This lecture examines
that decline, but first, it
provides a brief recap of the
rise of Roman Britain.
10
Lecture 2 | The Rise and Fall of Roman Britain
The Rise
Prior to the Roman conquest, Britain was inhabited by a variety
of tribes speaking dialects of the Celtic family of languages.
These dialects are referred to by linguists as Brittonic.
The Brittonic peoples, or Britons, practiced agriculture and

engaged in trade with each other and with the Roman world,
particularly in the southeast. This openness to the continent
foreshadowed the essential divide between the trade-oriented
south and east and the more pastorally oriented north and
west of Britain.
In 44 CE, Emperor Claudius was seeking a way to burnish his

lackluster military reputation, so he ordered a major expedition
to Britain. He accompanied the invasion himself, though he
was no soldier and took no part in the actual fighting.
The Romans rather rapidly conquered the various tribes of

southern Britain, who were not able to unite, particularly
as many tribes differed on whether to collaborate with the
Romans or resist them. Having asserted control, the Romans
then established villa-based agriculture in the fertile and
arable plains of the south and east of Britain, which prospered
for centuries.
The hillier north and west of Britain were better suited to

grazing and pastoral farming, but the Romans were also
forced to install an extensive military infrastructure in these
regions to hold down their more rebellious inhabitants. This
geographical divide is still a feature of life in Britain today.
11
The Britons of the lowland south and east were rather quickly
converted to a Roman way of life, with bouts of periodic
resistance. The north and west required a constant military
presence, so Britain was always brimming with soldiers, at
least on the fringes of Roman-ruled territory.
In the north, the Romans faced the hostile Caledonians. They

saw less of an advantage in investing in the troops required
to hold the rugged lands of what is now northern England
and Scotland, so they
decided build what Hadrian’s Wall
we know as Hadrian’s
Wall. A less formidable
barrier known as the
Antonine Wall was built
a few decades later
some 100 miles to the
north, but it was swiftly
abandoned. Hadrian’s
Wall represented the
northern limit of the
Roman Empire.
The wall did not act as an impermeable barrier. It was more

of a point of contact, and trade and people flowed freely
back and forth across the wall. Still, this was a heavily
militarized zone.
Roman towns and cities quickly developed in the territory

south of the wall. As in many other Roman provinces, these
towns were constructed on a grid pattern with many of the
amenities that Romans would have come to expect in their
Italian homeland.
12
The most important trading center in Roman Britain was

Londinium, today London, on the Thames River. The other
important centers in Britain were York, Chester, and Lincoln.
Outside of the major population centers, much of Britain

carried on as it always had. In agriculture, for example,
traditional field systems and practices continued. Still, there
were some very distinctly Roman enclaves in the midst of this
landscape. In the prosperous south and east, villa life on the
Italian model, with estates supported by slave labor, emerged
and continued for several centuries.
During this time Christianity spread to Britain, probably at

some point during the 3rd century, which was a period of
explosive growth in Christianity throughout the Empire. The
new faith was likely confined to the urban areas and the
Roman villas.
Linguistically, the situation in Roman Britain was mixed. In

the towns in particular, there was probably a great deal of
bilingualism. As an example of evidence, tablets in Latin have
survived, but Brittonic languages also continued to be spoken.
The Fall
Scholars don’t agree on exactly when the Romano-British
economy started to decline, but the trajectory of the economy
was downward beginning at some point around 300. The
archaeological record tells the tale.
Previously, residents of Britain had had access to

manufactured goods from all over the Roman Empire. This
was part of the integration into Roman life that had resulted
from the conquest.
13
There was a particularly active trade in pottery, as there

were extensive ceramic manufacturing centers in southern
Gaul. The goods they produced were shipped up the Rhône
River and then down the Seine, whence they were shipped
to Britain.
There were even pots from as far away as North Africa,

which was another major center of ceramic production.
There were also local ceramic manufacturers in Britain that

produced lower-quality pottery that was still serviceable, so
people had a choice of price ranges.
The 4th century saw a decline in manufacturing. By the 5th

century, trade from the continent had dried up, particularly in
the south and east.
Archaeology can tell us other quite worrisome things about how

the economy was doing. For example, there is evidence that
people in Britain were scavenging among ruins for anything usable
they could find, especially manufactured metal goods like nails
and other hardware. This tells us that the building industry had
basically shut down, as had ancillary businesses like iron-forging.
14
Causes of the Collapse

Identifying a single cause of the collapse is difficult. Still, it’s
relevant that the Roman Empire generally was engulfed in this
time by the so-called 3rd-century crisis.
During this period, Rome was rocked by repeated political

upheavals and by military threats on its borders, and during
the middle third of the century, the empire literally broke apart
into three pieces. Despite its distance from Rome, Britain was
at many times center stage during the crisis.
The fragmentation of the empire had a direct impact on the

integrity of Britain’s defenses against its barbarian enemies.
These enemies were from north of Hadrian’s Wall and along
the southern coasts, where waves of barbarian raiders and
dislocated peoples had begun to land.
In 286, a Roman naval commander named Carausius took

advantage of the chaos and briefly took control of Britain,
declaring himself emperor there. During his brief reign, he
called in Frisians and Saxons to help shore up the defenses of
the island along the southeastern coast. That section of coast
later became known as the Saxon Shore, though historians are
not sure whether this was because Saxons had been called
in to defend it or because Saxons were the people the shore
needed to be defended against.
Barbarian Groups
Helpful here is an understanding of the barbarian landscape of
northwestern Europe. Keep in mind that the following names
are extremely vague indications of what we might think of as
15
ethnicity. Ethnic identity was very fluid in this period; peoples on

the move often swept up additional followers as they went along,
and people could and did switch cultural allegiance quite readily.
With that said, the most important barbarians for this

lecture’s purposes are the residents of the coastal regions of
northwestern Europe. To the north from Roman Gaul, there were
the Frisians, mostly in what is Belgium and the Netherlands.
Continuing north and east along the coast into today’s

Germany, there were the Saxons, and a bit farther east were
the Angles, whose territory extended north into what is now
Denmark. These were the most important groups who sent
settlers to Britain. They would have all spoken closely related
dialects of the western branch of the Germanic family of
languages, and likely these groups would have been able to
communicate with each other.
16
Another group would end up dominating northwestern Europe

after the fall of Rome: the Franks. During the later 4th century,
the Franks had begun infiltrating northern Gaul, and over the
course of the 5th century, they slowly but surely hollowed
out the Roman administration in Gaul. In 486, the last Roman
imperial official, Syagrius, was defeated at the Battle of
Soissons by Clovis, the first acknowledged king of the Franks.
Increased Incursions
The Saxon Shore played an increasingly important role in the
defensive strategy of the island, with forts built along the
southeast coast. Most of the time, the forts were adequate
for repelling small nuisance raids, but the so-called barbarian
conspiracy in 367 represented a serious threat to Roman rule.
Britain was attacked virtually simultaneously by several

barbarian peoples: the Scotti from Ireland, the Picts from
Scotland, and the Attacotti, the Franks, and the Saxons from
northwestern Europe. The defensive resources even of the
heavily militarized province of Britain were overwhelmed. To
make matters worse, the disorder occasioned by the raids led
many Roman soldiers to desert and join in the plundering.
This was one inflection point in the relationship between the

Germanic peoples and the island of Britain. After this period,
contact between Britain and these peoples seems to have
increased.
The savior of Roman Britain at the time of the barbarian

conspiracy was the father of the future Roman emperor
Theodosius the Great, also named Theodosius. He arrived in
368 and was able to stabilize the situation.
17
But 15 years later, a Roman general named Magnus Maximus

rebelled against Emperor Gratian and took several legions with
him out of Britain to the continent to pursue his ultimately
unsuccessful claim to the imperial throne. He was never
replaced with a commander of equivalent stature.
Progressively, Britain was being denuded of its military strength,

and its borders were becoming more porous. As the situation for
the Roman administration became increasingly desperate, Britain
slipped farther and farther down on the priority list.
At the very end of the year 406, a motley barbarian horde

of Franks, Burgundians, and Vandals took advantage of an
exceptionally cold winter, crossed the frozen Rhine, and
rampaged throughout Gaul. In response, a Roman general
in Britain named Constantius was raised to the purple as
Constantine III and departed for Gaul, stripping the province
of its legions to respond to the Frankish threat.
In 410, the leaders of the Romano-British community, tired of

being left defenseless, expelled the remaining officials of this
usurping emperor. They then appealed directly to the Emperor
Honorius for help. They were initially met with silence. This
was perhaps understandable, as Rome had been sacked that
year by the Visigoths.
The following year, 411, produced a curious text called the

Rescript of Honorius, in which the emperor tells the cities of
Britain to look to their own defenses. There is some dispute
about whether this document refers to Roman Britain or to the
cities of Bruttium, in southern Italy.
If it did apply to Britain, then it was the last official

communication that we know of between Britain and the
Roman Empire.
18
Regardless, the Roman Empire was disconnected from

Britain from this point on.
One of our most vivid sources for this period is a text called On
the Ruin and Conquest of Britain by the Romano-British monk
Gildas. Gildas was writing more than 100 years after the events
he describes, so it’s not always clear what his sources are.
Nevertheless, he records that the Romano-British authorities
wrote to the imperial government and begged for help.
This appeal is dated to between 446 and 454 CE, and it was
addressed to the Roman general Flavius Aetius. According to
Gildas, it read in part, “The barbarians drive us to the sea, the
sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of
death, we are either killed or drowned.” There was no reply.
To sum up, Britain in the late 4th and early 5th centuries was on
the decline economically. Its horizons had shrunk in every way,
and it was increasingly subject to incursions from overseas.
Reading
Fleming, Britain after Rome, chapter 1.
Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, and Other Works.
19
3
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
The Germanic
Migrations
to Britain
O
ne version of the story
of the so-called Anglo-
Saxon invasion implies
that Angles, Saxons, and Jutes
got on boats en masse and
settled in different parts of
Britain. This version is the one
told by the 6th-century monk
and writer Gildas and the
8th-century historian from
northern England known as
the Venerable Bede. But using
archaeology and DNA analysis,
we now have a different way
to tell this story. This one is
much more complicated but
no less fascinating.
21
The Medieval Story

Gildas’s account dates from about a century later than
the events he describes. Gildas recounts that an unnamed
Romano-British chieftain, whom he calls a “proud usurper,”
with the help of a vaguely defined council of men, invited “the
fierce and impious Saxons” to come to Britain to help repel
northern invaders in exchange for a generous subsidy.
It is unclear whether Gildas provided the name of the

chieftain, since some manuscripts provide the name
Vortigern and others do not. The warlords began inviting more
compatriots to join them, and when they grew dissatisfied
with their pay, they broke the agreement with the Britons and
plundered their lands instead. The warlords, of course, never
left. Gildas sees these newcomers to Britain as nothing short
of a calamity.
Two centuries later, there emerged Bede’s version of the

arrival of the Germanic peoples. In Bede’s version, the
protagonists are named. The ruler is now definitely called
Vortigern, and he is specifically referred to as the king of
the Britons, so he has received a promotion. Key Germanic
mercenaries have also acquired names: Hengist and Horsa.
They are said to be great-grandsons of Woden, the most
important pagan Germanic god. Most of the rest of Bede’s
story is taken directly from Gildas.
Bede’s version has simplified the story but provided new

details. Everyone now has names, including the arriving
peoples, whom Bede calls the Angles, the Saxons, and the
Jutes. Writing from one of the flourishing new kingdoms
wrought by the Anglo-Saxon transformation, Bede views the
initial migrations in a wholly positive light.
22
Lecture 3 | The Germanic Migrations to Britain
Examining the Medieval Story

Bede’s story is satisfyingly clear and simple, but it is likely
wrong or at least misleading. Matters were more chaotic.
Scholars are no longer sure there really were people known

as Jutes on the continent. In fact, the continental migrants
to Britain were far too diverse for the big umbrella groups
of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to be accurate, thorough
categories. At best, we can call them the Germanic peoples,
which signifies that they all spoke related languages.
The Romans had been familiar with peoples they call the
Germani since the time of Julius Caesar. In fact, it was a
migration by two Germanic tribes called the Cimbri and the
Teutones that touched off Caesar’s conquest of Gaul.
Given their long history on the borders of the empire, the

Romans and Germans interacted frequently and often
violently. Yet despite periodic hostilities, trade between
Germans and Romans was also extensive.
Many historians argue that it was the growing prosperity

resulting from trade with Rome that caused the stratification
in Germanic society. That, in turn, allowed for the creation of
large tribal confederations with powerful rulers.
These large confederations were often ephemeral, and they

tended to form right along the zone of contact with the
empire, where the military ties between Germans and Romans
were often quite close. Germans often ended up serving in the
Roman legions.
23
These close relationships between Romans and Germans did

not characterize the German tribes who lived much farther
away from the zone of Roman contact. The Germans in the far
north and west of Europe had an economy that was far less
intertwined with that of the Roman Empire, and they remained
more fragmented. It was these fragmented groups, rather
than a huge tribal confederation, that would end up settling in
Britain.
Thus, there is a very striking contrast between the German

impact on the Roman Empire and the German impact on
Britain. The Roman Empire had to deal with extremely large
groups of people who moved by land and settled contiguously
right in the heart of Roman territory. These were the famous
successor kingdoms that were founded by the Visigoths, the
Ostrogoths, the Vandals, and the Franks.
The early settlement of Britain, by contrast, consisted of small

bands of settlers arriving by boat, perhaps no more than a
few dozen in some groups. They settled haphazardly along
the southern and eastern coast, wherever they could establish
themselves.
The Germanic Settlers’ Dialects

The northern Germanic peoples who settled in Britain left a
remarkable legacy of language. Scholars of Old English have
done a lot of work to reconstruct what these early dialects
were probably like.
There was linguistic diversity, but the Germanic languages

spoken in Britain were probably closely related enough to
be mutually intelligible. And the very fact that there were
24
small groups from many micro-dialects probably aided in the

linguistic convergence that gave rise to the broader dialect
groupings that characterized Middle English.
The Germanic tribes were not broadly literate, but a system of

writing did develop in the Germanic areas of the continent in
about the 5th century, and it made its way to Britain later. This
system was based on the Roman alphabet but took distinctive
forms. The letters they developed are known as runes.
New Archaeological Evidence

Medieval scholarship lends us the narrative that the Germanic
migrations constituted a violent conquest of Britain.
Increasingly, we know this is also a radical oversimplification.
There are two main kinds of evidence that earlier generations
lacked: the archaeology of the early settlements and DNA.
Both help illuminate matters.
As for archaeology, there is no real archaeological evidence

of conflict. The found settlements are too small and
unprepossessing to represent an invasion that established
itself by force. There is very little other evidence that the
Germanic settlers in Britain were anything other than farmers
on a rather small scale.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell from the archaeology

exactly why these Germanic groups decided to leave
continental Europe to come to Britain. However, we may
hypothesize that they were in search of fertile land in an area
with a milder climate and a low population density.
25
Migrants seem to have started arriving around 420 CE, and

they settled at first primarily in southern and eastern Britain.
These were the more Romanized parts of Britain, and as a
result, this is where the collapse of Roman order in the late
4th and early 5th centuries hit particularly hard.
The degree of prosperity of these newly arrived settlers varied

from place to place. Two 5th-century sites where they settled
have been excavated. One is at Beckford, in Worcestershire,
and the other is at Mucking, in Essex. At Beckford, the farmers
seem to have lived in comparative poverty. Life was a bit
better at the Mucking site, but it was still quite primitive.
The settlers’ first years must have been difficult, but by the end
of the 5th century, the number of settlements was increasing,
particularly in eastern England. Word was undoubtedly filtering
back to the continent that life was at least worth tolerating
in Britain. There seems to have been a concentration of
settlements that spawned around 470 to 520 CE.
But what do we know about who these people considered

themselves to be? The best evidence we have for answering
this question comes from cemeteries, where the settlers
practiced both cremation and burial in the ground. The
bodies were buried fully clothed, so a lot of bits of clothing
and accessories have survived, particularly metal pieces like
buckles and jewelry.
These cemeteries were different from each other. No single

set of grave goods was standard across cemeteries or even
within the same cemetery. The buckles and jewelry that we
find in the cemeteries don’t conform to a single type, and
some show mixtures of both Roman and Germanic styles.
Clothing was all very localized.
26
From this, we can conclude that these settlements were not

part of a wider cultural realm that had a distinct identity.
Brooches are helpful here: We have found one settlement
that had brooches similar to the ones found on Jutland in
Denmark, while another settlement had brooches more like
the ones in Lower Saxony, on the North German Plain.
In other words, eastern England was not settled by one single

group of migrants. Everybody was mixed together. Only much
later did their identities coalesce around particular kingdoms
in what we now call Anglo-Saxon England.
DNA-Based Revisions
Another area in which the narrative from medieval times
needs revision is the idea that newcomers replaced the
indigenous inhabitants. DNA evidence is important here.
27
There are two main ways that DNA can be used to illuminate the
study of ancient populations. One is by recovering and analyzing
the DNA from human remains. That gives us a snapshot of what
things looked like when the remains were buried.
The other is to study the DNA of modern populations to work

back to what those populations must have been like in the
past. Many studies combine both methods to understand the
movement of human populations throughout history.
A recent study that analyzed the DNA recovered from

cemeteries in eastern England revealed that there was
intermarriage between settlers and newcomers from the
earliest days of the settlement. The same study claimed that
Germanic migrants contributed something between 25%
and 40% of the DNA of modern British people, though the
proportion is higher in the east, where the migrants initially
settled, than it is elsewhere.
Even areas of so-called Celtic predominance have some

Germanic admixture. The results may be skewed by later mixing
between groups beyond the time of the migrations. Future
studies may refine or even contradict these results. But for
now, it seems that the Germanic settlers blended with the local
inhabitants and certainly did not replace them completely.
However, some recent studies have suggested an intriguing

possibility: that the Germanic newcomers crowded out native
British men in the competition to reproduce. A comparison of
mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on by the mother, with
the DNA in Y chromosomes, passed on by the father, reveals a
gender imbalance.
28
There is a higher proportion of Germanic male DNA and native

British female DNA than would be accounted for by chance.
Now, it would be easy to imagine that the settlers skewed
male, but it could also be that they were taking local brides
and thus preventing native British men from passing down
their genes. It is hard to date this development, however, and
DNA studies have a long way to go. There will likely be more
twists in the story to come.
Conclusion
We shouldn’t discount everything in the written sources.
They probably contain kernels of some important truths. For
instance, if we read between the lines of Gildas’s story about
mercenaries, it might preserve the memory of the Romano-
British authorities inviting Germanic warriors to come to Britain
to help protect them against other, more menacing barbarians.
Perhaps the unnamed chieftain and council he cited represent

the makeshift administration of Britain that had taken over
when the Romans had withdrawn in 410 AD. There is even
some scant archaeological evidence to support the use of
Germanic warriors as mercenaries in Britain.
The invasion story had a long future ahead of it. One of the
striking things about this period is how long the memory of
the migration lasted. These settlers did not forget their roots.
The Anglo-Saxon descendants retained a memory of their
continental origins many hundreds of years after they settled
in Britain.
29
The various Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies claimed to trace the

ancestry of their kings back to the continent (though this claim
was probably not always true). Anglo-Saxon lore was filled with
tales of heroic ancestors who had come from Europe.
Contact between the Germanic settlers in Britain and their

continental cousins clearly continued. Notably, the events
of the great Old English epic Beowulf actually take place in
Denmark. The reason is that the Anglo-Saxons were still tuned
in to the development of tradition back on the continent for
several centuries.
Reading
Leyser, A Short History of the Anglo-Saxons, chapter 1.
Naismith, Early Medieval Britain, c. 500–1000, chapter 5.
30
4
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
The Britons
Resist: The
Legend of
King Arthur
T he traditional narrative of
the settlement of Britain
by the Anglo-Saxons, based
on written sources, sees a coordinated
invasion by three distinct peoples,
the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes,
who carried out a deliberate military
conquest. The more recent view,
informed by archaeology and DNA
studies, sees a movement of settlers
arriving piecemeal and becoming
more and more numerous over time
without any coordinated military
confrontation, at least at first. This
lecture picks up the thread of this story
as the written sources present it and
follows it from the late 5th century to
the early 6th century. It focuses more
explicitly on the question of the local
response to the new settlers.
32
Lecture 4 | The Britons Resist: The Legend of King Arthur
Examining the Peacefulness

It might seem strange to us that the Germanic migrations
were largely a peaceful affair rather than a forceful invasion.
This is particularly so given the later history of Britain: The
Vikings and the Normans did not arrive peacefully, so it seems
natural to assume that the Saxons were just another invading
force from across the seas. But if archaeological and DNA
evidence suggests it was generally otherwise, a question
emerges: Was there any resistance?
It’s likely that the true implications of the Germanic migrations

were not immediately apparent. The newcomers did not arrive
en masse, nor did they necessarily have a common identity or
agenda. Rather, there were many waves of migration, both in
large and small groups, and some of the migration had already
occurred via Roman army recruitment.
Furthermore, Roman Britain had been thrown into disorder by

the chaotic withdrawal of the Romans. A power vacuum had
opened. The border defenses like the Saxon Shore, built up by
the Romans over decades, had rapidly fallen into disrepair or
delinquency. Without centralized organization on the borders,
migrants could arrive unopposed or unnoticed. And even if
they were noticed, small bands of Germanic arrivals were
likely low on the list of problems faced by a society whose
economy and social structure were collapsing.
Estimating the number of migrants who did arrive during this

period is extremely difficult, and even DNA evidence can only
give us a very rough sense of this. Using population models
and educated guesswork, scholars have suggested that
between 100,000 and 200,000 may have arrived over the first
century or two.
33
There is some evidence to suggest that sections of the elite

attempted to prevent the new arrivals from taking outright
control in the early years, particularly in the cities where a
Romano-British elite likely remained for a time, like London.
However, according to Gildas, divisions within the elite in
the struggle to control post-Roman Britain seem to have
undermined resistance efforts.
King Arthur
Still, there was undoubtedly resistance, as a new Anglo-
Saxon social and political structure began to take shape and
challenge the Britons for dominance. Relevant here is the
most famous figure from this period: King Arthur. Nobody
knows for sure if he was a real person.
However, archaeology can shed some light on the very

confusing transition period between Roman and Anglo-Saxon
England. This lecture now looks at that as well as some of the
evidence underlying the legend of King Arthur.
First up are the texts from Romano-British sources. Our

earliest written source is On the Ruin of Britain by the monk
Gildas, who was writing in the middle of the 6th century about
an earlier period, probably the middle of the 5th century.
Gildas presents the Germanic migrants as a just punishment

for the various sins of the Britons. He tells us that the
Romano-British authorities initially invited Saxons into Britain
as mercenaries to protect against northern raiders, continuing
the practice started by the Romans, but the newcomers grew
dissatisfied with their reward and became raiders themselves,
spreading destruction throughout the island.
34
This is where we get the idea that the Anglo-Saxons carried

out a systematic slaughter of the Britons, although there’s no
archaeological evidence for this. Regardless, Gildas says all
was not lost.
A war leader gathered the Britons together to resist, but his

name was not Arthur. It was Ambrosius Aurelianus.
The Battle of Badon Hill

Gildas tells us that Ambrosius mounted effective resistance
against the invaders. The struggle between natives and
newcomers went back and forth until the Battle of Badon
Hill, which took place 44 years after the arrival of the Saxons,
around the time of Gildas’s own birth. This battle resulted in a
purported defeat of the newcomers.
However, Gildas does not explicitly say that Ambrosius himself

was the victor at the Battle of Badon Hill. Since he describes a
period of endemic warfare during which the Britons in general
fought against the invaders, it could easily have been some
other, unnamed leader who won the battle.
Additionally, we do not know where Mount Badon was, though

many candidates have been proposed, none of which has any
solid evidence behind it. Still, the story would grow in the telling.
35
The Historia Brittonum

There is a gap in the sources after Gildas until a text from
the early 9th century called the Historia Brittonum. This text
is traditionally attributed to a Welsh writer named Nennius,
though scholars are not sure who really wrote the text or if it
was even compiled by a single author.
By this point the tale had been further elaborated. While the
details are clearly fantastical, it’s worth bearing with them for
what they reveal about the narrative that was taking shape on
the side of the Britons in the early years after the fall of Rome.
Nennius for the first time brings Ambrosius into contact

with Vortigern, who, according to Gildas, had been the
native leader who first invited the Anglo-Saxons into Britain.
First, we learn that Vortigern ruled the Britons and feared

Ambrosius as some sort of threat.
Nennius also describes the arrival of the Germanic

mercenaries Hengist and Horsa. They have been hired by
Vortigern to help him fight his enemies.
Nennius reports that Vortigern was revealed to have

committed incest with his own child, so he followed the
advice of his wise men to withdraw into the western
recesses of the kingdom (in what is now Wales) where he
could build a fortress to keep him safe from his enemies.
Nennius gives us a second figure named Ambrosius, a

mysterious child. Vortigern planned to sacrifice this child to
ensure the strength of the fortress.
36
But the child then utters a mysterious prophecy that two

dragons, one red and one white, will contend for the mastery
of Britain. The white dragon represents the Saxons, and the
red dragon represents the Britons.
This prophecy so frightens Vortigern that he cedes control of

the south to Ambrosius and retreats to the north. What really
worries Vortigern is the revelation that Ambrosius is the son
of a Roman consul. There is thus a strong sense in which an
exalted Roman background was still something to reckon with
in this period.
Nennius gives lots of details about the resistance to the

Anglo-Saxons. He introduces a new character as leader of that
resistance: Arthur, who is not called a king but rather a dux
bellorum, or leader of battles.
This is interesting because Nennius does refer to “all the

kings” of Britain.
He had also called Vortigern a king. Arthur, by contrast, is

just a particularly talented military commander.
Nennius tells us that 12 battles took place between the Britons

and the Anglo-Saxons. He provides a list, of which the Battle
of Mount Badon is the last. Nennius says,
The twelfth battle was on Mount Badon in

which there fell in one day 960 men from one
charge by Arthur; and no one struck them
down except Arthur himself.
Where Gildas has an unnamed fighter, possibly Ambrosius,

fighting the Battle of Mount Badon, Nennius has Arthur. The
other battles on the list seem to come from other early Welsh
37
literature, but none of them were previously associated with

Arthur. It’s hard to trust that these battles were literally all
fought by Arthur, but the general thrust is that the Britons
fought back.
The Venerable Bede’s Telling

The Venerable Bede was the most important English historian
of this period. Bede takes his cue from Gildas and names
Ambrosius as the leader of the resistance against the Anglo-
Saxons.
Bede essentially repeats much

of the story we get from
Gildas, and he even
reflects the point of
view of his source:
It’s a pro-British
perspective. Bede
adds the detail
that God helps
the Britons to
achieve victory.
Bede does
Venerable Bede
mention the
battle of Mount
Badon, which he
dates to some time
between 493 and 500
CE. Like Gildas, Bede
does not mention Arthur
at all.
38
Arthur in Legend
In the 600s, there began emerging legendary references to
the Arthur character in Welsh and Breton prose, characterizing
him as a heroic warrior and protector of Britain. Many of the
references we have are vague allusions, assuming it seems
that the reader would be readily acquainted with the name.
That suggests the Arthur character had already become a
well-known folk hero by this point.
Gildas (possibly) and Bede (definitely) identify Ambrosius

as the great resistance leader and the hero of the Battle
of Mount Badon, while Nennius associates the victory with
Arthur, a legendary figure of local lore. That raises the
question of whether these are just different ways of referring
to the same person.
Some versions of the Arthur story do make Arthur and

Ambrosius one and the same. However, no solid linguistic
analysis has been able to make the name Arthur derive from
Ambrosius Aurelianus. And we have much more historical
evidence that Ambrosius existed than we do that Arthur
existed. It is far more likely that over time the accomplishments
of Ambrosius were slowly transferred to Arthur.
This is how historical legends are created, and with each

retelling, the details get more grandiose and the story more
complicated. By the 9th century, Arthur and Ambrosius
became associated with each other, and by the 12th century,
they were purportedly related by blood.
After the Norman Conquest, the new arrivals from the

continent became fascinated with the stories about King
Arthur and adopted them as their own. Since the Normans
39
initially formed the elite of English society, their taste became

the taste of all aspiring people, and by the 13th century, the
story of a local hero who had resisted the Anglo-Saxons had
been embraced by all English people, regardless of ancestry.
Conclusion
Even if we can’t know for certain whether Arthur existed, his
legend served as a rallying cry for the Britons as they faced
the reality of the consolidation of Anglo-Saxon power. Clearly,
the stories in Nennius had grown in the telling since the days
of Gildas.
We can distrust the details, but the gist of the narrative is that
the Britons did mount resistance against the newcomers, and
that some of this resistance was at least initially successful. But
can we reconcile this narrative with the newly revised picture of
settlement that emphasizes infiltration rather than invasion?
Archaeological evidence does suggest an increase in the pace

of Germanic settlement around 470 or so that lasted about
50 years, followed by a slight pause. Depending on how we
interpret the chronology in Gildas’s work, this could just about
fit what he says about the Battle of Mount Badon, though it’s
hard to tell how consequential this one conflict was.
Slightly later, there was a period when the Anglo-Saxon

settlements began to coalesce. By the end of the 6th century,
large-scale conflict starts appearing in the historical record
between Britons and the Germanic arrivals. They began
extending the areas over which they had hegemony ever
farther to the north and west, such as the capture in 547 of
Bamburgh Castle in what became the Anglo-Saxon kingdom
of Northumbria.
40
It could be that the idea of a sustained and heroic resistance

to the Germanic settlers, with 12 battles rather than just
one, fits this period better. This would mean the stories of
resistance have been displaced backward in time to the
first years of Germanic settlement to make it seem as if the
Britons put up an effective fight from the start.
However, the Anglo-Saxon fusion of the early years was

largely peaceful, and in many places, it was voluntary. There
was no wholesale displacement or slaughter of the Britons
of England. Instead, there was a period of migration and
assimilation whereby native British cultures fused with
Germanic culture to form a new Anglo-Saxon identity.
There were those who departed and did not take part in
it. There clearly was resistance too, and in some places,
particularly in the north and west, the resistance may have
delayed the spread of the new Anglo-Saxon hegemony for a
period. But whatever resistance there was, it was outweighed
by the forces that led inexorably to the formation of the
people who would become the English.
Reading
Halsall, Worlds of Arthur.
Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain.
41
5
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Everyday Life
in 6th-Century
Britain
M
odern scientific
techniques have
allowed us to
build up a picture of the
way in which people in the
6th century led their lives.
That, in turn, has offered
important discoveries,
shedding light on the
complex process by which
the Germanic settlers
integrated into the existing
communities of Britons
as well as how they ended
up creating a new cultural
hegemony that displaced the
Roman-British identity.
43
Place Names and Cemeteries

It does not appear that the new Germanic settlers killed or drove
out the native inhabitants, at least not on a large scale. But how
do we know this was a peaceful, rather than violent, transition?
A key type of evidence comes from place names, or toponyms.

A toponym can tell us a lot about the identity of the people who
chose to call a place by that specific name. When it comes to
early Britain, some striking information presents itself.
Some of the most prominent landscape elements (as opposed

to the names of settlements) still have Brittonic names today.
For example, the Severn River, the Thames, and the Avon
are all Brittonic in origin. Scholars have proposed that the
newcomers must have learned the names of these rivers from
the inhabitants, and the names stuck.
But we also see many names in eastern Britain that describe

less prominent, more everyday places, and they still have
Brittonic names. Some major settlements, like Durham,
Lincoln, and Dover, also retained names with Brittonic
etymologies. This leads scholars to conclude that there were
many pre-settlement Britons surviving in these communities.
The migrants were not just starting new settlements. In many

places, they were joining communities that already existed
and building on them, and in time coming to dominate them
and changing their cultural makeup.
Besides the map itself, there is very concrete evidence for the
assimilation between native and Germanic cultures in some
of the cemeteries that have survived. Many of them contain
44
Lecture 5 | Everyday Life in 6th-Century Britain
a mixture of Germanic and British features. In other words,

Britons and Germanic peoples were intermingling, and their
cultures were blending.
Small-Scale Farming
Settlements
The new model for how the Britons and Germanic migrants
came together takes account of the economically devastated
landscape of eastern England in the early 5th century. The
great landowners had mostly fled, leaving the poorer Britons
to fend for themselves.
Archaeologists have concluded that while there may not have

been large-scale depopulation, there was a significant loss of
productivity, meaning that everyone was poorer. Most of the
people who lived in Britain in the 6th century would have lived
in small-scale settlements. These settlements would have
sustained themselves on agriculture.
This is not surprising since it was the desire for better

agricultural land and milder weather that probably drew the
Germanic settlers to Britain in the first place. But it would
have been agriculture of a rather humble sort, particularly in
comparison to the large-scale agriculture that was prevalent
during the height of the Roman period at the large villas in the
south and east.
The Germanic newcomers to Britain in the 5th and 6th

centuries faced the same essential challenges of geography
that their predecessors had for thousands of years. This was
the basic division in Britain between the relatively flat and
45
fertile south and east, which was well suited to raising cereal
crops, and the rocky, mountainous north and west, which was
much more suitable for raising livestock.
The newcomers from the continent adopted some of the

agricultural practices of the people among whom they settled,
such as the cultivation of spelt, which is a kind of wheat. But
the arrival of the settlers did lead to significant changes.
New crops began to be cultivated, such as bread wheat,

which the newcomers brought with them.
Multiple crops that had featured heavily during the Roman

period ceased to be cultivated entirely. Among these were
cucumbers, turnips, coriander, fennel, apples, and plums.
Agricultural cultivation was also spectacularly inefficient in this

period, and this was the case all over Europe. Yields may have
been as low as two or three to one. In other words, the farmers
harvested only about two or three times the amount of grain
that they sowed in seed, which is barely subsistence level.
46
Such low productivity meant much of the population had to

be dedicated to food production, with minimal surplus. A poor
harvest could spell disaster for an entire community.
Studying Remains
We can see the hardships of this time written on the bones
of the people who lived through it, left behind in Anglo-Saxon
cemeteries across Britain.
There are a few standard ways in which human societies

dispose of their dead. The two most common are still the
ones we use today.
One is burial, or inhumation, as archaeologists call it. The

other is burning, or cremation.
There are a few other choices, including burial at sea

and excarnation, which means allowing the flesh to
be consumed by animals. These tend not to leave an
archaeological record.
Many Anglo-Saxon burials were inhumations, and there is

much about everyday life we can derive from studying the
buried of this time. One of the things that we can readily
detect in the skeletons of 6th-century people is that they were
poor and that their lives were full of suffering of all kinds.
Their bones reveal that they performed a lot of hard physical

labor. For example, female skeletons from this period often have
ankles that are marked with squatting facets, which are bony
growths that develop when people squat close to the ground,
whether grinding grain or performing other similar tasks.
47
Serious injuries, such as broken bones, were relatively common.

These were probably caused by various work-related accidents.
Many people also suffered from chronic parasitic infections.
People were often in great physical pain for long periods

of time. The skeletons show signs of serious tooth decay
that must have been agonizing; this came about due to the
corrosive effects of eating hard bread. Skeletons of this area
also commonly display arthritis and joint problems.
Childhood in general and infancy in particular were the

riskiest period of life, but even adolescence and young
adulthood were no picnic. At two cemeteries in Oxfordshire
and Cambridgeshire, the rate of survival until the age of 35 for
males was 28%.
Women had it even rougher. There were very few adult women
who lived past the age of 40, doubtless due to high mortality
in childbirth, which was perilous. Whereas in modern Western
societies, women typically live longer than men, in these early
English communities, the opposite was the case.
Individual Experiences
The experience of individuals could vary considerably. Some
clearly suffered from chronic malnutrition. For example, in the
6th-century cemetery at Oakington in Cambridge, a third of
the skeletons exhibited a kind of lesion to the skull called cribra
orbitalia, which is a sign of childhood malnutrition. About the
same number had a disorder of the teeth called dental enamel
hypoplasia, which also indicates malnutrition in childhood.
48
At another 6th-century cemetery at Norton in County

Durham, more than half the skeletons exhibit this dental
disorder. These skeletons tell us that life must have been
extremely hard for members of these communities, and food
insecurity was a constant concern.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. The cemetery at Mill Hill
in Kent had a much smaller proportion of skeletons with
hypoplasia: only 5%. It’s hard to tell now why Mill Hill was
lucky and Oakington and Norton were not, but something
must have distinguished the experiences of these places from
each other.
By the 6th century, some people were clearly more successful

than others. This is a period for which we know very little
about the political narrative, which was at any rate quite
jumbled and fragmentary.
Nevertheless, by the end of the 6th century, some elites came

to the fore who would form the nuclei of the Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms. How exactly this happened is largely hidden from
us, but it must have involved many small interactions among
individuals and communities as some people gained more
wealth and power at the expense of others.
The evidence of this emerging elite can again be found under

the ground.
Cemeteries began to emerge in which a small minority of

people were buried with noticeably more elaborate, more
expensive articles of dress, or even with swords.
49
Sometimes the women wore jewelry that was typical of

a neighboring region. Scholars have hypothesized that
this jewelry came either from regional trade or from the
importation of brides from neighboring areas.
Both possibilities suggest that some people in these

communities were beginning to have economic clout that
set them apart from others, and this clout provided them
with wider connections. They were starting to build kin
networks that transcended the very small communities that
characterized the initial settlement period.
Identity Formation
Also in the 6th century, identities began to form. We can see
this in the grave goods from cemeteries. In the 5th century,
there was great variation in the types of goods buried and the
designs represented, not just between communities but within
individual cemeteries.
By the 6th century, more uniformity was developing, as if

communities were adopting styles that designate the identity
of that community. Those identities were becoming regional.
This is the formation of a people in action.
These identities did not come over from the continent with the
settlers. The identities formed after the settlers had arrived,
in the slow process of amalgamation between Britons and
Germanic peoples that occurred at the local level and then the
regional level.
50
There was also a social winnowing taking place that is

reflected in the grave goods, but it worked differently for men
and women. One striking example is the way in which men
were marked out by being buried with spears.
Among men buried before 525 CE, more than 40% had
spears, but the number dropped to a third in the period of
525–625. Thereafter, the rate dropped below 20%.
England did not become more peaceful as time went on,

so scholars think that society was restricting the mark of
status to fewer and fewer people.
For women, the change came in the presence of exotic

(and thus expensive) articles of personal adornment, such
as jewelry made with garnets or
amber, which would have been
imported from overseas.
A small number of women were

buried with these goods in the
6th century.
This contrasts with the 5th

century, when there were very
few such exotic objects to be
found, and the grave goods of
women were not noticeably
differentiated by the richness of
the objects.
In short, over the course of the 6th

century, scholars can see that the social hierarchy was being
formed. Scholars have theorized about how this social and
economic differentiation may have happened.
51
Perhaps the first generation to arrive in Britain was able to

establish a foothold, much as modern immigrants tend to do,
and they were then able to invite others to join them. This
theory is supported by evidence from a cemetery at Spong
Hill in Norfolk.
The earliest graves, judging by the style of cremations,

came from what is now Schleswig-Holstein in northern
Germany.
Later generations had more mixed origins, but there was

still a large contingent from that part of Germany, so it
seems that the pipeline remained open.
There is plenty of evidence that suggests that the new

Germanic migrants maintained their connections back to
continental Europe.
The kinds of metalwork found in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries

seem to have shifted over time in line with changing
fashions for metalwork on the continent, so the people at
Spong Hill were either making their own metalwork along
continental lines or they were importing it.
Either way, they were in touch with their original homeland.

People who had the resources to engage in this kind of
travel and/or trade were clearly able to establish a position
of social prominence.
Daily life for these people, regardless of ethnic origin, was

challenging. However, some communities fared better than
others.
52
Through some combination of luck, talent, and grit, certain

communities, and certain families within those communities,
began to prosper more than their neighbors. They were slowly
able to assert higher status than those neighbors. These are
the conditions that paved the way for the formation of the
early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
Reading
Hamerow, Hinton, and Crawford, eds., The Oxford Handbook
of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology.
53
6
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
The Birth of the

Anglo-Saxon
Kingdoms
B
y the end of the
6th century,
the power
vacuum left by the
decline of Rome had
been filled by a swathe
of Anglo-Saxon petty
kingdoms, which were
jostling for status
and power in a new,
transformed Britain.
This lecture offers a
tour of those kingdoms
and a look at how they
came into being.
55
Spawning the Kingdoms

The new kingdoms sprouted up as increasingly powerful
families extended their hegemony over more and more territory.
In some cases, they built their lordship from scratch; in other
cases, they took over a preexisting Romano-British territory.
The families built up their status through a combination of

luck, economic prowess, and the assertion of power through
violence. Little by little, some families were able to accumulate
wealth that they could pass on to the next generation, and
when those wealthier families intermarried, they perpetuated
and multiplied their economic success.
56
Lecture 6 | The Birth of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms
These families ultimately became so successful that they were

able to project their power not just at the local level but at the
regional level as well. That led to the foundation of the Anglo-
Saxon royal dynasties.
The most common framework for understanding this period

is the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, or the seven Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms that were identified by the 12th-century historian
Henry of Huntingdon. These are the Jutish kingdom of Kent;
the Saxon kingdoms of Essex, Sussex, and Wessex; and the
Anglian kingdoms of East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria.
However, the picture is more complex than the sevenfold

division of kingdoms. That’s because the kingdoms of the
heptarchy did not take their eventual form right away. They all
had rather complicated origin stories.
The Southern Kingdoms

For the southern kingdoms of Kent, Essex, Sussex, and
Wessex, quite a bit of information comes from the Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle. This source was compiled in the late 9th
century at the behest of King Alfred of Wessex.
As a work based in Wessex, naturally it contains more

information about southern Britain than northern Britain.
However, the stories of the foundation of the southern
kingdoms in the Chronicle fall into a repeating pattern that is
implausibly uniform.
First, there comes an intrepid Germanic warlord who lands in

Britain. Then the warlord creates a kingdom after an interval
of five or six years and prevails in a series of battles, usually
57
three in number. After 40 years, the son of the founder

succeeds to the kingdom. We see this with both Kent and
Wessex, and the coincidence is a bit concerning.
Sussex fits this pattern well. According to the Chronicle, a man

named Ælle landed on the south coast in 477 with his three
sons, whose names were Cissa, Cymen, and Wlencing. He
fought various battles with the local inhabitants. All three of
his sons had settlements named after them: Cissa gave rise to
Chichester, Cymen to Cymenshore, and Wlencing to Winchelsea.
Examining Wessex
As for the kingdom of Essex, we know very little about its
history. This is despite its important location in southeastern
Britain. Wessex, however, became the most important Anglo-
Saxon kingdom of them all. It eventually formed the nucleus of
the united English kingdom in the 10th century. It was built out
of much smaller units.
The kingdom was originally called Gewisse. That may have

been derived from an Old English word that means “true” or
“reliable,” as in the German word gewiss, which means “certain.”
Wessex was not among the areas that was most heavily settled
by the migrants in the 5th century; they were concentrated
more in the east. In Wessex, there was a combination of a
small core of Germanic settlers who may have been invited
into Britain originally as mercenaries, plus a larger group that
seems to have migrated west from those eastern areas of early
Germanic settlement. But they did meet resistance.
58
The earliest genealogy we know of for the kingdom of Wessex

was recorded in the 10th century, but it was recopied from
a much earlier manuscript. That earlier manuscript dated to
around 796 or perhaps as early as around 725–726. This text
traces the ancestry of the Wessex kings back to a founder
named Cerdic in the early 6th century, who supposedly came
from the continent to conquer the kingdom.
There are problems with this story, however. The first is that
Cerdic was not actually king of a kingdom called Wessex.
Rather, he was the leader of a people known as the Gewissae.
We don’t get evidence for a unit called Wessex until 686, a

century and a half after Cerdic’s lifetime. The later stories
gloss over the process by which these smaller tribal
groupings were slowly consolidated into larger ones.
Another problem with Cerdic comes from the fact that

there are conflicting traditions between the various
genealogical texts about how Cerdic was related to the
other men in the family tree. It seems that people in the 8th
and 9th centuries didn’t know what had happened in the
6th century.
The final problem with Cerdic is in the name itself. The

genealogy traces Cerdic’s ancestry back to Woden, the
Germanic father god. But most scholars are pretty sure the
name Cerdic is Brittonic—that is, it belongs to the Celtic
language of the indigenous inhabitants of Britain.
It is a form of the well-known Brittonic name Ceretic.

Historians have suggested that the founder of the Wessex
dynasty was actually a Briton and that his family adopted
an Anglo-Saxon identity over time.
59
Many of Cerdic’s descendants also have names that look

Brittonic, such as Ceawlin, Cedda, and Cædwalla. These
names all entered the store of common Anglo-Saxon
names, despite their Brittonic origins. Even the dynastic
myths that were intended to create a story of conquest
actually end up enshrining the mixed origins of the Anglo-
Saxon peoples.
Examining Kent
Kent is the only kingdom
supposedly founded by the
Jutes. According to later
Anglo-Saxon tradition, Kent
purportedly traces its origin
to the brothers Hengist
and Horsa, the Germanic
mercenary brothers who
treacherously betrayed their
employer, the Briton leader Hengist
Vortigern, and initiated the
Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain.
According to Bede, Hengist and

Horsa have semidivine ancestors named
Uihtgisl, Uitta, and Uecta. These names are almost certainly
connected to the Isle of Wight, which the Kentish kingdom
would have had an interest in claiming.
These stories were probably already in existence by 597, when

Saint Augustine of Canterbury arrived to evangelize the English.
It is interesting to note that these stories about descent from
pagan gods were extremely durable: They were too useful to be
jettisoned even after the change in religious regime.
60
Kent has a true distinction to boast of among the Anglo-Saxon

kingdoms: It is the only one to have been a sovereign state
before the Roman Conquest. The roots of Kent are very old
indeed. It is mentioned by the Greek explorer Pytheas in the
5th century BC.
When the kingdom of the Cantiaci had its capital at

Canterbury, the Roman conquerors essentially took over but
without causing any great disruption to existing patterns,
allowing the kingdom to continue as a subunit within Roman
Britain. The latest research on the origins of the Anglo-Saxon
kingdom of Kent suggests that there was a Romano-British
political unit with ancient pre-Roman roots that came under
new management by the Germanic settlers.
The Northern Kingdoms

This lecture now turns to the three kingdoms in the north that
were supposedly founded by the Angles. East Anglia was a
composite kingdom that was formed out of two earlier units
that coalesced in the 6th century, namely the South Folk (or
Suffolk) and the North Folk (or Norfolk).
The territory of East Anglia later incorporated part of what is

now Cambridgeshire. East Anglia was briefly quite powerful in
the early 7th century, but it later went into decline.
Mercia, for its part, became very important to Anglo-Saxon

political development, but its origins are in many ways the
most obscure of any of the major kingdoms of the heptarchy.
We have no native Mercian texts that describe the kingdom’s
early history.
61
In fact, as one historian put it, “its history was written by

its victims rather than by its friends.” One of Mercia’s chief
victims was the kingdom of Northumbria.
The great Northumbrian author Bede provides no

information about holy places in Mercia, which is a
sharp break from his practice for the other Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms. Even his discussion of the early kings of Mercia
could be seen as rather snarky.
As for Northumbria, it, like East Anglia, was a composite

kingdom. It did not cohere as a kingdom until two preexisting
units, Bernicia in the north and Deira in the south, were joined
by a dynastic marriage in the early 7th century. The two
sections still vied for supremacy for many years.
Northumbria, like Kent, may have had Celtic roots. Bernicia and
Deira, whose names are both Celtic in origin, already existed as
Celtic-speaking units that were taken over by the newcomers.
The fortress of Bamburgh in Bernicia fell to the Anglians in

547, and it would have a long history as the most important
center of Anglo-Saxon power in the north. There is evidence
for continuity at the Bernician royal site of Yeavering, which
also has a Brittonic-derived name. This is another case of new
management taking over.
Just as Mercia absorbed many smaller units, Northumbria, too,

incorporated at least one preexisting kingdom: Lindsey, which
was centered on the land surrounding the town of Lincoln.
62
A Gradual Shift
It is clear in the Midlands and the north that the process of
shifting from Romano-British rule to Anglo-Saxon rule was
drawn out. In some places, areas remained under Romano-
British rule for centuries after they were surrounded by
territory that was now ruled by Anglo-Saxon dynasties.
For example, the small Briton kingdom of Elmet existed

in what is now western Yorkshire from the 5th to the 7th
centuries. It was surrounded by the Anglian kingdoms of
Northumbria and Mercia.
In a later period, the Welsh looked back to a time before the

Anglo-Saxon dynasties had absorbed such surviving native
units and referred to them as the Hen Ogledd, or Old North.
Elmet was the only one of these territories to have neither

another Celtic-speaking neighbor nor access to the sea,
and it was thus the earliest to fade away.
Other smaller units were absorbed by the larger, more

successful kingdoms. Many of these were in the west
Midlands, such as Hwicce and Magonsæte. These were later
incorporated into the powerful Midland kingdom of Mercia.
Reading
Bassett, ed., The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms.
63
7
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
The Papal Mission

to Britain
T
his lecture’s focus is the process
by which Britain converted to
Christianity. This is really two
stories because Britain was Christianized, or
re-Christianized, from two directions: from
Ireland and from continental Europe. The
two regions where this process principally
unfolded are Kent in the southeast and
Northumbria in the north, but Northumbria
features in both stories because it was
Christianized twice. Politics were also very
important in the conversion, particularly
the complicated dynastic rivalries within
the composite kingdom of Northumbria. Its
branches, the Deiran subkingdom and the
Bernician subkingdom, vied with each other
for supremacy throughout this period.
65
The State of Religion

This lecture begins with a few words on the state of religion
on the island of Britain in the late 6th century. In the
Britonnic-speaking territories in the north and west and
southwest, Christianity continued to flourish. As a matter of
fact, the 6th century was a period of growth, as the monastic
movement took root there.
But in the areas of Britain now ruled by the Anglo-Saxons,

Christianity, which had made significant headway during the
late Roman period, had largely disappeared. There is evidence
from place names that there were some surviving Christian
churches in the now English-speaking areas in the south and
east, but these were scattered and isolated. By and large, the
English-ruled territories were solidly pagan.
This was a consequence of where the Germanic migrants to

Britain had come from. Those who had crossed into Gaul from
Germanic regions bordering the Roman Empire were at least
acquainted with Christianity if not Christians themselves,
as missionaries had started to penetrate these regions. By
contrast, the settlers from the far north and northwest of
Germanic Europe who landed in Britain were pagans.
Still, by the 600s, the now-Anglo-Saxon peoples were

certainly aware of Christianity and its spread, through frequent
contact with the neighboring British-ruled territories and with
continental Europe. Particularly in the southeast, in Kent, there
were strong trading contacts with the Frankish kingdom, which
had been Christian since the early 6th century.
66
Lecture 7 | The Papal Mission to Britain
Pope Gregory’s Mission

The Anglo-Saxons would have been familiar with Christianity
when the first Roman missionaries arrived in 597. They came
as part of Pope Gregory’s mission, which, according to the
Venerable Bede, was spurred on by Gregory’s seeing angelic-
looking people from Britain in a slave market. This occurred
prior to Gregory’s ascent to the papacy. Following the slave-
market sighting, Gregory supposedly then wished to bring
these people into the fold of the Christianity.
The story goes that after the encounter in the slave market,
Gregory had wished to go to Britain to preach to the English,
yet such was his popularity
in Rome that the people
refused to part with him.
Whom would he send in his
stead? He settled on a man
named Augustine, who was
the prior of a monastery
in Rome.
Augustine was extremely

reluctant to leave his
monastery for this perilous
assignment, but he agreed
to undertake the daunting
journey to the island of
Britain. He set off with
a suite of companions,
bringing with him precious
Christian manuscripts.
One of these was likely
the St Augustine Gospels,
67
an exquisitely illuminated gospel book that has survived in

England since the 6th century and is now one of the oldest
European books still in existence.
The journey and the scale of the task ahead was undoubtedly
daunting. Augustine traveled through the vast but largely
friendly kingdom of the Franks before crossing the Channel
into the kingdom of Kent. He even tried to turn back at
one point: He sent a delegation back to Rome to plead for
permission to abandon the task, but Pope Gregory enjoined
them to continue, and continue they did.
Augustine in Kent
Augustine’s mission arrived in Kent in 597. Kent was ruled
at the time by King Æthelberht. The king’s wife Bertha was
a Frankish princess. She was a Christian and had brought a
chaplain and presumably attendants who were Christian with
her to Kent at the time of her marriage, which had taken place
several decades earlier.
Augustine’s success was not immediate, but the king did give
him permission to worship in St. Martin’s Church, where his
wife’s chaplain presided. Augustine eventually succeeded in
converting Æthelberht. Augustine also founded a monastery in
Canterbury, later called St. Augustine’s after its founder, and
he began ordaining priests and deacons.
From this point on, though, Augustine had some questions

about the best way to proceed, so he wrote a very famous
series of letters to Pope Gregory asking for advice. Gregory’s
philosophy amounted basically to taking a gradual approach:
68
It is doubtless impossible to cut out

everything at once from their stubborn
minds: just as the man who is trying to
climb to the highest place, rises by steps and
degrees and not by leaps.
Rather quickly, the surrounding kingdoms also began to

convert, particularly Essex and East Anglia. Certainly, a great
deal of this success can be attributed to the sway that Kent
exercised in the southeast of England at the time. In 604,
Augustine consecrated two bishops. The first one, Mellitus,
became bishop of the East Saxons, with his seat at London.
The second was a bishop named Justus for the city of
Rochester, which was only 24 miles to the west of Canterbury.
69
Challenges
The work of conversion was arduous, and it didn’t always
produce permanent results. After the death of Æthelberht,
Kent briefly relapsed into paganism, as did East Anglia. The
East Anglian king Rædwald demonstrated that he did not
get the point of Christian monotheism. He famously erected
a series of altars to various pagan gods, plus one for the
Christian god.
Despite Augustine’s success with Anglo-Saxon rulers, he did

not manage to establish solid links to the existing Christian
churches in the Brittonic-speaking parts of Britain. The
pope had intended that this church should be subordinate to
Augustine, but the British church leaders did not see matters
in the same way at all.
To make matters worse, Augustine apparently took a “my way

or the highway” approach that rubbed the local leaders the
wrong way. All in all, Augustine’s efforts did not result in a
unified Christian church in Britain.
Pope Gregory had planned that there would be two

archbishoprics in Britain, one at Canterbury and one at York,
and they were intended to govern the whole island, not just
the pagan areas that were set to be converted by Augustine.
Each of these two archbishops would be supported by 12
subordinate bishops, so there would be 24 bishoprics and
two archbishoprics in all. This scheme did not fully come to
fruition for a variety of reasons.
70
Conversion Routes
One of the striking aspects of the conversion in England was
its largely peaceful nature. It was very much a top-down
conversion campaign. The missionaries went right to the
various royal courts and tried to convert the kings. If the
kings converted, their followers generally fell into line. This is
probably the reason why the conversion in England was, as far
as we know, entirely devoid of martyrs.
One of the most common routes for conversion at the apex

of the kingdom was via a royal marriage between a Christian
and a non-Christian. These marriages were sometimes
entered into with the hope or even expectation on behalf of
the Christian spouse (who was usually the wife) that the non-
Christian spouse would convert.
Conversion was by no means automatic, though, as

demonstrated by the case of Kent, where the Frankish
princess Bertha waited through several decades of marriage
before Augustine arrived and got things moving along. But it
did work a bit more swiftly in the case of Northumbria, where
Christianity was established by means of matrimony.
In 625, King Edwin of Northumbria married as his second wife

the Kentish princess Æthelburg of Kent, the daughter of King
Æthelberht and sister of the current king of Kent, Eadbald. She
brought her Christian chaplain Paulinus north with her in her
entourage.
King Edwin did not convert immediately. In fact, Bede tells

us that Paulinus toiled long and hard at first to win converts,
but with little success. Bede structures his account of the
conversion around two dramatic episodes.
71
The first occurs about a year after the marriage of Edwin and
Æthelburg. An assassin had appeared at court who had been
sent from the king of Wessex to kill the king with a poisoned
weapon, but this plot was foiled when a loyal retainer thrust
himself between the assassin and the king and absorbed the
deadly blow himself.
At this time, the queen had just delivered a daughter. The king
gave thanks to his pagan gods for the safe delivery of the
infant, but Paulinus thanked Christ and insisted that it was his
own prayers that had ensured the happy outcome of the birth.
Edwin was pleased by this and pledged that if God granted

him victory over the king who had tried to have him killed,
then he would accept the Christian faith. As a type of spiritual
down payment, Edwin allowed his infant daughter to be
baptized. The victory against Wessex was in fact forthcoming,
but still, Edwin hesitated to convert. Adding to the pressure
on Edwin, Pope Boniface sent him a letter that urged Edwin to
convert to Christianity.
In 627, one of the most famous events of the conversion

period took place. Paulinus was attempting yet again to bring
Edwin and his followers around to the new faith.
Rather suddenly, one of Edwin’s advisers seems to have had a

sudden insight. He said that the flight of the sparrow through
the lord’s hall in the winter is a lot like the spiritual condition
of man.
When the sparrow flies into the hall, we don’t really know
where it comes from, and when it flies out again, we don’t
really know where it goes.
72
The plight of the human soul is a bit like that. We don’t

really know what happens before or after we die.
The adviser had concluded that the Christian faith could

finally tell them the answer to these questions. This
argument was supposedly so persuasive that the king’s
chief priest, a man named Coifi, immediately embraced the
new faith and set about destroying the pagan idols.
Edwin would not convert, though, until he had the approval of

his chief advisers. It is significant that Edwin wanted to bring
his followers along with him. He did not want to impose the
new religion on them without their consent.
Edwin was successful in persuading his men to convert, and

they were all baptized. Paulinus set up his headquarters at the
royal town of York, thus doing his part to bring Pope Gregory’s
organizational schema for the Christian church in Britain
into being.
Scholars are no longer persuaded that the story unfolded

exactly as Bede tells us. Oral tradition tends to smooth out the
rough edges and give people better lines than they probably
delivered in the moment. But this was the oral tradition that
was passed down in Northumbria, and Bede must have heard
it either in his childhood or once he entered the monastery.
Edwin’s conversion was another false start because a few

years later, Edwin died in battle against the pagan king Penda
of Mercia and his Christian ally Cadwallon of Gwynedd. The
chaplain Paulinus returned to the south following Edwin’s
death, and Northumbria, too, briefly returned to paganism.
73
Conclusion
In Britain around 630, there was a striking pattern. There
were Celtic-style Christians in the west, who were continuing
to practice their beliefs, and there were the Roman-style
Christians in Kent, freshly converted by Augustine, who were
starting to spread into Essex and East Anglia.
Northumbria had been evangelized as part of the dynastic

marriage between King Edwin and the Kentish princess.
However, allegiance to Christianity there was precarious.
In the middle was the kingdom of Mercia, one of the last holdouts.
This was not the very last of the pagan areas, but it was certainly
the last of the large and powerful kingdoms to convert.
74
Reading
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon
England.
75
8
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Sutton Hoo
and the Early
Anglo-Saxons
O
n the rise of
a small hill in
Suffolk, near where
the River Deben drains into
the North Sea, lies one of
the most important and
iconic archaeological sites
in all Anglo-Saxon studies:
Sutton Hoo. The name
literally means “settlement
on a small hill,” but to us
today it is one of the best
windows we have into the
world of the Anglo-Saxons
and the English and
Christian identities that
were beginning to emerge.
77
Sutton Hoo’s Discovery

The heroine of Sutton Hoo’s modern story is Edith Pretty, who
was born in 1883. When her father died in 1925, Edith inherited
a great fortune.
She eventually
bought the site
of Sutton Hoo,
and in 1937, she
commissioned
the amateur
archaeologist
Basil Brown to
investigate it.
After some time,

Brown uncovered
a 7th-century Basil Brown
ship burial. Once
it became clear that this was a significant find, the British
Museum became involved, and the impetus shifted to a team
of professional archaeologists led by Stuart and Peggy Piggott
in 1939.
War broke out in September of that year, so the site had to be

shut down as an active excavation. The effort was necessarily
rushed because of the threat of impending war; it was, in
effect, an event known as a rescue dig, where artifacts are
recovered urgently so they can be protected, and a full study
made later. Soon, stunning grave goods and treasures in
gold, silver, and other precious stones and metals were being
uncovered from the burial chambers.
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Lecture 8 | Sutton Hoo and the Early Anglo-Saxons
Pretty donated the whole collection to the British Museum.

At the time, this was the largest assemblage of objects ever
donated to the museum by a private individual. Pretty died
just a few years later in 1942.
After a long hiatus, a second phase of excavation at Sutton

Hoo began in 1965 under the archaeologist Rupert Bruce-
Mitford, with the hope of answering questions that remained
from the first excavation campaign. In this second campaign,
the burial mound and its surrounding context were surveyed.
The team discovered phosphate deposits that confirmed that
a body had once existed at the site.
A third phase of excavation took place in the 1980s under

archaeologist Martin Carver. The emphasis during this phase
shifted away from the artifacts themselves and toward
uncovering what the site could reveal about the social and
economic life of the people who had lived around Sutton Hoo.
In 1991, Carver’s team found a burial that had only narrowly

escaped an attempt by Tudor grave robbers. This was a
very unusual burial with two chambers side by side. The
grave robbers had dug an exploratory shaft that passed just
between the two chambers, missing them both.
One of the chambers contained the burial of a man with

the accoutrements of a warrior. The truly unusual part was
contained in the second chamber: the man’s horse, or at least,
the skeleton of his horse. Presumably the horse was ritually
killed at the time of the burial.
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The Ship Burial and

King Rædwald
The very first find at Sutton Hoo—the ship burial—was quite
notable and intricate. The ship’s outline was measured at
89 feet long and 14 feet wide, and the areas where the ship
had been repaired were visible, meaning that it had been
an oceangoing vessel, although features like the mast and
decking had been removed before burial.
Who in this corner of Suffolk could have commanded sufficient

respect to warrant an elaborate ship burial? The most logical
answer is that it was King Rædwald of East Anglia.
We know from datable objects in the tomb that the burial

probably dates to around 625, and we know from written
sources that Rædwald died in around 624, so the dates line
up. We cannot be certain whether it was Rædwald who was
buried at Sutton Hoo, but it seems a very likely guess because
of the richness of the finds.
Objects from Sutton Hoo

There were many exquisite objects found in the principal burial
chamber of Sutton Hoo, all of which testify to the wealth and
far-flung connections of the occupant. Probably the most
famous is the Sutton Hoo helmet, which was uncovered in
1939 in hundreds of pieces and then reconstructed twice, first
in the years after the initial discovery and then again in 1970–
1971. The second reconstruction was able to take account of
four additional fragments that were discovered during the
second phase of excavation.
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The helmet is very elaborately decorated. For instance, there

are three dragon heads on the helmet. Two are on either end
of an iron crest that runs along the skull cap from front to
back, and a third is right between the eyebrows. The three
dragons had red garnets for eyes, which must have made
them appear very menacing.
The helmet probably dated back to the mid- to late 6th

century, so it may have been an heirloom of some kind. It was
obviously meant to be decorative and impressive, but scholars
believe that it was functional as well. Though we do not know
if the helmet ever was used in battle, it would have provided
almost complete protection against a sword blow to the head.
Besides the helmet, the grave contained other implements

of war. Off to one side on a metal stand was a very imposing
shield. There was also a very striking sword found in the grave.
Next to the helmet, probably the most spectacular items from

the burial chamber are gold jewelry, especially a beautiful
gold belt buckle. The buckle is decorated with intricate animal
interlace, and it has a hollow chamber in the back that might
have been intended to hold a relic of a Christian saint.
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There were also two shoulder clasps that would have held up
a cloak and the metal fashionings for a purse, all in beautiful
goldwork with intricately inlaid garnets. This ensemble would
have made quite an impression.
It was probably made in East Anglia, which indicates that this

kingdom had access to high artistic expertise. That only came
with significant resources.
Spectacular objects have been found a bit farther away from

the burial ship as well, most prominent among them a set of
three hanging bowls made of copper alloy. Sutton Hoo has
also proffered the largest quantity of silver ever discovered in
an early medieval burial. All the silver items were made in the
eastern Mediterranean.
Another important set of objects are the so-called Saulos and

Paulos spoons.
It was thought at one time that these spoons were a

sign that the occupant of the mound had converted to
Christianity because the Apostle Paul changed his name
from Saul to Paul when he accepted the new faith.
However, it now appears that the spoon that says Saulos

may have been just an engraver’s mistake for Paulos.
Regardless, they are a sign of how wealthy and well

connected the deceased was. He either purchased these
objects or received them as gifts, perhaps from the Franks
across the Channel, so his high status is apparent.
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Textiles were also found at Sutton Hoo. Most of the luxurious

textiles in the burial now survive only as fragments. The
textiles seem to have included cloaks as well as material used
for blankets or hangings.
Textiles were a primary way of displaying wealth in the

medieval world since it was extremely labor-intensive
to produce them. They might have been dyed with very
expensive materials.
Also found in the main ship burial was a lyre. A lyre is a

musical instrument played by plucking strings. Presumably
it was intended that the occupant of the tomb should enjoy
music in the afterlife.
What Sutton Hoo Tells Us

A remarkable fact came to light during the third phase of the
excavation. Once the main burial mounds had been excavated,
the team started looking at the space in between the mounds,
and it turns out that there were many other graves.
This was not just an assembly of high-status burial mounds but

a whole cemetery complex. The presence of human bodies was
detected because the sand was darker than in the surrounding
area. These burials became known as ghost bodies.
These were not normal, respectful burials. The bodies were

laid to rest in contorted positions. Many had their ankles
bound, some had their necks broken, and a few had had their
heads severed. There were 39 of them in all.
Scholars theorize that this was a place of execution. There were

postholes nearby, which could have been the site for gallows.
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Another interesting find came to light in 2000, when the

modern visitor’s center was being built. There were dozens of
cremations and inhumations, five of which were under small
burial mounds. The people buried here had a range of grave
goods that designated a variety of social levels. The goods
were mostly personal articles like combs and buckles.
The excavators dated these burials to the 6th century. They

theorize that these may have been the grandparents or great-
grandparents of the later East Anglian kings. The burials date
from the period when certain families began to distinguish
themselves from other families and acquire more wealth,
power, and prestige. The political development of the early
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms can be read in these graves.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the Sutton Hoo site

is the fact that the decision has been made not to excavate
every part of it. Instead, the archaeologists are using ground-
penetrating radar and drone-mounted lasers to investigate
the remaining mounds. This will allow them to learn more
about these features, such as exactly how the mounds were
constructed, without having engage in destructive excavation.
Reading
Carver, Sutton Hoo.
———, The Sutton Hoo Story.
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9
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Irish
Missionaries and
Christianization
T
hough the Roman
mission to Britain was
successful in converting
the southeast to Christianity,
Northumbria returned to
paganism after King Edwin’s
death. When Northumbria was
re-Christianized a few years later,
the impetus came from Ireland.
Irish missionaries played, if
anything, a more decisive role
in the conversion of England to
Christianity than the Romans did.
Over the course of the 7th century,
this second wave of conversion led
to all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
adopting Christianity.
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Lecture 9 | Irish Missionaries and Christianization
Irish Activities
In the early 5th century, through the work first of a papal
envoy named Saint Palladius and then of the much better-
known Saint Patrick, Ireland was gradually converted to
Christianity. But just as the new faith was taking hold in
Ireland, Christianity was on the retreat in Britain. Germanic
settlers began to arrive, and Roman Britain crumbled.
Two centuries later, the Irish returned to Britain to reconvert

those who had once converted them. The most important
vector of transmission for Christianity in northern England
was the monastery of Iona, which had been founded on a
small island in what is now southwestern Scotland by the Irish
monk Saint Columba in the 560s. Iona was part of a network
of monasteries all founded by Saint Columba that spanned the
Irish Sea.
During the reign of King Edwin, Oswald, heir to the

subkingdom of Bernicia in Northumbria, had gone into exile
at Iona, and while there he converted to the faith of the Irish.
In 634, Oswald returned to Northumbria and assumed the
throne after the death of Edwin. He restarted the process of
converting the kingdom to Christianity.
But the Christian practice that Oswald had learned at Iona

was not precisely the same as the Christian practice that
Augustine had brought to England from Rome. By this point, in
the early 7th century, there were quite well-delineated factions
within the church on the islands of Britain and Ireland. For
convenience, this lecture calls them the Roman party and the
Irish party.
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Issues between Parties

Several issues divided the parties. One of them was relevant
to monks, namely, the style of the tonsure, the special haircut
that monks adopted. The Roman style of tonsure involved the
monk shaving a circle on the top of his scalp. The Irish method
was to shave not just a ring of scalp but the whole top of the
head straight to the forehead.
A more serious issue arose regarding the proper celebration

of Easter, specifically the date on which Easter should be
celebrated. Easter, which commemorates the resurrection
of Jesus, is the most important celebration in the Christian
calendar. It is a movable feast, and its date can change from
year to year.
In the 5th century, the church in Rome adopted a new method

for calculating Easter that had been developed in Alexandria,
but by that point, the older method was well entrenched in the
far-flung parts of the Christian world such as Ireland. Many
clerics within both the Irish church and the British church—
that is, the Brittonic-speaking churches on the borders of
Anglo-Saxon territory—were reluctant to change.
There were churches in Ireland that conformed to the new

date of Easter in obedience to the pope, particularly churches
in the southern part of Ireland. These parts of Ireland tended
to be more open to continental influences. In the north, by
contrast, many Irish churches clung to the old date of Easter.
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Oswald’s Christianity
Oswald appealed to Iona to send missionaries to oversee the
conversion of Northumbria to Christianity, rather than calling
on Canterbury in the south. Irish monks practiced a form of
personal austerity that went beyond what many continental-
oriented monks were willing to practice.
This became clear when Oswald’s summons was answered

first by the monk Cormán, whose very austere form of
practice did not win him any friends at the Northumbrian
court. He was forced to return to Iona.
His replacement was Saint

Aidan. Aidan, while still a
rigorous man, dialed back
the asceticism and had
more success. The court
was Christianized, or
re-Christianized, but
with Irish-style religious
customs, including the
adoption of the Irish
method for calculating the Saint Aidan
date of Easter.
One of the most important

developments during this period
was the foundation of an island
monastery similar to the one at Iona. This time, the monastery
was founded on the east coast of Britain on the island of
Lindisfarne. Lindisfarne became one of the most important
monasteries in the kingdom of Northumbria.
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Aidan took a less aggressive approach to conversion. He

would wander the countryside, gently explaining the gospel
to the people. In this effort he sometimes had the aid of King
Oswald, who was bilingual in Irish and English thanks to his
lengthy exile on Iona.
After Aidan
Aidan died in 651. But by that time, much had changed in
the kingdom of Northumbria, as now it faced a renewed
fight for survival against Mercia. Mercia was at this point
the last pagan kingdom in England, and though Mercia and
Northumbria had long been at each other’s throats, now there
was a religious dimension intensifying their rivalry.
Penda was England’s last great pagan ruler, and he was very
much an expansionist. He had extended Mercian rule to the
west into the Severn Valley shortly after he took the throne
in 626, and he also made gains at the expense of East Anglia
and Wessex.
Arguably his most serious impact was felt in Northumbria. He

was responsible for the deaths of two Northumbrian kings.
Penda had killed King Edwin in battle, thus allowing King
Oswald to come to the throne. Now Penda was going to claim
his second royal victim.
Oswald must have felt that Penda’s growing power was a

threat to Northumbria and sought a decisive battle to curb
the pagans. In the summer of 642, Oswald led his forces into
Mercian territory, and on August 5, at the Battle of Maserfield
on the border between Mercia and Welsh territory, Oswald
was defeated and killed.
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Bede tells us that Penda had Oswald’s body dismembered and

placed the head, hands, and arms on stakes, which supposedly
had some sort of pagan meaning. But one of the arms, which
had been blessed by Saint Aidan at an Easter dinner, stayed
uncorrupted, and it was later rescued and revered as a relic.
The death of Christian Oswald in a battle against a pagan king
was construed as equivalent to martyrdom.
The relic caused significant tensions between several religious

communities, as one of them, Peterborough, supposedly stole
the arm from another, Bamburgh. Relics could be extremely
important to the spiritual and financial health of a monastery.
As a result of the battle in 642, Penda became the dominant

power in England, and Northumbria declined in authority
significantly, particularly because the death of Oswald
reopened the fracture between the two halves of the
Northumbrian kingdom. Oswald’s brother Oswiu took the
throne of Bernicia, the northern half, which was the ancestral
home of his dynasty. Deira reverted to choosing a king from
the Deiran branch. It would take more than a decade for the
two halves to reunite.
But Penda was not content at having subdued Northumbria.

He continued his aggressive posture toward his neighbors in
654 by defeating and killing King Anna of East Anglia, another
prominent Christian monarch.
Then in 655, Penda invaded Bernicia with a set of allies

that included Æthelwald, now king of Deira. Æthelwald was
Oswald’s son, whom Penda had slain, but clearly the chance
to rule over a united Northumbria had helped Æthelwald get
over this infraction.
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But Penda’s luck had ran out—he was killed at the Battle of
Winwaed by Oswiu, and he was succeeded by his son Peada,
who had previously converted to Christianity as a condition of his
marriage to the daughter of Oswiu. Sussex was the last kingdom
to convert shortly after, when its pagan king married a Christian
princess from newly converted Mercia. Through marriage and
through war, the Christianization of England was complete.
Remaining Tensions
There were still tensions because now there were competing
strands of Christian practice. In Northumbria for instance,
Oswiu was secure on the throne, but he was an Irish-style
Christian who had married his second wife in the Roman
tradition. Different members of the Northumbrian royal family
adhered to different strands of Christian practice.
Most notably, there were times when the two different

calendars could lead to Easter falling several weeks apart
for the two systems. (Given the dietary changes brought
by fasting for Lent during the leadup to Easter, having two
different date systems wasn’t truly workable.)
King Oswiu was eager to settle the question of which church

authority to follow once and for all. One reason was that his
adult son Alhfrith, to whom he had assigned the southern
subkingdom of Deira after the Battle of the Winwaed, was
attempting to establish a bit more autonomy than the
king was comfortable with. Alhfrith was using the religious
divisions within Northumbria as a wedge to do this.
This is where one of the most controversial figures of the 7th

century, Saint Wilfrid, enters the story. He had a decidedly
Roman orientation with regard to church politics.
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Around 660, he founded a monastery at Ripon that was

organized along Roman lines. Wilfrid’s pro-Roman stance
greatly influenced Alhfrith, and he began challenging his
father’s more Irish orientation.
The Synod of Whitby

Oswiu thus determined that he should settle the question of
whether Northumbria would worship in the Roman style or the
Irish style once and for all. A turning point was reached in 664
at the Synod of Whitby, which has come down to us through
the work of the Venerable Bede as a kind of Irish-versus-
Roman ecclesiastical contest.
Bede presents the synod as a polemical duel between Saint

Wilfrid, representing the Roman party, and Saint Colmán,
representing the Irish party. The debate hinged on the crucial
question of who had the authority to forgive sins, and thus,
who should be followed in other matters.
When the king asked both protagonists on whose authority they

spoke, Saint Colmán replied that he drew his authority from
Saint Columba, the founder of his monastic community at Iona.
Saint Wilfrid maintained that his authority came from Rome and
thus ultimately from Saint Peter, and he pointed out that Christ
had given the power of the keys of heaven to Peter—that is, the
power to forgive sinners or hold them bound.
It seemed to make more sense to Oswiu to go with the saint

who had the power to admit him or not admit him to eternal
life, so Oswiu declared for the Roman party. Northumbria
shifted to celebrating Easter in the Roman style. According to
Bede, it was apparently as simple as that.
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A saddened Saint Colmán withdrew from court, but the stock

of the pro-Roman Wilfrid rose. Wilfrid had so impressed
Alhfrith that he named Wilfrid bishop of Northumbria.
Note that there is probably reason to doubt that the Synod of

Whitby went down word for word as Bede tells it. Historians
now believe that Oswiu was taking the opportunity of the
synod to seize the initiative from his son.
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Continuing Practices
By the 680s, all of Anglo-Saxon England was at least
outwardly Christian. However, for perhaps centuries
afterward, syncretic and idiosyncratic practices that drew on
old pagan traditions likely persisted among the population,
especially outside the major cities and towns.
After the Synod of Whitby

Alhfrith’s own career did not benefit from the triumph of the
Roman party at Whitby. He disappears from the historical
record not long afterward, and historians speculate that he
may have been killed in a rebellion against his father.
As for Wilfrid, once he had been named bishop, he went off to

Gaul to be consecrated. Oswiu set aside the absent Wilfrid and
appointed a man named Ceadda in his place. Wilfrid withdrew
to Ripon for several years during this period.
For the next decade or so, the English church was dominated
by a quarrel between two very talented men who did not
see eye to eye: Wilfrid and a new archbishop of Canterbury,
Theodore of Tarsus.
One of Theodore’s chief goals as archbishop of Canterbury

was to reform the organization of the English church, and one
of his first tasks was to deal with the question of the bishopric
of Northumbria (or York). Archbishop Theodore was initially
quite favorable to Wilfrid. He determined that King Oswiu’s
deposition of Wilfrid had been invalid, so he deposed Ceadda
and restored Wilfrid as bishop of York.
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The bishoprics in England had been created rather

haphazardly to match the ad hoc political arrangements in
England. The various kingdoms were by no means of uniform
size. Northumbria by this point was a huge territory.
Theodore concluded that it would be better to break the

diocese up into several smaller units, thus making it easier to
carry out the pastoral care required of the bishop. That did
not sit well with Wilfrid, with whom the archbishop became
increasingly impatient, but Theodore bided his time.
That waiting strategy paid off because the archbishop was

not the only one who found Wilfrid to be a somewhat difficult
character. His pro-Roman zeal alienated some influential
members of the Northumbrian royal family.
At the same time, Wilfrid was resisting some of Archbishop

Theodore’s efforts to rationalize the organization of the church
in Northumbria. When King Ecgfrith demanded Wilfrid’s
expulsion, Theodore refused to back his subordinate.
Thus, Wilfrid went into exile on the continent. He regained

his see and was exiled several more times. He eventually
died in 709 or 710 at the age of about 77, leaving a legacy of
controversy but also of tremendous energy and dedication.
Reading
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
Mayr-Harting, Saint Wilfrid.
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10
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Kings of
the North:
Northumbria’s
Ascent
F rom the mid-7th century
down to the 9th, the kingdoms
of Northumbria, Mercia,
and Wessex each enjoyed a period
of hegemony. All three bordered on
territories ruled by peoples who were
weaker than they were, and each
of them was able to expand at the
expense of the British-ruled kingdoms
that were clinging to power. But they
were also able to project their power
over the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
that were bottled up on the eastern
and southern coasts, where there
were fewer opportunities to gobble up
new territory. This lecture focuses on
Northumbria in the 7th century.
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Lecture 10 | Kings of the North: Northumbria’s Ascent
Rulers
Bede tells us much about Northumbria, which is not surprising
in a Northumbrian author. One important way we can gauge
the fortunes of Northumbria is by looking at the list he wrote
of seven prominent rulers of Britain.
Rædwald of East Anglia was the fourth ruler on the list.

The three rulers who came before him were Ælle of Sussex,
Ceawlin of Wessex, who played a role in the very earliest
origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and Æthelberht of Kent,
who played a key role in the success of the Roman mission to
Christianize Britain. That’s three different kingdoms: Sussex,
Wessex, and Kent, with no clear pattern, except that they are
all in the south.
The three rulers who come after Rædwald are all from
Northumbria: Edwin, Oswald, and Oswiu. They were referred to
by the later Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the term bretwalda,
which means “Britain ruler” or “wide ruler,” which has caused
a lot of controversy over the ages.
Bede does not use the term since he is writing in Latin, so

we don’t know if it was a title that was current in the 7th and
8th centuries or not. It was likely an indication that these men
were the most powerful among a bunch of other rulers and
that they sometimes were able to project their influence over
other kingdoms, but not in any kind of official capacity.
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Northumbrian Power
The middle of the 7th century represented the height of
Northumbrian power. The pagan king Penda of Mercia died in
battle against Oswiu of Northumbria, meaning that the most
powerful enemy of the Northumbrians had been eliminated.
For a while, Northumbria was even able to exercise a loose
overlordship over Mercia.
Importantly, Northumbria grew more powerful by expanding

to the north and west at the expense of the British-controlled
kingdoms that still survived there. The north still contained
areas that were British-ruled and Brittonic-speaking up until
this point, but those areas began to give way.
The northern half of Northumbria, known as Bernicia,

bordered on the Brittonic-speaking kingdom of the Gododdin.
This territory essentially occupied the area of southeastern
Scotland south of the Firth of Forth.
The Bernicians and the men of Gododdin clashed repeatedly

around 600, and it was not always the Bernicians who took
the offensive. In 638, under Oswald, the Northumbrians
pushed deep into Gododdin territory and conquered Eidyn, or
Edinburgh. This solidified the annexation of the territories of
the men of Gododdin south of the Firth of Forth.
On the north side of the Firth of Forth, there were various

Pictish kingdoms. According to Bede, who was looking back
on this from about a century later, Oswald was also able to
exercise overlordship even over these Pictish rulers. Oswald’s
brother Oswiu seems to have maintained this hegemony into
his own reign.
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Ecgfrith and the Economy

Oswiu’s son Ecgfrith, who succeeded Oswiu in 670, was not
the successful ruler that his father had been. Ecgfrith was the
son of Oswiu and Oswiu’s second wife, the princess Eanflæd,
who was herself the daughter of King Edwin of Northumbria
and his Kentish bride.
One of Ecgfrith’s accomplishments was to issue the first silver

penny in Northumbria and perhaps in any of the Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms. This set the standard for coinage for centuries to
come. These were not the first coins ever produced by Anglo-
Saxon rulers, but they were important nonetheless.
Ecgfrith’s silver pennies, known as sceattas, were not fiat

currency like we understand it today—that is, they didn’t have a
face value. Instead, their value was their actual weight in silver.
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The sceattas were minted in large quantities. This indicated

that they were not a store of value but rather that they were
intended to be spent. That, in turn, is a sign of an economy
that was heating up and that required liquidity.
The Northumbrian economy, like much of northern England,

would have rested principally on livestock and the herding
of three principal animals: cattle, sheep and pigs. Pigs were
primarily a source of meat. Cattle were used to produce hides,
and this was a major export for the Northumbrian economy. But
probably the most important element was the burgeoning wool
trade, which would become an iconic part of northern England.
By the 8th century at least, English wool was being exported

to the rest of Europe, and the industry would continue on an
upward trajectory from there through the Industrial Revolution.
Northumbrian power thus did not just rest on force of arms.
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were growing economically by the 7th
century, and wealth and trade was flowing back into Britain,
recovering from a long period of decline after the Romans.
York
The principal city in the kingdom of Northumbria was York,
known as Eboracum to the Romans and Eoforwic to the
Anglo-Saxons. York was a major city under the Romans, and
evidence suggests that it continued to function as such even
after their withdrawal, unlike some other cities in Roman
Britain. York was connected to the economies of the Franks
and beyond through maritime trade.
102
The Anglo-Saxons seem to have appropriated much of the

Roman infrastructure of the city for their own purposes. The
Roman walls and street pattern, for example, remained intact.
The growing influence of York is also demonstrated by the

granting of the pallium by the pope to Ecgbert of York in
735, indicating his elevation to archbishop. Far from being
a backward frontier territory, Northumbria clearly was well-
connected with the rest of Europe by the 7th century.
Ecgfrith’s Challenges
Ecgfrith had faced challenges to his authority right after his
accession to the throne, but at first, things went well. In 671,
there was a Pictish revolt, but Ecgfrith was able to suppress
it, and for the next 14 years, he extended Northumbrian
hegemony to the other side of the Firth of Forth, reaching all
the way to the River Tweed.
For reasons that are not clear, in June 684, Ecgfrith sent
a raiding party to Brega in east-central Ireland, where a
number of slaves were seized, and monasteries were sacked.
This raid was carried out supposedly against the advice of
the prominent churchman Ecgberht of Ripon. Our source
Bede had nothing good to say about this raid. It brought
Ecgfrith into conflict with the church and brought no real
strategic gains.
The theme of the king acting against advice would recur. In

685, Ecgfrith faced a serious challenge to his authority in the
north when the Picts carried out several sieges of territories
on the border between their lands and Northumbria.
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Ecgfrith had been warned not to campaign against them by

Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, a prominent figure. Ecgfrith
overestimated his strength and took the field in May.
The battle that followed is referred to either as the Battle of

Dun Nechtain (the Irish name) or Nechtansmere (the Anglian
name). On the Pictish side, the leader was King Bridei Mac
Bili, who interestingly was Ecgfrith’s cousin; his mother
was probably a daughter of Edwin of Northumbria, just like
Ecgfrith’s mother.
Bridei drew Ecgfrith into an Evangelization

ambush. The two sites that The Anglo-Saxons
historians have identified as in the late 7th and
the battle's likely setting are 8th centuries were
Dunachton in Badenoch, in north- instrumental in
central Scotland, and Dunnichen evangelizing their
in Angus, close to the east coast. Germanic cousins.
Ecgfrith was killed in the battle, The missionary efforts
and the greater part of his army began in the late 7th
perished as well. century with the work
of Saint Willibrord,
There were immediate a Northumbrian
consequences for Northumbrian cleric who preached
power in both church and state. to the Frisians and
The episcopal see at Abercorn founded a very
was abandoned, and that was the important monastery
end of Northumbrian dominance at Echternach,
in the north. The Picts were in modern-day
never again brought under Luxembourg.
Northumbrian hegemony. Saint Willibrord
inspired many other
Instead, the Picts ended up missionaries, including
combining with the Scots to form Saint Boniface.
a unified kingdom that was later
104
known as Scotland. This battle in 685 may thus have played a

role in determining that there would be separate kingdoms on
the island of Britain: England and Scotland. Around this time,
the lines between what would become England and Scotland
were becoming clearer.
Aldfrith
Bede presents the death of Ecgfrith as a temporary setback.
Ecgfrith was succeeded as king by his half-brother Aldfrith,
who was the son of King Oswiu and an Irish princess. Aldfrith
had never been intended to rule; he had been educated
instead for the church. However, it was not all that rare in
the Middle Ages that a royal prince who had been dedicated
to the religious life needed to be pulled back into the secular
world, and that’s what happened to Aldfrith.
Aldfrith concentrated more on laying the foundations for what

historians like to call the Northumbrian Renaissance in art and
learning than on more worldly accomplishments. He seems to
have pulled back on the project of dominating his neighbors.
That is not to say that Northumbria did not make other gains
at the expense of Celtic-speaking rulers. The kingdom of
Rheged, which was in what is now northwestern England and
southwestern Scotland, came under Northumbrian rule at
some point before 730. This extended Northumbrian rule from
sea to sea.
King Aldfrith died in December 704, and the throne was

usurped by a mysterious figure named Eadwulf, who may have
had some sort of Northumbrian royal blood. However, it’s not
clear exactly how he was related to Aldfrith, if he was at all.
105
Saint Wilfrid’s Time in Power

Saint Wilfrid was a relevant figure during this time. In the
intervening years since the Synod of Whitby, Wilfrid had been
a constant thorn in the sides of the Northumbrian kings,
earning multiple exiles.
In 705, Wilfrid earned the enmity

of King Eadwulf. This time
he took up the cause of
Aldfrith’s son Osred, who
was a child at the time,
and promoted his claim
as the true heir to the
throne.
Eadwulf was quickly

deposed, and Wilfrid
adopted Osred as his Saint Wilfrid
son and essentially ruled
Northumbria on his behalf.
Wilfrid eventually passed away
around 709, at about 77 years old,
which was a ripe age at the time.
Soon after Osred came of age, he was killed in battle under

circumstances that are not entirely clear. He seems to
have been defeated by the Picts, which is a sign that the
Northumbrians still needed to worry about their northern
border.
106
Conclusion
Matters thereafter are murky in the Northumbrian genealogy.
There was a brief interregnum when a man named Coenred
seized the throne. He seems to have been distantly related
to the royal dynasty, but none of his close relatives had ever
been king.
This is a sign of instability appearing in the kingdom. Coenred’s

immediate successors have left little impression on historians.
Still, the momentum established by the most illustrious of

the Northumbrian rulers was able to carry Northumbria into
the early 8th century as the most powerful and influential
of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. But the perpetual risks to a
monarchy—under-impressive kings and dynastic instability—
ultimately led the advantage to eventually pass to Mercia.
Reading
Fraser, The Pictish Conquest.
Higham, The Kingdom of Northumbria, AD 350–1100.
107
11
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Northumbria’s
Century of
Renaissance
T
his lecture focuses on the
so-called Northumbrian
Renaissance, which was a great
flowering of art and culture that grew
directly out of the wealth that accrued
to the kingdom of Northumbria during
its heyday in the mid- to late 7th century.
Note that some of the most important
products of this period were not produced
until well into the 8th century. That is
because it can take time for physical capital
to be built up into intellectual capital. For
instance, many works were produced at
monasteries that were founded in the mid-
to late 7th century. It then took time for
monks to be educated and craftsmen to be
trained in those monasteries.
109
Lindisfarne and
Monkwearmouth and Jarrow
During this renaissance, some art and learning was modeled
very consciously on what was being produced on the
continent. In other cases, there was a synthesis of different
traditions, drawing from the new currents that arrived in
Britain due to the conversion to Christianity as well as from
Anglo-Saxon and Irish myths and artistic motifs. The result
was a rich blend.
One of the main centers of artistic production was the

monastery of Lindisfarne, right off the east coast of
Northumbria. This was a great center for Irish influence, which
had arrived with Irish missionaries in the early 7th century.
The more continentally oriented tradition favored by Saint

Wilfrid was extremely important as well. The most famous
Roman-oriented monasteries were the twin houses of
Monkwearmouth and Jarrow.
The founder of this house was a man named Benedict

Biscop. He went to Rome a total of five times, and
eventually he decided to return to Northumbria and found
an abbey of his own.
During his travels, he had gained experience of the

monastic life on the continent, and he knew exactly what
he wanted to emulate. In 674, he got permission from King
Ecgfrith of Northumbria to start a monastery.
110
Lecture 11 | Northumbria’s Century of Renaissance
This first monastery was later named Monkwearmouth.

A few years later, the king gave him more land to build a
sister monastery 20 miles away that was called Jarrow.
Benedict Biscop brought continental craftsmen with him to build

the buildings. He also brought glassmakers to provide stained
glass windows, which were the first in England. He made five
total trips to the continent to bring back books for the monastic
library, which would grow to several hundred volumes, a truly
enormous collection for that time in Christian Europe.
Monkwearmouth-Jarrow also became a leading producer of

manuscripts that were so beautifully executed that they were
exported back to the continent, a sure sign that Northumbria
had come of age. The most famous of these manuscripts is
the so-called Codex Amiatinus, a splendid book containing the
earliest complete version of the Latin (or Vulgate) Bible.
The Lindisfarne Gospels

Nearly 80 manuscripts survive that can be attributed with
some certainty to Northumbria, which is a far greater number
than can be associated with any of the other Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms at the time. The manuscripts that survive from
this period emanated from monastic centers, and they were
almost uniformly religious in content.
Lindisfarne produced the Echternach Gospels and the Durham

Gospels, for example. The Lindisfarne Gospels are another
notable work, and they represent the high point of what art
historians used to call insular art.
111
The term insular art is a hedge that scholars use when it

is hard to tell if a manuscript or other object was produced
in Ireland or Britain. In the case of the Lindisfarne Gospels,
though, we can securely attribute the book to the church at
Lindisfarne. The creator of the manuscript is thought to be
Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne from 698 to 721.
The manuscript contains the four Gospels of the Christian

New Testament. The pages were very carefully laid out to have
a uniform number of lines. The text was written in beautiful
insular-style script that was distinct from the writing seen on
the continent.
The Ruthwell Cross

The most spectacular surviving
example of 8th-century
Northumbrian stonework is the
so-called Ruthwell Cross. This
standing cross dates from the
8th century, and it is found in
the village of Ruthwell, which is
now in Scotland. At the time of
its creation, it was part of the
kingdom of Northumbria.
The cross is remarkable in that

it preserves probably the oldest
Old English text. The text is the
inscription that runs around the
cross’s carved images in both
Latin and runic letters. The Ruthwell Cross
112
The inscription contains a text very similar to the Old English

poem “The Dream of the Rood.” That poem is about the life
cycle of the tree that was used to create the cross on which
Jesus Christ was crucified.
The Franks Casket

The Franks Casket is one of the most spectacular and most
puzzling artifacts to survive from the Anglo-Saxon period.
It is named after the man who owned the casket in the 19th
century, Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, who donated it to the
British Museum. It has nothing to do with the contemporary
kingdom of the Franks.
The casket is actually a small portable box. One panel of the

casket was not preserved with the rest, and it is held in a
museum in Italy. The British Museum display has a cast of the
missing panel.
Scholars date the casket to the first half of the 8th century,
and they believe it was produced in Northumbria. The casket
is made of whale bone, and it is decorated on all sides with
carved figures and writing. The writing is quite remarkable, in
that it consists of multiple scripts and languages, including
Old English and Latin.
This linguistic mashup must have been deliberate. The creator

of the casket was clearly making a statement that these
languages and scripts belonged together. This is a world that
has embraced a new faith but has clearly not entirely turned
its back on the old ways.
113
That becomes particularly clear when we look at the scenes

that are depicted on the casket. The Anglo-Saxon scholar
Richard Abels has done a masterful job of reading these
images.
The most striking thing about these images is how eclectic

they are. They draw on many different traditions, including
Christian and pagan as well as classical and Germanic.
It is almost as if the creators of the casket sought to

provide a compendium of all the various cultural elements
that could have been available to someone in Northumbria
in the 8th century.
The first scene to mention is the only unambiguously Christian

scene on the casket, and it appears on the right half of the
front panel, so it’s in a prominent position. It is the Adoration
Franks Casket
114
of the Magi, which seems like a good scene to depict on a box

that might have contained something precious, like a relic or a
more secular treasure.
That is juxtaposed on the left side of the front panel with a

scene from the Germanic myth of Wayland the Smith. That is
a story of terrible revenge.
Wayland the Smith was held as a slave by a king named

Niđhad. Wayland escaped captivity by cutting the
hamstrings of his master the king, but he didn’t stop there.
He killed the king’s son and served the king a drink in a cup
made out of the son’s skull, and he drugged and raped the
king’s daughter. It’s a bloodcurdling story.
The story of Wayland the Smith and the Adoration of the Magi
make for a seemingly odd pairing. Richard Abels reads the
juxtaposition as a sign of the way in which the creator of the
casket harmonized the old world of Germanic mythology with
the new world of the Christian faith that had been adopted
within the last century.
The vengeance of Wayland the Smith may have been seen

as a warning. Christians had now adopted a new lord, whom
they were honoring as the Magi did, and they would have no
hesitation about seeking vengeance on their enemies. The
message of the casket is thus a bit terrifying.
115
The Venerable Bede

The most influential product of the Northumbrian Renaissance
was not an artist but a scholar. The so-called Venerable Bede
was born around 672 or 673, when Northumbria was at the
height of its power. Eventually, he received monastery-based
teaching from Benedict Biscop, proving to be a brilliant student.
One of Bede’s most interesting works is called De Temporum

Ratione, or The Reckoning of Time, which he wrote in about
725. The work talks about many natural phenomena, from
astronomy to the tides.
The work makes a systematic comparison of the various

systems of reckoning time in various cultures, from the
ancient Egyptians to Bede’s own day. The obsession with
time had a very specific purpose. It’s all in the service of
calculating the correct date of Easter.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the decision by the early

church to allow Easter to be a movable feast made a huge
contribution to the advance of human knowledge. Much
expertise was needed to calculate the date correctly, including
astronomical knowledge.
In addition to scientific knowledge, the need to calculate the

date of Easter added to historical knowledge because monastic
scholars compiled so-called Easter tables that provided
the date of Easter for many years out. These ended up as a
template for making notations about important events that
had happened in the years concerned, such as the deaths of
important rulers or the appearance of supernatural phenomena.
116
These notations took on a life of their own as annals, or

sequential records of events. The annals were then often used
as the raw material for full-fledged historical narratives, such
as the one that Bede himself wrote about the history of the
English church.
Bede also popularized a method of dating that became the

standard in the Western world: the system of dating that
measured time before and after the incarnation of Christ. This
is where we get AD dating from, standing for Anno Domini, or
in the year of the Lord.
Reading
Bede and Stephanus, The Age of Bede.
Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art.
117
12
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Rise of the
Midlands:
Mercia’s
Hegemony
T
his lecture focuses
on a shift in the
hegemony among
the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
from Northumbria in the
north to Mercia in the
Midlands. There are a couple
of reasons why the Mercian
hegemony is important.
The first is that Mercia
did its part to determine
the boundaries of the
later kingdom of England.
Additionally, the Mercian
hegemony connected Anglo-
Saxon England to the
European continent.
119
The Situation in Mercia

Mercia had a moment of prominence during the mid-7th
century under the pagan ruler Penda. However, his sons Peada
and Wulfhere, who converted to Christianity, had to rule under
the shadow of the more powerful Northumbrian kings.
Wulfhere was followed by another brother, who retired to a

monastery, and then by a son of Wulfhere, who also retired
to a monastery. Next came a man named Ceolred. With this
much turnover, Mercia was not able to make a run at being the
dominant player among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
This changed under a ruler named Æthelbald, who succeeded

to the throne of Mercia in 716. He ruled for more than 40
years until he was assassinated in 757. Æthelbald was the
grandson of the brother of Penda.
Æthelbald’s Reign
Kings in this period constantly had to assert their strength; if
they wavered, then a stronger king would come to dominate
their territory and reduce them effectively to the status of a
subking. Æthelbald was able to do this for two kingdoms to his
south: Wessex and Essex.
One way that a strong king could come to dominate another

kingdom was by putting another king in his debt, and the
easiest way to do that was to intervene in a succession
dispute on the side of the successful claimant. For example,
Wessex had benefited from the rule of a very strong king
named Ine.
120
Lecture 12 | Rise of the Midlands: Mercia’s Hegemony
Ine ruled Wessex until 726, which represents the first decade
of Æthelbald’s reign. Ine abdicated, leaving a major void, as he
had no close male relatives.
There was eventually a conflict between two claimants. One

of them was an ealdorman named Oswald. The other, who
ultimately succeeded, was a man named Æthelheard.
To win the throne, Æthelheard may have benefitted from the

support of Æthelbald of Mercia, which would naturally mean
that the newly installed king of Wessex would owe the king of
Mercia. In 733, Æthelbald seems to have seized some territory
from Wessex and annexed it to Mercia.
Several times during Æthelbald’s reign, he had to reassert

his dominance over Wessex. Though he was not always
successful in military conflict, by the end of his reign, it was
clear that Mercia held the upper hand.
Æthelbald’s reign is also extremely important because of the

shift that occurred in the relationship between Mercia and
Essex. Essex controlled the port of London, which was far
and away the most important economic center on the island
of Britain. We can tell from charters that authority in London
began shifting from Essex to Mercia in the 730s, and this was
a big boon to the power and prestige of Mercia.
Along with those interactions with the southern kingdoms,

Æthelbald also paid some attention to his northern neighbors.
In 747, he seems to have allied with the old enemies of the
Northumbrians, the Picts. He also sacked the city of York. If he
could inflict this sort of damage on one of the most important
Northumbrian settlements, that is a powerful sign of how far
his reach extended.
121
Regarding Æthelbald’s relationship with the church, Saint

Boniface is a relevant figure. Saint Boniface, who was busy
proselytizing on the continent at this time, still found time to
write back to Mercia and accuse the king of many sins.
In response, the king called 747’s Council of Clovesho.

The council made a strong statement in favor of the close
connection between the English church and the church in
Rome. There was to be no daylight on liturgical matters
between the two churches.
There was also to be a strict separation in dress between the

clergy and the laity, and they were not supposed to live in
the same houses. Two years later, the king issued a famous
charter that freed the churches of Mercia from all but the
most basic royal obligations on their estates. This was a major
concession, and it was almost certainly prompted by the
criticism of Saint Boniface.
Offa’s Reign
Æthelbald’s reign ended violently. We are told in an
anonymous continuation of Bede’s history that Æthelbald was
“treacherously murdered at night by his own bodyguards.” It is
impossible to know whether there was merely some personal
grievance at work between lord and subordinate, or whether
the bodyguards were suborned by a rival.
The violent death of a king was always a time of extreme

danger for the kingdom. Chaos could so easily ensue.
However, the period of instability following the assassination
of Æthelbald was mercifully short. There was a brief
122
interregnum when a man named

Beornred seized the throne, but he
ruled for less than a year before
he was driven away by the
famous Offa of Mercia.
Offa descended from a

royal Mercian line, but
the last time one of his
direct ancestors had
held the kingship was
back in the early 7th
century. However, Offa’s
grandfather had been
Æthelbald’s first cousin.
Once he was securely

established as king, Offa set
out to strengthen the royal grip
on Mercian territory. One of the Offa
accomplishments of his reign seems
to have been the final snuffing out of
the independence of the small kingdoms that
had been drawn into the Mercian orbit: Lindsey, the Hwicce,
and the Magonsæte.
And Offa went far beyond merely consolidating his hold on the
Midlands. He also extended his sway over the other Anglo-
Saxon kingdoms to a greater extent than any previous ruler.
East Anglia had been clinging to independence. In the

middle of Offa’s reign, the king of East Anglia, Æthelberht II,
was still able to issue coins on his own behalf, but he seems
to have fallen under Offa’s overlordship shortly thereafter.
123
By the early 790s, Offa was issuing coins in East Anglia

under his own name, and in 794, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reports that “King Offa ordered King Æthelberht’s head to
be struck off.”
Mercia faced a far more powerful rival to the south in

Wessex. During the interregnum following the death of
Æthelbald, the men of Wessex seized the chance to retake
some of the territory that they had earlier been forced to
cede to Mercia.
Not until 779 was Offa able to defeat Wessex under their king,
Cynewulf, and take back some of the territory that Wessex
had regained. After Cynewulf was murdered in 786, political
instability in Wessex played to the advantage of Mercia.
Offa’s most famous accomplishment, though, was to build

the huge earthworks that separated the kingdom of Mercia
from the frequently hostile Welsh to the west. Offa’s Dyke, as
this series of earthworks is known, still essentially marks off
England from Wales.
Offa’s other great claim to fame is the correspondence he

engaged in with the most famous ruler of the early Middle
Ages, the Frankish king Charlemagne. Charlemagne would
later be crowned the first emperor in the west in more than
three centuries.
In 789, Charlemagne wrote to Offa to propose a marriage

between one of Offa’s daughters and Charlemagne’s son
Charles. This would certainly have been a prestigious
alliance for the Mercian ruler, but he made a counteroffer,
proposing that his son Ecgfrith also marry one of
Charlemagne’s daughters.
124
Offa's Dyke
Charlemagne was notoriously reluctant to allow his

daughters to leave the Frankish court; several of them
never married, though they did lead colorful personal
lives. In addition, a bilateral marriage alliance of this kind
would have been a powerful mark of equality between the
Frankish and Mercian kingdoms.
Charlemagne balked, and the alliance came to naught.

Charlemagne was so insulted that he embargoed trade
from Britain.
The takeaway from this episode is multifaceted:

Charlemagne seemed to regard Mercia as a good-enough
place for his son to find a wife but not a good-enough place
for his daughter to find a husband.
125
By a few years later, relations between the Franks and the

Mercians had been restored, so there was clearly enough in
it for both parties for them to overcome their differences.
Charlemagne promised to respect the rights of English
pilgrims traveling through Frankish territory on their way to
Rome. However, there are also indications that Charlemagne
was harboring Mercian exiles at the Frankish court, so he was
keeping his options open.
Offa was clearly keeping an eye on developments on the

continent. Relevant here is an instance of continental coinage
influencing coinage in Britain. Charlemagne had reformed the
coinage, and Offa followed suit, producing a new style of coin
that featured his name and the name of the moneyer on each
coin. This set the trend among Anglo-Saxon rulers, many of
whom issued similar coins in imitation of Offa’s.
Conclusion
Without the dominant personality of Offa, the Mercian
hegemony did not survive. Offa died in 796, and while his
son Ecgfrith succeeded him, he ruled for less than a year and
seems to have died by violence.
Alcuin, a prominent court scholar of Charlemagne’s, rendered

a scathing judgment on the measures Offa had taken to
ensure that his son would succeed him. He wrote that Ecgfrith
has not died for his own sins; but the

vengeance for the blood his father shed to
secure the kingdom has reached the son. For
you know very well how much blood his father
shed to secure the kingdom on his son.
126
Offa’s achievements were many, but his own dynasty would

not enjoy the fruits. The next king of Mercia after Ecgfrith was
only distantly related to him, and the hegemony among the
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms would soon pass to Mercia’s southern
rival Wessex.
Reading
Hill and Worthington, eds., Æthelbald and Offa.
Wormald, “The Age of Bede and Aethelbald” and “The Age of
Offa and Alcuin” (chapters 4 and 5 in Campbell, ed., The
Anglo-Saxons).
127
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
13
Anglo-Saxon Law
and Warfare
I
n the power vacuum
left by the collapse
of Roman Britain,
ambitious leaders jostled
for territory, wealth,
and status, and in the
process, they created the
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
Two tools were essential
to the forging of these
kingdoms: war and law.
129
Warfare and the Shield Wall

Through war, small territories grew by taking on and defeating
their weaker neighbors. Only strong and well-organized armies
could prevail in the competitive atmosphere of post-Roman
Britain.
The Anglo-Saxon armies fighting on the battlefield probably

did not look very different from battles waged in continental
Europe. The shield wall is the most famous formation from
this period. It involved a long line of soldiers standing next
to each other, locking arms with their shields on the left and
their weapons on the right.
Having formed up on the field, then the first step in an Anglo-

Saxon battle would be to hurl missiles of various kinds at the
other sides, either arrows or other projectiles, to try to soften
the enemy up. Then formations would either march forward on
the offense or simply stand still on the defense.
When opposing formations met, to a certain extent, they were

using brute strength to push their shields against each other
while trying to gain purchase with a sword or other weapon.
The idea was to punch as many holes as possible in the shield
wall, leading to disorder, chaos, and eventually a rout.
Anglo-Saxon armies seem to have fought almost exclusively

only on foot. They certainly used horses in war, but their
purpose was mostly confined to riding to and from the
battlefield. That would be for the soldiers of highest social
status.
130
Lecture 13 | Anglo-Saxon Law and Warfare
There are some

exceptions, though. One
of them comes from a
Pictish picture stone at
Aberlemno in Scotland,
which scholars believe is
a depiction of the famous
Battle of Nechtansmere
in 685, when the
Picts defeated the
Northumbrians. In this
picture, the Anglo-Saxon
warriors are fighting on
horseback. But there are
few other indications
that cavalry was widely
used in this period.
Weaponry
Pictish picture stone at Aberlemno
Many people think of the
sword as the quintessential medieval weapon. Anglo-Saxon
swords had flat, two-edged blades. Some of the surviving
examples had elaborately decorated pommels. The process of
making the swords was extremely complicated.
With the technology available at the time, it was not

possible to forge the blade as a single piece.
It had to be built up of thin sheets of iron that were twisted

and then welded together in the forge. This is called pattern
welding.
131
The sword was usually suspended from a sword belt. These

were slashing weapons rather than thrusting weapons.
Swords were important, but the most common weapon used

in the field was the spear. Spears were considerably less
expensive to produce than swords and they required far less
skill to use, but they were no less deadly. The possession of
a spear was the sign of being a free man. Any Anglo-Saxon
slave who was found in possession of a spear could be
severely punished.
Spears could range in length from about five feet to nine feet.
The shaft was usually made of ash wood, though other kinds
of wood were also used. Spears were used either as throwing
weapons or as thrusting weapons.
Finally, there was the axe. Anglo-

Saxon axes could have either a curved
blade or an S-shaped blade, and they
were fairly small. These were throwing
axes, and they seem to have gone out
of use by the 7th century. Later on,
the Anglo-Saxons adopted the larger
axe used by the Vikings.
132
Law and War

The core of the military unit was the king’s immediate retinue,
made up of his thegns, the substantial landholders who had
followers of their own. Some of these thegns would have been
in more or less permanent attendance on the king.
There was also a broader public obligation to turn out to fight

for the king when the situation demanded a larger fighting
force. The military assembly of the free men of the kingdom
was called the fyrd. The fyrd was organized into smaller units
by locality.
In exchange for military service, the king was supposed to

provide defense and justice. The Anglo-Saxon legal system
had much in common with many of the other non-Roman legal
systems across northern Europe, whether they were Germanic
or Celtic in origin.
All of them worked on a system based on compensating

victims for wrongs committed against them. This system of
compensation was based on both the severity of the offense
and the social status of the victim. The point was to mitigate
the effects of blood feuds. The system is known as the wergild
system.
How were disputes settled before the law? Very often, of

course, there was a disagreement about what had occurred,
and the two parties to the dispute would tell different versions
of the events under oath. In order to support their version, each
party would be called upon to assemble so-called oath-helpers.
133
These were people who helped make the oath of the party
credible because they claimed to believe it as well. In practice,
one’s oath-helpers were one’s posse, often made up of family
members, close friends, and other associates.
Æthelberht’s Law Code

The traditional role of the king in Anglo-Saxon society had been
to lead men in war. There was no history before the conversion
period of kings acting as creators of new laws. That all changed
with the mission of Saint Augustine to Canterbury. Augustine
brought with him the notion that rulers were lawgivers like the
Roman emperors and like contemporary non-Roman rulers on
the continent, such as the Franks.
The first Anglo-Saxon ruler to issue a law code was

Æthelberht of Kent. His law code is fascinating on several
counts. It is preserved in a single manuscript from the early
12th century, half a millennium after the period when it was
first composed.
These laws tell us a lot about how Anglo-Saxon society was

evolving. For instance, offenses against the church, such
as stealing from a church or a priest, were given special
penalties, indicating the rising importance of the church in the
political order.
It is also clear that the king is staking a claim to special

status. Even though the basic DNA of this legal system
ran on compensation of the victim by the perpetrator, the
king demanded a special payment in each such case, the
idea being that any offense broke the king’s peace, and as
134
guarantor of social order, he needed to be compensated as

well. This was also a convenient way to skim a bit off the top
of all legal transactions, but there was some logic behind it.
Besides the usual monetary penalties for theft and murder,

the laws specify an interesting offense: hedge breaking.
This was the act of breaking into or cutting down someone’s
hedges to get at their property to steal it. Apparently, the
phenomenon of hedge breaking was serious enough and
prevalent enough to warrant a mention in this law code.
There were also some interesting provisions to regulate

economic transactions. Presumably this was because deals
gone wrong could contribute to social disorder.
Ine’s Law Code

For the first century or so, law codes in England were an
entirely Kentish phenomenon. Æthelberht’s laws were followed
by the codes of several of his successors, including Wihtred,
whose code was issued around 695. That came perhaps a
year after one of the most famous Anglo-Saxon law codes, the
code of Ine of Wessex, who ruled from 689 to 726.
Reflecting the need for military readiness due to the hostilities

between Wessex and Kent, the code of Ine regulated service
in the fyrd. There was a fine for shirking the obligation to turn
out and fight for the king, which shows that such service was
required, and the amount increased with the social status of
the victim.
135
The code also enforced the social hierarchy more directly. A

commoner who left his lord without permission must return
and pay a fine of 30 shillings, which would have been an
enormous sum.
There were some matters in Ine’s code that show that law
could change over time; it was not just an expression of
tradition. A good example comes in the provision for how to
handle the crime of murder. Ine’s code specifies that someone
accused of murder must have at least one person of high
social status among his oath-helpers.
Apparently, the king was not willing to trust the word of only low-
status people. The idea here was clearly that one would have to
convince somebody of rank to for help against an accusation of
murder. In general, there was a trend in Anglo-Saxon laws over
time away from purely relying on the support of one’s kin toward
requiring more and more support from a lord.
Ine’s laws offer a window onto relations between people of

different ethnicity within Wessex. Wessex had an extensive
frontier with Celtic-speaking regions in southwestern Britain,
and as it expanded to the southwest, Wessex absorbed
a number of people who still identified with their British
heritage. Such people were rated as half as valuable in the
wergild system as people of Anglo-Saxon identity.
Forgeries and Charters

One of the most important areas that the Anglo-Saxon laws
touched on was financial transactions. Kings helped to regulate
transactions by using written texts to fix a record of a transaction.
This was to minimize future disputes about it, and it was
something of a precursor to modern property and contract law.
136
One of the major difficulties that historians have in using

these records, though, is the fact that so many of them are
forgeries. (Scholars do have some ways to unmask forgeries,
such as by assessing whether the handwriting matches
handwriting from the time period in question.)
Many religious houses Chirograph

in the 10th century
and afterward forged
charters to give
themselves documented
proof to title of various
estates. Notably,
forgeries were not
always malign in intent.
Documents could
easily perish at the
hands of fire, water, or
misadventure, and being
able to recreate them
might be necessary
to hold on to what
had been legally one’s
possession.
Medieval people did

take steps to guard
against forgeries. One
of the most interesting
was the use of a special
kind of charter called a
chirograph.
137
A chirograph consisted of a sheet of parchment on which the

text of the document was written out twice or three times,
depending on whether there were two or more parties to the
transaction.
Then, in the space in between the two copies of the text,

the scribe would write the word chirographum, which
means “hand-written document.” At that point, the texts
would be cut apart, right through the word chirographum,
often in a jagged tooth-edged pattern, or indenture.
It was in reference to agreements made under this system

that term indentured servant came about.
A royal grant of land and/or privileges was known as a

diploma. A diploma would always invoke the protection of God
on the transaction and warn that anyone who violated the
terms of the agreement would be subject to divine wrath. The
language of this part of the diploma was always Latin.
But when it came to describing the locations of the specific

parcels of land being conveyed, the language switched to Old
English. That is because it was often simply easier to specify
locations in the vernacular because of all the place names,
some of which were hard to translate into Latin.
Kings used grants of land to reward the church for helping to

save their people’s souls and the nobility for helping to keep
the kings in power. Sometimes kings used charters not just to
give land to their supporters but to relieve them from burdens,
such as taxes or specific duties to provide goods or services.
Thus, we can see what kinds of privileges the nobility of this
society was interested in getting from their kings.
138
The law then was not just a tool to maintain order and
dispense justice in the literal sense. The king also used it to
curry favor and support from key groups like the church and
nobility. It was a carrot, as well as a stick, for the maintenance
of their power.
There was a specific set of obligations, though, that kings

typically never granted exemption from, and this was the
so-called triple obligation of serving in the fyrd, repairing
roads and bridges, and providing castle guard. Many charters
specifically say that these obligations are to be maintained.
Reading
Abels, Lordship and Military Obligations in Anglo-Saxon England.
Wormald, The Making of English Law.
139
14
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Fury of the
Northmen: The
Vikings Arrive
V
ikings were seafaring
raiders, settlers, and
traders that came
primarily from Scandinavia and
dominated northern European
affairs from the late 8th to early
11th centuries. Like they did all over
Europe, the Vikings burst onto
the British scene with terrifying
power and posed an existential
threat to the newly minted
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Yet they
also helped shape and define the
country we know as England and
created the circumstances under
which the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
would unify under a single crown.
141
The Raid on Lindisfarne

The first Viking raid occurred late in Offa’s reign in
northeastern England. It took place on Lindisfarne and other
coastal sites. This new and terrifying phenomenon would soon
be a common occurrence all over Europe.
The raid on Lindisfarne marks the beginning of the Viking age,

a remarkable period of around 250 years. During this time, the
Vikings spread their influence far and wide, transforming the
economic, political, and
cultural landscape of
Europe. The Lindisfarne Stone
The so-called Lindisfarne
Lindisfarne was one of Stone may depict the Viking
the holiest sites in Anglo- raid on Lindisfarne. One side
Saxon England and had of this stone depicts heavily
been a center for the armed warriors bearing axes
spread of Christianity and swords, charging forward
in Northern England. aggressively. The opposite side
Its desecration would is carved with a cross, around
naturally have been which are figures kneeling
shocking and widely in prayer, two outstretched
discussed. hands, and the sun and moon.
Arrival of the Vikings

The Vikings mostly stemmed from the western part of
Scandinavia, principally Norway and Denmark, though national
distinctions did not exist as such in this period. They were
part of a wider movement of Scandinavian peoples throughout
northern Europe. This time also saw raiders and traders from
142
Lecture 14 | Fury of the Northmen: The Vikings Arrive
Sweden travel eastward in the Baltic Sea region and down the
river systems west of the Urals to create the nucleus of the
later state of Rus, or Russia, at Kiev.
In the west, raiders explored the northern oceans, eventually

settling in Iceland. They made it as far as Greenland and even
North America, although the settlements there did not last.
As for Britain, the raid on Lindisfarne was merely a preview.

Raids continued throughout the first half of the 9th century,
slowly increasing in intensity and duration.
The most frequent targets of these raids were monasteries

because that was where the treasure was. Monasteries
owned many beautiful objects made of precious metal and
gemstones, such as chalices for serving communion wine, and
elaborate reliquaries for holding the remains of saints. Even
manuscripts could be decorated with covers that included
precious gems.
It was quite common in this period for objects of this kind to

be hacked apart or melted down. A smash and grab raid on a
monastery could net a lot of loot that could then be converted
into liquid wealth.
Monasteries were also attractive because other people tended

to use them to deposit their movable wealth, such as coins
and other valuables. Often a monastery was the only stone
building in a locality, so it could be defended against a casual
theft. Still, the fact that monasteries were built of stone did
not make them impervious to fire, so Vikings often used fire to
burn the monks out.
143
Viking Raiding and Navigation

These raids were so effective because the Vikings could often
count on the element of surprise. Despite the Anglo-Saxons
having ancestors who had migrated across the seas in recent
centuries, by the 8th century, they had long since given up
their seafaring ways.
Their focus was insular, and institutions like monasteries

often located themselves on islands off the coast to seclude
themselves from the politics of the mainland. There had been
no reason to suspect a great threat coming from the sea.
144
The Vikings were able to

pioneer naval raiding due to Dragon Heads
their incredible seamanship The most famous thing
and advanced shipbuilding that many people
techniques. Their masterpiece picture when they
was the longship, a hardy, imagine a longboat is a
flexible, and lightweight vessel carved dragon’s head
capable of dominating the on the prow. We do have
coasts and rivers of Europe. medieval illustrations
of boats with dragon’s
One of the most interesting heads, but not all Viking
topics regarding the Vikings ships had them.
is how they navigated across
the open ocean between Apparently, the heads
Scandinavia and Britain. were detachable. They
Scholars have various opinions were intended to scare
about Viking navigation. away the spirits that
were protecting one’s
Some scholars maintain enemies. Reports
that the Vikings used largely indicate that when
traditional methods to navigate, Vikings returned to
like familiarity with the tides Iceland, they would
and various landmarks. But take the heads off
other scholars believe that the when entering their
Vikings had access to more home ports because
sophisticated methods, such as they didn’t want to
the use of devices that would scare away their own
help them spot the direction of protective spirits.
the sun even when the sky was
completely overcast.
145
Viking Interactions
However they reached Britain’s shores, the Viking’s mission
was not always to cause death and destruction. Historians
have rightly pointed out that Vikings were interested in trade
as well as plunder; when the chance to make some easy
money through trade presented itself, they were quite happy
to do business.
Moreover, many people were eager to trade with the Vikings

since they had access to goods from a very far-flung network
of contacts. Large numbers of silver coins from the Islamic
world have been found in some of the areas where the Vikings
operated, which is a good indication of how sophisticated their
economic activity could be.
Of course, sometimes the business the Vikings did was simply

extortion, which might be levied against a particular church
or, on a much grander scale, against an entire city. In the 840s
they told the people of Paris that they would be happy to skip
plundering the city for a ransom of 7,000 pounds of gold and
silver. The Parisians paid up.
From the Vikings’ point of view, this was a rational transaction;

they were not invariably or gratuitously ruthless. Nevertheless,
we should not minimize the terror that the Vikings caused
among the English. When the Vikings came, it was not usually
a good day.
146
Vikings in Battle
The Vikings were formidable warriors when they chose to be.
The elite among them fought with swords and spears, but
the less wealthy Vikings would typically replace the sword
with the battle-axe, and the common soldiers would have to
content themselves with a spear only.
All Viking warriors would have used small round shields, and
these would typically have been decorated with scenes from
Norse mythology. Vikings used the shield wall formation on
land just like Anglo-Saxon warriors; they would interlock their
shields and use their spears to thrust in between at their
enemies.
They also used a slightly different tactic known as the

svinfylking, meaning “boar snout,” in which they formed a
wedge and tried to break through the enemies’ shield wall by
applying pressure at a specific point. The downsides of this
method were that it was susceptible to flanking and that if it
didn’t work immediately, it was hard to sustain the formation
in hand-to-hand fighting.
Still, the Vikings did a lot more winning than losing. Their style
of warfare allowed them to do much of their fighting against
relatively small groups of largely unarmed people whom they
had taken by surprise.
The Rise of Wessex

The first phase of Viking activity, mainly consisting of small
raids, coincided with the rise of the kingdom of Wessex,
which was now taking the place previously occupied by first
147
Northumbria and then Mercia as the most powerful of the

Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. By the late 7th century, Wessex
exercised a loose overlordship over the whole area east of the
Tamar River.
By 830, the southeastern kingdoms of Kent, Essex, and

Sussex had fallen under the domination of Wessex, with the
heir to the Wessex throne installed as the king of Kent. Further
progress was made in establishing the dominance of Wessex
under Æthelwulf, who ascended to the throne in 839.
It was a challenging time for the kingdom, despite its growing

influence. In 835, the Vikings raided the Isle of Sheppey off the
coast of Kent, and in 836, Wessex had lost a battle against the
Vikings at Carhampton in Somerset, at the western end of the
kingdom. However, Æthelwulf and his second son Æthelbald
defeated a large Viking force in 851 at the Battle of Aclea in
Surrey, at the eastern end of the territory Wessex dominated.
148
The Great Heathen Army

In the mid-9th century, Viking activity redoubled. Viking fleets
consisting of dozens of longboats were formed. In 865, a
group known as the Great Heathen Army landed in Britain and
conquered most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms one by one.
It was possible to do this because there was no coordination

between the various rulers. Each king faced the Vikings on
his own. According to later legend, these invaders were led by
the sons of the famous Viking Ragnar Lodbrok, including the
colorfully named Ivar the Boneless.
They first landed in East Anglia in 865. The East Anglian king,
Edmund, bribed them to refrain from attacking by providing
them with horses. After spending the winter in East Anglia,
they marched toward York, the capital of the Northumbrian
subkingdom of Deira, which they captured in the fall of 866.
The Great Heathen Army moved south again into Mercia. The
Mercian king Burgred paid the Vikings to go back to York.
The inability of the Mercians to mount a credible response to
the Vikings was certainly a factor in their continued loss of
prestige as compared to Wessex.
The army later forced Mercia to accept Viking hegemony by

dividing the territory of Mercia in half, leaving only one half to
be ruled directly by the Mercian king and the other half to be
ruled directly by the Vikings. In the 870s, the Vikings founded
five jarldoms or earldoms based on five towns in eastern
Mercia: Lincoln, Derby, Leicester, Stamford, and Nottingham.
149
These became known as the five boroughs, and they were

bastions of Norse law and culture for the next several
centuries. The division of Mercia was quite a humiliation for a
kingdom that could boast the legacy of Æthelbald and Offa.
In 869, the Great Heathen Army repaid the initial welcome they
had received in East Anglia with base ingratitude by invading
the kingdom. King Edmund attempted to defend his lands, but
he was defeated in battle, captured, and possibly tortured.
The Viking leaders executed him, supposedly by tying him to a

tree and shooting him with multiple arrows, then beheading him.
The story of his death was later taken up by monks who founded
a church in Suffolk to venerate him as a Christian martyr.
The cult of Saint Edmund was somewhat controversial, since

it was far from clear that he had been killed specifically
because he was a Christian, which would normally have
been necessary for him to be considered a martyr.
But stories of miracles performed at Saint Edmund’s

tomb spread, and the tide proved irresistible. Bury St.
Edmunds, as it became known, was one of the most popular
pilgrimage sites of the later Middle Ages.
The Viking Tide

The Viking army had divided the kingdoms and Mercia and
Northumbria in half, and they had wiped East Anglia off the
map. The next prize they were interested in was the great
trading port of London.
150
In the period after the victory of Wessex over Mercia at the

Battle of Ellandun, the two kingdoms had disputed control
over London. But neither kingdom could protect London
effectively against Viking attack.
London was raided multiple times from the 830s onward.

In 871, the Great Heathen Army spent the winter sheltering
behind the old Roman walls of the city. It’s not clear how long
they were able to control London directly, but it was very clear
that the city was not safe.
The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were in desperate shape by

871. The Vikings had carved out a huge chunk of England
for themselves, and they now dominated London and York,
arguably the two most important cities in Britain.
Only one kingdom, Wessex, remained undivided, but it was

regularly suffering devastating attacks by both land and sea. It
would take an extraordinary turn in the fortunes of the Anglo-
Saxon to stave off the seemingly unstoppable force from
across the seas.
That turn would come in the form of one of the great heroes
of British history, who would lead Wessex and the Anglo-
Saxons into a new era. This was Alfred the Great.
Reading
Brooks, “England in the Ninth Century.”
Richards, Viking Age England.
151
15
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Alfred the Great:

Defender of
England
T
his lecture is the
first of two that
focus on arguably
the most important ruler in
the history of Anglo-Saxon
England: Alfred the Great,
king of Wessex. He saved
England from being totally
overrun by the Vikings and
touched off an intellectual
and religious renaissance in
England. Alfred’s military
leadership is the core topic
of this lecture, while his
scholarly activities and
support of other scholars
are the subject of the next.
153
The Buildup to Alfred’s Reign

One remarkable fact about Alfred to start out with is the very
improbability of his ever becoming king. He had four older
brothers, the oldest of whom died while their father was still
alive. The other three served as king of Wessex in succession,
but all of them died prematurely.
As Alfred’s story opens, Wessex had suffered its share of

Viking attacks. There had been some victories as well as
defeats. The kingdom was under threat but intact. It had
a continuing alliance with Mercia. In 853, Alfred’s father
Æthelwulf helped Mercia suppress a revolt in Wales, and
Æthelwulf gave his daughter in marriage to Burgred, the king
of Mercia.
But the transition from Æthelwulf to a successor was messy.

One of the trickiest aspects of monarchy was what to do with
the king-in-waiting while he was waiting to be king.
One way to keep a son and heir busy was to give part of
the kingdom for him to rule as a subking. When Æthelwulf
became king in 839, he appointed his oldest son Æthelstan as
subking of Kent, and everyone moved up one place in line. But
Æthelstan died at some point after 851 and was succeeded as
king of Kent by the second brother, Æthelbald.
In 855, Æthelwulf decided to go on a pilgrimage to Rome.

Æthelwulf trusted his son’s loyalty enough to leave him in
charge of Wessex when he departed on a journey that would
keep him out of the kingdom for over a year.
154
Lecture 15 | Alfred the Great: Defender of England
The subkingdom of Kent was put in the hands of the next

brother down the line, Æthelbehrt. Young Alfred accompanied
his father on the pilgrimage.
When they arrived in Rome, Æthelwulf distributed royal

largesse and helped fund the creation of a hostel for English
pilgrims in Rome. He met with the pope and other dignitaries
and generally cut a consequential figure.
On the way back, the Wessex party stopped off to meet

Charles the Bald, ruler of the western part of the Carolingian
empire. Æthelwulf left with a new bride, Judith, the daughter
of Charles the Bald.
Judith was crowned queen of Wessex and anointed. This was

unusual in the traditions of both Wessex and the Frankish
empire. It was the first time ever that a woman had been
anointed, and for reasons that are lost to history, Wessex
had the custom of not calling the wife of the king by the title
of queen.
A rude surprise was awaiting the royal bridegroom when he

finally returned home, for unbeknownst to Æthelwulf, word that
a new queen of Wessex had been anointed and crowned had
reached the kingdom’s shores. His caretaker son Æthelbald was
not happy. This marriage was a potential threat to Æthelbald’s
position as heir apparent to the kingdom of Wessex.
When Æthelwulf arrived home, Æthelbald refused to give

the reins of power in Wessex back to his father. In the end,
father and son agreed to divide the rule between them, with
Æthelbald retaining the western part of the domain and
Æthelwulf the eastern part. The situation was hardly stable,
but it was resolved in 858 when the old king died.
155
Æthelbald soon died in 860. Then, the next brother in line,

Æthelberht, died in 865. By this point, only two of the original
five sons of Æthelwulf were still living. The next brother
Æthelred took the throne, and Alfred, by now age 16, became
his indispensable right-hand man.
King Æthelred and Alfred

It’s a good thing that King
Æthelred had Alfred to help
him because the 860s were
a perilous time for all the
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
The Great Heathen Army
roamed at will, bringing
Mercia, Northumbria,
and East Anglia to their
knees.
King Æthelred
In 868, Alfred fought on

behalf of his brother to
support Mercia’s effort to repel
the army, but Mercia capitulated.
At around the same time, Alfred
strengthened the Mercian alliance by
marrying Ealhswith, daughter of the Mercian nobleman Æthelred
Mucel. They eventually had five children together.
The army soon set its sights on Wessex, arriving there in

late 870. Much of the year 871 was spent in battles with the
Vikings, some of which were victories. Others were defeats.
156
An important victory came when Alfred and his brother

defeated the Viking commanders Bagsecg and Halfdan at the
Battle of Ashdown around January 8, 871. The modern location
of this battle is unknown, but it’s thought to be in Berkshire.
Alfred Becomes King

Alfred was soon in sole command. Shortly after Easter in 871,
King Æthelred died. Alfred was now king. He did have living
nephews, the sons of his recently deceased brother, but in
the face of an ongoing Viking threat, a minor on the throne
seemed like a bad idea.
In fact, Alfred and Æthelred had agreed on this plan

before the latter’s death, with the understanding that
Alfred’s nephews would succeed Alfred in place of Alfred’s
own sons.
This would cause trouble later on, but for now, Alfred was
on the throne of Wessex.
Shortly after becoming king, Alfred suffered a major defeat

and had to make peace with the Vikings. Under the terms of
the agreement, which are not recorded, the Vikings withdrew
from Wessex and occupied London. We can infer that they
were paid to go away.
For the next five years, Wessex had a bit of a respite while the
Vikings were occupied elsewhere, but the Vikings eventually
went on the offensive again. In January of 878 came a pivotal
moment in Alfred’s reign. That month, the Vikings made a
surprise attack on the Wessex royal court at Chippenham
while Christmas festivities were still in progress.
157
The attack killed many. Alfred escaped but was forced to go

into hiding in the marshes of Athelney with only a few trusted
retainers for support. With its leadership now scattered,
Wessex was on the verge of falling to Vikings.
This is the period when the most famous legend about Alfred
is set. And it is indeed legend, not appearing in writing until
100 years later. We should take it with a pinch of salt, but the
story does capture an essential truth about Alfred’s reign.
According to the
legend, Alfred was
sheltering in the hut
of a local peasant
family, and he
had concealed his
identity to prevent
his betrayal to the
enemy. The woman
of the house asked
him to keep an eye
on the cakes she
was baking while
she attended to
other chores, but
while she was out,
he fell to ruminating
about his situation
and how best to
restore the fortunes
of his people.
Alas, the cakes started burning. The peasant woman returned,

noticed the burning cakes, and rebuked Alfred for his neglect.
Instead of responding in anger, he accepted the justice of the
158
rebuke and apologized. The story thus gives us a humble king,

but it also catches him in the act of planning what the reader
knows to have been his successful comeback.
Alfred Rallies
Alfred rallied whatever forces he could from the surrounding
area, trained his men, and led them in a guerrilla war against
the Vikings until he could increase his strength. In early May
of 878, he summoned the men of Wessex to Egbert’s Stone,
named for his royal grandfather, where the fyrd or militia of
three shires or counties assembled.
They went up against the Vikings and their commander

Guthrum at the Battle of Edington, somewhere in Wiltshire.
Alfred defeated them and then pursued them to their camp.
He could not destroy them, so he had to come to some sort of
arrangement with them. Alfred did what Christian rulers often
did in this period when confronted with pagan enemies: He
forced the leader of the Vikings to convert to Christianity.
The terms of the agreement are preserved in a text of the

treaty written in Old English. Overall, the treaty endeavored to
set up a system of peaceful coexistence between the men of
Alfred and Guthrum.
Arguably the most important aspect of the peace between

the two leaders was the fact that Guthrum accepted Christian
baptism, with Alfred standing as godfather. It’s hard to know
how much Alfred really believed that such a conversion would
be sincere, but Alfred was a very sincere Christian, so he may
have hoped that God would change Guthrum’s heart.
159
For Guthrum, the conversion seems to have stuck, at least

outwardly. Guthrum did settle down to rule the territory allotted
to him under the agreement with Alfred more or less peaceably
thereafter. But it’s important to keep in mind that an agreement
with one Viking was not an agreement with all Vikings.
Alfred’s Defenses
There would be more trouble to come later in Alfred’s
reign. Alfred knew this was a possibility, so he spent much
of the decade and a half following the Battle of Edington
preparing Wessex to withstand further Viking attacks. Alfred
comprehensively reorganized the military capacity of Wessex
in three areas: its armies, its defensive network, and its navy.
Turning first to the army, traditionally, the fyrd had to be called

out when the king needed it, which meant that a message
went around to all the shires with a summons to appear at a
certain location on a certain day. This was too cumbersome
and slow to respond to the kind of surprise attack that the
Vikings typically mounted.
Alfred reorganized the fyrd so that half of the members

were assembled as a permanent mobile field force that
was available to spring into action whenever the Vikings
showed up.
The other half would be tending their crops, and the

two halves would rotate so that the kingdom always had
adequate defense and adequate provision for agriculture.
The defensive network involved burhs, which were a series of

fortifications throughout the kingdom that were designed to
make it easier to withstand the highly unpredictable Vikings.
160
Alfred took some existing sites that had previously

been Iron Age hillforts or Roman settlements and then
systematically added to them, making sure that each site
was about evenly spaced out from the others so that there
would be a roughly comparable travel time between them.
The fortifications were in easily defensible spots, taking

maximum advantage of the local terrain. In particular, he
positioned many of the fortifications along navigable rivers.
Critically, he calculated how much was needed in taxation

to fund all of these burhs. Indeed, Alfred’s reforms of the
taxation system were necessary foundations for a new,
expanded system of forts.
The point of these burhs was to create a system of defense

that responded more flexibly to the reality of Viking
attacks. Beyond that, they became the nuclei of prosperous
economic centers.
Of the more than 30 original Alfredian burhs, eight became

quite substantial urban settlements in the Middle Ages.
The modern city of Oxford, for example, had its start as an
Anglo-Saxon burh.
Probably the least successful of the three major efforts Alfred

made to shore up the defenses of Wessex was his attempt
to establish a permanent navy. In 896, he commissioned
the construction of a fleet of perhaps a dozen ships with 60
oars each.
He designed his own prototype of a naval vessel, possibly

based on classical sources, that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
praises for being larger, swifter, and steadier than the
Viking ships.
161
Modern naval historians are not as complimentary; it

was too big and unwieldy to go up against the highly
maneuverable Viking longboats in coastal waters.
Still, Alfred did score at least one naval victory in a hard-

fought engagement during which the fighting ranged back
and forth from the shore to the ships. At the very least,
Alfred grasped the need for a maritime response.
It was fortunate for his kingdom that Alfred carried out all
these preparations because in 892 or 893, a very large group
of Vikings landed in Kent with their wives and children, clearly
intending to stay. For about three years, Alfred and his son
Edward fought a campaign that ranged across the territory
that Wessex controlled.
They successfully countered the Viking threat, and by 896, the

Vikings had moved north, seeking easier targets. The defenses
of Wessex had held.
Reading
Abels, Alfred the Great, chapters 1–6.
Asser, Life of King Alfred.
162
16
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Alfred the
Great: Builder
of Institutions
B
eyond defending
Wessex from
Vikings, Alfred the
Great looked to the spiritual
and intellectual well-
being of his people, which
included an explicit effort
to raise the educational
level of the entire kingdom
by increasing the number
of texts available in Old
English so that they were
more accessible to a broader
audience. At the same time,
Alfred was trying to extend
the power of Wessex beyond
its original borders.
164
Lecture 16 | Alfred the Great: Builder of Institutions
Depictions of Alfred
Much of what we know about Alfred comes from sources that
Alfred had a direct hand in creating: the biography by the
Welsh monk Asser and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Asser’s
biography of Alfred is a fascinating text that survived the
Middle Ages in only a single manuscript that was destroyed
in a terrible fire that engulfed the Cotton Library in 1731.
Fortunately, transcripts had been made, so we have access to
the full text.
Alfred picked Asser to join Alfred’s team of court intellectuals.

Asser paints a picture of Alfred as a would-be scholar who would
have preferred to spend his time learning rather than fighting.
Asser made liberal use of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,

which consisted of many manuscripts that were compiled
simultaneously at a variety of monastic sites throughout the
territory later known as England. In keeping with Alfred’s
support for the vernacular, the language of the chronicle is
Old English, though bits of Latin occasionally creep in.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was designed to pull together and

standardize the record of the past. The starting point for the
work was a text likely created in the 890s by someone writing
in Wessex. The author seems to have had access to a variety
of sources that he digested and, in many cases, translated
from Latin into Old English.
This original version was then copied and distributed to

various sites, with the idea that these different copies would
then be continuously updated going forward. The intention
165
was to keep the document a relevant, living, and official view

of history that would be consistent across the newly unified
territories under Alfred’s rule.
Alfred’s biographer Asser used the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

as a source, as has every serious historian of this period ever
since. It is hard to overstate how much more difficult it would
be to reconstruct Anglo-Saxon history without the chronicle.
The Court School and

Pastoral Care
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle formed part of Alfred’s response
to one of the most important issues he faced, which was the
general decline in the church because of the stresses of the
Viking invasions and the neglect of earlier rulers. To create a
pool of educated men for leadership in both church and state,
Alfred followed the example of the Frankish ruler Charlemagne
by establishing a court school at which he hoped to educate
the sons of his major advisers.
In contrast to Charlemagne, who insisted on the use of Latin,

Alfred accepted that this education would have to make
heavy use of the vernacular, at least at first. Alfred thus set in
motion a project to translate a variety of key texts from Latin
into Old English.
The most important of these texts was a work by Pope

Gregory the Great entitled Pastoral Care, which was a manual
for bishops and other church leaders about the best way to
lead the Christian flock.
166
In Alfred’s Preface to the Pastoral Care, which he addressed

to the bishops of England, he is very explicit about the
rationale for this extensive program of translation.
167
He talks about how high the standards in the church used

to be and how rulers in the past used to respect the leaders
of the church.
That led to peace and prosperity, and people came to the

Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to be educated.
Now, the situation was reversed, and it was necessary to

bring learned men in from abroad, a situation that Alfred
clearly found to be somewhat humiliating.
Alfred asks the bishops to concentrate their attention on

study. He posits that the disasters that the people of his
kingdom experienced during the period of Viking attacks
could be attributed to the lack of learning among Christians.
Eventually, Alfred also asks why earlier scholars had not

had the foresight to translate their books into the language
of the people. Alfred was now going to take care of it.
The text he was sending to the bishops proved to be just the

first of many. It was an immense intellectual labor, and Alfred
took a considerable part himself. Alfred was not a trained
scholar, but he seems to have been a highly competent
amateur, and at the very least, his was the guiding intellect
that drove the entire enterprise.
Alfred sought out excellent Latinists. He was interested as

much in their ability to translate into the vernacular as in their
facility with Latin itself. To attract the best and brightest,
Alfred recruited scholars from Wales, Mercia, and continental
Europe. For example, he tapped Plegmund of Mercia to help
with the translation project, and in 890, Alfred made him
archbishop of Canterbury.
168
Alfred’s translators set to work on many different texts. Their

first project in fact was another of Pope Gregory’s works,
entitled the Dialogues, which contains a biography of the great
monastic leader Saint Benedict. The word was undertaken by
Wærferth, bishop of Worcester.
Alfred also oversaw the translation into Old English of the

famous text by the 6th-century Roman philosopher Boethius,
the Consolation of Philosophy. Alfred’s support for the
vernacular embraced not just continental works but important
homegrown texts as well. At some point during his reign, an Old
English translation was made of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.
Alfred and the Law

One of the most important roles of the king was to serve as
a guarantor of justice. The Anglo-Saxon kings, especially in
Wessex, had developed a tradition of promulgating law codes.
The agreement Alfred made with Guthrum the Viking in 878
very much drew on the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition.
Alfred issued a law code at some point during the late 880s
or early 890s, and in the preface, he explained his working
method. He says that he collected all the laws he could find
and then
ordered to be written many of the ones

that our forefathers observed—those that
pleased me; and many of the ones that did
not please me, I rejected with the advice of
my councillors, and commanded them to be
observed in a different way.
169
One interesting aspect of the code is the explicit connection

Alfred makes between the Anglo-Saxon legal system and
Christian law. In his introduction, he focuses on making
Christian learning accessible by including a translation into
Old English of the Ten Commandments and a few other
biblical passages relating to the law.
He claims that there is an organic relationship between the

biblical law and the system of compensation for offenses
that lies at the heart of the Anglo-Saxon legal system. This is
perhaps a bit of a stretch, but it is clearly important to Alfred
to assert that there is no contradiction between traditional
Anglo-Saxon law and Christian law.
In keeping with this idea of integrating Christianity and the

contemporary social order, he also draws a parallel between
loving one’s God and loving one’s lord. Alfred made it very
clear that this was a society that respected the hierarchy
implicit in the system of lords and retainers.
The importance of this connection is underscored by the

fact that the only sin for which compensation cannot be paid
is treason against one’s lord. Thus, Alfred is reinforcing the
hierarchical nature of this society.
The law also sought to strengthen the bonds between the

king and his subjects by requiring that all free men swear an
oath of fidelity to the king. This provision initiated a tradition
that carried throughout the Anglo-Saxon period and into the
Norman period.
170
Alfred’s Impact
One of Alfred’s goals in creating legislation, enforcing justice,
and fostering education and church reform was to establish
himself as the preeminent ruler in Britain. The old, somewhat
vague title of bretwalda, or ruler of Britain, seems to have
been very much in his sights.
From the 880s on, the charters that he granted to various

churches and noblemen don’t merely call him king of Wessex
but king of the English. In Asser’s life of Alfred, the equivalent
of an authorized biography, Asser calls him “king of the Angles
and Saxons.” The same claim appears in some of Alfred’s
charters. These are very big claims, but Alfred was doing his
best to make them a reality.
He was more successful in having his status recognized on

a wider scale than any ruler since Offa. He helped secure
the loyalty of Mercia, the one remaining rump Anglo-Saxon
kingdom south of the Humber, by marrying his extremely
impressive daughter Æthelflæd to the ealdorman of Mercia.
Æthelflæd turned out to be possibly the most gifted of

Alfred’s offspring. She was hailed as the lady of the Mercians,
and her capable leadership in Mercia both before and after
the death of her husband, in both peace and war, did much to
knit together the two formerly separate kingdoms.
Alfred’s diplomatic overtures did not stop there. Eight years

after he defeated the Viking leader Guthrum in 878, Alfred
confirmed with Guthrum that the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of
East Anglia whom Guthrum was ruling would be treated as the
equals of the Danes.
171
This was an expansion of a guarantee of equal treatment to

the men of Wessex that Alfred had negotiated in the original
treaty. It positioned Alfred as the guarantor of good treatment
for all English people, not just men of Wessex.
Alfred also appears to have made overtures to the very

important Christian shrine of St. Cuthbert in Northumbria.
Clearly, Alfred was attempting to make himself the obvious
choice as preeminent Anglo-Saxon ruler.
He extended his reach outside the Anglo-Saxon cultural realm

to encompass the Celtic speakers of Wales, which consisted
in this period of a dozen or so small entities that jockeyed
constantly for supremacy. Alfred was able from early on in
his reign to secure the allegiance of the princes of southern
Wales, who were attempting to get out from under the
overlordship of their rivals in northern Wales and the ever-
present threat from Mercia.
By the 890s, the princes of northern Wales had also signed

on, and they followed Alfred in his campaigns against the
Vikings. In a real sense, then, Alfred was setting himself
up to be the hegemonic power not just of the Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms but of the island of Britain as a whole.
Alfred also put out diplomatic feelers to the continent. He sent

frequent embassies to Rome, and Asser makes some rather
vague references to his correspondence with other rulers,
but the lack of detail may mean that very little came of these
contacts.
Perhaps these feelers bore fruit in the next generation, when

Alfred’s son Edward the Elder was able to marry his daughter
to the emperor of Germany, thus finally bringing about the
172
alliance that Offa the Great had tried in vain to create. Alfred’s
diplomatic overtures may have started England down the path
of joining the first rank of European nations.
Alfred’s time eventually wound down. He died on October 26,

899. He was either 50 or 51 years old and had suffered all his
life from a painful illness, though we do not know whether it
contributed to his death.
He was buried at the New Minster in Winchester. His remains

suffered various indignities over the years as they were moved
about due to changing circumstances, and nobody is truly
sure where they ended up, but it is just possible that a bone
discovered in 1999 might belong to Alfred.
The discovery of the probable remains of King Richard III in

2012 has stimulated further interest in locating royal graves
like Alfred’s. We will see if further research is able to shed any
light on this topic.
Reading
Abels, Alfred the Great, chapters 7–9.
Asser, Life of King Alfred.
Swanton, trans. and ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.
173
17
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Beowulf and
Anglo-Saxon
Literature
T
his lecture discusses
one of the glories
of Anglo-Saxon
culture: its literature,
including the great epic
poem Beowulf. Anglo-
Saxon literature is largely
recorded in poetry rather
than prose, and its ethos is
apparent in later works like
The Lord of the Rings by
J. R. R. Tolkien, who was a
scholar of the genre.
175
Surviving Works
In the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English
People, he gives us a Latin translation of the “Hymn of
Caedmon,” the very first recorded Anglo-Saxon poem. A
tradition developed of copying the poem’s original Old English
version into manuscripts of Bede’s text, of which as many as
21 survive.
Almost all of the rest of the Old English literature that we

have is contained in just four manuscripts, all of them written
around the year 1000.
One is the so-called Junius Manuscript, which contains poems

with biblical themes. They are based on the books of Genesis,
Exodus, and Daniel as well as on the encounter between Christ
and Satan in the Gospels. In these poems, the Anglo-Saxons
were able to blend Christianity and their own native traditions.
Another is the Vercelli Manuscript, which is now preserved

in Vercelli, Italy, for reasons that are lost to history. Like the
Junius Manuscript, it contains a variety of texts that treat
religious subjects.
The most important literary text in Vercelli is “The Dream

of the Rood,” which belongs to a genre known as dream
literature, in which a dream or vision is recounted that has
religious significance.
In this dream, the narrator speaks directly to the tree that

was cut down to make the cross, or rood, on which Christ
is crucified. The cross regards Christ as its lord, and it
maintains its loyalty just as a retainer would to a lord who
had been slain in battle.
176
Lecture 17 | BEOWULF AND ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE
As in the Junius Manuscript, the Christian tradition has

been somewhat remade to conform to Anglo-Saxon society.
The third crucial manuscript is the so-called Exeter Book,

which contains the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry
to survive. It contains more than 30 poems dealing with an
astonishing variety of topics, from overtly religious poems to
riddles that are unabashedly risqué.
One poem from the Exeter Book relates directly to Beowulf.

This poem is called “Widsith,” otherwise known as “The
Traveller’s Song.”
The events described in the poem take place about four

centuries before the date of the manuscript in which
they are preserved. The poem hearkens back to a period
of the initial Germanic settlements in Britain, before the
identities that later characterized the different Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms had had time to form.
“Widsith” is a catalog poem that aims to store and transmit

knowledge rather than to tell a distinct story. The poem
lists the various rulers and peoples that the narrator, the
traveler, has encountered. The key passage from Widsith
runs as follows:
Hroðulf and Hroðgar held the longest

peace together, uncle and nephew,
since they repulsed the Viking-kin
and Ingeld to the spear-point made bow,
hewn at Heorot Heaðobards’ army.
Some of these names, like Hroðulf, Hroðgar, and Ingeld, also

occur in Beowulf.
177
Beowulf
Beowulf is contained in the fourth major manuscript of Old
English poetry, the Nowell Codex, which can be dated to around
the year 1000. The manuscript was nearly destroyed in the
terrible Cotton Library fire in 1731, but fortunately, it survived.
The protagonist of the poem is the hero Beowulf, nephew of

the king of the Geats, who comes from over the sea to the
land of the Scyldings, ruled by their lord Hrothgar. Beowulf
arrives to help rid Hrothgar’s realm of the threat of attack
by the monster Grendel, who has been regularly stealing
into Hrothgar’s great mead hall, Heorot, at night and helping
himself to Hrothgar’s warriors.
Beowulf engages in a lot of boasting to establish his worth

with Hrothgar’s men, but when the time comes, he proves his
mettle by killing Grendel bare-handed. That’s not the end of
178
the conflict, though, since Grendel’s mother rises from deep

under the lake, termed a mere, where she lives to avenge her
fallen son.
To defeat her, Beowulf must ultimately follow her down

into the mere to battle her on her own ground. With his
task complete, Beowulf takes his leave of Hrothgar and his
men and returns to his own land across the sea, where he
ultimately succeeds to the kingship of the Geats due to a
break in the direct line of succession.
As a very old man, he faces renewed danger when a dragon

is disturbed and threatens his people. Beowulf somewhat
foolishly goes up against the dragon alone, and though he
defeats and kills the dragon, he is slain in turn. Beowulf dies
knowing that because he has no son to succeed him, civil war
will surely follow. This ends the poem on a down note.
Examining Beowulf
Remarkably, Beowulf is not set in England but rather in
the Scandinavian world. This must have had interesting
resonances for a 10th-century audience that had to worry
about Scandinavian raiders.
The setting almost certainly derives from common Germanic

traditions that had been preserved throughout the period
since the first Germanic migrations to Britain. The poem
gives us evidence that the people of what became England
preserved a memory of their kinship with people on the
continent even many centuries after they had migrated away.
They kept in close-enough contact with these people to
receive updates on events that occurred after they had settled
in their new home.
179
There is much we don’t know about Beowulf. We don’t have even

a hint of the authorship, for example, though this is not unusual
for medieval texts. We don’t know when it was written either.
The only surviving medieval manuscript probably dates to

around the year 1000, which was quite late in the Anglo-
Saxon period.
Since the poem was almost certainly composed and

transmitted orally at first, and manuscripts were often
copied and recopied many times, it could have been written
far earlier than our oldest manuscript.
We also don’t know where it was written. Though the

manuscript we have was produced in Wessex, that does not
mean that the text itself was composed there. Scholars have
used variations in the dialect to place it in Yorkshire or in West
Mercia, but there is no agreement.
Additionally, we don’t know whether the poem is meant to

reflect a pre-Christian world or a Christian world. There are
various mentions of God in the text, and the poet draws
explicitly on the Old Testament books of Genesis, Exodus,
and Daniel, but there is not a single reference to Jesus Christ.
There are no overt Christian symbols, such as crucifixes, but
neither is there anything overtly pagan.
Seemingly, the poet was aware of the transition from

paganism to Christianity that had taken place.
The poet apparently knew that they could not introduce too
many religious anachronisms if they wanted to maintain the
sense of the action having taken place a long time ago.
180
It also seems that the poet did not want to lard on the pagan
elements either since the audience is clearly Christian.
Interestingly, Beowulf includes many digressions. A fascinating

example occurs when Beowulf first arrives at Heorot, the hall
of Hrothgar, and tells a very long story. It’s about a swimming
contest in which Beowulf defeats a rival after remaining in the
open ocean for seven days.
There is an important element of foreshadowing here. We

get a preview of the swimming prowess Beowulf will need
to deploy later in the poem when he must descend deep
into the waters of the mere where Grendel’s mother lives to
defeat her once and for all.
It is easy to imagine the surprise and delight of the

audience when Beowulf is forced to dive into the mere,
knowing that he is a powerful swimmer.
For historians, these digressions provide connections to actual

historical events. For example, some of these digressions
reveal that there has been a longstanding feud between the
Swedes and the Geats that has colored events before the
poem begins.
Besides looking backward, the poet also gives us a taste of

what will happen after the events in the poem. In the final
episode, after Beowulf has been killed by the dragon, we get a
preview of the disaster that will befall the Geats since Beowulf
has no son to succeed him.
The digressions throughout the poem have given us examples

of what happens to a kingdom when the succession is
disrupted. And this warning about disputes in royal succession
181
would have resonated very strongly with its intended

audience, whether the poem was written in the 8th century or
the 10th.
Beowulf also promotes proper relationships between lord

and retainer and between kinsman and kinsman. These were
the two fundamental bonds in the society that produced the
poem, and again, this would have been true regardless of the
actual date of composition.
Notice that these obligations essentially involve men

exclusively. This is a homosocial society where the
important social relationships occur between men.
Even ties by marriage are primarily regarded as links

between men, via their wives. For instance, a marriage could
create a close alliance between the brother of the bride and
her new husband, or a father-in-law and the son-in-law.
The retainer owed his lord loyalty. Retainers were obliged to

turn up to fight when called on and to support their lord in any
other way necessary.
On the side of the lord, the most important virtue was

generosity. In the poem, for instance, Hrothgar is referred to
over and over as a giver of gifts. Often lords are described as
“ring-givers.” This refers to the custom of handing out precious
metal in the form of rings or bracelets. But a lord might also
distribute weapons, which were extremely expensive.
The most important value in this society was clearly honor,

which depended on the exercise of certain noble virtues.
The first was bravery. This was a culture that lived with the
182
possibility of violence daily. Men had to be brave in battle.

Physical prowess was also clearly vital, hence all of Beowulf’s
boasting about his success in the swimming contest.
The need to preserve honor drove the most destructive social

phenomenon in this society, namely, the feud. The wergild
system was supposed to circumvent feuds (though this did
not always work). The society depicted in Beowulf accepted
violence as a fact of life.
For rulers, there was a tension between the need to preserve

order and the need to demonstrate the ability to cause
mayhem and reward one’s followers with plunder. Every ruler
in this period had to face that problem.
Reading
Heaney, trans., Beowulf.
Mitchell, An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England.
183
18
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Together at
Last: Wessex
Unites England
A
fter the death of Alfred
the Great, the major
question was whether
his successors would be able
to build on his legacy. The
answer was an emphatic yes.
Where Alfred had held the
line against the Vikings and
shored up the defenses of
Wessex, his heirs extended
the reach of the kingdom
to encompass all the other
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that
had suffered under Viking
attacks. In the process, these
rulers created a united English
kingdom for the first time.
185
Following Alfred
Alfred the Great died in 899 after
reigning for a very successful
28 years. He had repelled
two major waves of Viking
attacks. By the 890s,
when the Viking threat
appeared for the second
time, he had a very
capable grown son,
Edward, to help him.
(Edward is referred to as
Edward the Elder because
of a second King Edward
who came along at the end of
the century.) Edward the Elder
Edward’s succession was not

uncontested. His cousin Æthelwold, the son of Alfred’s older
brother and predecessor Æthelred, had been passed over
when Alfred became king because he was a child at the time,
and England was in far too much danger from the Vikings to
survive a royal minority.
There seems to have been an agreement between the two

royal brothers that Alfred would pass the throne to his nephew
when the time came. Alfred frankly broke this agreement and
designated his son Edward as his heir. Æthelwold rebelled,
even gaining Danish allies, but he eventually died in fighting
during the Battle of the Holme in 902.
186
Lecture 18 | Together at Last: Wessex Unites England
Edward’s Expansion
Edward would pay the Danes back for their support of the
wrong side. He established new burhs at strategic locations
encroaching into the Viking sphere, and he expanded
Wessex’s economic domination of the southeast, particularly
as London and its trade flourished. Wessex elites were
encouraged to buy land in Danish territory, further expanding
their economic hold.
Within a few years, strongholds were being constructed deep

into Essex, leading many settlements to switch allegiance to
Edward for protection. This slow but steady strategy—move
forward with force, construct a burh, secure local allegiance,
and move forward again—ultimately smothered the Danes.
By 917 the Danish position was becoming dire, and reinforced

with men from the continent, they attempted to break the
tightening ring around them in a series of pitched battles,
but to no avail. Eventually, the Danish king of East Anglia was
killed. Within a year, nearly all the remaining Danish nobles
had submitted.
Æthelflæd’s Role
Secure for now, Edward was assisted by one of the most
remarkable figures in English history, his sister Æthelflæd.
Alfred the Great had given her in marriage to Æthelred,
ealdorman of Mercia, to cement the alliance between Wessex
and Mercia, but this also firmly established Alfred as the
overlord of Mercia and definitively shunted aside the old
Mercian royal house.
187
After the marriage, Æthelflæd clearly played a very important

role in the affairs of Mercia, and when her husband died in
911, she succeeded him on her own with the title lady of the
Mercians. For the next seven years, she ruled Mercia as the
ally of her brother, King Edward, and by all accounts, she did
so very effectively, even leading her troops on campaign.
In the wake of the collapse of the Danish position in East

Anglia, Æthelflæd waged several successful campaigns to
recapture the Mercian lands previously taken by the Vikings.
Her greatest triumph came with the capture of Derby in
917, a key town of Danish Mercia and one of the famous five
boroughs. This seemed to trigger a domino effect, and within
a few years, the Vikings had lost all of their territory south of
the river Humber.
Yet Edward hardly rewarded his sister in accordance with her

great achievements. When Æthelflæd died in 918, she left only
a daughter, Ælfwynn, as heir in Mercia, and Ælfwynn seems to
have hoped to fill the same role as her mother. King Edward
stripped her of power and sent her to a nunnery.
Edward took the opportunity of his sister’s death to annex

Mercia entirely to Wessex rule—a final step that was resented
by the Mercians, who bristled at their loss of independence.
When Edward died in 924, he had only just suppressed a
Mercian revolt.
During the reign of Edward the Elder, the Vikings settled

Normandy. Their presence would have far-reaching
implications, especially later in the Anglo-Saxon story.
188
Athelstan
Eventually, Edward’s son Athelstan masterminded a diplomatic
coup by marrying his half-sister Eadgyth to Otto I, the
future holy Roman emperor. Athelstan took the throne after
the death of Edward in 924, and his reign turned out to be
decisive in the history of Britain, because it established the
kingdom of Wessex as the dominant power on the island.
Britain still contained a multitude of small political units, and

Athelstan’s goal was to expand the reach of Wessex over as
many of these as he could. They included the small kingdoms
in Wales, the kingdom of Strathclyde, the kingdom of
Scotland, and the kingdom of Bernicia in Northumbria, which
was the only remaining Anglo-Saxon entity besides Wessex
that was still under native rule.
Southern Northumbria was dealt with early in Athelstan’s

reign. In 926, Athelstan had strategically married one of his
sisters to Sihtric, the Viking ruler of southern Northumbria,
189
and the kingdoms entered into a mutual support agreement

of sorts. When Sihtric died unexpectedly the following year,
Athelstan marched on York, securing the submission of
southern Northumbria to Wessex.
By the 930s, nearly all the Anglo-Saxon world was united

under the hegemony of Wessex. However, now an uneasy
situation existed with the British kingdoms on the borders to
the north—Scotland (or Alba) and Strathclyde—and the Viking
kingdom of Dublin across the Irish Sea.
Constantine was the ruler of the kingdom of Scotland. Owain

of Strathclyde ruled a British-speaking kingdom in the region
of what is now southwestern Scotland up to and including
Glasgow. Olaf Guthfrithson ruled the kingdom of Dublin,
which was the most powerful Viking settlement in Ireland
at the time. He also had a claim to the Viking kingdom of
Northumbria, which Athelstan had usurped, so he was trying
to reestablish a link across the Irish Sea between these two
Viking domains.
In the early 930s, Scotland and Strathclyde had accepted

Athelstan’s overlordship of Britain, but they soon realized
that unless they worked quickly together to curb Anglo-
Saxon expansionism, their kingdoms may well be next to be
annexed. Constantine set about creating a coalition with the
other major powers on the islands of Britain and Ireland. He
forged an alliance with King Olaf by giving him his daughter
in marriage, and he put out feelers to the other rulers. In 937,
the alliance gathered somewhere in the north and then moved
south to meet Athelstan.
190
The resulting Battle of Brunanburh was one of the most

important in English history. We don’t know exactly where the
battle was fought, but it was probably somewhere in Yorkshire.
It was a bloody conflict, and many English were slain, but
ultimately, they prevailed.
The most important source depicting this battle is an

Old English poem that was inserted into the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle under the relevant year. The poem has been
presented as the first great statement of English nationalism,
or rather of Wessex asserting that it has a right to represent
all of the English. It’s bloodthirsty, and it puts the Angles and
Saxons alongside each other. They are not quite merged yet,
but they are clearly part of the same phenomenon.
After Athelstan
When Athelstan died in 939, only two years after the Battle of
Brunanburh, he left no sons. Athelstan was succeeded by his
half-brother Edmund, who had fought beside him at Brunanburh.
Athelstan had been able to impose his will on the men of York
as a result of the battle. But as soon as word of the king’s
death reached York, they chose Athelstan’s old adversary,
Olaf, king of Dublin, as their king instead of Edmund.
The work of Brunanburh was thus undone at a stroke. Edmund

was followed by another half-brother, Eadred, and it took the
hard work of both kings in succession to try to restore the
status quo that had prevailed at the end of Athelstan’s reign.
Not until 954 did the Northumbrians drive out their new Viking
ruler, who sported the picturesque name Eric Bloodaxe. But
the reintegration of Northumbria marks a turning point when
191
we can really say that the kingdom of England, as it would

later be called, had assumed something very close to the
configuration that it would maintain from this point on.
A Pivotal Moment
In 946, Edmund had been murdered by a convicted criminal;
possibly it was a political assassination. His half-brother
Eadred died young as well, in 955, though not by violence.
Eadred left no sons, so the succession fell on his nephews,
Eadwig and Edgar, the sons of Edmund.
This moment posed the biggest threat to realizing Alfred’s

dream of creating a unified English kingdom under a single
ruler. Eadwig, the elder son, was only 15 when he inherited
the throne, and he proved a very controversial king. He was
regarded as an enemy of the church, and while this view was
certainly overstated, he alienated many people through his
debauched personal lifestyle.
The men of Mercia, Northumbria, and East Anglia eventually

became frustrated with Eadwig’s policies on taxation, and they
declared their support for Eadwig’s younger brother Edgar as
king. This led to a division of the kingdom between the two
brothers, with Eadwig able to maintain control only of Wessex
and Kent in the south. Edgar ruled all the northern territories.
Thus, the work of Alfred and his successors almost came

undone. However, Eadwig died a mere two years later.
Edgar was able to reunite the kingdom, and he was also
able to project his power beyond his own territory. Edgar’s
reign, though it only lasted 16 years, was remembered as a
golden time.
192
He was nicknamed Edgar the Peaceable, and while he was

not personally a mild-mannered man, he was able to ensure
political stability in England. He restored the sense of English
hegemony over the island of Britain that his grandfather
Athelstan had achieved.
The Shire System

One of the most important aspects of the reconquest of
England by Wessex was the extension of the shire system to
the rest of the kingdom. Wessex had traditionally been divided
into shires or counties, such as Hampshire and Wiltshire.
These were smaller units that were ruled over by ealdormen,

who were loyal retainers of the king. These units might have
originally been separate territories that the larger kingdom
had absorbed, but by the 9th century, they had become
thoroughly integrated into the administration of the kingdom.
When the kings of Wessex began to extend their rule over the
rest of England, they divided up the territory into shires in
accordance with the system they were familiar with. In the case
of the smaller kingdoms, such as Essex, Sussex, and Kent, each
one just became a shire. The division in East Anglia between
Norfolk and Suffolk was maintained in two separate shires.
In Mercia, though, the kings divided up the kingdom deliberately

into units of roughly equal tax liability. This process then moved
northwards as the reconquest of England proceeded.
Thus, the Wessex kings created a unified England by

extending their own system, either by drawing new
boundaries or working with existing ones, depending on the
193
circumstances. It was a practical and effective way to rebrand

the landscape along the new lines without needing to reinvent
the wheel at every turn.
By the late 10th century, the kings of Wessex had integrated

the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into a united polity. They
had asserted their dominance over the rest of the island of
Britain—for now.
Reading
Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State.
Foot, Æthelstan.
194
19
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Monastic
Reform: A Tale
of Three Saints
I n the middle of the 10th century,
a trio of monks took over the
leadership of the church; in
effect, they staged a coup, backed by
the king and a few noble supporters.
They were hoping to purge the
church of corruption and repair
the damage that had been done to
English monasteries during the
years of Viking attacks. Vikings
had not been the only culprits. The
church had also suffered at the hands
of laypeople because monasteries
often had extensive estates that
were very tempting to noblemen on
the make. Many monastic lands had
fallen out of church control. Making
matters worse, new monasteries
were not being founded because it
was far cheaper to support priests
who did not require an expensive
monastic apparatus.
196
Lecture 19 | Monastic Reform: A Tale of Three Saints
Background on the Situation

Alfred the Great had made some initial efforts to combat
the problem by founding a monastery for men at Athelney
and one for women at Shaftesbury. The reigns of Alfred’s
successors also saw the foundation of monasteries.
However, eventually came the reign of Athelstan, who did not

emphasize the foundation of new monasteries, preferring to
donate to existing houses. Thus, by the mid-10th century,
there were still comparatively few religious houses in England
compared to the continent.
At the end of Athelstan’s reign, a reform movement was

taking shape that sought to dramatically revitalize English
monasticism. One of the goals of this movement was to
make the English church and state more like the regime of
Charlemagne, who was still seen as the gold standard.
Charlemagne had insisted on as much uniformity of

religious observance as possible throughout his vast
empire. It made for good order and discipline if everyone
was worshiping in the same way.
These reformers and their royal patrons genuinely believed

that the correct form of worship performed by the right
people would protect the nation from evil and lead its
people to salvation.
197
The Three Leaders

The three monastic leaders who spearheaded this movement
were Saint Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury; Saint Oswald,
bishop of Worcester and archbishop of York; and Saint
Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester. This lecture focuses first on
Dunstan, who was born around 910 to a noble Wessex family
in Somerset.
Notably, Dunstan supposedly took the teenage King Eadwig

by the ear for his ungentlemanly coronation behavior and was
subsequently exiled to the continent. Dunstan’s exile turned
out to be a blessing in disguise because he took refuge in
Flanders, where the church was strongly influenced by the
reforms that had been instituted at the famous monastery of
Cluny in Burgundy starting in the early 10th century.
The church at Cluny was staffed by monks of impeccable

character who emphasized a return to a strict observance
of the Rule of Saint Benedict. The monks chanted the
monastic office (the daily liturgy of the hours) as Saint
Benedict had prescribed with great regularity and beauty.
The liturgy was expanded in fact so that the monks were
spending the greater portion of their day at worship.
Their worship was regarded as the Opus Dei, meaning

“Work of God,” and the prayers that they said were offered
for all mankind, but in a special way for the patrons who
supported the monastery through donations.
Dunstan believed this was the way forward for the church,
and he resolved to bring these reforms back to England
whenever he managed to return there.
198
Dunstan was aided in this mission by Saint Æthelwold, a near

contemporary who was born between 904 and 909 into a
noble Wessex family based in Winchester. He was heavily
influenced by the work of Carolingian reformers.
In 954, King Eadred made Æthelwold abbot of Abingdon. This had

once been among the richest and most prestigious monasteries
in Wessex, but it needed refurbishment, both materially and
spiritually, to bring it up to Æthelwold’s exacting standards.
The third member of this trio, Saint Oswald, was born in

about 925, so he was the youngest of the reformers by about
15 years. He may have come from East Anglia, and he was
certainly of Danish extraction. He was the nephew of Odo, who
was archbishop of Canterbury from 941 to 958.
Oswald benefited enormously from family patronage, specifically

within the church. His uncle arranged to send him for further
education to the abbey of Fleury in France, which had been
reformed under the influence of the abbey of Cluny, just like the
abbey where Saint Dunstan had taken refuge in Flanders.
Oswald eventually returned to England and began his meteoric

ascent in the hierarchy of the English church. Oswald’s uncle
Odo had died and been replaced as archbishop of Canterbury
by Dunstan, who was impressed enough by the younger man
to take him under his wing and ensure his promotion to the
see of Worcester, Dunstan’s own former see.
By this time, Dunstan had returned to good graces in England.

Eadwig’s successor, Edgar the Peaceable, had recalled Dunstan
from Flanders and quickly conferred on him leadership of
the English church, a clear royal endorsement of the reform
movement and one that would prove critical to its success.
199
Monastic Emphasis
One of the most distinctive features of the church reform
movement was its very strong emphasis on monasticism.
Dunstan, Æthelwold, Oswald, and their allies believed deeply
that monks were vastly superior to rank-and-file priests, who
are confusingly referred to as secular priests because they live
in the world, or saeculum, rather than within the monastery.
This often meant that the priests were married. Church

councils dating back many centuries had mandated that
priests be celibate, but this injunction was widely ignored.
Priests usually lived in the community and engaged in some

economic activity to supplement the income they received
from tithes.
All in all, many of the cathedrals at this period were staffed

by married priests, who lived with their wives and children on
the proceeds of church property. To the reformers, this was a
scandal, and they saw no choice but to drive these priests out
of the cathedrals and replace them with monks instead.
Saint Æthelwold was the most aggressive in chasing away

the married priests. He became bishop of Winchester in 963,
and the next year, he led what was basically an attack on the
cathedral in Winchester (the Old Minster) as well as the adjacent
church founded earlier in the century (the New Minster). With
the backing of King Edgar and the support of an armed guard,
he forced the priests of Winchester out and installed monks
from his own monastery of Abingdon in their place.
200
In doing so, Æthelwold essentially invented a new kind of

ecclesiastical entity: the monastic cathedral. Only in England
did these monastic cathedrals develop.
Æthelwold was not alone in desiring a transition from priests

to monks at his cathedral, but he seems to have been the
most zealous. Oswald managed the changeover at Worcester
with much less drama, and at Canterbury, Dunstan arranged
for a more gradual shift that was not fully complete until the
late 11th century.
Efforts at Monasteries
All three reformers also worked hard to improve the discipline
and level of education at English monasteries. In addition
to Abingdon, Æthelwold set out to restore some of the
monasteries that had fallen into disrepair during the period of
Viking attacks.
After taking care of the reform of the churches of his own see
of Winchester, Æthelwold next turned to the church of Ely in
East Anglia (in what is now Cambridgeshire) as well as two other
important Fenland monasteries, Peterborough and Thorney.
He staged a repeat performance of the expulsion of the

priests in Winchester on a smaller scale when he drove out
the few secular priests at Ely.
The dramatic expulsion of the priests and their replacement

with monks was the most important motif of the reform
movement.
201
Ely Cathedral
The monasteries at Ely, Peterborough, and Thorney featured

prominently in the work of the Venerable Bede. They
represented a connection to the glorious past of the Anglo-
Saxon church.
These ties to the past were crucial because these regions

had only recently been brought under the rule of the kings
of Wessex after having been reconquered from the Danes.
By re-founding these churches, the Wessex monarchy
and its clerical allies were making a statement about the
continuity between the Anglo-Saxon past and the present.
They were thereby glossing over the fact that Ely and
Peterborough had been founded under a totally different
regime. By patronizing these monasteries, King Edgar was
emphasizing that he was now king of all the English, of
whatever national origin and without regard to regional
particularism.
202
Not all of the churches that the reformers patronized were

new foundations. Saint Oswald preferred to found monasteries
from scratch. The most important of his foundations was
Ramsey Abbey, which was situated in the Fenlands nearly
equidistant between Æthelwold’s houses at Peterborough
and Ely.
Oswald worked especially closely with a local secular lord,

Ealdorman Æthelwine of East Anglia, who acted as the
external protector of the material interests of the monastery
while Oswald took care of the spiritual affairs of the monks.
As a byproduct of their efforts, the monastic founders were

often able to further the careers of their relatives or other
associates by assigning to them the leases of the monastic
lands. There was a significant amount of cronyism involved, but
that is how this society worked. Still, these methods would come
back to haunt the reformers when the political winds shifted.
Once the reformers had managed to get the right personnel

in place in the monasteries, the next step was to ensure
the quality of the observance that they would carry out.
One of the most important developments during this period
was the promulgation by Saint Æthelwold of a new manual
for monastic observance called the Regularis Concordia,
which translates loosely as Monastic Harmony. It lays out
the specific ways in which monasteries were supposed to
celebrate the monastic office, namely, the liturgical services
that were offered in monasteries at specific times throughout
the day.
203
Conclusion
In 975, Edgar the Peaceable died. The succession was
contested, and a period of instability ensured. Edgar was still
a very young man when he died, and the succession was far
from clear.
He had sons by two different wives. The older son Edward was
the product of his first marriage (or liaison) but had not been
explicitly acknowledged as the heir by his father. The younger
son Æthelred, who was not even 10 years old at the time, was
the son of his current wife and consecrated queen Ælfthryth.
Each of these sons had noble and ecclesiastical supporters.

Æthelwold backed the younger son Æthelred. The older son
Edward had the backing of Saint Dunstan and Saint Oswald,
and they managed to get him crowned. The reformers were
divided, and soon so were some of the key ealdormen in the
kingdom. But now a run-of-the-mill succession scuffle had
a religious element. In the ensuing conflict, the monasteries
were dragged in.
Estates of the newly founded Ramsey Abbey were plundered,

and the refunded monastery at Ely was attacked as well.
Nowadays, historians see these attacks very much as the
product of internal court politics, but earlier generations
saw these attacks as an anti-monastic reaction. Order was
restored relatively quickly when the political crisis passed, and
the monasteries were largely able to recover the ground they
had lost.
204
Overall, the work of the reformers was successful. They raised

the level of education in England tremendously by importing
continental scholars from the major churches with which they
had personal connections.
This was also a period during which art flourished in the

reformed monasteries. Some of the most beautiful Anglo-
Saxon manuscripts were produced in this period. A distinctive
artistic tradition of line drawing in manuscripts also emerged.
Though the cultural achievements of the monastic movement
were not the goal of the reformers, they were some of the
most important and enduring.
Within half a century, the English church had been

transformed and revitalized, and a moribund monastic culture
was now flourishing again. There were some people harmed,
such as the priests (and their wives and children) who were
driven out of their homes. But England also realized gains
from the reforms, and they put the church on a solid footing
to withstand the next crisis England would face: the return of
the Vikings.
Reading
Brooks, ed., St. Oswald of Worcester.
Ramsay, Sparks, and Tatton-Brown, eds., St. Dunstan.
Yorke, ed. Bishop Æthelwold.
205
20
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
The Golden Age of

Anglo-Saxon Art
T
his lecture examines
how 10th-century
England excelled when
it came to art. The unification
of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
combined with peace made for
a vibrant economy that could
support lavish works of art.
These works were in many cases
designed to give glory to God,
but they were also intended
to assert the prestige of those
who commissioned them.
Particular areas of focus in this
lecture include manuscripts,
metalwork, carved stone and
ivory, and textiles.
207
Manuscripts
Manuscripts are the most well-preserved 10th-century artistic
remnants we have. The most famous of them are illustrated
in a form known as the Winchester style, so named because
so many of the manuscripts are associated with Winchester,
which was one of the richest and most important churches in
the 10th century.
The script of the manuscripts was modeled directly on

Caroline minuscule, the standard script in the Carolingian
empire. The art style, too, is more influenced by the continent
than the distinctively insular style typical of the manuscripts
of the 8th century in Northumbria.
The illustrations are characterized by bold, incisive lines and

expansive borders filled with acanthus leaves. It is really this
combination of the pictures with the elaborate framed borders
that sets the Winchester style apart. Another trait of this style
is the emphasis on rich colors, especially purple, green, and
blue in addition to gold.
A remarkable example is the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold.

This is a liturgical text. It provides the texts for the blessings (or
benedictions) used by the bishop on the different days of the
liturgical year, all of which would be distinct from each other. It
is gorgeously illuminated with liberal use of gold and silver.
The benedictional is greatly influenced by the particular

churches that Æthelwold was connected to. The most
important saint at Winchester, where he was bishop, was Saint
Swithun, who appears several times in the benedictional. It
208
Lecture 20 | The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art
also contains several depictions of Saint Æthelthryth, the

patron saint of Ely, which was arguably the most important of
the monasteries that Æthelwold had re-founded.
209
The scribe who produced the manuscript was named

Godeman. He was probably brought to Winchester from
Abingdon by Æthelwold, but after Godeman had finished
creating this manuscript, he was tapped by the saint to be
abbot of the monastery of Thorney in the Fenlands. Godeman
is a prime example of an important church leader who was
also an artist, and he seems to have inspired other centers of
manuscript production in the Fenlands. One such center may
have been Peterborough Abbey.
Artistic excellence was not confined to places with a specific

link to Æthelwold. Canterbury could boast two important
churches: Christ Church cathedral and the nearby monastery
of St. Augustine’s. Both produced beautiful manuscripts.
One splendid example from St. Augustine’s monastery is

a manuscript of the Rule of Saint Benedict, which was an
indispensable text for any English monastery in this period. It
was made around the year 1000, and it was written in beautiful,
large capital letters with an abundance of decorated initials.
Many lavishly illustrated manuscripts were produced in

the scriptorium of the other Canterbury community, Christ
Church. One example is the Bosworth Psalter, which
contained the texts of the monastic office. Unlike many other
manuscripts from this time, it was written in a very insular-
style script.
Metalwork
Another important artistic endeavor was metalwork. Some
of the great monastic reformers, such as Saint Dunstan
and Saint Æthelwold, were themselves accomplished
metalworkers, the former in silver and the latter in gold.
210
Unfortunately, very little metalwork from the era has survived.

That’s because it was always extremely tempting to resort to
pawning these objects or melting them down when a church
ran short of funds. Additionally, the English Reformation led to
the confiscation and destruction of many articles deemed to
be closely associated with the old Catholic faith.
However, we have descriptions of these objects in the many

inventories of church treasures that are preserved in later
manuscripts. These inventories record large numbers of gold
and silver candlesticks as well as chalices and patens (for the
distribution of Holy Communion).
Among the most important items to be made with precious

metals in this period were reliquaries designed to hold the
remains (in whole or in part) of the saints.
One notable example is a reliquary cross that found its way

eventually to Brussels. It is made of oak and covered in
silver sheeting with some gilding.
It once held a relic of the True Cross in a small recess at

the crossing point of the arms. Although the front panel is
now missing, it probably once depicted the Crucifixion.
The remarkable aspect of this reliquary is the way it

incorporates inscriptions. In addition to a note of who
commissioned the cross to be made, it includes two lines
of verse in Old English: “Cross is my name: once, trembling
and drenched with blood, I bore the mighty king.”
This is a quotation from the famous Anglo-Saxon poem

“The Dream of the Rood,” which tells the story of the
Crucifixion from the point of view of the cross itself.
211
Stone and Ivory Works

Though there are only a few surviving examples of fully intact
Anglo-Saxon churches, we know from those survivors and
many written sources that the 10th and early 11th centuries
were a great age of building in stone. The great monasteries
and cathedral churches associated with the Benedictine
reform movement were the most conspicuous examples, but
there were also hundreds of parish churches built at this time.
There are also many preexisting churches that were

substantially expanded and remodeled in the 10th century.
The most famous is probably St. Mary’s Priory Church at
Deerhurst in Gloucestershire, where original masonry can
still be found amidst later additions. The church also features
an Anglo-Saxon baptismal font, complete with original
St. Mary's Priory Church
212
scrollwork and patterning. A Feast for the Senses

Another example is St. In its time, a 10th-century
Peter’s Church in Barton- church would have been a
upon-Humber in North feast for the senses, with
Lincolnshire, which features colorful sculptures, brilliant
windows and doors from wall paintings glittering with
the 10th century. gold, beautiful gold and
silver vessels on the altar,
In addition to stone, one of jeweled reliquaries, and
the most important media priests wearing elaborately
for carving in this period embroidered silk vestments.
was ivory, often walrus Add to that the sound of the
ivory from Scandinavia. choir chanting, the smell
Such items would have of the incense, and the
been extremely rare and movement of the clergy, and
expensive. the effect would have been
very striking.
One of the most
spectacular examples is a
presumed case for quill pens that was made in the mid-11th
century, so slightly later than the period this lecture focuses
on. It picks up motifs that were common in the manuscript
illumination of the late 10th century. The case had carving in
high relief on all four sides and on the lid. Its images depict
people and creatures in various struggles.
Textiles
Finally, we come to the art form for which the English were
best known: textiles. The English were famous for their
elaborate embroidery. Highly prized were fringes made with
gold thread, known as orphrey. English vestments must have
literally glittered.
213
The presence of these precious threads is one reason why so

few garments survive. Just as with metal objects, they could
be seen as liquid assets and either pawned or picked apart to
harvest the gold thread when times were tough.
Other than from what we see in paintings, we don’t know very

much about the garments that secular people wore in this
period, but we do know a fair bit about liturgical vestments.
These could be very plain or extremely fancy, depending on the
status of the cleric who wore them and the wealth of his church.
One example of surviving garments comes from the tomb of

Saint Cuthbert in Durham. Cuthbert was a saint who lived in
the late 7th century, but his remains had been moved many
times during the difficult centuries that followed.
He was finally reburied at Durham in the 10th century, and

new garments were placed in his tomb at that time. These
garments consisted of a stole, which is a long rectangular
band that is worn around the shoulders with both ends
hanging down in front, and a maniple, which is a shorter
rectangular band that is worn over the left arm while
celebrating the Eucharist, plus two girdles, which were worn
around the waist.
They had probably been made in Winchester in the south

about two decades earlier. They were then brought north for
the ceremonial reburial of the saint.
The stole depicts standing figures of prophets from the Old

Testament as well as busts of Saint James and Saint Thomas
at the ends, with a symbol of the Lamb of God in the center.
The 12 surviving prophets are separated by decorative
acanthus leaves, which were also a major feature of the
manuscript illumination of the later 10th century.
214
The maniple was created in the same style, but it depicts

different figures: Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the
Evangelist are on either end, with images of Peter the Deacon,
Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Sixtus, and Saint Lawrence in
between. There is also a symbol of the right hand of God.
Patrons who donated splendid garments to the church could

expect to be remembered for their generosity. Often these
vestments were used for many decades if not centuries. They
were described in church inventories that recorded the name
of the donor, who could anticipate being prayed for.
Embroidery was a high-status occupation because of the skill

required and the status that inevitably rubbed off on anyone
who associated with the high officials of church and state
who wore such garments. But some of these officials were
practitioners themselves.
Saint Dunstan is said to have made at least one drawing

that was intended as a design for an embroidery, and Saint
Margaret of Scotland, the great-granddaughter of King
Æthelred, was famous for the vestments she made for the
churches she patronized. At Ely, the monks venerated Queen
Emma, Æthelred’s wife, because of the many items she
donated, apparently made by her own hand.
The most extensive surviving example of Anglo-Saxon

embroidery is, ironically, a work that depicts the final defeat
of the Anglo-Saxons at the hands of the Normans. This is the
famous Bayeux Tapestry, which was probably made in England
but now preserved in Bayeux in Normandy. Much about the
tapestry is disputed; there are entire academic conferences
devoted to debating the fine points about it.
215
Despite its name, the Bayeux Tapestry is not actually a

tapestry. Tapestries are woven on a loom with the design built
in, so to speak. The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidery—that
is, the designs were added stitch by stitch to a preexisting
piece of woven cloth. Such embroideries would once have
hung in many churches and in the houses of nobles, and they
could be used to tell stories and to send messages, just like
manuscript illustrations and wall paintings.
Reading
Backhouse, Turner, and Webster, eds., The Golden Age of
Anglo-Saxon Art.
Deshman, The Benedictional of Æthelwold.
216
21
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Unfinished
Business: The
Vikings Return
T
he reign of Edgar
the Peaceable was
a successful one,
but a succession crisis
followed his death in 975.
Two factions formed
immediately, one around
Edgar’s son Edward and one
around Edward’s younger
half-brother Æthelred.
218
Lecture 21 | Unfinished Business: The Vikings Return
Æthelred Takes the Throne

Edward was initially installed on his father’s throne. After ruling
for just three years, Edward was murdered under mysterious
circumstances. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that he
was killed in Dorset while visiting his half-brother Æthelred and
Queen Ælfthryth, Æthelred’s mother and Edward’s stepmother,
but the chronicle provides no further detail.
Regardless, Edward’s death

precipitated Æthelred’s rise
to rule as King Æthelred
Æthelred
II, sometimes referred
to as the Unready. This
derives from Unræd, an
Old English nickname
meaning something like “ill
counseled.” That places the
blame of the king’s faults
on his advisers, but it is
also a diplomatic criticism of
the king himself for choosing
subpar advisers.
There were many issues that

could have given cause for the king’s
unflattering epithet. However, they would all pale in
comparison to the king’s handling of the return of the Vikings.
219
The Viking Situation

The Wessex monarchy had been able to slowly drive out
the Viking rulers from the territory of the formerly separate
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The last such ruler had been expelled
from York in 954. There were still many people living in those
territories who were of Danish descent, and the language was
still widely spoken, but for a while now, the Scandinavians
living in England had been assimilating into the wider culture.
Back in Scandinavia, much had changed since the first waves

of attacks in the late 8th century. By the late 10th century,
Scandinavia had undergone its own process of what we can
anachronistically call state formation. Denmark, Norway,
and Sweden had all produced rulers who at least could lay a
plausible claim to ruling an entire kingdom.
The one who would have the largest impact on English history
was Sweyn Forkbeard. He was the son of Harald Bluetooth,
the legendary first Christian king of Denmark.
At some point in the mid-980s, Sweyn rebelled against his

father and drove him into exile.
Sweyn then allied with the king of Sweden in attacking

Norway, which the two kings divided between them. The
takeaway point here is that Sweyn was quite prepared to
conquer entire countries.
From around 980 onward, small groups began raiding England

again. In 988, there was a major pitched battle in Devon
between the local thegns and a party of invaders.
220
The Vikings were getting help from their distant cousins in

Normandy. The Normans periodically cooperated with Viking
traders and raiders by providing them with access to their
ports for refitting and resupplying their ships. Eventually, the
English appealed to the pope, who brokered an agreement
between the Normans and the English whereby the Normans
would cease granting such access to the raiders. But this
agreement did not stop the Viking raids.
In 991, the Vikings struck with much greater force, appearing

off the coast of Kent and then raiding up the Blackwater River
in Essex. This led to the Battle of Maldon, which the Vikings
won and which inspired a famous poem of the same name.
King Æthelred now faced the problem of deciding what

to do about the Viking threat. One of his chief advisers,
Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury, along with the thegns of the
southwestern provinces suggested that he come to a financial
agreement with the Danes, so Æthelred paid the Danes 10,000
pounds of silver.
Payment and Marriage

Paying tribute signaled to the Vikings that England was
wealthy and vulnerable. The problem was compounded by the
fact that the earlier agreement between the English and the
Normans had not stuck, with Normandy opening its ports to
the Viking raiders.
In 1002, King Æthelred took as his second wife Emma, who

was the sister of Duke Richard II of Normandy. The marriage
did not achieve its prime objective of short-circuiting
cooperation between the Normans and the Vikings, but this
royal marriage was one of the most consequential in English
221
history because it linked England and Normandy in a way that

led directly to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and thus to the
end of Anglo-Saxon England.
That could not have been foreseen in 1002, though, and at

first the marriage seemed exceedingly promising. Emma was
given an English name, Ælfgifu, and she rapidly made herself
indispensable at court. She and Æthelred had three children:
two sons, Edward and Alfred, and a daughter, Godgifu. (By this
point, Æthelred had already had 10 children with his first wife,
including six sons.)
Continued Attacks
At some point after the year 1000, Sweyn Forkbeard set his
sights on England. He attacked England repeatedly from 1003 to
1012. The motive for these repeated raids may have been more
than simple economic self-interest. It may have been personal.
Relevant here is the St. Brice’s Day Massacre. This took

place in 1002 on the feast of St. Brice, which fell on Friday,
November 13.
King Æthelred responded to the renewed Viking attacks by

ordering the execution of all Danes in the kingdom, and by
this point, there were many Danes in England.
In one episode of violence, St. Frideswide’s Church became

the victim of an English mob that took matters into its own
hands and burned the roof over the heads of terrified Danes.
222
Why did the massacre take place? The king may have been
intending to send a message to the Vikings that they should
not meddle with England. It may have also been a calculated
show of strength to his own people.
It was also likely a very direct message to Sweyn Forkbeard,

who had clearly emerged as the most formidable of the
Scandinavian leaders. Sweyn’s own sister fell victim to the
massacre. This may have been a coincidence, but it could also
have been a deliberate attempt to intimidate Sweyn.
If so, it was a gross miscalculation. Sweyn now became a

permanent menace. He either attacked England (for example,
he sacked Norwich in East Anglia in 1004), or he extorted huge
sums of money to go away (in 1007 he was paid £36,000).
Sweyn was not the only Viking King Æthelred had to worry
about. The army of a warlord named Thorkell the Tall roamed
freely in England between 1009 and 1012 until they were
finally induced to accept a payment of £48,000. The tribute
amounts kept growing higher, which was unsustainable.
During these years of invasion, the most noteworthy atrocity

that occurred was the murder of Archbishop Ælfheah of
Canterbury. In 1011, a Viking force besieged Canterbury. The
archbishop was captured, and Christ Church was sacked.
Ælfheah was held captive in London for seven months, but he
refused to let the monks pay a ransom. Eventually, the Vikings
killed him.
223
England under Siege

Among the English people, the Viking raids were seen just
as much as a religious and spiritual crisis as they were a
military and political one. In 1009, Archbishop Wulfstan II of
York drew up an edict on behalf of Æthelred that directed the
entire English kingdom to do three days’ penance and pray for
salvation. People were ordered to eat nothing but bread and
water while attending church and praying daily.
In 1013, after many years of Viking attacks, disaster

overwhelmed the English. Sweyn Forkbeard became more
serious about invading England. Enriched by years of tribute
payments, he landed at Sandwich in August.
224
He then proceeded to East Anglia and traveled up the Humber

River. At this point, some people in England began to look on
Sweyn as the best bet for stability.
The semiautonomous Uhtred, ruler of Northumbria,

submitted to him, as did the people of the Danelaw, so now
Sweyn had peeled off the parts of England that were the
least securely attached to the Wessex monarchy.
He then moved south into the heart of Wessex and received

the submission of Oxford (a key town in the old kingdom of
Mercia) and finally Winchester (the heart and soul of Wessex).
Only in London did Sweyn meet resistance, and that is

because Æthelred personally led the army there, in company
with a rather surprising ally: Thorkell the Tall. Thorkell had
become quite disillusioned after the murder of the archbishop
of Canterbury, and he and some of his army defected and
entered into the service of the English.
Sweyn simply bypassed London and went west to Bath, where

the thegns of Wessex pledged him their loyalty, at which point
the men of London did likewise. Æthelred sent his sons by
Emma into exile with their relatives in Normandy and soon
followed suit. On Christmas Day, 1013, Sweyn was proclaimed
king of England in London.
Conclusion
Having enjoyed being king for slightly more than two months,
Sweyn died in February 1014. That left Sweyn’s son Cnut, who
was probably in his early 20s, as the heir to the captured throne.
225
Here the divisions within English society opened up again.

The men of the Danelaw elected Cnut as their king, but the
witan, the council of English elders, elected to recall the exiled
Æthelred and make him king.
There was, however, a caveat: They would only accept him

as ruler if he agreed to govern “more wisely” than before.
Æthelred did succeed in chasing Cnut back to Denmark, and
for the next year or so, he was able to rule England relatively
undisturbed. However, the throne would soon change hands
yet again.
Reading
Abels, Æthelred the Unready.
John, “The Return of the Vikings” (chapter 8 in Campbell, ed.,
The Anglo-Saxons).
226
22
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Cnut the Great

and the Danish
Conquest
I
n 1014, King Æthelred
was on the throne,
having been called
back to his kingdom. This
was after the death of the
earlier conqueror Sweyn
Forkbeard and after
Sweyn’s son Cnut had been
chased back to Denmark.
Æthelred unleashed
reprisals on the Danelaw
and those communities
and nobles, mostly of
Danish descent, that had
supported Sweyn and
Cnut, but it was a chaotic
time in England.
228
Lecture 22 | Cnut the Great and the Danish Conquest
Cnut’s Return
Cnut was smarting for revenge, and in 1015, he returned,
landing in Sandwich and ravaging the countryside with his
forces. In the face of this new force running riot, Æthelred’s
precarious support began to collapse.
The king had apparently fallen ill, and his son and heir,
Edmund Ironside, was leading in the field instead. Æthelred’s
allies started to defect. Thorkell the Tall, who had been so
appalled at the murder of the archbishop of Canterbury that
he had abandoned the Vikings and joined England, switched
sides back to Cnut, a major blow to Æthelred.
Even worse was the defection of Eadric Streona, one of

Æthelred’s most important allies and right-hand men. Eadric
joined Cnut in plundering Warwickshire, where they killed
everyone they met.
In April, Æthelred died, and Edmund Ironside took over the

part of the kingdom that the English still controlled. Cnut
confronted Edmund in a series of battles, with Eadric fighting
now on Cnut’s side.
After some ups and downs, Eadric eventually decided to

rejoin Edmund. When the climactic Battle of Assandun took
place, however, Eadric withdrew from the fighting. There were
reports that this withdrawal had been prearranged with Cnut
and that Eadric’s return to the English side had been a ruse
de guerre. In any case, the English were defeated at Assandun
and were compelled to negotiate terms.
229
Eadric helped broker the subsequent peace between Edmund

and Cnut, and they divided the kingdom between them. This
agreement echoed the division that had been agreed on by
Alfred and Guthrum more than a century before, but it did
not last because almost immediately after the treaty was
concluded, Edmund died under mysterious circumstances.
Cnut in Command
Cnut was now able to step easily into the role of sole ruler of
England, and Eadric kept his position as ealdorman of Mercia.
Edmund left two very young sons. They were not an

immediate threat, but they could’ve grown up to pose a
challenge to Cnut, so
he sent them away to
Sweden, hoping that
they would come to
misfortune and never
be seen again. They
ended up in Kiev and
then Hungary.
In 1017, Cnut ordered

the execution of Eadric
and two other English
noblemen, indicating
that he couldn’t trust
them. This was a cold
and calculating move,
which Cnut followed
230
with a pragmatic one: He married Æthelred’s widow Emma, who

became the only person in English history to have borne the
title of queen twice.
Cnut was trying to give the appearance of continuity: The

king may have changed, but the queen was the same.
Additionally, Emma brought with her a great deal of

experience with the royal English administration. She was a
valuable key to helping Cnut make England run smoothly.
For Emma, marrying Cnut was likely the smartest move she
could make to save herself and her children.
Cnut also conciliated himself to his new realm by serving as a

patron of English churches. Cnut gave lavish donations of both
land and treasure to help repair the damages that had been
done to English churches during the Viking wars, and he also
brought about the return to Canterbury from London of the
relics of Saint Ælfheah, the archbishop who had been killed
during the chaotic years when his father Sweyn was battling
King Æthelred for the throne.
Cnut also made use of a power unique to the king: the right
to grant exemptions from taxes. For example, he granted a
tax break to Christ Church, Canterbury, and he gave gifts to
Winchester and Peterborough as well, among other powerful
churches.
One of the most important ways in which Cnut signaled his

intention not to upset the English applecart was his position on
English law. He had no intention of changing it radically, and in
fact, he explicitly incorporated earlier English legal codes into
his own, which was supervised by Archbishop Wulfstan.
231
Although Cnut placed a great emphasis on continuity between

his regime and that of his predecessors, there were some
elements of royal administration that he adjusted. For one
thing, he replaced the office of ealdorman with the new,
Scandinavian title of jarl, or earl.
Cnut’s efforts proved successful, and he felt so secure that

he even went on an extended pilgrimage to Rome in 1027,
something no English king had been able to do since King
Alfred’s father Æthelwulf in the mid -9th century. The trip
doubled as diplomatic outreach.
The ostensible occasion for the pilgrimage was the

coronation of Emperor Conrad II of Germany; no English
king had ever been present at an imperial coronation.
At the ceremony, Cnut was treated on a par with the king of

Burgundy, which was a signal of high status.
It made sense for Cnut to receive such attention because he

had already made a marriage alliance between his daughter
Gunhilda and Conrad’s son, the future emperor Henry III.
The occasion for the alliance was the need to settle a border
dispute between Denmark and Germany, but it still meant that
after about a half of a century of relative isolation, the English
were making a play for relevance on the continent.
Cnut also had sent gifts to Duke William the Great of

Aquitaine, the most important ruler in the economically
vibrant southwestern region of France. Cnut was determined
not to be left out of the wider picture of European civilization.
232
After Cnut
For the purposes of succession, Cnut produced three
plausible sons by two different women. However, there was
a full-on succession crisis when Cnut died in 1035. Both of
the women with whom he had produced sons were alive
at the time, and both eagerly promoted the causes of their
respective offspring.
Ælfgifu of Northampton had one son in the running, Harold

Harefoot, and another son named Sweyn. Emma had another
who was named Harthacnut.
How was this going to be decided? Emma’s biographer later

claimed that an agreement had been made when Cnut and
Emma married that any son born of their union would take
precedence over his other offspring.
The main problem with Harthacnut’s claim to the throne was

the fact that he was not in England when his father died.
Cnut had made use of his son by Emma to solve a problem
common to rulers of multinational empires: He needed
someone on the spot in Denmark to fly the family flag while
Cnut ruled in England. So Sweyn was sent to Norway, and
Harthacnut had been taken to Denmark as a very small child,
guided by a series of advisers, including Thorkell the Tall.
Harthacnut was still in Denmark in 1035 when Cnut died, and

he could not be spared to rush home to England because the
Danish throne was not secure either. A plan was proposed that
would have Harold Harefoot rule as regent in England until
Harthacnut could arrive.
233
Eventually, by 1037, Harold was claiming the full kingship of

England. Another notable event occurred in 1036, when the
younger of Emma’s two sons by Æthelred, whose name was
Alfred, went to England for what must have been a kind of
exploratory visit to canvass support for the cause of the exiled
brothers.
Alfred landed in Sussex in the fall, bringing with him a small

detachment of Norman bodyguards.
But he was betrayed, very likely with the connivance of

Earl Godwin of Wessex, and blinded, which was a classic
method in this period of putting someone out of contention
for royal power: Per contemporary views, a king needed to
be entirely able bodied. Alfred died in February 1037 of the
effects of the wounds.
This had become quite a web: Emma had just lost one of her
two sons by Æthelred in the disastrous trip to England. She
now called on the other, Edward, to help put his younger half-
brother Harthacnut, her son by Cnut, on the throne.
Edward was apparently reluctant to become involved, and the

question became moot when it became clear that Harold was
dying, and that he would leave no heir. It seemed better for
Harthacnut to bide his time.
Harold Harefoot died in early 1040, and in June, Harthacnut

sailed to England at the invitation of the English witan. When
he arrived in London, he had Harold’s body dug up and
beheaded and then thrown into a sewer.
234
This was to take vengeance for the murder of his half-brother

Alfred. Earl Godwin was put on trial for his involvement, and
he only got off on the grounds that he was just following
Harold’s orders.
Harthacnut’s reign was short and inglorious. He seems to have

been more interested in the pleasures of the flesh than in
actually ruling England, and in 1041, he called on his surviving
half-brother Edward to return from his Norman exile to help
him rule.
Soon, Harthacnut fell ill and died, supposedly at a banquet, in

1042. Edward enjoyed the full support of Earl Godwin and his
family, the Godwinsons, who surely enjoyed the opportunity
to play kingmaker. The House of Wessex was restored to the
throne, and the empire of Cnut was no more.
Edward’s Reign
Edward and Emma had had a falling out over something, and
after becoming king, he dismissed her from court and took
away most of her property. Emma died a decade later.
Edward remained as a relatively weak king who had not had

much time to cultivate supporters in England. Meanwhile,
Godwin was active: Godwin had many sons, and positions of
power were found for all of them. Godwin even managed to
persuade Edward to marry his daughter Edith, making Godwin
the potential grandfather of a future king of England (or so
Godwin hoped).
235
Throughout the 1040s, Edward took steps to build up an

independent power base by bringing in advisers from
Normandy. In particular, he used appointments to high office
in the church for this purpose.
In 1051, he blocked a relative of the Godwinsons who had been

elected as archbishop of Canterbury by the monks, naming
instead Robert of Jumièges, whom he had already brought
to England from Normandy to be bishop of London. This was
tantamount to a declaration of war. King Edward had chosen
the right man to lead the charge because Robert almost
immediately accused Earl Godwin of illegally detaining some
estates that belonged to Canterbury.
An incident occurred in September 1051, shortly after Robert

took office, that triggered a fault line in English politics
between the pro-Godwin and anti-Godwin factions. Not
everyone who opposed the Godwinsons was a Norman, but all
the Normans historians can identify were anti-Godwin.
King Edward had invited his brother-in-law Eustace II, count of

Boulogne and the second husband of Edward’s sister Godgifu,
to visit England. The men of Eustace’s entourage seem to have
caused a disturbance in the port of Dover. Edward ordered
Earl Godwin, in his capacity as earl of Kent, to punish the town
burgesses for tolerating the disorder, but Godwin backed the
burgesses, and Edward seized the opportunity to crack down
on his overmighty follower.
The king got the backing of other powerful earls, including

Siward, earl of Northumbria, to send Godwin into exile. Godwin
and his wife and several of their sons went to Flanders, while
his sons Leofwine and Harold took refuge in Dublin with King
Diarmait of Leinster. King Edward even sent his wife Edith
Godwinson to a nunnery.
236
In their various exiles, the Godwinsons gathered supporters

and returned to England the following year. They forced King
Edward to restore them to favor and to recall his wife from the
nunnery. Archbishop Robert left England, never to return.
It used to be thought that this crisis in Edward’s reign truly

represented a kind of preview of the English-versus-Norman
conflict that would occur after Edward’s death, since Edward
had been forced to sideline some of his Norman advisers in
favor of the Anglo-Danish Godwinsons. However, in this course’s
view, ethnicity was not the most important factor for Edward.
For him, it was all about trying to chart his own course.
He had tried, and he had failed. But for the leading men of
England, the desire to be ruled by someone they knew and
trusted would hold tremendous weight when yet another
succession crisis befell them in 1066.
Reading
Bolton, Cnut the Great.
Lawson, Cnut.
237
23
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
1066 and the

Norman Conquest
A
t the opening of the 1060s,
England had faced nearly a
century of political tumult.
The House of Wessex had managed
to regain the throne under Edward
the Confessor, who managed to hold
onto power for more than 20 years.
But it was an uneasy situation.
Edward had to contend with the
powerful Anglo-Danish House of
Godwinson, who were constantly
jockeying to increase their wealth
and influence. Edward also faced a
complex international situation, as
both the Normans and the Vikings
had designs on his kingdom.
239
Another Succession Crisis

Edward the Confessor’s historical
reputation has been poor,
but given the situation he
inherited, his long reign
was largely successful.
Evidence suggests that
his relatively peaceful
reign had allowed the
country to recover Edward the Confessor
economically from
decades of Viking raids.
But the same fundamental

problem that had bedeviled
England now for half a century
came to a head in the 1050s: Who
would succeed Edward? Edward was
childless, and all seven of his brothers were dead. Edward thus
had to work to track down if there were any legitimate heirs to
his house.
There was one: Edward Ætheling, whom historians call Edward

the Exile to help keep track of all the Edwards. As a recap:
After the death of Edmund Ironside, King Edward’s older half-
brother, in 1016, Cnut the Great had sent his two young sons
into exile in Europe, hoping they would die or disappear. One
of them, Edward the Exile, survived and was living in Hungary.
He had married a Hungarian princess and produced three
children, a boy named Edgar and two girls named Margaret
and Christina.
240
Lecture 23 | 1066 and the Norman Conquest
It took several years to find Edward the Exile, but he finally did
decide to return, so he packed up his family and came back
to the home from which he had been sent away as a very
small child. But by the time he arrived in 1057, King Edward
had changed his mind about the succession, and he refused
to receive his long-lost nephew, leaving Edward the Exile in
limbo. The returned Edward died shortly thereafter.
King Edward then did nothing whatsoever to signal that he

considered the Edward the Exile’s son, Edgar, to be his natural
successor. Thus, when Edward the Confessor died in January of
1066, the succession question had not been resolved. The issue
had to be decided by the witan, a council of nobles and clergy.
For centuries, the witan had all but rubber stamped the
closest male heir as the next monarch, but they did not simply
elevate Edgar Ætheling, Edward’s closest blood male relative,
to the throne. Two factors worked against him: He was still
quite young, and he did not have a network of supporters.
Claimants to the Throne

The powerful Godwinson family favored the head of their
house—Harold—to succeed Edward. But there was a fly in the
ointment of the Godwinsons’ plan: William, Duke of Normandy.
The Normans had been deeply enmeshed in English politics

now for more than half a century, but in 1066, the Norman
threat became very real. William had a weak claim to the
English throne in the form of a supposed promise from
Edward the Confessor that he should succeed him there
as king.
241
An important piece of backstory here is that in 1064, Harold

Godwinson was shipwrecked on the coast of Ponthieu, which
is just north of Normandy. He was taken prisoner by the local
count, Guy of Ponthieu, who would presumably seek to extract
a large ransom for his release.
Harold found himself at William’s mercy, since only William, as

the overlord of Count Guy, could order Guy to release Harold.
Release did come, but with a very important condition:

Harold purportedly had to swear that he would support
William’s claim to the throne.
Note that it’s difficult to surmise the nature of this oath—or

even confirm if it definitely happened—as there is a dearth
of sources.
The most striking evidence for the oath comes on the

famous Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts Harold swearing on
an altar. But we don’t know exactly what was sworn to.
If such an oath was indeed sworn, then one can imagine

William’s fury in January 1066. That was when Harold
accepted the nomination of the witan to take the throne.
Lurking on the sidelines was a fourth contender for the English

throne: Harald Hardrada, king of Norway and a person whom
many scholars regard as the last great Viking warlord. His
claim had a roundabout nature that relied on a tenuous claim of
inheritance from Magnus of Norway, but he knew England could
be conquered just as it had been first by Sweyn and then by
Cnut. His claim was simply window dressing, but it helped.
242
There was logic to the witan’s confirmation of Harold

Godwinson as Edward’s successor. Harold was earl of Wessex,
and his reach extended farther than that. No king was going
to be able to keep Harold in check, so it made sense for him to
just be the king.
There was also no way the English were going to turn away
from Harold, an experienced war leader and administrator with
connections throughout the kingdom, in favor of William of
Normandy, who had been to England only once, at most, and
who was related to the previous king rather tenuously. As for
the other two claimants, nobody in England at the time was
thinking about Harald Hardrada, and Edgar didn’t have the
clout or connections to realistically sway the witan.
King Harold II’s Situation

Harold Godwinson, now King Harold II, never had a quiet
moment in his brief reign. William was apparently making
preparations for an invasion practically from the moment the
news of Harold’s accession reached Normandy.
There was also the threat from Harald Hardrada. Relevant here is
the problem of Harold II’s discontented younger brother Tostig.
Tostig was the next brother down the line from Harold in
the large Godwinson line of sons. Like all the Godwinson
boys, he had been given large responsibility, in his case, the
earldom of Northumbria, which he assumed in 1055.
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Tostig “repressed

[the Northumbrians] with the heavy yoke of his rule.” He
relied on Danish mercenaries called housecarls to act as his
bodyguard, which was expensive and thus resented.
243
Despite this outlay, he was criticized for not doing enough

to protect Northumbria from Scottish raids. The last straw
seems to have come in 1063 or 1064, when he contrived
the assassination of an enemy who was visiting him under a
safe conduct.
The Northumbrians took offense, and they rose up and

expelled him from the earldom.
A furious Tostig then demanded of King Edward that he

be reinstated by force if necessary, and he expected the
backing of his influential older brother Harold.
Harold seems to have realized there was no way

Northumbria would accept Tostig back as earl. To pacify
the crucial northern part of the kingdom, it was better
to replace the earl, which King Edward duly did, without
interference from Harold. He installed a man named Morcar,
a member of the family of the earls of Mercia, in his place.
Shortly thereafter, Edward died, and Harold became king.

Once more, Harold refused to reinstate his brother as earl.
A furious Tostig went on a tour of northwestern Europe to

scare up allies to invade England and take his revenge. He
approached William of Normandy, but these overtures seem to
have gone nowhere.
Tostig spent the summer of 1066 at the court of King Malcolm

of Scotland attempting to get him to intervene, but nothing
came of this, either. Finally, he reached out to Harald Hardrada
of Norway. This paid off.
244
Harald decided that if he had the backing of Tostig, it was

just the moment to act on that ghost of a claim to the English
throne that he had inherited from Magnus of Norway. This
meant that England was going to be invaded in 1066 twice,
and that probably made all the difference in the success of
William of Normandy at Hastings.
King Harold II’s Response

The king was beset on all sides. He knew that William was
building an invasion fleet: It was difficult to build 700 ships
and keep it a secret. The king also knew Tostig was canvassing
for support.
Harold rightly calculated that the biggest threat would come

from William. Harold stationed his troops, including the fyrd
(the national levy) in the south, at the Isle of Wight, to guard
against the danger from Normandy, but adverse winds kept
the Norman duke bottled up in port.
Finally, on September 8, 1066, with the harvest looming,

Harold sent the bulk of his men home. He had to balance the
need to get in the crops with the probability that the year
might already be too advanced for William to sail.
Harold guessed wrong. To make matters worse, Harald

Hardrada landed at the mouth of the Tyne River in Northumbria
with King Harold’s disgruntled brother Tostig in tow. The king
was at the wrong end of England to meet this threat.
Harold rushed north, pushing his remaining men as hard as he

could. Before he could arrive, Hardrada and Tostig had already
defeated Earl Morcar of Northumbria and his brother Earl
245
Edwin of Mercia at the Battle of End of an Age

Fulford on September 20, although Hardrada’s invasion
both earls survived the battle. was almost the last
great Viking hurrah
Five days later, Harold appeared by in England. For many
surprise and crushed the invading historians, it has
army at the Battle of Stamford traditionally been
Bridge. It was a hard-fought considered the end
engagement, but at the end of the of the Viking age,
day, both Harald Hardrada and which had begun
Tostig lay dead. The first invasion with the attack on
had been dealt with. Lindisfarne hundreds
of years before.
William Arrives
On September 28, just three days after the Battle of Stamford
Bridge, William landed at Pevensey in Sussex. Harold now faced
a dilemma. His troops had already been diminished in number
before the recent battle, and now they were sorely in need of
rest. Beyond that, there was a good case for taking a wait-and-
246
see attitude. Supplying a large invading force was never easy,

and morale among any military force in this period was very
fragile, so there was a chance the invasion would melt away.
However, two factors probably led Harold to decide to rush south

to confront William immediately. For one, he had just used this
tactic quite successfully at Stamford Bridge. The second factor
was that William was probably deliberately goading him into
battle by harrying precisely the lands in southern England that
belonged to the Godwinson earldom of Wessex.
By harrying and burning in Wessex, William was proclaiming that

King Harold was unable to defend not just his kingdom in general
but his own lands and his own men in particular. This means that
honor was probably involved as well. Whatever the cause, Harold
chose to fight, and this time, the gamble did not pay off.
The Battle of Hastings

Harold approached Hastings from the north and set up a
shield wall on elevated ground. After making little headway at
first with their archers, William ordered his cavalry to advance
up the slope. They did not get very far until a seeming reverse
gave William a brilliant idea.
The Norman cavalry were forced to retreat, and some of the

English troops pursued them, thus slightly weakening the
shield wall. Seeing this, William ordered a series of feigned
retreats, and each time, the shield wall weakened still further.
This created opportunities for the Normans because late in

the day, King Harold himself was killed. Not unsurprisingly,
English morale began to collapse with the loss of their leader,
and many troops fled. The Normans held the field.
247
After the Battle of Hastings

The English did not accept defeat quietly. For the next decade
and a half, they engaged in a series of tactical submissions to
William’s authority followed by rebellions that were frequently
coordinated with incursions from Scandinavia.
The first such submission came shortly after the Battle of

Hastings. The English witan faced a decision. Harold and two
of his brothers were dead on the battlefield, and the only
surviving Godwinson brother, Wulfnoth, had been a captive at
the court of William the Conqueror in Normandy for more than
a decade.
England was out of Godwinson brothers. The

leading men of the witan persuaded their
fellows to elect Edgar Ætheling, who had
been passed over the first time, as king,
and the House of Wessex was restored
once again.
William made his brutal way from Hastings

Edgar Ætheling
to London, harrying and burning as he went
to impress upon the locals the desirability of
making peace with the new regime. Edgar failed
to mount any real resistance. Instead, he submitted meekly
to William. This was probably his best move at the time,
but he went on to rebel against William many times when
circumstances allowed.
Additionally, after the Battle of Hastings, the family of Harold

Godwinson continued the fight, led by Harold’s formidable
mother Gytha. She was from a noble Danish family and was
248
the sister-in-law of Cnut. It took Gytha some time to muster

her forces, but in 1068, she organized resistance to the new
regime at Exeter and withstood a siege by William for 18 days.
Harold’s adult sons by his first wife, Godwin, Edmund,

and Magnus, were presumably with her at the siege. They
eventually fled to Ireland, where they received help from
Diarmait, the king of Leinster.
The following year, in 1069, Harold’s sons attacked Devon on

the southwest coast of England, but they were defeated by
Brian of Brittany, one of William’s most capable commanders,
at the Battle of Northam. The brothers were forced to return
to Ireland, but at this point, King Diarmait washed his hands
of them, and when they tried to get help from their Danish
relatives, they found no aid there, either.
Nobody knows what became of the sons of Harold. Gytha’s

fate thereafter is also uncertain, but some scholars presume
that she returned to Scandinavia.
Gytha is not as well-known as she should be. That’s because her

efforts failed and because she was a woman who did the hard
work of military leadership without personally fighting in battle.
Still, she deserves to be considered alongside the other famous
English rebels who continued the fight against the Normans.
Reading
Huscroft, The Norman Conquest.
Mortimer, ed. Edward the Confessor.
249
24
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Aftermath: From
Anglo-Saxon
to English
T
his lecture looks at
the last gasps of
English resistance
against the latest group of
settlers, the Normans. These
rebels may have been fighting
for England (or at least for
their own corner of England),
but they were by no means
insular. The Norman leader
William the Conqueror had
to worry constantly about
invasions from Scandinavia
and Scotland, which his
English enemies might
actively solicit or at least
opportunistically take part in.
251
William as Ruler
At first, William tried to govern as much as possible through
existing English procedures and personnel. The language of
administration in England had been Old English, for the most
part. English kings had accomplished many tasks by means
of writs, or brief written commands, in the vernacular. William
continued the practice of using vernacular writs, but in his
case, the orders had to be translated into Old English.
We have no indication that he ever learned to speak the local

language. The point was that the recipient of the writ was
more likely to understand the writ and act on it if it was in the
vernacular.
But after a major revolt in the north of England in 1069–1070,

this practice quickly disappeared. William seems to have
decided that he would rely more exclusively on his own
personnel, who were more comfortable working in Latin rather
than in English. His attempt to rule through existing power
structures had clearly not been an unqualified success.
Northumbrian Resistance
Northumbria had been one of the last regions to submit to the
English kingdom in the 10th century, and it still maintained a
more independent culture as well as a much larger population
of Anglo-Danish extraction. The revolt in the north occurred
when the native earl of Northumbria, whom William had left
in office, embraced the cause of Edgar Ætheling, the last
surviving claimant to the English ruling house, and fled to the
court of King Malcolm of Scotland.
252
Lecture 24 | Aftermath: From Anglo-Saxon to English
William then installed a Norman as earl of Northumbria, but

when the new earl arrived in Durham, the Northumbrians
murdered him and marched south to York. An infuriated
William barreled north, punishing the countryside along
the way.
William’s brutality was not enough to end the rebellion

because Edgar Ætheling appealed to the king of Denmark,
Sweyn II, who was the nephew of Cnut the Great and the first
cousin of the dead king Harold Godwinson. Sweyn sent a fleet
to support the English rebels, but after some initial successes,
including the capture of York, the Danish fleet accepted a
judicious bribe from William to sail away and abandon Edgar.
Hereward the Wake

The native English were not quite done yet, though. The most
famous figure from this rebellion is Hereward the Wake. His
name comes from the Old English words for “army” and
“guard,” so it means “the guard or bulwark of the army.” He
came from an Anglo-Danish family.
Hereward got swept up in the great northern revolt, to which

he may have been attracted because of the participation
of the Danes. By late in 1071, most of the rebels had been
mopped up, and Hereward took refuge with the last remaining
rebels in the Isle of Ely, which was then an extremely marshy
area where it was often far easier to travel by boat than by
land. It was an ideal place to attempt to withstand a siege.
The 1866 novel Gesta Herewardi, or Deeds of Hereward,

depicts the many expedients to which the Normans resorted
in their desperate attempt to crush the rebellion in general
253
254
and Hereward in particular. Only when the Normans bribed

one of the monks to reveal the location of a safe route to the
Isle of Ely were the rebels finally defeated.
There are conflicting accounts of what happened to Hereward.

An Anglo-French text called the History of the English says that
Hereward was ambushed and killed by a group of Normans. But
in the Deeds of Hereward, he is pardoned by the king after a
few last chances to demonstrate his superiority over William’s
own knights, and he lives the rest of his life in peace. The story
in the Deeds of Hereward is more folklore than fact, but we
can think of it as a way of helping the English and the Normans
work through the trauma of conquest.
Waltheof ’s Execution
The next revolt against the Normans took place in 1075, again
in the north, but the transition to Norman rule was already far
advanced. The rebel concerned was Waltheof of Northumbria.
He was a member of the ruling family of Northumbria.
He was descended on his mother’s side from the ruling

family of Bernicia, while his father, Earl Siward, was of
Scandinavian heritage.
He perfectly embodied the blended Anglo-Scandinavian

aristocracy that had taken root over the course of the 11th
century.
But he did not rebel in 1075 to restore the true line of English
kings. Rather, he was drawn into a plot that was hatched by
Normans against their own liege lord, King William.
255
Before he had actually taken any actions against the

king, Waltheof confessed to Archbishop Lanfranc, but the
archbishop revealed what he knew to the king, and Waltheof
was thrown in prison. After having languished for nearly a
year, he was executed. None of the Norman earls shared
his fate.
The execution of Waltheof was a public relations disaster.

Waltheof’s remains were buried at Crowland Abbey in
Lincolnshire. A cult of Waltheof soon arose that cast him as a
martyr, and miracles were recorded at his tomb.
Waltheof was remembered not just in England but in

Scandinavia, where a skaldic poet named Thorkell Skallason
wrote a memorial poem for him. The northern connection still
mattered to England in historical and cultural terms, but the
Norman Conquest marked the end of three centuries during
which the English had twice nearly been absorbed into the
Scandinavian world.
The Last Revolt and

Subsequent Events
The last major English revolt William faced once again
involved Scotland. After the northern revolt, King Malcolm
Canmore married Margaret, the sister of Edgar Ætheling.
Margaret was ambitious for her family’s restoration. She gave
her first four sons by Malcolm unmistakably royal English
names: Edward, Edmund, Æthelred, and Edgar. It was clear
that the ambitions of the House of Wessex were alive and well.
256
Malcolm had his own reasons for pursuing this alliance.

He hoped to make inroads along the northern border with
England that had been stable since the late 10th century.
Unfortunately, the alliance between Scotland and the exiled
English royal house did not end well. After many episodes
of mutual raiding across the border, there was a major
showdown in 1080, when Scottish raids touched off a revolt
by the Northumbrians against the Norman bishop of Durham,
William Walcher.
During the revolt in 1080, the bishop was murdered, which led
the king to send his half-brother, Odo, bishop of Bayeux, to
punish the Northumbrians. Odo raided and harried throughout
the north, and both the Northumbrians and the Scots were
cowed.
William the Conqueror’s oldest son Robert Curthose built the

fortress of Newcastle in 1080 to drive the message home,
and it stood from then on as a bulwark protecting the north
of England from Scottish attack. It was not until 1093, during
the reign of William’s second son, William Rufus, that Malcolm
Canmore ventured to challenge the Norman forces again, and
this time he paid for it with his life.
Supposedly, the news of Malcolm’s death proved fatal to his

widow Margaret. William II followed up and annexed the region
known today as Cumbria from Scotland, moving the Scottish
border to just north of Carlisle. After this point, a stalemate
set in along the Scottish border.
Eventually, there occurred a union of the crowns in 1603, when

James VI of Scotland became James I of England by right of
inheritance. Still, the separate Scottish and English spheres
persist.
257
The same is true for Wales, which resisted Norman

encroachments for two centuries, until it was finally
conquered in the 1280s by King Edward I. It was brought
under the administrative aegis of the English government in
1536. Even then it did not really become part of England; the
separate cultural identity of Wales that had been entrenched
by the early Middle Ages also persists to this day.
Conclusion
The six centuries between the fall of Rome and the Norman
Conquest were formative in defining the nations of Britain
today. An interesting exception perhaps is Cornwall, once the
British kingdom of Dumnonia. It was one of the very last areas
to be fully integrated into England and has held on to aspects
of its Celtic identity, which has motivated significant Cornish
support for official recognition as a constituent country of the
United Kingdom.
But in England, a new synthesis between Norman and English

was underway. It got a symbolic boost with the marriage
between William the Conqueror’s youngest son, Henry I, and
the daughter of Queen Margaret of Scotland, who had been
given the obviously English name of Edith.
Although there are some signs that the Normans initially

looked down on the people they had conquered, they ended
up embracing English identity rather quickly. Within a century,
despite clinging to the French language among themselves,
they were widely bilingual in English and considered
themselves to be English by nationality.
258
One of the major signs of cultural synthesis is the growth

of the tradition of King Arthur, which took a dramatic turn in
the 12th century. That was when the Norman conquerors of
England made a cultural alliance with the traditions of the
Celtic-speaking world.
The story took off due to a Welsh cleric named Geoffrey of

Monmouth, who wrote a work in Latin in the 1130s called the
History of the Kings of Britain. It was a sprawling text that
covered the largely legendary early history of the island of
Britain before the arrival of the Romans, and Arthur was its
breakout figure.
Geoffrey’s work inspired tales of King Arthur in both Anglo-

Norman French and Middle English. Via the process of fusion
between Anglo-Saxon and Norman elements that occurred
in the 12th century, by the later Middle Ages, the English in
general had adopted King Arthur. They no longer saw him as a
British or Welsh hero who had resisted their ancestors. Rather,
they viewed him as a great king from the legendary past.
These stories tended to skip over the very specific historical

context of the fall of Roman Britain and the age of Anglo-
Saxon settlement. Instead, the tales are set in a kind of
timeless age of chivalry, in which the court of King Arthur is a
highly idealized version of a 12th-century court.
The stories and legend of King Arthur would be revived with

a passion by the Victorians and the Romantic movement, and
his popularity as a throwback to an idealized medieval world of
knights and honor would spread across the English-speaking
world in the 19th century. He hasn’t gone out of fashion since.
259
King Arthur for many is a mythic symbol of the English

identity, but it’s important to remember that that identity
is very fluid. The English identity at the time of the Norman
Conquest was a vibrant intermixture of several different
cultures and peoples.
The arriving Normans themselves were a unique fusion of

Viking, Frankish, and Romanized Gallic cultures, and they
would add aspects of their own culture and language to that
English identity. Today, the term Anglo-Saxon has in some
circles become a byword for a certain kind of idealized cultural
purity, yet the historical record demonstrates the exact
opposite to be true.
There is no necessary connection between one’s DNA and

one’s cultural or linguistic identity, even though for many
people, these elements do coincide. The people we think
of today as the English are descended from the indigenous
people of Britain and the Germanic settlers who came in the
6th century as well as the Vikings who arrived in the 9th and
the Normans who conquered in the 11th.
And those are just the medieval English people. England

has of course been enriched by many waves of immigration
since then: Italians, Jews, Spaniards, Huguenots, Poles, and
people from the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa. Today, all of
them are the heirs of the culture that was first created in the
southeastern part of the island of Britain in the period before
the year 1000, and they have shaped it in their turn. Like all
cultures, English culture is ever evolving.
260
Reading
Rex, The English Resistance.
Thomas, The English and the Normans.
261
Image Credits
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Images Plus; iv HodagMedia/iStock/Getty Images Plus; 1 Charles Edmund
Brock/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain; 7 The British Library; 9 Carole
Raddato/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0; 12 Carole Raddato/Wikimedia
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20 yoingco34/Fiverr.com; 27 The Portable Antiquities Scheme/CC BY 2.0; The
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4.0; 31 Il Dottore/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain; 38 yoingco34/Fiverr.
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78 Harold John Phillips/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain; 81 Michel wal/
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Public Domain; 89 Randy OHC/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0; 94 © 2021
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262
NOTES
NOTES
NOTES
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Topic Subtopic

England: From the Fall of Rome History Medieval History

to the Norman Conquest

England: From the Fall of Rome to the Norman Conquest

THE GREAT COURSES ®

Cover Image: © Gernot Keller/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.5.

Course No. 30140 © 2022 The Teaching Company. PB30140A

EDITORIAL & DESIGN

Jennifer lectures regularly at the

Jennifer’s Great Courses include The Story of Medieval England:

About Jennifer Paxton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i

1 Exploring How England Came to Be . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2 The Rise and Fall of Roman Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

3 The Germanic Migrations to Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

4 The Britons Resist: The Legend of King Arthur . . . . . 31

5 Everyday Life in 6th-Century Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

6 The Birth of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms . . . . . . . . . . . 54

7 The Papal Mission to Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

8 Sutton Hoo and the Early Anglo-Saxons . . . . . . . . . . . 76

9 Irish Missionaries and Christianization . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

10 Kings of the North: Northumbria’s Ascent . . . . . . . . . 97

11 Northumbria’s Century of Renaissance . . . . . . . . . . . 108

12 Rise of the Midlands: Mercia’s Hegemony . . . . . . . . 118

13 Anglo-Saxon Law and Warfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

14 Fury of the Northmen: The Vikings Arrive . . . . . . . . 140

15 Alfred the Great: Defender of England . . . . . . . . . . . .152

16 Alfred the Great: Builder of Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . 163

17 Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

18 Together at Last: Wessex Unites England . . . . . . . . . 184

19 Monastic Reform: A Tale of Three Saints . . . . . . . . . 195

20 The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206

21 Unfinished Business: The Vikings Return . . . . . . . . . 217

22 Cnut the Great and the Danish Conquest . . . . . . . . . 227

23 1066 and the Norman Conquest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

24 Aftermath: From Anglo-Saxon to English . . . . . . . . . 250

 In the area of government, at a time when much of Christian-

 Political unity and stability are extremely difficult to achieve

 In 1066, the Anglo-Saxons did succumb to invasion in the end,

 Although the poem seems on the surface to be about

 Beowulf is a literary reflection of the difficult task of forging a

 The entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature was instrumental

 The visual arts were no less an area of Anglo-Saxon

 The Anglo-Saxons also made a significant contribution to

 After the Norman Conquest, the Normans naturally had an

 There was a fashion for distinctively Anglo-Saxon names.

 The novel Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, is set a century after

 A few decades later, in 1866, the novel Hereward the Wake:

 At the same time as the Anglo-Saxons were enjoying a

 The Anglo-Saxons were also very popular in the United States,

 A very explicitly racial idea of Anglo-Saxon identity helped

 Scholars have long since abandoned these racial views of the

 This is, of course, nonsense. There was no “pure” Anglo-

Evidence for This Course

 The course also

 Coins are another valuable

specific uses of imagery and inscriptions on the coins. All of

 Naturally, archaeological evidence is vital for a period that

Useful General Overviews

The Rise and Fall

 The Brittonic peoples, or Britons, practiced agriculture and

In the area of government, at a time when much of Christian-

Political unity and stability are extremely difficult to achieve

In 1066, the Anglo-Saxons did succumb to invasion in the end,

Although the poem seems on the surface to be about

Beowulf is a literary reflection of the difficult task of forging a

The entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature was instrumental

The visual arts were no less an area of Anglo-Saxon

The Anglo-Saxons also made a significant contribution to

After the Norman Conquest, the Normans naturally had an

There was a fashion for distinctively Anglo-Saxon names.

The novel Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, is set a century after

A few decades later, in 1866, the novel Hereward the Wake:

At the same time as the Anglo-Saxons were enjoying a

The Anglo-Saxons were also very popular in the United States,

A very explicitly racial idea of Anglo-Saxon identity helped

Scholars have long since abandoned these racial views of the

This is, of course, nonsense. There was no “pure” Anglo-

The course also

Coins are another valuable

Naturally, archaeological evidence is vital for a period that

The Brittonic peoples, or Britons, practiced agriculture and

In 44 CE, Emperor Claudius was seeking a way to burnish his

The Romans rather rapidly conquered the various tribes of

The hillier north and west of Britain were better suited to

In the north, the Romans faced the hostile Caledonians. They

The wall did not act as an impermeable barrier. It was more

Roman towns and cities quickly developed in the territory

The most important trading center in Roman Britain was

Outside of the major population centers, much of Britain

During this time Christianity spread to Britain, probably at

Linguistically, the situation in Roman Britain was mixed. In

Previously, residents of Britain had had access to

There was a particularly active trade in pottery, as there

There were even pots from as far away as North Africa,

There were also local ceramic manufacturers in Britain that

The 4th century saw a decline in manufacturing. By the 5th

Archaeology can tell us other quite worrisome things about how

During this period, Rome was rocked by repeated political

The fragmentation of the empire had a direct impact on the

In 286, a Roman naval commander named Carausius took

With that said, the most important barbarians for this

Continuing north and east along the coast into today’s

Another group would end up dominating northwestern Europe

Britain was attacked virtually simultaneously by several

This was one inflection point in the relationship between the

The savior of Roman Britain at the time of the barbarian

But 15 years later, a Roman general named Magnus Maximus

Progressively, Britain was being denuded of its military strength,

At the very end of the year 406, a motley barbarian horde

In 410, the leaders of the Romano-British community, tired of

The following year, 411, produced a curious text called the

If it did apply to Britain, then it was the last official

Regardless, the Roman Empire was disconnected from

It is unclear whether Gildas provided the name of the

Two centuries later, there emerged Bede’s version of the

Bede’s version has simplified the story but provided new

Scholars are no longer sure there really were people known

Given their long history on the borders of the empire, the

Many historians argue that it was the growing prosperity

These large confederations were often ephemeral, and they

These close relationships between Romans and Germans did

Thus, there is a very striking contrast between the German

The early settlement of Britain, by contrast, consisted of small

There was linguistic diversity, but the Germanic languages

The Germanic tribes were not broadly literate, but a system of

As for archaeology, there is no real archaeological evidence

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell from the archaeology

Migrants seem to have started arriving around 420 CE, and

The degree of prosperity of these newly arrived settlers varied

But what do we know about who these people considered

These cemeteries were different from each other. No single

From this, we can conclude that these settlements were not

In other words, eastern England was not settled by one single

The other is to study the DNA of modern populations to work

A recent study that analyzed the DNA recovered from

Even areas of so-called Celtic predominance have some

However, some recent studies have suggested an intriguing

There is a higher proportion of Germanic male DNA and native

Perhaps the unnamed chieftain and council he cited represent

The various Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies claimed to trace the