Anglo-Saxon England

Introduction

The history of Anglo-Saxon England is the history of a series of small kingdoms that, over the course of six centuries, grew into a single Christian monarchy, lost most of its territory to Scandinavian invaders, and then rebuilt itself into the most centralized state in eleventh-century Europe. The first generation of Anglo-Saxon settlers, who arrived in Britain in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, had no English kingdom to build and no English church to convert. By the eleventh, the kingdom of the English, ruled by a single king, served by a sophisticated ecclesiastical bureaucracy, and writing in three distinct languages (Latin, Old English, and Norman French), was a model for the rest of Latin Christendom. The transition between these two states is one of the great stories of early medieval history.

The Germanic Settlement of Britain

The withdrawal of Roman troops from the province of Britannia, traditionally placed in 410, left the rich lowland zone of southeastern Britain exposed to attack from Ireland in the west and from Germanic peoples across the North Sea. The Anglo-Saxon tradition, recorded by the monk Gildas in the mid-sixth century and by Bede a century later, was that the Saxon warlords Hengist and Horsa were invited to Britain as mercenaries by the British king Vortigern, that they revolted against their employer, and that they and their followers gradually took over most of the lowland country. The archaeology and the linguistic evidence are consistent with this story in broad outline: a Germanic settlement, heaviest in the south and east, demographically substantial, and complete enough to displace or absorb the Brittonic language of the lowland population and to give its name to the new political entity — Englaland — that emerged from it.

The settlement was a slow process, not a single event. By the end of the fifth century, several small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were established: Kent, Sussex (South Saxons), Wessex (West Saxons), Essex (East Saxons), East Anglia, and the Midlands kingdom of Mercia. Northumbria, north of the Humber, was created in the early sixth century by the union of two earlier kingdoms, Deira and Bernicia. Each of these polities was a small and ethnically heterogeneous realm, ruled by a king drawn from a warrior aristocracy, supported by a band of retainers (thegns), and settled on the proceeds of the countryside they had taken from the Britons.

The Age of the Heptarchy

The sixth and seventh centuries were the period of the heptarchy — Bede’s term for the seven-fold division of the Anglo-Saxon south — in which a shifting pattern of overlordship produced, by the late seventh century, a single dominant kingdom: Northumbria. The conversion of the kingdoms to Christianity, which was the central political and cultural event of the seventh century, was also the period in which the Roman and Irish Christian traditions were brought into contact and conflict.

The Roman mission to Kent, led by the Augustine of Canterbury and dispatched by Pope Gregory the Great in 597, was the central fact. Augustine landed in Kent, converted King Æthelberht and his people, established his see at Canterbury, and in 601 received from the pope the pallium that made him archbishop of the southern English. The mission was successful in the southeast: Kent, Essex, East Anglia, and Wessex were converted within a generation. Northumbria, however, was converted by Irish missionaries from Iona, beginning with the mission of the Aidan to King Oswald in 634, and the resulting Northumbrian church followed Irish customs in the dating of Easter, the shape of the tonsure, and other minor matters.

The famous Synod of Whitby (664) settled the dispute in favor of the Roman party and aligned the English church, in its central institutions, with the rest of Latin Christendom. The cost of the alignment was the temporary eclipse of the Irish-influenced monasticism of Northumbria, but the gain was integration. The English church became a single body under the archbishop of Canterbury, who was in regular communication with the pope, and the English monasteries, especially those of Whitby, Ripon, and Hexham, became both the major landowners and the major centers of learning in the kingdom.

The Mercian Supremacy

The political center of the English kingdoms moved in the eighth century from Northumbria to Mercia. Penda of Mercia (d. 655) had built a powerful kingdom by killing seven English kings and defeating the Northumbrians at the Battle of the Winwaed in 655, but it was his grandson the Offa (r. 757–796) who imposed a long-lasting Mercian overlordship on most of the southern English kingdoms. Offa has a respectable claim to be the first Bretwalda in fact as well as in name: his charters used a single dating formula, his authority was acknowledged from Kent to the Humber, and his dyke, the great earthwork that still runs along the Welsh border, marks the western limit of his power.

The Mercian supremacy was also the period in which the English church was, in a sense, nationalized for the first time. The Council of Cloveshoo (747) and the reforming synods of the period reorganized diocesan boundaries, established the right of the archbishop to call councils, and imported the program of church reform that the Carolingians were simultaneously pursuing on the continent. The English kings of this period corresponded with Charlemagne and with the pope, and the English Liber Vitae and the Vitae of the eighth-century saints show a church that was intellectually and politically in touch with the larger Latin Christian world.

The Age of Alfred

The Viking Age nearly destroyed the English kingdoms. The Great Heathen Army that landed in East Anglia in 865 was not a raiding force but an army of conquest, and within fifteen years it had overrun Northumbria, East Anglia, and Mercia, and had reduced Wessex to a fraction of its former extent. The survival of Wessex — and with it of an English future — was the work of the Alfred the Great (r. 871–899), the fourth and youngest son of King Æthelwulf.

Alfred’s reign was, in many respects, the first English government. He reorganized the fyrd, the Anglo-Saxon militia, into a regular army that could be paid and garrisoned; he built a network of fortified burhs at strategic points across Wessex, from which mounted patrols could respond to Viking incursions; he constructed a fleet of royal ships; he codified the law in a series of royal dooms that synthesized the older Anglo-Saxon codes with biblical and Christian principles; and he presided over a cultural revival that brought in continental scholars (notably Grimbald of Saint-Bertin and Asser, the Welsh monk who became his biographer) to teach Latin, history, and natural philosophy in his court school.

The Treaty of Wedmore (878), which gave Wessex peace and recognized the Danish occupation of eastern England — the area known as the Danelaw — was the foundation of a new political order that Alfred’s successors, Edward the Elder (r. 899–924) and Æthelstan (r. 924–939), used to absorb the Danelaw and to establish a single kingdom of the English. By the time of Æthelstan’s death, the kings of Wessex were kings of the English in something more than name; by the 970s, the renewed unification of the kingdom under Edgar the Peaceful (r. 959–975) was accompanied by a wave of monastic reform led by Dunstan, Æthelwold, and Oswald that brought the English church into close alignment with continental Benedictinism.

Late Anglo-Saxon England

The eleventh century opened with a powerful English monarchy, a wealthy and well-organized church, and a sophisticated vernacular culture. King Cnut (r. 1016–1035), a Dane, ruled England as part of a North Sea empire that included Denmark and Norway, and his reign, far from being a period of Viking predation, saw the English church and government continue to develop. The reign of Edward the Confessor (r. 1042–1066), modeled by his biographers on the saintly kings of legend, ended with the succession crisis that the Norman Conquest of 1066 would resolve.

The late Anglo-Saxon state was, in some respects, the most advanced in Europe. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, compiled in various monasteries from the reign of Alfred onward, recorded events year by year. The Domesday Book of 1086, although compiled after the conquest, was a record of the Anglo-Saxon taxation system in its most developed form. The English coinage was the most uniform and the most respected in Europe. The vernacular literature — Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, The Dream of the Rood, the sermons of Ælfric and Wulfstan — was the most substantial in any non-Latin European language of the period. The conquest of 1066, when it came, would replace the Anglo-Saxon ruling class with a French-speaking one, but the institutions and the church of Anglo-Saxon England would, in many ways, survive the conquest.

Language, Literature, and the Insular Tradition

The language that the Germanic settlers brought to Britain was a set of closely related dialects, classified by scholars as Ingvaeonic and grouped under the general name of Old English. By the tenth century, the West Saxon dialect, made prominent by the political dominance of Wessex after Alfred, had become a standard literary language; in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, this standard began to break down as the political weight of the kingdom shifted. The vocabulary of Old English is, by modern English standards, surprising: although it is unmistakably the ancestor of modern English, the heavy Norse influence from the Danelaw period and the heavy Latin influence from the Christian and royal courts transformed it into a hybrid language by the eleventh century.

The earliest substantial Old English poetry is preserved in four great codices of the tenth and eleventh centuries — the Exeter Book, the Junius Manuscript, the Vercelli Book, and the Beowulf Manuscript — and includes the heroic epic Beowulf, the religious poems The Dream of the Rood and The Battle of Maldon, and a substantial body of biblical paraphrase. The prose literature of the late Anglo-Saxon period is more varied still: the homilies of Ælfric of Eynsham and Wulfstan of York; the great chronicle of the Anglo-Saxons; the legal codes and royal diplomas; the Life of St. Cuthbert, the Life of St. Edmund, and the lives of the desert fathers. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in particular is one of the great achievements of medieval historiography, recording events year by year in vernacular prose for more than three centuries.

The Insular Church and the Lindisfarne Gospels

The Anglo-Saxon church is also known for a distinctive and influential visual and material culture, called insular or Hiberno-Saxon. The most famous products of this culture are the great gospel books produced in Northumbrian and Irish monasteries in the seventh and eighth centuries: the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Durrow, and the Echternach Gospels. These manuscripts combined Mediterranean Christian iconography, Irish curvilinear ornament, Anglo-Saxon animal and interlace patterns, and a unique sense of the page as a sacred object. The Lindisfarne Gospels in particular, produced in the monastery of Lindisfarne around 700, are a landmark in the history of book production and a monument to the cultural self-confidence of the seventh-century English church.

The art of the tenth-century reform was different in character. The Winchester school of illumination, associated with the patronage of King Edgar and Bishop Æthelwold, produced a more formal, more restrained style, of which the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold and the New Minster Charter of Edgar are the most famous examples. The metalwork and the ivories of the same period, especially the Alfred Jewel, are equally refined. Together with the Ormesby Psalter and the great tapestries of the late Anglo-Saxon period, they show a culture that, on the eve of the Norman Conquest, was at a high point of material and artistic achievement.