What Was Anglo-Saxon England Like?

Short answer

Anglo-Saxon England was a series of small Christian kingdoms, later united under a single monarchy, occupying most of the island of Great Britain between the fifth century and the Norman Conquest of 1066. The Anglo-Saxons were Germanic-speaking migrants who had settled in the lowland zone of Britain during the fifth century, displacing or absorbing the Brittonic-speaking population. Their kingdoms — Kent, Sussex, Wessex, Essex, East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria — were converted to Christianity in the late sixth and seventh centuries, developed a rich vernacular literature, were invaded and partly conquered by the Vikings in the ninth century, and were reunited under the kings of Wessex. By the eleventh century, the kingdom of the English was the most centralized state in western Europe.

The Kingdoms and Their People

The seven principal Anglo-Saxon kingdoms — the heptarchy of Bede — were a mixture of larger and smaller units. Northumbria, the great kingdom of the north, dominated the political life of the seventh century and was the principal center of the English church. Mercia, the Midlands kingdom, dominated the eighth. Wessex, the kingdom of the West Saxons, dominated the ninth and tenth. East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, and Essex were smaller, often subordinate to one of the great kingdoms.

The people of Anglo-Saxon England were ethnically mixed. The archaeological evidence shows that the Germanic settlement was substantial, and that it displaced the Brittonic language of the lowland population; the genetic evidence suggests that the actual demographic displacement was less complete than the linguistic one, and that the lowland population of Roman Britain survived in significant numbers. The English of the seventh century, looking back to the aduentus Saxonum, told a story of conquest; modern scholarship is more cautious, seeing the formation of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as the result of a long process of settlement, warfare, and cultural fusion.

Society and Daily Life

Anglo-Saxon society was a stratified one. The king and his household were at the top; below them were the ealdormen, the great men of the kingdom, and the thegns, the sworn retainers who formed the warrior class; below the thegns were the ceorls, the free peasants who formed the bulk of the population; below the ceorls were the theows, the unfree, who worked the land and the households of the wealthy. The conversion to Christianity did not change this social structure, although it added a new social layer: the bishops, the abbots, and the monks of the great monasteries, who held much of the land and most of the learning of the kingdom.

The economy was overwhelmingly rural. The principal crops were wheat, barley, oats, and rye; the principal animals were cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry. Most people lived in timber houses in villages of a few dozen families; the few towns were the episcopal and royal centers of the seventh and eighth centuries (Canterbury, Winchester, London, York, Ripon, Hexham) and the burhs of the tenth-century defensive reform. Trade was carried on by Frisian, Frankish, and English merchants, mostly by sea; the principal exports were wool, slaves, and tin; the principal imports were wine, oil, and Mediterranean metalwork.

Religion and the Church

The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is the central fact of their history. The mission of the Augustine of Canterbury, sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 597, was the principal event; the conversion of Kent, Essex, East Anglia, and Wessex in the late sixth and early seventh centuries was its immediate consequence. Northumbria was converted by Irish missionaries from Iona in the early seventh century, and the resulting conflict between the Roman and Irish Christian traditions was settled at the Synod of Whitby in 664, in favor of the Roman party. By the late seventh century, the English church was unified under the archbishopric of Canterbury and was in regular communication with Rome.

The Anglo-Saxon church was, by the standards of the seventh and eighth centuries, exceptionally wealthy. Bishops and abbots held vast estates; monasteries like Whitby, Ripon, and Hexham in the north, and Glastonbury, Bath, and Winchester in the south, were centers of art, learning, and royal patronage. The Viking invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries destroyed many of the older monasteries, but the tenth-century reform movement associated with Dunstan, Æthelwold, and Oswald rebuilt the English church on the model of continental Benedictinism, and the new monasteries of the period — Ramsey, Abingdon, Ely, Westminster — were the wealthiest and most influential institutions in the late Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

Language, Literature, and Law

The language of the Anglo-Saxons was Old English, a West Germanic language that, in its earliest attested forms (the runic inscriptions of the fifth and sixth centuries), was closely related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon. The Christianization of the kingdoms brought a flood of Latin loanwords, and the Viking invasions of the ninth century added a substantial Norse element to the vocabulary of the eastern and northern dialects. By the eleventh century, Old English was one of the richest and most developed vernacular languages in Europe.

The literature of the Anglo-Saxons was correspondingly rich. The greatest surviving Old English poem is the heroic epic Beowulf, but the corpus also includes the religious poems The Dream of the Rood and The Battle of Maldon, a substantial body of biblical paraphrase, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the sermons of Ælfric of Eynsham and Wulfstan of York, and a substantial body of legal and historical prose. The law codes of the Anglo-Saxon kings, from the laws of Æthelberht of Kent (c. 600) to those of Cnut and Edward the Confessor, are among the most important sources for the social history of the period.

The End of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom

The Anglo-Saxon kingdom came to an end in 1066, when the childless Edward the Confessor was succeeded by his brother-in-law Harold Godwinson, who was in turn defeated and killed at the Battle of Hastings by the Norman duke William. The Norman conquest, although politically devastating, did not at once change the institutions and the language of England: the Anglo-Saxon church continued, the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition was preserved, and the Anglo-Saxon vernacular survived the conquest and eventually reasserted itself as modern English. The cultural achievement of the Anglo-Saxon period was, in the long run, more durable than the political entity that produced it.