Anglo Saxons England detailed summary, Unit 3: Impact of Socio- Political History on Literature from 11th to 17th Century, Allied Paper, 1st Year 1st semester B.A English Literature

 HISTORY OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS

Britain before the English

When the English migrated from the Continent to Britain in the fifth century or perhaps even earlier, they found the island already inhabited. A Celtic people had been there for many centuries before Julius Caesar’s invasion of the island in 55 B.C. And before them, other peoples, about whom we know very little, had lived on the islands.

The Roman occupation, not really begun in earnest until the time of Emperor Claudius (A.D. 43), was to make Britain—that is, Britannia—a part of the Roman Empire for nearly as long as the time between the first permanent English settlement in America and our own day. It is therefore not surprising that there are so many Roman remains in modern England.

Despite the long occupation, the British Celts continued to speak their own language, though many of them, particularly those in urban centers who wanted to “get on,” learned the language of their Roman rulers. However, only after the Anglo-Saxons arrived was the survival of the British Celtic language seriously threatened.

After the Roman legionnaires were withdrawn from Britain in the early fifth century (by 410), Picts from the north and Scots from the west savagely attacked the unprotected British Celts, who after generations of foreign domination had neither the heart nor the skill in weapons to put up much resistance. These same Picts and Scots, as well as ferocious Germanic sea raiders whom the Romans called Saxons, had been a considerable nuisance to the Romans in Britain during the latter half of the fourth century.

The Coming of the English

The Roman army included many non-Italians who were hired to help keep the Empire in order. The Roman forces in Britain in the late fourth century probably included some Angles and Saxons brought from the Continent. Tradition says, however, that the main body of the English arrived later. According to the Venerable Bede’s account in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in Latin and completed around 730, almost three centuries after the event, the Britons appealed to Rome for help against the Picts and Scots. What relief they got, a single legion, was only temporarily effective. When Rome could or would help no more, the wretched Britons—still according to Bede—ironically enough called the “Saxons” to their aid “from the parts beyond the sea.” As a result of their appeal, shiploads of Germanic warrior-adventurers began to arrive.

The date that Bede gives for the first landing of those Saxons is 449. With it the Old English period begins. With it, too, we may in a sense begin thinking of Britain as England—the land of the Angles—for, even though the long ships carried Jutes, Saxons, Frisians, and doubtless members of other tribes as well, their descendants a century and a half later were already beginning to think of themselves and their speech as English. (They naturally had no suspicion that it was “Old” English.) The name of a single tribe was thus adopted as a national name (prehistoric Old English *Angli becoming Engle). The term Anglo-Saxon is also sometimes used for either the language of this period or its speakers.

These Germanic sea raiders, ancestors of the English, settled the Pictish and Scottish aggressors’ business in short order. Then, with eyes ever on the main chance, a complete lack of any sense of international morality, and no fear whatever of being prosecuted as war criminals, they very unidealistically proceeded to subjugate and ultimately to dispossess the Britons whom they had come ostensibly to help. They sent word to their Continental kinsmen and friends about the cowardice of the Britons and the fertility of the island; and in the course of the next hundred years or so, more and more Saxons, Angles, and Jutes arrived “from the three most powerful nations of Germania,” as Bede says, to seek their fortunes in a new land.

We can be certain about only a few things in those exciting times. The invading newcomers came from various Germanic tribes in northern Germany, including the southern part of the Jutland peninsula (modern Schleswig-Holstein). So they spoke a number of closely related and hence very similar Germanic dialects. By the time Saint Augustine arrived in Britain to convert them to Christianity at the end of the sixth century, they dominated practically all of what is now known as England. As for the ill-advised Britons, their plight was hopeless. Some fled to Wales and Cornwall, some crossed the Channel to Brittany, and others were ultimately assimilated to the English by marriage or otherwise. Many doubtless lost their lives in the long-drawn-out fighting.

The Germanic tribes that came first—Bede’s Jutes—were led by the synonymously named brothers Hengest and Horsa (both names mean ‘horse,’ an important animal in Indo-European culture and religion). These brothers were reputed to be great-grandsons of Woden, the chief Germanic god, an appropriate genealogy for tribal headmen. Those first-comers settled principally in the southeastern part of the island, still called by its Celtic name of Kent. Subsequently, Continental Saxons were to occupy the rest of the region south of the Thames, and Angles, coming presumably from the hook-shaped peninsula in Schleswig known as Angeln, settled the large area stretching from the Thames northward to the Scottish highlands, except for the extreme western portion (Wales).

The English in Britain

The Germanic settlement comprised seven kingdoms, the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy: Kent, Essex, Sussex, Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria—the last, the land north of the Humber estuary, being an amalgamation of two earlier kingdoms, Bernicia and Deira (see the accompanying map). Kent early became the chief center of culture and wealth, and by the end of the sixth century its King, Ethelbert (Æðelberht), could lay claim to hegemony over all the other kingdoms south of the Humber. Later, in the seventh and eighth centuries, this supremacy was to pass to Northumbria, with its great centers of learning at Lindisfarne, Wearmouth, and Jarrow (Bede’s own monastery); then to Mercia; and finally to Wessex, with its brilliant line of kings beginning with Egbert (Ecgberht), who overthrew the Mercian king in 825, and culminating in his grandson, the superlatively great Alfred, whose successors after his death in 899 took for themselves the title Rex Anglorum ‘King of the English.’

The most important event in the history of Anglo-Saxon culture (which is the ancestor of both British and American) occurred in 597, when Pope Gregory I dispatched a band of missionaries to the Angles (Angli, as he called them, thereby departing from the usual Continental designation of them as Saxones), in accordance with a resolve he had made some years before. The leader of this band was Saint Augustine—not to be confused with the African-born bishop of Hippo of the same name who wrote The City of God more than a century earlier. The apostle to the English and his fellow bringers of the Gospel, who landed on the Isle of Thanet in Kent, were received by King Ethelbert courteously, if at the beginning a trifle warily. Already ripe for conversion through his marriage to a Christian Frankish princess, in a matter of months Ethelbert was himself baptized. Four years later, in 601, Augustine was consecrated first archbishop of Canterbury, and there was a church in England.

Christianity had actually come to the Anglo-Saxons from two directions—from Rome with Saint Augustine and from the Celtic Church with Irish missionaries. Christianity had been introduced to the British Isles, and particularly to Ireland, much earlier, before the year 400. And in Ireland Christianity had developed into a distinctive form, quite different from that of Rome. Irish missionaries went to Iona and Lindisfarne and made converts in Northumbria and Mercia, where they introduced their style of writing (the Insular hand) to the English. For a time it was uncertain whether England would go with Rome or the Celts. That question was resolved at a Synod held at Whitby in 664, where preference was given to the Roman customs of when to celebrate Easter and of how monks should shave their heads. Those apparently trivial decisions were symbolic of the important alignment of the English Church with Rome and the Continent.

Bede, who lived at the end of the seventh century and on into the first third of the next, wrote about Christianity in England and contributed significantly to the growing cultural importance of the land. He was a Benedictine monk who spent his life in scholarly pursuits at the monastery of Jarrow and became the most learned person in Europe of his day. He was a theologian, a scientist, a biographer, and a historian. It is in the last capacity that we remember him most, for his Ecclesiastical History, cited above, is the fullest and most accurate account we have of the early years of the English nation.

Anglo-Saxon England Timeline:

Year	Historic Events
ca. 410 A.D.	First Germanic tribes arrive in England.
410-600	Settlement of most of Britain by Germanic peoples (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, some Frisians) speaking West Germanic dialects descended from Proto-Germanic. These dialects are distantly related to Latin, but also have a sprinkling of Latin borrowings due to earlier cultural contact with the Romans on the continent.
600-800	Rise of three great kingdoms politically unifying large areas: Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex. Supremacy passes from one kingdom to another in that order.
ca. 600	Christianity introduced among Anglo-Saxons by St. Augustine, missionary from Rome. At the same time, Irish missionaries bring the Celtic form of Christianity to mainland Britain from the northwest.
793	First serious Viking incursions. Lindisfarne monastery sacked. Excursus: Map of Viking invasions
800	Charlemagne, king of the Franks, crowned Holy Roman Emperor; height of Frankish power in Europe. Wessex kings aspire to similar glory; want to unite all England, and if possible the rest of mainland Britain, under one crown (theirs).
840s-870s	Viking incursions grow worse and worse. Large organized groups set up permanent encampments on English soil. Slay kings of Northumbria and East Anglia, subjugate king of Mercia. Storm York (Anglo-Saxon Eoforwic) and set up a Viking kingdom (Jorvik). Wessex stands alone as the last Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Britain.
871	Vikings move against Wessex. In six pitched battles, the English hold their own, but fail to repel attackers decisively. In the last battle, the English king is mortally wounded. His young brother, Alfred, who had distinguished himself during the battles, is crowned king.
871-876	Alfred builds a navy. The kings of Denmark and Norway have come to view England as ripe for the plucking and begin to prepare an attack.
876	Three Danish kings attack Wessex. Alfred prevails, only to be attacked again a few months later. His cause looks hopeless.
878	Decisive battle at Edington; Alfred and a large contingent of desperate Anglo-Saxons make a last stand (they know what awaits them if they fail). Alfred leads the Anglo-Saxons to decisive victory; blockades a large Viking camp nearby, starving them into submission; and exacts homage from the kings of Denmark and an oath that the Danes will leave Wessex forever. Under Alfred's terms of victory, England is partitioned into a part governed by the Anglo-Saxons (under the house of Wessex) and a part governed by the Scandinavians (some of whom become underlords of Alfred), divided by Watling Street. 15 years of peace follow; Alfred reigns over peaceful and prosperous kingdom. First called "Alfred the Great".
925	Athelstan crowned king. Height of Anglo-Saxon power. Athelstan reconquers York from the Vikings, and even conquers Scotland and Wales, heretofore ruled by Celts. Continues Alfred's mission of making improvemen ts in government, education, defense, and other social institutions.
10th century	Danes and English continue to mix peacefully, and ultimately become indistinguishable. Many Scandinavian loanwords enter the language; English even borrows pronouns like them, their they.
978	Aethelred "the Unready" becomes king at 11 years of age.
991	Aethelred has proved to be a weak king, who does not repel minor Viking attacks. Vikings experiment with a major incursion at Maldon in Essex. After losing battle, Aethelred bribes them to depart with 10,000 pounds of silver. Mistake. Sveinn, king of Denmark, takes note.
994-1014	After 20 years of continuous battles and bribings, and incompetent and cowardly military leadership and governance, the English capitulate to king Sveinn of Denmark (later also of Norway). Aethelred flees to Normandy, across the channel.
1014	Sveinn's young son Cnut (or Canute) crowned king of England. Cnut decides to follow in Alfred's footsteps, aiming for a peaceful and prosperous kingdom. Encourages Anglo-Saxon culture and literature. Even marries Aethelred's widow Emma, brought over from Normandy. After Cnut's death his sons bicker over the kingdom. When they die without issue, the kingdom passes back to the house of Wessex, to young Edward, son of Aethelred and Emma, who had been raised in exile in Normandy. Edward is a pious, monkish man called "The Confessor". Edward has strong partiality for his birthplace, Normandy, a duchy populated by the descendents of Romanized Vikings. Especially fond of young Duke William of Normandy. Edward is dominated by his Anglo-Saxon earls, especially powerful earl Godwin. Godwin's son, Harold Godwinson, becomes de facto ruler as Edward takes less and less interest in governing.
1066	January. Edward dies childless, apparently recommending Harold Godwinson as successor. Harold duly chosen by Wessex earls, as nearest of kin to the crown is only an infant. Mercian and Northumbrian earls are hesitant to go along with choice of Harold. William of Normandy claims that Harold once promised to support HIM as successor to Edward. Harold denies it. William prepares to mount an invasion. Ready by summer, but the winds are unfavorable for sailing. September. Harald Hardradi of Norway decides this is a good time to attack England. Harold Godwinson rushes north and crushes Hardradi's army at Stamford Bridge. The winds change, and William puts to sea. Harold rushes back down to the south coast to try to repel William's attack. Mercians and Northumbrians are supposed to march down to help him, but never do. They don't realize what's in store for them. October. Harold is defeated and killed at the battle of Hastings. December. William of Normandy crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day.

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