5
When invasion is not invasion
As we have seen, the origins of the peoples of eastern Britain remain obscure. The traditional history is unequivocal. These people arrived from overseas, like the Celts before them, reputedly as violent intruders from the plains of north Germany. They allegedly killed or evicted the indigenous Celtic population and imposed on the land a wholly new language, Anglo-Saxon. Such a thesis dates back to one near-contemporary source, a fiercely ‘anti-Saxon’ Welsh monk named Gildas, from whom all later authorities took their lead.
Gildas’s tract, The Conquest and Ruin of Britain, written c.540, describes the Saxons as ‘a multitude of whelps come forth from the lair of this barbarian lioness [Germany]’, followed by ‘a larger company of her wolfish offspring to join their bastard-born comrades’. First invited as mercenaries to protect the British from other such raids, these intruders were said to have devastated Britain. Multitudinous landings saw tens of thousands slaughtered, raped, enslaved or driven off their land and herded west, to be replaced by incoming Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and others. England was reduced to a wilderness of emptied towns, smashed altars and corpses covered in congealed blood, corpses, said Gildas, ‘licking even the western [Irish] ocean with their red and savage tongue’.
This history offered a military climax to its invasion, a battle between the Saxons and the indigenous Britons at an unknown location called Mons Badonicus in c.500. A victorious British general named only as dux bellorum halted the Saxons and established half a century of peace. Gildas’s book was blatant propaganda, a howl of Welsh pain at the misdeeds of the inhabitants of eastern Britain later pressing west towards Wales in the sixth century. It clearly suited him to portray his enemies as foreigners. For want of an alternative narrative, this went on to inform all later accounts of the period, notably those of the Venerable Bede in the eighth century and of another Welsh monk, Nennius, in the ninth.
It was Nennius who identified the victor of Mons Badonicus as ‘King’ Arthur, the name lauded by Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1095–1155) as a figure of legendary British glamour and saintly personality. Arthur and his entourage of Guinevere, Merlin, Lancelot and others were subsequently to be claimed by Cornish, Welsh and, most emphatically, Breton romantics. They became the toast of the Plantagenets and Hollywood romantics ever after. All of England (and much of France) was to have its Arthur.
Gildas’s fifth-century Saxon invasion remains a toxin in the history of what are controversially termed Britain’s Dark Ages (c. ad 500–700). Histories down to the present day still take what Gildas wrote at face value and repeat it uncritically. Scholars have sought to explain the received wisdom in all its implausibility. Given the rapid spread of the Anglo-Saxon occupation and its linguistic supremacy – it had to be validated by suggestions of mass slaughter, mass eviction or at best mass enslavement. All traces of a Celtic/Brythonic culture had to have been obliterated, place names changed, settlements vacated and demolished.
From Bede onwards, scholars thus saw their task as to explain how the Saxon invasion happened, not ask whether it happened. The Saxon invasion of fifth-century Britain became a study in confirmation bias. To the Germanophile Victorians in particular, the Saxon arrival took on the aura of a second coming, an ethnic refreshing of Romano-British Celts grown indolent on the fat of the Roman empire.
This stance has changed. Most contemporary scholars of this period now accept that, while there was certainly considerable Germanic raiding and some migration across the North Sea at the ending of the Roman empire, there was no formal incursion or population eradication. There are no archaeological remains of mass graves or gutted settlements. There are no Welsh sagas of tribes fleeing north and west. British huts continued to be built round, not rectangular as in Germany. At Berinsfield in Oxford, a fifth-century grave was filled with Germanic goods – continental trade was voluminous – but its human contents showed long-standing local DNA.
It stands to reason that the population replacement of eastern Britain – of Brythonic speakers by Anglo-Saxon speakers – in a matter of two to three generations is inconceivable. Various models have been proffered, such as apartheid settlements and ‘elite replacements’. The incoming Saxons could have banned Brythonic in the east, though such bans are never total. In reality, as the historian Jared Diamond has pointed out, ethnic/cultural eradication on such a scale was unknown before the age of ‘guns, germs and steel’. Even the imperial eradication of aboriginal tribes in Australasia, Africa and America was never this complete.
The most thorough demolition of the theory of a mass Saxon incursion comes from Cambridge University’s Susan Oosthuizen in The Emergence of the English (2019). She did for the Saxons what Cunliffe had done for the invading Celts. She found no genetic markers or changes in land ownership or burial practice. She found no evidence of ‘a political take-over by Anglo-Saxons of existing communities or the foundation of new Germanic kingdoms by immigrant elites’. Saxon pedigrees tracing back to royal houses on mainland Europe were mostly fantasies, such as Wessex kings claiming descent from the god Woden.
To Oosthuizen, the post-Roman era in the British Isles appears to have been one of relative peace. Romano-Britons and their western neighbours did indeed have to adjust to occasional new arrivals from Europe, but evidence suggests that ‘enough Roman stability survived from four centuries of occupation for [Britain] to evolve and adapt at least for the first two post-imperial centuries’. As for ‘a substantive invasion, settlement or conquest of Britain from north-west Europe in the fifth century’, it simply did not happen.
There is little doubt that northern Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries saw considerable population upheaval. The migrations successively of Goths and Huns from the east caused considerable disruption, though how much of it led to population displacement rather than assimilation is much debated, informed by a constant flow of new DNA evidence. The consensus is that such migration did contribute to British DNA, but only minimally and over a period of time rather than traumatically.
This would seem to confirm the thesis outlined in previous chapters, that people long called ‘Saxons’ by westerners had, for whatever reason, been long-standing occupants of the eastern side of the British Isles. Their probable use of a Germanic Old English language would have been reinforced by the many thousands of German veterans, settled in Britain by the Romans and loyal to them, who were part of what were called the empire’s foederati (allies). Max Adams, in The First Kingdom (2021), also suggests that by the fifth century these ‘Saxons’ might well have reacted against their Roman past by favouring a Germanic tradition. He posits a ‘culture war’ of east Britons as against those in the west, one that included a spasmodic revival of paganism and a favouring of Germanic gods such as Woden and Thor, giving their names to English days of the week. It is perhaps intriguing that, until the twentieth century, the North Sea was widely known on both its sides as the German Ocean.
The Old English question
The most crucial evidence for the settlement of any territory is the language spoken by its people. After the fall of the Roman empire in the west, Germanic peoples – Visigoths, Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, Vikings, Ostrogoths and Lombards – are known to have moved west into France and on into Spain, Portugal and even north Africa. Though traditionally presented as invading hordes, under longue durée, these movements should rather be seen as migrations of herdsmen and hunter-gatherers, moving with the seasons. What is significant is that, in every case west of the Rhine, their presumably Germanic tongue was lost in the process of assimilating with the prevailing Latin lingua franca.
Yet Saxon invasion theory asks us to believe that when these same tribes migrated to Britain, uniquely in Europe no trace of any indigenous Celtic tongue survived their arrival, beyond barely a dozen ‘loan’ words. Instead we find, as by a miracle, that a Germanic language is in a matter of a century being spoken everywhere across eastern Britain and indeed deep westwards. Anglo-Saxon was crowded with traces of Latin, but no Brythonic.
This conforms to the evidence described in the last chapter from river and place names. To this can be added virtually the only written evidence we have from this period, inscriptions gathered in University College London’s ‘inscribed stones’ project (1999). This listed hundreds of Celtic-language inscriptions from the Roman and post-Roman period across the British Isles. Virtually all are in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. None are in eastern England, where all are in Latin.
It must also be significant that the sixth-century law books of kings Ethelbert of Kent (r.589–616) and Ine of Wessex (r.689–726), which delve deep into local customs of marriage and property, were written in Old English. There are no such records in Brythonic. The same applies to the earliest English creative literature, Caedmon’s Hymn (c.670) and The Dream of the Rood (c.700), both in Old English. We have sagas in Welsh, but they hail from the Brythonic-speaking regions of north and west Britain, none from the east.
As for how far west the borderland of Old English might have gone, we cannot tell. The archaeology of place names, inscriptions and burials hints at somewhere along Kenneth Jackson’s line from Yorkshire to Southampton, dividing what might be called ‘greater’ south-east England from the rest of Britain. It seems that the long-established ‘Saxons’ of the east were moving west well before the end of the fifth century. Later battles between ‘Britons’ and ‘Saxons’ are recorded throughout the sixth and seventh centuries, but none is in the east and almost all are somewhere down the central spine of England.
Other clues are at best fragmentary. Gildas’s Battle of Mons Badonicus, believed to have been somewhere at the southern end of the Cotswolds, possibly in Wiltshire, was said to have marked the westward limit of Saxon ‘invasion’. By the seventh century Saxons appear to have progressed to the valley of the Severn. Here the diary of a Welsh monk, St Beuno (d.640), specifically mentions his fear on hearing ‘a strange-tongued man across the river shouting at his dog’. The language cannot have been Brythonic or Latin, which Beuno would have known. It must have been Anglo-Saxon.
One day I am sure these questions will be settled. For the time being I prefer to repeat that a divide between a Brythonic-speaking west and an English-speaking east must most plausibly have been the result not of conquest or invasion but of long-standing settlement. The ‘Welsh’ never occupied eastern England and were never evicted from it. Indeed, in the twelfth century, the chronicler Gerald of Wales remarked on ‘how everyone in Wales entertains this illusion’ of a once-Welsh ‘British’ empire of which they were brutally dispossessed. A medieval chronicler in 1316 was more direct. He described the ‘long-standing madness of the Welsh, as formerly called the Britons, that they were once noble, crowned over the whole realm of England, but were expelled by the Saxons and lost both name and kingdom’. Yet still Celtic departments set essays on ‘Why do the English not speak Welsh?’ The answer must be because they speak English and always have.