CHAPTER ONE
“For the fire of vengeance … spread from sea to sea … and did not cease, until destroying the neighboring towns and lands, it reached the other side of the island, and dipped its red and savage tongue in the western ocean.”
—GILDAS
For the fire of vengeance … spread from sea to sea,” wrote the monk Gildas, in the mid-sixth century A.D. , of the arrival of the Angle and Saxon tribes to Britain from northern Europe. His treatise, On the Ruin of Britain , is the primary account we have of the murky period that saw the coming of what he terms “the fierce and impious Saxons”: “… and did not cease, until, destroying the neighboring towns and lands, it reached the other side of the island, and dipped its red and savage tongue in the western ocean.”
Written not so much to record history as to rebuke and chastise Britons for their evil ways, the treatise is a sermon, and it serves Gildas’s purpose to exaggerate the sufferings inflicted on the island as a just retribution from God. Today historians challenge his claim that the entirety of Britain was vanquished by Anglo-Saxon invaders who put the island to the torch and sword. At the same time, the period of the settlement of Britain by Germanic tribes in the fifth and sixth centuries was indeed tumultuous. To understand this tumult in its proper context, it is necessary to pull back further and to survey Britain as it was before Angles or Saxons or Jutes or Frisians or any other northern European tribes had designs upon its shores—in other words, to scan briefly the three and a half centuries during which Britain had been Britannia, a province of Imperial Rome; for the fate of Rome is integral to the movements of the Saxons.
According to the historian Cassius Dio, the troops mustered at Boulogne across the English Channel in the spring of A.D. 43 for what was to be Rome’s first successful invasion of Britain had at first balked, “indignant at the prospect of campaigning outside the known world”—an eloquent indication of how remote the island lay from continental civilization. This ultimately successful campaign of 43, under Emperor Claudius, vindicated two inconclusive attempts that had been made almost a century earlier by the great Julius Caesar. Caesar had been checked by the guerrilla tactics of the British, by their skilled use of horses and chariots and tendency to vanish into the woods, and most of all by a sudden, devastating storm that had destroyed much of his anchored fleet. His failure notwithstanding, Caesar left a valuable description of the island and its inhabitants as seen through Roman eyes:
The interior portion of Britain is inhabited by those of whom they say that it is handed down by tradition that they were born in the island itself: the maritime portion by those who had passed over from the country of the Belgae [northern Gaul, or modern France] for the purpose of plunder and making war … The number of the people is countless, and their buildings exceedingly numerous … The most civilized of all these nations are they who inhabit Kent, which is entirely a maritime district, nor do they differ much from the Gallic customs. Most of the island inhabitants do not sow corn, but live on milk and flesh, and are clad with skins. All the Britons, indeed, dye themselves with woad, which occasions a bluish color, and thereby have a more terrible appearance in fight. They wear their hair long, and have every part of their body shaved except their head and upper lip.”
What the Romans wanted from Britain is unclear. It was later rumored that Caesar “was led to invade Britannia by the hope of getting pearls, and that in comparing their size he sometimes weighed them with his own hand.” In his own memoirs, however, Caesar spoke lightly of Britain’s assets, remarking that “tin is produced in the midland regions; in the maritime, iron; but the quantity of it is small”—meager commodities that would not seem to have justified the expense and effort of an 800-ship, 27,000-man invasion. He had also noted, however, that “in almost all the wars with the Gauls assistance had been furnished to our enemy from that country,” meaning Britain; Caesar’s expressed objectives, then, seem to have been mostly tactical. It was also true, however, that Britain had traded with continental Europe and the Mediterranean centuries before the coming of the Romans, and in later times, when the island was better known, it was well regarded, according to the first-century geographer Strabo, for exports of “corn, cattle, gold, silver, and iron … and also skins, and slaves, and dogs sagacious in hunting.” (Eventually, in the course of Roman rule, Britannia would also be known for its hooded woolen coats and beer.) Possibly the first attempt was among other things a matter of prestige, and the failed invasions only sharpened later imperial resolve.
By A.D. 47, southern England was under Roman rule, and Britain as a whole had been claimed for the empire. Like other imperial provinces, Britannia became subject to taxation, Roman law (although the native population still used local laws), and use of Latin as a lingua franca—all the usual baggage of a colonial occupation. With Roman efficiency, a network of roads and other infrastructure for the movement of troops, trade, and communication was established. Despite Caesar’s observation that the number of Britain’s people “is countless, and their buildings exceedingly numerous,” the archaeological record indicates that prior to the Romans, Britain had no settlements large enough to be called towns; in contrast, archaeologists have found some hundred walled towns or small settlements dating from the Roman occupation, along with evidence of countless Roman-era villages. London itself—Londinium—was developed from a trading center on the Thames. In the larger towns public services such as the supply of water and sewage disposal were superior to anything available in later medieval times.
While Roman development projects created previously nonexistent urban landscapes, the majority of the new province’s estimated 1.5 to 3 million inhabitants lived rural lives, which, far as they were from administrative centers, seem to have continued more or less as before. The effects of Roman conquest appeared in the countryside; rural settlements suddenly had access to trinket jewelry, imported pottery, and even glass. Buildings in Roman style, villas, were built. The villas, many of which were working farms, adopted amenities particularly suited to Britain, such as central heating and heated floors—innovations appreciated by a people whose “sky is obscured by continual rain and cloud,” as the Roman historian Tacitus, writing at the end of the first century A.D., famously observed.
Popular Roman institutions, such as public baths and, in some towns, theaters and temples, helped spread Roman culture among the economic and political elite, as did the sheer attraction and novelty of all things Roman. Tacitus, citing a strategy of the Roman general Agricola (who was his father-in-law) on campaign in Britain, gives a vivid and cynical account of how a conquered people can be led to abandon their own long-held customs for new fashions:
He likewise provided a liberal education for the sons of the chiefs, and showed such a preference for the natural powers of the Britons over the industry of the Gauls that they who lately disdained the tongue of Rome now coveted its eloquence. Hence, too, a liking sprang up for our style of dress, and the “toga” became fashionable. Step by step they were led to things that dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance, they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude.
But the most important, and visible, addition to British life and landscape was Rome’s military presence. Three legions, amounting to 15,000 professional Roman citizen soldiers, supported by auxiliary units composed of foreign troops from diverse parts of the empire and amounting to as many as 20,000 additional men, were more or less permanently stationed in Britain; toward the end of the second century this figure may have reached 50,000. This staggering statistic can best be appreciated when considered in light of modern military ventures; at the height of the “surge” of troops in Iraq, U.S. forces amounted to 165,000—a little over three times the number of Roman troops in Britain, but in a nation with a civilian population of 30 million, as compared with Britain’s 2 to 3 million.
The Roman troops dispersed among the many garrisons and forts in the north and west must have been, with their constant military exercises and training maneuvers and dashing games of display, a conspicuous, daunting, and possibly even glamorous presence. More practically, garrisons and forts of salaried soldiers far from home were a valuable source of income for merchants of the nearby settlements. These active garrisons do not take into account the thousands of veterani, ex-soldiers pensioned off in land grants in cities like Colchester and Lincoln.
Why were there so many troops in Britain? Some would like to credit their necessity to the unquenchable fighting spirit of the colonized native Britons, balking at the Roman yoke. A less romantic explanation is that Britain’s location, at “the end of the world,” and an island at that, made it a convenient holding center for crack troops who could only with difficulty meddle in the politics of the empire. The first Roman troops to make a successful invasion, we recall, had been reluctant “of campaigning outside the known world.” If a Roman army was reluctant to venture into the stormy North Atlantic, how unlikely it must have seemed that any other foreign forces would. The likely foes were well known and close to home: the Picts, the tattooed (in Latin pictus) tribes who inhabited what was to become Scotland and who, being proficient sailors, raided the eastern coastland as well as the northern borderland; and the Scotti, tribes from Ireland and also sea raiders. As troublesome as these tribes were over the years, their efforts never amounted to much more than periodic harassment that was always quelled by a single, professional Roman campaign.
Rome’s troubles in Britain grew apace with its broader troubles on the Continent. Germanic tribes had been moving westward from the mid- to late third century, their progress intermittently checked by a series of campaigns, and scholars estimate that the Saxons began to make raids on Britain around the same time. When exactly Rome began to lose its grip on the island province, however, is impossible to establish, the archaeological record being mixed and the written sources meager. Fortifications suggest one story: Between approximately A.D. 270 and 330, a string of massive fortresses was built on Britain’s eastern and southern coastline, implying preparations against new invaders. Similarly, the British line of defense was mirrored across the channel in northern France. Recently, some historians have argued that these “defenses” were actually giant storehouses, not garrisons—signs of Britain’s prosperity and stable social infrastructure, rather than of decline. Yet the location of the forts, solidly facing the sea, and their general lack of connection to road networks that would be necessary for transport tend to support the traditional view that the forts were outward looking and defensive: Britain’s island status had always been perceived as protective, but this complacency had been based on the assumption that potential foes would not be seafarers. The fortified shore is referred to by name in a rare Roman document, the Notitia Dignitatum, or “List of High Offices,” dating from around A.D. 395. A curt inventory of military resources that includes fortifications, the list cites a comes litoris Saxonici, or a “count” or military officer “of the Saxon shore”—a suggestive name. Similarly, established forts on the western coast, in what is now modern Wales, were kept manned and reinforced, as were sites along the northwest and northeast coasts, some with signal stations attached to cavalry posts. Thus, to the north, east, south, and west Britain was ringed with stout defenses bespeaking a state of high alert.
And there is written evidence of trouble. “During this period practically the whole Roman world heard the trumpet-call of war, as savage peoples stirred themselves and raided the frontiers nearest to them,” wrote Ammianus Marcellinus, a historian and former soldier writing close to the events in the fourth century A.D.: “The Picts, Saxons, Scots and Attacotti were bringing continual misery upon Britain … a concerted attack by the barbarians had reduced the province of Britain to the verge of ruin.” The so-calledbarbarica conspiratio, or barbarian conspiracy, of A.D. 367 to 368, whether a true conspiracy or a coincidental series of independent raids, was disruptive enough to require a lengthy campaign to restore Roman rule and order: Ominously, Pictish raiders from Scotland had been aided by a revolt of Roman scouts to the north of Hadrian’s Wall, Britain’s northern frontier.
Ironically, this same fourth century—riven, it would seem, with chronic border anxiety and unrest as well as turmoil in the restless army—has also been called a Golden Age. This is the time when country villas were built and expanded—600 have been identified in Britain. An increasing use of mosaic floors—a conspicuous luxury—appears at this time. The term Golden Age is overblown, but the evidence suggests that the elite and landed gentry, at least, enjoyed notable prosperity—the benefit of a wide social discrepancy between the rich and poor; and this expansion of villas could be a manifestation of the flight of the aristocracy from declining towns. A number of remarkable treasure hoards dating from this time have also been found. On the one hand, the high quality and value of these objects indicates the level of disposable wealth enjoyed by the prosperous; on the other hand, the manner of disposal—hidden in the ground—is suggestive of unsettled times. The Mildenhall Treasure, a spectacular, highly decorated silver dinner service; the Thetford Hoard and silver vessels with Christian symbols from Water Newton; the Corbridge Lanx—these fourth-century Roman finds are by no means the earliest hoards in Britain, nor the last, but are an impressive slice of a remarkable tradition.
Undoubtedly, rumors of this kind of wealth kept the barbarian raiders coming; treasure and slaves, the objects of their raids, were there for the snatching. A poignant testimony of a slave raid is given by St. Patrick, who recalls in his Confession how his father “had a small villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen years of age … I was taken into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of people.”
The erratic miscellany of sources that is the sparse historical record for this critical period now provides equally erratic glimpses of Britain’s lurching decline, mirroring the turmoil on the Continent that increasingly held Rome’s attention. In 402, one of the two British field armies was recalled to help in the defense of Rome against the Visigoths, and there is evidence that from this year onward the British garrisons were unpaid. In 406, the army revolted, putting forward a succession of weak pretenders to the throne. The same year, the last of these military emperors, Constantine III—“a worthless soldier of the lowest rank,” according to the Venerable Bede, writing from older records in A.D. 731—left Britain to quell rebellions in Gaul and took with him the last remaining elements of the field army, although miscellaneous other troops may have remained. After this date, the archaeological record shows that the importation of coinage—money—from the Roman mints ceased, an unambiguous indicator of economic decline. According to theGallic Chronicle (a document written some four decades after the events it describes), the following year, A.D. 408, saw “the province of Britain laid waste by Saxons; in Gaul the barbarians prevailed and Roman power diminished.” A new and valuable voice comes from the Greek historian Zosimus, who, writing in the early sixth century, reports, “[T]he barbarians above the Rhine, assaulting without hindrance, reduced the inhabitants of the Brettanic island and some of the Celtic peoples to defecting from the Roman rule and living their own lives, independent from the Roman laws. The Britons therefore took up arms and, braving the danger on their own behalf, freed their cities from the barbarian threat.”
In the vacuum left by Rome, it appears that military and political authority was grasped by local chiefs, or “tyrants,” as one source calls them. Two years later, also according to Zosimus, petitioners in Britain sent a letter to Emperor Honorius begging assistance—apparently, despite their revolt and the loss of the legions, the British still regarded themselves as subjects of Rome. But Rome was now beyond giving aid: According to Bede’s stark summary, “[A]fter this the Romans ceased to rule in Britain, almost 470 years after Gaius Julius Caesar had come to the island.” In other words, in A.D. 410, Rome had cut herself free of all responsibility for Britain’s defense, and the island was on its own.
Although Rome had been withdrawing her military resources from Britain over a number of years, the exodus of the last Roman troops must have been unsettling. There are no surviving accounts to describe it, and one must look to descriptions of later evacuations to conjure what it must have been like—the marching troops tramping down the well-built Roman roads, the prancing horses of the cavalry, the exotic auxiliaries, the lumbering baggage trains, all accompanied by streams of retainers and even family retinues. Each bivouac site would have caused a local stir, the opportunity to make last sales of goods, and to have a look at the backbone of what had been the world’s most powerful empire. There would have been the noisy gathering and clamor at the docks as troops and horses and massive amounts of equipment were patiently embarked onto waiting ships. Troops had come and gone before, and there must have been an expectation that they would return.
The exodus of the army did not mark the end of Roman Britain, but it did point ahead to its inevitable demise. While some towns hung on for several generations, there was general conspicuous urban decline. The villas, too, which a century before had been lavished with expensive improvements, fell into disrepair. Money was not around to be circulated; agriculture was disrupted. Deserted farm fields reverted to scrub and woodland, and the land became widely forested. Decay and decline must have been everywhere apparent. The centralized factories producing pottery disappeared with the collapse of the economy and communications. One can only guess at the emotions and expectations of the remaining Romano-Britons, the people who had been shaped by three and a half centuries of Roman rule and custom. Three and a half centuries is a very long time—as historians are fond of pointing out, three and a half centuries is almost as long as the time from Shakespeare’s era to our own, and far longer than the lifetime of the United States.
It is likely that different social classes viewed Rome’s departure differently. For many Britons, the Roman presence may have amounted to little more than a military occupation, which they were glad to see gone, although with the army went stability and security. Surviving written accounts express regret—but these, by definition, are the products of literate, educated Britons, for whom Rome meant, among other things, civilized culture. “[The Romans] had occupied the whole island south of the rampart already mentioned [Hadrian’s Wall],” Bede writes, almost nostalgically, “an occupation to which the cities, lighthouses, bridges, and roads which they built there testify to this day.”
The Romans’ exodus would have been closely watched, and in its wake the Scotti and Picts renewed their hostilities across the now unguarded borders. That new allies from across the sea joined these old foes on occasion is clear from a reference in another source, St. Germanus of Auxerre, who made two visits to Britain on church business from Rome, in A.D. 429 and 447, and is credited by his biographer with reporting that “the Saxons and Picts had joined forces to make war upon the Britons.” At the same time it seems that on both visits Germanus was traveling in a country in which vestiges of Roman infrastructure still functioned; there were men of wealth, designated meeting places in the towns, and a functioning church.
Germanus’s mid-fifth-century report is the last surviving voice to come out of Britain from this critical period when so much hung in the balance. The meager written record recommences a century later with a single work—Gildas’s On the Ruin of Britain, believed to have been written in the middle of the sixth century. Whereas Germanus departed from an island that was still, despite the barbarians pressing at the defenses, recognizably Romano-British, at least in the places he was travelling, Gildas raises the curtain on an entirely new landscape. Much of Britain is in ruins, and Gildas has the story of its downfall.
According to his account, when the barbarians in the north, joined by Saxon pirates, continued to raid the weakening former province, the Britons made one last-ditch appeal to Rome, sending a petition to one Aetius, a “powerful Roman citizen” and a consul, sometime between A.D. 446 and 454: “The barbarians drive us to the sea; the sea drives us back on the barbarians; thus two modes of death await us, we are either slain or drowned.” Once again, this very last time, Rome could not comply; her own downfall in the West was only three decades away.
To whom could Britain turn? Gildas recounts the historic choice made at the initiative of a shadowy British king—a “proud tyrant”—who holds sway over a group of compliant counselors: “as a protection to their country, they sealed its doom by inviting among them like wolves into the sheep-fold, the fierce and impious Saxons, a race hateful to God and men, to repel the invasions of the northern nations.” The Saxon mercenaries came in three ships—“cyuls, as they call them,” Gildas notes, using the authentic Saxon term for their vessels (and the basis of the English word keel)—which could have carried up to 180 men. At first the barbarians were generously provisioned, but then they started “to complain that their monthly supplies are not furnished in sufficient abundance, and they industriously aggravate each occasion of quarrel, saying that unless more liberality is shown them, they will break the treaty and plunder the whole island.” And, according to Gildas, they were as good as their word.
“For the fire of vengeance … spread from sea to sea,” Gildas wrote. His intent was to rebuke the Britons for their sins by drawing biblical comparisons—in this case likening the depredations of the Saxons in Briton to the Assyrians in Judea—and so one must read his descriptions with circumspection. In his telling, lofty towers topple in the streets and towers are brought low. There are shattered bodies covered with blood and houses in ruins, and those Britons who are not killed or enslaved flee to the forests, the mountains, or overseas. At length, a champion rises for the British people, one Ambrosius Aurelianus, “who of all the Roman nation was then alone in the confusion of this troubled period by chance left alive.” Many scholars look wistfully to this mysterious Romano-Briton—the last of his kind, whose parents had been “adorned with the purple” (from the ruling class)—for the origin of the legend of King Arthur. Heated battles follow, with a significant victory for the British at a place called Mons Badonicus, or Mount Badon, sometime around A.D. 500. Gildas and his fellow Britons of the time, then, are living in a period of uneasy peace, albeit with the evidence of ruin around them.
Later writers including, most prominently, Bede would add details to the basic account given by Gildas. Bede states the year of the fateful invitation—circa A.D. 450—and further characterizes the Saxons: “They came from three very powerful Germanic tribes, the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes.” Modern scholars, drawing on both archaeology and ancient accounts, locate the homelands of these tribes as lying in northern Germany and along the North Sea coast, Jutland and the southern Danish peninsula and islands, and Frisia, extending from northwest Holland to Denmark. The first three ships were followed, in Bede’s account, by “a much larger fleet,” enticed by reports of the richness of the land and “the slackness of the British.” Soon, “hordes of these people eagerly crowded into the island and the number of foreigners began to increase to such an extent that they became a source of terror to the natives.” The result is the bloody mayhem Gildas describes.
This lurid description of the fall of a nation is not, at face value, incredible; the annals of history contain all too many accounts of well-documented events described with comparable imagery. And to some extent archaeology substantiates Gildas’s account. If there is no evidence of a Saxon invasion per se, there is much evidence that the decline that had begun even before the departure of the Romans continued apace. By around 450 many cities were deserted, and evidence of organized civic life is lacking. The archaeological record indicates there was a general collapse of the population throughout Britain, although it is possible that this was caused not by Saxon raiders, but by a plague, believed to have been as potent as the Black Death, that descended on Europe at this time.
Yet as bloody as a Saxon rebellion and its aftermath may have been in specific parts of Britain, it did not spread mayhem throughout the length and breadth of the island. For a start, in the west of the island British life survived intact. Elsewhere archaeologists are finding evidence more suggestive of cultural assimilation than invasion and conquest. Excavations at West Heslerton in Yorkshire, for example, have uncovered a sequence of settlements and villages ranging from Neolithic times to the mid-ninth century A.D., well into the Anglo-Saxon era. Most revealing is the evidence of an Anglian village established in the late fourth century, as Rome’s authority was waning, but well before the bloody invasion Gildas evokes. The village and its associated cemetery slide into the evolving settlement landscape with no evidence of violence or destruction. Life lived in late Roman times, it seems, simply moved on, adapting to a new sociopolitical structure; or, to paraphrase the excavation report, by the beginning of the sixth century the population of East Yorkshire had adopted Anglian dress and burial customs, possibly brought about by the widespread availability of the material culture—not by dominance. One hears the echo of Tacitus’s cynical observation: “Hence, too, a liking sprang up for our style of dress, and the ‘toga’ became fashionable.”
As Anglo-Saxon styles and practices took hold in Britain, the old Roman ways did not vanish simultaneously, but faded at different rates. In Lincolnshire, metal detectors have unearthed a striking number of locally made copies of late Roman military buckles; here, the inspiration for military uniforms was still evidently to some extent the Romans. Also found here, however, were German brooches from the late fourth century or early fifth century A.D. Such feminine wear suggests the presence of German families at the time Britain was still under Roman rule, suggesting in turn that Germans were stationed in Britain well before the “coming of the Saxons,” possibly serving as foederati—allies bound to Rome by treaty—or as lower ranking laeti—conquered people resettled abroad.
Such artifacts, in Lincolnshire and elsewhere in Britain, do not indicate the presence of a large German contingent, let alone suggest that they turned on their hosts when their Saxon kin arrived from across the sea; rather, they are evidence of the casual diversity of Britain’s population that was a legacy of the Roman occupation. The German forces may have had the kind of easy-going if controlled interaction with local people that, for example, U.S. troops stationed in Germany possess today. Possibly the average, non-elite Briton did not view the coming of the Saxons with alarm and terror. The ancient kingdom of Lindsey, which is now a part of Lincolnshire, shows almost no destruction over the transitional period from Roman to Anglo-Saxon rule. For rural workers who made up the majority of the population and who expected to live their lives under the dominance of one master or another, the transition may not have been so very disruptive. As Kevin Leahy, Anglo-Saxon authority and the leading scholar on ancient Lindsey, has memorably put it, “[F]or most people, tramping in the mud behind a plough, the view of the ox’s backside remained depressingly familiar.”
Whether the Germanic tribes arrived in three ships or a hundred, and whether or not they found fellow tribesmen and women in some places on their arrival, the point is that they had now come to Britain to stay. This is what made the adventus Saxonum—thecoming of the Saxons, as the event came to be memorialized—different from all the raids with which they had plagued Gaul and Britain over the past centuries. This time, they had not come on slave raids, or to carry off portable treasure—they had come for land.
Just as the date of the adventus is in doubt, so there is question as to when the migration to Britain ended. A suggestion comes from an exotic and, at first sight, implausible source: Writing around the year A.D. 550, Procopius, a historian at the court of Justinian in Byzantium, states that on the continental shore opposite the island of Brittia, there dwell fishermen whose task is to ferry the souls of the dead over the misty water to the island. This much of the narrative does not inspire confidence, but following this fairy tale is a more interesting report:
Three very populous nations inhabit the Island of Brittia, and one king is set over each of them. And the names of these nations are Angles, Frisians, and Britons who have the same name as the island. So great apparently is the multitude of these peoples that every year in large groups they migrate from there with their women and children and go to the Franks.
The “Franks,” of course, are the inhabitants of Gaul, or modern France, and the migration in question—from Britain, to the Continent—is known to have occurred. The westward movement of Britons from Cornwall, in western England, and across the English Channel to what is now Brittany, in France, is well attested; Cornish and Breton, their respective languages, are today closely related. Furthermore, despite the fanciful parts of his narrative, Procopius’s account of the reverse migration is substantiated by both independent German traditions and linguistic studies. Thus, by the time of his writing, about A.D. 552, the Saxon migration to Britain had stabilized; there was no more easy land—or uncontested land—to grab, and descendants of the Germanic immigrants were now looking for places to settle in continental Europe. It is also possible that they had been checked in the face of stiffening British resistance. The transforming migration to Britain, then, appears to have lasted little more than a century.
Who were the people who now inhabited Britain? Gildas states that of native Britons, all save a “miserable remnant” had fled the land or been enslaved, a claim that in this case is partly substantiated by the blunt fact that the same word—wealh—is used in early Anglo-Saxon law to mean both “Welshman” (i.e., Briton) and “slave.” It is also true that scholars have found very little evidence of post-Roman British settlements, as opposed to those of the Anglo-Saxons, although the survival of British place-names referring to rivers and hills, or place-names referring to Britons (such as Walton or Wealh-town), suggests that certain areas may have harbored British settlements of some kind.
DNA studies of present-day Britons have produced wildly conflicting conclusions. One team of researchers reported results suggesting that Anglo-Saxon immigrants had displaced virtually the whole British population and had pushed all the natives west to Wales; another study conducted at more or less the same time concluded that British Celts remained in both England and Ireland. More reliable than the DNA surveys are stable isotope analyses of tooth-enamel samplings taken from migration-era cemeteries; tooth enamel is formed in childhood and absorbs chemicals present in the soil and water at the time of development, a fact that in turn allows scientists to identify the geographical region of childhood. The team excavating in West Heslerton in Yorkshire, on examining 24 skeletal remains from the early Anglian cemetery, found that only 4 of these were from Scandinavia, 10 were local to the area, and 10 came from west of the Pennine hills in northern England and southern Scotland. On the basis of burial items, the cemetery appeared to be solidly Anglian, but clearly the people who had acquired these items were mostly British born. Assimilation, not extermination, is the most likely explanation for the “disappearance” of the British population.
Of the immigrant Saxons, to use the all-purpose term most employed by ancient writers, we have a number of descriptions, albeit as observed through the watchful eyes of the Romans. “For my own part, I agree with those who think that the tribes of Germany are free from all taint of intermarriages with foreign nations, and that they appear as a distinct, unmixed race, like none but themselves,” wrote Tacitus. “Hence, too, the same physical peculiarities throughout so vast a population. All have fierce blue eyes, red hair, huge frames, fit only for a sudden exertion. They are less able to bear laborious work. Heat and thirst they cannot in the least endure; to cold and hunger their climate and their soil inure them.”
For archaeologists, the Germanic immigrants are evoked most intimately by the raw data that can be culled from their cemeteries. From these we learn that the average height of men was a little over five feet eight inches and the average height of women about five feet three inches, which can be compared to the estimated average height of just under five feet seven inches for British males. Life expectancy in the early Anglo-Saxon period was, by our standards, terrifyingly short—33.1 years for women, 34.7 years for men—although consistent with that of other populations in the ancient world and also in a few parts of the modern developing world. A close study of skeletal remains from several cemeteries in Lincolnshire showed evidence of joint and spinal damage consistent with heavy labor; but by and large, the populations appeared to have been well fed, relatively healthy, and uninjured. It is tempting to correlate the latter scientific data with the anecdotal observations of Caesar, who had wide experience of continental Germans in the course of his Gallic campaigns, and who reported that they braved the elements mostly naked, dressing only in “skins or small cloaks of deer’s hides”—in other words, they were hardy folk.
The immigrants did not live in, or attempt to rebuild, the rubble of the fallen Roman towns. Their own buildings were of timber, and they lacked a tradition for working in stone. They preferred, it seems, to establish themselves on deserted sites, perhaps for practical reasons, perhaps from a desire to shun other people’s ruins. The hall was the principle Anglo-Saxon residence: a single-story structure built of split timbers with a thatched gable roof and an average floor space of some 540 square feet. Roughly a quarter of these halls had a partition at one end, possibly serving as private quarters. The other characteristic structures from this early period are the so-called sunken-floor buildings, which were also thatched and which at one time were fancifully believed to have been hole-like dwellings in which the strapping Saxons presumably huddled Hobbit-like. Today archaeologists view them as ancillary buildings such as granaries or storage sites. A scattering of such farmsteads would make a settlement of some 12 to 50 souls. Remarkably all the settlements that have been discovered are “open,” or without defensive walls, a striking fact in its own right, but especially so when compared to the hundred or so walled cities that the Romans left.
Most of these early households would have been occupied with farming and homesteading. Yet barbarian though they were, the Anglo-Saxons were well acquainted with luxury goods, intent as they had been on plundering them for some centuries. In Kent, strategically located close to the channel crossing to the Continent, it appears that silver was imported. Exotic finds such as ivory, cowrie shells, and coral from fifth- and sixth-century graves show links with Africa and the Indian Ocean. More generally, trade in a few important commodities—such as salt for preserving food and metals for tools and weapons—continued on a small scale. The Anglian settlement at West Heslerton had a craft and industry area equipped with a kiln, which shows evidence of ironwork. Slaves were traded too, it seems, along with cattle, for which London, much reduced, served as a market. More significant for our purposes, an analysis of the Staffordshire Hoard indicates that the garnets embedded in the elaborate gold cloisonné were likely from Bohemia or Portugal or even India.
Nothing in this survey of the lives and livelihoods of the Anglo-Saxon immigrants indicates how great and historic a landmark was their arrival, nor how the culture that eventually evolved not only transformed Britain but also, indirectly, left its mark on the world. And although the burial evidence suggests an assimilation of the British population within that of the Anglo-Saxon, in truth this did not represent an equal fusion of two cultures, but rather the dominance of one, the Anglo-Saxon. The evidence of this is seen most unambiguously in the Anglo-Saxons’ most enduring and potent legacy—their language. Across the English Channel, much of Europe emerged from the post-Roman world speaking Romance languages—Spanish, Italian, French—based on the Latin of the now vanished Romans. In England, however, the language that defined the island was Germanic—English, or the language of the Angles. And from this point forward we may refer to the speakers of this language as the English and to the country they claimed as England.
BRITAIN BEFORE THE ROMANS
When the legions of Julius Caesar and later Emperor Claudius fought to control the Isle of Britain, who were they fighting? The Romans dubbed the natives Britons, but we don’t know what they called themselves. It’s likely there was no single name, as there was no single nation—but their material culture indicates they were Celts, who, linked by languages, originally came from central and northwestern Europe and mixed with still earlier inhabitants of the islands. From about 700B.C., as the Celts moved across the British Isles, they established small chiefdoms and engaged in constant warfare. Massive hill forts attested to the unsettled nature of the society.
Well before the “civilizing” arrival of the Romans, Britons had already mastered fine metal arts and international trade, and they lived in a flourishing agriculture-based civilization (despite Caesar’s description of them as living exclusively “on flesh and milk”). Their houses were earthen and wood, but graves of this period are generally rare, so very few material remains have come down to us. The few we have may be due to their religion: They created beautifully wrought shields and swords, examples of which have been found ritually deposited with other objects in rivers or bogs—perhaps offerings to earth gods.
Their worship was nature based, with a veneration of the oak tree as a protective force, and their ceremonies appear to have taken place outdoors. Caesar and other early writers described a priest class called druids, though there is little physical evidence they existed.
The main impact of the Roman conquest was in Britain’s south and east, where towns and villas developed. North and west, in the so-called military zone, the impact of Rome was much smaller, and Britons continued their traditional lifestyles, though with some exposure to Roman culture. The separation from the continental Celts allowed a distinctly British Celtic culture to evolve. Though never held by Rome, Ireland remarkably adopted Roman Christianity and became a beacon of learning during the Dark Ages. 
HADRIAN’S WALL
In an attempt to consolidate the empire and end troubles from Barbarians in Britain’s north, the Roman emperor Hadrian built a 15-foot-high wall along the northern border. Ten feet thick, it ran for 73 miles, traversing Britain from Carlisle on the west coast to Newcastle on the east. Seven thousand men guarded its ramparts.
With the wall’s many gates, the guards could also now control ingress and egress, tax customs and goods, and prevent smuggling.
Recognizing that a good army is a happy army, the Romans built elaborate forts every five miles along the wall. Each fort could house between 500 and 1,000 troops.
Local people quickly adapted to the wall. Since Roman armies traditionally fed and clothed themselves locally, communities began to evolve around the forts. Thus, a military barricade soon became a community, a culture, and then a thriving and prosperous area.
All that changed, however, when Emperor Hadrian died of heart and liver failure in July 138. Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius, pushed the frontier farther north with the construction of turf-and-timber defenses across Britain. This line was not held for long, however, and soon the army withdrew to Hadrian’s Wall and manned it until the Romans’ final departure.
When the Britons chose Constantine III, one of three homegrown British emperors, as their own emperor in A.D. 407, they cut themselves off from the rest of the Roman Empire. When money stopped coming in from Rome, the soldiers who had at one time garrisoned the wall were withdrawn. Some turned to farming, joined independent armies, or left for other countries. Hadrian’s Wall had effectively become a mere landmark on the English landscape.
THE MYTH OF SAXON DESTRUCTION
In the old books it was all so simple: The Romans left Britain in A.D. 410; the Britons, faced with the loss of their protectors, invited in the Anglo-Saxons, who rebelled and took over, killing most of the Britons. Now we know things were much more complicated, and a fascinating picture has emerged where even the “known unknowns” are open to question.
When did the Anglo-Saxons arrive in Britain?
The influx seems to have come around the middle of the fifth century. The late Roman army contained many Germanic soldiers, some of whom were stationed in Britain. The recruiting of Germanic soldiers likely continued, and as the Anglo-Saxons increasingly took control, more of their compatriots followed across the North Sea. During the fourth century, the Romans also sent in Germanic tribesmen as frontier guards and settlers in threatened parts of the empire, but there is no evidence that they played any part in the Anglo-Saxon takeover of Britain.
How many Germanic people migrated to Britain?
Estimates vary between the “three boat loads” (about 180 men) referred to by Gildas, the sixth-century British historian, to a mass migration that left parts of Jutland empty. The Celtic or British language died out over much of Britain and was replaced by Old English, which may suggest a large number of incomers. However, a few concentrated warriors can have a disproportionate effect, as in the case of the Arabs in Egypt. Perhaps the original influx was small and was followed by a long migration.
What happened to the Britons?
Gildas carries much responsibility for the blood-and-fire version of the Britons’ fate, but a substantial number seems to have survived in Anglo-Saxon England. The Wealh (from which comes the word Welsh) people appear in Anglo-Saxon law codes. Some of the early Anglo-Saxon kings had British names (Cerdic of Wessex and Caedbaed of Lindsey). Most of the British peasants probably stayed in place, and over a few generations Old English replaced British as their language.
FINDING THE ANGLO-SAXONS
History, archaeology, and place-names contribute to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon England. The first historical source was a diatribe on the evils of his times by the sixth-century British monk Gildas. He included, as background, a brief account of Anglo-Saxon settlement. Notes in Gallic and Byzantine records also provide some idea of events in Britain. Once the English were converted to Christianity in the seventh century, records became more common. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History was completed in A.D. 731, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was started in the late ninth century. Finally, the great Domesday Survey of 1086 describes England as it was in 1066 and 1086.
Archaeology is the main source for the early part of the Anglo-Saxon period. New types of pottery, brooches, and burial rites from the Germanic homelands offer evidence of incomers. Once objects were no longer placed in graves after the seventh century, this source disappeared. It is only in recent years that scholars have started to see—and understand—the middle (ca A.D. 700–870s) and later (ca 870s–1066) Saxon periods. Large-scale excavations on settlements like Flixborough, Lincolnshire, and Brandon, Suffolk, have produced large numbers of finds and evidence of middle Saxon buildings, showing the extent and richness of later Saxon society.
In England layers of place-names represent all the peoples who settled over the millennia: Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans. The survival of Celtic river names marks the extent of Anglo-Saxon settlement. In the east, where settlement was most dense, only major rivers, such as the Thames and the Trent, kept their Celtic names. In the Midlands, Anglo-Saxon settlement was less intense, with smaller streams retaining original names: the Tame, the Dove, and the Derwent. Early Anglo-Saxon settlements have names ending in -ham, such as Cleatham. Later we get -ingham place-names, like Birmingham. The common -ton place-names (Barton) appear in the eighth century. In eastern England, the Danish conquest of the later ninth century is marked by towns with names ending in -by and -thorpe: Derby and Scunthorpe.
THE LEGEND OF ARTHUR
The legend of King Arthur and his kingdom of Camelot has come to denote a time when the world was pure, the spirit of man knew no bounds, and humans could accomplish great deeds. But over the centuries some scholars have thought the story might just be true.
Many historical texts mention Arthur as a great leader from the Middle Ages. The Historia Brittonum (ninth century A.D.) and the Annales Cambriae (Welsh Annals, tenth century A.D.) note him as a historical person of Roman descent who fought in 12 battles.
It was not until the 12th century, when French poet Chrétien de Troyes wrote a series of romances, that Arthur’s name became legend. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1470) continued the legend, as did poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892). Recently, leading Arthuriana expert Tom Green has suggested strong links between the core legend and Indo-European folk myths. Onto myth, he believes, were grafted half-remembered bits of history about the time when the British and Anglo-Saxons battled.
Other scholars have offered historical candidates to assume Arthur’s mantle:
· Geoffrey of Monmouth (History of the Kings of Britain, 1138) believed him to be the grandson of Constantine in the fifth century.
· Geoffrey Ashe (King Arthur’s Avalon, 1957) claimed he was King Riothamus of Brittany, who crossed the channel to fight the Visigoths in A.D. 468.
· Several studies say he is none other than Arthuis, a northern King who lived just a generation before most of the celebrated stories.
· P. F. J. Turner (The Real King Arthur, 1993) posits that he was the descendant of Lucius Artorius Castus, a general who commanded Roman troops in Britain.
The stories continue to enchant us, perhaps because they contain shadowy remembrances of historical fact. Perhaps Merlin’s wizardry recalls the “secret knowledge” of the Druids. Perhaps Excalibur’s magic properties echo ancient reverence for the “magic” of pouring molten metal into a stone mold—and pulling, as did young Arthur, a gleaming sword from the stone.