THIS HAS BEEN a book about evolving identities, origin myths and the use or abuse of history and archaeology. The past continues to live in the way that we study, reconstruct and interpret it. We should treat it as a subject which has a life of its own.We should also recognise that part of its life exists within ourselves. If we take the trouble to think, write or talk about the past, then we become a component of history ourselves. History is personal, not absolute, and there is no such thing as absolute historical truth.
That is why I find the ‘Dark Ages’ so fascinating. For a start, there are huge problems in reconciling the historical account with the actual evidence provided by archaeological fieldwork. One has to favour one or the other, and I have chosen archaeology, not just because it is my own subject, but because it is still producing a wealth of completely unexpected new discoveries - and not only in wild, remote places, but in unexpectedly familiar locations, such as the outskirts of Southend.
I see little point in ‘rubbishing’ the Arthurian legends. It may be impossible ever to be certain whether there actually was a fifth-century British hero named Arthur. He may have existed, or he may not. That is all we can say with any certainty. Rather than endlessly pondering that not very enlightening question, would it not be better to view the myths of Arthur, and indeed the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, as interesting phenomena in their own right? That is what I have attempted to do. If I cannot reveal Arthur, I can at least try to show where and how he might have existed. I also think it is useful to examine how his story has been handled over the centuries and what its actual origins might have been - be they never so far back in time.
Arthurian legends are a reflection of over a thousand years of history and prehistory.We still do not fully understand how the earlier, prehistoric, elements came to be incorporated in the later tales, but it does seem clear from work in the Witham Valley and elsewhere that ancient traditions persisted for some three millennia within the landscape, if not in literature. As the landscape is in turn a reflection of the way people lived and organised their lives, we must assume that the ideas behind it were still common currency. Their incorporation within legends and stories that were written deliberately to invoke an earlier, perhaps more glorious, time is therefore entirely explicable.
If, as we saw in Chapter 2, the creation of Arthur may have owed more than a little to the legitimising of a Welsh élite in the face of an outside threat, then it is possible to see both Arthur and the Anglo-Saxons as symbols to do with identity. My own feeling is that both have outlived their usefulness as symbols of this sort; they have acquired much ‘baggage’ which we could well do without, whether it be the New Age Celtic twilight that surrounds Arthur, or the continuing belief (in certain quarters) in the superiority of Anglo-Saxon racial characteristics. Neither, to my mind, is particularly useful, truthful, or edifying. So where does that leave the question of identity? Let us first think about identity at the local level.
Local identities can be as hard to pin down as smoke. A day or two ago I was talking to a retired farmworker in the village shop. We were discussing ways of trapping eels in drainage dykes, as he had lent me his set of hooped nets, which I plan to employ (illegally) soon. I mentioned that in the peat country a few miles to the east long barbed spears, known as eel gleaves, had traditionally been used. ‘Hmm,’ he said, completely unimpressed. ‘There’s no knowing what them Black Fen boys will be up to next. They’re a rum ol’ bunch.’ So far as he was concerned, they could have come from the moon, not Whittlesey.
Beneath the veneer of local culture lie more profound differences. As men of the Fens, my friend in the village shop and the rum old boys around Whittlesey would traditionally have been strongly nonconformist, maybe belonging to a Primitive Methodist Chapel.1 I remember being reminded by an old man near Huntingdon (Oliver Cromwell’s birthplace) that ‘the Fens were for Parliament’, something he was plainly proud of. Yet England as a nation is supposed to be a monarchy with an established Church - both of which I suspect my Fen characters would have pushed out into the North Sea long ago, given half a chance.
If you spoke to the sons and daughters of Fen people today, you would be astonished by the changes that have taken place in just one generation. The strong religious nonconformity has largely gone, and Primitive Methodist Chapels are everywhere falling down and overgrown. Very few people catch eels, or even know the difference between the silt Fens, where they live, and the peat or Black Fens further east. The old Fen dialects have almost vanished, and people even dress in wholly different ways: tweeds have disappeared, and jeans are worn by all but the elderly. The traditional culture, dialect and religion of the ‘Fen tiger’, as men of the Fens were known in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has almost entirely vanished - within at most two generations.
When we consider concepts like identity, locale or sense of place we are departing a long way from the hard and fast, supposedly definable cultural realities of archaeology or history, and in the process we may be undermining them, which is no bad thing. Identity, like history and archaeology, is a personal business. It is also something that changes through time - and space. I had not grasped the significance of this until recently when, reading a poem, it struck me that if Anglo-Saxons had actually settled down in Britain, they would have regarded not just the Britons, but themselves, differently. This change of identity would have been even more radical if they had arrived as settlers rather than as an élite warrior aristocracy, for which, as we have seen, there is no good evidence in the fifth century. We do not know how a new, insular identity would have manifested itself in the archaeological record, but to look for simplistic correlations across the North Sea is almost certainly a naive mistake.
Freddie Kramer was our first local volunteer when we opened Flag Fen to the public in 1987. He and his wife Lotte had come to England from Germany just before the outbreak of war, as Jewish refugee children of the Kindertransport.2 Many of the relatives they left behind were murdered by the Nazis. It was Lotte who wrote the poem that set me thinking how identities can change not just with time, but through space.
Seesaw*
At school,
On the other side of the Channel,
I was taught
Oliver Cromwell was a hero,
A man of vision.
In England,
Living with an upper-crust family,
Democracy
In peril during the Second World War,
He was a villain.
But now,
In his native countryside
Near the Great Ouse,
The smashed cathedral glass
Receives the white light
Of the fens.
There is a sense of independence
In that black earth
Sponsoring his army of footsteps
All the way to the gallows.
Identity and culture are essentially unstable, and the attachment of a label is therefore bound to be misleading. Not only that, but labels tend to take pride of place, so that one becomes, say, English or Christian, at the expense of being what one wants to be. It’s an imposition that I find annoying in my daily life, which is why I try to avoid attaching labels in my archaeological work. I find the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ label particularly irritating, because it has been used too often as an excuse to avoid thinking about some of the serious issues that archaeology ought to be addressing.
Archaeologists of the ‘culture-historical’ school regard such things as culture, religion and language as being fundamental to the identity of the groups they study. Being perceived as indicators of identity, they are traditionally viewed as unchanging. Language and religion, for example, were believed to remain fundamentally the same. If one or both of them changed, it was likely that a new group of people had taken over. But the real world is not as simple as that. In parts of Britain, such as southern Ireland or Cornwall, for example, the ‘native’ British languages were replaced by English in a very short time, mainly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while in northern Wales most Welsh-speakers are actually bilingual in Welsh and English. In these instances the people remained the same, but the language changed. Religion too can change with great rapidity, as Henry VIII so clearly showed.
The adoption of Anglo-Saxon, or Early English, in south-eastern Britain was a very complete process. Few pre-English place names survive, and this has been taken as clear evidence for wholesale population change. But it is just one aspect of the profound social changes that were taking place in the fifth and sixth centuries, and it should not be taken in isolation. I am also unsure as to why language change should have to involve the exchange of people, rather than ideas. Besides, if we take a proven mass migration, such as that to North America by Europeans, it is remarkable how many significant places retain versions of their original names: Manhattan and Toronto, to name just two.
We can see this even more clearly if we look at South America, where well-established civilisations were brought crashing to the ground by a small number of European incomers. As a result, the religion of South America is Roman Catholicism, and the languages are Spanish and Portuguese. In the mighty Inca Empire of Peru, the whole system depended and focused upon the personality of the Emperor, who was regarded as having absolute temporal and spiritual authority. The incoming conquistadores knew nothing of this. To them he was just another human being: ‘While the Emperor was venerated as a divine monarch this was no weakness, but when a handful of invaders, who cared for none of these things, struck at Atahuallpa, the head and heart of the Empire, they brought it to the dust.’3
In England the roots of Early English lay in Anglo-Saxon, which was probably taken up as the dominant language in south and eastern Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. The change of language was accompanied by changes in dress and religion. It was all part of the process of ‘acculturation’ that was taking place around the North Sea basin at the time. The British were being influenced, but they were also influencing others themselves. Everyone involved in the process used the exchange of new ideas in their own way, to form identities that would gradually evolve into the embryonic nation states of the full medieval world.
Dr Catherine Hills of Cambridge University, who spent many years excavating the large Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Spong Hill in Norfolk, has pointed out that ‘people can change their names, language, currency and political allegiances without the majority of the population being replaced’. She has in mind, of course, the hypothetical mass migration of Anglo-Saxon settlers into eastern England. She then asks two core questions: ‘Did the English arrive as an intrusive band of invaders and migrants, planting themselves in eastern Britain and replacing earlier populations? Or was it a change in political allegiance that changed Britons into Anglo-Saxons?’4 She opts for the second alternative.
I noted at the conclusion of Britain bc that the British have long seemed to respect the freedom of the individual. I still stand by that. I also believe that the British are by and large an inclusive nation. They generally accept incomers, albeit after initial resistance. This does not apply to the teeming cities alone: the Fens, for example, were home to large communities of French Huguenots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Maybe the British feel sufficiently secure in their islands not to worry about being ‘swamped’, as the Home Secretary recently put it. Possibly, but I think there is more to it than that.
In the post-Roman period the British Isles remained well populated, and their cultures were diverse. British or Celtic languages were spoken in the west and south-west, possibly Pictish in Scotland, Anglo-Saxon in the east, while Latin was still spoken in the Church and by élite classes in the south-west. This mix of tongues, with Anglo-Saxon at its core, gave rise to Early English.5 The intermingling of different tongues shows that whatever their cultural differences, the various communities of Britain were in communication with one another. It is a tradition of cultural give-and-take which has left its mark on the language.
The English language is one of the glories of world culture. Unlike French, which tries unsuccessfully to exclude ‘Franglais’ in the interest of linguistic purity, dictionaries of the English language often include an addenda which defines new and slang words, many of which may be taken from other tongues. These new words may or may not appear in the main body of the text in subsequent editions. The English language thrives because it positively encourages the creation of new words and concepts; it succinctly and colourfully expresses what people all over the world think and believe. When it comes to defining some form of national identity that most people could subscribe to, one could do a lot worse than borrow the creative plagiarism of the English language.
Where does that leave us? To begin with, I believe we should discard the simplistic idea that invasions or mass migrations were the cause of the major changes that we see in the archaeological and historical record of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’. The ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and their invasions have become an essential part of England’s origin myth. What is worse, certainly for me as an archaeologist, is that they have also affected - no, infected - archaeology as well. Those much-vaunted invasions provide a false explanation for a complex of changes, each of one which deserves explanation in its own right. But they are all bundled together: language, pottery, new house forms, burial rites, etc., etc., holus-bolus, under the umbrella of mass migration.
By invoking a catch-all explanation such as ‘invasion’ one avoids having to think about the cause and the precise nature of the changes that took place. I believe that the all-pervading presence of the Anglo-Saxon invasions has led us to misappreciate not just the Dark Ages but Late Roman Britain too. They have stopped us thinking about the extent of actual mobility in the fifth and sixth centuries, and have set historians and archaeologists the impossible task of explaining how phenomena such as Sutton Hoo could have arisen in just two or three generations from a ‘Dark Age’ background, which in social terms at least must still have been as liquid as soup.
The Anglo-Saxon ‘invasions’ have also coloured the way we have viewed the entire period. They sit happily within the murk of a ‘Dark Age’, and they encourage a view of the past as a dark, sinister place which seems to owe more to Edgar Allan Poe than to rational thought. Further, by flying in the face of what we know about the way human societies have inhabited their landscapes over the past six or seven millennia, the concept of a Dark Age Migration Period - where special rules are believed to apply - has prevented us from placing the post-Roman world into its longer-term contexts. Surely we should be thinking about Saxon England as something that possesses close links not just with Roman Britain, but with the prehistoric world as well. Instead, we take the history of England back to the start of the seventh century, at which point we stop. Everything before that is irrelevant. I wonder what the nameless king beneath the Lexden Tumulus would have thought of that.
Arthur and the Dark Ages seem made for each other. They are a Hollywood dream: pump smoke into the pre-gunpowder battle scenes and watch while the fantasy unfolds. This is what happens if one makes the mistake of confusing metaphor with history, which is not something our medieval ancestors would have done. They may have lacked our sense of historicity, and they seem to have accepted some strange origin myths, such as the Brutus stories, but I wonder to what extent they believed that these stories were the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They lived in a world where myth and legend were woven into history and where history, religion and politics were inextricably combined. Their understanding of the Arthurian legends was probably far more sophisticated in its use and appreciation of metaphor than anything we would be capable of, given our post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment, analytical patterns of thought. I think this is apparent in the proliferation of modern Arthurian literature, where meaningless detail is relentlessly and mindlessly pursued. Meanwhile the point of the entire exercise is missed.
The Arthurian myths are a repository of clues, rather than signposts towards significant historical events - and they should be read as such. Over the years they have acquired their shape mainly through individual acts of literary creation by men like Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chréien de Troyes and the elusive Thomas Malory; but these authors were themselves influenced by the stories and legends that were current in their time. They were also seeking themes that would add an air of mystical antiquity to their writing. This may help to explain why the Arthur cycle includes such a diverse mix of ancient concepts: there may be echoes of the Bronze and Iron Ages in the deposition of Excalibur in the Lake and the presence of Avalon on its Isle, not to mention the mysterious business of the sword in the stone. There are possible memories too of the ‘Golden Age’ of Roman Britain in the Holy Grail, and of course there is what was then current medieval mythology in the Round Table and the chivalry of its knights. There are also lessons to be learned from the way in which the Arthurian tales slipped from fashion as political documents at the start of the post-medieval period.
But there is a danger in all of this. Whether or not one accepts Arthur - or Alfred, his Anglo-Saxon surrogate - as a real figure, one is looking at someone whose deeds are largely products of more recent times. If we really want to understand what happened in Britain after the Roman period - and it is a fascinating time - we must set these largely mythological figures to one side, because they have little, of themselves, to teach us today. Further, by concentrating our attention on the battles fought between Briton and Saxon we are in danger of missing the central point: that these were more probably battles between two sets of Britons, one of which had adapted Continental customs and political systems for its own ends. If we think about the Dark Ages in these less black-and-white terms, we might arrive at a better understanding of what it was that motivated the conflict - and to what extent the battles themselves have been exaggerated in the interests of subsequent political necessity.
I am in no doubt that archaeology is the only means by which the Dark Ages can become fully illuminated. There is a huge amount of exciting new work taking place, and the more we discover, the more it becomes apparent that the fifth and sixth centuries were never truly Dark. There was no population collapse, the countryside never reverted to woodland, field systems continued in use, towns quite rapidly appeared and then stayed for good. Yes, there were major social and political changes, and yes, we can see the effects of real raiding in the Viking depredations of the mid-ninth century, that were followed by the collapse of long-distance trade. But where is the evidence for such happenings in the ‘Dark Ages’, when communication with mainland Europe and the Mediterranean was a regular occurrence, by both land and sea? If we are looking for English origins, we should forget the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and turn instead to the resident population, who had been there, in their millions and in their various cultures and communities, all the time. I refer, of course, to the real heroes of this book: that diverse group of people - the British.
*From Lotte Kramer, Earthquake and Other Poems (Rockingham Press, 1994).