7
The seventh-century Breton Life of Samson of Dol discusses the saint’s early career in Britain in the early sixth century in some detail. Samson was supposedly from an aristocratic family of hereditary royal tutors in Dyfed (modern south-west Wales), but was dedicated to the priesthood and sent to be taught by the learned Illtud, probably at Llantwit in Glamorgan. From there he travelled around south Wales, the Severn valley and Cornwall, looking for monasteries with greater rigour, and ending up as a hermit in a fortification above the Severn. Here, he was recognized and promoted by the local bishop; later, he became an abbot in a monastery founded by his mother, and eventually a bishop himself, before he left for Brittany and Francia. This sort of storyline is a familiar one in hagiographies. Less familiar are his opponents, for he regularly combated and destroyed (or tamed) poisonous serpents, and once he had to face a sorceress with a trident. A particularly significant feature of the text is that, between his high-status origin and his later encounters in Francia (called by the author Romania) with King Childebert I (511-58), no kings are mentioned, and hardly any other secular people except his immediate family. In Britain, Samson seems to operate in an almost entirely ecclesiastical world, even though he moves about such a lot and gains preferment so systematically; wider political systems barely impinge there at all, although in his Breton and Frankish travels they are mentioned at once. This is a Breton, not a British, text, but the two culture areas were closely linked, and Breton and Welsh were effectively the same language in this period, thanks to migration from Britain to Brittany. It was at the least unnecessary for a Breton author to imagine that his subject had dealt with kings in Britain, even in order to get land and patronage for his monasteries. This makes Samson close to unique in the world of early medieval hagiography, but it may tell us something about the evanescence of British kingship, whether in the seventh century or the sixth.
Britain faced economic meltdown in the early fifth century, after the withdrawal of Roman armies and the end of the Roman provincial administration around 410. We cannot say if the Romans intended to return after they coped with the civil wars in Gaul in the same period, but anyway they did not do so. Britain effectively fell off the Roman map. In archaeological terms, the consequences were extreme: by 450 at the latest, villas were abandoned, urbanism had virtually ended, the countryside was partly abandoned around the old military focus of Hadrian’s Wall (although not elsewhere, probably), and all large-scale artisan production had ceased. In no other part of the empire was this economic simplification so abrupt and total, and it must reflect a sharp social crisis as well. Our early written sources are fragmentary (a few inscriptions, some writing by Patrick, the fifth-century British missionary to Ireland, and a mid-sixth-century hellfire sermon by Gildas), but they seem to show that by 500 western Britain, at least, was divided among a set of small-scale rulers, sometimes called kings (reges), sometimes tyrants (tyranni: a negative term in Gildas, but maybe related to tigernos, ‘ruler’ in Brittonic). A patchwork of tiny polities had replaced the Roman state. In eastern Britain there was by now a similar set of micro-kingdoms ruled by immigrant Anglo-Saxons; in the late fifth century these had been expanding westwards, but British counterattacks, obscurely led by a warlord called Ambrosius Aurelianus, had held them back at the edge of the Severn river basin. We shall come on to the Anglo-Saxons in a moment, but for now it can be noted that the evidence we have for the small scale of the British kingdoms and of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms each backs the other up, for otherwise one set would have prevailed more easily against the other.
How the British polities developed has been the subject of endless speculation, as the changes were so great and the evidence so exiguous and contested. (Here I mention Arthur only to set him aside, for the sources that cite him as in some way Ambrosius’ successor in the early sixth century in western or northern Britain are all late; by the ninth century, he was a recognized hero figure, but that is all that can be known about him.) Some things can be said, however; first, concerning language. Latin was still the normal literary language of inscriptions, and Roman titles like civis, citizen, appear in them, as they also do in Patrick and Gildas, but most people actually spoke Brittonic, the ancestor of Welsh. The Romano-British élite had doubtless spoken Latin, too (Welsh has a large number of Latin loanwords in it), but the peasantry did not, even in lowland Britain as far as we can tell, and spoken Latin soon ceased to be common, again unlike in most of the West. Secondly, lowland Britain was heavily Romanized in its economy and culture, but northern and western Britain were less so. Roman occupation was more military there (above all around Hadrian’s Wall, but in most of Wales as well), there were fewer cities, and traditional social structures were stronger. The kingdoms that seem to have been largest in post-Roman Britain were Dyfed, and Gwynedd in north-west Wales, both in relatively un-Romanized areas. This does not mean that they were simply successors of some pre-Roman political tradition; Gwynedd (Venedotia in Latin) was a new territorial name, and later tradition claimed that its rulers had come in the fifth century from north of the Wall; Dyfed was at least an old name (the Demetae were the earlier British people in the area), but the kingdom was in this period a zone of strong Irish immigration, and its ruler Vortipor, castigated by Gildas, has left us a bilingual inscribed monument in both Latin and Irish at Castelldwyran in Pembrokeshire. But, despite the complex history of both of these kingdoms, they do seem to have crystallized more easily because there were social structures there that did not depend on the Roman state: tight links of kinship and personal dependence, a wide sense of collective loyalty, and a long-standing military style to local authority, that can be called ‘tribal’. These tribal communities stretched south into Cornwall and Devon and northwards, past the Wall, into southern Scotland, where the British kingdoms of Rheged, Strathclyde and Gododdin are attested in slightly later sources. They seem to have been stably Christian, as Gildas’s denunciations also presume, but this was the only obvious Roman influence on them. One of their leaders may have been the ‘proud tyrant’, unnamed in Gildas but called Vortigern by the eighth century, who was blamed for inviting the Anglo-Saxons in at some moment in the fifth century; Vortigern (Gwrtheyrn in Welsh) was claimed as an ancestor by kings of Powys and Gwrtheyrnion in eastern Wales by the ninth century.
The post-Roman British in the lowlands probably operated on a smaller scale still. The only lowland powers who can be traced in any detail are the kings of Ergyng, Gwent, the Cardiff region and Gower, all in lowland south-east Wales, some documents for whom, land-grants to churches, survive from the late sixth century onwards: these kings ruled perhaps a third of a modern county each, and sometimes less. This was the Romanized section of Wales, and this sort of scale may well have been normal in the whole of lowland Britain. It probably derived from the first generations after the end of Roman rule, in which local landowners had to look to their own self-defence, and even the Roman city territories, the traditional units of government in lowland Britain as elsewhere, soon fragmented into rather smaller de-facto units. When they did so, they could sometimes call on Roman imagery, such as the civis terminology already mentioned, and also the imitative Roman lifestyle implied by the scatters of Mediterranean wine- and oil-amphorae and fine pottery found in several early sixth-century hill-fort sites, probable political centres, especially south and north of the Bristol Channel. Again, they were certainly Christian, as the land-grants show, and as the Life of Samson implies: even if they were too small-scale for the latter’s author to mention them, that author at least assumed a uniform Christian environment in lowland western Britain. But it is likely that they also drew on the political models of the western British kingdoms, for an imagery of tribal identity, and for the values of small-scale military activity, such as loyalty, bravery and feasting, which were new in the previously civilian lowland areas.
The previous two paragraphs use the words ‘seem to have’, ‘may have’, ‘likely’ and ‘probably’ in nearly every sentence: this faithfully reflects the surviving documentation. Everything is guesswork. If we follow the British (we can now call them Welsh) into the seventh and eighth centuries, the patterns become slightly clearer, and at least do not contradict what has just been said. By 700 the Anglo-Saxons had taken Somerset, the Severn valley and Lancashire, thus effectively confining the Welsh to three unconnected areas, largely upland, in what is now south-west England, Wales and southern Scotland. In these areas, however, kingdoms had continued to crystallize, and the tiny kingdoms of south-east Wales had merged into a larger one called Glywysing, which joined Gwynedd, Dyfed and Powys to make up the four major polities of Wales in this period. Gwynedd was probably always the strongest; Gildas had thought so already in the mid-sixth century, when he called its king Maelgwn the ‘island dragon’, and Cadwallon of Gwynedd (d. 634) raided far into the Anglo-Saxon lands, right up to northern Northumbria, as Bede recounts. In the ninth century its kings would become hegemonic in Wales. Our earliest poetic texts in Welsh date from the seventh century to the ninth, and these contain a number of laments on dead kings, including Marwnad Cynddylan, the earliest, for King Cynddylan, based in or near modern Shropshire, who died in the mid-seventh century, and Y Gododdin, the longest, for King Mynyddog of Gododdin, who supposedly took his army from his capital at Edinburgh to Catraeth, perhaps modern Catterick, where they all died around 600. These show a homogeneous set of ‘heroic’ values, which were clearly those of the Welsh aristocracy by 800 at the latest: ‘The warrior ... would take up his spear just as if it were sparkling wine from glass vessels. His mead was contained in silver, but he deserved gold.’ Or: ‘The men went to Catraeth, swift was their host. Pale mead was their feast, and it was their poison.’ It is not unreasonable to suppose that these values were already shared in the sixth century. Whenever they developed, however, they were a world away from those of Rome. This is important as a reflection of the political crisis we began with, for these military élites were lineal descendants of British Romans, unconquered by invaders; all the same, all their points of reference were by now different. They were quite parallel, however, to those of the Anglo-Saxons.
It is not easy to tell what Welsh kings did. They evidently fought a lot, and their military entourage is one of their best-documented features. They were generous and hospitable to their dependants, and (at least in literature) got loyalty to the death in return, although where they got their resources from is not so clear. They took tribute from subject and defeated rulers, and also tribute or rent from their own people, but the little we know of the latter implies that only fairly small quantities were owed by the peasant population to their lords; Mynyddog’s gold, silver and glass were a literary image, too. They did justice, along with clerics and aristocrats, that is to say in public, although there is little or no reference to them making law before the tenth century at the earliest. They patronized the church, but that church itself operated fairly informally through families of religious houses, each claiming foundation by charismatic monastic founders of the sixth century, Illtud in Glamorgan, Padarn in the centre-west, and so on. Overall, they acted in the framework of face-to-face, personal lordship, with no institutionalized administration at all. As we shall see in Chapter 20, that would hardly change until well after the period covered by this book.
The institutional simplicity just referred to was one thing that kept British/Welsh kingdoms small; royal power extended to a not always very subject peasantry, to the élites who feasted with (and got gifts from) the king, to the people most recently defeated in battle, and no further. Sometimes wider hegemonies were achieved, but until after 850 they were temporary. If we move northwards, however, we do find one kingdom which sometimes operated on a larger scale, that of the Picts, in what is now central and eastern Scotland: well to the north of any area the Romans influenced, but at least partly parallel in culture to the British/Welsh, and speaking a language descended, like Welsh, from Brittonic. The Picts remain amazingly obscure, even by British standards, including after their gradual conversion to Christianity in the late sixth and seventh centuries. Uniquely among European societies, they were apparently matrilineal, which means that Pictish royal daughters, marrying out, could bring legitimate succession to members of rival families, such as Talorcan (c. 653-7), son of King Eanfrith of Bernicia, but how this really worked is anyone’s guess. They were not always united (they had seven provinces by tradition, from Fife to Caithness), but their main king, the king of Fortriu, was often hegemonic over the whole of Pictland, and could fight off enemies with some effectiveness, as when Bridei, son of Beli (c. 672-93), the best-known king of the seventh century, destroyed the over-reaching Northumbrian king Ecgfrith, and with him Northumbrian political hegemony, at Nechtansmere in 685. At the height of Pictish power, in the eighth century, Onuist, son of Urguist (c. 729-61), defeated enemies across the whole of modern Scotland, establishing his own regional hegemony, which lasted on and off until the 830s. How the Picts managed this with no visible infrastructure, in one of the most unpromising terrains in Europe, remains a mystery; but they at least show it was possible.
Given the sharp social and cultural changes in the unconquered parts of Britain, it is hardly surprising that the early Anglo-Saxons were not significantly influenced by Roman traditions. Our written information about them focuses on a later period: Bede’sEcclesiastical History, written in the 730s, which really begins with the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity from 597 onwards, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a late ninth-century text, which begins to be plausible around the same time. Before the late sixth century, our knowledge has to be constructed essentially from archaeology. But it is at least the case that the Anglo-Saxon settlements were concentrated in the lowland areas of Britain, always the best-documented areas of the island in archaeological terms, and research in these areas has often been dense by European standards, so we can construct a relatively consistent picture of them.
The Anglo-Saxons came to Britain by sea, for the most part from Saxony in modern north Germany, including the small region known as Angeln; they spoke variants of the Germanic languages of Saxony and the Frisian coast. Their raids on Britain had begun as early as the third century (the Romans built coastal fortifications to counter them), but there is no evidence that their permanent settlement began before the second quarter of the fifth. Whether any of it was associated with invitations like that later ascribed to Vortigern cannot be known. Such stories are common after invasions, and there is little sign of post-Roman political units in eastern Britain strong enough to do any inviting, but it would be foolish to be anything other than agnostic about accounts that cannot be disproved (the same is true of the existence of Arthur). What can be said with certainty, however, is that the Anglo-Saxon settlement was very highly fragmented, more even than the pre-Clovis Frankish settlement in northern Gaul, and stayed so. Even in the late sixth century, after a period of political recomposition, we find at least nine documented kingdoms in the eastern half of what we can now call England, from Bernicia in the north to Wessex in the south, and there were probably several more. Most of these were the size of one or two modern counties, equivalent to the size of Roman city-territories, smaller than the smallest ex-Roman units we can ever find Germanic rulers controlling on the Continent. But what has become increasingly clear in recent years is that most of these kingdoms, even though they were so restricted in size, were themselves built out of much smaller building-blocks, sometimes called regiones by modern historians (it is a word also found in some eighth-century texts). These often covered around 100 square kilometres, though sometimes more and sometimes even less, 100 square kilometres being just over a quarter the size of the Isle of Wight, and just over a fortieth the size of Kent. Welsh kingdoms like Ergyng were a little larger than this around 600, but the order of magnitude is comparable. The best-attested of these small building-blocks were in the Fen-lands and the areas of the Midlands just west and south of them, which even in the late seventh century were not united into a single larger kingdom, unlike their neighbours to the east and west, respectively East Anglia and Mercia. This intervening area, called by Bede a bit weakly the Middle Angles, was listed as a separate set of units in a tribute list, the Tribal Hidage, probably dating from the later seventh century: the North and South Gyrwa of the Peterborough area, the Sweord Ora of part of Huntingdonshire, and so on. Units of this kind are also referred to casually in later documents, surviving as identifiable units in many larger kingdoms, and topographical research has identified many more.
This model for the Anglo-Saxon settlements, which I broadly accept, thus has the invaders settling in very small groups, initially covering a handful of local communities for the most part, which could, as in Wales, be called tribal. Political leadership would have been very simple and informal, though of course necessarily military, for a fragmented conquest is still a conquest. This picture further fits with the archaeology of early Anglo-Saxon settlements and cemeteries, which shows a very simple material culture, far simpler in every respect than that found anywhere on the ex-Roman Continent outside the Balkans. Ceramics were all hand-made, without even the use of kilns, before 700; iron-work was small-scale enough to have all been local; glass- and complex jewellery-making was rare before 550 and largely restricted to Kent even then, a kingdom influenced culturally by the Franks and perhaps sometimes ruled by them; even house types were much simpler and village structures more fragmented than in Saxony. These all point to a very modest ruling class and an undeveloped social hierarchy. And, as noted earlier, the eastern British polities that these small units replaced must have been no larger. How the lowland British themselves fitted into such units remains guesswork however. The Anglo-Saxons settled in a still-used Roman landscape as far as we can see, but seldom on former Roman sites; they hardly picked up Romano-British material culture at all (which further attests to the systemic crisis in post-Roman Britain), and adopted almost no loanwords into Old English from Brittonic. The British majority, that must overwhelmingly have been there, evidently adapted to Anglo-Saxon culture, rather than vice versa. This seems even to have been the case for enclaves that stayed under British control up to the years around 600, such as the Chilterns west of London and the region of Leeds.
The end of the sixth century and the start of the seventh seems to have been the moment in which these small units, which had doubtless been expanding in the meantime, began to crystallize into kingdoms the size of one or two counties; the latter emerge in the written record then, but archaeology, too, shows the beginnings of an internal hierarchy in rural settlements, together with some prestige royal centres like Yeavering in Northumberland (which even had a Roman-influenced theatre-like grandstand: below, Chapter 10), and the remarkable wealth of royal graves at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk and Prittlewell in Essex. The kingdoms that arguably crystallized first were Kent, East Anglia, Deira (roughly modern Yorkshire), Bernicia on the Northumberland coast, and Wessex in modern Oxfordshire and Hampshire; of the main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Mercia seems to have been the latest to emerge. The late sixth century was also, probably as a result of this crystallization, the period in which the Anglo-Saxons began to expand again at the expense of the Welsh kingdoms after the military stand-off of the early sixth century. Æthelfrith of Bernicia (c. 593-616) is recorded in both English and Welsh sources as a fighter, attacking westwards to Chester and probably also taking over Gododdin, up to Edinburgh; Ceawlin of Wessex (d. c. 593) may have been responsible for conquering the southern part of the Severn valley and the Chilterns, though here the evidence is late. ‘Probably’ and ‘seems to have’ recur here too, for our sources are so uncertain. What is clear, however, is that there was a much greater military protagonism among the leaders of these newly coherent kingdoms. They fought each other, indeed, rather more than they fought the Welsh. Some claimed temporary hegemony over neighbouring kingdoms, as Æthelfrith did over Deira, Æthelberht of Kent (d. 616) over his immediate neighbours, and the Deiran king Edwin (616-33) over Bernicia and some of the southern kingdoms as well.
The seventh century was dominated in political terms by two kingdoms, Northumbria and Mercia. Northumbria was the result of the unification of Bernicia and Deira, which became permanent after 651. Edwin, then Æthelfrith’s sons Oswald (634-42) and Oswiu (642/51- 70), then Oswiu’s son Ecgfrith (670-85) all claimed hegemonies in the south at various moments; they also extended either direct rule or overlordship into British and Pictish areas, and Ecgfrith even attacked Ireland once, in 684. These hegemonies remained intermittent, but their frequency presumably resulted from the size of their kingdom, which was the largest in England at that time. Mercia began much smaller, and it is not certain that it even existed as a single kingdom before its first powerful king, Penda (c. 626-55). It was centred in an inland area, around Tamworth and Lichfield in Staffordshire, which was close to the border of early Anglo-Saxon settlement, and as it crystallized it probably came to include smaller British-run units as well. Penda was also allied to Cadwallon of Gwynedd, with whose help he destroyed Edwin in 633; this victory (and Cadwallon’s own death a year later) probably gave him the status to absorb or gain hegemony over more of his neighbours, and he killed Oswald, too, in a defensive war this time, in 642. Oswiu destroyed him in return in 655, but Penda’s son Wulfhere (658-75) was able to rebuild his regional hegemony. From this point onwards Mercia was usually the political overlord of neighbouring kingdoms like the Hwicce of northern Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, Lindsey in north Lincolnshire, and most of the tiny Fenland polities: it sat squarely in the middle of southern Britain, a good strategic location. Northumbrian influence southwards was blocked as a result, and very soon Ecgfrith’s death at Pictish hands lessened its influence in the far north as well. By 700 or so, political power in the Anglo-Saxon lands was shared between four main kingdoms, Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex (which was by now extending its power into the British south-west) and East Anglia, with honourable mention also for Kent, small but unusually wealthy thanks to its Frankish links. Of these, Mercia was clearly the most powerful. Except for Kent, thse kingdoms would survive into the late ninth century.
These four kingdoms were bigger than Welsh kingdoms by now, but had many similarities all the same. The values of small-scale militarism are equally visible in our written sources. Beowulf, the longest Old English poetic text, stresses loyalty and heroism, and royal hospitality and gift-giving, much as Y Gododdin does. Beowulf ’s date is contested between the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, but its imagery fully fits other early texts. One example is Felix’s Life of Guthlac, a saint’s life of the 730s, which depicts its Mercian aristocratic saint as having been the leader of a war-band in his youth in the 690s, ‘remembering the valiant deeds of heroes of old’, who razed the settlements of his enemies with gay abandon and accumulated immense booty before changing his ways and becoming a monk. As late as the 690s (or 730s), that is to say, it was possible to be a small-scale independent freebooter, and to get credit for it, in that Felix writes it up with some enthusiasm. But kings themselves did not operate on so large a scale yet. TheAnglo-Saxon Chronicle, in a passage plausibly drawn from an earlier text, recounts the death of King Cynewulf of Wessex in 786: he was surprised in his mistress’s house by his rival Cyneheard, his predecessor’s brother, and killed before his entourage reached him; his entourage then fought to the death around him, despite being offered their lives; the following day Cynewulf’s army besieged Cyneheard in return, and after a failed negotiation Cyneheard and the eighty-four men with him were themselves killed; again, his men would not desert their lord, and Cynewulf’s avengers would ‘never serve his slayer’. The text heavily stresses the imagery of loyalty, but it is also important to note that an army of less than a hundred, contained in a single stockade, was determining the fate of a whole kingdom as late as the 780s.
Linked to this is a restricted set of royal resources. Kings had rights to tribute in food from their territory, but the evidence we have for this tribute implies, as in Wales, that it was pretty small, and perhaps only owed when the king or his entourage turned up to eat it. As late as 700, it is hard to say that Anglo-Saxon kings were resource-rich: they had enough gold and jewels to leave impressive burials like Sutton Hoo, but not necessarily enough to reward more than a small entourage or army, except in lucky years when they plundered an enemy. They also controlled land, and Bede makes it clear that by the 730s they used this to reward a military aristocracy, but there were the usual early medieval risks to this; Bede also says that if a king ran out of land his younger aristocrats would leave the kingdom.
These patterns were likely to keep kingship simple, royal administration sketchy, and kingdoms small, as in Wales. But in other respects the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were beginning to develop. For a start, they occupied the lowland areas of Britain, which are agriculturally richer, can sustain a higher population, and are also closer to the Continent. Archaeology shows us that the late seventh and early eighth century saw a notable increase in exchange between England and the Continent, centred on a series of trading ports which were soon controlled by kings, Hamwic (modern Southampton) in Wessex, London in Mercia (the Mercian kings conquered down to the lower Thames in, probably, the 660s, and quays along the Strand in London have been dated to the 670s), Ipswich in East Anglia, York in Northumbria (see below, Chapter 9). These ports soon developed their own local artisans, and can simply be referred to as towns, the first urban centres of Anglo-Saxon England; but they remained closely linked to kings, who were privileged recipients of their products, and who took tolls from them. Such tolls were available to kings throughout Europe, but in England, where kings were so small-scale, they were an important addition to royal resources.
Secondly, kings were closely supported by their aristocracies. We perhaps should not put too much weight on the imagery of loyalty in Beowulf or the Cyneheard narrative (after all, the men who died with Cyneheard had themselves been disloyal to King Cynewulf), but it is at least arguable that adult aristocrats who did not, or could not, stay loyal to kings had a difficult time, for they often ended up as ‘exiles’, as texts call them, without evident patronage, rather than simply finding welcome in a rival court. Kings and aristocrats were also linked by a slow development in power over land. Early Anglo-Saxon land-units do not seem to have been landed estates with a single owner and his or her dependent tenants, but, rather, territories from which kings and maybe also their aristocrats could take tribute, which as we have seen could be small, although it is also likely that unfree dependants on these estates paid rather more. Between the late seventh century and the tenth, these territories turned into estates, with rents and services which were much higher, benefiting kings and aristocrats alike, as we shall see in Chapter 19. It may well be that the politics of landed gift that Bede describes was not very old in the 730s, and that it was one of the first signs of this slow change. But the development of landownership would only be steady if political systems were strong and kings powerful. It was thus in the interest of aristocracies to accept increases in royal power, as they developed.
A third change was that the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms converted to Christianity. We know a lot about this because it was the central topic of Bede’s history. Bede (lived 673-735) was a monk at the linked monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow in northern Northumbria; he was a highly educated intellectual, and not obviously a political dealer (though he knew kings and bishops). He painted the conversion as a heroic narrative. It began with Gregory the Great’s Roman mission to Kent in 597, and expanded to several kingdoms including Northumbria in the next generation, but retreated after Edwin’s death; it was then revived by an Irish mission from Iona to Northumbria after 634. After the death of the pagan Penda in 655, Christianity was accepted, at least by kings and their immediate entourages, almost everywhere. It was then consolidated by two key events: in 664 the synod of Whitby marked the acceptance in Northumbria and elsewhere of the Roman date for Easter and, more widely, of Roman (rather than Irish) institutional structures for the church; and in 669, after a plague had killed most of the bishops of England, Theodore of Tarsus arrived from Rome as archbishop of Canterbury (668-90), and restructured the episcopacy as a collective hierarchy covering all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Church councils on a Continental model began in 672, and the Anglo-Saxon church was more and more evidently an organized body.
Bede saw these developments as self-evidently good, and divinely ordained. The conversion process was doubtless more political and more ambiguous than that, but his picture of a church victorious by the 670s is convincing, and is backed up by other evidence as well. Both bishops and an ever-growing network of monasteries grew prosperous as a result of royal gifts, documents for which begin to survive from the 670s; one could say that the church was the first beneficiary of the new politics of land, perhaps even before the aristocracy. By the early eighth century, if there was any aspect of Anglo-Saxon society that was by now parallel to that on the Continent, it was the church. This hierarchy was much more solid than that of the Welsh world, or, as we shall see, the Irish world; it was essentially a Continental import, and it looked to Francia and particularly Rome for inspiration. And it linked all the kingdoms for the first time. Bede, indeed, saw the conversion as of a single people, the Angli, a word which he tended to understand generically, as the ‘English’ rather than the ‘Angles’. It is not clear that many other people shared his vision of English common identity until Alfred in the late ninth century. But the network of bishops, between one and three per kingdom, covering every Anglo-Saxon polity and no Welsh-ruled areas, and looking systematically to a single archbishop at Canterbury, was at least a potential support to kings who wished to extend their hegemony outside their kingdom. This support was all the more potentially useful in that bishops in England seldom engaged in any political activity independent from their kings; the one exception, the Frankish-trained Wilfrid (d. 709), bishop of Ripon and York at different times, was thrown out of Northumbria by both Ecgfrith and his successor Aldfrith (685-704). They did not bring to the Anglo-Saxon polities any of the secular political ceremonial of Continental kingdoms; royal government remained simple, probably based on assemblies, until late in the eighth century. Anglo-Saxon kings did begin to legislate, however: first in Kent, with the laws of Æthelberht, the first king to be converted, around 602, followed by three successors later in the century, and then in Wessex, with the laws of Ine (688-726) around 690.
The possibilities for an expansion in royal authority that are represented by these developments were first taken up by three Mercian kings, who ruled almost without breaks for over a century, Æthelbald (716-57), Offa (757-96) and Cenwulf (796-821). They were not closely related, and their successions were not straightforward, but they built systematically on each other’s power-base. For a start, they conquered; for most of their reigns, all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Northumbria (and after 802 Wessex) recognized their hegemony. Secondly, more systematically than ever before, they took steps to absorb many of these kingdoms into Mercia. The king of the Hwicce is already by 709 called subregulus, ‘sub-king’, in documents, which for two more generations alternates withregulus on the one hand and minister on the other, and then after 789 becomes stably minister or dux. The king of Essex had a similar trajectory between 812 and around 835. Kent was absorbed with greater violence, for it threw off Mercian rule in 776, but then after 785 Offa was back in Kent, and acted directly as its king with no intermediary, except between 796 and 798, just after Offa’s death, when the local dynasty briefly took back power. Cenwulf put his brother in as king, and Kent was never independent again. Mercia thus steadily expanded; Charlemagne, Offa’s contemporary, regarded him as the only real king of the southern English.
This physical expansion was matched by much clearer evidence for some sort of administrative infrastructure. Royal charters to churches from the mid-eighth century begin to exclude from their cessions three ‘common burdens’, army-service, bridge-building and fortress-building, which were still due to kings; although army-service was doubtless traditional, the other two burdens seem to be new, and had to be organized. In the ninth century, the list of royal officers who no longer had to be entertained by the recipients of these cessions became quite long; the king had a rather larger staff by now. The traditional association of Offa’s Dyke, the 100-kilometre earthwork that delimits the borders of Wales, with King Offa seems certain, and the construction of this, crossing relatively remote areas as it often does, would also have required considerable organization. Offa reformed the coinage, and was one of the first Anglo-Saxon kings south of the Humber to put his name on coins. Mercia was by no means the richest part of England; that remained the east coast, where the ports were, and where an exchange economy was developing in the eighth century; but Offa controlled that coast by now, and he could begin to take systematic economic advantage from it. And kings now used church councils, following Frankish example (see below, Chapter 16); a sequence of councils, presided over by kings, is documented from 747 to 836, and many of their decisions were secular. One of them, in 786, hosted a papal legation, and its acts are notably wide-ranging. This network of measures and procedures indicates a structure for royal power which, in Offa and Cenwulf’s time, could be called a state.
This build-up of royal power was not inexorable. For a start, although, after Theodore of Tarsus, the church hierarchy linked all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, this was modified when Northumbria gained its own archbishopric at York in 735, perhaps to ward off Mercian influence, and when Mercia gained its own at Lichfield in 787. In the latter case, Offa had had trouble with Canterbury, which was too much associated with Kentish autonomism, and he found it safer to create an archdiocese under his own control, at least temporarily (in 803 the south was reuni fied under Canterbury). Secondly, the eighth century was a period of wars between rival branches of the royal family for kingship in Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria alike. In Mercia, this had no structural impact until 821, but thereafter political infighting undermined Mercian hegemony. The wide stability of the last three generations was lost, and was not picked up by any king until Alfred, in very different circumstances (below, Chapter 19). Charlemagne might recognize Offa as an equal (in diplomatic formality, at least), but Anglo-Saxon kingship was as yet much smaller-scale and less stable. It was also based on profoundly different roots, with no Roman infrastructure to build on, unlike in Francia. Conversely, it was at least moving in the direction of Frankish political structures. The Mercian kings probably did this entirely consciously; Francia was so much more powerful that it would have made complete sense to do so as much as possible. Alfred and his successors would follow Offa’s example too.
Ireland, which was never under Roman rule, had certain parallels to Wales and England in the fragmentation of its political structures, but here political decentralization was even more intense. No one knows how many kings Ireland had at any one time, but 100 to 150 is a widely canvassed estimate. Each ruled a túath or plebs, the Irish and Latin words respectively for the ‘people’ of each king; plebs means a local community in Continental Latin, but here it can equally well be translated as ‘kingdom’. These ‘kingdoms’ or ‘peoples’ varied very greatly in size and importance, but each was closely linked to a king, and was often named for the king’s family, the Cenél Conaill, the kindred of Conall, or the Uí Dúnlainge, the descendants of Dúnlang. Using the characterization already set out in the Welsh context, they can firmly be seen as tribes. Each had a fairly simple social structure, even the large kingdoms (the small ones may only have had a few family groups each): a network of free kin-groups owed clientship dues to a network of lords, who similarly owed dues to the king (himself related to many or most of his lords). These dues were generally in cattle, and were based on temporary patron-client relationships between independent landowners. Only the unfree were permanent dependants. Irish sources are unusual, for they are in large part law tracts, the private handbooks of lawyers; they are strikingly, often impossibly, detailed about tiny differences in status, obligation and legal category: there were supposedly up to fourteen ranks in free society, for example. How these minutely differentiated relationships really worked on the ground usually cannot be said. They were certainly very simply policed; most kings might have a steward to collect dues, a war-band to enforce and an annual assembly of the túath to deliberate, and that was all. But lawyers were one of a set of island-wide learned professions, along with poets and pagan priests (after Christianization, the latter were replaced by clerics), with a separate hierarchy and professional education. The elaboration of lawyers’ law could thus run far ahead of its applicability, although, conversely, skilled judicial expertise was rather more widely available than in most societies as simple as these.
Irish kingdoms were themselves arranged in hierarchies, with lesser kings owing tribute and military support to over-kings, and sometimes there were three or four levels of kingship. The lower levels of these hierarchies were probably fairly stable, for the smallest túatha had no prospect of going it alone successfully, and a permanent clientship relationship to a larger túath was the safest course of action. These ‘base-client peoples’ (aithechthúatha in Irish) were all the same seldom absorbed into larger groupings; this did happen sometimes, for some kingdoms did expand, but most small peoples survived for the whole of our period, as far as we can tell. This stability has sometimes been seen as the product of the archaism of Irish society, for the law tracts are graphic about the rituals and rules governing kingship. Críth Gablach, the major eighth-century tract on social status, states: ‘There is, too, a weekly order in the duty of a king: Sunday for drinking ale . . . ; Monday for judgement, for the adjustment of túatha; Tuesday for playingfidchell [a board game]; Wednesday for watching deer-hounds hunting; Thursday for sexual intercourse; Friday for horse-racing; Saturday for judging cases’ - an impossible set, of course, but probably a reasonably accurate characterization of the bulk of royal tasks. Kings had taboos, gessa, too: an eleventh-century poem lists those of each of Ireland’s five provinces, Ulster, Connacht, Meath, Leinster and Munster, and tells us, for instance, that the king of Tara could not break a journey in Mag Breg on a Wednesday or enter north Tethba on a Tuesday. All the same, even if the endlessly fascinating arcana of Irish kingship tell us a lot about the ritual force of tribal communitarian bonds, they do not explain why it was that an ambitious over-king could not sweep them away. Here, the best explanation is that Irish kings did not yet have an infrastructure suitable to rule directly over more than a small area, so that the cellular structure of tiny peoples had to be left to run itself. The patron-client bonds between kings were also less stable at the higher levels; no king could gain a hegemony over the whole of Ulster or Leinster for more than very brief periods, as revolt would soon break out and coalitions would crumble. Kings were fighters (a task curiously omitted from Críth Gablach’s list), and not much else.
The two major dynasties of kings in Ireland both contained several separate kingdoms, in rivalry with each other: the Uí Néill, dominant in Meath and western Ulster, the more powerful of the two, and the Éoganachta, dominant in Munster. Each of these dynasties had a main ritual centre, Tara and Cashel respectively, which was not actually lived in (Tara was an ancient and abandoned hill-fort; Cashel was newer, and later had a church built on it); the paramount king of the dynasty at any given moment was king of Tara or of Cashel. The Uí Néill and the Éoganachta seem to have established their dominance in the fifth century, although exactly how is obscure; Níall Noígíallach, the ancestor of the Uí Néill, is a largely legendary figure. Before their appearance, an important centre was Emain Macha (now Navan Fort) near Armagh. This was the focus of the entirely legendary saga-cycle of Cúchulainn, hero-fighter for King Conchobar of the Ulaid, the original core tribe of Ulster, whose kings were pushed east into modern Antrim and Down by the Uí Néill; they made up four kingdoms there by the sixth century. Leinster was largely outside the dominance of the two dynasties, and so even was Connacht, the poorest province, though the Uí Néill seem to have come from there originally and claimed kinship with the major dynasties of kings there. Successful Uí Néill kings could nonetheless claim temporary hegemonies among the kingdoms of any province except Munster (the Éoganachta, by contrast, stayed in Munster until the eighth century).
Amid the hundreds of Irish kings sparely documented in rival sets of annals, a few stand out. Diarmait mac Cerbhaill (d. 565) was arguably the king who moved the Uí Néill from legend into history (though many traditional stories attach themselves to him, too); he was ancestor of the main dynasties of the Uí Néill in Meath, and from his time onwards, at the latest, there was seldom doubt of the family’s dominance in the midlands and north of the island. Báetán mac Cairill (d. 581) of the Ulaid kingdom of Dál Fiatach attempted to establish a hegemony over the Isle of Man and Dál Riata in western Scotland as an alternative power-focus to the Uí Néill. He failed, but he shows that the fifth-century political settlement was not immutable. Seventh-century politics was more stable, with kings from the rival branches of the main dynasties succeeding each other regularly in all the provinces. We begin to find wider ambition again in the eighth. One example is Cathal mac Finguine (d. 742) of the Éoganacht Glendamnach in modern northern Cork, who began for the first time to link up with Leinster kings and attack Meath, until Áed Allán (d. 743) of the Cenél nÉogain, the northern Uí Néill of Tyrone, held him back in Munster in 737-8. Another is Donnchad Midi mac Domnaill (d. 797) of the Clann Cholmáin of the Uí Néill of Meath, who from the 770s was paramount in Leinster and keen to fight Munster kings as well. Their successors, Feidlimid mac Crimthainn (d. 841) from the Éoganacht of Cashel, easily the most aggressive Munster king before the end of the tenth century, and his Uí Néill enemies will be looked at in Chapter 20; the ninth century was more clearly a period of political aggregation, when traditional rules were disrupted by Viking attack and increasingly broken by native rulers as well. But there was a continuity from the eighth century all the same; that was when ambitious kingship first broke the old boundary between the Éoganachta and the Uí Néill. Conversely, Donnchad Midi did not obviously have a style of kingship that differed from that of his ancestor Diarmait mac Cerbhaill; the Irish were very slow indeed to consider the sort of political infrastructural change that was developing in England.
Ireland began to convert to Christianity in the fifth century, thanks largely to the mission of the Briton Patrick, whose writings survive but whose own career (and even dating) is largely obscure; by the late sixth, when Irish written sources begin, formal paganism seems only a memory, at least among élites, and the clergy fitted easily into the learned professions after that. But Irish Christianity was different. It had an episcopal network, attached to the kingdoms, but it also had an increasingly wealthy and powerful network of monastic families, whose connections went in different directions from those of political and episcopal hierarchies. Armagh claimed episcopal primacy from the seventh century onwards, on the grounds of a largely spurious association with Patrick. This was contested by Kildare in Leinster, and largely ignored by the churches subject to the monastery of Iona in western Scotland; the latter was the chief cult site of Dál Riata, but was, interestingly, controlled by an Uí Néill dynasty from the time of its foundation by Colum Cille (Columba, d. 597) in 563. The monastery of Clonmacnois in the centre of Ireland had fewer claims to primacy, but achieved considerable wealth by obtaining land and lesser monasteries, in an area of relatively weak kingdoms (its abbots were generally drawn from aithechthúatha), and by the mid-eighth century was prosecuting its own secular politics by force of arms. The episcopal and monastic churches had firmer views on accumulating wealth in land (as opposed to cattle) than most kings and aristocrats, and by the eighth century their leaders were probably richer than all but a few kings; this was a future resource for political power (and, by the ninth century, an object of plunder by royal rivals as well). The Irish church had some sense of Ireland-wide identity, just as the legal profession had. Church councils began already in the 560s, education in Latin must have begun around then too, and in the seventh century there was a flowering of ecclesiastical literature - hagiography, penitentials, poetry, grammars - parallel to that of secular law. Irish clerics and intellectuals had some influence in Francia, from Columbanus (d. 615) to John the Scot (d. c. 877), the ninth-century West’s greatest theologian. But that identity was not, unlike eventually in England, in itself an underpinning for secular ambition; the Irish church was in its own way as fragmented as secular authority.
The tiny northern Antrim kingdom of Dál Riata seems to have expanded into western Scotland from the late fifth century, occupying what is now Argyll and some of the Hebridean islands. Its king Áedán mac Gabráin (d. c. 609), Columba’s patron, had thirty years of military protagonism in northern Britain (he fought and lost to Æthelfrith in 603), and so did some of his successors, at least up to the 640s; after that, Dál Riata power in Scotland fragmented into two or three rival lineages with separate power-bases, a process familiar in Ireland as well. Argyll was nonetheless a solid political focus; it was in size, even though probably not in resources, already larger than any kingdom in Ireland. The colonial bet of sixth-century Dál Riata in this respect paid off. In the eighth century, starting with Onuist son of Urguist, it was subject to Pictish hegemony more often than not, and this continued into the ninth, although by then intermarriage between the two ruling families (made easier by Pictish matrilineal rules, although patrilineal succession was coming in by the ninth century even there) meant that the same king could claim inheritance in both. This was the basis for what seems to have been a double coup by Cinaed (Kenneth) mac Ailpín (d. 858), a Dál Riata prince, first around 840 when he took Dál Riata, and then around 842 in Pictland itself. Kenneth transferred his political seat to the Perthshire heartland of the southern Picts; this reflected the overall dominance of the Pictish lands, but was also, probably, rendered necessary by Viking attacks in Argyll. He seems to have ruled in effect as a Pictish king, but the kingdom of Alba or Scotia which his descendants ruled was after the end of the ninth century ever more clearly one dominated by Dál Riatan, that is, Irish aristocrats, Irish law, Irish ecclesi astical culture and eventually the Irish language. Unification was a slow and intermittent process, but Alba by 900 was nonetheless already much larger and more stable than any Irish kingdom or over-kingdom, and this must reflect the fact that its core area was by now the former Pictish provinces. Dál Riata, so small in Ireland, was thus in purely political terms the most successful Irish kingdom ever. Whatever the Pictish political infrastructure consisted of, it was the foundation for that.