Anglo-Saxon England: A Survey

Roman Britain reached its official end in AD 409, when the last of the legions departed the British isles to fight on the continent. Not all the soldiers left; some remained behind, privatizing their services to the highest bidder, and others cut their losses and settled in the towns and countryside. Britain remained a Roman province in name only, and with the departure of the Romans new invaders set their sights on the island: the Germanic tribes of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. In truth these continental peoples had been raiding Britain for some time, but now they began to settle and pushed inwards from the east. Eastern Britain succumbed to the Anglo-Saxons (though this was likely more a matter of acculturation than conquest), and by the turn of the 6^th century the original British culture was largely confined to the western fringes of the island, in Wales and Cornwall. A Christian Celtic culture flourished around the Irish Sea, and an Anglo-Saxon culture had embedded itself in eastern Britain.

Having conquered the British Isles—either by acculturation or conquest—the Anglo-Saxons transformed the landscape of eastern Britain. The first half of Anglo-Saxon Britain is marked by the rise and fall of various kingdoms. The original Britons, who still clung to their culture, were slowly pressed to the western fringes of the island. The main English kingdoms, which played pivotal roles in the history of this time period, were the kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex. These kingdoms were at variance and warred with one another, and a number of kings conquered wide tracts of territory, becoming semi-overlords of southern Britain, and received the title Bretwalda (meaning “King of Britain”). Amid the constant feuds and bloodletting, Christianity spread like wildfire. Christianity had been introduced to the island by the Romans, and around AD 650 it blossomed. After this point the religious changes in Britain wouldn’t be matched until the Reformation Period a thousand years later. As an example, midway through the 7^th century there were little more than a dozen monasteries on the island, but by the advent of the Viking Age there were at least two hundred.  The changes wrought by the establishment of the Anglo-Saxons weren’t limited to religion or politics; as the late historian John Green notes:

[The Anglo-Saxon Age] was, in fact, an age of revolution—an age in which mighty changes were passing over every phase of the life of the English-men; an age in which heathendom was passing into Christianity, the tribal king into the national ruler, the aetheling into the thegn; an age in which English society saw the beginnings of the change which transformed the noble into a lord, and the free ceorl into a dependent or a serf; an age in which new moral conceptions told on the fabric of our early jurisprudence, and in which custom began to harden into written law.

     (from The Conquest of England, 1883)

The relentless feuds weakened the squabbling kingdoms, and a third invader since the days of the Romans took advantage of their weakness. The Northmen (mainly the Danes, but also including Norwegians and Swedes) began raiding the British isles before invading to seize land for farming and settlement. When raiding they were known as Vikings, but they were principally known as the Northmen (“Viking” is a verb rather than a noun, meaning “raiding,” so saying “Viking Raiders” is a lot like saying “Policing Policemen”). In time the Danes swallowed Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia and created from their residue “The Danelaw,” land controlled by various Danish warlords. The Danes marched against Wessex, but a famous Wessex king, Alfred the Great (the only English monarch to be known as “The Great”) successfully opposed them. He halted the spread of the Northmen and kept England (embodied in Wessex) alive. His later successors weren’t as successful, however, and for a brief period of time the Danes, under King Cnut (a.k.a. Canute), ruled all of the British isles except for the western contingents of the Britons. Power eventually transferred back to English rulers, but this was short-lived: for a time England had been populated by Norman settlers and nobles, and these were the first stages of the fourth (and last) major invasion of the British Isles: that of the Normans.