Anglo-Saxons II

Who Were the Anglo-Saxons?

The people we call the Anglo-Saxons were the descendants of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and other North Sea peoples who had crossed into Britain after the collapse of Roman rule and gradually pushed the native British westward into Wales and Cornwall. By 871, when a young West Saxon prince named Alfred came to the throne of Wessex, his kingdom was the last serious English power left standing against the Danish armies that had already swallowed Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia. Alfred's long, patient war against the Danes, his fortified burhs, his reform of the laws, and his insistence that English priests read English books made him the figure around whom a wider English identity could finally crystallize. By the early tenth century his grandson Athelstan was calling himself king of the English, and the word meant something it had not meant before.

Homeland and Way of Life

Anglo-Saxon England was a country of villages. Most people lived in clusters of timber houses around an open green, with their plowlands divided into long strips and worked in common rotation. The heavy plow had spread across the lowlands, and the rich clay soils of the Midlands and the south fed a population that was growing steadily through the tenth and eleventh centuries despite war and bad harvests. Sheep mattered enormously: English wool was already a prized export to the cloth towns of Flanders, and the great upland flocks of the Cotswolds and the Welsh marches would still be the country's chief source of foreign silver three centuries later. The towns were small by continental standards but real: London on the Thames, York under Danish and then English rule, Winchester as the old capital of Wessex, Norwich and Lincoln in the east. A town meant a market, a mint, a wall, and a church, and by the year 1000 England had perhaps a hundred of them.

Warfare, Power, and Limits

The Anglo-Saxon army was built around the fyrd, a militia of free landholders who owed military service to the king, stiffened by the housecarls of the great lords, professional warriors who fought on foot with two-handed axes and long mail coats. They were good soldiers, and at Stamford Bridge in September 1066 King Harold's housecarls destroyed a Norwegian invasion in a single afternoon. Three weeks later the same army, exhausted by a forced march south, was broken at Hastings by William of Normandy's mounted knights and crossbowmen. The conquest that followed was thorough and harsh. Within twenty years almost every Anglo-Saxon lord above the rank of village thegn had been killed, exiled, or dispossessed, and a new French-speaking nobility sat in their halls. Yet the conquest did not erase the people. The peasants still spoke English, the parish priests still preached in it, and the new lords were a thin layer of perhaps eight thousand families ruling a population of nearly two million. Over the next two and a half centuries the two cultures slowly grew into one.

Beliefs, Customs, and Society

Christianity had reached the Anglo-Saxons twice, once from Irish missionaries who came down from Iona in the seventh century and once from Roman missionaries sent by Pope Gregory the Great, and the meeting of the two traditions at the Synod of Whitby in 664 had set the English church on a Roman footing while keeping much of its Celtic warmth. By the late Anglo-Saxon period that church was producing some of the finest scholarship in Europe. Bede, writing at Jarrow in the early eighth century, gave the English their first history of themselves. Aelfric and Wulfstan, writing around the year 1000, produced sermons in plain Old English that ordinary parish priests could actually read aloud. Anglo-Saxon law was preserved in the vernacular too, an unusual habit on a continent where almost everything official was written in Latin. After 1066 the language of government became French and the language of the church remained Latin, but English never died as a written tongue and never even stopped being a literary one. By the time of Geoffrey Chaucer, born around 1340, it had become the speech of the court again and the medium of one of the great poems of medieval Europe.

Contacts, Conflicts, and Legacy

The slow fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Norman is one of the quietest revolutions in medieval history. The first generation after Hastings spoke French, the second still preferred it, the third used it at court but English at home, and by the early thirteenth century even the descendants of William's companions were thinking in the language of their tenants. The loss of Normandy to the French crown in 1204 cut the Anglo-Norman aristocracy off from its continental homeland and forced it to become English in self-defense. By 1300 a knight whose great-grandfather had fought under William now spoke English as his first language, married into families with Anglo-Saxon names, and called himself an Englishman without irony. The most visible symbol of the new fused people was a weapon. The longbow, drawn from yew or wych elm and shot by yeomen archers from the villages of England and Wales, became in the early fourteenth century the terror of European battlefields. It is anachronistic to put it in the hands of Alfred's housecarls, but the people who would carry it at Crecy in 1346 and Agincourt in 1415 were the great-great-grandchildren of the men who had stood with Harold at Hastings, now speaking a language that had absorbed thousands of French words but kept its old Germanic bones. By 1337, when Edward III claimed the French throne and opened the long war that would define the next century, the English were fully themselves.