The Story of England, page 7
The next forty years are among the most critical in British history but are among the least understood. The situation on the ground was evidently radically different between western Britain, where Roman British society survived with cities and tribal ‘kings’, and the east, where a mixed British and Germanic society was already developing. But the Roman world didn’t disappear into a void: civil society still existed. Even close to London in 429 Verulamium was a still functioning city, where the former Roman official Germanus of Auxerre, who came from Gaul to visit the shrine of Alban the protomartyr, could be received by civic authorities and find pilgrim hostels and the wherewithal to receive visitors. Indeed some cities – Bath, Cirencester and Gloucester among them – survived as centres into the late sixth century. But, according to a Gallic chronicle, in the late 440s ‘Britain fell under the control of Saxons.’
Gildas’s account also points to the same decade: he says that in 446 attacks by Anglo-Saxon raiders had become so severe that British authorities made a further last-ditch but fruitless appeal for military aid in a letter to the Roman consul Aetius. By then, if later traditions are to be believed, disorder had spread across southern Britain and civil wars had broken out between regional warlords, with mercenary revolts and counter-marches by predatory armies. Gildas gives us graphic images of the breakdown of civic order: demolished buildings and overturned altars, unburied dead in town squares. Where this took place is not known, for no archaeological evidence of wholesale devastation has so far been detected, and it may be that Gildas is reporting a localized disaster. But there is one significant detail where his sweeping account has been amply confirmed. In lowland Britain this was a period of progressive abandonment of cities by local authorities and of retreat to the old Iron Age hill forts. Over forty of them have yielded archaeological evidence of this shift, among them Cadbury Castle in Somerset and the magnificent fort at Burrough Walls on the Jurassic escarpment over the Wreake valley near Leicester – the old tribal centre of the Corieltauvi. There is no doubt then that by the middle of the fifth century important social change was in the offing. Romanitas was on the wane and in lowland Britain, still populous, and in places still well-off, a return to older modes of society was under way.
And in Kibworth, our scanty sources, such as they are, now run out. The villa is abandoned, its wall paintings crumbled, the floor tesserae scattered and its coins are out of use. The local community is left to fend for itself under a Welsh-speaking chief (though perhaps still owing allegiance to a civic authority in Leicester), while to the east the news is of a growing number of Anglian and Frisian settlements, in some places tribes and clans settled under their chiefs around towns, bearing weapons in exchange for land, speaking a language very different from that of the Britons. Romanitas with all its benefits is over now, and its technology, its level of material wealth – and its order – for many would not be regained till the eighteenth century. Locally and nationally the narrative now moves into the hands of the newcomers.
3. Angles and Saxons
Some time towards the end of the fifth century, perhaps around the year 475, a band of people picked their way up a little stream which flows down between low hills west of the River Welland. Heading towards the Kibworth ridge, their track led past British villages and ruined Roman villas by Langton Brook and on Glooston Hill. Men, women and children, horses carrying packs, tents, poles and cooking pots; we might guess a couple of hundred people in all. Their war gear was not Roman – their wooden circular shields were studded with leather with iron bosses, they had dragon-patterned belt buckles, fleece-lined wooden scabbards and enamelled sword hilts. Their spears had long wide flanged blades, their horses’ harnesses had crude linked-iron bridle bits. Though there were echoes of Roman war gear in the leaders’ helmets hanging on leather straps from their saddles, these were mutated copies of Roman cavalry helmets with neck flaps and cheek pieces, but with boar’s head nasal pieces inlaid with garnets, and tinned plaques with serpents and wolves’ heads.
Among them was a striking young woman. She was of medium height – 5 foot 6 inches, well-built and strong. She was young, around twenty years – it is easy to forget that most of the new migrants must have been young. She wore a linen tube dress with a wool undergarment held by two bronze cruciform shoulder brooches with elongated horses’ heads. Her jewellery included animal bone amulets, rings and, at her waist, girdle hangers, softly tinkling, delicately punched with dotted lines of decoration: imitations of a Roman chatelaine’s keys – not real keys but symbols of her position as woman of the house, the hlafdig. Round her neck hung a bear claw amulet and a large orange fluted Roman melon bead. As for her ethnicity, that is another matter. We speak of the newcomers as Anglo-Saxons and refer to the ‘Coming of the English’ as a definable historical event; but the fact is that the population of Britain remained largely the same. The same people who were there in the Iron Age and under Rome emerge again at the end of the Dark Ages speaking Anglo-Saxon. As we cannot hear her speak we cannot tell whether she was British or of mixed race. Her dress and ornaments might indicate that she was what we call Anglo-Saxon – except the fluted Roman bead: perhaps an heirloom from her British grandmother? On such matters archaeology is silent.
They were then, we must imagine, typical of the migrants of the day, an amalgam of native Britons and older settlers – Frisians, Angles, Saxons and Danes – plus new migrants from Frisia, Jutland, Denmark and Belgium in the later fifth century. It would have been a two- to three-day journey across the wide seas – ‘ofer brad brimu’ – in long curving ships propelled with oars like the fourth-century Nydam ship from Denmark. There were clearly some Frisian-speakers. Place names such as Rothwell and Rothley contain the Frisian word roth (‘clearing’) and in two places south of the Welland migrants buried their dead with pottery from the same Frisian workshop as examples found at Saint-Gilles-les-Termonde in eastern Flanders, revealing a remarkably precise example of connections between the continent and this part of the East Midlands in around 500.
But the majority of the settlers in East Anglia and the Midlands were speakers of the Germanic dialect we call Anglian, which takes its name from a region of Schleswig still called Angeln – on a promontory projecting into the Bay of Kiel on the Baltic side of Jutland. This is where the name England comes from, as Bede writing in 721 says in his famous summary of the origin of the gens Anglorum:
From the Angles, that is, the country which is called Anglia, and which is said, from that time, to remain desert to this day, between the provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, are descended the East Angles, the Middle Angles, the Mercians, and all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the river Humber, and the other nations of the English.
Though the ethnic mix of early England was predominantly Celtic, the basic story of a sizeable Anglian migration from Jutland must be true. It is likely that the ancestors of many of the band who settled in Kibworth and its region had been in East Anglia for a couple of generations or more, some maybe since the end of Roman rule. Others were recent migrants come over to join their kinsmen and kinswomen. They may have had a paramount leader for whom they used the word cyning, ‘guardian of the kin’, from which comes our word ‘king’. According to an ancient Midland tradition he was a man called Icil, son of Eomer, grandson of Angeltheow and ancestor of the Mercian royal pedigree. Long afterwards this family tree was remembered by a descendant, the holy man Guthlac, who was born around 673 and whose family tree dated back to the late fifth century, counting ‘step by step’ over 200 years, the ‘oldest and noblest family in Mercia back to Icil with whom it began in days of old’.
In today’s parlance they were economic migrants as much as warbands, hoping to find a livelihood in new lands in lowland Britain. They had made their way into the East Midlands through the Welland valley, leaving as their markers cemeteries with distinctive knobbed pots; their war gear and brooches; and also their place names – as always, silent markers. The earliest stratum of place names left by Germanic migrants consists of names ending in ‘ham’, the Old English for a ‘village or collection of dwellings’. This very common English place name (West Ham, Tottenham and Fulham for example) is a marker for the early Anglo-Saxon expansion across lowland Britain from the east. It is especially associated with Roman sites, towns, villas and the roads by which they travelled in the decayed but still populous former province of Britain. These ‘ham’ names have their greatest concentration in the east, the earliest area of settlement. There are large numbers in Lincolnshire, seventy in Suffolk, nearly eighty in Norfolk and a small sprinkling in the East Midlands: six each in Rutland and Northamptonshire, a dozen in Leicestershire. This spread is indicative of the Anglian expansion out of East Anglia from around 500. The Welland, their route into Leicestershire, is not a big river (it is only navigable as far as Spalding) but it is a very old cultural boundary between zones. Its valley for example appears to have been a border zone between the Corieltauvi and the Catuvellauni. Surrounded as it is by fine farming country, it is one of the earliest settlement areas in the Midlands.
Beyond the Roman town of Medbourne, where an Anglian community had already settled, ‘marvellous goodly meadows’ stretch between Welham Hill and the Langtons, as noted by the Tudor traveller John Leland. In the area is a cluster of early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, one of them on the river at Welham. It was from there perhaps in the late fifth century that a new wave of Anglian settlers moved into the lands that would become the homeland of the Middle Angles and eventually part of Mercia. From Welham, the shallow valleys of two streams fed by springs on the Kibworth ridge naturally led the migrants northwards and both are marked by early-Anglian cemeteries.
Heading on foot up towards Kibworth the traveller crosses one of the streams, the Lipping, by an ancient ford at Stonton Wyville which is still twenty yards wide in wet weather, the water deep enough to cover a car. Small but fast flowing in winter, when it can still flood neighbouring fields in the bottom of the valley, the stream is a perennial source of good water. Beyond the ford the walker passes under ‘Knaves Hill’, its name derived from the Old English cnafa, meaning ‘boy’, ‘youth’ or ‘young warrior’ – it is the site of an early-Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery. The newcomers seem to have moved along the stream and over rising country to the low ridge on which Kibworth stands today.
There on the ridge where the Roman villa stood, a Welsh-speaking community still lived, cultivating the fields by the abandoned buildings. Here perhaps one of the lesser migrant leaders and his clan stayed while another group moved into the neighbouring valley of the river the Celts called Glen. Here they settled, leaving rich warrior graves and the burial of the woman described at the top of this chapter. Close by was the former civitas of Leicester, with its Roman walls still standing, where the old British population continued to live, perhaps under a civic authority, a praefectus civitatis; maybe even with a Christian church. Big Anglo-Saxon cemeteries outside the city at Thurcaston and Humberstone are further signs of the newcomers’ presence. By now civic amenities had declined and although the Roman aqueduct still functioned, the grand civic buildings were no longer in use. From early Anglo-Saxon poetry it is easy to imagine the migrants’ response to the huge and now derelict bath house, one of the most dramatic surviving Roman buildings in Britain, now falling into ruin. ‘Wreatlic is thaes wealstan, wyrde gebraecon …’ – ‘Wondrous wallstones, broken by fate … the courtyard pavements smashed, the work of giants, their roofs fallen, the cement on their gates split by frost … the bright painted murals in the town … many the bath houses.’
The earliest English settlement at Kibworth dates from this time, around 500. Its presence was completely unsuspected till the summer of 2009, when a stratified fragment of an incised patterned early-Anglo-Saxon bone comb was found with pottery and metalworking slag under the car park of the Coach and Horses pub on the A6. These were not chance drops. The slag was perhaps from making tools or iron swords; or brooches and pins for women’s and men’s clothes, like the pair of cruciform brooches found recently by metal detectorists, which probably came from the grave of an early settler; the first traces of the ‘English’ inhabitants of the village.
From Angeln to England
So into this fragmented late-Roman world, still perhaps with its rundown but partially functioning cities and its populous countryside, the migrants came, and out of it the earliest English tribes and kingdoms emerged. They were led by kings who were able to establish dynasties and dominate their region with their armed followings, whom they rewarded with treasure, weapons, war gear, slaves, women and land. The first Anglian immigrants in the area may be dated to around 475–500, later than in East Anglia, and the first ‘kings’ arose perhaps in the sixth century. Our settlers who had journeyed overland from their core area of power in Suffolk were augmented by new migrants from across the North Sea who had come in increasing numbers into eastern Britain after the early 400s. That said, historians are still in the dark as to exactly how things happened on the ground and about the beginnings of that imperceptible process in society, language and custom by which the Roman Britons became English. How such people got their land in the Glen valley and the Kibworth hills, how they appropriated the villa sites along the Langton Brook, is not known – whether for example it was by negotiation or even treaty, through deals between Anglian cyninges and a surviving civic authority – a praepositus or praefectus civitatis in Leicester (as there was still in Lincoln in the 620s); whether it was by peaceful assimilation or by ethnic cleansing, killing the men and enslaving the women and children. Depending on local circumstances, no doubt both were the case.
Later written sources for these events are to say the least patchy. Bede wrote his great account of the origin and conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 720s at Jarrow in Northumbria on the Tyne using largely Northumbrian and Kentish sources and informants; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, compiled from earlier material in Wessex in the 890s, inevitably has a southern viewpoint. But the annals of Mercia are lost. Our only account of these momentous events from a Midland perspective appears in much later chronicles of the thirteenth century, and is piecemeal, confused, unverifiable and hence of dubious value (because it is possible that it is simply an imaginary reconstruction.) It describes an invasion from East Anglia into the East Midlands, the lands of Middle Angles, towards 500, and the formation of an early Mercian kingdom in the Trent valley in the 570s or 580s. This account does at least match what is known from DNA and archaeology. In reality though it was perhaps not a single datable event but a long process by which British tribal groupings in the old area of the Corieltauvi were overcome by Anglian-speaking chieftains from eastern Britain with their ethnically mixed warbands. A key idea though is the tradition that just like the Goths, Vandals and Huns in their wanderings in Europe, the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain with what the Germanic tradition called cyninges – kings.
Post-Roman Kibworth then comprised both Anglian and British communities. The Anglian chief’s wooden hall was of a kind excavated at West Stow village in Suffolk (dating from the 420s to 650), a simple timber frame on a raised wooden platform set inside a fenced enclosure to keep the animals safe from rustlers and wolves. Around it were other huts, a threshing floor, a clay bread oven, a small mud and thatch horse mill, weaving sheds and a smithy working metal. Most Anglo-Saxon villages of any size would have had these. Initially we must conjecture the native and Anglian communities lived alongside each other but separately (as for example is implied by the place name Walton, north of Kibworth: the ‘tun of the Welsh’). The area the Anglo-Saxon migrants chose for their first settlement was a few hundred yards away from the Iron Age fields of the Britons, on rising ground near the site of the Roman cemetery, suggesting that at first they deliberately put down roots away from the huts of Britons. The find of slag, pottery and a bone comb fragment places the early centre at the present Coach and Horses pub, on the ancient track which in time would become ‘the King’s highway’ and then Main Street and finally the A6: the core of today’s village of Kibworth.
This first century of ‘English’ history is shrouded in darkness. During this time the tale of the migration was shaped into a narrative in the courts of various early kings of Angles and Saxons. In modern times a number of royal and noble burials have given insight into the early culture of the Anglo-Saxons, such as the ship burials at Sutton Hoo and Snape and most recently the rich East Saxon princely grave uncovered at Prittlewell by Southend. But despite the almost incredible riches of the seventh-century Staffordshire treasure, archaeologists have not yet found the grave of any early chief of Mercia. But there is one key area of evidence. We know these early Mercian kings were commemorated in song, that their pedigrees were handed down in poems that hark back to the migration period, like Beowulf, which was originally composed in an Anglian-speaking region perhaps on the edge of the Fens. Memories and traditions of the migration-era kings were turned into heroic narratives which were recited and sung by bards before the hearth in the king’s hall. ‘Since we first came over the wide waves, seeking Britain, to overcome the Welsh and win ourselves a kingdom’ as a later poem put it. In Anglo-Saxon culture this foundation myth was told and retold for centuries; rather as in the USA immigrants from Ireland and Italy maintain a tenacious loyalty to the idea of their places of origin.
