The Story of England, page 8
The voice of the Anglian migrants themselves can be faintly heard in their earliest poems, like Widsith, Deor and Beowulf, which though composed much later contain oral traditions harking back to real people and events in the late fifth century. Of course, no written texts exist from the English themselves from this time. Except for a few runic inscriptions, writing only starts among them when their rulers adopted Christianity, starting in Kent in 597. But in their oral stories the Mercians and later English preserved dynastic pedigrees and heroic tales of their ancestors before they came to England. The possibility of a historical kernel to such material has often been rejected by modern historians, but oral traditions can have great tenacity – after the migrations of Indo-European speakers into late-Bronze Age India poems were preserved with uncanny linguistic accuracy for two millennia before they were committed to writing.
The early Old English poems were all composed in the Anglian dialect and some contain very archaic survivals in verse forms, metre, language, images and stories. For example, one of the earliest Old English poems about a bard called Widsith contains fragments of royal deeds and genealogies from before the migration: stories about kings’ deeds, their generosity, gift-giving and success in war. These were the kind of songs sung in the royal and noble halls of the Middle Angles around Kibworth in the Dark Ages. One in particular long remembered in Mercia was the tale of a continental chief called Offa of Angeln (after whom the famous eighth-century king of Mercia was named). This Offa may have lived in the fourth century AD and around him in later times legends gathered among the Anglian peoples in Britain which were put into writing in eighth- and ninth-century Mercia, and were still available as traditions in the later Middle Ages in the great cult centre at St Albans, where they had particular reason to remember the generosity of the Mercian royal family. In these legends the ancient Offa lived on the continent three generations after Woden, but more realistically was the father of Angeltheow, grandfather of Eomer and great-great-grandfather of Icil, who was viewed as the founder of the Mercian dynasty in Britain and was perhaps the chief who led the migration into the Midlands. This first Offa also appears in Beowulf – ‘famed for his fighting and giving by men worldwide; spear-bold warrior he ruled wisely with wisdom over his inheritance …’
These poems give us a sense of the heroic culture which the Anglian warbands brought with them into the Midlands of Britain around 500, within living memory of the migrations. Traditions partly invented no doubt, but partly commemorating real ancestors of the kings who would rule in the English Midlands in the seventh to eighth centuries and create the first kingdom of what they called the ‘patria of all the English’. Even if all the stages were not accurately remembered such poetic genealogies contain the kind of real pedigrees found in pre-industrial societies across the world, where the descent of kings and heroes is always best recorded, from the Rig Veda to Homer and the Irish epics. It is likely then that Angeltheow and Eomer were real chiefs in Europe, that Icil was the man who either brought his kin group to Britain or who founded a kingly line in Britain at some date between the late fifth century and the 510s or 520s: ‘the famous and most noble kin among the Angles, descended from the royal line of Icil’. If anyone, it was this man who led his clan and his warband from East Anglia into the land of the Middle Angles around 500.
Change and continuity
By the mid-500s the British-speaking societies of the eastern part of Britain had fallen under the domination of the newcomers. The news by then had travelled to the other end of the Mediterranean. In a report that must have sounded rather like a tale from another planet, in the 540s in Constantinople the historian Procopius spoke through a Latin interpreter to an Angle travelling with a Frankish embassy who told him that Britain was no longer ‘Roman’ but now divided between the indigenous Britons, Angles and Frisians. Later Midland traditions indeed refer to a push west in the middle of the sixth century, and to wars in the Midlands in which the Angles were victorious and the Britons driven into flight. Modern geneticists have speculated that there was ethnic cleansing in some areas of the East Midlands with the massacre of male populations and the enslaving of the women, but as yet this is only speculation. By the middle of the sixth century the Angles were the dominant element in the population. But how they gained their land here – by fighting; by occupying empty land where they began to plough and raise stock; whether they even negotiated with a still surviving local British aristocracy – whether in fact the Corieltauvi in some sense became the Middle Angles – cannot be known. It may be that in some places the newcomers drove out or killed the menfolk and took British women as their wives. In others they clearly settled alongside the indigenous population, opening up new land in marginal areas. In the Kibworth area one or two field names have survived from Welsh speech; the most important being the open field name Cric or Gric in Kibworth Beauchamp, a tiny hint, could it be, that Beauchamp began as a settlement of dependent Welsh serfs?
But none of this is firm enough to build on. All we know for sure in the Kibworth area is given us by the buried woman described at the beginning of this chapter, the warrior graves found near her, the two women’s brooches picked up by metal detectors at Kibworth, and the bone comb, slag and pottery under the Coach and Horses car park. That is as far as it goes for the first century of the ‘English’. The newcomers lived alongside the native British-speakers, who still farmed their big furlongs and tended their flocks of sheep, perhaps trading their surplus with an Anglian lord. But stratified among the finds under the Coach and Horses, the smelting slag and pottery show they had come to stay.
The catastrophic sixth century
By the middle of the sixth century Anglians and Frisians had settled under their lords in the lands between Glen and the Welland where Kibworth now lies, and around them lived the indigenous British population with whom over time they intermarried and merged identities. All perhaps owed allegiance to a ‘king’ who ruled in the old Roman city of Leicester. In time the patchwork of tribes occupying the fens and wolds between East Anglia and Leicestershire became known as Middle Angles, their ethnic roots of diverse origins, Celtic and Danish, Germanic and Frisian. The genetic makeup of the early Anglo-Saxons then was particularly mixed. But out of them the English would emerge.
The first century of this new society was particularly hard. Anyone who was lucky enough to survive and live to an old age on the low ridge above the Glen where Kibworth now stands, who lived through the century after the fall of Rome, would have seen far-reaching changes. Between the third and seventh centuries the archaeological record of settlements has suggested that the population of lowland Britain fell to less than a million, fewer people than a millennium before in the Iron Age. Climatologists tell us that the early Anglo-Saxons suffered from colder and wetter climate conditions between the fourth and ninth centuries, culminating in a mini-Ice Age in the early tenth. One of the biggest and most wide-ranging events was a catastrophic volcanic dust storm followed by pestilence in the 540s. The great plagues of the 540s and 680s and the natural catastrophes such as the so-called narrow tree ring event of 536 have attracted a lot of attention from historians recently. Ice cores reveal an extensive acidic dust layer. The health and growth of trees (as seen in annual growth rings for a fifteen-year period) were greatly diminished across the northern hemisphere. Annals from Ireland in the west and as far as China in the east describe the impact: prolonged dry fog, crop failure and acute bread shortages. The historian Procopius, who was alive then, says that during 536 ‘a most dreadful portent took place: the sun gave forth its light without brightness, and it seemed very like the sun in eclipse for the beams it sent forth had no brightness.’ The contemporary Byzantine administrator and antiquarian John Lydus speaks of a full year of half-light which killed all the crops. A later chronicler, Michael Syrian, says the sun was dimmed for eighteen months: ‘each day it shone only for four hours and even then its light was but a feeble shadow, so that the fruits did not ripen.’ The statesman and scholar Cassiodorus writing in Constantinople is our most vivid eyewitness: ‘we were astonished to see no shadow of ourselves at noon, to feel the mighty strength of the sun enfeebled and the phenomena that accompany an eclipse prolonged for almost a whole year. We have had a summer without heat, the crops have been chilled, blasted by north winds, and rain denied.’
This is what the people in the villages of Britain experienced too. Tree rings cut from bog oaks excavated in Ireland show the British Isles were as severely affected. Though long ignored or underestimated, these were great events, their effects more widespread than those of any battle or change of dynasty, the most protracted short-term cooling in the northern hemisphere known over the last 2,000 years. Tree ring specialists think the fifteen-year period after the initial impact in 536 was catastrophic, and it is probably no coincidence that in the middle of that period plague swept across the Eurasian landmass as far as Britain. The cause is generally identified as a huge eruption on the scale of Tambora in 1815 (the biggest since the last Ice Age) or the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. Though its extent has been disputed, when we see the effect of a minor eruption in Iceland in 2010 it can be seen that environmental damage could have been tremendous and an almost unbearable strain on subsistence farmers who worked the fields under their lords in the Britain of the Dark Ages. As with the aftermath of 1815, in what was known as the ‘year without a summer’, most deaths were due to starvation and disease as the fallout ruined agriculture. Even in Western Europe, failed harvests brought famine and typhus: newspapers in 1815 told of hill farmers’ families in Wales travelling the roads of England begging for food. Harvests also failed and livestock died in large areas of the northern hemisphere. Such events though thinly recorded perhaps help account for the decline in population and the depression of society visible in the archaeological records across Western Europe.
This natural disaster of 536 was followed by the great plague of 541–2: ‘a universal plague through the world which killed the noblest third of the human race’ as Procopius described it. Pestilence continued to return to the Mediterranean basin through the sixth century and into the seventh, ending with the great plague of 682. The mortality figures are unknown but the Black Death in the fourteenth century killed a third of the population, maybe more (as we shall see, two thirds of the tenants in Kibworth died). The later plague changed everything: work patterns, labour law, freedom itself, but we have no idea how the sixth-century disasters unfolded: whether for example the deprived peasantry who survived won economic freedoms in a contracted agricultural economy. No one knows. But a comparable catastrophe in the sixth century may be the single most important reason for the steep drop in population from its height in the late-Roman world (some think 4–5 million) down to 2 million in the eleventh century. Though largely unknown in the historical record, it may be then that the biggest event of the late-Roman world and the Dark Ages was the plague. It contributed to the collapse of society back to subsistence conditions in many places; and in Britain the technological level of the fourth century was perhaps not regained till the seventeenth or even the eighteenth century.
The village: 500–700
So the first English settlement grew up at Kibworth in very harsh times, emerging in the sixth century in poverty and hardship out of the older Roman British world: its population a Roman-British core (particularly of women) with a smaller Anglian elite. Kibworth was not yet a village, or at least not as we imagine the English village, as a concentrated mythic image of the eternal unchanging English landscape. The origins of the English village are comparatively recent, nucleated from the tenth century onwards by powerful lords in a swathe from Devon to Northumberland. Older patterns continued (and still continue) in the hill country of the west and south-west, where a landscape of isolated Iron Age farms still remains; but the open-field landscape of the English Midlands with its nucleated villages, of which Kibworth is a classic example, only developed after the Viking Age.
Throughout the sixth century the settlement at Kibworth (and thousands like it) was just a fenced enclosure containing the farmstead of the Anglo-Saxon lord and his extended kin, the scattered houses of the peasants and serfs, a cattle barn, a bread oven, a well, a threshing floor and a cattle corral of hurdles and thorn brakes, with perhaps an outer enclosure of brushwood to keep out wolves and bandits. The people lived in platform huts roofed in reed thatch or wooden shingles, and the craftsmen and craftswomen worked in weaving sheds and woodsmen’s workshops with one end sunk below ground, like those excavated at Stow in Suffolk (dating from AD 420–650). Such sunken huts were still used into the twentieth century by the wood turners of Bucklebury in Berkshire, the last of whom as late as the Second World War made wooden bowls on a pole lathe as his ancestors in the Dark Ages had done. (This wooden tableware, which was used by most ordinary people until the early modern world, is called in English dialect ‘treen’, an Old English word signifying ‘made of tree’.) Compared with the Roman world this was a subsistence existence but it was the life of most ordinary people in England until comparatively recently, even in some places well beyond the Industrial Revolution.
In the wooden hall of the lord there may have been some imported luxuries. A description of a local nobleman’s house in the seventh century hints at possessions: ‘a dwelling house furnished with an abundance of goods of all kinds in the district of the Middle Angles’. There the lord gave hospitality to his warband, as in traditional Germanic society, the women (as in Beowulf ) ‘offering the joy of the hall’, serving mead and greeting guests, ‘carrying the flagon, filling the cups the warriors held out’. The headman was the hlaford (our word ‘lord’, literally the ‘bread giver’); his wife, the hlafdig (the ‘bread kneader’ – the lady). Soon the Angles were intermarrying with the locals and in the village over time the language and customs of the Angles would replace those of the Welsh. Welsh was still spoken in the region in the early eighth century, but in the landscape the Britons left few things save river names.
In the runes: words and thoughts
Kibworth in the Dark Ages was a subsistence place whose horizons had closed down. Hardly any finds from between 500 and 900 were found in the village dig in 2009. One sherd of eighth-century pottery suggests that they used clay and wooden tableware, wooden spades and rakes, even wooden ploughs – though it would be hard to plough the heavy clays around Kibworth without iron. But there is scanty evidence to bring the people to life. They have not yet got names; nor has the place. Its British name is yet to be discovered; its medieval and modern name, which means the enclosure of a man called Cybba – Kibworth – will come later.
The people of Kibworth were illiterate and it is very unlikely anyone in the village came into close contact with literacy at this time. But the small class of priests and seers among the pagan Anglo-Saxons used a system of writing before the Latin script was reintroduced into lowland Britain by missionaries from the Church of Rome. Starting in the fifth century in Frisia, the continental Angles, Saxons and Frisians used a system of writing which they brought over with them from the continent to Britain. They called it ‘futhorc’ – we call it runes – and it was the script of priests and seers, the ritual specialists. Incised or marked on bones, pottery, ivory combs, it was a system of twenty-six signs, later expanded to thirty-three. Each magical sign had a phonetic value but also a meaning in itself, and as we search for a way into the thought-world of our early ancestors, clues perhaps lie in these magical symbols.
One cluster of signs denotes aspects of material life – wealth, need, distress, gift, cup, torch, joy. A further group describes the weather – sun, hail, ice – and another trees – oak, ash, birch, yew, thorn. Animals named include horses and aurochs. Some allude loosely to time – day, year, harvest – and to nature – stone, land and lake. Weapons of course figure in the futhorc signs – spear and bow – and the masculine world – warrior, estate, ride, hero. Finally, death and the hereafter are found in the signs for grave and god. ‘God’, like ‘soul’, it is as well to remember, is a pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon word. The pagans too believed in such things.
To the modern reader these mysterious glyphs – scratched or incised on disc brooches, burial urns, weapons, bone tools and combs – appear fantastically allusive precursors to what will become the English language. It reveals a world-view and images that will run through Anglo-Saxon poetry with its down-to-earth fatalistic and ruminative streak. In them perhaps we can glimpse the bedrock of the speech, thought and values of the early villagers. Few such early texts exist (only with Christianity and Latin script do we get full-length texts) and only as grave inscriptions and commemorations on the continent. In England about thirty fragmentary runic inscriptions have been deciphered on bone combs, sword hilts and sherds: brief signifiers or prayers for auspiciousness. Some are men’s and women’s names. A recent find near Leicester was of a runic inscription on a pair of disc-headed pins representing the name of a woman, Ceolburg. Among the few longer inscriptions that have enough characters to be read is one from the East Midlands that recalls our dead twenty-year-old at the start of this chapter. It reads, ‘the grave of Sithaebaed the maid …’
