People of Ancient Britain History of Britain

Anglo-Saxon England settled into a pattern of seven kingdoms. The three largest, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex eventually came to dominate the country, each at different times. First it was Northumbria (the only time in English history when the centre of power has been in the north). Northumbria stretched as far as Edinburgh and for a time included part of the kingdom of Strathclyde, in south-west Scotland.

 
Offa's Dyke

During the 8th century, Northumbrian leadership was replaced by the midlands kingdom of Mercia. The greatest of Mercian kings, Offa (757-796), corresponded with the mighty Charlemagne, emperor of the Franks; he minted his own coins - the first nationwide currency since Roman times. He is remembered also as the builder of Offa's Dyke (ров), an earth rampart over 190 kilometres long which marked the border of Mercia with Wales. It can still be seen, but it was much higher in Offa's time.

On his coins, Offa called himself 'king of the English', and his power stretched far enough for him to have a rebellious king of East Anglia beheaded, and to give estates to his subjects in Sussex. He even had some influence in Northumbria.

However, neither Northumbria nor Mercia succeeded in making their kings the rulers of all England. That honour was to fall to the House of Wessex, made great by King Alfred.

But what was this office of kingship, and how did it work in Anglo-Saxon England?

The idea of kingship was not invented in England. The Anglo-Saxons knew it in Germany. Kings grew from simple tribal chiefs who were leaders successful in war, and therefore conquest of land. As time went by, the king became a grander, more exalted figure, and when England became Christian again in the 7th century reverence for kingship was encouraged by the Church.

The king was elected; he did not gain his crown by right of inheritance. Or not at first. In time it became the custom to elect a member of the royal family. Still the king's power was not total. He ruled with the advice of his council - the great men of the kingdom. He had no permanent capital and was always on the move. It must have been quite difficult for visitors hoping for a royal interview to track him down.

The later Anglo-Saxon kings received a constant stream of visitors, from overseas and from other parts of Britain. In 973 King Edgar was visited by no less than eight sub-kings at the same time. They manned the oars of his boat as a gesture of loyalty.

Such visitors brought expensive gifts, or tributes. But for his regular income the king relied on the profits of his own estates. which were large and widely scattered, and. on rent, usually paid 'in kind' - i.e. as goods, not cash. Receipts from tolls of various kinds and fines from the law courts added something. His subjects gave him free labour and military service: in an emergency that meant every male who could swing a sword. Special expenses, like bribing the Vikings not to attack, were met by special taxes, and various persons or places owed special duties to the king. Norwich, for example, supplied a bear and six dogs for the sport of bear-baiting.

Anglo-Saxon kings were less worried by money problems than their successors in medieval and modern times, but from Alfred's time maintaining the fleet became a costly business.

In return for the support of his subjects, the king gave them protection and rewarded them with grants of land.

Besides their loyalty to the king, men were also bound by obligations to their own relations: the bond of kinship. If someone were murdered, it was the duty of his relations to avenge him: to die unavenged was a terrible thing. Fear of family vengeance helped to prevent crime at a time when there was no better way of enforcing the law. Everyone had a wergild ('man-price'), the sum payable in compensation to his family by those responsible for his death. Sometimes wergild was refused by the injured family, who preferred violent revenge. Then tremendous feuds began, with one act of vengeance following another. We know of one feud in Northumbria which began in 1016 and was still going strong nearly seventy years later. But kinship also meant cooperation in everything within the clan, looking after orphans, and even protecting the interests of a young woman who married outside the family.

The amount of a man's wergild was a sign of his position in society. A nobleman's wergild was larger than a peasant's.

To be classed as a nobleman, or thegn, a man had to have at least five hides of land (a hide was the amount needed to support one household). The nobleman lived in a windowless, barn-like hall, built of wood, surrounded by smaller houses and protected by a stockade. (Stone buildings appeared in the 9th century.) The furniture was simple - trestle tables, benches, and straw mattresses on the floor. In this hall, much heavy drinking and telling of stories took place after a day's hunting. Anglo-Saxon poetry is full of fighting, feasts and falconry - the main activities of the thegns. Before Alfred's time, few could read.

Running the household was the woman's job. But an Anglo-Saxon household was nothing like a suburban semidetached. It was almost self-sufficient, doing its own baking, brewing and so on. The woman's job was not mere housework, more like managing a business. Anglo-Saxon women were not oppressed. Divorce was easy (Christianity made it harder), arid a divorced woman was entitled to half the household goods. She could hold property in her own right-impossible in later times.

The wergild of a churl, or peasant, was one-sixth that of a nobleman. The churl normally held at least one hide of land, and lived in a simple thatched hut with no window or chimney - just a hole in the roof. The better kinds of tradesmen - goldsmiths, sword-makers, falconers and small merchants - were also classed as churls. The churl was free but poor, and he depended on the nobleman for protection. In time, he often came to sell his service to the nobleman and so, gradually, he became less independent.

The third class in society was the slave, or unfree peasant. He had no rights and no wergild, though if you killed him you had to pay compensation to his owner (about 1 pound - the price of eight oxen). Unlike the churl, the slaves could often improved his position and even buy his freedom.

Although Anglo-Saxon settlements were nearly self-sufficient, trade in goods like salt, fish and metals went on inside the country and overseas. The contents of the Sutton Hoo burial ship proved that an early East Anglian king owned luxuries imported from Europe. England's chief exports were wool and slaves (although the slave trade declined in Christian times because of Church opposition.) Trade led to towns growing up at harbours and crossing places. London and Winchester were the largest; few others had more than 5,000 people.

Although several kings issued written laws, a lot of Anglo-Saxon law was simply custom, passed on by word of mouth from one generation to the next. There were no professional lawyers, and the nearest thing to a law court was the folk moot, a public assembly where quarrels were settled, local problems discussed and crime punished. (Later, some noblemen had private courts on their own estates.)

An accused man sometimes had to prove his innocence by ordeal. One form of ordeal - probably not so common, though we hear a lot about it in books - was by water. The accused was thrown in, and if he floated he was guilty. The trouble was that if he sank, although he might be proved innocent, he was likely to be drowned. However, not many crimes carried the death penalty. The Church disliked capital punishment, though the alternative it preferred - chopping off a hand or an ear - seems savage enough to us.

The Christian Church in Britain History of Britain (история Британии) 

In the Roman slave market one day, Pope Gregory noticed some pretty fair-haired Yorkshire children for sale. He asked who they were and was told they were Angli, English. 'Angli who look like Angeli (angels)', the Pope replied, making a famous pun.

If this old story is true, the Pope's interest in Britain was aroused on that day, and he decided to send a missionary to convert these attractive heathens to Christianity. In 597, St Augustine landed in Kent. After 150 years of silence, England's contact with Rome was restored.

St Augustine landed very near the spot where the Roman legions had waded ashore, but unlike them he came in peace, and with the agreement of the king of Kent. His message was gratefully received: on Christmas Day 10,000 people were baptized at Canterbury, where a Christian church was still standing.

Beyond Kent, Christianity spread less rapidly. King Edwin of Northumbria, after consulting his council, accepted Christianity in 626; but he was killed a few years later and the new churches were destroyed in a pagan reaction. Although Christianity was soon restored, it was not by missionaries from the Church of Rome.

For Christianity had never disappeared from the British Isles. The British, when they retreated from the Anglo-Saxons, took their religion with them. More than thirty years before St Augustine landed in Kent, an Irish monk, St Columba, founded the monastery of Iona, Scotland's Holy Isle, which became the centre of British Christianity. It was to Iona that the new king of Northumbria sent for a bishop in 635, and the man appointed was St Aidan, who settled at Lindisfarne. He soon made that island a Northumbrian counterpart to Iona.

While out of touch with Rome, the British, or Celtic, Church had developed differently from the continental Church. Even the date of Easter was different, so that in places where both Churches were represented, half the people were mourning the crucifixion of Christ while the other half were celebrating his resurrection.

In 663 a synod (a meeting of clergy) was held at Whitby in Yorkshire to decide the matter of the double Easter. At least, that was the main point on the agenda; but what the synod really decided was a much wide question: was the Church of England to be British or Roman? The King of Northumbria, who presided, decided that English Christians should not cut themselves from fellow Christians in the rest of Europe. But although the Romanists won the argument, Celtic influence remained strong. The Church in England was always to remain different in spirit from the Church in Italy or France, and the influence of Celtic Christianity, gentler and less grand than Roman, was one of the chief reasons for it.

The Celtic Church was a Church of missionary monks, while the Roman Church was organized under bishops, whose headquarters were in large towns. The Roman Church was supported by a mass of learned laws and, from a political point of view, it looked like a more orderly, stable institution. For that reason kings preferred it.

Monasteries were also a vital part of Roman Christianity. St Augustine himself was a monk (he founded the monastery of St Peter and St Paul at Canterbury), and monastic influence was strong in early Christian England. All kinds of people became monks, including several kings, and many of them deliberately chose a monastery far away from home, to cut themselves off more thoroughly from ordinary life.

Devout Christians went on pilgrimages if they possibly could, mostly to Rome though one or two bold people went to Jerusalem. King Alfred was taken to Rome as a child. But a pilgrimage, or any journey, was neither safe nor simple. Storms and pirates made the Channel crossing a fearful experience, and on land bandits and swindlers waited to trap the innocent traveller. One archbishop, on his way to Rome, was frozen to death crossing the Alps. Sensible people made their wills (завещания) before they set out on a pilgrimage.

Irish monks were working as missionaries in Europe before 597, and this tradition was continued by early English Christians. Most of northern Europe was converted to Christianity by English missionaries. Charlemagne's chief assistant in his programme of educating the people of his empire was a Yorkshireman, Alcuin.

Christianity was a great civilizing influence. To begin with, it introduced more education. Its teaching was narrow, as it was simply designed to make native Englishmen fit to be priests, but it did produce scholars who knew Greek as well as Latin and had read some Classical - i.e. pre-Christian - literature. Among them was the 'father of English history', Bede.

 
Venerable Bede Translating the Gospel of John, by JD Penrose

Bede, who is sometimes called 'the Venerable' (Бéда Достопочтенный), though such a dusty title does not suit him, spent all his life in the Northumbrian monastery ofJarrow. He wrote many books, but the most famous is his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731. It is the only worthwhile history of England in the earliest period. Bede had a remarkable sense of history - of the passing of time - as well as a rare scholarly attitude to facts. His book, in English translation, still makes good reading.

Although books were written in increasing numbers, a far greater number were imported from the continent. Up and down the country monks were kept busy copying them, and often decorating them with beautiful miniature illustrations. The Lindisfarne Gospels in the British Museum (produced about 700) are a magnificent example of their work.

All these books were written in Latin. But English too was being written. According to Bede, the first Anglo-Saxon poet was a peasant named Caedmon, who was inspired by a dream to write about the Creation. Anglo-Saxon is, of course, almost a foreign language to us. Caedmon's poem, for instance, runs like this:

Nu scylum hergan hefaenricaes uard, 
metudaes maecti end his modgidanc …

(Now we must praise the guardian of heaven, the powers of the Creator and his thoughts ... ).

The most famous Anglo-Saxon poem is Beowulf, the saga of a hero who saves his people from a series of evil monsters. Like many Anglo-Saxon stories, it is on the grim side.

The objects - works of art, to weapons, etc. - that survive through the centuries do not always give a perfectly accurate picture of the works of an ancient people. Most Anglo-Saxon art that has survived is Christian, for people went round smashing pagan idols after they were converted. We also have examples of swordhilts, drinking horns and jewellery, but not much to show us the fine quality of early English needlework, because cloth does not last as well as metal or stone.

Anglo-Saxon art was similar to Celtic art in design and inspiration; at least, it was more like Celtic than Roman art. Patterns of decoration were often abstract, or semiabstract, based on animals and plants. Christianity brought foreign influences with it, in particular the tradition of realistic art inherited from Ancient Rome. In Northumbria the two styles merged to prouce sculpture, like the stone cross at Ruthwell, Dumfries, made in the 7th centuty, which experts once believed to have been made 500 years later.

Invasions of the Vikings History of Britain (история Британии) 

Before the end of the 8th century, the British Isles were raided again by another non-Christian people, from Scandinavia. In 793 the Vikings, as we call them, destroyed the monastery of Lindisfarne, drowning some of the monks and stealing precious objects.

The Vikings were a sea-going people; they had the best boats yet seen in Europe, powered by oar and sail. They crossed the Atlantic, founding a colony in Newfoundland 500 years before Columbus discovered America; they rounded Lapland and sailed up the rivers of Russia; they raided Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Norsemen sailed around Scotland and down the west coast of Britain as far as the Mersey; they established colonies in northern Scotland and created a Scandinavian kingdom in Ireland. Danes raided the east coast of England, burning and killing, exulting in violence. Nothing stopped the Vikings, not even the northern winter.

These long-haired warriors wore coats of mail, carried hefty battle-axes and long shields. No one had the ships to match them at sea, and when they landed they moved so fast - rounding up all the horses in the neighbourhood - that they could destroy a town, burn a church and slaughter the people before a force could be raised against them. When they were brought to battle, they were often too strong for the motley group of poorly armed peasants who confronted them, and when they were defeated they were back again, stronger than ever, a year or two later.

What began as raids for quick plunder soon developed into something more. The Danes descended on England in ever-larger bands and raided steadily farther inland. In 851 a Danish host spent the winter in Kent. A few years later they wintered near London. The English were in no position to prevent them. Northumbria was feeble, with rival kings fighting for the crown. In Mercia another royal argument was going on, and the midland kingdom was squeezed between the Danes from the east and the forces of the Welsh prince, Rhodi Mawr, from the west.

That was the situation in 865, when a Danish army larger than any before arrived in England. This time the Danes came not merely for plunder, and they had no plans to return in the autumn or the following spring. They meant to conquer England.

York fell in 866, and the rival kings of Northumbria were killed. East Mercia was overrun and the rest of the kingdom saved, for a short time only, by a truce bought with Mercian gold. In 869 King Edmund of East Anglia (St Edmund of Bury) was savagely murdered while a prisoner. Essex was conquered. By 870 only Wessex was left to resist the barbaric Danes, whose main camp at Reading was well placed to receive reinforcements up the Thames.

Soon after the Danes turned against Wesses, the West Saxons gained a new king, who was only about twenty-two years old. His name was Alfred (849-899), and we know him as 'the Great'. He is the only English king who has earned that title.

After one stirring victory, Alfred was forced on to the defensive, and for a few years it looked as though Wessex too would soon be submerged. By 878 Alfred was a fugitive, hiding in the wintry marshes of Somerset. (It is from this period in his life that legends later grew - stories like the tale of the burning cakes which the king was supposed to be watching while the farmer's wife was out of the kitchen.)

But Alfred's West Saxon peasant-warriors, or most of them, remained loyal. With the spring, he surged out of the marshes to harass the Danes. In May, the men of Wiltshire and Hampshire met him in the forest near Southampton. They told him they were 'glad to see him'. Two days later Alfred's Christian army smashed the Danes at the battle of Edington. 'The turn of the tide!' Alfred exclaimed.

Under their able commander, Guthrum, the Danes fell back to Chippenham. Alfred swept the surrounding country bare of food and horses, and in two weeks the Danes were forced to surrender. They promised to leave the country. Guthrum accepted Christian baptism, with Alfred acting as god-father.

What made Alfred a great man was not just his military victories but his statesman-ship. After years and years of bloody conflict, he saw the futility of trying to destroy the Danes by force. He believed that a man who grows content will cease to be a dangerous enemy, and he was determined to reach friendly agreement with the defeated Danes. This he did. His treaty with Guthrum gave the Danes a large part of eastern England, where Alfred hoped they would settle down as peaceful farmers.

Alfred's statesmanship showed itself also in his ability to learn from his enemies. When new groups of Vikings resumed the attack some years later, they found England far better prepared. Having studied the defenceworks of Guthrum's camps, Alfred set up a system of strongly fortified burghs in southern England. (Traces of his fortifications can still be seen at Wareham in Dorset, among other places.) He also built warships on the Danish pattern and, as the English were not experienced sailors, he hired men from the coastal districts of the Low Countries to man his navy. We know that more than once Viking raiders were defeated at sea by Alfred's ships, and prevented from landing.

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Edward the Confessor (Эдуард Исповедник) was half-Norman by birth. He had spent most of his life in Normandy; and he appointed Normans to important positions in the state (partly to balance the power of great English earls (графов) like Godwine of Wessex). England was already half 'Normanized' before the Norman Conquest of 1066. 
  
Edward had no children, and as he died he recognized Harold, son of Godwine, as his heir (наследник). Across the Channel in Normandy, а loud protest was heard. According to Duke (герцог) William, Edward the Confessor had made the same promise to him; what was more, Harold had already accepted William's claim during а visit to Normandy two years before. 
  
Such arguments are usually decided by force. William swept across the Channel with his army and landed near Hastings. Harold was in the north, where he had just defeated а Norse invasion, but he hurried south and, brave but foolish, offered battle. His men were tired and he would have done better to have starved the Normans out. Still, his position on а hill was а strong one, until the Normans, pretending to run away, lured (выманили) the English down the hill.