History

The North Sea is a dangerous body of water. What made many thousands of people embark on small boats and set out on the whale road so that they might arrive at a cold wet island in the sea?

There’s no single answer. Some may indeed have come as conquerors. In the fifth and sixth centuries Britain had split into a myriad petty kingdoms, many of which were so small and fleeting as to leave no trace of their existence. In such a context, a determined warlord with a retinue of fifty warriors could ta control of a kingdom and proclaimed himself its king. But amid the political chaos and worsening climate of the time, other people may well have arrived as refugees, pitching up together in a boat hoping to find better land to farm and a new beginning. Some may have been a combination of both: people going into exile after a defeat and finding the opportunities in the new country better than their prospects should they return.

No one story tells the tale and future work should reveal more of the nuances of what happened during those obscure centuries when Britain went from Britannia, where people spoke British Celtic and British Latin, to a land split into many kingdoms where people in the south, east and midlands spoke Old English and the people in the west spoke what was becoming Welsh and Cumbric, and Cornish.

While from the outside the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons seems like a slow-motion invasion, it would have often seemed different to the people living then.

In particular, local identities and loyalties were more important than ethnic identities, if such even existed then. Identity was familial and local, attached to a tribal grouping and lord, and to religion. The boundaries of these identities were not fixed although they would probably have been clear to the people of the time.

A good example is provided by the genealogy of the House of Wessex, Alfred the Great’s own house and the one that would go on to rule over the first unified English state. The founder of the dynasty was one Cerdic, which is undoubtedly a Britonnic name, as was true of his seven successors. This suggests that a Romano-British dynasty developed strong links, most probably through marriage, with some of the incoming Germanic tribes and set themselves up as rulers in the same way that the newcomers were doing. Having adopted the ruling style of the newcomers, the Cerdicings assimilated to their culture too but from the top down, becoming rulers to the Anglo-Saxons rather than their subjects.

aDNA analysis has confirmed traditional view that there was really a period of mass movements. Large numbers of Anglo-Saxons did sail across the North Sea to Britain. But within that overall scheme, it’s clear that there is room for a great deal of nuance. There is also clear evidence for intermarriage between continental incomers and native Britons, as well as there being a significant number of arrivals from France too.

What we seem to have is a patchwork picture. Yes, there were large groups of settlers who arrived and who appear to have largely displaced the native population, particularly in eastern regions such as Kent and East Anglia. As we move west, the degree of admixture increases, with some families showing clear signs of marrying among both groups over a number of generations. And in the west there is relatively little presence of these continental ancestors. This does tally quite well with the accounts of Gildas and Bede. Factor in that this all took place over a couple of centuries and we have a sort of slow moving Anglo-Saxon creep north and west from their original strongholds in the south and east. It’s a mixture of conquest, intermarriage, alliances, slave taking and the slow consolidation of tiny kingdoms into larger polities.

The archaeologists and historians who came to the conclusion that the Anglo-Saxon invasion was not so much an invasion but rather a take over, an early equivalent of a hostile bid for a company, were influenced by a general presumption towards gradualism, which disposed them against the idea of a mass invasion by hordes of Anglo-Saxon invaders. Coupled with that was a reluctance to play into right-wing narratives about immigration. An elite replacement that left the vast majority of the people in Britain unaffected resonated better with modern prejudices than the idea of invaders displacing the natives and taking over.

So by the turn of the millennium, at least among academics, the old idea of mass folk movements and violent invasions had been pretty well entirely discarded. The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons was a cultural transformation resulting from small groups of warriors taking over the petty kingdoms of Britonnic kings and the native populations gradually adopting the language and customs of their rulers. The archaeological evidence trumped the patchy historical accounts.

From the middle of the 20^th century, archaeologists started looking for the traces left by the Anglo-Saxon invasion. But the problem was, they couldn’t find any. Landscape archaeologists, examining how fields and pastures developed in the fifth and sixth centuries, could find no evidence that significant areas had been abandoned for extended periods of time, as one would expect if a native population was driven out by war.

With archaeologists failing to find evidence for the violent ethnic cleansing of the native Britons, a new consensus began to develop. The new consensus could take support from a far better recorded invasion of England: that of the Normans in 1066. In that case, a relatively small invading army effectively removed the entire upper echelon of Anglo-Saxon society, producing massive changes in land ownership and language, all based on roughly 10,000 immigrants.

From this example, and other examples around the world, it seemed clear that warrior bands sailing over the North Sea could produce a social revolution despite relatively small numbers. Linguists suggested that the language replacement was a result of the higher status of Old English, where language was an obvious marker of status. Under this theory, it would take relatively few generations for the old language to die out and Old English to become the accepted language of the land.