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DNA and the Anglo-Saxons

16 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

The widely accepted new paradigm of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons abandoned the old idea of mass arrivals in favour of an elite takeover. Small groups of warriors sailed over from Europe, killed the native kings and took over their kingdoms while the native population gradually adopted the language and customs of their new rulers.

Then something new came on the scene that had the potential to completely confirm the new paradigm: DNA and isotopic analysis. Among other things, isotopic analysis of teeth allows us to find out where somebody was born and brought up. As teeth are the parts of the body that survive burial best, they offer a valuable insight into the origins of the person excavated. DNA analysis can show the descent of the individual concerned.

The first tranche of DNA studies provided somewhat contradictory findings. These studies attempted to extrapolate backwards from the contemporary population of England to work out where people came from, rather like the popular DNA testing kits that purport to tell people their ancestry. However, it proved very difficult to reliably work backwards as far as necessary to find the origins of the Anglo-Saxons. A much better way for testing this would be to take DNA from people buried between the 5th and 7th centuries and test what their ancestry was. But extracting usable, and uncontaminated aDNA (which simply stands for ancient DNA) was initially very difficult if not impossible.

The New Paradigm

10 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

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.

A New Origin Story for England

10 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

Archaeologists examining the fifth and sixth centuries in Britain had failed to find evidence of the native Britons being driven out. The main evidence for the spread of the Anglo-Saxons had come from burials. But this new generation of archaeologists pointed out that we had been applying different preconceived ideas to the spread of peoples and culture.

In Britain, one of the ways of measuring the spread of the Anglo-Saxons across the country was from different burial practices. The Britons, being largely Christian, generally buried their dead in plain graves, with perhaps one or two personal items, but precious little else. However, the pagan Anglo-Saxons preferred to equip their dead for the afterlife, burying their dead with a full panoply of weapons, for men, and utensils, for women. The spread of these sort of burials across the country appeared to tell the story of the gradual advance of the Anglo-Saxons westward. It all seemed to make perfect sense.

But then archaeologists pointed to the change in burial practices through Germany and Scandinavia from the 8th and 12th centuries. There too, burials gradually changed from corpses fully furnished for the afterlife to spartan interments. There too there was a gradual spread, radiating east and north in this case. But in this case, no one was interpreting the change in burial customs as the result of invading Christians supplanting the native pagans. Rather, the change in burials was read as the result of the conversion of pagan Germans and Norse to Christianity.

 Perhaps the change in burial practices in Britain could also be explained by a religious and cultural change rather than one lot of people being driven out and replaced by others.

We were interpreting the past in the light of what we expected to find there. A story of elite takeover and cultural change appeared to explain the archaeological facts in the ground better than the previous story of conquest, mass migration and ethnic expulsion.

This new paradigm swiftly became the dominant theory for Anglo-Saxon origins. It emphasised acculturation, cooperation outside the conflicts of the warrior elite, and general continuity through the otherwise obscure fifth and sixth centuries.

An Elite Takeover

10 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

From the middle of the 20th 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.

The Invasion Hypothesis

10 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

The problem with the sources that talk about the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons as an invasion is that almost all of them, barring Gildas, were written hundreds of years after the events which they purport to record. But nevertheless, the story they told, of an Anglo-Saxon invasion that pushed the native Britons west until they were confined to Wales and the West Country, was generally accepted by scholars until recently.

The strongest proponents of the invasion theory were scholars who specialised in place names. The simple fact is that, in what we today call England, there are very, very few place names that derive from the language of the Britons. Where names are not English, they come from Norse, reflecting the later Viking settlement in Yorkshire. But if there was still a substantial population of Britons living in areas which Anglo-Saxon warriors had conquered, the expectation is that some of the place names would reflect that. Think of the new Anglo-Saxon lord, riding up to a group of his idling peasants to tell them to cut some logs from the wood to build his new hall. While he wouldn’t deign to learn their language, some form of communication would be necessary and to give orders the use of familiar place names would be the only way of conducting business otherwise the native inhabitants would not know where they were being sent. So by this view, the native Britons must really have been expelled from their lands by the invading Anglo-Saxons.

The Birth of Anglo-Saxon England

10 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

We have only the faintest of outlines of what occurred in the two centuries following the withdrawal of Roman forces from Britannia. Our one contemporary source, Gildas, a Romano/British priest who lived in the second half of the 5th and into the 6th century, wrote what is perhaps the most frustrating book ever penned. His De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) is a jeremiad against the corrupt rulers of his time. Gildas calls down calumny on the Britonnic rulers that he holds responsible for the tribulations facing his people. But unfortunately, he does all this without mentioning a single date and many of the kings he labels by their attributes rather than their names, making working out who he’s talking about a matter of educated guesswork.

However, Gildas is clear that the tribulations faced by the Britons, a Christian people still bearing the dignity of Rome, came in the shape of barbarian invaders: the Saxons.

According to this story, the two centuries following the end of direct Roman rule were a time of strife. Seafaring Germanic raiders, against whom the Saxon Shore forts had been raised, continued to raid but their raids turned into full-scale invasions. The traditional story, which is compiled from Gildas and Bede, tells of how the Britons invited Germanic mercenaries to settle in the country. Gildas does not name the protagonists; it is Bede who names the Britonnic king as Vortigern and the mercenary leaders as the brothers, Hengist and Horsa.

Gildas’s laconic account has the Saxons attempting to gouge more money for their services and, when this is refused, deciding to take payment directly. In one of those details that Gildas slips in which makes historians, on the point of despairing at finding anything of value in his account, decide that there might be something in what he says after all, he records that the first party of Saxons arrived in three cyulis (‘keels’), the name they gave their war boats. Cyulis is probably the first recorded word of English. Bede records that Horsa died in battle against the Britons, a burial mound being raised over him in Kent that was still extant in his time.

Later accounts, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the History of the Britons, put the brothers’ landing at Ebbsfleet and their first base on the Isle of Thanet, from which they gradually wrested control of Kent.

Book review: The Happy Prince and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde

2 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
The Happy Prince and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde

There was once a man who became famous throughout the realm for his wit. He played with words, leavening them into the lightest of souffles such that they tripped off the tongue of the players, or wrought them dark and hard as people read of the corruption of innocence. He became a byword for world weary cynicism and any man might quail upon whom the writer turned his tongue.

Yet in his other works, this apostle of abandon and philosopher of despair told tales of the purest innocence, with not a hint of irony nor a soupcon of cynicism; tales of the purest, self-sacrificial goodness, tales to make the hardest man cry and the bitterest woman weep.

Which was the real man? Read them and weep, weep tears of a joy so sharp it hurts.

The End of Roman Britain

2 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

Although an integral part of the Empire, Britannia required a large Roman garrison throughout its centuries under Roman control, firstly to deter attacks from the tribes north of Hadrian’s Wall. As Imperial might waned, barbarian raiders became bolder. The south and east coast were lined with forts to protect against sea-borne raiders, its commander bearing the title of Count of the Saxon Shore for Britain (comes littoris Saxonici per Britanniam), one of three military governors of Britannia, the other two ruling the central and northern regions of the diocese.

Having under command powerful legions stationed far from Rome, the men tasked with guarding Rome’s border had a powerful temptation to get involved in the power struggles that wracked the Empire at the end of the fourth century. Magnus Maximus stripped Britannia of its troops when he made a bid for the purple in 383. His rebellion began in north Wales and for a time he ruled half the Empire: Britannia, Gaul, Spain and Africa. According to later Welsh traditions, Magnus handed power over to local rulers when he left the country and early Welsh genealogies list Magnus as the founder of later Welsh kingdoms, including Gwent and Powys.

After the last attempted usurper, Constantine III, left Britannia in 407, effective Roman rule in the diocese came to an end. But it was not an abrupt end. While political power had drained away from the Empire, many of the inhabitants of Britannia still thought of themselves as Roman and they continued to live, as far as was possible, as Romans should. While urban life declined, the Romano/British elite built themselves rural villas within which a version of Roman life continued in many places well into the 5th century. Although some cities were abandoned, Carlisle, Wroxeter, Winchester and Gloucester continued as functioning towns throughout the 5th century and even into the 6th century. However, Roman coinage pretty well ceased coming into the country after the first decade of the 5th century. Without fresh coinage arriving, it probably took twenty or thirty years for the money-based economy to collapse. At roughly the same time, the pottery industry in Britannia, which had produced pottery utensils in industrial quantities, also declined precitipitously.

Economically, the country collapsed. But in any such collapse, some people are affected more than others: wealth can insulate from many of the tribulations of the world.

But alongside the economic collapse, there was political disintegration.

Sails or Oars?

2 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

Did the Anglo-Saxons cross to Britain in ships with sails or did they row across the Channel?

It might seem obvious that they had masted ships – can you imagine rowing across the North Sea? – but the problem remains that the ships we have excavated dating from before the Viking Age are all mast less. The ship buried at Sutton Hoo had rotted away but its ghost marks left in the soil told of a ship 89 feet (27 metres) long, tapering to high posts at prow and stern. It would have been a magnificent vessel, built clinker fashion (which means the hull planks overlap each other) but with a shallow keel that did not descend significantly lower than the hull. There was no sign of a mast step in the impression left by the keel in the sandy soil. There were, however, distinctive oar rests, indicating that the boat was rowed up the River Deben.

Other boats dating from before the Viking Age, such as the boat excavated from the Nydam bog in Denmark and dated by dendrochronology to between AD 310 and AD 320, are also clinker built and oared.

On the other hand, the Romans had sails on their boats and it seems strange that the Germanic peoples, who were in contact with the Romans through trade and war, would have ignored the fairly obvious benefits of sails for their own vessels. So the argument runs on how strongly we weigh absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

The First Pilgrims Take Ship

2 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

None of the sources say where Biscop and Wilfrid sailed from when they set off on their pilgrimage to Rome. But they were already in Kent and they were both young men with a sense of history. What they were embarking upon was something historic in itself: the first pilgrimage by Anglo-Saxon Christians to Rome.

To acknowledge that history, and because it was a good place to find a ship sailing to France, a likely site for their embarkation was Richborough, the old Roman port and fortress of Rutupiae. It stands at the origin of Watling Street – in itself a plausible route to the coast – and at the mouth of the Wantsum Channel where the River Stour drained into the Channel. There was a good harbour near the fort and although the fort had been abandoned following the Roman withdrawal, there’s no reason to suppose that the harbour was no longer in use since it follows maritime logic to anchor there while waiting for the tide to help push the boat out into the Channel.