Ancient Origins of the Anglosphere

Robin Fleming, Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 490 to 1070 (Penguin, 2011), 458 pages, $24.95

Tim Clarkson, The Picts: A History (John Donald, 2010), 192 pages, £14.99

David Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire 54 BC–AD 409 (Penguin, 2007), 640 pages, $29.95

The Anglo-Saxon story takes another battering in this latest and second volume of the Penguin History of Britain. For centuries, the English and their diaspora were told they were descended from bold, Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes who invaded and took over a shattered island after Rome withdrew. In recent years, however, historians and pre-historians, grappling with myriad fragments of material and high-tech analysis, have been telling a different story.

In eastern England, though less so elsewhere, the Romano-British society of towns like London and York and of a high-living elite collapsed quickly, mainly because the economy depended on the Roman legions and administrators. A flattened, but fairly egalitarian, society remained.

Robin Fleming, in this account of the “Dark Ages” from 410 to 1070 AD, says it is more likely that small but growing numbers of bands of Germanic boat people arrived on British shores from the European continent over about 200 years after Rome withdrew. Without warfare or permission, they settled in among the existing British, usually peaceably and on vacant land.

There may have been some who could be classed as from Angeln (the present Schleswig-Holstein), Jutland (Denmark) and Saxony (round Hamburg) but there were also large numbers of others, many from Scandinavia. A contingent, especially in the south-eastern county of Kent, were Franks, the general name applied to German tribes living between the lower Rhine and the North Sea, today’s Belgium, Netherlands and northern France, plus adjoining Germany.

These to some extent were names others gave them later; it is less likely that the early generations of arrivals had this strong a sense of tribal identity. The first volume in the series says that there was already in Roman times a flow of non-Anglo-Saxon Germanic immigrants.

As far as can be ascertained, these were the first, faltering steps of what became the Anglosphere, now the world’s dominant cultural bloc. But it seems mainly a story of frequently harmonious multiculturalism—people who differed culturally and linguistically living near each other and gradually merging, through intermarriage, trading and copying each other’s customs, along with a bit of fighting.

The big, bold ancestor story and accompanying racial pride came later. Robin Fleming sees it as likely to be the invention of an elite that gradually arose from the mix, in order to boost their image and self-esteem—a process still not gone from the world. Bold ancestor stories were particularly common in ancient times, before adequate written records kept a lid on the process. Archaeology and other detailed study has shown that Abraham and Moses in the Old Testament are each likely to have been composite figures rolled into one. The Exodus flight from Egypt may have been built from one lucky escape into the escape of a whole people. Larger-than-life animal spirit ancestors are the basis of many Australian Aboriginal origin stories.

Robin Fleming implicates as chief spinner the Venerable Bede, the Northumberland monk whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People was completed in 731. His history is one of the main written sources for the time, the work of a great historian and regarded as responsible, but Fleming says Bede would have drawn on oral versions which had grown and simplified over the previous two centuries. Bede was developing the story of God’s chosen people, the English, converting the heathen.

Fleming is particularly wary about the story of the Anglo pioneer heroes Hengist and Horsa. Her book is largely based on archaeology, much of it recent. She is mostly writing as a synthesiser and simplifier, drawing together archaeological work published in specialist journals, often only in the past ten years or so. This not so much breaks new ground as confirms in mounting detail the likelihood that the Anglo-Saxon story is a romance, much like Exodus.

It is still early days in unravelling the story, but DNA evidence has indicated that about one-third of the English gene pool is of Germanic origin and two-thirds ancient British, akin to the Welsh and to some extent the French. Only about a third of this third can be attributed to the North German and Viking arrivals of Fleming’s period. It is likely that some of the rest goes back to ethnically mixed hunter-gatherer people who roamed the North Sea plains during the Ice Age and came ashore—in Britain as in the Netherlands—when the seas rose around them with the global warming of about 10,000 years ago.

Fleming does not get into this, but uses archaeological studies to show that there was an “English cultural zone” in the east of England, where the newcomers assimilated without much apparent difficulty, and a more stubborn Romano-British zone in the west.

She also avoids the language question, though acknowledging that she would love to know what language eighth-century people buried in Worcester spoke. Others have speculated, with limited evidence, that English originated in England thousands of years before the Anglo-Saxons, who have usually been given credit for introducing it.

Another possible fairy tale handed down from Bede is that Christianity came to England with Saint Augustine arriving in 597 to convert the Anglo-Saxons. According to this version, Pope Gregory the Great saw blond English slave boys on sale in Rome. Impressed by their angelic looks, he called them “not Angles but angels” and decided to speed up the conversion of England. A base at Canterbury soon followed; that can be established.

But, Fleming says, Christianity had been around in the south and west since Roman times, in rich and sometimes eccentric diversity. It also came to Scotland in the sixth century with the Irish monk Columba and to Ireland well before that.

The English church as it evolved and became more organised in this early medieval period—she prefers this name to “dark ages”—seems to have had a top-down character, with conversion of the elite, who often saw it as a way to improve relations with the Almighty. An almost commercial approach seemed to follow. The church consolidated with minsters of monks, who were well endowed with land and well connected with the lay elite. They sponsored the lesser priests and, compared to most people of the time, lived comfortably. Despite the Vatican order for celibacy, many clergy seemed to be married or at least have children.

Although it is a history of Britain, Fleming seems tokenistic about Scotland and Wales. Tim Clarkson makes up for this with his history of the Picts, the foundation people, with the Scots, of Scotland, using a similar piecing together of fragments. They lived over most of what is now Scotland other than the west coast and south, though some areas were more Pictish than others. Perthshire was Pictland central. The Romans named them, perceiving them as a painted people, at least at war, but they also called some of them in a different context Caledonians.

The Picts left no written records and disappeared from history when their kingdom amalgamated with the Scots of the west coast in the 840s. They often came to be regarded in later times as a mystery people.

Clarkson sees no mystery. He sees them as ancient Brits, like most of the English, who probably mostly also spoke a language related to Welsh, though they had some distinctive stone monuments and a few distinctive customs, such as at one stage inheritance through the maternal side.

Roman pressure from the south brought them together in defence as a more organised society. Before that they were, Clarkson says, “a typical Iron Age society of farmers, fishermen and craftsmen grouped into tribes and ruled by a land-owning aristocracy”.

Most of the people lived in small settlements scattered across the landscape and owed their allegiance to local chiefs, who in turn acknowledged the authority of greater chiefs or kings. The economy was based on livestock—sheep, pigs and cattle—and on crops such as oats and barley. This, broadly, was the British way of life everywhere for aeons before Rome, and probably for many people was not so different under Rome.

Pressure from another unwelcome outsider, the Scandinavian Vikings, caused the Picts to disappear 600 years later. Viking incursions round the coast put both the Picts and Scots under pressure, but Clarkson rejects as “rose tinted” the view that it was a benign defensive merger. Though evidence is limited, he sees it as conquest. Invading inland, the Scots won and killed, deposed or otherwise dispatched the Pictish aristocracy, took over their estates and introduced their own language. The extent to which this bothered the general population is unknown.

Clarkson sees the architect of the takeover as the tough and ambitious Scot warrior-aristocrat Cinaed mac Ailpin (Kenneth McAlpin), who welded the embattled west coast Gaels together and headed east. He was the founder of Scotland and, in a liberal interpretation, also founder of the lineage (through the House of Stuart) leading to Elizabeth II.

The Scots and other western Gaels were also mainly Ancient Brits genetically but, probably through immigration, invasion and other contacts with nearby Ulster (and vice versa) over aeons had become Irish in speech and culture, with the intermingled genes of the region.

Such is the skimpiness of information that Clarkson’s book covers the whole Pict story in 188 pages. By comparison there is now a huge assemblage of information on the England of the period.

Fleming forgoes the politics. These were mainly about small local elites gradually coalescing into local kingdoms, through a mixture of violence and other contact, to almost—but not quite—becoming a united England as the Norman Conquest of 1066 approached. She instead keeps her focus on the people. She is able to tell us that the adults, though not the children, were of normal size but seemed to have prominent jaws. Long hair trimmed in the front was popular for men. But the terrible story she most reveals is that of the appalling health, diet and early deaths. It is hard to see the millers of merrie England being jolly for long, suffering so much physical and emotional pain. 

The previous book in the series also uses recent archaeological material and other fragments to piece together in amazing detail a fuller story than has been known previously of how and why, over four centuries, Rome occupied England, Wales and, more intermittently, parts of Scotland. Oxbridge historians in the past have tended to a benign view of Rome, Greece, imperialism and civilisation—in the sense of writing, towns, good buildings and elaborate law—generally. The Romans also left written records, which have favoured their cause.

David Mattingly, Professor of Roman Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester, takes a more critical, modern approach and seeks to appraise the impact on the British people. Needless to say, 400 years is a long time and many different things happened. While some impressive new buildings went up it was mainly a timber-and-thatch society of people wearing the tunic-type clothing often associated with the later Middle Ages. As so often there is abundant context and lots of complication and nuance, as well as yawning gaps left by lack of information. Mattingly concludes that “it is hard to contest the view that the Roman occupation of Britain was ultimately very unpopular, having extracted a high price for too long”.

Robert Murray contributed “When Sheep Mattered More than People” in the November issue.