Anglo-Saxon

Introduction
Anglo-Saxon, term used historically to describe any member of the Germanic peoples who, from
the 5th century CE to the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), inhabited and ruled territories that
are today part of England and Wales. They were a mix of tribes from Germany, Denmark and
the Netherlands. The three biggest were the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. The land they
settled in was 'Angle-land', or England. If we use the modern names for the countries they came
from, the Saxons were German-Dutch, the Angles were southern Danish, and the Jutes were
northern Danish.

The peoples of each of the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms spoke distinctive dialects, which
evolved over time and together became known as Old English. Within that variety of dialects, an
exceptionally rich vernacular literature emerged. Examples include the masterful epic
poem Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of manuscripts that cover events in the
early history of England. They replaced the Roman stone buildings with their own wooden ones,
and spoke their own language, which gave rise to the English spoken today.

The Anglo-Saxons also brought their own religious beliefs, but the arrival of Saint Augustine in
597 converted most of the country to Christianity.The Anglo-Saxon period lasted for 600 years,
from 410 to 1066, and in that time Britain's political landscape underwent many changes.
Anglo-Saxon rule came to an end in 1066, soon after the death of Edward the Confessor, who had
no heir. He had supposedly willed the kingdom to William of Normandy, but also seemed to favour
Harold Godwinson as his successor.
Harold was crowned king immediately after Edward died, but he failed in his attempt to defend
his crown, when William and an invading army crossed the Channel from France to claim it for
himself. Harold was defeated by the Normans at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066, and thus
a new era was ushered in.

A short history of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain

Anglo-Saxon armed force had fought for many years in the Roman army in Britain, so they were
not total strangers to the island. Their invasions were slow and fragmentary and began even before
the Roman masses departed. There is even some evidence to suggest that, initially, some Saxons
were invited to help protect the country from invasion.
When the Roman masses left Britain, the Germanic-speaking Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians
began to arrive – at first in small invading parties, but soon in increasing numbers. Initially they
met little firm resistance from the relatively defenseless inhabitants of Britannia. Around 500 AD,
however, the invaders were resisted fiercely by the Romano-British, who might have been led by
King Arthur, if he existed – and there is no hard evidence that he did. However, the Saxon monk
Gildas, writing in the mid-6th century, talks about a British Christian leader called Ambrosius who
rallied the Romano-British against the invaders and won twelve battles. Later accounts call this
leader Arthur. See 'Saxon Settler' lesson plan.

The Celtic areas of Britain regarded the Saxons as enemies and foreigners on their borders: their
name became Sassenachs to the Scottish and Saesneg to the Welsh.

The various Anglo-Saxon groups settled in different areas of the country. They formed several
kingdoms, often changing, and constantly at war with one another. These kingdoms sometimes
acknowledged one of their rulers as a ‘High King', the Bretwalda. By 650 AD there were seven
separate kingdoms.

Anglo-Saxon Literature
1. Anglo-Saxon Conquest

In the ancient times, there were three tribes called Angles, Saxons and Jutes in the northern Europe.
In the 5th century, they conquered Britain and settled down there. After driving the native people
into the deep mountains of Wales and Scotland, they divided the whole island among themselves.
Angles settled down in the east midland, and built the kingdom of East Angles; Saxons took the
southern part of the island and set up some small kingdoms such
as Wessex, Essex and Sussex; Jutes occupied the southeastern corner of the island. Gradually
seven kingdoms arose in Britain. In the 7th century, these small kingdoms were combined into a
United Kingdom called England.

Angles, Saxons and Jutes who are usually known as Anglo-Saxons are the first Englishmen. The
language spoken by them is called the Old English, which is the foundation of English language
and literature. With the Anglo-Saxon settlement in Britain, the history of English literature began.

2. Characteristics of Anglo-Saxon Literature

Anglo-Saxon literature, that is, the Old English literature, was almost exclusively a verse literature
in oral form. It could be passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. Its creators
for the most part were unknown. It was given a written form long after its composition. There were
two groups of poetry in the Anglo-Saxon period. The first group was the pagan poetry represented
by Beowulf ; the second was the religious poetry represented by the works of Caedmon and
Cynewulf. In the 8th century, Anglo-Saxon prose appeared. The famous prose writers of that
period were Venerable Bede and Alfred the Great.

Language of Anglo-Saxons
Old English (Ænglisc, Anglisc, Englisc) or Anglo-Saxon is the early form of the English
language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what
are now England and southern and eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the
mid-12th century. Old English is a West Germanic language closely related to Old Frisian and Old
Saxon. It had a grammar similar in many ways to Classical Latin. In most respects, including its
grammar, it was much closer to modern German and Icelandic than to modern English. It was
fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative,
and instrumental), three grammatical numbers (singular, plural, and dual) and three grammatical
genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons
only and referred to groups of two.
Some of the characteristics of the language were: adjectives, pronouns and (sometimes) participles
that agreed with their antecedent nouns in case, number and gender; finite verbs that agreed with
their subject in person and number; and nouns that came in numerous declensions (with deep
parallels in Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit). Verbs came in nine
main conjugations (seven strong and two weak), each with numerous subtypes, as well as a few
additional smaller conjugations and a handful of irregular verbs. The main difference from other
ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, is that verbs can be conjugated in only two tenses
(vs. the six "tenses" – really tense/aspect combinations – of Latin), and have no synthetic passive
voice (although it did still exist in Gothic). Gender in nouns was grammatical, as opposed to
the natural gender that prevails in modern English.
Many linguists believe that Old English received little influence from the local insular languages,
especially Common Brittonic (the language that may have been the majority language in Lowland
Britain, although it's also possible that British Latin had already replaced it in this region).
Linguists such as Richard Coates have suggested there could not have been meaningful contact
between the languages, which is reasonable argued from the small amount of loanwords. Recently
a number of linguists have argued that many of the grammar changes observed in English were
due to a Brittonic influence (see Brittonicisms in English). John McWhorter suggests that the
language changes seen later in English were always there in vernacular speech and this was not
written, especially since those who did the writing were educated individuals that most likely spoke
a standard form of Old English. The speech of an illiterate ceorl, on the other hand, can not be
reconstructed.[203] The progressive nature of this language acquisition, and the "retrospective
reworking" of kinship ties to the dominant group led, ultimately, to the "myths which tied the entire
society to immigration as an explanation of their origins in Britain".[204]
What survives through writing represents primarily the register of Anglo-Saxon, and this is most
often in the West Saxon dialect. Little is known about the everyday spoken language of people
living in the migration period. Old English is a contact language and it is hard to reconstruct
the pidgin used in this period from the written language found in the West Saxon literature of some
400 years later. Two general theories are proposed regarding why people changed their language
to Old English (or an early form of such): either, a person or household changed so as to serve an
elite; or, a person or household changed through choice as it provided some advantage
economically or legally.[205] Over time, Old English developed into four major dialects:
Northumbrian, spoken north of the river Humber; Mercian, spoken in the Midlands; Kentish,
spoken in Kent in the far southeastern part of the island; and West Saxon, spoken in the southwest.
All of these dialects have direct descendants in modern England, and American regional
dialects also have their roots in the dialects of Old English. "Standard" Modern English (if there is
such a thing), or at least modern English spelling, owes most to the Anglian dialect, since that was
the dialect of London.[206]
Near the end of the Old English period the English language underwent a third foreign influence,
namely the Scandinavian influence of Old Norse. In addition to a great many place names, these
consist mainly of items of basic vocabulary, and words concerned with particular administrative
aspects of the Danelaw (that is, the area of land under Viking control, which included extensive
holdings all along the eastern coast of England and Scotland). The Scandinavians spoke Old
Norse, a language related to Old English in that both derived from the same ancestral Proto-
Germanic language. It is very common for the intermixing of speakers of different dialects, such
as those that occur during times of political unrest, to result in a mixed language, and one theory
holds that exactly such a mixture of Old Norse and Old English is thought to have accelerated the
decline of case endings in Old English.[207] The influence of Old Norse on the lexicon of the
English language has been profound: responsible for such basic vocabulary items as sky, leg,
the pronoun they and hundreds of other words.[208]
Nick Higham has provided a summary of the importance of language to the Anglo-Saxon culture:
As Bede later implied, language was a key indicator of ethnicity in early England. In circumstances
where freedom at law, acceptance with the kindred, access to patronage, and the use of possession
of weapons were all exclusive to those who could claim Germanic descent, then speaking Old
English without Latin or Brittonic inflection had considerable value.[1]

Development of an Anglo-Saxon society (560–610)

In the last half of the 6th century, four structures contributed to the development of society; they
were the position and freedoms of the ceorl, the smaller tribal areas coalescing into larger
kingdoms, the elite developing from warriors to kings, and Irish monasticism developing
under Finnian (who had consulted Gildas) and his pupil Columba.
The Anglo-Saxon farms of this period are often falsely supposed to be "peasant farms". However,
a ceorl, who was the lowest ranking freeman in early Anglo-Saxon society, was not a peasant but
an arms-owning male with the support of a kindred, access to law and the wergild; situated at the
apex of an extended household working at least one hide of land.[54] The farmer had freedom and
rights over lands, with provision of a rent or duty to an overlord who provided only slight lordly
input.[c] Most of this land was common outfield arable land (of an outfield-infield system) that
provided individuals with the means to build a basis of kinship and group cultural ties.[55]
The Tribal Hidage lists thirty-five peoples, or tribes, with assessments in hides, which may have
originally been defined as the area of land sufficient to maintain one family.[56] The assessments
in the Hidage reflect the relative size of the provinces.[57] Although varying in size, all thirty-five
peoples of the Tribal Hidage were of the same status, in that they were areas which were ruled by
their own elite family (or royal houses), and so were assessed independently for payment of
tribute. [d] By the end of the sixth century, larger kingdoms had become established on the south
or east coasts.[59] They include the provinces of the Jutes of Hampshire and Wight, the South
Saxons, Kent, the East Saxons, East Angles, Lindsey and (north of the
Humber) Deira and Bernicia. Several of these kingdoms may have had as their initial focus a
territory based on a former Roman civitas.[60]
By the end of the sixth century, the leaders of these communities were styling themselves kings,
though it should not be assumed that all of them were Germanic in origin. The Bretwalda concept
is taken as evidence of a number of early Anglo-Saxon elite families. What Bede seems to imply
in his Bretwalda is the ability of leaders to extract tribute, overawe and/or protect the small
regions, which may well have been relatively short-lived in any one instance. Ostensibly "Anglo-
Saxon" dynasties variously replaced one another in this role in a discontinuous but influential and
potent roll call of warrior elites.[61] Importantly, whatever their origin or whenever they flourished,
these dynasties established their claim to lordship through their links to extended kin ties. As Helen
Peake jokingly points out, "they all just happened to be related back to Woden".[62]
The process from warrior to cyning – Old English for king – is described in Beowulf:

Conversion to Christianity (590–660)

In 565, Columba, a monk from Ireland who studied at the monastic school of Moville under
St. Finnian, reached Iona as a self-imposed exile. The influence of the monastery of Iona would
grow into what Peter Brown has described as an "unusually extensive spiritual empire," which
"stretched from western Scotland deep to the southwest into the heart of Ireland and, to the
southeast, it reached down throughout northern Britain, through the influence of its sister
monastery Lindisfarne."[64]
In June 597 Columba died. At this time, Augustine landed on the Isle of Thanet and proceeded to
King Æthelberht's main town of Canterbury. He had been the prior of a monastery in Rome when
Pope Gregory the Great chose him in 595 to lead the Gregorian missionto Britain
to Christianise the Kingdom of Kent from their native Anglo-Saxon paganism. Kent was probably
chosen because Æthelberht had married a Christian princess, Bertha, daughter of Charibert
I the King of Paris, who was expected to exert some influence over her husband. Æthelberht was
converted to Christianity, churches were established, and wider-scale conversion to Christianity
began in the kingdom. Æthelberht's law for Kent, the earliest written code in any Germanic
language, instituted a complex system of fines. Kent was rich, with strong trade ties to the
continent, and Æthelberht may have instituted royal control over trade. For the first time following
the Anglo-Saxon invasion, coins began circulating in Kent during his reign.
In 635 Aidan, an Irish monk from Iona, chose the Isle of Lindisfarne to establish a monastery
which was close to King Oswald's main fortress of Bamburgh. He had been at the monastery
in Iona when Oswald asked to be sent a mission to Christianise the Kingdom of Northumbria from
their native Anglo-Saxon paganism. Oswald had probably chosen Iona because after his father had
been killed he had fled into south-west Scotland and had encountered Christianity, and had
returned determined to make Northumbria Christian. Aidan achieved great success in spreading
the Christian faith, and since Aidan could not speak English and Oswald had learned Irish during
his exile, Oswald acted as Aidan's interpreter when the latter was
[65]
preaching. Later, Northumberland's patron saint, Saint Cuthbert, was an abbot of the
monastery, and then Bishop of Lindisfarne. An anonymous life of Cuthbert written at Lindisfarne
is the oldest extant piece of English historical writing, [e] and in his memory a gospel (known as
the St Cuthbert Gospel) was placed in his coffin. The decorated leather bookbinding is the oldest
intact European binding.[67]
In 664, the Synod of Whitby was convened and established Roman practice as opposed to Irish
practice (in style of tonsure and dates of Easter) as the norm in Northumbria, and thus "brought
the Northumbrian church into the mainstream of Roman culture."[68] The episcopal seat of
Northumbria was transferred from Lindisfarne to York. Wilfrid, chief advocate for the Roman
position, later became Bishop of Northumbria, while Colmán and the Ionan supporters, who did
not change their practices, withdrew to Iona.