7). The venerable bede and gens anglorum

Pre-reading task: What was the principal differene between Gens Brittonum and Gens Anglorum?

During the late seventh century and the early eighth, the most eminent Anglo-Saxon scholar of the age lived and worked. Bede was born near Jarrow about ad 673 and, when he was only seven years old, his parents decided he should enter a religious life and gave him to Benedict Biscop (Benedict the bishop), who had founded a monastery at Monkwearmouth. Benedict had once been a member of Oswiu's personal bodyguard. About ad 666, he had made a pilgrimage to Rome and then decided to enter the religious life. It was the first of many visits to Rome and he became a convinced adherent of Roman practices, becoming abbot of St Augustine's at Canterbury. He was charged with conducting Theo­dore to Britain as the new archbishop. Ecgfrith of Northumbria eventually gave Monkwearmouth to Benedict for the creation of a major centre in ad 674. He made another journey to Rome, returning with several valuable books with which to stock the library of his foundation. The young Bede proved an enthusiastic pupil and was passed into the care of Ceolfrith whom Benedict had appointed abbot of a new religious foundation at Jarrow. Ceolfrith (ad 641-716) had been raised in Celtic customs but eagerly adopted the new Roman forms and was particularly enthusiastic to spread literacy among his people. He enlarged the library at Jarrow which included the Codex Amiatinus, now the oldest surviving Latin text of the Bible and in the Bibliotheca Laurensiana in Florence. It was intended as a gift for the Pope. In ad 716 Ceolfrith set off for Rome, taking the book with him, but he died en route at Langres, in Burgundy. An аnonymous Life, written shortly after his death, says that earlier a plague had ravaged Jarrow and only the abbot, Ceolfrith, and one small boy were left alive. The small boy must have been Bede. its rapid fluctuations can be seen by the grants of ecclesi­astical land given by Ine. In ad 704 he endowed Sherborne and made over to it two clearly Celtic monasteries at Coneresbury and Banwell. Sherborne also acquired five hides of land by the River Tamar and it has been suggested that the gift was given by the Dumnonian king to prevent further West Saxon aggression.

In ad 706 Aldhelm was appointed bishop of Sherborne. He had studied both at the Irish foundation of Malmesbury and at Canter­bury. His first teacher was the Irish scholar Maildubh, who had founded the monastery. Ine had now given him charge of the West Saxons' ecclesiastical area 'west of Selwood' with Sherborne as its centre. Aldhelm had a cathedral church built there which William of Malmesbury admired during a visit.

Aldhelm wrote a tract on the matrimonial customs of the Saxons, which were contrary to the teachings of St Paul. In De Vtrginitatae, wtitten for abbess Hildelith and the nuns of Barking, Aldhelm pro­duced a new philosophical approach to the problem. He was also a skilled poet in Latin and English, fond of Latin riddles, and his works became popular in pre-Conquest England. Aldhelm also became part of the diplomatic process, and was used by Ine in the period preceding final onslaught on Celtic Dumnonia to justify such expansion.

The Saxons were certainly in occupation of Taunton by this time and the major part of Somerset was in their hands. Just how much western Devon was left to the Dumnonians is difficult to say.

Bede has become famous for his Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, completed in ad 731. It was widely read at the time and no fewer than five eighth-century copies still survive. Without this work, we would know little of Saxon thinking and internal events during this period. But Bede's work was much wider and more varied than that of an historian. He wrote Lives of the abbots, a history of his own monastery, two Lives of Cuthbert, one in prose and one in verse, and two works on the reckoning of time, De Temporibus and De Temporum Ratione, which had considerable influence at this time. They are tracts on the reckoning of Easter and, of course, Bede supports Rome in this matter. His ‘Letter to Ecgberht’ composed in ad 734 is also an important document, being a critique of the failings of the Northumbrian Church in the years following its abandonment of Celtic practices.

During the period of Bede's life, the Saxons continued their expan­sionist campaigns against the Celts and the Northumbrian scholar was a witness to the last days of the British Celtic kingdom of Dumnonia.

Ine, son of Coenred, succeeded Caedwalla as king of the West Saxons in ad 688. He made it a policy to continue the western expansionist settlements in the territory of the Celts of Dumnonia. In ad 710 he was fighting against Geraint who would appear to be one of the last, if not the last, king of Dumnonia. Ine had been pressing into the Celtic kingdom from the first days of his succession and when he issued a series of laws, in about ad 695, they demon­strated that Celtic populations had been incorporated into his king­dom. The welisc or Britons were provided with a definite place in the West Saxon scheme of things and a tariff of wergelds, or compen­sation payments, for taking a Briton's life was included in the new laws. These ranged from payment of fines for the killing of British Celtic slaves of between fifty and sixty shillings, to compensation of 600 shillings for the slaying of a landed Briton with five hides, being 500 acres. Obviously, ownership of five hides clearly marks a person of substance. One of the categories in the laws is defined as a British horseman in the Saxon king's service, whose compensation was placed at 200 shillings. This indicates that the West Saxons were employing British cavalry mercenaries in their wars. But were these Celtic mercenaries employed in the wars against their own people or the internal squabbles of the Saxons such as Ine's attack on Kent? In AD 694 Ine exacted a wergeld from Wihtred (ad 690-725) for he slaying of Mul, brother of Caedwalla of Wessex. Kent had been conquered by Caedwalla but it was not a permanent conquest.

Bede’s Historia makes repeated reference to the gens Anglorum – the ‘people of the English’ – in contexts which require that both he and his intended autdience had a comparatively clear vision of the group identity of the Anglo-Saxons (however that be defined) de­spite their several origins, at least in his own view, as Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The most recent, extended treatment of this term and its origins has concluded that the term derives from Pope Gregory's need for a single tag by which to define the peoples to whom he had dispatched Augustine, and was thence exported to Britain where it eventually prevailed over alternative terms by which the English might have chosen to describe themselves. This may, however, be to overestimate the influence of Rome in this matter and to ignore more local imperatives, which may have played a more important role than so far acknowledged in the adoption of a single term for the Germanic community inside Britain.

To revert once more to Bede's comments at the close of his first book of the Historia Ecclesiastica, the crucial polarity in his vision of Britain was between the gens Brittonum - who were intrinsically heretical - and the gens Anglorum - who were intrinsically divinely favoured - and it is probably as much as anything his need to define these two groups that led him to adopt the phrase. It was, as has here been demonstrated, a fundamental of Bede's purposes in this work to justify the English domination of their neighbours and he adopted several means of achieving this, one of which was the widespread and recurring deployment of the analogy of the Roman Empire.

It is not, however, very likely that the favouring of the term 'Angles' over 'Saxons' or even 'Jutes' was fundamentally the re­sponsibility of either Bede or his distant mentor, St. Gregory. The reason for this is twofold:

1 Although Pope Gregory could conceivably have learnt to refer to the Germanic immigrants to Britain as 'English' from Deiran Angles in the slave market at Rome, this is the least credible facet of this well-known but surely apocryphal story. Even had he done so, the term necessarily had, thereby, an insular origin. Far more significant is Gregory's use of the term rex Anglorum in correspondence addressed to Aethelberht of Kent. Gregory was, by this point, in a position to know what sort of termin­ology would have been appropriate to the Kentish king, both from Frankish sources and insular ones; indeed his dispatch of a mission may have been in response to Aethelberht'e own initiative in the first place. We can, therefore, be reasonably sure that Aethelberht would have both recognised and approved this form of address: it may have conceded him more power than was in fact appropriate to the realities of his hegemony, but it cannot have been either obscure or irrelevant to him, let alone unwelcome. Despite the certain presence of only one signifi­cant 'Anglian' people (the East Angles) then recognising his imperium, therefore, and despite the inclusion within his he­gemony of far more numerous groups purporting to be Saxons or Jutes, the title rex Angiorum was necessarily acceptable to Aethelberht. This implies that it was already in widespread use even before Gregory began its popularisation within the context of the English conversion.

2 Secondly there has been far too little attention addressed to the role of the Britons in what was, in Bede's opinion at least, a highly competitive and bitter struggle with their conquerors. English perceptions of all the very numerous British tribal king­doms as a single gens is directly paralleled by British treatment of their Germanic neighbours and conquerors in similar terms. Writers of the late Empire consistently termed the Germanic intruders Saxones and Gildas, our only early insular source, used the same term in his only specific reference to them. Other than in reference to specific tribal kingships (in particular the East Angles), the Historia Brittonum used the same term with some consistency. There is some evidence that the British did make use of at least one alternative to this: Bede noted that the Britons referred to the English by the generic term Garmani and I have sought to direct attention already else­where to the possibility that Gildas had, in two passages, punned on the term Germanus. Both Saxones and (less cer­tainly) Germani were apparently, therefore, already being used by the enemies and competitors of the English in Britain, so were essentially contaminated by their pejorative purposes.

For the purposes of this fundamental contest for the control of erstwhile Roman Britain, the English required a collective identity, whether as pagans or Christians. The contest was a very real one and not an invention of Bede's fertile mind. The extensive English military and political conquest of so much of Britain achieved in the fifth century and never thereafter reversed provides the essential backdrop to this issue. If the terms 'Saxons' and 'Germans' were already in use as pejorative terms in the mouths of their British opponents, then it was incumbent on the English to adopt an alternative and Angli was the obvious one available, at least to the best of our knowledge. In similar fashion did the British prefer their own terminology for themselves - Cumbri and its vernacular equivalents - to the derogatory English term Wealas ('foreigners'), whence ultimately derived Wales and 'Welsh', with the meaning of slave.

However long the gestation of these terms, the political circum­stances which called them into existence were already in being when Gildas was writing, late in the fifth century. The term 'Angles' was appropriately enough used in its generic sense by Procopius little more than a half century later, writing probably on the basis of contemporary Frankish sources. It had, therefore, presumably already then begun to take root, at least a half century or so before Gregory turned his mind to the paganism of the English. It was a deep-rooted and very long-lived Anglo-British antagonism, there­fore, and the rhetoric to which that antagonism gave rise, which impelled the Germanic intruders of the fifth century, whom the world knew as Saxones and whom the Britons may also have thought of as Germani (or Garmani), to adopt the term Angli as uniformly appropriate to themselves. That this process was incom­plete in 731 may be implicit in Bede's recognition of the equality of the terms Saxones and Angli. Alternatively, this may be nothing more than Bede's own recognition of the use of Saxones by earlier providential historians with whom he wished to identify his own work. Certainly, his commoner usage is Angli as a generic term for the entire Germanic community in Britain, so the Old English speaking community. The vernacular term, Englisc(ne) was simi­larly used in a generic sense and specifically as a means of dis­tinguishing the Germanic from the British population in the Laws of lne (XXIV, XLVI, UV, LXXIV). If any English community should be expected, c. 700, to prefer 'Saxon' to ‘English’, it must surely be the

West Saxons: that they had adopted 'English' by this date suggests that it was already the generally accepted term throughout English-speaking Britain.

That Bede envisaged that the Britons were, per se, subject to the imperium of the gens Anglorum is at one and the same time a perceptive and subtle piece of casuistry and a reflection of the reality of English tenure of estates worked in large measure by unfree Britons. So were rhetoric and realism commingled in Bede's Historia.

Investigation of the literary sources available from the early eighth century suggests that the English intelligentsia expected the rural population - to which they rarely referred - to be in important respects different from their masters, even to the extent of being outside their sense of cultural and social community and kin. In several instances it is explicit that members of that rural population were British: in other instances it is either implicit or at least a reasonable interpretation. If it is inappropriate to generalise from these instances, then it must be said that the patterning of anecdotes is strange indeed.

Examination of the legal codes of the period emphasises this distinction between those who were law-worthy and those who were their dependants, or in some sense different and legally disadvantaged. While some Britons in Wessex, for example, could be of quasi-gentry status (and recall Bede's notice of British bishops there in the 660s), it is implicit in both the West Saxon and Kentish laws that the unfree were both numerous and unlikely en masse to be English, by any definition of that term then appropriate.

Discussion of the hide sheds further light on the structure of the rural community and the estates of which it was composed, as well as of complex interactions within the ranks of the political elite. Definition of the hide as a fundamental unit of render in reference to the maintenance of a free household once again emphasises the role of the gens Anglorum as a political, military and cultural elite, atop a community which remained otherwise quite visibly British even up until the early eighth century.

This survey picks up, therefore, many of the ideas and processes identified and discussed in the first of these volumes, which concen­trated on Gildas's writings and examined the process of the English conquest in the fifth century. That conquest remained a reality in the seventh century, and one which was of fundamental significance to the social and political structures of Bede's own time, to the justification of which he directed as much of his own considerable rhetorical talents as had Gildas deployed of his own in purposing to undermine it.

If the rhetoric of Bede and his contemporaries provides a reliable indication of the social fabric of seventh-century England, then the free gens Anglorum - comprising kings, clergy and the warrior classes - was in a position of mastery over a larger (and probably very much larger), but rarely mentioned, unfree underclass of servi et ancillae, rustici pauperes and the vulgus paupere. That underclass was defined in the legal codes very largely by virtue of its exclusion from access to law. In Bede's perception, it primarily comprised the Britons who had been sold into slavery to the English - so disinherited and handed over into their dominion by God. His responsibility must be in doubt but their subordination is a matter of factual comment wherein Bede had little room for misrepresen­tation. His lack of interest in the conversion of this underclass - and too in so many of the minor kingships within England (such as the W(r)ocenstete)

- perhaps reflects not so much the limitations of his knowledge but the fact that neither was in his opinion part of the gens Anglorum, whose glorious espousal of the true faith was the subject of his work. That many may additionally have already have been Christians is a possibility that Bede can have had little cause to publicise, for fear that it might damage his general perceptions of the relative virtues of the Britons and the English, which was such a central feature of his dialectic.

(from “AN ENGLISH EMPIRE Bede and Anglo-Saxon kings” by N.J.Higham MUP 1995).