4. ROMANS LEAVE BRITONS. THE ENGLISH INVASION
While Britain lived under Roman rule, the Roman Empire was beginning to become weak. It had many enemies on the continent, and it was impossible to have enough men for the protection of Britain. In 408 A.D. the legions dislocated on the island were called back to Rome to defend it from Goths. (To no avail, as it turned out, as the Goths succeeded in occupying Rome in 410 A.D.)
In the year 410 the islanders had to defend themselves against Picts and Scots. The Britons quite forgot by those times how to fight all together, they were used that the Romans took care of them, but now the Romans left them and returned to their own country, leaving behind their walls, their cities and their villas, camps and theatres. There were many a sad good-bye, because often Romans had British wives and relatives, and they felt despair in their hearts going away from those they loved dearly and to leave them in great danger.
The Britons were also in despair and even wrote a letter to Rome, asking soldiers to come back and help them; the letter is so sad that it is called "the groans of the Britons". "The barbarians draw us to the sea", they wrote, "the sea drives us back to the barbarians. We shall either be killed or drowned". Many sad relics are found in the caves, where whole families took refuge when their homes were destroyed.
At the beginning of the 5th century, Vortigern, the Romano-British overlord, was assailed on many fronts. Aside from Irish and Pict invaders on his northern and western frontiers, there were Germanic raiders on his eastern coasts, and from within he faced a challenge of his rival Aurelius Ambrosius, who had powerful allies in Gaul. In great despair he called to their strongest enemies — the Germanic tribe known as Jutes, who came very soon. The Saxons, another Germanic tribe, from the land between the Weser and Elbe, soon followed, and not long after that - the Angles (who came from the European coast of the North Sea, near neighbours of the Jutes in Jutland). Those were the Germanic tribes belonging to the Ingvaeone group.
The conquest of Britain by the Anglo-Saxon tribes (the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes) is well described by Bede the Venerable in his “Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum” and in “Historia Brittonum”. According to them, in 449 AD the Germanic tribes headed by the mercenary chieftains Hengist and Horsa landed on the island of Thanet in the Thames estuary. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Hengist and Horsa sent word to the Angles describing "the worthlessness of the Brythons, and the richness of the land" and asked for assistance. At the same time the Saxon commanders, understanding Vortigern’s weakness, recommended they bring in more of their countrymen to help. Vortigern agreed, and nineteen more ships landed. In order to pay these warriors, Hengist suggested they be granted land in Kent. By the time Vortigern realized his control was slipping away, it was too late.
The migration of a whole people, bringing its language and customs, began.
There were long cold winters on those flat and sandy shores round the south-east corner of the North Sea, from where the newcomers into England came. The meadows by the marshes, the dark woods behind them could not give enough food for the people who lived around; as time went on, more and more tribes of the same family of nations pushed nearer to the sea, till all were overcrowded.
Each spring, "when the birds began to twitter in the sunshine, and the brooks and the rivers ran gaily singing to the sea", some of the youngest and strongest of the people took their boats and went to find new good homes, where they could hunt, and fish, and grow corn to feed their families.
It was quite a terrible sight in Kent and other places, when the long, narrow boats, ornamented with dragon or some other heads came swiftly to the shore. The tall, strong men with flowing hair and bronzed faces, glittering swords and shields, jumped ashore one
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after the other, and very soon became masters of some good piece of land, situated either near the mouth of a river or in a bay. The newcomers began to build their homes, their towns and villages.
The Britons under Vortigern resisted and began to win important victories, pushing back their enemies, but the Saxons treacherously deceived them. Hengist sent to Vortigern an offer of peace. Vortigern accepted, and Hengist prepared a feast to bring together the British and Saxon leaders. However, he instructed his men to conceal knives beneath their feet. At the right moment, Hengist shouted "nima der sexa", and his men massacred the unsuspecting Britons. However, they spared Vortigern, who ransomed himself by giving the Saxons Essex, Sussex, Middlesex, and other unnamed districts. In all, during this massacre some 300 leading Romano-Celts were slaughtered, and the Celtic command of England never fully recovered from this blow.
Following the destructive assault of the Saxons, the survivors gathered together under the leadership of Ambrosius, who is described as "a gentleman who, perhaps alone of the Romans, had survived the shock of this notable storm. Certainly his parents, who had worn the purple, were slain by it. His descendants in our day have become greatly inferior to their grandfather's excellence." He was of high birth, and had Roman ancestry; he was presumably a Romano-Briton, rather than a Roman from elsewhere in the empire, though it is impossible to be sure. It also appears that Ambrosius was a Christian: the 6th-century British cleric Gildas says that he won his battles "with God's help." Ambrosius organised the survivors into an armed force and achieved the first military victory over the Saxon invaders. However, this victory was not decisive: "Sometimes the Saxons and sometimes the citizens [meaning the Romano-British inhabitants] were victorious." It is impossible to know to what degree Ambrosius actually wielded political power, and over what area, but it is certainly possible that he ruled some part of England. Ambrosius Aurelianus is supposed to be either himself a prototype for Artorius, King Arthur, or someone from Arthur's entourage.
One more of the few-recorded actions between the Romano-British and the Germanic invaders is mentioned in a poem by Aneirin from around 600 A.D. He describes how the Gododdin of Lothian (near Edinburgh, now part of Scotland), a Romano-British tribe controlling the eastern end of the Antonine Wall, spent a year preparing for a raid against the Angles of Northumbria. The warlord Mynydogg lavishly feasted his followers, giving them mead and wine. Then with three hundred leading horse warriors and their followers, Mynydogg rode south to attack the Angles at the Battle of Cattraeth in Yorkshire. They wore coats of mail, leaf-bladed swords and had gold torcs around their necks. As brave and well equipped as they were, they nevertheless came to grief at the hands of the Angles. All three hundred were slain, and the realm of the Celts was pushed further back. Lothian wouldn’t be recovered by the Scots for centuries.
The transmigration of the Anglo-Saxon tribes lasted for 150 years and ended in their occupation of most English territory. The Britons fought against the conquerors till about 600 but they were eventually done to the world and retreated. The territory of Britain was divided as follows: the Saxons and the Angles occupied the territories south and north off the Thames: the Saxons in Sussex, Essex, and Wessex, and the Angles along the eastern coast. The Jutes (who came from the Juteland Peninsula in Europe) settled on the Peninsula of Kent and the Isle of White. The Celtic tribes travelled to Brittany (Bretagne) in France or were ousted to the outskirts of the island: to Wales, Cornwall and Cumbria.
The tongue of the Anglo-Saxons was West-Germanic, different from the Celtic language of Britons. As the Celts were driven off their land, their language was eradicated, too. According to the linguist Mario Pei, the antipathy between the AngloSaxons and Britons was such that very few Celtic words came into the Anglo-Saxon language of that period (crag, dun, combe). Most borrowings from Celtic took place at a
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later period: glen, heather, clan, bard, plaid, slogan from Scots Gaelic; coleen, whiskey, blarney from Irish; eisteddfod, flannel from Welsh.
Comprehension questions
1.Why did the Romans leave Britain?
2.Against whom did the Britons have to defend themselves? Why were they unable to?
3.What did "the groans of the Britons" say?
4.What is Vortigern known for?
5.What happened in 449 A.D.?
6.Who was Ambrosius Aurelianus?
7.What is known about the tribe of Gododdin?
8.Where did the Anglo-Saxon tribes settle? Why was their settlement devastating for the Celts?
9.What linguistic fact does M. Pei note?
5. ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST. STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE TRIBES. CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY
By the end of the 7th century the invaders had conquered the territory which was later named the Kingdom of Anglia (under King Egbert of Wessex, who united England in one feudal state in the 9th c.). Moving northward they reached Fort of Firth and in the West they got as far as Cornwall, Wales and Cumbria.
The Germanic tribes who settled in Britain in the fifth century originally had no state unity and permanently waged wars. In the sixth century there were nine small kingdoms in
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Britain: Deira, Bernicia (Angles), East Anglia (Angles), Mercia (Angles in the north, Saxons in the south), Essex, Middlesex, Sussex, Wessex (Saxons), and Kent (inhabited by Jutes). Later Deira and Bernicia were united and named Northumbria. There was no concord among the kings, and no peace among the kingdoms. Each ruler desired to gain the supreme power and subordinate the others. At the end of the 6th c. there were seven kingdoms (The Heptarchy): Northumbria, East Anglia, Wessex, Essex, Sussex, Kent and Mercia. Later they united into four kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex and Kent.
At first the kingdom of Kent was the most prominent of them all. Northumbria, which appeared as a result of the forcible unification of Deira and Bernicia, gained the dominating position in the 7th century. [Blair 1969] Edwin, the King of Northumbria, enlarged the borders of his kingdom and built the citadel Edinburgh.
In the 8th century Mercia became the most powerful kingdom. [Halliday 1983] The zenith of her power is associated with the name of King Offa, who was received in Europe as a respectable ruler and upheld close diplomatic relations with Charlemagne. He was considered by Charlemagne the overlord of south Britain.
At the beginning of the 9th century the dominating position passed over to Wessex. This kingdom dominated and united nearly all the territory of Britain, its capital Winchester becoming the capital of Britain. The Wessex king Alfred the Great (849-901), the enlightened monarch, played an important role in the strengthening of the Wessex position, as he increased the fleet, strengthened the army, built new fortresses and forts, set up the England’s first school for feudal lords, invited scholars and writers to England and himself translated from Latin.
In the 9th AD Egbert, the King of Wessex, defeated Mercia’s troops and became the first king of all all England (the Kingdom of Anglia). The country was divided into the administrative units, the counties, headed by King’s officers – sheriffs. Several counties were united under the power of earls, who became major feudal lords.
Drawing parallels between Russia and England as regards the evolvement of their statehood, we cannot fail to notice differences, as well as correspondences between them. The democratic rule with the help of people’s assembly (a veche) had existed in the Russian territorial communes longer than folkmoot in the Anglo-Saxon tribes. In Russia the people’s rule with elected chieftains and voyevodas had been extended well into the 8- 9th c. (recorded at different times by Procopiusof Caesarea (6 c. A.D.), Jordanus, Arab chronicles etc.). In England folkmoots and elected chieftains and thegns still existed in the 5 c. (Octa, Eosa, Hengist, Horsa), but already in the 7-8 c. they were replaced by kings who sat on the throne as hereditary rulers.
The perseverance of the democracy from the bottom upwards and the electivity of chieftains in Rus was explained by the prevalence of the collective forms of labour and everyday life, owing to its more rigorous climatic conditions. The class-formation in Rus resulted in mere property differentiation, rather than political differentiation and power seizure by the rich. Gradually, the community-veche structure evolved in the polis-veche one.Several of these polices are known from the ancient Russian chronicles. ThePolyans had Kiev for their capital, the Ilmen Slavs — Novgorod, the Drevlyans — Iskorosten, the Krivichies — Smolensk. Like in Ancient Greece, in Russia the polices with their suburbs and communal lands were city-states, with their elected administrations.
In the late 9th c., the Novgorod people’s assembly, seeking to put an end to feudal strife and driven by the need to defend themselves against Khazars, Polovets and other nomads, decided to call Rurik, who had been living in Ladoga, to be their Konung, or leader of a hired guard (according to the Ipatyev Chronicle data, relied upon by the historian V.O. Klyuchevsky). Another version, upheld by some historians, e.g. I.Ya. Froyanov, is that Ruric was a Varangian leader of mercenaries, who, upon the end of war, deposed and killed the Slavonian prince of Novgorod, Vadim the Bold. The Kievan State emerged as
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the centre of Ancient Rus when Prince Oleg seized Kiev in 882, and later subjugated the East Slavic tribes, uniting them into one state, about the same time as Egbert of Wessex had tried, with little success, to unite Wessex, Mercia and other territories into the Kingdom of Anglia (circa 830). It should be noted, that Prince Oleg did not (and, obviously, couldn’t) abolish the veches, he had to come to terms with the people’s assemblies. Thus the hereditary princely power in Rus did not interfere with the veche, but rather complemented it. More than once did the veches in Novgorod, Pskov, Pinsk, Smolensk, Lvov, Galich and Kiev refuse credence to princes and even drive them out. Thus the early Russian princes ruled by the agreement with the veche and with its consent.
Conversion to Christianity
The Anglo-Saxons, settling on the British Isles, knew only the gods of their forefathers, they were pagans. The pagans had many gods. There were Woden, the god of war; Thor, the god of thunder; Freya, the goddess of peace, and others. We recall those gods now as we speak of Wednesday (Woden's day), Thursday (Thor's day), Friday (Freya's day). Thus the English knew nothing of Christianity during a long time after Christ was born. But in fact Christianity arrived in Britain long before then, in the 1st century A.D., when Roman artisans and traders arriving in Britain spread among the Britons the story of Jesus along with stories of their Pagan deities.
But let us return to the English.
Christianity came at the pagan Anglo-Saxons from two directions. The Celtic Church, pushed back into Wales, Cornwall, and particularly Ireland, made inroads in the north from an early base on Lindisfarne Island. We can still see the crosses in the north of England and in Ireland.
The Roman Catholic Church approached from the south, beginning with the mission of St. Augustine to Aethelbert, King of Kent, in 597. This king became Christian, following the example of his wife, a daughter of the West-Frankish king.
Let us dwell on the second direction. According to Bede, about the year 600 A.D. (in fact, in 597) a monk in Rome was surprised very much when he saw a sad sight of several English boys, they were sold as slaves at the market. The monk decided to send news of Christianity to the boys' country. Later the monk became Pope Gregory the Great and sent a missionary, Augustine, to Britain. It was very important for the development of the country because the people of the island so became nearer to the civilisation of the Continent.
A fine cross was put up at the beginning of the 20th century in the Isle of Thanet, to mark the spot where Augustine, the Roman missionary, landed at the end of the sixth century. He and his clergy had a painted cross and banners, and they went to Canterbury from here, singing hymns and prayers. They set up large stone crosses on their way, when they stopped at many places and told the people the Gospel story.
Kent, following king Aethelbert's example, became Christian; but the other tribes remained pagans for some time.
Comprehension questions
1.What Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were there in the sixth century A.D.?
2.How did they fight for supremacy?
3.Under what king did the Kingdom of Anglia appear?
4.What are the differences and similarities between early Russia and early England?
5.In what two directions did Christianity make inroads in England?
6.When was Christianity introduced in Kent? What does Bede tell about it?
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6.EDWIN, THE GREAT KING WHO FOUNDED EDINBURGH, OR EDWIN'S TOWN. BEDE, THE SCHOLAR
Edwin was one of the greatest of the first Christian kings. He lived from 585 till 633 and was the king of Northumbria. It was he who founded Edinburgh — Edwin's burgh, or town. He needed a strong fort to protect the fertile lands in the south and the roads from the north. The great castle rock between the hills and the sea gave the good protection of the town which grew up round its base.
Edwin was a pagan when he married a Christian woman, Ethelberg, the Kent king's sister. The king of Kent made him a condition to baptize his people — and he did it beginning from 626. In 633 Edwin's enemies, kings of North Wales and of Mercia, rose against Edwin and killed him.
A little further north there lived a little later the great scholar and writer, his name was Bede (672-735), the first English historian. People often called him "the Venerable Bede". We know about his life from his autobiographical notes to one of his books.
"I, Bede, a servant of Christ, and priest of the monastery of the apostles Saint Peter and Saint Paul, have with the God's help, composed so far as I could gather it, from old documents or from the traditions of the elders, or from my own knowledge. I was born in the territory of this monastery, and at the age of seven I was given to the Abbot Benedict, and he taught me".
Bede spent all his life learning and teaching, translating and writing books for the pupils who gathered round him.
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