The Anglo Saxons by Marc Morris
A review
The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England
Mark Morris
Hutchinson
2021
In his 2012 book The Norman Conquest, Marc Morris remarks upon what a different experience it was to write about the eleventh century after cutting his teeth researching the document-rich court of Edward I. “The sources for the Norman Conquest can seem woefully impoverished,” he writes. Nonetheless, he adapted to his new research project and produced an excellent book. In his latest book, he tackles a far longer period for which the sources are still more scanty. He rises to the challenge admirably, and produces a book that is a delight to read.
This book, like the best history books, succeeds in telling two compelling stories at once: The story of the peoples of what became England, and the story of historians, trying to make sense of the sources they can find. While primary sources are comparatively scarce, we can today look to the fruits of decades-worth of systematic study across several disciplines. Morris still chooses a limited palette to work with, explaining that trying to summarise the “thousand streams of scholarship,” would be “as foolhardy as trying to freeze a waterfall.” He is dismissive of the use of DNA studies for his purposes, preferring “a reconsideration of traditional evidence,” this being written and archaeological sources.
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History proves as invaluable to Morris as it does to any Anglo-Saxonist. Morris acknowledges that as a source it has its limitations. When describing the earliest presence of Germanic peoples in Britain, Bede is writing of events that took place three hundred years before his time. Morris explain that parts of Bede’s account appear to be folklore, while for other parts Bede seems to have consulted his sixth-century British predecessor Gildas, writing a hundred years after the events he describes in his tract, known as The Ruin of Britain. A Gallic written source from 452 provides a tantalising glimpse of events in Britain, but Morris confesses to wishing its anonymous writer “could have been a little more garrulous.” Where things really start to firm up are those “occasions when history and archaeology touch hands” such as an excavation at Yeavering revealing abundant evidence of a “mighty hall,” just like King Eadwine’s hall, which Bede claims was situated in that very spot.
Germanic peoples inhabited Britain for centuries before any sense of a unified Anglo-Saxon ethnicity came about, much less a politically unified England. Instead, a range of smaller kings jostled for territory and influence. These kings, Morris reminds us, were among other things brutal warlords, and carved out and maintained their territory through bloodshed and treachery. So too were some churchmen, and the alliance between sacred and profane ambition is explored in the pages on St Wilfrid and King Ecgfrith. These struggles continued between different settled populations of Germanic peoples, as well as against new arrivals and of course against the indigenous Britons. Morris ponders how the culture of the Germanic migrants came to supersede the Roman influenced indigenous culture. He draws no firm conclusions, instead exploring the merits and demerits of the dominant theories. Given the relative numbers, he finds outright genocide less than convincing, but he remains circumspect about a competing theory of “elite transfer,” in which the indigenous population adopts wholesale the culture of the incoming migrants.
It is impossible to read the book without seeing that Anglo-Saxon culture was never static. Those arriving in the fifth century brought their own religious traditions. Later generations converted to Christianity, perhaps sometimes through religious conviction, but certainly often motivated by political expediency or violent coercion. Questions about just what the correct forms of Christianity were also proved contentious, and as the bitter controversy over the dating of Easter illustrates, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the Anglo-Saxons would align themselves with the rituals of the Roman church.
When we see signs of a sense of unity, they appear to be attempts by kings to consolidate their power. One such attempt, Morris suggests, was the construction of Offa’s Dyke, a great earthwork that runs approximately down the modern border between Wales and England. Morris notes that such an undertaking would have taken a remarkable mobilisation of labour and would be of only limited use as a defensive feature. Speculations that it once had other components that have since disappeared do not convince him. Instead, he says, the purpose of the Dyke is likely to have been “more political than pragmatic.” The great earthwork was part of a campaign to foster a burgeoning sense of shared identity among the disparate Germanic peoples resident in Britain by setting them apart from the indigenous Britons, the wilisc, meaning ‘strangers’ to the Anglo-Saxons and the root of our word ‘Welsh.’ Why demarcate a border to the west but not to the east? Because cordial relations with the Carolingian Empire were recognised as essential for Offa, a letter to him from Charlemagne reveals as much. To the east lay abundant commercial opportunities and connections to the heart of Christendom. To the west, despised and “dangerous enemies of the Saxon race.” The Britons had largely become Christian but had maintained their older reckoning of when Easter should be celebrated, one of several “evil customs” that set them at odds with the fashions of the mainstream western Church. By this theory, the Dyke was a statement. To the Anglo-Saxons it said, ‘the strangers are over there. We must all be friends.’ To Western Christendom it said ‘we’re not with those guys. We’re like you.’
It was around this time that Viking raids began, and these unwelcome confrontations emphasised the shared identity of Britain’s Germanic population. Now Christian but still with some awareness of their ancestral religion, the brutality of the Odin-worshipping Norsemen “meant a confrontation with the demons of their own pagan past.” Centuries later, when Alfred defeats a Viking army at Edington, among the terms he demanded was that they convert to Christianity. This, says Morris, could have been in the hope that Christianised Norsemen may play by the rules of politics and warfare that the Anglo-Saxons had come to take for granted, hopefully making them more predictable neighbours for Alfred’s successors to deal with.
Morris tells us that King Alfred was not quite the father of the English nation he is sometimes made out to be, although his official biographer Asser begins to use the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ “to convince the people of Mercia that they had not been annexed, but that they were an integral part of a new, larger political entity, ‘the Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.’” A century later, a territory recognisably English does indeed exist, one that is promptly conquered by Danes before returning to Saxon rule, then finally and famously falling to the Normans in 1066. It is the governmental apparatus introduced under King Alfred’s successors that made it possible for the famous Norman survey of their newly conquered lands to be so thorough. This survey, the Domesday Book, provides historians with an excellent source, “a composite picture of Anglo-Saxon England at its sunset,” a wealthy, unified polity with deep and strong foundations, some of which the Normans saw fit to leave intact.
The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris provides us with a truly entertaining overview of a tumultuous half-millennium. It combines a flair for storytelling with an honest appraisal of the sources and reminds us that the finest history books do not furnish us with a sense of certainty. The finest history books inspire deeper curiosity.