Anglo-Saxon migration debate

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The debate on the Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain has tried to explain how there was a widespread change from Romano-British to Anglo-Saxon cultures in the area of England between the fall of Rome and the eighth century, a time when there were scant historical records. Traditionally there had been a near universal belief, dating from the earliest surviving written sources, that the Romano British inhabitants of Britain had been exterminated, expelled or enslaved from England into Wales.

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From the 1970s onwards there was a reaction to this narrative, drawing particularly on archeology, contending that the initial migration had been of a very small group of elite warriors who offered a superior form of social organisation to late Roman models, and through a position of social superiority had seen lower social classes adopt Germanic language, religion and social structures. Although it was close to historical orthodoxy for a time, it never enjoyed as wide acceptance as the traditional view had in its time, and many academics and more popular writers still put forward a more migrationist interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon settlement.

The migrationist viewpoint has gained more acceptance recently with genetic studies showing that particularly in the South and East of England that there was wide spread population displacement.

Early medieval views

The Venerable Bede writing the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, from a codex at Engelberg Abbey, Switzerland. E-codices bke-0047 001v medium.jpg
The Venerable Bede writing the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, from a codex at Engelberg Abbey, Switzerland.

No contemporary written sources give a detailed account of the most influential phases of Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain, generally thought to be around the fifth century. Surviving written accounts of events of that period are all at least a century after the facts and the influential account by the scholar Bede was written several centuries later.

British sources

The earliest text to give an explicit account of settlement of Britain by what it calls "Saxons" (Latin Saxones) is the sermon De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, which paints a bleak picture of a history of violent expulsions of the British westwards from areas in eastern Britain where pagan "Saxons", initially invited to the island as mercenaries, settle. In Gildas's account, these events are divine punishment for the sinful nature of many British rulers. [1]

Anglo-Saxon sources

From the Anglo-Saxon side, the self-consciously English historian Bede wrote about the settlement in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, to a large extent adopting Gildas's account. [2] He also takes the view that this was an invasion of three tribes — the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes — at a specific date, 449 AD. [3] He also claims that the Welsh had a strong hostility to the Anglo-Saxons, which meant that unlike the Irish missionaries or the Roman mission of Augustine they did not try to evangelise the Saxons. [4]

Regardless of how close it may have come to historical reality, Bede's account of the migration was hugely influential on later Anglo-Saxon historical writing, for example influencing the Anglo Saxon Chronicle's account of the fifth and sixth centuries, [5] Wulfstan of York's conception of Scandinavian migration to Britain in the late tenth century, or The Battle of Brunanburh 's representation of Æthelstan's attempts around the 930s to conquer all of Britain: [6]

Never yet in this island before this by what books tell us and our ancient sages, was a greater slaughter of a host made by the edge of the sword, since the Angles and Saxons came hither from the east, invading Britain over the broad seas, and the proud assailants, warriors eager for glory, overcame the Britons and won a country. [7]

Continental sources

Near contemporary continental sources, although clearly further removed from events also backed up the Romano-British and Saxon accounts of Germanic immigration and displacement of native Britons. According to the Chronica Gallica of 452 , a chronicle written in Gaul, Britain was ravaged by Saxon invaders in 409 or 410. This was only a few years after Constantine III was declared Roman emperor in Britain, and during the period that he was still leading British Roman forces in rebellion on the continent. Although the rebellion was eventually quashed, the Romano-British citizens reportedly expelled their Roman officials during this period, and never again re-joined the Roman empire. [8] Writing in the mid-sixth century, Procopius states that after the overthrow of Constantine III in 411, "the Romans never succeeded in recovering Britain, but it remained from that time under tyrants". [9]

Later medieval views

The opening page from Book 1 of the Historia Anglorum. Corpus Christi College ms 280 f.7v.jpg
The opening page from Book 1 of the Historia Anglorum.

During the late medieval period, interpretations of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain were shaped by a combination of monastic traditions, genealogical interests and political concerns. Chroniclers such as Henry of Huntingdon and Geoffrey of Monmouth relied on earlier sources, particularly Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, [10] but often adapted these accounts to reflect the concerns of their own times.

A dominant narrative among late medieval writers was the idea of the Anglo-Saxon migration as a violent invasion that led to the near-total displacement of the native Britons. This interpretation, rooted in Bede and so in Gildas, was frequently repeated and expanded upon in later medieval chronicles. Henry of Huntingdon, in his Historia Anglorum, presented the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons as an overwhelming catastrophe for the Britons, describing their defeat as divine punishment for their sins - he treated the Angle and Saxon "invasions" as two of five invasions (together with the Picts, Scots and Normans) that were sent as a punishment from God. [11] This was an idea that resonated with medieval religious interpretations of history.

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s highly unreliable Historia Regum Britanniae further popularized the idea of Anglo-Saxons as barbaric invaders, who destroyed a once-glorious British kingdom. This reading was tremendously popular during the High Middle Ages, revolutionising views of the Anglo-Saxon settlement despite the criticism of such writers as Gerald of Wales and William of Newburgh, who stated "no one but a person ignorant of ancient history [can doubt] how impertinently and impudently he falsifies in every respect." [12]

This period also saw the persistence of a Welsh tradition, which continued to depict the Anglo-Saxons as usurpers and oppressors. Welsh historical texts such as the Historia Brittonum and later Brut y Tywysogion emphasized the resilience of the Britons against Saxon aggression. [13]

Early-modern views

An emphasis on the Germanic roots of the English was a theme of early seventeenth century historians Richard Verstegan and William Camden, who traced English institutions to a Germanic love of liberty that the Anglo-Saxon settlers had imported into Britain. Racial categories were far vaguer than they would be in later centuries but these writers did start a commonly repeated seventeenth century theme of the Anglo-Saxons being the "most distinguished branch of the sturdy, free-growing Germanic tree". [14]

The Anglo-Saxon settlors were often seen particularly by the Radical Whig faction, as the foundation of English legal and political liberty with Anglo-Saxon settlors bringing in a system of governance based on customary law, local assemblies and the rule of law, which was later disrupted by the Norman Conquest. Seventeenth-century thinkers such as James Harrington and Algernon Sidney viewed the Anglo-Saxon period as one of free institutions, where common folk had a voice in governance through folkmoots and witans.

Thomas Jefferson subscribed to this idea of Saxon liberties brought in by the settlers. For that reason he proposed that Hengest and Horsa, the legendary leaders of the first settlors, be put on the Great Seal of the United States. [15] calling them ""the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we assumed". [16]

During the eighteenth century, British and American intellectuals and politicians developed a view, later labelled "Anglo-Saxonism" by scholars such as Alan Frantzen, which contended that the British and Americans were a superior culture due to their Anglo-Saxon racial roots. [17] [18] This movement took Bede's opinion that the migration of Anglo-Saxons to Britain was divinely ordained as a means to bring the whole island of Britain under proper Christian rule and extended it to argue that the later extension of English settlement and political dominance over the British Isles, Caribbean, and North America was likewise ordained by God (becoming one of the sources for the ideology of manifest destiny). One of the main arguments was the "Teutonic germ theory" which argued that many British and so American institutions came about due to the racial characteristics inherited from the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain. [19] It later evolved into the Nordicism of the 20th century which was more inclusive towards Celtic and Norman influences influences in Britain. [20]

Traditional View

The traditional view of a mass invasion in which the Anglo-Saxon incomers drove the native Romano-British inhabitants to the western fringes of the island was widely accepted from at least the Victorian times until around the 1970s. This view has influenced much of the scholarly and popular perceptions of the process of anglicisation in Britain. It remains the starting point and 'default position', to which other hypotheses are compared in modern reviews of the evidence. [21]

The theory, prominently set out by Edward Augustus Freeman, suggests that the Anglo-Saxons and the Britons were competing cultures, and that through invasion, extermination, slavery, and forced resettlement the Anglo-Saxons defeated the Britons and consequently their culture and language prevailed. [22]

William Stubbs in his Constitutional History of England [23] laid out a more conventionally Whig view which for a while became the standard authority on its subject. [24] The book claimed to trace the development of the English constitution from first Anglo-Saxon settlers until 1485. [25] [26]

Widespread extermination and displacement of the native peoples of Britain is still considered a viable possibility by a number of scholars. [27]

There are a number of non written methodologies that were traditionally used to back this school. Using linguistic analysis, British Celtic languages had very little impact on Old English vocabulary, and this suggests that a large number of Germanic-speakers became important relatively suddenly. [28] Such a view is broadly supported by the toponymic evidence. [29]

Diffusion theory

In the latter half of the 20th century, archaeologists pushed back against that view and allowed for only the movement of a small Anglo-Saxon "warrior elite", which gradually popularized a non-Roman identity among the Romano-Britons after the downfall of Roman institutions. This hypothesis suggests a large-scale acculturation of natives to the incoming language and material culture.

In support of this, archaeologists have found that, despite evidence of violent disruption, settlement patterns and land use show many continuities with the Romano-British past, despite profound changes in material culture. [30] The elite takeover, similar to the Norman Conquest, rather than a large-scale migration, meant the bulk of the population were Britons who adopted the culture of the conquerors. Bryan Ward-Perkins argues that while "culturally, the later Anglo-Saxons and English did emerge as remarkably un-British, ... their genetic, biological make-up is none the less likely to have been substantially, indeed predominantly, British". [31]

Within this theory, two processes leading to Anglo-Saxonisation have been proposed. One is similar to culture changes observed in Russia, North Africa and parts of the Islamic world, where a politically and socially powerful minority culture becomes, over a rather short period, adopted by a settled majority. This process is usually termed 'elite dominance'. [32]

The second process is explained through incentives, such as the wergild outlined in the law code of Ine of Wessex. The wergild of an Englishman was set at a value twice that of a Briton of similar wealth. However, some Britons could be very prosperous and own five hides of land, which gave thegn-like status, with a wergild of 600 shillings. [33] Ine set down requirements to prove guilt or innocence, both for his English subjects and for his British subjects, who were termed 'foreigners/wealas' ('Welshmen'). [34] The difference in status between the Anglo-Saxons and Britons could have produced an incentive for a Briton to become Anglo-Saxon or at least English speaking.. [35]

Synthesis

Possible routes of Anglo-Saxon migration in the 5th/6th centuries Anglo.Saxon.migration.5th.cen.jpg
Possible routes of Anglo-Saxon migration in the 5th/6th centuries

In recent years, partly driven by new genetic studies, there has been a synthesis of migration and acculturation, with a return to a more migrationist perspective but with an emphasis on the regional variation of the ratio of Anglo-Saxon and Romano-Britons.

Heinrich Härke explains the nature of this agreement:

It is now widely accepted that the Anglo-Saxons were not just transplanted Germanic invaders and settlers from the Continent, but the outcome of insular interactions and changes. But we are still lacking explicit models that suggest how this ethnogenetic process might have worked in concrete terms. [36]

Genetic studies

Recent genetic studies, based on data collected from skeletons found in Iron Age, Roman and Anglo-Saxon era burials, have concluded that the ancestry of the modern English population contains large contributions from both Anglo-Saxon migrants and Romano-British natives. [37] [38] [39]

A major genetic study in 2022 which used DNA samples from different periods and regions demonstrated that there was significant immigration from the area in or near what is now northwestern Germany, and also that these immigrants intermarried with local Britons. [40] This evidence supports a theory of large-scale migration of both men and women, beginning in the Roman period and continuing until the 8th century. At the same time, the findings of the same study support theories of rapid acculturation, with early medieval individuals of both local, migrant and mixed ancestry being buried near each other in the same new ways. This evidence also indicates that in the early medieval period, and continuing into the modern period, there were large regional variations, with the genetic impact of immigration highest in the east, and declining towards the west.

Fringe theories

Pre-Existing peoples

There is a recent hypothesis that some of the native tribes, identified as Britons by the Romans, may have been Germanic-language speakers, [41] this is primarily based on genetic rather than linguistic evidence, [42] but most scholars disagree with this due to an insufficient evidence of Germanic languages in Roman-period artefacts. [43]

British Israelism

The British Israelite movement is a belief that the British people, in most cases particularly the Anglo Saxon component are some or all of the ten lost tribes of Israel. The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain is seen by most of this movement as part of the exodus of the tribes who after leaving Israel, went to the Black Sea and then to the Carpathians, and finally up the Danube from southern and eventually Northern Germany. [44]

References

Footnotes

  1. ↑ "The Ruin of Britain". Medieval manuscripts blog. British Library. 11 June 2019.
  2. ↑ Lapidge 1984, p. 204.
  3. ↑ "The Anglo-Saxon invasion and the beginnings of the 'English'". Our Migration Story.
  4. ↑ Yorke 2006, p. 118.
  5. ↑ Janet Bately, 'Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', in Saints, Scholars and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honour of Charles W. Jones, ed. by Margot H. King and Wesley M. Stevens, 2 vols (Collegeville: 1979), I 233–54.
  6. ↑ Howe, Nicholas (1989). Migration and mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN   978-0-300-04512-3.
  7. ↑ ASC, s.a. 937, text C , quoted in Æthelstan [Athelstan - The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  8. ↑ Halsall 2013, p. 13.
  9. ↑ Dewing, H B (1962). Procopius: History of the Wars Books VII and VIII with an English Translation (PDF). Harvard University Press. pp. 252–255. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 March 2020. Retrieved 1 March 2020.
  10. ↑ "Henry [Henry of Huntingdon]". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  11. ↑ "Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum". University of Lancaster .
  12. ↑ William of Newburgh (1198), Historia rerum Anglicarum, Book I, Preface, retrieved 24 May 2023
  13. ↑ "56", The History of the Britons (Historia Brittonum), translated by Lupack, Alan, The Camelot Project, archived from the original on 10 March 2016, retrieved 26 February 2015
  14. ↑ Horsman, Reginald (1976). "Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850". Journal of the History of Ideas (Jul. - Sep., 1976). University of Pennsylvania Press: 387–410. doi:10.2307/2708805. JSTOR   2708805.
  15. ↑ "II. Jefferson's Proposal, 20 August 1776". Mr. Jefferson proposed the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; and on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed
  16. ↑ Peterson 1970, p. 98.
  17. ↑ Frantzen, Allen J. (1990). Desire for origins: new language, Old English, and teaching the tradition. New Brunswick (N.J.) London: Rutgers university press. ISBN   978-0-8135-1590-8.
  18. ↑ Kaufman, Will; Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl (2005). Britain and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History, Volume 2. ABC-CLIO. pp. 90–91. ISBN   978-1851094318.
  19. ↑ Dockray-Miller, Mary (2017). "Introduction". Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women's College (1st ed.). Springer Nature. ISBN   978-3-319-69705-5.
  20. ↑ Kassis, Dimitrios (2015). Representations of the North in Victorian Travel Literature. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 28. ISBN   978-1443870849. In the Nordicist discourse, what can be noticed is the attempt to racially unite the English with the Celts, a rather pioneering element considering the earliest theories which were ideologically constructed on a strictly anti-Celtic basis.
  21. ↑ Grimmer, M. (2007) Invasion, Settlement or Political Conquest: Changing Representations of the Arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, 3(1) pp. 169–186.
  22. ↑ Freeman, E.A. (1869) Old English History for Children, MacMillan, London, pp. 7, 27–28
  23. ↑ 3 vols., 1874–78
  24. ↑ s:A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature/Stubbs, William
  25. ↑ Wikisource-logo.svg This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain :  Hunt, William (1911). "Stubbs, William". Encyclopædia Britannica . Vol. 25 (11th ed.). pp. 1048–1049.
  26. ↑ A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past by J. W. Burrow, Cambridge University Press, 1981. ISBN   0-521-24079-4
  27. ↑ Ausenda, G. (1997) Current issues and future directions in the study of the early Anglo-Saxon period, in Hines, J. (ed.) The Anglo-Saxons from Migration Period to the Eighth Century, Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology, pp. 411–450
  28. ↑ R. Coates. 2007. "Invisible Britons: The view from linguistics." In Britons in Anglo-Saxon England [Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies 7], N. Higham (ed.), 172–191. Woodbridge: Boydell.
  29. ↑ O. J. Padel. 2007. "Place-names and the Saxon conquest of Devon and Cornwall." In Britons in Anglo-Saxon England [Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies 7], N. Higham (ed.), 215–230. Woodbridge: Boydell.
  30. ↑ Higham & Ryan 2013 :104–105
  31. ↑ Ward-Perkins 2000, p. 523.
  32. ↑ Ward-Perkins 2000, p. 513-533.
  33. ↑ Lavelle, R. (2010) Alfred's Wars: Sources and Interpretations of Anglo-Saxon Warfare in the Viking Age, Boydell & Brewer p. 85
  34. ↑ Attenborough. The laws of Ine and Alfred. pp. 35–61
  35. ↑ Thomas, Mark G., Michael PH Stumpf, and Heinrich Härke. "Evidence for an apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 273.1601 (2006): 2651–2657.
  36. ↑ Härke, Heinrich. "Anglo-Saxon Immigration and Ethnogenesis". Medieval Archaeology 55.1 (2011): 1–28. Archived 26 September 2021 at the Wayback Machine.
  37. ↑ Schiffels, Stephan; Haak, Wolfgang; Paajanen, Pirita; Llamas, Bastien; Popescu, Elizabeth; Loe, Louise; Clarke, Rachel; Lyons, Alice; Mortimer, Richard; Sayer, Duncan; Tyler-Smith, Chris; Cooper, Alan; Durbin, Richard (January 19, 2016). "Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history". Nature Communications. 7 (1): 10408. Bibcode:2016NatCo...710408S. doi:10.1038/ncomms10408. PMC   4735688 . PMID   26783965 – via www.nature.com.
  38. ↑ Martiniano, Rui; Caffell, Anwen; Holst, Malin; Hunter-Mann, Kurt; Montgomery, Janet; Müldner, Gundula; McLaughlin, Russell L.; Teasdale, Matthew D.; van Rheenen, Wouter; Veldink, Jan H.; van den Berg, Leonard H.; Hardiman, Orla; Carroll, Maureen; Roskams, Steve; Oxley, John; Morgan, Colleen; Thomas, Mark G.; Barnes, Ian; McDonnell, Christine; Collins, Matthew J.; Bradley, Daniel G. (January 19, 2016). "Genomic signals of migration and continuity in Britain before the Anglo-Saxons". Nature Communications. 7 (1): 10326. Bibcode:2016NatCo...710326M. doi: 10.1038/ncomms10326 . PMC   4735653 . PMID   26783717. S2CID   13817552.
  39. ↑ Ross P. Byrne, Rui Martiniano, Lara M. Cassidy, Matthew Carrigan, Garrett Hellenthal, Orla Hardiman, Daniel G. Bradley, Russell L. McLaughlin, "Insular Celtic population structure and genomic footprints of migration," PLOS Genetics (January 2018)
  40. ↑ Gretzinger, J; Sayer, D; Justeau, P (2022), "The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool", Nature, 610 (7930): 112–119, Bibcode:2022Natur.610..112G, doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05247-2 , PMC   9534755 , PMID   36131019
  41. ↑ "Myths of British ancestry". Prospect . 20 October 2006.
  42. ↑ Forster et al. MtDNA Markers for Celtic and Germanic Language Areas in the British Isles in Jones. Traces of ancestry: studies in honour of Colin Renfrew. pp. 99–111 Retrieved. 26 November 2011
  43. ↑ Alaric Hall, 'A gente Anglorum appellatur: The Evidence of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum for the Replacement of Roman Names by English Ones During the Early Anglo-Saxon Period', in Words in Dictionaries and History: Essays in Honour of R. W. McConchie, ed. Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Säily, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice, 14 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011), pp. 219–31 (pp. 220–21).
  44. ↑ Cottrell-Boyce, Aidan. 2021. "British Israelism." In James Crossley and Alastair Lockhart (eds.) Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements. 21 October 2021. Retrieved from https://www.cdamm.org/articles/british-israelism

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