The Anglo-Saxons
The various groups from the northwest fringes of Europe who reached Britain in the centuries following the departure of the Romans made the greatest contribution of all to the English language. Indeed, they could be said to have created it. They provided the bedrock of words which, with some relatively small modifications, we still use most frequently today. At least in linguistic terms, they are the most significant visitors – and later inhabitants – in English history.
These expanding groups were the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. They came from regions of what is now Denmark, northern Germany and northern Holland. In his history of how Christianity came to Britain, written in Latin around 730 (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), a Northumbrian Benedictine monk called Bede described those who came over as being from ‘the three most powerful nations of Germany’, even if they were members of tribes rather than what we would regard as ‘nations’. But unlike the Roman landings, this was no systematic invasion. Instead it was a repeated and piecemeal process of incursions, which resulted in a patchwork of settlements that eventually came to dominate the country.
Some of the ‘occupiers’ were probably present before the Romans left, simply as immigrants or possibly as auxiliaries in the Roman army. Some were actually invited over – a case of fire being used to fight fire. They were required to help the native British counter threats from other enemies overseas or from the Picts in the far north. There was resistance to the Anglo-Saxon newcomers – the legends of King Arthur date from this time – but less than 100 years after the departure of the Romans, the new ‘English’ had control of a great triangle of land consisting of the southeast of England and East Anglia and parts of Northumberland.
Although there were differences between the language variants spoken by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, to the extent that it is not known how easily they could have understood each other, they did share a linguistic heritage. Their branch of the language tree was one of three collectively called Germanic. North Germanic gave birth to languages such as Icelandic, Swedish and Danish; East Germanic produced a tongue (Gothic) which is long extinct; while West Germanic was the foundation for English, Dutch and German.
It is tempting to see the movement of languages and peoples as a neat, timetabled affair. The Romans go, leaving the door half open for the Angles, Jutes and Saxons to come in. The native population of British is pushed steadily back to the western fringes of the island while the new arrivals set themselves up in the bit of country appropriate to them (the Angles in East Anglia, etc.). In reality, things would have been much more haphazard. Some of the original British speakers would probably have been assimilated by the new arrivals, while others would have been displaced altogether. Others might have coexisted, uneasily or not, with the Germanic-speaking groups.
But a couple of related questions remain. How was it that those British who stayed put were assimilated by the invaders rather than the other way round? And why did the Germanic language of the new arrivals, which was oral rather than written, prevail over the native forms of Celtic? After all, the Norman invasion of England produced exactly the opposite results. It may have taken a couple of hundred years after the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066 but the Normans ended up being absorbed by the people they had conquered just as they ended up speaking English (although with a multitude of French additions). So why didn’t something similar happen after the Anglo-Saxon invasion?
There are no definitive answers. It has been suggested that, following the death of some charismatic leader such as King Arthur, the British areas fell to squabbling among themselves, offering no united resistance to the newcomers. Perhaps any mingling between the races was confined to intermarriage at the top, for which there is some evidence in the choice of Celtic names by the Anglo-Saxon nobility. On the other hand, the displacement mentioned earlier might have been so systematic and thorough as to indicate a dismissive, even contemptuous, attitude towards Celtic culture on the part of the Anglo-Saxons. A very different interpretation is that the new arrivals, feeling themselves not superior but inferior to a people who had been shaped and polished by nearly four centuries of Roman rule, wanted nothing to do with the Romano-Celtic heritage.
Whatever the causes, the result was that (Old) English became the dominant tongue while, over the long term, Celtic speakers chose or were forced to retreat to the more remote areas of Britain. Just as Hadrian’s Wall had marked the northern limits of Roman control under the emperors, so the construction in 757 of Offa’s Dyke, a line of defensive earthworks along the boundary of the kingdom of Mercia and present-day Wales, made for a literal division of the Britons and the English.
The success of English was all the more surprising in that it was not really a written language, not at first. The Anglo-Saxons used a runic alphabet, the kind of writing J.R.R.Tolkien recreated for The Lord of the Rings, and one more suitable for stone inscriptions than shopping lists. It took the arrival of Christianity to spread literacy and to produce the letters of an alphabet which, with a very few differences, is still in use today.
The Roots of English
It would be a mistake, though, to think that Anglo-Saxon culture, with its oral traditions and remote pagan origins, was a crude affair. The world reflected in the famous Old English poem Beowulf (see Beowulf, pages 41–3) which is a fusion of Viking and Saxon cultures, may be hard, even unrelenting, but it is far from crude either in its themes or its language. Beowulf and other Old English poems like Dream of the Rood (‘rood’ meaning Christ’s cross) are as ornate in their style or imagery as some of the artefacts recovered from Anglo-Saxon burial sites like Sutton Hoo.
But the skeleton of a language is not to be found in elaborate or poetic inventions. Rather, it is in the basic words that are used for everyday things. It is here that Old English triumphed and continues to do so. It has been calculated that almost all of the 100 most frequently found words in English, wherever it is used now around the world, come from Old English. These include a and the and and itself, as well as pronouns (I, you, she), prepositions and conjunctions (from, with, when), and the various forms of the verbs to have and to be. The very word ‘word’ is Old English. Slightly more elaborate but still very commonplace terms also have their roots in Old English: ship, sheep, field, earth, wood, work. Like all vocabulary, these give us an insight into the way of life, in this case a largely agricultural one, that would have been standard for the settlers.
As far as the language was concerned, the two most important historical events in the lengthy period of Anglo-Saxon domination were the arrival of the Vikings or Danes (shorthand terms covering all the Scandanavian groups who began raiding England towards the end of the seventh century) and the earlier arrival of Christianity in England with St Augustine in 597. This could more accurately be termed a second coming, since there was already a vigorous Celtic Church, which had been driven westwards by the pagan Anglo-Saxons. By 550 Christianity survived in England only in Cornwall. However, the new missionaries dispatched from Rome not only brought back religion, but also fostered literacy and produced a new crop of concepts and words, many deriving from Latin.
The Return of Christianity
The Christian conversion of England operated at both ends of the country. In the south, Augustine together with a band of missionaries began by converting Ethelbert, the king of Kent, who even at his first meeting with Augustine seems to have shown a remarkably open-minded attitude towards beliefs that were new to him. A little later in the north, Aidan – originally from Celtic Ireland and a monk on the Scottish island of Iona – worked to convert Northumbria. The principle that Augustine adopted was to convert a king or queen, on the reasonable assumption that their people would follow. It didn’t always work. Some kingdoms relapsed from Christianity and some rulers hedged their bets: the king of East Anglia, for example, maintained pagan altars as well as Christian ones in the same building.
A trace of this double standard lies innocently hidden in the names for days of the week, most of which are derived from ancient Norse or Germanic gods like Woden (Wodnes daeg – Wednesday) or Thor (Thors daeg – Thursday). Similarly, Easter may be derived from a spring festival in honour of the Germanic goddess Eostre, and it has often been remarked that the Christmas season was superimposed on older pagan practices celebrating the mid-winter period.
But the Christian influence was felt in a slew of words brought in during the years following the conversion of England, however much parts of the country may have stayed attached to older forms of worship. Concepts such as heven and hel were already familiar from Old English but hierarchical terms like bisceop (bishop) or nonne (nun) now entered the language, ultimately from Latin or Greek. The deofol (devil) came out of Latin diabolus, although Old English already knew all about the feond (fiend), which had its modern sense of ‘devil/monster’ as well as meaning, simply, ‘enemy’ (cognate with the modern German word for enemy, Feind). Other imports included altar (connected to Latin altus – ‘high’), engel (angel, from Greek angelos meaning ‘messenger’) and ymen (hymn, from Latin hymnus or ‘song of praise to gods or heroes’).
In some cases, a direct translation from Latin produced word-forms that have lasted to the present day. Spiritus sanctus became halig gast or Holy Ghost. The Latin evangelium, meaning ‘good news’, became god-spell (literally ‘good story’) which turned into gospel. ‘Judgement’ was dom in Old English so ‘Judgement Day’ became Domesday or Doomsday. William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book – which was so thorough a summary of English property and possessions in the 11th century that it was said not ‘one cow nor one pig escaped notice in his survey’ – acquired its slightly puzzling name because it was thought to be as definitive as Judgement Day.
The essential vocabulary of religion already existed in Old English before these imports. In the Anglo-Saxon version of the Lord’s Prayer there are only a handful of terms which differ from the famous version established in the King James translation of the Bible. They include rice instead of ‘[Thy] kingdom [come]’ (compare modern German Reich) and syle for ‘give [us this day]’ (syle is related to ‘sell’ in its present-day sense, which in Old English would have been expressed by the formula sellan wiþ weorþe or ‘give with worth’). Even though the basics were already there, the long-term effect of the return of Christianity to England was to add about 400 new words to the language.
The life of one prominent Christian figure illustrates well the contribution that the religion’s resurgence made to the continuing development of English national identity. The ‘Venerable’ Bede (he did not become St Bede until 1899 when he was canonized) may not be much more than a name to us. But he was the first great historian of England and in the years following his death he became famous in scholarly circles as copies of his writings were disseminated across Europe. Bede wrote a variety of texts and he is credited with devising the chronological structure which is still in worldwide use, by dating events from the year of Christ’s birth, or anno domini (AD).
Bede, who was born in around 673, began his education at the monastery of Wearmouth in the northeast at the age of seven and within a few years moved to the nearby monastery at Jarrow. There he remained until his death in 735. His most important work, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’, written, in Latin, towards the end of his life), gives an account of the arrival of Christianity in Britain. He was very careful to establish dates and to provide an accurate narrative, going so far as to get a fellow-priest to consult the papal archives in Rome. He was the first to give expression to the idea that the English were a unified people, and it is surely no coincidence that King Alfred – likewise concerned with ideas of national identity and unity – should have overseen a translation of the Historia ecclesiastica.
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
‘I see somebody now!’ she exclaimed at last.‘But he’s coming very slowly – and what curious attitudes he goes into!’ (For the Messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)
‘Not at all,’ said the King. ‘He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger – and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes.’
(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)
The popular image of the Anglo-Saxons is of primitive and often ferocious tribal groups who pushed aside the original Celtic Britons as they spread across England. The newcomers were obviously warlike, as suggested by the possible derivation of the term Saxon from an old Germanic word for ‘knife’. But the wider reality is that, while Anglo-Saxon society was not as sophisticated or highly ordered as the civilization brought by the Romans more than four centuries earlier, it possessed its own intricate culture, rituals and social organization.
Apart from their provision of English as the bedrock of the modern language, the idea of the Anglo-Saxons lives on in ways that are sometimes slightly ‘curious’, to quote Lewis Carroll’s Alice.
Not so curious perhaps in the case of the Church of England or Anglican Church, whose alternative title derives from the medieval Latin Anglicanus, which in turn comes from the Angles who began to arrive in Britain in the fifth century. The name of the people which was eventually bestowed on the established Church recalls the well-known story of sixth-century Pope Gregory’s encounter with a batch of boys about to be sold as slaves in Rome. Struck by their fair complexions, Gregory asked where they were from. When told they were Angles, he punned in Latin: ‘Non Angli, sed angeli’ (‘Not Angles, but angels’). The legend goes that after this he resolved to bring Christianity to their pagan country.
Not all applications of the Anglo-Saxon idea are so highminded. At one end of the spectrum, the heavy-metal band Saxon – from Barnsley in Yorkshire – presumably acquired their name through a desire to be seen as basic and primitive, a head-banging force straight out of the Dark Ages. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, which covered much of south and southwest England, was revived by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) as the setting for the great sequence of novels he wrote in the closing years of the 19th century. There was a fashionable interest in the Anglo-Saxon era in the Victorian period and both people and streets were given Old English names (e.g. Hereward, Athelstan, Alfred) in a style that is somewhere between the whimsical and the nostalgic. But Thomas Hardy went much further and created an entire world in Wessex, which he described as ‘partly real, partly dream’. He rechristened many existing towns, of which Casterbridge for Dorchester is the best-known example. Hardy’s explanation shows how potent was the folk-memory of an Anglo-Saxon regional kingdom:
. . . the press and the public were kind enough to welcome the fanciful plan, and willingly joined me in the anachronism of imagining a Wessex population living under Queen Victoria; – a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post, mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches, labourers who could read and write, and National school children.
A final illustration of the survival of the Anglo-Saxon idea is the US acronym WASP standing for ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ and characterizing the upper-middle class group (particularly in the northeastern states) which is descended from the earliest settlers or which claims to embody their values.
KEYWORD
Mead-Hall
The mead-hall (in Old English, meduheall) was not simply the equivalent of the pub in the world of the Anglo-Saxons. True, it was the communal hall where they might consume mead, made of fermented honey, and other drinks besides, but the mead-hall was primarily a refuge from a hostile world. It was a place where stories and riddles were told, reputations made or lost, and tribal identity fostered. At least it is so in the great Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf and today’s reader will find such scenes echoed in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. There is a wonderfully poignant line in the poem Beowulf describing how the light from the hall gleams out across distant lands (‘lixte se leoma ofer landa fela’), which conveys to us more effectively than pages of history the fragile but tenacious sense of community and civilization that the mead-hall helped to sustain.