Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons. Francis Pryor
have had to look somewhere else. The Vikings and Normans are already spoken for by the Danes and the French, which leaves only the Germanic presence of the Anglo-Saxons—a choice which was made very much easier, in Georgian and Victorian times, by the presence on the English throne of a German royal family.
The idea that the origins of the English nation could be found in a massive influx of Anglo-Saxon people first became popular around AD 700—1100.18 Its widespread acceptance was due to a number of contemporary accounts, including those of Gildas (sixth century), the Venerable Bede (c.731) and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (from c.890).19 Then, some time around 1136, the highly influential author and creator of the principal Arthurian stories, Geoffrey of Monmouth, wrote in his Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) an origin myth which traced the foundation of Britain back to the Trojans—of all people.20 This wonderful flight of fantasy described how Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas of Troy, landed at Totnes, subdued the race of giants who lived there, and gave his name to the country he had pacified (Britain = Brutus). During his visit he founded London, calling it New Troy. Even the creation of the Arthur stories seems drab by comparison with the Brutus myth, but both were widely accepted throughout the medieval period, during which Geoffrey’s history was held in high regard as an accurate historical source.
After about 1600 the Brutus myth fell from favour, to be replaced by a new set of semi-mythic principal characters, including Hengist, Horsa and Alfred the Great.21 Alfred is of course a known historical figure, whose achievements are well documented. Perhaps it is sad that today he is better known for burning cakes than for his administration or government. The brothers Hengist and Horsa are indeed semi-mythic. They make their first appearance in that magnificent work of early propagandist history, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (c.731), where they are portrayed as the founders of the royal house of Kent. Bede tells us they were leaders of Germanic forces invited to Britain by Vortigern, a Romanised southern British king, in the year 449. According to Bede, their arrival signalled the adventus Saxonum, or coming of the Saxons, who originally appeared as mercenaries, or foederati.
During the 450s we learn that the mercenaries turned against their client, Vortigern, to establish their own rule. It seems a straightforward enough story, and it was later taken up and elaborated by other sources, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles; but Bede, like all subsequent historians, had his own motives for writing in the way he did. He did not see himself as writing ‘pure’ or unbiased history in the sense that we would understand it today. In writing his great work he was also delivering a message; and the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons was part of that message.
In the early eighteenth century the Anglo-Saxonist view of history was strongly influential. It was widely believed, for example, that institutions such as Parliament and trial by jury were ultimately Germanic. But this view changed as the political scene itself altered in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We have seen in the case of the Celts how issues to do with nationalism and self-identity came to the fore at this time, but it was by no means a straightforward picture. France was perceived as the great enemy, not just as another powerful nation, but one with the potential to subvert the entire structure of British government, as witnessed by French attitudes to the American colonies, the Revolution of 1789 and of course the subsequent Napoleonic Wars. There were pleas for British unity. The great Whig politician and conservative thinker Edmund Burke, in his highly influential Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, did not play down national differences within Britain, but placed great emphasis on the antiquity of the British system of government. A few years earlier, in 1756, the antiquarian and pioneering archaeologist of the Old Stone Age, John Frere, also worried about contemporary political developments; he ‘called for the English, Lowland Scots and the Hanoverian Kings, all of whom were descendants of the Saxons, to live in harmony with the Ancient Britons (the Welsh)’.22 Ancient history was being brought into contemporary affairs in a way that we would find extraordinary today.
We have already seen that archaeological and historical research is affected by the climate of thought prevailing at the time, and I cannot avoid a brief discussion of the two World Wars, both of which saw Britain pitted against Germany: in theory, at least, Anglo-Saxon versus Teuton. The First World War did not have a major impact on Anglo-Saxon research in Britain. Before it, opinion was divided as to whether the Anglo-Saxons were large-scale military invaders or true immigrants, and in the 1920s and thirties an essentially similar debate continued. However, after the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in the Second World War, the English began to feel uncomfortable with their supposed Germanic roots.
The end of the war also saw the effective end of the British Empire, for a number of reasons. This led to a change in historical attitude: a world view centred on Anglo-Britishness was no longer possible. Nicholas Higham has described the effects of the post-war/post-Empire situation well:
One result was the final overthrow of the old certainties provided by a belief in the inherent superiority of English social and political institutions and Germanic ancestry, by which the British establishment had been sustained for generations. This provided opportunities for the revival or construction of alternative visions of the past. Historically, insular Germanism was rooted in the enterprise of legitimising the early and unique rise of the English Parliament to supremacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but its fragility was now revealed.23
We will discuss the problems inherent in ‘insular Germanism’ later; here I merely want to note that today the world of Anglo-Saxon archaeology is divided over the question of large-scale invasions in post-Roman times. More conservative opinion still favours mass folk movements from the Continent to account for the widespread changes in dress style, funeral rites and buildings. Other scholars point out that such changes can be brought about by other means. This alternative view, which I support, would have been inconceivable thirty years ago. Viewed as a piece of archaeological history, it seems to me that the Anglo-Saxon invasions are the last of a long list of putative incursions that archaeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used as catch-all explanations when they encountered events they could not explain. It is far more healthy, intellectually speaking, to admit sometimes that we don’t fully understand a particular phenomenon, rather than to rush to an off-the-peg ‘solution’. Doubts can sometimes prove wonderfully stimulating.
As has been noted, however, wherever archaeologists have taken a close look at the development of a particular piece of British landscape, it is difficult to find evidence for the scale of discontinuity one would expect had there indeed been a mass migration from the Continent. We will see this in several case studies, including the Nene Valley (Chapter 4), West Heslerton in Yorkshire, and in the Witham Valley near Lincoln (both Chapter 8). I believe it will be a close study of the landscape that will clinch the archaeological case against large-scale Anglo-Saxon invasions, just as it did for their supposed ‘Celtic’ predecessors.
CHAPTER TWO The Origins and Legacy of Arthur
LIKE MANY CHILDREN, I found the tales of King Arthur enthralling. Everything about him seemed to fire the imagination. I did not fully understand the rather murky business surrounding his conception in Tintagel Castle; nor did I realise that the various elements of the tales came from different sources and periods. That didn’t matter, because the whole epic was driven by the energy that comes from a good story.
Arthur was the son of Uther Pendragon (King of Britain) and Igraine, the beautiful wife of Duke Gorlois of Cornwall. This union was made possible by the wizard Merlin, who altered Uther’s appearance to resemble that of the Duke, who was away fighting. Conveniently he was killed in battle shortly after Arthur’s conception. Uther married Igraine and Arthur became their legitimate son, growing up to be