The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain was a process by which Germanic invaders who arrived in Britain in the mid-5th century quickly pushed the Britons into fringes of the island and established a series of kingdoms, which by the 8th century became increasingly sophisticated with rulers who were among the most powerful in Europe. The Germanic invaders, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, were collectively known as the "Anglo-Saxons"; the Saxons established kingdoms in Wessex, Essex, Sussex, Kent, and Hwicce; the Angles established the kingdoms of East Anglia and Northumbria; and the Jutes settled in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight before being assimilated into the Saxons. The Brythonic tribes were defeated and scattered by the Saxons, establishing holdout kingdoms in Wales and Cornwall, while the Picts maintained their independence before ultimately founding the kingdom of Scotland in 843. Following the Anglo-Saxon conquests of the 5th and 6th centuries, the newly-established Germanic kingdoms began to feud amongst each other, setting the stage for two centuries of competitive warfare for hegemony over the other Anglo-Saxon states. By the 830s, Mercia had lost its hegemony due to invasions by Wessex and Vikings. The age of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms ended in 867 with the arrival of the Great Heathen Army of Vikings, which led to the destruction of all of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except for Wessex, which would go on to lead the successful Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Viking invasions of England and unite England by the end of the 10th century.
Aftermath[]
Evidence for early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is obscure and much of our understanding comes from significantly later sources. Writing in the 8th century, the monk Bede dated the arrival of the Saxon invaders in England to 449. The British king Vortigern is said to have invited their leaders Hengest and Horsa to bring a troop of mercenaries to protect his kingdom against other barbarian marauders. A Gallic chronicle dates a Saxon victory to 440 and it is probable that somewhere around this time the nucleus of the groups who would form the later Anglo-Saxon kingdoms began to settle in England.
The invaders, whom Bede divided into Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, are believed to have come from northwestern Germany and the Frisian coast of the modern Netherlands. It is not clear why they began to migrate, but the lack of a central authority in Britain after the collapse of the Roman province must have made the island a tempting target.
History[]
The Anglo-Saxons made rapid territorial gains in the century after their arrival in England. There was a pause in around 500 AD when, according to the near-contemporary Gildas, the Britons won a great victory at Mons Badonicus, led by a war-leader whom later tradition identified with King Arthur. By 550, however, the Anglo-Saxon advance had resumed and a decisive victory at Dyrham in Gloucestershire in 577 opened most of the West Country to them. By around 600, the Britons had been reduced to control of the area known as Dumnonia (Devon, Cornwall, and Somerset), Wales, Cumbria, and Scotland.
Seven kingdoms[]
Gradually, the tribal war-bands coalesced into a series of kingdoms, with the seven principal among them being collectively termed the Heptarchy (Kent, Sussex, Essex, East Anglia, Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, compiled in the 9th century, names the founders of several other kingdoms, although there is little independent historical evidence for any of these figures. Cerdic is said to have arrived in what would become Wessex (in western England) in 495, while Aelle of Sussex enjoyed a brief period of preeminence among the Anglo-Saxon chieftains from 477 to 491. Among his reported exploits was the capture of Anderida, the former Saxon Shore fort at Pevensey, which the Britons were still clearly using as a stronghold. In East Anglia, a dynasty called the Wulfingas ruled from the late 6th century (although Germanic settlers arrived there more than a century earlier), while in the northeast of England, Ida founded a kingdom called Bernicia in 547 which, together with its neighbor Deira, probably originated as a British kingdom taken over by Anglo-Saxon war bands. The Tribal Hidage, a tax-collection assessment drawn up for an 8th-century Mercian ruler, mentions others, such as the Hwicce and Magonsaete in the Midlands, so the reality was probably more like a kaleidoscope than a neat-fitting jigsaw of seven pieces.
Warrior kings[]
Anglo-Saxon kingship had its roots in north European Germanic custom. The king was a source of patronage and wealth, who gave feasts in his hall attended by a retinue of warriors. He was predominantly a war-leader, and the portrait painted of kings by the epic of Beowulf, one of the most important surviving pieces of Old English literature, probably reflects the reality reasonably closeley. The poem gives us an insight into the passionate and dangerous lives led by the kings of this period in a way that the scant archaeological evidence cannot. "It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning," is a line that several kings clearly took to heart, as in the Northumbrian ruler Oswy's campaigns against Penda, responsible for the death of his brother Oswald. Archaeological evidence for this period has come from sites including Yeavering, near Bamburgh in Northumberland, where a series of royal halls were built in the 6th and 7th centuries. One of them - presumed to be that of King Edwin - was more than 82 feet long.
Power of the Bretwalda[]
Bede, writing in the 8th century, refers to the office of Bretwalda, a ruler who wielded power over a far greater area than his own kingdom and sometimes over the whole of Britain. The first of these was Aelle of Sussex in the late 5th century. Another Bretwalda was Aethelbert of Kent (560-616), the first royal Christian convert. Under him, Kent was open to influences from Merovingian France and seemed set to dominate the constellation of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in southern England. However, the next Bretwalda, Raedwald of East Anglia (who died 627) was a pagan and the presumed occupant of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, denied Aethelbert and his successors the opportunity to expand into East Anglia and relegated Kent to a permanently subordinate position.
The rise of Mercia[]
Reflecting a shift in power northwards the next three Bretwaldas, Edwin (616-33), Oswald (634-42), and Oswy (642-70) were all kings of Northumbria. By now, however, the kingdom of Mercia was on the rise. The pagan Penda (626-55) defeated and killed both Edwin (in a battle near Hatfield in 633) and Oswald (near Oswestry in 642), although he himself died in battle against Oswald's successor Oswy in 655. Mercia's position was consolidated by a series of Penda's successors, including Aethelred, who defeated Ecgfrith of Northumbria in 679 and put an end to the northern kingdom's ambitions to expand into the Midlands. Aethelred felt secure enough to abdicate in 704 to become a monk, a choice also made by his immediate successor Cenred in 709. King Aethelbald of Mercia (716-57) consolidated Mercia's position, absorbing territory as far south as London, and even went so far as to style himself King of the "Southern English" as well as the Mercians.
The Mercians, though, faced rivals in the south in the shape of the growing power of Wessex, beginning with Caedwalla who took control of Kent in 686 and Ine (688-726), who though, he lost Kent, maintained control over the formerly independent kingdom of Sussex. Ine gave Wessex its first law code in 694, a useful source of evidence for the social structure of Wessex at the time: it lays down separate penalties for his Anglo-Saxon and British subjects, showing that the two groups were not yet fully integrated; and it sets an obligation on certain groups to provide fyrd or military service, indicating that the defense of the kingdom was a constant preoccupation. It was probably during Ine's reign that the great trading center at Hamwic (near modern Southampton) was established, a sign of the growing economic strength of Wessex. In the 8th century, a series of more obscure kings ruled Wessex, which increasingly struggled to compete with Mercia. A new Mercian king, Offa, seized ground in Berkshire and around Bath. It would be a century before Wessex was able to establish itself as the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom.
Offa of Mercia[]
Offa (757-96) was the most powerful king of his day, being the first to style himself simply as "King of the English." He extinguished the royal dynasties of Kent and Sussex and seems to have ruled there directly. He had the East Anglian ruler Aethelberht put to death in 794 and in Mercia he installed his own son Ecgfrith on the throne in 787. Only Northumbria resisted his overlordship, and here a period of dynastic instability ensured that it did not pose him any real threat: King Aelfwold (779-88) was murdered and his successor Osred II (788-90) was forcibly placed in a monastery, while his replacement Aethelred (790-96) was also murdered to make way for Osbald, whose reign lasted for only a few months. Offa maintained a network of international connections, in part through the agency of the scholar Alcuin, who originally came from York, but who became one of the leading intellectuals at the court of the great Frankish king Charlemagne. He sent a yearly tribute to the Pope in Rome and received papal legates (including Alcuin) at his court in 786. In 796 he corresponded with Charlemagne over a commercial dispute and he clearly viewed himself as the equal of the Frankish ruler, as he asked for a Frankish princess as a bride for Ecgfrith. Offa also began the minting of a new penny coinage for Mercia, which was issued from Canterbury, Rochester, London, and Ipswich. He commanded sufficient resources to build a huge defensive work - Offa's Dyke - between western Mercia and the surviving British kingdoms in Wales. He left Mercia sufficiently stable and powerful for its hegemony to survive into the 830s when it collapsed under the twin pressures of Wessex and Viking invaders.
Aftermath[]
Northumbria endured a time of prolonged political instability in the 8th century, while Mercia enjoyed a last period of supremacy before its final eclipse by Wessex after 800. Concerned at the rising power of Wessex, King Beornwulf of Mercia marched against Egbert in 825 but was defeated at the Battle of Ellendun. As a result Egbert was acknowledged as King in Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex. While Wiglaf recovered Mercia's independence in 830, it never again recovered the pre-eminence it had enjoyed under Offa. An uneasy situation prevailed in the 830s and 840s with power balanced between Wessex and Mercia. This equilibrium, however, was destroyed by the onset of severe Viking raids which would ultimately result in the destruction of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms save Wessex. The raid at Lindisfarne in 793 AD is remembered in the Lindisfarne Stone erected there.