Before the Angles and Saxons, Brittania did not attract much attention. Although it took a tenth of Rome's legions to occupy its contested realm, it did not supply much wealth. Career opportunities for its Celtic natives, as Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan tally them, proved limited: laborers, recruits for the military, slaves, and prostitutes. They begin their survey with an examination of Britain, as a fusion of Roman rule, adapted by native British peoples, characterized the first few centuries after its occupation in the middle of the first century C.E. Dealing with a distant land, and increasingly beset by barbarian incursions, Rome did not sustain its dominance. Its power had faded from the island before the end of the fourth century, as the imperial legions gradually withdrew to defend the Western Empire, and the sea raiders surrounding the coasts of Britain had stormed in.
While Higham and Ryan, after paraphrasing recent research, remain hesitant to calculate how many Saxons, Angles, and Jutes left their German, Frisian, and Danish homes to settle in Britain, it appears a "high-prestige" contingent convinced or coerced the Romanized and indigenous lowland Britons to adapt Old English by the middle of the fifth century. Few words we speak in its modern descendent come from Celtic tongues, and this imbalance demonstrates the replacement of ancient languages by that new import as its popularity and status spread rapidly. A sort of "apartheid" may have accompanied this Germanic regime, so that those loyal to Celtic culture and leadership found themselves increasingly marginalized. The "wergild" or man-price value varied when restitution was sought in a violent society where invaders and resisters battled among themselves and against many occupiers: a Briton was worth half of the value of those who made the laws as Angles and Saxons.
Compounding this imposition, over the next two centuries, came Christianity. A Celtic version had endured if in a persecuted manner (as the invaders were pagan for a considerable if varying time initially) among some natives, but Saxons and Angles found that a revival of the Roman version (first introduced under later imperial occupation of Britain, intriguingly) suited martial rule and mental constructs well. Catholicism imported by missionaries from the former empire delivered clerical administration, militarized models, and continental learning. By 730, Britain had been Christianized, at least officially. As Beowulf shows, still puzzling scholars today, pagan elements lingered long.
For the Germanic peoples imposing control over fractious and divided Celtic kingdoms, the importance of family, lineage, and kindred enabled "kingship" (from the same root as "kin") to combine not only spatial advantage in territory conquered but tribal alliances negotiated to expand the dynasties of Northumbria, Mercia, Anglia, Kent, and the Saxon lands of Essex, Wessex, and Sussex. Eventually, seven kingdoms fought for dominance. Given the bloody conflicts against internal and foreign rivals, its rulers took a long time before settling on the name of England (the Latin on coinage as King Alfred craftily minted ca. 875 to call himself "rex anglorum" is an elusive phrase as it may mean king of the Angles or of the English, as they came to label themselves later). This review necessarily simplifies what "The Anglo-Saxon World" conveys in complicated chapters full of formidable names in many languages and what proves for dutiful stretches relentless strife.
This depth, compressed into density, may weigh down even a reader as fascinated by this era as this reviewer. Higham and Ryan present in nearly five hundred pages a necessarily thorough account, if one while accessibly written will be consulted more in history seminars than airport lounges. Given the scarcity of evidence for much of this period, the relative lack of social history, lively anecdotes, or everyday life as it was endured can exact demands on those looking for the past made popular, but the rather old-fashioned top-down dominant approach of names, dates, and reports does result in a trusted resource, open-ended and able to weigh and sift contested evidence.
The fact that it interprets specialist lore and scientific findings adds to its value. Its heft and generous inclusion of charts, maps, tables, and illustrations (many from archeological excavations, monuments, manuscripts, the engrossing Bayeux Tapestry, and especially coins--not sure if these depictions will be in color as I have a galley proof) will ease your learning curve; the authors supply a list of sources in a running series of endnotes, but they keep the text itself free of parenthetical citations or superscription, which lightens their academic tone.
What's admirable about this wide-ranging presentation? The asides as to how Anglo-Saxon terms and inventions echo down to us. For instance, shire-reeve incorporates the establishment of this territorial division with the man who patrolled it as a royal agent by the late tenth century, a "sheriff". And as for if not law or order, then their lack; certainly when the Vikings arrive ca. 800, the pace quickens.
The "St. Brice's Day Massacre" of November 13, 1002, may be unknown to gangland aficionados today, but it anticipates what any brutal leader who needed to crack down on his rivals and defend his turf might do. Aethelred, although denigrated in his own parlous reign as the "unready" (literally "ill-counseled" as this very term denotes linguistic shifts over a thousand years), endures as an English king determined to launch a pre-emptive strike against Danish mercenaries. After two centuries of Viking raids, then occupation, Aethelred (unlike some of his Germanic predecessors) tried to rally against the Scandinavian raiders--and their English allies, as warlords and collaborators.
When some Danes fled into St. Frideswide's Church in Oxford, the king ordered their sanctuary to be burnt down, and those within it. All over the realm, on royal command the Danes were slain, as digs over the past decade reveal. Carbon-dating and isotope analysis of skeletons now can pinpoint Scandinavian origins for the bones dug up from mass graves: many young men with multiple wounds not suffered in battle, decapitated, attacked from behind while prone, or hit in the back of the skull.
Emma, Aethelred's second wife, found herself willingly or wisely married off to his Danish successor, Cnut, who in 1016 took over England. Game of Thrones comes often to mind when reflecting on the internecine revenge and diplomatic contentions filling many paragraphs here. The hard bargain apparently driven by Emma herself hints at this sort of lively inspiration for tale tellers.
The next year Cnut divided England among himself and three rivals, only to kill off one the same year, while eliminating three more leaders. Furthermore, consider the fate of Aethelred's sons and grandsons. "Eadwig, the son of Aethelred by his first consort Aelfgifu of York, was driven into exile in 1017 and killed soon afterwards, while Edward and Alfred, Aethelred's sons by Emma, went into exile in Normandy. Edmund Ironside's sons, Edward and Edmund, were likewise exiled to the Continent, ending up eventually in Hungary having escaped attempts by Cnut to have them murdered." One reflects upon the distance needed to flee to what was the edge of Europe, and a barbaric enclave itself, to elude vengeance of a Viking made uneasy king.
Unsurprisingly, the authors find Cnut's long reign intriguing; they trace the derivation of our meaning for "rich" to the OE "rice" which by this time melded the older meaning of "power" with the newer one of "wealth" to symbolize the fusion of the two for an ambitious set of social climbers. Among these was Cnut's favorite Godwine, who'd enter the jockeying for the throne after Cnut's death in 1035. No wonder both King Alfred and Harold II would stamp "pax" (Latin for "peace") on their coinage alongside their regal profiles: the Vikings kept pressing their advantages while the English fought or bought them off. The issue of succession defies brevity: the authors' chart of the English, Norwegian, and Danish claimants to or inheritors of the English crown, and the Norman dukes who would soon seize it, records nearly sixty progenitors, spouses, siblings, and/or descendants, with fifteen kings controlling some or all of England between the tenth and the twelfth centuries.
The "some or all" proves the sticking point. Harold Godwineson's less than ten months as ruler found him driving back Norwegian invaders--then immediately hastening south to fend off William of Normandy, to an end every student used to know if no other date in English lore. 1066 represents the "biggest land grab" in the kingdom's history. Monasteries were given over to the newcomers; castles loomed over the angry inhabitants of besieged cities and insurgent borders. Heavy cavalry had won the Norman battle at Hastings; armed might bested the resistance put up by Harold's feebler allies.
The conclusion of this sprawling narrative may be less familiar that that preceding scene. Normans decimated those they hated as Saxons. England's elite rebelled repeatedly; William imposed a scorched-earth policy over much of the restive north of his vast but hostile kingdom. The peasants and villagers had nowhere to run. Far fewer in numbers than the fifth-century Anglo-Saxon elite who had conquered what they finally called England, the "barely one percent" of Normans swept in to take over the ninety-nine percent, its mixed peoples calling themselves now the English. The island's newest (and last successful) invaders first had settled down in France and turned from Viking Northmen into Normans. Then, emboldened to rush into an England under Scandinavian attack, and embittered by what they saw as Harold's unlawful taking of the crown against William's own claim, they killed, expelled, or drove off the ruling class among their Saxon predecessors. Ironically, many from this displaced English elite joined the Vikings as they continued in their raids--if elsewhere. (A 6-25-13; PopMatters 6-7-13)
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