The Anglo-Saxons

I've just finished a three month long trawl through a book entitled 'A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons'. Sounds thrilling, I know. However, as much as the 300+ pages of Anglo-Saxon history were frequently filled with sufficiently obscure names, events and other material that proved to be a curious mixture of the dull and the overwhelming, for the most part I really enjoyed the journey through England's (and by result of later events many other nations) past.

For one the Anglo-Saxon period of English history was one of remarkable fluidity. The initial kingdoms that sprang up after native Britons were defeated/fled/crushed (delete as appropriate) led to a very different nation than the one we know today. For many years power rested between two kingdoms centred on the Midlands - Mercia - and Northumberland/York - known as Deiria and Bernecia for a while before being unified as Northumbria - and the rulers of these kingdoms vied for power and lordship over the smaller Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (essentially the areas that now make up the Home Counties). In doing so they frequently came into conflict with or tried to make alliances with powerful Welsh rulers.

There was a great deal of spiritual vibrancy too. This was an age in which there was a great fight for the spiritual heart of England, with missionaries and churches springing up all over. This eventually led to England being regarded as the great centre of learning in Early Medieval Europe and a hotbed of missionary activity to the Continent. Thus English missionaries and scholars travelled across Europe and influenced some of the great rulers of the time, including Charlemagne or 'Charles the Great.'

What I found most interesting and perhaps most startling (thinking in terms of much we take for granted the continued security and prosperity of our own nation) is the way in which Anglo-Saxon England seemed to recurringly reach a stage of financial prosperity, great learning and literacy, military power, political stablity, only for it all to be quite literally annhilated. The first such occurance saw centuries old kingdoms wiped off the map by Viking raiders to the point that the last remaining vestige of English power was the then King of Wessex, a man named Alfred, who was forced into hiding with a few supporters on a tiny island. Largely through the efforts of Alfred (who I shall come back to very shortly) the Anglo-Saxon culture and political establishment was to be revived, but only after virtually everything that people took as granted had been destroyed.

Alfred, known to us now as Alfred the Great, is a particularly interesting figure (at least to me) as he came from nothing short of a hopeless postion (trapped on an island he visited as a child, few supporters, massive and overwhelmingly successful Scandanavian armies controlling the entire realm of the English) to paving the way for a revitalised and ultimately far reaching Anglo-Saxon culture. Not only did he defeat the Viking armies, he retook and paved the way for the re-establishment of English rule over Danish settlements in Britain. He also greatly revived English literature and used the vernacular as a means to which legal business was carried out. Theres a great deal else about Alfred that really does boggle the mind, however you'll have to bare with me as I leave that out - mostly as I read it in February and have forgotten some of the more important details!

One crucial part of Alfred's reign that I can remember is that he, seemingly more than any other Anglo-Saxon king before or since, emphasised the importance of reading and writing (both in English and Latin) principally as a means for his people to grow in their understanding of the Bible. That understanding of God's word was the overiding priority, and according to Alfred the underlying success of his rule. Ignorance of the Bible was likewise seen as the principle downfall of those Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that had preceeded. Fascinating.

After Alfred there followed a long peace, great prosperity, and a complete lack of Viking activity (which if understood in terms of what had preceeded was nothing short of remarkable). However around about a hundred years later a curious mix of complacency (We see the arrival of a king named Ethelred the Unready, which clearly states how his people percieved him), political infighting and politicians more concerned with their own position than with that of the country (nice to see nothing changes!), coincided with renewed Viking activity. Unlike Alfred (who built fortified towns and raised small armies to fight the Vikings regionally), Ethelred decided the only way to stop the Viking war parties was to buy them off with increasingly large sums of money. Unfortunately for Ethelred this strategy didnt work, and, with a timely piece of greed-based treachery by one of the most powerful nobles in the country, a Viking named Swein Forkbeard eventually gained control of England, largely unopposed.

What followed was rampant destruction of all that people held dear - once more, this being the second such occasion - and political and dynastic confusion that would eventually lead to 1066 and the arrival of William the Conquerer and the end of 400 years of Anglo-Saxon England.

However, intriguingly it wasn't quite the end, as many of the legal, linguistic, and even monetary reforms of the Anglo-Saxons outlived the Normans and many others and are still in place in the UK and in many other nations.

If you are still reading then this was an interesting book, stacked full of facts and events and from a Christian perspective both interesting and slightly frustrating. Partly it was encouraging to see a people that clearly saw God in everything. Frustratingly the author, whilst not denying the Saxon belief in God, explained it away as being a practice carried out by a people a millenium away. Whilst not entirely wrong - since he was after all talking about people living a 1000 years ago - it was something of a bizarre statement since as a nation we only really stopped seeing God in all things in the twentieth century. With that in mind - that we as a country abandoned God less than a hundred years ago - it seems presumptious and perhaps foolish to see us as being reasoned and wise when Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that seemed more assured than our own (and were much more long-lasting than the post-Christian nation we currently live in) were utterly and totally undone almost overnight.

As we approach a major election in the UK, it was also a little too close to home to read of a nation preoccupied with wealth and filled with duplicitous, self serving politicians, only to then read that that same nation was completely unprepared and unable to prevent a conquest that led to well over 70 years of ensuing turmoil.

However, ending on a lighter note if you like Lord of the Rings then it may interest you to know that Tolkein (who was a bit of an Anglo-Saxon geek) based the Rohan kingdom on the Mercian kingdom which itself was centred on Tamworth, which basically means they were from the black country.