by Bryan Sykes
The genetic origin of the Roman army itself is also something to be aware of when we examine the genetics. It was certainly not 100 per cent Roman, in the Italian sense, and drew its recruits from many different parts of the Empire, particularly from the lower Rhine. But nothing from the Roman occupation, save perhaps the import, and export, of female slaves, seems likely to have had a big impact on the maternal genealogy of England.
16
SAXONS, DANES, VIKINGS AND NORMANS
The end of the Roman occupation of Britain was quite unlike our own recent colonial goodbyes. There was no lowering of the flag, no salute from a member of the imperial family, no tear brushed away from the eyes of the last governor and no dignified departure on a warship. That was Hong Kong in 1997, not Britain in the fifth century AD. The Romans left a country already accustomed to the intermittent attention of raiding war parties from across the porous land borders to the west and north. In the great attack of 367, Picts from Scotland had joined Saxons from across the North Sea in rampaging through the countryside, killing and looting at will. The final withdrawal of the Roman army, some fifty years later, left England completely undefended and the population unprotected. Four centuries of occupation, during which citizens and slaves alike were forbidden even to carry arms and all weapons and military equipment were in the hands of the army, had left a population unaccustomed to warfare. That is not to say that the population was necessarily completely defenceless. Everyone must have seen this coming, and there were unknown numbers of retired veterans living in the towns and countryside. There may even have been remnants of a command structure at York and around Hadrian’s Wall. The wall was not breached by the Picts, who must, therefore, have taken to the sea to attack the North Sea coasts in the great rising of 367. There were already Germanic settlements in eastern England based on former auxiliary units of the Roman army.
It takes only a little imagination to see these men using even their small advantages to establish themselves as minor kings in the confusion. But what actually happened is shrouded in mystery for one very good reason. There are simply no contemporary records. Even allowing for their exaggerations and creative imagination, the histories of Tacitus and others were some sort of record. After AD 410 there is nothing. We have to wait over 100 years for the next account–and that makes Tacitus sound as reliable as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Ruin of Britain, written by the monk Gildas in about 540, which we encountered in an earlier chapter, is little more than an indignant rant against the corruption and godlessness of his own time. This is how he describes the incursions of the early fifth century:
As the Romans went back home, there eagerly emerged from the coracles that had carried them across the sea valleys the foul hordes of Scots and Picts, like dark throngs of worms who wriggle out of narrow fissures in the rock.
As to their appearance, Gildas writes, ‘They were readier to cover their villainous faces with hair than their private parts with clothes’.
Here he describes the emergence of Vortigern from the chaos as a leader of the British and his invitation to the Saxon Hengist to protect him against Pictish attacks:
To hold back the northern peoples, they introduced into the island the vile unspeakable Saxons, hated of God and man alike…of their own free will, they invited in under the same roof the enemy they feared worse than death.
The Ruin of Britain is certainly colourful stuff–and totally unreliable. But what a great title. It is largely through the writings of Gildas that the central enigma of the Saxon age and its genetic effect on the British has been formed. Were they all killed or driven to the hills? This is what Gildas has to say about the effect of Saxon attacks in Norfolk:
Swords flashed and flames crackled. Horrible was it to see the foundation stones and high walls thrown down…mixing with holy altars and fragments of human bodies, and covered with a purple crust of clotted blood…There was no burial save in the ruin of houses or in the bellies of the beasts and birds.
However, the archaeological evidence for immediate and wholesale destruction is conspicuously absent. London was not sacked, York and Lincoln were evacuated, then quickly recovered. In the far west the former legionary town of Wroxeter near Oswestry in Shropshire was completely untouched.
The far more dependable Bede, writing from the monastery at Jarrow, completed his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731. It is thanks to him that we are able to differentiate between the three tribes of ‘barbarians’, namely Saxons, Angles and Jutes. According to Bede, Jutes from the Jutland peninsula of northern Denmark occupied Kent and the Isle of Wight, while Saxons from Saxony in north-west Germany settled in southern England. They eventually differentiated into the East Saxons, in Essex, the Mid-Saxons farther west (and remembered in the now vanished county of Middlesex) and the West Saxons of Wessex, which was much later divided into Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. The Angles, originally located in Angeln in southern Denmark, between Saxony and Jutland, took over East Anglia, as well as the Midlands, which became Mercia, and Northumbria in the north-east.
In very broad terms, archaeology confirms Bede’s account of the origins of the invaders, as far as the general area goes, with objects found in English graves of the period very similar to the styles of northern Germany and southern Denmark. But the neat division between Saxons, Angles and Jutes and their various destinations in England almost certainly applies only to the leaders, not the mass of settlers.
Unlike the ‘barbarians’ who finally defeated the Roman Empire within Europe, the Saxons, if I may use that term to embrace the three ‘tribes’ of Bede, came from well outside the frontiers of the Empire. They had completely different customs, and social organizations which emphasized kinship and loyalty to the chieftains. Honour was to be found in avenging the death of relatives, or accepting a payment, the wergild, in its place. The Gods were Norse–Tiw, Woden, Thor, Freya, and are remembered in the days of the week–Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday–and also in English place-names like Tuesley in Surrey and Wednesbury in Staffordshire.
There was stiff resistance to the Saxons, culminating in the British victory around AD 500 at Mons Badonicus, an unknown location in the West Country where Geoffrey of Monmouth has King Arthur lead the victorious Britons. In the century that followed, the Saxons advanced only very slowly into territory still held by the Britons. By 600 the Saxons had moved north from Northumbria to defeat the Britons of southern Scotland. The Saxon victory at the battle of Chester in 616 severed the land link between the Britons of Wales and the Britons of the north, preventing them from helping each other. The British kingdoms of Rheged on the Solway Firth and Elmet around Leeds were extinguished, while Strathclyde, with its base in Dumbarton on the Clyde, survived. At the other end of the country, Cornwall resisted until the beginning of the ninth century. Saxon lands coalesced into larger kingdoms–East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, Wessex, Mercia, and Bernicia and Deria, both in Northumbria. Gradually, through conquest and alliance, kings of one region claimed sovereignty over one or more of the others. Raedwald of East Anglia, whose treasures were found at the burial site at Sutton Hoo, was one of these, claiming supremacy over Mercia and Northumbria.
Life in the court of Raedwald and other Saxon kings centred around the Great Hall and Bede gives a captivating account of what it was like: ‘the fire is burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm, while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging’. The king, his earls and household listen to the songs and poems of their bards. This is the world of Beowulf–heroic, courageous and at the same time sensitive to literature and beauty, as even a brief glimpse at the Sutton Hoo treasure confirms.
One enduring question is why it was that the Britons did not simply absorb the invaders. This is what happened in France, where the Germanic invaders were quickly assimilated into the culture of Roman Gaul. Their language was almost entirely lost as Gaul slowly moved from Latin to French. But in England the revers
e happened. English owes very little to Celtic, but almost everything to its Germanic roots. The abrupt change of language, the reason indeed that I am writing this book in English rather than a form of Welsh, is a major reason among historians and archaeologists for supporting the extermination scenario. Reading the bloodthirsty accounts from Gildas and faced with the extinction of the Celtic language and its replacement by English, it is tempting to explain them as variations on the theme of genocide. The English Celts were simply wiped out, or driven to the hills. Whether this is true or not is certainly something I hoped genetics would be able to discover, but is it really very likely?
There certainly were civilian massacres, on the eve of the battle of Chester in 616 for example, but there is also plenty of evidence that the British were living peacefully in Saxon kingdoms. A set of laws promulgated by a seventh-century king of Wessex specifically provides for Britons living in his territory. There is also the question of numbers. Is it realistic to think that there were enough invaders coming across the sea completely to supplant the native population? The genetics should provide a big clue towards resolving the perennial Saxon/Celt debate, and it is the main question to be answered about England. Or is it?
In the year 789 it is recorded that the King of Wessex married the daughter of the Mercian King Offa. Almost as an afterthought is added this ominous sequel:
And in his days came first three ships from Horthaland and then the reeve [the King’s sheriff] rode thither and tried to compel them to go to the royal manor, for he did not know what they were; and then they slew him. These were the first ships of the Danes to come to England.
This was a chilling prelude to yet more raids, invasions and warfare by the mixed hordes of Vikings and Danes. After two centuries without any substantial foreign invasions in England, it looked as if it was starting all over again. After the killing of the king’s sheriff in 789, on what has all the appearance of a reconnaissance mission, the Vikings paid most attention to the north of Britain and to Ireland, as we have already seen. But this was only a temporary respite. In 835 there was a large raid in Kent, then annually after that until, in 865, there was a full-scale invasion. The Danish Great Army landed in East Anglia led by Ivar Ragnusson, better known as Ivar the Boneless. I have rather a soft spot for Ivar the Boneless, because he was said to have suffered from the same genetic disease which I once researched myself. He was born, so it is said, with ‘only gristle where his bones should have been’. From this description, Ivar almost certainly suffered from osteogenesis imperfecta, an inherited form of severe brittle-bone disease. If Ivar was anything like the osteogenesis patients I got to know he would have been very short, unable to walk without aid and with badly deformed limbs and spine. His head, however, would have been of normal size and his mental functions not impaired in the least.
The mystique of a fully mature mind in the broken body of a child is very powerful. I am not surprised that, even with this great physical disability, which would have prevented him from any combat himself, he was able to command an army by his legendary wisdom and force of personality alone. He was carried into battle on a shield. It must have been a disconcerting sight for the enemy.
Ivar forced the East Anglian king to supply him with food, horses and winter quarters, and next spring marched his troops north and captured the Northumbrian capital of York, beginning the long association between this city, renamed Jorvik by Ivar, and the Vikings. The Great Army then moved south to invade Mercia, then east to complete the invasion of East Anglia, which culminated in the brutal murder of Edmund, the Anglian king who had supplied the Great Army when it first landed. In three short years the Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia had been utterly destroyed.
The rampaging Great Army then turned south and prepared to invade Wessex. For the first time, the Danes were defeated, on the Berkshire Downs near Reading by Alfred and his brother Aethelred. The Danes withdrew and attacked again, this time beating the Saxon force near Basingstoke. The Danes were reinvigorated by the arrival of a new army in 871 and then prepared for the final showdown with the Saxons, with Alfred at their head. Alfred’s Wessex and Mercia under King Burgred were the only Saxon kingdoms left in England that were not under Danish control. The Danes left Alfred alone for five years, and headed north, conquering Mercia en route to Yorkshire, which they began to divide up into permanent settlements. Then, at last, the Great Army turned south to attack the remnants of Saxon resistance in Wessex. They crushed Alfred at Chippenham in 878 and forced the king to retreat to his refuge in the marshes of Somerset, where he spent the winter arranging reinforcements. In the spring of 879 he headed towards Wiltshire and engaged the Danes at Edington Down on the slopes of Salisbury Plain near Warminster. He crushed the Great Army completely and forced their commander Guthrum to come to terms. The treaty separated England into two halves, with the dividing line running roughly north-west from London to the coast near Liverpool. East of the line was the Danelaw, to the west was Alfred’s Saxon England. Schoolchildren learn that Alfred the Great saved England from the Danes. He clearly did not, as the Danes won control of half the country. Unsurprisingly, the peace did not last. Another army landed in 893, but restricted its campaign to the Danelaw and left Alfred’s kingdom undisturbed.
From the genetic point of view I could see it was going to be hard to distinguish between Saxon and Dane. They both came from roughly the same place, their cultures were very similar, built around the Great Hall ideals of Beowulf. It was beginning to look, from the genetic point of view, like just another layer of north Germans and Scandinavians.
The next century saw the gradual reconquest of the Danelaw by the Saxon kings of Wessex. There were the inevitable setbacks. Norse armies recaptured York in 939 and 947, on the latter occasion under the command of the colourfully named Eric Bloodaxe. Another Danish army, under the equally chromatic Harold Bluetooth, had to be bought off after defeating an English militia in Essex. That only encouraged more raids, and by the turn of the first millennium huge amounts of cash had been paid to the Danes as what amounted to protection money.
The Vikings also used the same methods on the other side of the Channel. In 911 Hrolfe of Norway, or Rollo as he is more commonly known, sailed up the Seine and blockaded the river. In exchange for lifting the siege and withdrawing the threat to attack Paris, Rollo demanded, and got, a grant of land on the north-west coast from the French king. He became the first Duke of Normandy. He, his followers and descendants soon immersed themselves in French language and culture, though never forgetting their Viking roots.
Meanwhile, in England, the endless wars between Saxon and Dane continued. King Aethelred ordered a massacre of all Danes in England in 1002–an impossible task, but serving to spread more hysteria and violence. Danes in Oxford took refuge in a church, but the citizens burned it down with the Danes still inside. The attempted ethnic cleansing forced Sweyn, the King of Denmark, to intervene, which he did on two unsuccessful campaigns until, in 1013, he launched a full-scale invasion. Aethelred fled to Normandy and thus began the fateful alliance that was to lead directly to the Norman Conquest. On Sweyn’s death the following year his son Cnut, or Canute, inherited the Danish throne. By 1016 he had crushed Saxon resistance and become King of England as well. Notoriously he is the monarch who sat on the beach commanding the tide to retreat as a show of strength, but it was actually done to demonstrate his limitations in the face of nature. He was, in fact, a surprisingly good king, even though he divided his time between England and Denmark. But the fortunes of Wessex, whose regal supremacy Cnut had terminated, revived as Godwine, the Earl of Wessex, rose to prominence, even though he was not of the royal house.
Cnut died in 1035 and was succeeded by his son Harold. When Harold passed away five years later, his brother Harthacnut reigned for two brief years before he too died in 1042. That was the end of three decades of direct Danish rule and the kingdom was once more under a Saxon king, Edward (the Confessor), the son of Aethelred. Edward
had grown up in Normandy at the court of his father-in-law, Richard, Duke of Normandy, after Aethelred had fled to France to escape the Danes in 1013. Already the Saxon royal family owed a debt to the Normans, a debt which only increased when the Earl of Wessex, Godwine, defied the king and threatened to seize control. To deflect this ambition of Godwine, according to Norman propaganda, Edward, who had no children, promised the succession to William, Duke of Normandy. When Godwine died, he was succeeded to the earldom of Wessex by his son Harold who, again according to the Norman version of events, promised to back William of Normandy’s claim to the English throne.
However, as he lay dying, Edward named Harold as his successor and England’s last Saxon king came to occupy the throne on 5 January 1066. As William, Duke of Normandy, prepared the ground for invasion to press his claim to the Crown of England, the Danes were getting ready to do the same. Harald Hardraade, whose claim to the throne came through Cnut, was the first to attack. He invaded Northumbria and occupied York. King Harold, whose main army was in the south anticipating William’s invasion from Normandy, was forced to move north to deal with Hardraade. This they did, and destroyed the Viking army at the battle of Stamford Bridge, close to York, on 25 September. Hardraade was killed. Three days later, on 28 September, William landed with his army at Pevensey Bay on the Sussex coast. Only nineteen days after defeating the Danes at York, Harold’s exhausted army arrived to confront William at Senlac Hill, near Hastings. On the morning of 14 October 1066 the battle forces lined up. Harold’s Saxon army massed behind a wall of shields on the crest of the hill and threw back charge after charge by William’s heavy cavalry. In mid-afternoon, sections of Harold’s army broke away to pursue a feigned Norman retreat and, without the advantage of the high ground, were cut off and overwhelmed. Harold was killed by an arrow and the day was lost. His men did not surrender, but fought to the death. They were all killed.
