A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons
Page 42
13 Campbell, Anglo-Saxon State, 2000, p. 74.
14 Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, 2005, p. 284.
15 Kabir, Paradise, Death and Doomsday, 2001, p. 12.
16 Ibid., p. 149.
17 Rollason, Northumbria, 500–1100, 2003, p. 183.
18 Lang, ‘Imagery of the Franks Casket’, 1999.
19 Kendrick, Anglo-Saxon Art, 1938, p. 119, cited in Hawkes and Mills, eds, Northumbria’s Golden Age, 1999, p. 1.
20 Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries, 1981, p. 155.
21 For a fuller discussion of Ruthwell and related matters see Hawkes and Mills, eds, Northumbria’s Golden Age, 1999.
22 Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels, 2003.
23 Michelli, ‘Lindisfarne Gospels’, 1999, p. 357.
24 Rollason, Northumbria, 500–1100, 2003, p. 143 and, for the rest of this paragraph, pp. 144–6.
Chapter 4 – The Mercian Sphere
Here a special debt is owed to the contributors in Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe (2001) under the editorship of Michelle P. Brown and Carol A. Farr. Ann Dornier’s Mercian Studies (1977) is a classic and a useful survey is to be found in Ian Walker’s Mercia and the Making of England (2000).
1 Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, 2005, p. 287.
2 Featherstone, ‘Tribal Hidage and the Ealdormen of Mercia’, 2001.
3 Bassett, ed., Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, 1989, p. 170.
4 Keynes, ‘Mercia and Wessex in the Ninth Century’, 2001, pp. 319, 322.
5 Swift, Croyland Abbey, 1999, p. 4.
6 Hodgkin, History of the Anglo-Saxons, 1935–9, I, p. 385.
7 Wormald, ‘The Age of Offa and Alcuin’, in Campbell, The Anglo-Saxons, 1991, p. 128.
8 Abels, Alfred the Great, 1998, p. 48.
9 Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, 2005, p. 274.
10 Keynes, Councils of Clofesho, 1994, p. 3, n. 14.
11 Ibid., p. 6.
12 Ullmann, Short History of the Papacy, 1972, p. 79.
13 For the potential military importance of these scholae, realized in the mid-ninth century under Sergius II, see the translations from the Liber Pontificalis by Raymond Davis, The Lives of the Eighth-century Popes and The Lives of the Ninth-century Popes, Liverpool UP, 1992, 1996. See also Nelson, ‘Carolingian Contacts’, 2001, pp. 136–7.
14 Lapidge and others, eds, Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 1999, p. 106.
15 Brooks, ‘Alfredian Government’, 2003, p. 8.
16 Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, 2005, p. 257.
17 See the article by Gareth Williams and Gerard Spink in Current Archaeology, 194, 2004, pp. 56–7.
18 ‘A papal seal from Herefordshire’ by Peter Reavill in Current Archaeology, 199, September 2005, p. 317.
19 The two foregoing paragraphs are heavily indebted to Cowie, ‘Mercian London’, 2001.
20 Keynes, ‘Mercia and Wessex in the Ninth Century’, 2001, p. 323.
Chapter 5 – Apostles of Germany
A useful collection of primary sources in translation is to be found in C. H. Talbot’s The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany (1981), which comprises a selection of the letters of St Boniface; the life of the saint himself (Vita Bonifacii) by St Willibald; the Life of St Willibrord (Vita Willibrordi); the Life of St Lioba (Vita Leobae) by Rudolf of Fulda; the Life of St Sturm, Boniface’s German assistant; and the Hodoepericon by Huneberc or Hygeburg of Heidenheim. The classic survey of the subject in English is still England and the Continent in the Eighth Century by the German scholar Wilhelm Levison, published in 1946 but originating as the Ford Lectures delivered at Oxford University in 1943.
1 Ullmann, Short History of the Papacy, 1972, p. 66.
2 Levison, England and the Continent, 1946, p. 57.
3 Ibid., p. 58.
4 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, III, 13.
5 Levison, England and the Continent, 1946, p. 72.
6 Ayerst and Fisher, Records of Christianity, 1977, II, P. 55.
7 Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries, 1981, p. 39.
8 Ibid., p. 74.
9 Ibid., p. 47.
10 Levison, England and the Continent, 1946, p. 84.
11 Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries, 1981, p. 96.
12 Ibid., p. 99.
13 These paragraphs are based on Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World, 2004, pp. 44–52, and the translation of the Life of Willibald in Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries, 1981.
14 Ayerst and Fisher, Records of Christianity, 1977, II, p. 58.
15 For all the above see Boniface’s letter (Tangl 51) to Pope Zacharias for the year 742; Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries, 1981, p. 100.
16 Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries, 1981, p. 134.
17 Ibid., p. 118.
18 McKitterick, ‘England and the Continent’, 1995.
19 McKitterick, Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, 1990, p. 25.
Chapter 6 – Alcuin of York
An important recent source is Alcuin of York (2003), edited by L. A. J. R. Howen and A. A. MacDonald. In this chapter I have used the selected edition of Alcuin’s letters in translation from the Latin by Stephen Allott in Alcuin of York: His Life and Letters (1987). This also contains excerpts from his ‘The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York’, of which the Oxford Medieval Texts published a full edition by Peter Godman in 1982. For the legends of St Oswald on the Continent, the standard reference is Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint (1995), edited by Clare Stancliffe and Eric Cambridge, notably the paper by Annemiek Jansen, ‘The Development of the St Oswald Legends on the Continent’. D. A. Bullough’s entry ‘Alcuin’ in the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) is recommended.
1 Allott, Alcuin of York, 1987, Letter 69, p. 85.
2 Ibid., Letter 160, p. 156.
3 Compare Bolton, Alcuin and Beowulf, 1979, and Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, 1993.
4 Campbell, ed., The Anglo-Saxons, 1991, p. 106.
5 Allott, Alcuin of York, 1987, p. 187.
6 Cited in Stancliffe and Cambridge, eds, Oswald, 1995, p. 161.
7 Elton, The English, 1994, p. 17.
8 Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries, 1981, pp. 189 and 190.
9 Ibid., p. 199.
10 Orchard, ‘Latin and the Vernacular Languages’, 2003, pp. 212–13.
11 Talbot, Anglo-Saxon Missionaries, 1981, p. 229.
12 Ibid., pp. 156–7.
13 Levison, England and the Continent, 1946, p. 98.
14 Abels, Alfred the Great, 1998, p. 73.
15 Campbell, ed., The Anglo-Saxons, 1991, p. 106.
16 Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 1983, p. 86.
17 Lapidge, ‘Asser’s Reading’, 2003, p. 39.
18 Garrison, ‘Social World of Alcuin’, 1998, pp. 78–9.
19 Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre, 1981.
20 Allott, Alcuin of York, 1987, pp. 8 and 40.
21 Garrison, ‘Alcuin’, in Lapidge and others, eds, Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 1999.
22 Ullmann, Short History of the Papacy, 1972, p. 1981.
23 Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 1994, p. 5.
24 Bullough, ‘Alcuin’, ODNB, 2004.
25 Garrison, ‘Alcuin’, in Lapidge and others, eds, Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 1999, p. 24.
26 Robertson, History of German Literature, 1962, p. 18.
Chapter 7 – Viking Raiders, Danelaw, ‘Kings’ of York
The Danelaw (1992) by Cyril Hart and Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Thirteenth Viking Congress (2001), edited by James Graham-Campbell and others, both carry fascinating essays on the subject. Viking Empires (2005) by Angelo Forte, Richard Oram and Frederik Pedersen, a survey of Scandinavian culture in general from the first century AD to the late thirteenth, appeared as this book was going to press. Of more interest from an Anglo-Saxon and British perspective is H. R. Loyn’s The Vikings in Britain (
revised 1994) and Blood of the Vikings (2000) by Julian Richards. David Rollason’s Northumbria 500–1100 (2003) is the major contemporary survey of its subject and of special interest in its treatment of the ‘kings’ of York.
1 O Croínin, ‘Writing’, 2003, p. 170.
2 Keynes, ‘The Power of the Written Word’, 2003, p. 17.
3 Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 1996, p. 55.
4 Richards, Blood of the Vikings, 2000, p. 78.
5 Ibid., p. 20.
6 Stafford, ‘Kings, Kingships, and Kingdoms’, 2003, p. 38.
7 Gillingham, ‘Britain, Ireland and the South’, 2003, p. 231.
8 Cited in Abels, Alfred the Great, 1998, p. 285.
9 Hunter Blair, Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, 1956, p. 70.
10 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘E’ annal 870.
11 See Lawson, Cnut, 2004, pp. 164–6, for much of this paragraph.
12 Crawford, ‘The Vikings’, 2003, p. 57.
13 Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, 2005, p. 293.
14 Crawford, ‘The Vikings’, 2003, p. 61.
15 Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, 2005, p. 312.
Chapter 8 – The Wessex of Alfred the Great
There is a plethora of books to draw on. Of recent biographies, John Peddie’s Alfred: Warrior King (1999) is admired for its handing of his military record; David Sturdy’s Alfred the Great (1995) makes revealing comparative use of the actual texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relating to its subject. Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (1988) by Richard P. Abels is a lucid account of the reign within its historical context. Alfred P. Smyth’s King Alfred the Great (1995) is in danger of being dominated by his protracted argument that Asser’s biography of the king was in fact the work of a forger. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (1983), edited and translated by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, is on the other side of the debate. An important survey of Alfredian studies is provided by Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences (2003), edited by Timothy Reuter. Finally, of the many recent works of special interest, one would mention The Defence of Wessex:The Burghal Hidage and Anglo-Saxon Fortifications (1996), edited by David Hill and A. R. Rumble. A specialist study of particular interest is Kings, Currency and Alliances: History and Coinage in Southern England in the Ninth Century (1998), edited by Mark A. S. Blackburn and David N. Dumville.
1 Blackburn, ‘Alfred’s Coinage Reforms in Context’, 2003, p. 205.
2 Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 1994, p. 58.
3 Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents: I, p. 810.
4 Blackburn, ‘Alfred’s Coinage Reforms in Context’, 2003, p. 207.
5 Foard, ‘Field Offensive’, p. 13.
6 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, 1969, p. 26, n.
7 Lapidge, ‘Asser’s Reading’, 2003, p. 46.
8 Abels, Alfred the Great, 1998, p. 14.
9 Crawford, ‘The Vikings’, 2003, p. 56.
10 Wallace-Hadrill, ‘The Franks and the English’, 1950.
11 Keynes, ‘The Power of the Written Word’, 2003, p. 176.
12 Wormald, Making of English Law, 1999, p. 450.
13 Keynes, ‘The Power of the Written Word’, 2003, p. 175.
14 Kelly, ‘Literacy in Anglo-Saxon Lay Society’, 1990, p. 59.
15 O Croínin, ‘Writing’, 2003, p. 286.
16 Smyth, King Alfred the Great, 1995, p. 398.
17 See Abels, Alfred the Great, 1998, pp. 261, 268.
18 Sturdy, Alfred the Great, 1995.
19 For these paragraphs on Alfred’s ‘writing office’, see Keynes, ‘The Power of the Written Word’, 2003, pp. 184–5, 193–5.
20 Bately, ‘The Alfredian Canon Revisited’, 2003, pp. 109–11.
21 Godden, ‘The Player King’, 2003.
22 Campbell, ‘Placing King Alfred’, 2003, p. 6.
23 Keynes, ‘The Power of the Written Word’, 2003, p. 192.
24 Keene, ‘Alfred and London’, 2003.
25 Based on Hill, ‘The Origins of Alfred’s Urban Policies’, 2003, pp. 219–33.
26 Abels, Alfred the Great, 1998, pp. 203–4, 206.
27 Based on Hill, ‘The Origins of Alfred’s Urban Policies’, 2003, pp. 219–33.
28 Sturdy, Alfred the Great, 1995, p. 152.
29 Mason, The House of Godwine, 2004, p. 12.
30 Cited in Lawson, Cnut, 2004, p. 133.
31 Gifford and Gifford, ‘Alfred’s New Longships’, 2003, pp. 281–9.
32 Campbell, ed. and trans., Chronicon Æthelweardi, 1962, p. 51.
33 Keynes, ‘The Power of the Written Word’, 2003, p. 197.
Chapter 9 – Literature, Learning, Language and Law in Anglo-Saxon England
Essential here is Rosamond McKitterick’s The Uses of Literacy in Medieval Europe (1990), with such chapters as ‘Royal Government and the Written Word’ by Simon Keynes and ‘Literacy in Anglo-Saxon Lay Society’ by Susan Kelly. The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature (1991) by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge is invaluable, while E. Temple’s Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts (1976) is still basic. Patrick Wormald’s The Making of English Law (1999) is a magisterial survey. For the fuller background, the best is probably Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England (1985), edited by Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss. As an introduction to the language itself, nothing can approach Bruce Mitchell’s An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England (1995). Michael Swanton’s Anglo-Saxon Prose (revised 1993) and S. A. J. Bradley’s Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1982) are comprehensive anthologies and the finest translation of Beowulf is the one by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney (1999).
1 O Croínin, ‘Writing’, 2003, p. 183.
2 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, IV, 24.
3 Crossley-Holland, The Exeter Book Riddles, 1980.
4 Elton, The English, 1994, p. 36.
5 Hunter Blair, Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, 1956, p. 352–5.
6 Howlett, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Idea of Rome’, 2003, p. 3.
7 Kabir, Paradise, Death and Doomsday, 2001, p. 183.
8 Cited by Lapidge, ‘Asser’s Reading’, 2003, p. 41.
9 D. P. Simpson, Cassell’s New Latin–English, English–Latin Dictionary, revised 1979.
10 Kelly, ‘Literacy in Anglo-Saxon Lay Society’, 1990, p. 58.
11 Ibid., p. 39.
12 Lapidge, ‘Beowulf, Aldhelm, the Liber Monstrorum and Wessex’, 1982.
13 Wormald, Making of English Law, 1999, p. 451.
14 For this paragraph see ibid., pp. 462–4.
15 Keynes, ‘Royal Government and the Written Word’, 1990, pp. 228–9.
16 Loyn, The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England, 1987, cited by Keynes, ‘Royal Government and the Written Word’, 1990, p. 229.
17 Gillingham, ‘Britain, Ireland and the South’, 2003, p. 229.
Chapter 10 – The Hegemony of Wessex
Given the scant nature of the materials relating to England’s tenth-century kings, ‘biography’ in the usual sense of the word is difficult. Recent works focusing on specific reigns are Higham and Hill’s Edward the Elder, 899–924 (2001) and Paul Hill on The Age of Æthelstan (2004), which gives much attention to the antecedents of the reign.
On religious life John Blair’s The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (2005) is essential if somewhat specialized reading here, as throughout the period, and John Godfrey’s The Church in Anglo-Saxon England (1962) is a valuable general survey. For a general survey of the period Pauline Stafford’s Unification and Conquest:A Political and Social History of England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (1989) is recommended.
1 Wormald, Making of English Law, 1999, pp. 170–71.
2 Campbell, ‘Placing King Alfred’, 2003, p. 4.
3 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘C’.
4 Abels, Alfred the Great, 1998, p. 218.
5 Gillingham, ‘Britain, Ireland and the South’, 2003, p. 215.
6 Brooke, The Saxon and Norman Kings, 1963, p. 120.
7 Campbell, ed., The Anglo-Saxons, 1991, p. 11.
8 Annals of Ulster, cited in Stafford, Unification and Conquest, 1989, p. 35.
9 Hare, ‘Abbot Leofsige of Mettlach’, 2004.
10 For much of this paragraph see Hill, The Age of Æthelstan, 2004, pp. 32, 35, 105.
11 Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 1983, p. 21.
12 For this paragraph see Campbell, ‘The United Kingdom of England’, 1995, pp. 39, 41.
13 Keynes, ‘Royal Government and the Written Word’, 1990, p. 243.
14 Wormald, Making of English Law, 1999, p. 126.
15 Keynes, ‘Royal Government and the Written Word’, 1990, pp. 235, 248–9.
16 Hill, The Age of Æthelstan, 2004, p. 121.
17 Ibid., p. 25.
18 Blackburn, ‘Mints, Burhs and the Grately Code’, 1996, p. 160.
19 Davis, From Alfred the Great to Stephen, 1991, p. 57.
20 Campbell, ‘The United Kingdom of England’, 1995, p. 38.
21 Elton, The English, 1994, pp. 47–8.
22 Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 1983, p. 133.
Chapter 11 – Danish Invasions and Kings
There are a number of important recent books here, including the study by M. K. Lawson, revised as Cnut: England’s Viking King (2004), an exhaustive view of original sources by the leading authority in the field; Frank Barlow’s The Godwins:The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty (2003); and Emma Mason’s The House of Godwine (2004). Pauline Stafford’s Queen Emma and Queen Edith (1997) is highly recommended, as is her ‘The Reign of Æthelred II: A Study in the Limitations on Royal Policy and Action’ (1978). Simon Keynes’s somewhat specialist The Diplomas of King Æthelred ‘The Unready’: 978–1016 (1980) opens up such documents as quarries for historical evidence. For a glimpse of the dramatic and sometimes sordid reality behind the politics, see Richard Fletcher’s Bloodfeud (2003).
1 Campbell, Anglo-Saxon State, 2000, p. 160.