Offa and the Mercian Wars

by Chris Peers

  Archaeology also casts doubt on Bede’s story. The process he describes – the Britons abandoning their land and setting up refugee communities in the hills, widespread starvation due to the disruption of agriculture, and four decades of fighting across a deserted no man’s land – should have left traces in the archaeological record. If fields are left unworked even for a couple of seasons in the English climate, they will become overgrown with grass and weeds and will require considerable effort to bring them back into cultivation. In five to ten years trees will start to spring up, and after forty years they will have reverted to forest. If these changes occur over a large area, they will affect the composition of the pollen which is found in large quantities in soil samples. Pollen analysis is now so sophisticated that archaeologists would expect to be able to detect a catastrophic change of population by sudden changes in the type of vegetation it indicates. No such changes have been found. Most analyses of field patterns also suggest continuity between the farmers of the Roman period and those of Anglo-Saxon England.

  In the territories associated with the peoples known as the Stoppingas and Aro Saetna in what is now Warwickshire, Della Hooke (1985) has traced a pattern of tracks and drove roads running between the low-lying arable lands in the south-east and the wooded and hilly north-west, and has argued that these represent a survival into Anglo-Saxon times of pre-Roman stock-raising practices. Cattle and other animals could be driven regularly from one region to the other in order to take advantage of the grazing in these different environments at different times of the year. It is surely incredible that recent immigrants could have worked out such complex arrangements in a short time in an unfamiliar country, or that they would have so closely paralleled those of the previous inhabitants. The obvious conclusion is that the Stoppingas and the Aro Saetna had already been living in Warwickshire for a very long time, and the same is no doubt true of the rest of the tribes of what was to become Mercia.

  A perhaps even more persuasive argument for continuity comes from the survival of Roman roads into the medieval and modern periods. As Rackham has pointed out, before the invention of tarmac, a road abandoned for even a few years would have provided an ideal habitat for thorn bushes, so that if people subsequently wished to reopen the route they would find it easier to make a new road rather than clear the old one. Roads which still follow the straight Roman routes must therefore have been in use more or less continuously, which implies continuous occupation of the places which they connect. Taking Essex as an example, Rackham observes that: ‘Every few years, through the darkest of the Dark Ages, there has been somebody from Duddenhoe End and Brent Pelham to take a billhook to the blackthorn on two short stretches of Roman road.’

  Another piece of admittedly negative evidence is the absence of the mass graves which might be expected if a population numbering hundreds of thousands had been massacred, or wiped out by plague or famine, over a short period. Some interesting work by a team led by Paul Budd on skeletons recovered from a fifth- or early sixth-century cemetery at West Heslerton in Yorkshire tends to support the above conclusions (Pryor, 2004). From its date and location it was thought likely that the cemetery would contain the remains of first-generation Anglian immigrants to Britain, and so they were subjected to a technique known as stable-isotope analysis, which uses trace elements in the teeth to determine where their owners spent their formative years. The results were surprising. Of twenty-four bodies tested, ten were of people who had grown up locally and another ten were from the west coast, on the far side of the Pennine Hills. This suggests that at the very least there had been no rigid east – west divide at that time between ‘Angles’ on one side of the watershed and ‘Britons’ on the other. The remaining four skeletons were identified as coming from Scandinavia, a region which might include the area where the Angles are supposed to have originated. Unfortunately for the migration theory, however, these people do not represent a band of conquerors. They were all women, and they had been buried with almost none of the grave goods that are traditionally associated with Anglo-Saxons, implying that they were not from the families of wealthy or powerful war leaders. So even if there were invasions from across the North Sea in this period, there were other movements that were apparently peaceful. The women could of course have been slaves captured in warfare, but if native Britons in Anglian Northumbria were owning Scandinavian slaves, the ethnic situation must still have been far more complex than traditional theories allow.

  The advent of sophisticated genetic studies in the last few years promises eventually to solve the question of Mercian origins once and for all. Unfortunately the work published to date has generated some widely varying conclusions, leading even some of the most perceptive writers to dismiss the entire subject. In 2002 Michael Weale and colleagues tested the DNA of people living in seven small towns across England and Wales on a line running from Norfolk to Anglesey, the idea being that the populations of such places were likely to have remained broadly in the same locality since the ‘migration’ period. They found a dramatic difference between the English and Welsh results, and concluded that the population of England had been almost entirely replaced by immigrants from the Continent in a process that must have involved prolonged violence.

  Professor Stephen Oppenheimer at Oxford University has argued that this study tells us nothing about when this replacement might have happened, that peaceful contacts across the North Sea over a much longer time period could have produced an indistinguishable outcome, and that the sample was, in any case, too small to be valid. He has employed a different approach which seems to produce some more plausible results. By looking for exact DNA matches on specific chromosomes between England and the supposed Anglo-Saxon homelands, he estimates that immigration from these regions in the entire post-Roman period has amounted to about 5.5 per cent of the total male population, with up to 15 per cent in some areas of East Anglia and around the Wash, and correspondingly lower rates elsewhere (Oppenheimer). These figures represent an upper limit, as they may include many migrants from later centuries and make no allowance for greater population growth among the new arrivals once they settled in England, which might be expected if they represented a social elite. Using an estimate of one million for the total population, half of whom were males, this might represent a migration by up to 25,000 men altogether, of whom a large proportion would have travelled no further west than Norfolk or Lincolnshire. This would have been a very large army by early medieval standards, but even supposing that it is all accounted for by fifth- and sixth-century Angles, they could have arrived over several generations.

  Hines (in Hawkes), arguing from the evidence of Continental warrior burials, states that Germanic armies of the time are unlikely to have consisted of more than a few hundred men. Most of the later arrivals may of course have been farmers rather than warriors, and have settled peacefully on land acquired by their friends or relatives. Living alongside them, on terms of wary coexistence if not actual friendship, would have been the original British population, not as Bede’s wretched survivors, but constituting a large majority. A good analogy might be with the ninth- and tenth-century Danish settlement of the same areas, which replaced some of the local rulers and introduced new names for some of the villages, but left the existing inhabitants largely intact. In that case we should see the Mercians not as invaders, but as descendants of the Coritani, Cornovii, Dobunni and other tribes of Roman Britain, ruled by a foreign dynasty perhaps, and having adopted much of the foreigners’ culture, but still essentially British.

  This does not mean that there were no Germanic invaders at all, and Bede could hardly have expected to be taken seriously if he had invented the migration theory from scratch. It was, after all, supposed to have happened at a time which would have been within the limits of oral tradition when he was writing. However, modern genealogical experience has shown that families tend to remember ancestors who are unusual in some way, and by the eighth century a majority of the inhabitants of M
ercia may well have believed, rightly, that they were descended from invaders from across the sea, even though in most cases they would be recalling one distant ancestor among many others who were locally born.

  This relatively peaceful view of the Anglo-Saxon ‘conquest’ is still controversial, however, and several arguments can be mustered against it. We may legitimately wonder why the urban civilisation introduced by the Romans disappeared so completely – far more completely than it did across the Channel in France – if there had not been a mass influx of ‘barbarians’ into Britain. The answer seems to be that, as modern research is making increasingly apparent, Britain had never been very thoroughly Romanised in the first place. It was always a rather remote frontier province of the Empire, only superficially urbanised and with an economy that was heavily reliant on the presence of the army. When the legions left at the beginning of the fifth century, the stimulus which government spending had provided to trade and industry disappeared. At the same time the disturbances on the Continent interrupted communications with the Mediterranean, Roman coins ceased to circulate and the people abandoned the towns and rich villas which had now lost their reason for existence and were too expensive to maintain. Classic Roman civilisation was already losing ground in the fourth century, long before the supposed Germanic invasions, and it is unlikely that many people, apart from a very small Romanised elite, were sorry to see it go.

  To later Christian writers the Roman Empire had become synonymous with the Catholic Church, and it was axiomatic that it must have been a good thing. Bede, for example, cites the letter to the consul Aetius as evidence that the people were eager for the Romans to return. But other writers contradict this claim. Nennius actually states that the Britons rose up and drove the Romans out, and Gildas in his polemic criticises them for their habit of rebelling, ‘sometimes against God . . . and often against foreign kings’. The Roman writer Zosimus appears to confirm this view when he states that barbarian invasions encouraged some of the inhabitants of the island to ‘leave Roman control and live their own lives, free of Roman laws.’ Roman laws may well have seemed oppressive, especially those which restricted people to hereditary occupations and prohibited civilians from bearing arms. In addition the burden of taxation under the later Empire fell disproportionately on the poor, while a small minority became fabulously rich. Salvian, in his De Gubernatione Dei, wondered that the ordinary subjects of the Empire did not desert en masse to the barbarians, observing cynically that ‘the enemy is more merciful to them than the tax collectors.’

  Similar factors may even explain the paradox that Christianity, which had become the official religion of the Empire under the emperor Theodosius in the late fourth century, continued to thrive in the west of Britain – the region where Roman influence had always been weakest – while apparently disappearing in the more Romanised east. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that it had never been popular with ordinary Britons living under Roman rule, and it may have been discarded along with the rest of the discredited Roman way of life (Russell and Laycock). We also have the testimony of Bede that as late as the seventh century recently Christianised Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were apt to revert to their more familiar old pagan practices when under stress, as happened in Sussex during the plague of 664. In what were to become Wales and Cornwall, however, the new religion was less tarnished by association with the Roman occupation, and so it was able to spread further west to Ireland, and thence north to the Picts and Scots, on its own merits.

  Another objection to the idea of ethnic continuity cites the presence of the English language, which is clearly related to Germanic dialects and just as clearly different from Welsh and other ‘Celtic’ tongues spoken in the west of the island. The usual explanation for this situation is that before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons the whole of Britain was occupied by people speaking Celtic languages, but this is difficult to prove, as evidence for any native language in eastern Britain in Roman times is almost non-existent (Oppenheimer). People can replace their languages with new ones over time, as can be seen in Turkey and Hungary, for example, where Asiatic languages introduced by small numbers of conquerors from further east have replaced those originally spoken in historic times. It may be that English took over from whatever had preceded it much more slowly than our sources suggest; the documents we have are written in Latin or Old English, the languages of the ruling and literate classes, but there is little evidence of what the ordinary people were speaking until after the Norman Conquest. Alternatively, contacts across the North Sea between eastern England and northern Germany had probably been strong since the Iron Age, and Germanic language and culture may already have been established in the island, or at least have been familiar enough to facilitate their rapid adoption when Roman influence disappeared.

  The extent of the economic decline of post-Roman Britain can be exaggerated, and despite the lack of archaeological evidence it is hard to believe that people forgot how to make pots, for example, or ceased to be able to carry out repair work on Roman buildings (Fleming). One reason for the apparent abandonment of Roman towns might have been eminently practical. Hydatius confirms some of Gildas’ apocalyptic account when he says that a plague devastated ‘almost the whole world’ in the 440s, and although it has been argued that this is too late to be responsible for the situation in Britain it need not have been unique. Remains of the black rat, alleged to be the carrier of the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages, have been found in fifth-century deposits, and black rats are mainly creatures of towns and sea ports. Professor William McNeill has argued that Mediterranean civilisation was experiencing a prolonged period of stress from the second century AD onwards as a result of new diseases brought in via trade contacts with Asia, and it is not unlikely that people in Britain understood that their afflictions were somehow connected with Rome and its works.

  One further obstacle to the idea of continuity between Britons and Anglo-Saxons needs to be addressed. Why would the devoutly Christian Bede make up or promote a story which depicts his own ancestors as mass murderers who dispossessed the rightful owners of the country by force and treachery? The answer no doubt lies in his explicit view of the English as ‘God’s chosen people’ by analogy with the Israelites of the Old Testament. His main grievance against the British of his own day was a theological one, deriving from the split between the Roman and Celtic churches over such matters as the authority of the Pope and the calculation of the date of Easter. Such matters were taken very seriously in the eighth century, when the conversion of the English was still a recent event, and the hold of the Catholic Church must still have seemed precarious. There seems also to have been a longstanding grievance over the allegation that the British churches had never tried to convert their neighbours, who had had to languish in heathen superstition until a mission arrived from Rome at the end of the sixth century. Bede was therefore predisposed to regard the Britons who followed the Celtic tradition as immoral, cowardly and lazy – especially as he was aware of the work of Gildas, who had said as much about his own people. It was therefore logical to identify the Britons with the Canaanites, whose violent dispossession by the Israelites on God’s orders is described in the Book of Joshua. There was no reason to question Gildas’ lurid account of the massacres perpetrated by the invaders of England, and since the conquest must have been God’s will, the use of force tended to reinforce rather than undermine its legitimacy.

  Chapter 3

  Kingdoms and Armies

  Whatever really happened during the sparsely documented fifth and sixth centuries, it is generally agreed that by the beginning of the seventh the process which would lead to the growth of the first true English kingdoms was well under way. We seem to be able to detect traces of a period in which the country was divided among a large number of small tribes, the results either of invasions or of local movements for autonomy after the end of Roman authority, which had gradually coalesced into larger political units. West of the Mercian heartland along
the River Trent, for example, two once-independent peoples, the Magonsaetan and the Hwicce, retained their own rulers but were coming under increasing Mercian influence, culminating in the eighth century with the downgrading of their kings to ‘subreguli’, ‘sub-kings’, and eventually ‘ealdormen’ or ‘earls’, recognised to be of noble blood but no longer royal even in their own estimation.