Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700

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chapter 10

THE EARLIEST ANGLO-SAXON

KINGDOMS

Helena Hamerow

introduction

By the time Bede began to write the Historia Ecclesiastica, the origins of the

earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were believed to lie in the ethnic pedigrees of

Germanic invaders, primarily the three tribes named in the HE, the Angles,

Saxons and Jutes, groups who gave their names to many of the earliest king-

doms.

Indeed, the traditional view of kingdom formation takes as its point

of departure the accounts of the invasions in the HE and the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle and sees the distribution of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and settlements

as marking out a process of military conquest and political takeover, in the

course of which new kingdoms were carved out.

An admirable example of this

school of thought is Beck’s chapter on ‘The Teutonic conquest of Britain’, in

the ﬁrst volume of The Cambridge Medieval History published in 1911.Modern

scholarship has at its disposal a range of data, especially in the form of archaeo-

logical remains, unimagined in Beck’s day, and the ‘conquest model’, a central

tenet of English history, has crumbled since the 1970sasthe origins of the

Anglo-Saxon kingdoms have come under renewed scrutiny.

Anew understanding, if not exactly a consensus, has emerged which is

more complex, though less satisfyingly comprehensive, than Beck’s vision. This

view of England in the sixth century stems from an ongoing re-evaluation

of four related issues: the scale and nature of Germanic immigration and,

conversely, of British survival; the formation of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ social identities;

the construction of power; and the formation of new economic structures as

reﬂected in strategies of production and exchange.

The approach taken in this survey recognises, indeed emphasises, regional

variability with regard to each of these issues. It has, for example, long been

acknowledged that the impact of Germanic immigration varied regionally.

Bede, HE i.15.1.

See for example Leeds (1912) and Myres (1954).

263

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264 helena hamerow

Some parts of the country, i.e. much of the south and east, were directly and

profoundly affected while in other areas such as the west midlands, Germanic

immigration must have had little or no direct impact, although its indirect

effects were ultimately no less important. The recognition, furthermore, that

early written sources offer little reliable information regarding events, ethnic

origins and social identity in sixth-century England

means that any overview

of sixth-century developments must rely heavily on archaeological evidence

which, if it offers few certainties, is at least relatively abundant and steadily

increasing.

germanic migration and the formation of

anglo-saxon england

The question of continuity: cemeteries and settlements

Central to the re-evaluation of the immigration and its impact on post-Roman

Britain is the relationship between Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon ceme-

teries and settlements. The overwhelming majority of cemeteries founded in

the ﬁfth and sixth centuries were de novo establishments, even though many lie

near Romano-British burial grounds. A prime example is the settlement com-

plex at Mucking, overlooking the Thames estuary in Essex, which contained

not only two cemeteries and a sizable settlement, all established during the

ﬁrst half of the ﬁfth century, but also four Romano-British cemeteries. The

latest Romano-British burials at Mucking probably post-date ad 350,and some

could date to the late fourth, or even ﬁfth century.

The period of time which

elapsed between the latest burials in the Romano-British cemeteries and the

foundation of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cemeteries must therefore have been brief –

it is even conceivable that their periods of use could have overlapped – yet the

latter were established on new, entirely separate sites. A new settlement and a

new burial community were thus deﬁned simultaneously.

We now know, however, that some Romano-British cemeteries remained in

use well into the post-Roman period, though how common this was is unclear

owing to the difﬁculty of dating the latest Roman burials. The Romano-British

cemetery at Queenford Farm (Oxon.), for instance, lay outside the Roman

small town of Dorchester-on-Thames in an area with an early ﬁfth-century

Anglo-Saxon presence, yet radiocarbon dates indicate that it continued in use

into the sixth century.

In such cemeteries may lie many Britons who lived

and died in the ﬁfth and sixth centuries, but who are rendered archaeologically

invisible by a burial rite which involved no durable, datable grave-goods. Their

See Yorke (1993).

Hamerow (1993); C. Going, pers. comm.

Chambers (1988).

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The earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms 265

exact relationship to those buried in nearby ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cemeteries, and their

numbers, remain for the time being moot points.

In the great majority of cases, as at Mucking, communities established new

cemeteries in the ﬁfth and sixth centuries, yet a small number of exceptions to

this rule are known. At Wasperton, Warwickshire, a cemetery established in the

fourth century was still in use in the seventh century, although a radical change

in burial rite took place some time in the sixth century.

Of the 182 inhuma-

tions excavated at Wasperton, thirty-six were characteristically Romano-British

and 137 were Anglo-Saxon; nine, it has been suggested, were ‘hybrid’ burials.

It seems likely that Wasperton represents a family cemetery spanning the late

Roman and early Anglo-Saxon periods, in which the population remained

largely the same even though the burial rite and material culture became

‘Anglicised’. The adoption by this community of new and powerful ethnic

symbols suggests a profound change, indeed a cultural assimilation of the local

population that came to regard itself as ‘Anglo-Saxon’.

In light of this kind of evidence, as well as the implausibility of the population

of late Roman Britain

being numerically dominated or displaced by immi-

grants crossing the North Sea in small boats, the many thousands of cremations

and inhumation burials of the ﬁfth and sixth centuries, where the deceased was

buried with continental-style grave-goods and costume, are no longer seen as

necessarily those of immigrants, or even the direct descendants of immigrants.

Instead, the great increase in the number of sixth-century ‘Anglo-Saxon’ burials

and cemeteries in comparison to those datable to the ﬁfth century must be due

in large part to the cultural assimilation of Britons. Much of the ﬁfth-century

population would, furthermore, have been rendered archaeologically invisible

by the unavailability of durable, mass-produced ceramic, metal, glass and stone

goods. Old objects would consequently have been reused, greatly complicating

the recognition of ﬁfth-century burials.

Various attempts have been made to identify Britons in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ceme-

teries. It has been argued, for example, that the many burials that contained

few or no grave-goods, individuals buried in a crouched position or males

buried without weapons may be those of Britons.

Yet, whatever it meant

exactly to be wealh (literally, a foreigner, slave or Briton) in early Anglo-Saxon

Esmonde Cleary (1989), p. 201;Wise (1991).

The cemetery at Frilford, Berks., incompletely excavated in the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, is another probable example of the continued use of a Romano-British burial ground into

the Anglo-Saxon period. See Meaney (1964), p. 46.

This is currently estimated at around three to four million, although it is likely that the later fourth

and early ﬁfth centuries saw a substantial decline in population. See Millett (1990), pp. 180ff.

See, for example, Faull (1977) and H

arke (1992b). A number of post-Roman cemeteries have now

been excavated in south-west England that show what British burials actually look like. See Leech

(1986), Cox (1989) and Watts and Leech (1996).

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266 helena hamerow

England,

it was clearly a disadvantage; it may be that many British fami-

lies sought to conceal their ancestry by adopting an ‘orthodox’ Anglo-Saxon

burial rite in order to improve their social status and economic conditions.

In the late seventh-century laws of Ine of Wessex, weallas have roughly half

the wergilds of Englishmen and a number of clauses suggest that most Britons

possessed low legal status, despite the fact that the names of several members

of the royal dynasty of Wessex contain British elements, itself suggestive of

intermarriage.

The low social standing which this implies, combined with

large-scale assimilation, seems the most likely explanation for the widespread

and rapid adoption of Old English and, conversely, the tiny number of British

loan-words (only about ten), which survived in English, even in the west of the

country.

If this conjecture is correct, it would render sixth-century Britons

difﬁcult or impossible to identify archaeologically.

Just as new forms of burial rite appeared full-blown in Britain in the ﬁfth

and sixth centuries, so too did two new types of building. The ﬁrst, known

variously as sunken huts, sunken-featured buildings (SFBs) or Grubenh

auser,

are virtually ubiquitous in Migration Period settlements in north-west Europe.

They are generally small, with dugout ﬂoors, and vary considerably in depth.

How they should be reconstructed has generated considerable debate, with

some evidence suggesting that they had wooden ﬂoors suspended over a kind

of cellar, while other buildings have produced evidence of apparent trampling

on the base of the hollow. We can be quite sure that they served a variety

of functions, although most were probably used for storage and craft-related

activities. In any case, their continental pedigree has never been seriously ques-

tioned. They are generally found together with another type of timber building

about whose origins there is less agreement. These were rectangular, with walls

made of timber posts set into postholes, generally with two opposing door-

ways positioned centrally in the long walls, measuring on average around 10 to

12 metres in length and 5 to 6 metres in width. In at least a quarter of these build-

ings, a dividing wall in one end formed a small compartment. These buildings

were presumably living quarters, although some could represent barns or other

special-purpose structures. This ‘Anglo-Saxon house’ appeared in most regions

of England by the sixth century with little regional variation, to the extent

that the ground plans of certain buildings in Northumbria, Wessex and Essex

correspond almost exactly in terms of dimensions, as well as in the positioning

and width of the doorways and internal subdivisions. This type of building did

not, however, closely resemble either the traditional long-house found on the

EHD i,p.402,n.5.

See, for example, clauses 23.3, 24.2, 32, 33. trans. EHD i,pp.367–8.

SeeHamerow (1991); Higham (1992), pp. 181ff; Charles-Edwards (1995), pp. 729–30, 733;H

arke

(1997), p. 149;Ward-Perkins (2000).

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The earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms 267

continent, in which cattle and people lived under one roof, or late Romano-

British buildings. The present consensus is that they represent some degree of

hybridisation, although the Anglo-Saxon house ﬁnds its closest parallels within

the building traditions of north-west Europe.

A signiﬁcant number of early Anglo-Saxon settlements were sited near,

or even on the same site as, Romano-British settlements, contrary to the

old maxim that the Anglo-Saxons avoided Romano-British settlements. Yet

the thorny question of ‘continuity’ of settlement persists. At Barton Court

Farm (Oxon.), for example, timber buildings and burials typical of the early

Anglo-Saxon period were erected in the course of the ﬁfth and sixth cen-

turies on the site of a prosperous fourth-century farmstead, where a hoard

may have been hidden as late as c.430.

What, if any, link existed between

the people who built these structures and the previous occupants? The lay-

out of the Anglo-Saxon settlement was to some extent conditioned by the

Roman boundary ditches, but there is no evidence to suggest that the stone

buildings of the Roman period remained occupied; indeed the farmhouse was

demolished at the end of the fourth or early ﬁfth century. Yet, despite the

lack of any signiﬁcant break in either time or space between the two com-

munities at Barton Court Farm, their material cultures, in the words of the

excavator, ‘were poles apart’.

The continuity of town life in any mean-

ingful sense into the sixth century also seems highly unlikely.

While the

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the capture of a number of Romano-British

towns such as Bath, Cirencester and Gloucester by the Anglo-Saxons in

the sixth century, implying their survival – at least as defended places –

through the ﬁfth century,

these are the exceptions which seem to conﬁrm (as

does the archaeological evidence) that the majority of Romano-British towns

were effectively defunct by the mid-ﬁfth century.

Sixth-century demography and the origins of kingdoms

To B eckin 1911,itseemed‘incredible that . . . the invasion of Britainshould have

been accomplished without the employment of large and organised forces’,

though he ventured to suggest that ‘many scholars have probably gone too

far in supposing that the native population was entirely blotted out’.

By the

SeeHamerow (1999).

Miles (1986).

Miles (1986), p. 52.Other examples of Anglo-Saxon settlements on the site of Romano-British farms

include Orton Hall, near Peterborough, and Rivenhall, Essex. See MacKreth (1996) and Rodwell

and Rodwell (1985).

SeeBiddle (1989) and Esmonde Cleary (1989).

ASC s.a. 577.See Loseby (2000).

Beck (1911), p. 388.

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268 helena hamerow

1980s and early 1990s, the scholarly pendulum had swung to the opposite

extreme, and the early accounts of large-scale migrations were consigned to

the realm of mythology. Instead, the transformation from Roman Britain to

Anglo-Saxon England was seen as having been carried out by a tiny, military

elite aided by the processes of exogamy, assimilation and exchange.

Yet the

widespread adoption by the mid-sixth century of continental-style dress,

itself a powerful symbol of group self-consciousness and common descent, as

well as the burial of thousands of individuals in cremation urns which are effec-

tively indistinguishable from Continental examples, cannot be convincingly

explained without accepting that immigration, at least viewed cumulatively

over a period of some hundred years, took place on a signiﬁcant scale. Indeed,

archaeological and palynological evidence from Schleswig-Holstein appears to

support Bede’s account of a dramatic depopulation of Angulus during the ﬁfth

to eighth centuries.

There is, furthermore, little sign of socio-economic con-

tinuity from the fourth to sixth centuries in lowland Britain. One important

exception is land use, as there is increasing evidence, primarily from pollen

analysis, which indicates that cleared landscapes were maintained from the

Roman to late Saxon periods and that large-scale reafforestation in the ﬁfth

and sixth centuries was the exception rather than the rule.

The notion that these immigrants came from ethnically coherent and dis-

tinct groups or ‘nations’, however, is unsupported by the archaeological evi-

dence. Fifth-century Europe clearly did contain groups known, by outsiders

at least, as Angles, Saxons and Jutes, as well, of course, as Frisians, Franks

and others.

The material cultures of the regions they are supposed to have

inhabited also display certain distinctive traits, which, for example, distinguish

the regions east and west of the Elbe and in northern and southern Jutland.

A considerable degree of overlap, however, exists between these supposed ‘cul-

tural provinces’ and we cannot assume that differences in pottery styles, for

example, relate in any direct way to ethnic identity. Ethnic labels such as

‘Angles, Saxons and Jutes’, at least as they were applied to ﬁfth-century peo-

ples by chroniclers seeking to explain the political situation several centuries

later, may reﬂect groups who originated from the same geographical regions

(indeed, Bede deﬁnes these gentes with reference to geographical territories,

not to political or cultural afﬁliation), but these groups were unstable, mobile

tribal confederacies. The cultural uniﬁcation of the Angles, the Saxons and the

See for example Arnold (1984), Hodges (1989) and Higham (1992).

Particularly in Norfolk and Suffolk, where nearly a hundred early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are known.

See Scull (1993), p. 69.

HE i.15.SeeM

uller-Wille et al.(1988).

SeeMurphy (1994) and Tyers et al.(1994).

SeeHines (1995).

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The earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms 269

peoples of Kent, which preceded their political uniﬁcation into kingdoms, was

achieved after the migrations to Britain.

There is today little doubt that the early accounts of mass invasion and

population replacement in ﬁfth-century Britain are in large part ‘origin myths’

devised to serve the interests of the ruling elites of later periods by offer-

ing a unifying, stabilising ideology which would confer political legitimacy.

Archaeology nevertheless indicates that immigration did play a critical role

in the formation of an Anglo-Saxon identity. Large-scale migration into cer-

tain regions and substantial indigenous survival are, however, not mutually

exclusive. Yet the complex and absorbing problem of the exact fate of the

indigenous population of southern and eastern Britain in the ﬁfth and sixth

centuries remains to be resolved. Ethnic identity is of course determined not

by biology, but by personal and historical circumstance; under certain condi-

tions, individuals may switch their ethnic afﬁliation and ‘change the label by

which they are known ...according to biographical convenience’.

One can

only conclude that large numbers of Britons did precisely this and that direct

evidence of assimilation and hybridisation will therefore continue to prove

elusive. In those areas less directly affected by the collapse of Roman rule and

barbarian assaults, for example in the Peak District and the west midlands, very

few Anglo-Saxon-style burials of the sixth century have been found and local

groups presumably maintained their position; in east Yorkshire, Roman-style

burial rites survived well into the post-Roman period.

In short, the same

demographic model will not do for the whole of Anglo-Saxon England.

While the precise demographic composition of sixth-century England will

probably always elude us, we can be sure that the truth was far less clear-cut

than Bede’s account of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. By the middle of the

sixth century, however, new, relatively coherent regional identities had formed,

identities that found expression in the archaeological record several generations

before the earliest written accounts.

anglo-saxon communities and the formation

of identity

These Anglo-Saxon identities were forged in small, closely spaced communities

(see pp. 273–6 below), using a cultural vocabulary derived largely from north-

west Europe. The process of ‘Anglicisation’ itself remains hidden from view, but

it is evident that by the middle of the sixth century, many people in southernand

eastern England (and some in Northumbria) believed, or at least wanted others

SeeHines (1995) and Wood (1997), p. 45.

See Pohl (1997), p. 9.

Chapman (1992), p. 22.

SeeLoveluck (1994), p. 140 on cist burials at Elmswell.

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270 helena hamerow

to believe, that they were of Germanic descent. The evidence that survives from

this period, in particular elements of female costume and the ornamental styles

found on pottery and metalwork, suggest that material culture was actively

used to signal tribal afﬁliation. Indeed it was during the sixth century that

regional distinctions in material culture, particularly in female costume, were

most pronounced. This must have had more to do with the formation of

new corporate identities than with any primary ethnic distinctions of the ﬁfth

century, since these, as we have seen, were extremely blurred. Thus in East

Anglia, for example, ‘a new, consistent and distinctive Anglian English culture

was rapidly – within a few generations – put together out of a remarkably diverse

range of sources’;

the female costume, with its distinctive Scandinavian-style

brooches and wrist clasps (used to fasten the cuffs of a long-sleeved garment),

ﬁgured prominently as an expression of this new culture. In Kent too, the

adoption of Frankish fashions marked out the leading members of communities

as distinctively ‘Kentish’. These signiﬁcant regional differences in female dress

styles emerged early in the sixth century. They did not arise from ﬁfth-century

realities; they had to be formed. Individual communities formed the backdrop

to this process of cultural uniﬁcation and ultimately to kingdom formation,

and it is therefore appropriate to review what is known about the internal social

organisation of sixth-century communities. Later written sources can be drawn

upon to inform the picture, but burials are by far the most abundant source

of information for the sixth century, while the growing number of excavated

settlements is adding greatly to our understanding of social organisation in

important ways.

The burial community

Tw o main types of burial ground existed in the ﬁfth and sixth centuries. The

ﬁrst of these, the large cremation cemetery, is relatively uncommon and found

only in Anglian regions.

The best-studied example is Spong Hill in Norfolk,

where over 2000 cremation burials are estimated to represent a population of

between about 450 and 750 individuals.

This number greatly exceeds the size

of a single settlement (see below) and indicates that the burial communities

represented in such ‘urnﬁelds’ derive from at least half a dozen large settlements

Hines (1995), p. 81.

It is sobering to realise that, of over 1500 early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries known to date, only ﬁfty or

so have been excavated on a scale and to a standard which allow for meaningful statistical analysis (at

the time of writing). Only around a dozen have in addition yielded well-preserved skeletal material,

essential for the study of age and gender. See H

arke (1992a).

On the continent, similar ‘urnﬁelds’ are found in northern Germany and southern Denmark,

especially Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony.

McKinley (1994), p. 70.See also Timby (1994).

The earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms 271

and perhaps as many as thirty small settlements. The second, more common

type of cemetery contains only inhumations, or a mixture of inhumations and

cremations, and is much smaller, ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred

burials. These presumably represent single settlements, although the underrep-

resentation of children in most of these cemeteries begs the question whether

all members of the community were in fact buried in such apparently ‘commu-

nal’ cemeteries. Why there were two types of burial community (sometimes

even within the same region, for example Caistor-by-Norwich and Morning

Thorpe in Norfolk

)isfar from clear, though they presumably represent two

different ways of deﬁning ‘the community’, perhaps involving different types

of clans or moieties.

Where the original extent of the cemetery is known and a substantial per-

centage has been excavated, the size of the community it represents may be

estimated, as at Spong Hill; while such calculations are far from straightfor-

ward, they can at least provide a sense of the size of sixth-century communities.

At the small, mixed-rite cemetery of Norton, in Cleveland, a population of

around twenty-eight has been estimated; at Berinsﬁeld, Oxon., thirty to forty;

and at Morning Thorpe, around sixty.

As will be seen, these estimates correlate

broadly with the size of communities indicated by excavated settlements.

Studies of Anglo-Saxon burials themselves indicate that the internal struc-

ture of these sixth-century communities was ranked and differentiated in a

way which related to age, gender and kinship, factors which account most

obviously for variability in dress style and the kinds of grave-goods buried with

the deceased. The existence of age grades is indicated both by archaeological

evidence and by written sources, which suggests that rank was in part related

to the passing of certain age thresholds. Trends in the number and type of

grave-goods with which the deceased were buried appear to mark such thresh-

olds. The quantity and range of grave-goods buried with females, for instance,

increased markedly around the age of ten to twelve, while males were buried

with more or less the full adult range of weapons from around the age of

twelve. An age threshold around ten to twelve years old corresponds well with

the evidence from Anglo-Saxon laws.

Gender played a still more pronounced role in determining dress and grave-

goods in the sixth century, although much research remains to be done in

this area.

Children were generally buried in a manner that was ‘gender neu-

tral’, as were over 40 per cent of adults.

Yetcertain relatively common items

Myres and Green (1973); Green et al.(1987).

SeeSherlock and Welch (1992), p. 107, Scull (1993), p. 72,Boyle et al. (1995), p. 116 and Boyle et al.

(1998).

See H

arke (1997). See also Stoodley (1998) and Crawford (1999).

Stoodley (1999).

See H

arke (1997), p. 132.

272 helena hamerow

were almost exclusively found with one sex or the other. Thus brooches, neck-

laces and chatelaines (bunches of metal implements worn at the waist, includ-

ing real and ‘imitation’ keys) were buried with females while weapons were

buried with males. Different forms of cremation urn also appear to have been

deemed appropriate for males and females, the latter tending to be buried

in shorter, narrow-mouthed vessels.

The cremated remains of animals were

sometimes included with the burial, and here too certain correlations with age

and gender are apparent; horses, for example, were buried primarily with adult

males.

A good illustration of the way in which grave-goods could express social

identity is the case of burials with weapons, conventionally known as ‘warrior

graves’. Around half of adult males were accorded the weapon burial rite in the

sixth century. A detailed study of these burials has revealed that the weapons

buried were normally not functional sets;

in other words, they were not what

would have been carried into battle. They were instead carefully selected, and

the selection was in part determined by the age of the deceased. Weapon burials

also generally contained above-average burial wealth. Yet, some of the males

buried with weapons were too young to have wielded them in battle, while

others were seriously disabled. This evidence (combined with the distribution

of certain epigenetic traits) indicates that burial with weapons did not neces-

sarily denote someone who had been an active warrior, but rather symbolised

membership of a certain, apparently ascendant, lineage or clan, and perhaps

descent from immigrant groups.

Social rank and identity are thus reﬂected, at least indirectly, in both inhu-

mations and cremations. The type, quantity and range of grave-goods, the

costume worn by the deceased and the burial rite as a whole, co-varied to some

degree with age and gender, which were self-evidently among the ‘structur-

ing principles of society’.

Yet, while the Anglo-Saxon burial rite of the sixth

century was clearly inﬂuenced by age and gender, invisible aspects of social

identity such as kinship, ethnicity and rank, as well as perhaps religion or cult,

must also have had a critical bearing on the treatment of the deceased; for this

reason, correlations between burial rite, age and gender are rarely absolute and

can only provide a small window onto the rich complexity of sixth-century

social relations.

See Richards (1987), p. 196.

See Richards (1992), ﬁg. 22; but see also Hills (1998) for evidence that horses may have been more

widely present in East Anglian cremation graves than is usually recognised.

See H

arke (1992a) and (1992b).

Richards (1992), p. 144.Itseems unlikely, however, that most grave-goods were intended for use in

the afterlife.

SeePader (1982); Richards (1987), p. 197, and (1995).