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

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The earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms 283

to assume that they had always done so. Whatever their origins, it is unlikely

that these lower-order political entities occupied territories with well-deﬁned

boundaries; they may merely have consisted of a group of settlements all of

whom paid renders to the same centre through some system of hidation.

Later accounts such as the Historia Ecclesiastica and the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle describe the origins of kingdoms as the leaders of the day wished

them to be seen. This makes them dubious sources for those seeking an accu-

rate account of sixth-century events, yet they make one point abundantly clear:

warfare arising from competition for land was rife and territorial expansion was

the sine qua non of power. The appearance of Woden, god of war, as the progen-

itor in so many Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies is surely no coincidence.

These

genealogies themselves indicate a sixth-century origin for the major dynasties,

although this requires extrapolating from the dates of historically well-attested

rulers the approximate dates of their semi-mythical forebears such as Cerdic

of Wessex and Wuffa of East Anglia. Some have argued that these genealogies

merely reﬂect the limits of folk memory at the time when these oral traditions

were ﬁrst written down, extending backwards in time a few generations and

no further.

Yet when the evidence is taken in its entirety, the conclusion that

there were kings in the sixth century seems inescapable, even while the nature

and extent of their power remains obscure. Certainly, the laws of King Æthel-

berht of Kent, dated to the beginning of the seventh century, imply that he,

at least, had power and responsibility not only over his immediate followers,

but ‘over all ranks of society: nobles, freemen (ceorls), unfree peasants and

slaves’.

What were the origins of these kings? If there is any truth to Gildas’ account

of the activities of rebellious Saxon federates in sub-Roman Britain, the possi-

bility exists (on analogy with the Franks, for example) that some rulers of the

later sixth century ‘evolved’ from such opportunistic raiders who began to take

control of particular territories which they had been exploiting.

Another

possible catalyst for kingdom formation in eastern Britain lies in the links

between the elites of Kent and East Anglia and the Merovingian courts. Close

connections existed between the Kentish and Frankish elites in the later sixth

century as evidenced by the marriage of the Frankish princess Bertha to King

Æthelberht; a clause concerning escaped slaves in the law-code of the Salian

Franks (probably originating at the end of the ﬁfth or early in the sixth century)

furthermore suggests reciprocal legal arrangements between Francia and some

parts of Britain.

See Yorke (1990), p. 16.

See Yorke (1990), p. 4 and Scull (1993), p. 68.

Trans. EHD i.SeeYorke(1990), p. 17.

Iamgrateful to Barbara Yorke for this suggestion.

See Wood (1997), pp. 47–9.

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284 helena hamerow

The changes which took place in the archaeological record of the later sixth

century, while they do not provide direct evidence of territorial conquest or

warfare, are consistent with the emergence of a new elite and, perhaps, of

dominant lineages. These changes, as already noted, are the appearance of the

ﬁrst ‘special function’ settlements such as Yeavering and Cowdery’s Down,

which shared a new architectural style and layout, and, as we will see shortly,

of the ﬁrst trading stations; second are the changes in burial rite in which elites

are given a new prominence. If ostentatious burial is an attempt by newly

pre-eminent families to maintain their standing in unstable times, then the

appearance of rich burials suggests intensiﬁed competition for local power

in these regions.

Third is the evidence, not yet considered and notoriously

difﬁcult to interpret, for population growth. The number of settlements and

cemeteries known from the sixth century is far greater than from the ﬁfth. This

must be due in large part, on the one hand, to the difﬁculty of recognising

ﬁfth-century material culture, and, on the other, to the cultural assimilation of

indigenous groups who emerged from archaeological invisibility in the sixth

century, as we saw earlier in this chapter. Yet, the possibility that even a gradual

increase in population during the sixth century could have fuelled competition

for land to a signiﬁcant degree merits serious consideration. Certainly by the

seventh century, control over land was essential to maintaining status and

power; land was thus not merely an economic resource but a social one,

and the imperative for younger sons to obtain land in order to maintain and

enhance their power would have fuelled the very competition which ultimately

concentrated that power into fewer hands.

If sixth-century England was full of small polities of the kind named in

the Tribal Hidage, some of which at least can reasonably be called kingdoms,

then the administrative infrastructure of late Roman Britain must have dis-

integrated rapidly into various more or less independent units; the degree to

which their territories were conditioned by late Roman administrative organ-

isation, indeed whether they had deﬁned territories, remains a moot point,

as we shall see. Given such a scenario, the potential for networks of trade

and exchange to provide a framework for later integration would have been

considerable.

Evidence from the region of Metz during the same period supports this interpretation of rich graves

as a sign of competition for local power. Such graves are rare within 20 or 30 kilometres of Metz in

the sixth century: ‘close to Metz itself, disputes might be resolved by appeal to the king, bishops,

dukes and counts in frequent residence there. Further away, this was less easy and so more open

displays of access to power and resources were necessary’ (Halsall (1995), p. 48).

See Charles-Edwards (1972) and Scull (1993), pp. 77ff.

Trade has, however, received surprisingly little attention in most current theories of kingdom for-

mation.

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The earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms 285

When, in the course of the seventh century, a number of royally controlled

trading centres or ‘emporia’ were established along the English coast and major

rivers (the major examples being at Southampton, London, York and Ipswich),

the extensive, formalised trading networks that sustained them were most

likely based on pre-existing axes of exchange.

The evidence for ﬁfth- and

sixth-century trade routes comes primarily from the appearance of non-local

goods in settlements and cemeteries. While such prehistoric exchange networks

defy precise deﬁnition, the patterns produced by mapping the distribution of

obvious imports are revealing. The distribution of Illington-Lackford Ware,

for example, traces the outlines of an exchange network centred on the Little

Ouse valley and the Icknield Way, as already noted. A much more common

artefact, with consequently greater potential for illuminating mechanisms of

exchange, is amber beads, which are widely found in female graves of the sixth

century. Their distribution (along with that of crystal beads, a less common

sixth-century import) clusters at several ‘nodal points’, such as the cemetery at

Sleaford, Lincolnshire, where nearly 1000 amber beads were buried.

Around

these nodal points lie numerous cemeteries with smaller quantities of amber

beads, a pattern best interpreted as reﬂecting the redistribution of amber by

local leaders. Further evidence that access to amber was tightly controlled and

preferential is the fact that these cemeteries generally contained one female

grave with more than ten times the average number of amber beads. The

distribution of other non-local commodities, such as iron in regions with-

out ready sources of ore, would also doubtless repay closer study.

Even

from such limited evidence, a picture is beginning to emerge of sixth-century

exchange networks which were neither market driven nor currency based, and

in which the redistribution of many goods, especially luxury items that con-

ferred prestige upon the owner, was controlled by the leading members of local

communities.

One hint that the economy was becoming increasingly organised in the

later sixth century may be found in the growing number of Merovingian gold

coins entering south-east England, some 100 years before the ﬁrst real Anglo-

Saxon currency was minted. A small number of scales and weights (mostly

fragmentary) used to assess the bullion value of the coins were deposited in

graves; these come mostly from Kent, whose early prosperity derived from

its near-monopoly on trade with Francia, and the upper Thames valley, now

recognised as the cradle of the kingdom of Wessex.

100

See Scull (1997).

SeeHuggett (1988), p. 89.

Recent work on trade patterns in the Upper Thames valley, east Yorkshire and the Peak District

suggests differential access to commodities even within a quite limited geographical region. See

Loveluck (1994).

100

See Scull (1990) and (1997).

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286 helena hamerow

The evidence for exchange should ideally be evaluated alongside the evidence

for modes of production. Yet the rapid disintegration of the Romano-British

economy led to the collapse of industrial production c.400 – the sudden demise

of the wheel-thrown pottery industries of Roman Britain has become a vir-

tual clich

e–and for the next 200 years, production sites are conspicuous by

their absence. Thousands of early Anglo-Saxon brooches have been found, for

example, yet the number of surviving examples of the moulds and models used

to make them can be counted on the ﬁngers of one hand. In the absence of pro-

duction sites, the mode of production for early Anglo-Saxon material culture –

whether domestic, ‘itinerant’ or part-time specialist – remains largely a matter

for speculation. We can, perhaps, see hints of some limited reorganisation in

the later sixth century, for example in Illington-Lackford pottery and possibly

in metalwork such as square-headed brooches, but not until the trading centres

of the seventh century do we ﬁnd clear evidence for concentrated industrial

activity.

The ‘competitive exclusion’ model of kingdom formation outlined above is,

with its Darwinian overtones, a triﬂe pat and not without its critics,

101

but it

has held the ﬁeld for some years, with few real contenders. The chief competing

thesis (though the two are by no means mutually exclusive) is that the Anglo-

Saxon kingdoms largely adopted the political geography of Roman Britain. It

has long been recognised that the names of some of the earliest Anglo-Saxon

kingdoms derive from Romano-British tribes or districts, such as Cantwarena,

Bernicia, Deira and Lindsey. This gave rise to the hypothesis that the earliest

kingdoms were based on pre-existing territorial units that were taken over by

Anglo-Saxon overlords. A range of evidence exists for the continuity of territo-

ries from the Roman (and indeed pre-Roman) to the Saxon periods.

102

Indeed,

continuous use of old boundaries and geographical divisions is intrinsically

likely; it need not, however, imply that these boundaries were politically main-

tained. Thus, the seventh-century evidence for the Anglo-Saxon takeover of the

west midlands

103

provides an interesting model for what could have happened

further east in the sixth century: namely, a considerable degree of territorial con-

tinuity as well as reorganisation. Seen archaeologically, however, these regions

appear radically different. In short, it remains exceedingly difﬁcult to deﬁne

101

SeeHalsall (1997).

102

See, for example, Balkwill (1993) and Barnwell (1996)onthe possible Roman origins of the hide

and the hundred.

103

See, for example, Pretty (1989). Bassett, in his consideration of the criteria used in selecting the sites

of the ﬁrst Anglo-Saxon sees, concludes that while ‘some weight does seem to have been attached

to using places which had had regional importance...intheRoman period . . . in most cases it

was on account of their again (or still) having an important political role in the seventh century,

and sometimes an economic one, not because of their late Roman status per se’((1989b), p. 247).

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The earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms 287

the limits of a late Romano-British villa or an early Anglo-Saxon royal estate,

let alone determine whether they were the same. A frequently cited archaeolog-

ical example of possible political continuity is the Northumbrian settlement

at Yeavering, which was established in the sixth century and was a royal vill

by the seventh. Yeavering was certainly the site of a British cult centre and of

ritual activity since at least the Bronze Age, but close analysis of the layout of

the site suggests that we should not read any meaningful degree of political

continuity into the choice of location.

104

Unlike the other western provinces, Roman Britain did not pass intact into

barbarian hands, nor was it conquered rapidly. The old social order, institutions

and power structures suffered violent disruption. While the socio-political

structure of the earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that replaced them was not

entirely new, it does not, in most of southern and eastern England at least,

appear to have been constructed using the building blocks of Romano-British

political structures.

conclusion

The earliest Anglo-Saxon leaders, unable to tax and coerce followers as suc-

cessfully as the Roman state had done, instead extracted surplus by raiding and

collecting food renders. The portable wealth they amassed in this way was used

to maintain followers through conspicuous consumption and ritualised giving

of prestigious gifts.

105

The later sixth century saw the beginning of the end of

this ‘prestige goods’ economy, along with the decline of accompanied burial

and the appearance of the ﬁrst princely graves and high-status settlements. By

600, the establishment of the ﬁrst Anglo-Saxon emporia was in prospect.

106

These centres of trade and production reﬂect the increased socio-political strat-

iﬁcation and wider territorial authority which allowed seventh-century elites

to extract and redistribute surpluses with far greater effectiveness than their

sixth-century predecessors would have found possible.

107

Anglo-Saxon society,

in short, looked very different in ad 600 than it did a hundred years earlier.

It would, however, be a mistake to assume that this was the result of a steady

evolution or progression. Despite a tendency in current scholarship to seek the

origins of the early medieval kingdoms in ever earlier periods,

108

the extent to

which the kingdoms of seventh-and eighth-century Englandwerein fact rooted

104

SeeBradley (1987).

105

See Scull (1992).

106

It is possible that trading stations had already been established in the course of the sixth century in

east Kent, at Dover, Sarre, Fordwich and Sandwich.

107

See Scull (1997), p. 285.

108

SeeHalsall (1995). This trend is particularly prevalent in Danish archaeology, see for example Axboe

(1995).

288 helena hamerow

in the sixth century is debatable. While many of the interpretations offered

above are little more than modest speculation, as for an essentially prehistoric

period they must be, the combined weight of the written and archaeological

evidence indicates that at least some of the earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms

arose out of a period of intensiﬁed conﬂict and competition during the later

sixth century, the outcome of which was far from certain.

acknowledgements

Iamvery grateful to Dr Tania Dickinson, Dr John Blair, Dr Martin Welch

and Dr Barbara Yorke whose comments and suggestions have greatly improved

this chapter.

PART II

THE SEVENTH CENTURY

chapter 11

THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE IN THE

SEVENTH CENTURY

Andrew Louth

Most centuries can be claimed to have been, in one way or another, a watershed

for Byzantium, but the case for the seventh century is particularly strong. At

the beginning of the century, the Byzantine Empire was part of a political

conﬁguration focussed on the Mediterranean world, that had been familiar

for centuries and was characterised by two factors, one external and the other

internal. Internally, the basic economic unit of that world was the city and its

surrounding territory, which, although it had by now lost much of its political

signiﬁcance, still retained much of its social, economic and cultural position.

Externally, however, it was a Mediterranean world: bounded to the east by the

Persian Empire, most of the regions that surrounded the Mediterranean formed

a single political entity, the Roman (or Byzantine) Empire. At the beginning of

the seventh century, this traditional conﬁguration was already being nibbled

away: much of Italy was under Lombard rule, Gaul was in Frankish hands, and

the coastal regions of Spain, that had been the ﬁnal acquisition of Justinian’s

reconquest, were soon to fall to the Visigoths. But by the end of the century, this

whole traditional conﬁguration had gone, to be replaced by another, which was

to be dominant for centuries and still marks the region today. The boundary

that separated the Mediterranean world from the Persian Empire was swept

away: after the Arab conquest of the eastern provinces in the 630s and 640s,

that boundary – the Tigris–Euphrates valley – became one of the arteries of a

new empire, with its capital ﬁrst in Damascus (660–750) and then in Baghdad

(from 750), which by the middle of the eighth century stretched from Spain

in the west to the valleys of the Oxus and the Indus in the east. That empire,

far larger in extent than Justinian’s Byzantine Empire – larger even than the

Roman Empire had ever been – and hugely richer than any of its neighbours,

caused Europe, East Asia and North Africa to be reconﬁgured around itself,

forcing the Byzantine Empire (and the emerging Frankish Empire) into virtual

satellite status. This radical upheaval, together with the persistent aggression

of the Arabs on the remaining Byzantine lands, as well as the incursion of Slavs

291

292 andrew louth

and other tribes from the central Eurasian plain into the Balkans, accelerated

the transition of the cities of the eastern Mediterranean world that was already

well under way, so that by the end of the century the cities had lost much

of their social and cultural signiﬁcance, and survived as fortiﬁed enclaves,

and sometimes also as market centres.

The only place approximating to the

traditional city was Constantinople, and that largely because of the presence

of the imperial court; but even Constantinople barely survived, and did so in

a much reduced state.

This dramatic transition caused something of a crisis of conﬁdence and

even identity for the Byzantine Empire. At least twice the emperor entertained

the notion of deserting Constantinople, and re-establishing the capital of the

Empire closer to its traditional centre in Rome: in 618 Heraclius thought of

moving to Carthage, and in the 660s Constans II settled in Sicily. In both cases

we can see how the traditional idea of a Mediterranean empire still haunted

the imagination of the Byzantine rulers. In fact, despite the dramatic and

permanent changes witnessed by the seventh century, the Byzantine reactions

can be seen as attempts to preserve what was perceived as traditional. But, as

always with the Byzantines, one must be careful not to be deceived by their

rhetoric. This rhetoric – and, as we shall see, administrative changes that were

more than rhetorical – spoke in terms of centralisation, an increasing focus

on the ﬁgure of the emperor and the court, and a growing inﬂuence of the

patriarch and the clergy of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia in religious

matters. In reality, however, events and persons on the periphery were often

more important than what was going on at the centre. The transition that

took place in the seventh century was not completed in that century: not until

the late eighth and ninth centuries, when, with the relocation of the capital

of the Arab (Umayyad) Empire eastwards from Damascus to Baghdad, the

Arab pressure on the Byzantine Empire relented, did the Byzantine Empire

ﬁnally complete the transition that began in the seventh. What emerged was

an empire and a culture focussed on the emperor and the capital, but much

of what the centre by then stood for had, in fact, been worked out, not in

Constantinople itself, but at the periphery.

The history of the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century is difﬁcult to

reconstruct. Traditional sources are sparse and mostly late.

We can draw on

Theophylact Simocatta’s History and the Chronicon Paschale, both of which

were probably written at the court of the patriarch Sergius around 630 in the

The pace of this change in the cities, and its interpretation, is the subject of a still continuing debate.

See Foss (1975) and (1977), who emphasises the impact of the Persian invasion in the ﬁrst quarter of

the seventh century, and the discussion in Haldon (1997), pp. 92–124, 459–61.

For Constantinople, see Mango (1985).

On the problems of the literary source materials, see Cameron and Conrad (1992).