History of England 1-6

The reaction of the mercenaries was immediate and strong. Their insurgency began in East Anglia, and then spread down to the Thames Valley. They took over many of the towns and countryside areas in which they had been stationed. They appropriated large estates, and enslaved many of the native English. They had seen at first hand the prosperity of the land and had acquired a taste for it. Thanet itself, as a granary, was a golden prize. The Saxon federates then sent out a call to their compatriots. Come and settle here. Together we can master the natives.

So the Germanic migrants kept on coming. Among them were four predominant tribes – the Angles from Schleswig, the Saxons from the territories around the river Elbe, the Frisians from the northern coast of the Netherlands, and the Jutes from the coast of Denmark. There were no such people as ‘Anglo-Saxons’ until the chroniclers invented them in the sixth century. The routes of settlement were already established by the river system. The settlers pushed along the Thames, the Trent and the Humber.

The Jutes settled in Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight; the New Forest was once Jutish land. The Saxons were established in the Upper Thames valley. The Frisians were scattered over the southeast, with an important influence in London. The Angles settled in eastern and north-eastern England; by the early sixth century the people of east Yorkshire were wearing Anglian clothes. These were small tribes, small communities under a leader or leading family. Some were resisted; some were welcomed. Others were simply accepted by a working population who had no real love for their earlier native masters. All were accommodated and, according to the best genetic evidence, eventually made up 5 per cent of the population we now call English; in the eastern regions it may have reached approximately 10 per cent, but there is no hint of deliberate genocide and replacement of the native population.

They came because they were being pushed by other tribes in the great westward migrations of that era, but they also came because their ancestral lands were in peril from the rising sea. This was the period in which the northern European coastline was sinking, as the archaeological evidence from Germany and the Netherlands testifies; there was urgent need to find land elsewhere.

The revolt of the Saxon federates was a decisive blow to the prestige and authority of Vortigern. He was overthrown by another Romanized English leader, Ambrosius Aurelianus, who led a counter-attack upon the Saxons and for ten years engaged in a series of strenuous battles. In 490 the English won a great victory at a place known to posterity as Mons Badonicus, believed to be near modern Bath. The leader of the English forces on that occasion is not recorded, but in this period the name of Arthur emerges as over-king. He is a shadow in the historical record, known only as dux bellorum or ‘leader of warfare’. He is said to have participated in twelve battles against the Saxons, but the places cannot now be identified. In the pages of the medieval romances he is a great king with a shining court at Camelot, otherwise known as Winchester; in truth he may have been a military commander whose headquarters were within the hill fort of Cadbury. 18 acres (7.2 hectares) of that hill fort were enclosed in the period of Arthur’s supposed lifetime.

The English had survived but, as part of the spoils of war, the Saxons retained their control over Norfolk, East Kent and East Sussex. There was a division in the country, perhaps marked by the construction of the Wansdyke designed to keep the Germanic people from crossing into central southern England. On one side of that barrier were small English kingdoms; on the other, Germanic tribes with their warrior leaders. What had previously been some of the most Romanized parts of the country had become the home of ‘barbarians’. The town and villa life of these regions was, therefore, in abeyance. An English chronicler of the early sixth century, Gildas, laments that ‘the cities of our country are still not inhabited as they were; even today they are squalid deserted ruins’. This was the process of the Saxon ‘invasion’.