Offa and the Mercian Wars Read Online Free PDF

three shiploads of Saxon warriors, and they were given land in the eastern part of the country in return for military service. They quickly proved their worth by defeating a Pictish invasion from the north, then sent back to Saxony for more recruits, adding, in Bede’s words, ‘that the country was fertile and the Britons cowardly’. This sparked off a land rush which brought immigrants from the territories of three of the most warlike pagan tribes of Germany – the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes. Soon they were settling in such numbers that the Britons became afraid. Bede does not specifically say that the Germans brought their families with them, but it is clear that he regarded this as a large-scale settlement of peoples rather than just a collection of pillaging war bands. He goes on to state that the various English peoples of his day were all descended from these newcomers: the occupants of Kent, and the Isle of Wight and the mainland opposite, from the Jutes; those of Essex, Sussex and Wessex from the Saxons; and the East and Middle Angles, the Northumbrians, the Mercians and ‘other English peoples’ from the Angles.
    It was the latter who precipitated the catastrophe which was to overwhelm the native Britons, when they made an alliance with the Picts and attempted to extort more land and provisions from their British employers. Whether or not they were successful in this we are not told, but eventually they broke out of the enclave where they had settled and began to ravage the country ‘from the eastern to the western shores’. There was no organised opposition and the Anglian war bands inflicted terrible damage, destroying buildings, murdering bishops and priests as well as laymen and forcing the survivors to flee overseas or take refuge in the hills. Bede’s language implies a deliberate genocide: ‘A few wretched survivors captured in the hills were butchered wholesale, and others, desperate with hunger, came out and surrendered to the enemy for food, although they were doomed to lifelong slavery even if they escaped instant massacre.’
    After this devastating raid the invaders returned to their settlements, and the surviving Britons gradually rallied. Under the leadership of Ambrosius Aurelianus, said to have been the sole surviving man of ‘Roman race’ in the country, they inflicted a defeat on their enemies and a long struggle ensued, with neither side gaining a decisive advantage over the other. Eventually the Britons won a victory at the Battle of Mount Badon, which earned them peace for a generation. According to Bede this took place ‘about forty four years’ after the Anglo-Saxon invasions, which would place it around the year 500. This was not the end of the story, for both Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle record further campaigns as late as the early seventh century which are usually supposed to be part of a gradual westward expansion of the invaders at the expense of the Britons. In 552, for example, the West Saxon king Cynric routed a British army at ‘Searo byrig’ (Old Sarum, outside Salisbury). In 577 his successors Cuthwine and Ceawlin defeated and killed three British kings at Dyrham in Somerset, and subsequently captured the towns of Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath. Then in 605 Aethelfrith of Northumbria killed ‘a countless number of Welsh’ at Chester, including Christian priests who had come to pray for a British victory.
    Bede’s account is not the only source for the Anglo-Saxon invasion. We also have the testimony of the British monk Gildas, who was writing much closer in time to the events he described, and who may have been the source of some of Bede’s information. Gildas’ book, evocatively entitled On the Ruin of Britain and written in Latin around 550, describes Vortigern’s invitation to the Saxons, their arrival in three ships, later reinforced by ‘a larger company’, and their