Offa and the Mercian Wars Read Online Free PDF Page B

demands for extra provisions, followed by a brutal attack. However, Gildas’ perspective was much narrower than Bede’s. His main purpose was to depict the sufferings of his people as God’s punishment for their sins and those of their rulers, and he mentions contemporary kings by name only to condemn them for their immorality. Most of the identifiable places he refers to are in the far south-west of what is now England, and the only invaders he discusses are the Saxons. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes a series of campaigns against the ‘Britons’ or ‘Welsh’ which seem to be the same as the events related from the other side by Gildas, but again they give us only part of the picture, concentrating on the activities of Saxon pirates in Kent, Sussex and the region around the Solent. What is more, the Chronicle in its present form was not written down until the ninth century, and so it cannot necessarily be regarded as an independent authority for the events of 400 years before.
    On Bede’s evidence it was the Angles, the ancestors of the Mercians, who eventually conquered and occupied most of England north of the Thames after the temporary setback at Mount Badon. But we have no account of any military operations by which this extensive conquest might have been achieved. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle the Angles appear as if from nowhere. The earliest mention here of them as invaders appears in a poem about the Battle of Brunanburgh inserted in the Chronicle under the year 937, which boasts that there had never been a greater slaughter, ‘as books tell us . . . since Angles and Saxons came here from the east, sought out Britain over the broad ocean . . . overcame the Welsh, seized the country.’ A passage of this date cannot be regarded as independent of Bede, though, especially in view of the specific appeal to the authority of ‘books’.
    The earliest mention of Angles in Britain, in fact, comes from a brief survey of the island in the De Bello Gotthico of Procopius of Caesarea (Stenton), who was writing only a decade or so after Gildas. According to Procopius, Britain was inhabited by three races: the native Britons, the ‘Frissones’ or Frisians, and the ‘Angiloi’. But he says nothing of a recent invasion or migration. On the contrary, basing his account on the statements of some Angles who had accompanied a Frankish embassy to Constantinople, he states that the country and its people were so fertile that their surplus population regularly emigrated to the European mainland, where the Frankish king settled them in sparsely inhabited parts of his territory.
    The presence of large numbers of Frisians in England is otherwise undocumented, but is not particularly surprising. They travelled widely as merchants and seaborne raiders, and the English language is remarkably similar to the Frisian dialects still spoken on the other side of the North Sea, in the coastal regions of what is now the Netherlands. It is possible that Procopius’ Anglian informants used the term ‘Frissones’ to denote their Saxon neighbours, although such usage is not attested in England itself. But Sir Frank Stenton has pointed out that German traditions also describe a population movement from England around the sixth century, and that according to one version, recorded at Fulda in the ninth century, the Saxons of Germany were descended from ‘Angli’ who had come from Britain.
    With our earliest sources in such a state of confusion it is tempting to sidestep the issue of ethnic identity, and in common parlance the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (which was already in use in late Anglo-Saxon times) is widely used to include the descendants of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, as well as the smaller groups of Frisian and Frankish immigrants whom Bede also mentions. The Welsh writers were lumping them all together as ‘Saxons’ as early as the time of Nennius, around 800,