Anglo Saxon
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links to Anglo Saxons
Who were the Anglo-Saxons, and what was Old English?
"The Anglo-Saxons" is the general name given
to the Germanic peoples who inhabited Britain between the fifth and the
eleventh centuries, between the Romans and the Normans. The name isn't a
modern invention: it was first used in England at the court of Alfred
the Great (871-899), who came to the throne as King of the West Saxons,
but redefined his title as King of the Anglo-Saxons (rex Angolsaxonum)
in the 890s, to mark his rulership over all free English people. It was
used abroad even earlier, in the time of Charlemagne (768-814), but
there it seems to have been to distinguish the "English"
Saxons from those who stayed behind on the Continent. (Later on, the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle sometimes makes the same distinction, using "Old
Saxons" to refer to the people of Germany.)
"Old English" is the name modern scholars
give to the language of the Anglo-Saxons, though some scholars use
"Anglo-Saxon" to refer to the language as well as the people.
The Saxons themselves called their language Englisc (Old English
-sc is pronounced like modern -sh, so they would have pronounced it
"English"), and a lot of the low-level structure and
vocabulary of our modern English goes back to their Englisc. The main
effect of the Norman conquest in the long run was to add an extra layer
of vocabulary.
Where did they come from?
The simple answer is probably all up and down the
North Sea coast, from Denmark and from the northern coasts (in modern
terms) of Germany, the Netherlands, and France.
The more famous answer is that of the eighth-century
Northumbrian monk Bede, who wrote an Ecclesiastical History of the
English People in 731, and put it like this (Ecclesiastical
History, i.15):
They came from three most powerful Germanic tribes, the
Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes. Of Jutish origin are the people of
Kent and of the Isle of Wight, and the part of the kingdom of Wessex
opposite the Isle of Wight, still called the nation of the Jutes. From
the Saxon land, that is the place which is now called Old Saxony, came
the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. From the
Anglian land, that is the place between the realms of the Jutes and
the Saxons which is called Angulus, and remains deserted to
this day, came the East Angles, the Middle Angles, the Mercians, and
all the Northumbrian peoples, that is, those who dwell north of the
river Humber, as well as other Anglian peoples.
This looks very neat and tidy, but towards the end of
his History (v.9), Bede gives another and a more inclusive list:
He knew that there were many nations in Germania from
whom the Angles and Saxons, who now live in Britain, get their origin
... There are the Frisians, Rugians, Danes, Huns, Old Saxons, and
Boructuari.
"Germania" here means not just modern
Germany, but (from a Roman point of view) all of northern Europe,
settled by barbarian Germanic tribes. The Boructuari were Franks, and we
have other evidence for earlier Frankish interest in Anglo-Saxon
affairs; the Byzantine historian Procopius writing in the sixth century
had heard that Britain was divided between Angles, Frisians, and
Britons.
To sum up, the Saxons (from Saxony) and the Angles
(from between Saxony and Denmark) were probably the main force behind
the invasion -- at any rate, they ended up in charge in Britain. The
Jutes, Frisians and Franks were also clearly involved, and there were
probably lots of other tribes long since lost to history.
Did they really arrive in AD 449?
In fact they arrived much earlier. The late Roman
historian Ammianus Marcellinus records the Saxones among the
barbarians (along with Picts and Scots) who were harrassing the Britons
in about AD 365, and the mid-fifth-century Gallic Chronicle
mentions another severe raid in 410, and the fall of Britain to the
Saxons "after many troubles" in 441. The date "449"
comes at the end of a long history of confusion.
The confusion starts with Gildas in the sixth century,
who wrote the first British account of the Anglo-Saxon invasions,
without including a single date. He did however mention that just before
the British invited the Anglo-Saxons, they sent an appeal to one Agitius,
who was three times appointed a Roman consul. This is probably Aetius,
whose third consulship began in AD 446.
We move on to Bede in the eighth century, who mentions
the Saxon invasion in a couple of places, in his Chronica Maiora
of 725 and in the Ecclesiastical History of 731. Bede was one of
the early adopters of A.D. dating, but in his Chronica, he was
using the then-common method of assigning events not to years but to the
reigns of the contemporary Roman emperors. He seems to have decided from
the fact that Aetius became thrice-consul in 446 to put the Saxon
invasion in the following reign, the joint reign of Martianus and
Valentinianus (Valentinian III ruled the Roman Empire in the west from
425 to 455, and Marcian ruled in the east from 450 to 457). When Bede
came to include the Saxon invasion in his History, he added an
(incorrect) A.D. date, and wrote "In the year of our Lord 449,
Martianus, forty-sixth [emperor] from Augustus, took the kingdom with
Valentinian, and ruled for seven years. At that time the race of the
Angles or Saxons..."
The earlier sections of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
were composed in the late ninth century, and they simply repeat Bede's
words against the year 449. Later writers saw the invasion listed
against the year 449, ignored the context, and invented a legend.
Set against these contradictory written records,
archaeology promises more impartial results. Unfortunately, none of the
remains can be dated with the precision that historians are used to: a
recent survey refuses to be any more precise than the half-century. But
in these general terms, one can see a few sites with identifiably
Anglo-Saxon remains in the first half of the fifth century, but a great
increase in the number and density of Anglo-Saxon sites over the second
half of the fifth century and the first half of the sixth.
So although 449 was not the date of the first arrival
of the Anglo-Saxons, it is perhaps fair to say that by then it was clear
that they were here to stay.
[For the archaeology, see J. Hines, "Philology,
Archaeology and the adventus Saxonum vel Anglorum", in Britain
400-600: Language and History, edd. A. Bammesberger and A. Wollmann
(Heidelberg, 1990), pp.17-36]
What sort of money did they use, and how much was it
worth?
From the middle of the eighth century, Anglo-Saxon
coinage standardized on the silver penny, which was about the size of
(though much thinner than) a modern quarter or 10p piece. For designs,
the coins tended to have the king's head (with his name around the rim)
on the front ("heads", or obverse) side, and a pattern (often
a cross) with the moneyer's name around the rim on the back
("tails", or reverse) side. The Northumbrians didn't switch to
the new standard and continued to issue base silver coins (eventually
base copper coins) until the independent kingdom of Northumbria was
snuffed out by Vikings in 867. Everyone else, however, used silver
pennies to the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. There are references to
"shillings" and "pounds", but both seem to be set
amounts of money, made up in pence, rather than separate coin
denominations. A further unit, which hasn't survived into modern times,
the "mancus", was worth thirty pennies, and it has been
suggested that a handful of later gold coins, with the same designs as
silver pennies but three times the weight, are actual mancus coins.
Since only four survive from the whole period, it's hard to say what
role they played. As for ha'pennies and farthings, these were made
informally in the tenth and eleventh centuries by cutting an existing
penny into halves or quarters.
So what could you buy with a handful of silver
pennies? The short answer is that we don't know, but from a handful of
clues a penny seems to have been a substantial sum of money, more
equivalent to a ten or twenty pound note (C$20-50) today. An
eleventh-century law of Cnut (II Cnut 24) notes that witnesses are to be
present for any monetary transaction involving four or more pennies
(this was an anti-theft provision so that there would be witnesses as to
who owned what later: if the threshold for the law to take notice is set
at "four pennies", a penny is clearly a tidy sum). A
tenth-century law (VI Æthelstan 6) notes that a horse could be valued
at up to half a pound (120 pence), an ox at a mancus (30 pence), a cow
at 20 pence, a pig at 10 pence, and a sheep at a shilling (here perhaps
4 pence). Another code (Dunsæte) gives quite similar numbers,
adding that you could get a goat for two pennies. While other codes list
fines for offences and injuries, and other documents note monetary
payments for estates, they bring us no closer to answering what a penny
could buy in our own modern-day terms. source
