Anglo-Saxon England: Conquest, Conversion, Language
Unit 1: Historical Background
1.1. England Between 449-1066
1.1.1. The Conquest
The Venerable Bede explains that the invasion of Britain began in 449, when the British king Vortigern invited Germanic mercenaries under Hengest and Horsa to help protect Britain from the Picts and Irish. The Roman army had withdrawn from Britain in 410. The invaders came in small bands and spread inland, overcoming British resistance. The newcomers first settled in the south and east of the island, but gradually extended their dominance to the west and the north. Furthermore, the Jutes took Kent and the Isle of Wight; the Saxons the Thames valley and south of it; the Angles the Midlands and the North. As a result, small tribal kingdoms emerged, the chief ones being Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, Kent, and East Anglia. The invasion and settlement were complete by 597. The unification of England was at first ecclesiastical.
The name of England derives from Engla-land, that is, the land of the Angles, a term which appears at the end of the period. But an English national consciousness is something which began to crystallize only with Alfred’s resistance to the Danes.
The Battle of Chester, with the West Saxon Victory of Bedcanford in 571, marks the confining of independent British strength to Wales and the virtual completion of the conquest of what is now England.
1.1.2. The Conversion
The second phase is the period of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and their unification under the kings of Wessex (597-793). When pagan English had triumphed over Christian Britons, the Roman mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great arrived in Thanet (597). By 680, all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were ruled by Christian kings. It should be mentioned that Britain was Christian before the Anglo-Saxon invasion, and that no conversion was required in Wales. The Britons made no effort to convert their conquerors.
1.1.3. The Scandinavian Phase
This is the third phase, between 793-1066. At first, the Danes wanted plunder rather than land for settlement. In 865, the Danes brought an army in order to rob more systematically, overrunning most of Northumbria and East Anglia. But the Danes failed to partition Wessex due to King Alfred’s resistance. After the initial defeat in the spring of 878, Alfred withdrew and gathered a force that compelled the Danes to leave Wessex and later, in 886, he recaptured London. He was able to treat with the Danish king Guthrum the division of south England, south of the Humber.
With Alfred, the reconquest of the areas occupied by the Danish armies was only a matter of time. After the battle of Brunanburh (937), in which an army from Wessex and Mercia defeated the Northmen, King Athelstan reigned over England. The Scandinavian attacks were renewed in 975 and the new attacks took the form of raids followed by an army ready to do more than loot. The attacks of this army continued from 997 to 1002, when King Ethelred the Unready bought them off with money. Finally, he died in 1016 and the Danish king Cnut was left without a rival. For a short time, Cnut united Norway, Denmark, and England in a single kingdom. Cnut’s empire broke up after his death, and the kingship returned to the old royal house in the person of Edward.
1.2. Old English: The Language
The Germanic language that emerged in England carried with it the differences of the various invading tribes and led to the development of the four main dialects of the Old English language: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and West-Saxon. Before 597, Old English was scarcely written, but English had certainly been spoken for centuries before that. This OE language survives mostly in the West Saxon dialect, which became the official and literary language from the 890s until the Norman Conquest, thanks to King Alfred.
Under his leadership, education was revived and a policy of translating important books from Latin into Old English was initiated. As a result, King Alfred’s influence and the work of contemporary and subsequent scholars, not only did the Saxon dialect become the literary standard, but also was far more developed for the expression of prose and poetry. The language in which Old English literature is preserved is purely a Germanic one in its syntax, morphology, and lexis. Finally, we have to say that the word ”English” derives from Anglisc, the speech of the Angles, who settled in Mercia and Northumbria.