ANGLO SAXON PERIOD

ANGLO SAXON PERIOD

The Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) period is broadly defined as extending from the earliest written records (ca. 500) to 1100, when the social and linguistic effects of the Norman Conquest started to become apparent. This was the period when the Germanic peoples traditionally called the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded and settled Britain. The term Anglo-Saxon is a relatively modern one. It refers to settlers from the German regions of Angeln and Saxony, who made their way over to Britain after the fall of the Roman Empire around AD 410. The early settlers kept to small tribal groups, forming kingdoms and sub-kingdoms. By the ninth century, the country was divided into four kingdoms - Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex. Wessex was the only one of these kingdoms to survive the Viking invasions. Eric Bloodaxe, the Viking ruler of York, was killed by the Wessex army in 954 and England was united under one king - Edred.

Most of the information we have about the Anglo-Saxons comes from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a year-by-year account of all the major events of the time. 

Among other things it describes the rise and fall of the bishops and kings and the important battles of the period. It begins with the story of Hengist and Horsa in AD 449. Anglo-Saxon rule came to an end in 1066, soon after the death of Edward the Confessor, who had no heir. He had supposedly willed the kingdom to William of Normandy, but also seemed to favour Harold Godwinson as his successor. Harold was crowned king immediately after Edward died, but he failed in his attempt to defend his crown, when William and an invading army crossed the Channel from France to claim it for himself. Harold was defeated by the Normans at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066, and thus a new era was ushered in.

 

The Peterborough Chronicle,in a hand of about 1150, is one of the major sources of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; the initial page

The Roman armies withdrew from Britain early in the fifth century because they were needed back home to defend the crumbling centre of the Empire. Britain was considered a far-flung outpost of little value.At this time, the Jutes and the Frisians from Denmark were also settling in the British Isles, but the Anglo-Saxon settlers were effectively their own masters in a new land and they did little to keep the legacy of the Romans alive. They replaced the Roman stone buildings with their own wooden ones, and spoke their own language, which gave rise to the English spoken today.The Anglo-Saxons also brought their own religious beliefs, but the arrival of Saint Augustine in 597 converted most of the country to Christianity.

The literary materials that have survived are of a high moral tone, including the epic poem Beowulf (ca. 900), various heroic lays or narrative poems, saints’ lives, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the laws of some of the Saxon kings, charms, and gnomic verses or “wisdom literature.” 

The sole exception lies in the miscellaneous riddles, some of which are certainly obscene. Consequently what the Anglo-Saxon “language of the street” was like is not known. However, there are numerous instances of maxims that stress the importance of using language in a disciplined and responsible way, as in this quotation from The Wanderer: “A wise man must be patient, not over-passionate nor over-hasty in speech” (ll. 65-68). Such prescriptions stress the vital, indeed sacred link between words and deeds. The Gnomic Verses contain much proverbial material endorsing loyalty, such as “Faith shall be in an earl” (Gordon 1954, l. 314). Numerous warnings concern the punishment awaiting the man who breaks faith and is thus ostracized to the feared condition of exile, movingly depicted as the state of a solitary wanderer. The epic, heroic, and moralizing qualities of the surviving Anglo-Saxon poetry limit the kind of swearing encountered there to asseverations. Oaths are reserved for the serious commitments of the warrior ethic. When Beowulf makes a public undertaking to the Danish King Hroðgar and his followers to rid them of the threat of the cannibalistic monster Grendel (ll. 636-38), his word is taken not merely as a statement of intent but as an article of faith. Perhaps most revealing is the point that when this extraordinary hero, slayer of monsters and a dragon, lies dying, Beowulf reflects modestly that he kept faith: “I did not pick treacherous quarrels, nor have I sworn unjustly any oaths” (ll. 2736-39). A revealing moral insight is also provided by the etymology of the word warlock , which is Anglo-Saxon wærloga ,meaning “oath breaker.” Black magic was thus seen as a form of false swearing. When the monster Grendel incapacitates the swords of the Danish warriors by evil spells, the term used is forsworen , “forsworn” (ll. 801-5).

Furthermore, the name of God is mentioned some thirty times in Beowulf , but always in a solemn fashion; it is never “taken in vain.” Religious swearing, which was to become so common from the Middle English period onward, is a rarity. The typical heroic response in a moment of exasperation is dignified, cool, and measured, similar to the convention in the old western films. When Beowulf’s sword breaks in his crucial confrontation with the dragon, he responds with philosophical dignity, not with an expletive typical of his modern equivalent (ll. 2680-87).While one would expect Beowulf to be an ideal exemplar or role-model, the importance of the self-binding oath is an essential feature of the whole verbal culture. In the Germania (written ca. 55), the Roman historian Tacitus especially noted the prime importance accorded loyalty among the Germanic tribes, some of whom were to become the English. The poem The Battle of Maldon , based on an actual battle between the men of Essex and some marauding Vikings in 991, provides a striking ethical example. When the Vikings arrogantly ask for treasure, assuming that the people of Maldon will buy them off with danegeld , or protection money, rather than fight, the local leader Byrhtnoth gives them a savagely ironic answer: the Vikings can expect spears and swords for tribute (ll. 46-47). (The term answer is significant here, since this now mundane word derives from Anglo-Saxon andswarian , meaning literally “to swear against,” to make a formal legal reply to a charge.) Byrhtnoth was an ealdormann or nobleman, but the acute sense of verbal honor is by no means limited to his class. As the poem unfolds every man in his station from Byrhtnoth, who is “Æ?telredes eorl,” King Ethelred’s earl or viceroy, down the social hierarchy via Aescferth, the hostage from Northumbria, to the humble churl Dunnere, each man is given his dramatic moment to make good the English boast. It is some nobles, in fact, who treacherously flee when Byrhtnoth falls and the battle seems lost. They embody the ignominy Tacitus had noted a thousand years previously: “As for leaving a battle alive after your chief has fallen, that means lifelong infamy and shame” (chapter 14).

The Anglo-Saxon laws corroborate a similar underlying rigor and discipline in the matter of insults. (They also indicate that such language was indeed to be heard, even if it has not survived in the existing texts.) “If anyone in another’s house calls a man a perjurer, or shamefully accosts him with insulting words, he is to pay a shilling to him who owns the house, and six shillings to him to whom he spoke that word, and to pay twelve shillings to the king.” (Laws of Hlothhere and Eadric, kings of Kent [673–685?], no. 11). The Laws of Alfred (900) contain an interesting injunction: “Do not ever swear by the heathen gods.” (This constraint comes some 300 years after Christianity was first brought to England.)

The end of the Anglo-Saxon period shows, however, a sad degeneration of the old traditions of verbal honor. As the land was invaded by the marauding Vikings, so a general demoralization set in. Wulfstan, Archbishop of York at the time of the worst Viking depredations, denounced a wholesale breaking of faith in his jeremiad Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (1025): “Many are forsworn, and grievously perjured, for pledges are broken over and over again” (ll. 87-88). The Anglo-Saxon period lasted for 600 years, from 410 to 1066 whenHarold was defeated by the Normans at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066, and thus a new era was ushered in and in that time Britain's political landscape underwent many changes.