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History of Medieval England - Tuesday 6th Period: Lecture 2: Dark Ages in the Isle of Britain
Right, so when we last left things, the Saxons, Jutes and Angles were invading the Romanized and not-so-Romenized Celts in Britain. There are few historical records -- by which we generally mean eyewitness reports -- remaining from this period. In part, this is because literacy, prized by the Roman Empire, had fallen into a decline. The current occupants of Britain were defending themselves against invasion from territories in northern Germanica -- the aforementioned Saxons, Jutes and Angles.
It is in this time period that we get the legends of Arthur. While I can certainly say no pre-Saxon leader was king of all England after the Romans left, modern historians have a great deal of difficulty judging just how much of Arthur's legend is fact and how much is fantasy. However, the image of a unified front against an invading force remained a potent one for the inhabitants of the isle. As I mentioned in the discussion section last week, approximately seven hundred years later, Henry II of England would ceremoniously bury Arthur at Glastonbury Abbey. The irony, of course, being that the people who were then championing Arthur as their visionary leader were the descendants of the ones he was fighting.
Despite what he -- or how many war leaders contributed to his legend -- tried to accomplish, the Germanic invaders eventually swamped the majority of the island. They pushed the Celtic culture to the fringes -- to Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and various small communities such as the Isle of Man. However, modern DNA testing has proven that the physical population did not move. The Saxons -- for simplicity's sake, we will refer to them by the largest group -- intermarried with the existing peoples and settled down. What they had come raiding for was the wealth of Britain: it had fertile land and ore to be mined.
Within a hundred years or so, the Saxons were sufficiently comfortable in their new homeland that when a Scandinavian menace began, well, menacing, they were peeved. Viking invasions were in many ways responsible for the beginning cohesion of the nation-state known as England. Separate small Saxon kingdoms began banding together under attack from the Vikings, reaching its pinnacle under the aegis of a king known to history as Alfred the Great.
The Viking attacks fall under two separate types. There are the smash-and-grab attacks that meant that coastal communities were in constant danger. In these, the raiders were looking for portable goods, and while they did tend to slaughter anyone who got in their way, they didn't settle in claim the land. However, the second group began expanding into the islands of Britain and Ireland, and were fighting the Saxons for territory.
Alfred, although perhaps not as well known now, was a legendary figure because he managed to be both an outstanding diplomat and an outstanding war leader -- and in his spare time, encouraged education and the arts and also laid the foundations for the English navy. His peace settlement divided the island of Britain between himself and a Viking king, a settlement known as the Danelaw. By settling this with a formal peace treaty -- and converting the Viking king to Christianity -- Alfred not only proved just how useful education could be. Saxon Britain -- which can now begin to be called Saxon England, although the territory was still developing -- entered an age of artistic and educational flowering. Other countries in Europe imported Saxons from England to teach at their courts or monasteries.
The Viking threat came in two great waves a generation or so apart. When the nascent kingdom of England was not under attack from the outside, it often attacked itself from within with family rivalries. The 900s were a confusing welter of a couple of family lines switching the throne back and forth, with a few Scandinavian kings pouncing during the switches and getting it a couple of times themselves. (The difference between the Viking raiders and the Viking kings is that the raiders were outlaws... kind of like Old West gunslingers. The Viking kings were more like the Union Army marching west to fight the Indians.)
By the year 1042, what this left was a Saxon ruling family that had dwindled to one member who had spent the majority of his life in exile in the French duchy of Normandy. In the end, Edward AEthelredson came to England to be king. And that set off a whole chain of events which, literally, changed the entire world. (How's that for a cliffhanger?)
Your homework is not officially assigned until Thursday, but it will be drawn from readings here. Please make sure you have turned in last week's homework here.
[[OCD threads up! Post away!]]
It is in this time period that we get the legends of Arthur. While I can certainly say no pre-Saxon leader was king of all England after the Romans left, modern historians have a great deal of difficulty judging just how much of Arthur's legend is fact and how much is fantasy. However, the image of a unified front against an invading force remained a potent one for the inhabitants of the isle. As I mentioned in the discussion section last week, approximately seven hundred years later, Henry II of England would ceremoniously bury Arthur at Glastonbury Abbey. The irony, of course, being that the people who were then championing Arthur as their visionary leader were the descendants of the ones he was fighting.
Despite what he -- or how many war leaders contributed to his legend -- tried to accomplish, the Germanic invaders eventually swamped the majority of the island. They pushed the Celtic culture to the fringes -- to Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and various small communities such as the Isle of Man. However, modern DNA testing has proven that the physical population did not move. The Saxons -- for simplicity's sake, we will refer to them by the largest group -- intermarried with the existing peoples and settled down. What they had come raiding for was the wealth of Britain: it had fertile land and ore to be mined.
Within a hundred years or so, the Saxons were sufficiently comfortable in their new homeland that when a Scandinavian menace began, well, menacing, they were peeved. Viking invasions were in many ways responsible for the beginning cohesion of the nation-state known as England. Separate small Saxon kingdoms began banding together under attack from the Vikings, reaching its pinnacle under the aegis of a king known to history as Alfred the Great.
The Viking attacks fall under two separate types. There are the smash-and-grab attacks that meant that coastal communities were in constant danger. In these, the raiders were looking for portable goods, and while they did tend to slaughter anyone who got in their way, they didn't settle in claim the land. However, the second group began expanding into the islands of Britain and Ireland, and were fighting the Saxons for territory.
Alfred, although perhaps not as well known now, was a legendary figure because he managed to be both an outstanding diplomat and an outstanding war leader -- and in his spare time, encouraged education and the arts and also laid the foundations for the English navy. His peace settlement divided the island of Britain between himself and a Viking king, a settlement known as the Danelaw. By settling this with a formal peace treaty -- and converting the Viking king to Christianity -- Alfred not only proved just how useful education could be. Saxon Britain -- which can now begin to be called Saxon England, although the territory was still developing -- entered an age of artistic and educational flowering. Other countries in Europe imported Saxons from England to teach at their courts or monasteries.
The Viking threat came in two great waves a generation or so apart. When the nascent kingdom of England was not under attack from the outside, it often attacked itself from within with family rivalries. The 900s were a confusing welter of a couple of family lines switching the throne back and forth, with a few Scandinavian kings pouncing during the switches and getting it a couple of times themselves. (The difference between the Viking raiders and the Viking kings is that the raiders were outlaws... kind of like Old West gunslingers. The Viking kings were more like the Union Army marching west to fight the Indians.)
By the year 1042, what this left was a Saxon ruling family that had dwindled to one member who had spent the majority of his life in exile in the French duchy of Normandy. In the end, Edward AEthelredson came to England to be king. And that set off a whole chain of events which, literally, changed the entire world. (How's that for a cliffhanger?)
Your homework is not officially assigned until Thursday, but it will be drawn from readings here. Please make sure you have turned in last week's homework here.
[[OCD threads up! Post away!]]
Re: TALKING IN CLASS: Medieval England: Lecture 2