Assess the Evidence for the Relationship between Northumbria and it’s British Neighbours
The period between 400 AD and 800 AD in Britain was one of unprecedented change. The Romans, who had occupied most of southern Britain, troubled by concerned on the continental mainland, departed and waves of Germanic peoples, principally Angles, Saxons and Jutes, arrived on the country’s eastern and southern shores.
By the seventh century these peoples, who came to be known as Anglo-Saxons, had created seven kingdoms and had reshaped the political, economic and cultural landscapes of much of the country. In many parts of Britain, particularly in eastern areas, the domination of these Germanic settlers quickly came to be absolute and there is very little evidence for subsequent survival of Romano-British cultural forms in either the archaeological or written records.
The northernmost part of Britain which eventually fell under Anglo-Saxon domination was Northumbria. This area, between the Humber and Hadrian’s Wall is particularly interesting, because it has produced a wealth of both important archaeological and written evidence for the changes which were taking place throughout much of southern Britain during this period. Relations between Northumbria and its neighbours were complex, being part of a pattern of shifting alliances between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which characterised the political landscape in Britain during this period, and were further complicated by the rivalry between Bernicia and Deiria, the two formerly separate kingdoms which the Bernician ruler Aethelfrih had united in the early seventh century to form Northumbria. This rivalry between Bernicia and Deiria royal houses however, persisted throughout much of the seventh century, and was the cause of considerable intrigue and conflict between Northumbria and its neighbours to the south, East Anglia, Mercia and Gwynedd. Relations between Northumbria and the Picts and Scots, were also strained, and the early years of the seventh century in particular are characterised by warfare between Deira and Bernicia on the one hand, and their northern neighbours on the other. One of these conflicts, culminating in the Battle of Catreath (c. 600), is described in Aneirion’s epic poem Gododdin (Jarman 1998). The Northumbrians were victorious in these wars and Bernicia became an important military presence in the region, effectively crushing British resistance to Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the north (Kirby 1967: 25).
The most important written accounts which help us to reconstruct the relationship between Northumbria and its neighbours are Gildas’s Ruin of Britain, written around 540, and Bede’s Ecclesiastical history of the English people, completed in about 731, both of which have most to say about Bernicia. There are some interesting archaeological sites in Deiria dating from the 620s but most of the more informative finds date from the late seventh century onwards when the diffusion of Christianity and the peace, mainly with Mercia and Gwynned which came in its wake, seems to have ushered in a period of church and monastery building. It is during this period that the monasteries of Whitby, Monkwearmouth and Jarrow were founded, and it is from this time that the archaeological evidence begins to suggest the importance of the church in secular affairs (Arnold 1997 149-175).
Gildas’s Ruin of Britain (Winterbottom 1990), dating from the mid-sixth century, describes the destruction which he believed characterised the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the previous century. Bede (Sherley-Price (1990), writing two hundred years later,relied heavily on Gildas for his own account of the early period of Anglo-Saxon Britain and it is this view of discontinuity between the Romano-British order and the Anglo-Saxon society which displaced it, which became academic orthodoxy. A number of scholars (Kirby 1967) in recent decades, however, have challenged this view, seeing the writings of Gildas as essentially a moralising discourse about the changes which the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons ushered in. In Gildas’s view the invasion of the Germanic peoples constituted a divine punishment which the Britons wholly deserved. Bede, writing three hundred years after the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, depended heavily on Gildas and evidently shared this view. This picture of a disruptive and violent Anglo-Saxon conquest, however, is not unequivocally supported by the archaeological evidence which in many places equally suggests an infiltration, albeit a rather thorough one, of British society by the Angles and Saxons. In his attempts to create a coherent narrative, some scholars argue (Kirby 1967), Bede simplified rather complicated realities for this earlier period, while downplaying the violence of his own time.
The archaeological site at Yeavering provides evidence for some of these continuities between Roman Britain and the advent of the AngloSaxon kingdoms. Yeavering was, it seems, originally a prehistoric religious site, centred on a prehistoric stone circle. During the post-Roman period, occupiers further developed it by constructing several wooden buildings which included a great enclosure, a temple, large halls, and an auditorium. The kings of Bernicia took over Yeavering and turned it into a palace, enlarging the grandstand, rebuilding the great enclosure and erecting a great hall (Arnold 1997: 173-179). Yeavering is interesting in that it provides evidence for the continuities of which Gildas and Bede make little mention.
While the archaeological record indicates more continuities with the Romano-British past than the texts of Gildas and Bede, it also points to important divisions between the kingdoms. The opulent grave-goods found at Sutton Hoo, for example, particularly those in Mound 1, demonstrate an emphatic East Saxon character in spite of their proximity to East Anglian influences. Some scholars have consequently interpreted the funeral, of which these grave-goods were once part, as a political gesture to restate the nature of the boundary with the East Angles (Parker Pearson et al. 1994: 47). If this reading is correct, it suggests that the boundaries of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, including no doubt Northumbria, were unstable and required gestures of this kind to protect them. It also suggests that the stability which Bede emphasised was probably less a peace and more an equilibrium between mutually hostile polities.
The Germanic peoples who came to constitute the Anglo-Saxons came from a number of places. They included Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and possibly other peoples. The Angles tended to settle in the north and east, the Saxons in the south and west, and the Jutes in Kent, but it seems likely that in many places peoples of varying origins lived together, along with the indigenous Britons. There was no systematic invasion of Britain but rather waves of settlers, many of whom quite probably arrived (pace Gildas) with entirely peaceful intentions towards the local population. Indeed, some scholars (Kirby 1997) have argued that the Britons actually encouraged Saxon mercenaries to come, hoping that they might help them repel the Scots and Irish. If this was the case, it would also be true to say that relations between the host Britons and the Saxons soured, resulting in a mercenary revolt which the Britons were only able to check at Badon (c. 530).
Germanic settlement in southern Britain must have involved large numbers of people, for within a matter of a few centuries Anglo-Saxon had become almost entirely dominant throughout much of the country. Anglo-Saxon dialects replaced Celtic speech and British place names were almost entirely forgotten. Some scholars have argued that it is possible that Romano-British society remained in place after the Anglo-Saxon conquest and indeed gave form to Anglo-Saxon social organisation. However, historians who in recent years have considered Anglo-Saxon political processes in the light of documentary and archaeological evidence have come to the conclusion that these more greatly resemble similar institutions in the Frankish polities of mainland Europe than they do their British equivalents (see Kirby 1967: 26), giving renewed life to Gildas’s view that the continuities between Romano-Britain and the post-Conquest were rather few..
Another view has it that Anglo-Saxon political processes were less continental imports than the end result of an evolution which originated in competition between ranked lineages. This competition produced in time unstable chiefdoms, the most successful of which coalesced, around the sixth century, into kingly dynasties with more complex political structures (Arnold 1997: 188-210). Evidence for this comes in part from consideration of burials which from the late sixth century onwards come to assume a growing uniformity suggesting the emergence of an elite chiefly culture. This elite, centring on a warrior class, seems to have thrived. By exploiting an economy which, examination of cemeteries and settlement sits shows, had become rather specialised, this elite became increasingly prosperous, and new socio-cultural forms associated with this development, entirely Anglo-Saxon in character, may well have further caused people in places like Northumbria, where the military supremacy of the Anglo-Saxons was particularly strong, to abandon identification with things British as they aspired towards an emerging Anglo-Saxon identity (Arnold 1997).
The documentary and archaeological records indicates that relations between Northumbria and its British neighbours was probably initially relatively peaceful with the Britons happy to allow the Germanic peoples who settled in their midst a roles as their protectors against the Picts to the north. It seems, however, that these relations became strained as the newcomers began to arrive in ever-greater numbers, eventually, despite British resistance, resulting in Anglo-Saxon ascendancy and the marginalisation of indigenous identities. The emergency of new forms of centralised authority, centred on warrior elites, and the concomitant adoption of new socio-cultural processes ensured that Anglo-Saxon domination was complete.
Bibiography
Arnold, C.J. 1997. An archaeology of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. London:
Routledge.
Jarman, A.O.H. 1988. Aneirin: y Goddodin: Britain’s oldest heroic poem.
Liandysul, Dyfed: Welsh Classics vol. 3.
Kirby, D.P. 1967. The making of early England. London: Batsford.
Parker Pearson, M, R van de Noort and A. Woolf. 1994. Three men and a boat:
Sutton Hoo and the East Anglian kingdom. Anglo-Saxon England 22: 27-50.
Sherley-Price, L. 1990 (ed. and trans. R.E. Latham) Bede: an ecclesiastical
history of the English people. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Winterbotoom, M. (ed. and trans.). 1990. Gildas: the ruin of Britain and other works. Chichester: Phillimore.
Tags: Anglo-Saxon, Britain, history, Northumbria, records
