797-834: Avoiding the Mistakes of the British

In the last posting we saw the arrival of the 'Heathen Men' (the Vikings) in raids on Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Iona in the mid-790s. We have classed these raiders, like the Saxons of the 360s and later, as a form of hungry organised crime. The Roman Empire had been able to hold the Saxons at bay for a while because it was a unified and relatively efficient structure that could command the necessary resources. Britain only became England because the Romans left and because what remained was a set of petty Kingdoms quarrelling with themselves as much as seeking to resist interlopers. We recall that the English invasion started in earnest when the nearest thing to a British 'bretwalda' [Vortigern] invited one set of invaders [the Saxons] in to deal with another [the Picts]. So, before looking at the progress of the Viking raids and how Wessex managed to avert the fate of Vortigern's Britain, we have to look at just how divided and so potentially vulnerable the Anglo-Saxons were to this new incursion, an incursion that might be regarded as a form of poetic justice from the point of view of the Cymry.

At the opening of the period, the dominant petty state is still Mercia. Perhaps Mercia (as we have suggested) could have become strong enough to be the 'Wessex' of the later period. While the Vikings were threatening the North, Mercian ambitions were largely directed at rival Kingdoms. Kent, for example, was laid waste by Cenwulf of Mercia in 798 when it attempted to recover its independence. The Kentish King Eadbert was taken to Mercia, blinded and had his hands cut off. The Kingdom was not made into a tributary but was effectively destroyed, with Cenwulf's brother, Cuthred, acting as Governor (though titled King of Kent). Anglo-Saxon campaigning (noting the laying waste of Cornwall by Egbert of Wessex in 815) and violent court politics continues but without a final resolution until Egbert of Wessex appears. When Cenwulf of Mercia dies in 821 and is succeeded by Ceolwulf, it seems almost normal for Cenwulf's seven year old son to be murdered. Ceolwulf is deposed two years later and succeeded by Beornwulf and so on and so forth.

The two great players by the mid-820s are the chaotic Mercia and the more disciplined Wessex. They eventually came to blows at the Battle of Ellandun (825) in Wiltshire. Egbert of Wessex defeated the Mercians, gaining overlordship over the minor Kingdoms of Kent, Sussex and Essex. Beornwulf is was killed that year by the East Anglians, the fourth of the small South Eastern Kingdoms, but the main change is that Kent, Sussex and Essex are now to be ruled over directly by the Kings of the West Saxons. This unites all Southern England under one dynastic house capable of undertaking some resistance to the Vikings who have not yet emerged as a major force in Southern Britain.

In 827, the possibility of a unified approach is enhanced by Egbert of Wessex's conquest of Mercia, thoroughly weakened by another round of dynastic blood-letting. Egbert of Wessex is now the eighth King or 'bretwalda' to control all England south of the Humber. The early bretwaldas were simply the dominant minor kings of their day (Aelle of Sussex, Ceawlin of a much smaller Wessex, Aethenbryht of Kent, Redwald of East Anglia) but this is the first serious unification of the majority of the English since the age of the Northumbrian Kings Edwin, Oswald and Oswy. Not even Offa had achieved so much.

An acquisition of power in Early English history is never simple or complete. The Mercians make a brief come-back in 830 but the successes of Egbert of Wessex mean that, when the Danes do arrive in force in 835/836, we have one centre of power that can 'roll with the punches' and command greater resources, backed by the power of a Church with a clear interest in defeating the 'heathens' if they cannot be converted. The more divided (internally and externally) Mercian world would be unlikely to be able to do this so the rise of Wessex does seem to presage the survival of England - a territory that might otherwise now be speaking a version of Danish. A severely weakened Northumbria and the smaller Southern Kingdoms would never have been able to command the necessary resources in themselves. The question is simply whether Wessex was internally stable enough and administratively competent enough not only to do what Ambrosius Aurelianus is said to have done to check the Saxon raids after Vortigern but to have sustained that defence and built on it to expel the raider in a way that Ambrosius Aurelianus's successors could not.

447-559: The Mercenaries Take Over

The fateful but probably unavoidable decision in 449 by the Romano-British warlord Vortigern to invite a mixed Anglo-Saxon force over to Britain to help defeat the Picts and the Scots is shrouded in mystery but the legends plausibly suggest a brutal palace coup by the incomers and their seizure of the profitable part of the country closest to the trade route across the Channel (Kent).

The coup took place in 455 in Aylesford in Kent and was not without cost to the invaders. Hengist, the leading Angle, may have slaughtered the Romano-British court but he lost his brother Horsa and it is quite possible that an attempt to seize control of the whole country by ousting the 'superbus tyrranus' merely left them with Kent which they seem to have ethnically cleansed of the entire Romano-British elite who then fled to Londinium and elsewhere. The exiles would be the descendants of the thoroughly Romanised Cantiaci and have included many merchant princes. It can reasonably be said that England was founded on an ethnic massacre which might suggest to the English that they should be wary of being over-judgmental about the founding histories of other nations.

The matter was not uncontested. Hengest and his son Esc have to defend their newly acquired acquisition. The dispossessed, called the Welsh by the Angles (or rather Wealhas which means foreigners or strangers in Anglo-Saxon) fight back but are defeated at Crayford in 456, apparently with great losses, and then at Wippedesfleot (probably Ebbsfleet) in 465 before the Anglo-Saxons go on the offensive with a major raid in 473 against the Cymri (the term we will now use rather than Romano-British which they have ceased to be and use rather than Wealhas which defines them in the terms of the invader). There is no point in trying to tell the story in detail of the remorseless drive for control of South Britain by clearly superior (in military terms and in terms of sheer will and greed) Anglo-Saxons but we can perhaps highlight the process by which Roman Britain failed to become Cymru and largely became England instead.

The next key moment is a mini-invasion by Saxons under Aelle and his three sons and the seizure of another key economic asset close to the continent, Sussex, in 477. They need only three ship loads of men to dispossess the Cymry landowners, engaging in the same slaughter that Hengist and his brother had dished out two decades earlier. This is essentially an organised crime operation, using superior force to seize assets from a richer but more vulnerable population although we should perhaps not feel overly sorry for a local elite grown fat on slaves and peasant labour and refusing to organise itself adequately for resistance. There is method in all this - the new warlords are targeting the existing rackets with the same determination that Al Capone did in Chicago. Selsey where Aelle lands was a central distribution hub for the profitable trade in wheat and other agricultural and industrial goods in a regional economy which is still (just) functioning on Roman lines although the political and military protection for it has long since crumbled.

As in Kent, the Cymry try to fight back but the fighting skills and no doubt armament of these ruthless gangs is too much for them. They are finally defeated in Sussex with the seizure of the important Roman fort at Pevensey (Anderida) in 491 and the slaughter of everyone inside. There is much that is obscure in all this - context, precise dates and events, names and lineages, the actual politics - but Britain (we reserve the name Cymru for later and apply it to the area the Wealhas/Cymri were finally pushed into) may have suffered these attacks because around 480, Clovis, King of the Franks, was cutting the possibility of the Saxons raiding and seizing Northern French land. The idea that England might have emerged as much on one side of the Channel as the other might amuse but the reality was that Germanic aggression was taking place on a massively wide front, filling the huge vacuum left by the Romans.

In 495 the Saxon warlord Cerdic appears in Hampshire to create the basis for what will be the Kingdom of Wessex (to follow alongside Sussex and Kent). Other Saxon warlords seize land around Portsmouth in 501. The pattern of capturing the export zones of Britain continues, exerting a stranglehold on the old Romano-British economic system. Since the new arrivals are interested in extracting as much as they can by way of taxation and dues and pushing the locals off the best land in order to be otherwise self-sufficient, the economic disruption is immense. It is at this point that there is an attempt to pull together the Cymry in what might be called a last attempt to create a viable independent Romano-British state, that of 'King Arthur' and push the Anglo-Saxons back into the sea.

In fact, King Arthur is so shrouded in legend and subsequent accretions that we can discount the vast bulk of it as history. What it is probably safe to say is that a Romano-British warlord was able to muster the forces to halt the Western Anglo-Saxon advance and, if not push them back into the sea, stop their move inland and seizure of prime agricultural land and markets for a while. The legend centres around a major battle at an unknown site, the Battle of Badon Hill, where the Cymry finally defeated a major Anglo-Saxon force in pitched battle in or around 513. The relief is not one that lasts for long. Cerdic is acknowledged King of Wessex by 519 (to be succeeded by his son Cynric in 534), although all these dates and even persons are uncertain, and he apparently seizes the Isle of Wight (although it seems to have been settled and ruled in practice by Jutes) in 530. Wessex appears at this time still to be a small  'stranglehold' kingdom in and around Hampshire and to be far from the West of England hegemon that it was to become later.

Meanwhile, a similar process of invasion and settlement is taking place in Northern Britain with the most important development being the reign of Ida (547-559), King of Bernicia, an Anglo-Saxon Kingdom established throughout the sixth century to give Anglo-Saxons mastery of south-eastern Scotland and what is north-eastern England. It almost certainly emerged out of mercenary operations similar to those in the south east and directed at northern Pictish and Scottish raiders. Ida builds a strong fortress at Bamburgh and is succeeded by his son Glappa but we are going to forgo king lists in this series. Ida's ability to maintain his position and fight off attempts to oust him is the basis for what will be the important Kingdom of Northumbria.

By the middle of the sixth century, Roman Britain is not merely dead on paper but in fact. Romano-Britons, to be the ancestors of the modern Cymry but already regarded as such in our series for convenience, are still occupying much of the country but their frontiers to the North East and South are firmly in the hands of Germanic warlords who, in the South, have a stranglehold on the vital export trades that had kept the country prosperous. It is down hill for the original inhabitants all the way from now on.