The English Conquest: Gildas and Britain in the Fifth Century

228 Pages·1994·3.146 MB·English

by  Nicholas J. Higham

The English conquest
It is rare for an historian to be able to rewrite the history of an entire
century. In this provocative and carefully researched book, N. J. Higham
does just that, offering a complete reinterpretation of the crucial events
from 400 to 500 AD when the Saxons took over a large part of Britain,
and came to dominate both the language and material culture of its
lowland heartland.
The writings of Gildas, who wrote the only near contemporary and
extended description of the ‘English Settlement’, are central to the story.
Higham offers fundamentally new insights into Gildas’s purposes and the
social, political and chronological context in which he worked. He shows
how Gildas wrote around the years 479 to 485 in the context of Saxon
domination south of the Mersey, and how he wrote in order to find a way
to reverse the conquest, using metaphor and imagery as his literary
weapons.
The first volume of a major three-part analysis of the origins of England,
The English Conquest shows how history can still contribute to our
understanding of the ‘Dark Ages’, and challenges the interpretations now
being offered by many archaeologists researching pagan England.
To Naomi
The English conquest
Gildas and Britain
in the fifth century
N. J. HIGHAM
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
Distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin’s Press
Copyright © N. J. Higham 1994
Published by Manchester University Press
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK
and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
Distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada
by St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010, USA
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Higham, N. J.
The English conquest: Gildas and Britain in the fifth century /
N. J. Higham.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-7190-4079-5 (hardback). — ISBN 0-7190-4080-9 (paperback)
1. Gildas, 516?-570? Liber querulus de excidio Britanniae.
2. Great Britain—History—Anglo-Saxon period, 449-1066—
Historiography. 3. Great Britain—History—Anglo-Saxon period.
449-1066. 4. Anglo-Saxons—Historiography. 5. Britons—
Historiography. I. Title.
DA150.G483H54 1994
942.01'4—dc20 93-45583
ISBN 0 7190 4079 5 hardback
0 7190 4080 9 paperback
Typeset in Hong Kong by Best-set Typesetter Ltd.
Printed in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow
1
Contents
Figures vi
Abbreviations vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 The rationale of Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae 7
2 Gildas and the Saxons 35
3 Gildas and Jeremiah 67
4 The locality of the De Excidio Britanniae 90
5 The chronology of the De Excidio Britanniae 118
6 Gildas and his contemporaries 146
7 Postscript: Gildas and the ‘Age of Arthur’ 203
Index 213
Figures
1 The geographical introduction of the De Excidio
Britanniae 100
2 Central southern Britain 105
3 The British tyrants 109
4 Britannia Prima 112
5 Gildas’s Britain 192
vi
Abbreviations
AO Annales Cambriae or ‘The Welsh Annals’, in Nennius: British
History and the Welsh Annals, Chichester, 1980, ed. and trans.
J. Morris, pp. 85—91.
DEB: De Excidio Britanniae, or ‘The ruin of Britain’, in Gildas:
the Ruin of Britain and Other Documentsy ed. and trans. M.
Winterbottom, Chichester, 1978, pp. 87-142.
HB: Historia Brittonum or the ‘British History’, in Nennius:
British History and The Welsh Annals, ed. J. Morris, Chi­
chester, 1980, pp. 50-84.
HE: Historia Ecclesiastica or ‘The ecclesiastical history of the
English People’, in Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English
People, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors,
Oxford, 1969.
Orosius, Histories: Paulus Orosius, Seven Histories against the
Pagans, ed. and French trans. M.-P. Arnoud-Lindet, Paris,
1991 in 3 vols.
vu
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Nicholas Brooks
and Professor Patrick Sims-Williams for their encouragement and
good will. My work would have been impossible without the
computing skills of Mrs Sarah Davnall, which she yet again placed
at my disposal. I am eternally grateful. This volume owes much, in
addition, to Richard Purslow of MUP, who has responded to its
changing shape with unfailing good humour. My thinking on this
period has benefited enormously from an entire generation of
extra-mural students and several groups of third-year under­
graduates, yet the ideas offered herein are my own, as too are any
errors. 1 am grateful in addition to the University of Manchester
for a sabbatical term in the summer of 1993, during which the
bulk of this text was written. My greatest debt, as ever, is to
my family, who have treated my increasing abstraction with a
tolerance that I did not deserve. This book is for them.
Vlll
Introduction
The origins of England have been wrapped in controversy for
centuries. We might do worse, in illustration, than quote an
American scholar’s frustration at the contradictory hypotheses to
which he found himself subjected, just over a century ago:1
the Saxon conquest is, in Mr Coode’s conception, very little more
than the comfortable absorption and education of barbarians by a
resident mass of civilized people; to Dr Guest and Dr Freeman it is a
grim and thorough slaughter for more than a hundred years; to
Mr Green it is a slow beating back, with a few of the vanquished
left within the victor’s lines until the Severn valley was gained; to
Archdeacon Jones it is the winning of the low ground only, the Celt
remaining in the uplands even today; to Mr Wright it is in the west,
a comparatively harmless overrunning of a region already devastated
by the Celts of Brittany; while Mr Pearson makes it partly a matter
of bargain or compromise, partly a championship of the cities against
the unruly country people. In so long a contest there must have been
instances of almost everything. An adequate understanding of it
would include the above and much more.
Modern scholarship has come a long way since this was written,
yet the characteristics of this ‘Saxon conquest’ are no less con­
troversial today: within archaeological works published over the
last two decades, it is possible to find the earliest Saxon incomers
described variously as ‘a substantial immigration’;2 as late fourth-
century foederati (federate troops) in Roman pay;3 as migrant
peasant farmers entering an apparently empty land,4 as refugees
from flood damage in Germany, who remained in Britain after
their attack thereon in 410,5 or as a comparatively small, im­
migrant warrior elite, whose culture the indigenes adopted6 — all
1
Introduction
beside the otherwise near-ubiquitous theory of a massed, tribal
migration.7
Although several of these works have conscientiously taken
account of written sources, each of these syntheses is based pri­
marily on archaeological data. Some can be disproved,8 but most
cannot within the context of this data base. Indeed, it is fast
becoming apparent that archaeologists are capable of producing
an almost endless array of models of infinite variety through
which to explain the emergence of England, each of which is
(more or less) equally incapable of either proof or refutation.
The intractability of these hypotheses derives in part from the
nature of archaeological data. This consists primarily of artefacts
of various kinds - including pottery, metalwork, textiles, glass
and buildings - and the spatial relations existing between those
artefacts when found. Archaeology offers fundamental insights
into a wide variety of cultural activities - such as burial practices,
exchange, technology, architecture and the use of space within a
settlement — but it provides only a very distant reflection of the
social conditions, the political system, the language, religion and
ideology then prevalent within a community. We cannot be sure
what language - or languages — were spoken by the inhabitants of
a pagan English settlement, nor even (in most instances) the name
by which they identified that site. Nor is it an easy matter to
establish the social and economic status of its occupants. Once the
archaeologist departs from interpretation which is site-specific
and seeks to make general comments concerning the entirety of
society, his problems multiply: he is confronted primarily by the
imponderable question: ‘How representative of the total popula­
tion is the site, or small group of sites, which has been investigated?'
Those who prefer a migrationist view of the period assume
(generally without discussion) that excavated sites and cemeteries
reflect the culture - and so the ethnicity - of the majority, or even
the totality, of society, while those who prefer ‘elite dominance
theory’ assume the presence of a large but archaeologically in­
visible underclass of indigenes.
The very nomenclature in use reflects these different perspec­
tives and, at one and the same time, conditions the way we view
the past: a ‘migration’ conjures up a specific group of images; so
too does a ‘settlement’; so too does a ‘conquest’ - which is a term
which is now rarely used of the period, yet has a pedigree as good
2