The Anglo-Saxons

I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up: an “inhumation” is a human burial; a “furnished” one means the guy was buried with some of his stuff.

Just two of many interesting things we learn reading today’s volume, The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris. If you’re guessing that means we’re reading English history, you’re right. Our book starts with the Romans beating feet out of the place as part of the fall of the Western Empire around A.D. 396, and it ends with the arrival of William and the Norman Conquest of 1066. What transpires between is a delightfully messy story of Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and (of course) the French contending for control of what are today England, Wales, and Scotland.

To set the stage: the Romans didn’t arrive in “Britannia” until A.D. 43 under Emperor Claudius. Four hundred years later the collapse of the Romans in Britannia left a power vacuum, one that the Saxons of northern Germany saw as opportunity knocking. They invaded, ultimately controlling most of what we think of as England today, with native Briton control remaining in Scotland and Wales. The borders changed a lot, but that’s the basic configuration we speak of as “Anglo-Saxon England.” Unfortunately, the arrival of the Saxons is also a period where the documentary record is incredibly thin…war and poverty are the enemies of scholarship, and the written record largely exited with the Romans. So our author turns to archeology, “metal detectorists,” and the above-captioned inhumations to suss out much of that story.

Things pick up considerably with the arrival of Gregory the Great in the narrative.

You remember Greg, the pope and future saint. He’s the one who decided that trying to impose the Western Church’s will on Constantinople and the Eastern Empire wasn’t going to work, and turned his attention to the Great Unwashed, to the barbarians of Western Europe. Which specifically included Anglo-Saxon Britain, and it was Gregory who sent St. Augustine to England as its first Christian missionary, later its first archbishop of Canterbury.

Our author records a story from the period, one that may tell us much about Greg the man, rather than Gregory the saint. As the tale goes, the pope was out shopping for slaves when a couple of truly pretty boys on offer caught his eye. Told that they were Angles (i.e., from England), Gregory decided he just had to have them, saying “they have both the name and the faces of the angels.” Morris corrects a couple of details: the pope had sent somebody from the Vatican to England to buy a few slaves to use as monks, and Gregory didn’t see the boys until after they were purchased and shipped back; so his approval was likely tinged by a certain pride of ownership.

Morris is the most circumspect of all historians. He does not speculate, nor does he titillate…so nary an eyebrow is arched, nor does a hairpin hit the floor. It is, however, pretty obvious to you and me that Pope Gregory the Great was one of ours; and to the extent that you believe in saints, we can now safely say that we have at least one actual Saint batting for Team Gay. Regrettably, however, one prone to making Dad jokes and punning on “Angles/Angels” in Latin. Sigh.

Slavery was a surprisingly big business in Anglo-Saxon England. Even rich popes can only buy so many slaves, and it turned out that the biggest export market for English slaves was Scandinavia…not surprising, since for most of the book the Danes are either invading or ruling the English. A large percentage of the slave trade, male and female, were specifically designated for the sex market. Morris helpfully points out that the Danish wife of an English earl bought and sold slaves in blocks, bulk trade as it were, and her specialty was lithe, young (female, in this case) sex workers. A highly lucrative trade, until William the Conqueror took over and broke up the party. For the record, he didn’t go all moral outrage on anybody, he just shut down the markets, prohibited the export of slaves, and moved on.

The French are entitled to feel superior in this case.

As noted, the early period covered by The Anglo-Saxons is lightly documented. The written record improves as the story progresses, although it isn’t until A.D. 802 that Morris even attempts a genealogical chart of the ruling families. A chart on which we find two potential members of the club…plus some of the most outrageous names we’ve bumped into.

A couple of notes on names: first, it helps to know that the prefix “Æthel” – pronounced “Ethyl” – means “noble.” So an awful lot of rulers have names that are Æthel-something…and if you have an Aunt Ethyl, you owe her an apology for all the jokes you made about her name. The second thing to know is that names got reused. I mean, reused a lot…and the later convention of numbering identically named monarchs (Elizabeth II, Henry VIII, that sort of thing) didn’t exist. So delightful as it is, working your way through some of these folks is like attending a family reunion and trying to understand if it’s your Cousin John, your Uncle John, or Grandpa John they’re talking about.

In that context we meet Edward the Elder, his wife Ecgwynn, and their famous son, Æthelstan. (Keep breathing: Ed and Gwyn had a kid named Stan.) Æthelstan was one of the great kings of England, a grandson of Alfred the Great. By Alfred’s time the Danes had established control over the northeastern half of England and were threatening complete conquest. Alfred got “the Great” tacked on his name by consolidating the middle and southern parts of Anglo-Saxon England and holding the line against the Danes. His grandson, Æthelstan, did him much better and reconquered most of what was called the Danelaw, driving the Danish invaders into Scotland and Ireland. In doing so, he had to consolidate the efforts of the various regional lords. His grandfather, Alfred, had first instilled the idea of “Englishness” among them, but it was Æthelstan who fully developed that identity and translated it into military victory. In a very real sense, Æthelstan deserves to be known as the first king of all the English.

Also unless I miss my guess, a major homosexual.

That’s my speculation, not the author’s. Morris reports the facts, that Æthelstan’s dad, Edward the Elder, had a complicated marital life with three wives and three sets of legitimate offspring. Æthelstan was the eldest male child of the first marriage to Ecgwynn, so his succession was unquestioned. Next in line would have been the male offspring of Edward’s second wife, but his third wife, Eadgifu, decided to cut line and cut a deal with Æthelstan: Eadgifu and her faction would support Æthelstan’s succession and rule…if Æthelstan would then promise not to have children and to engineer it for her kid, Edmund, to succeed Æthelstan when the time inevitably came. Unexpectedly, that sounded like a great deal to Æthelstan and he kept to his part of the bargain throughout his life. He even went one better than agreed, he didn’t even marry.

He did, however, design the crown. Up until that time Saxon kings were consecrated by having a helmet lowered onto their heads, a move both symbolic and practical, given the number of people the Saxons went to war with. Æthelstan, however, had himself coronated (crown-corona-coronation) using the now-familiar circle of gold. Part of the attraction was that it just showed so much better…kings of the day signed documents in front of big audiences, and there in the middle of it all was the king wearing this drop-dead piece of jewelry on his head, it drew the eye. The imagery must have worked, since the kings and queens who followed kept the tradition. Æthelstan was good to his bargain and was succeeded by the very straight Edmund. On his coronation day Edmund was found doing a mother-daughter three-way, with the crown much in evidence.

In fairness to everybody, there are other reasons Æthelstan might have remained unmarried and childless. Eadgifu, the third wife, was a very powerful figure who went on to outlive nearly everybody and proved herself tough to the point of vicious. She would have been a difficult opponent. But Æthelstan knew better than anyone that a monarch who does not leave a legitimate heir schedules civil war in his own country and invites attack from the outside. So either (a) one of the greatest of English military kings was being manipulated by his dad’s third wife, right down to his reproduction…or (b) an overachieving gay man reached an accommodation with his stepmom, an accommodation that helped her out and saved him face. My guess is some measure of both interpretations is true, but more of the latter. Everybody wins.

The same can’t be said a century later with Edward the Confessor, the penultimate Anglo-Saxon king. (Harold Godwinson ruled for a few weeks after him and was the guy who lost to William the Conqueror.) Edward the Confessor, too, neglected to make offspring, and his wife Edith was pretty clear about why: she couldn’t get him to touch her in bed. A fact she pointed out to anybody who would listen. “Modern scholars attribute it to bad biological luck,” Morris retorts. Say whaat?? If the man’s wife says she isn’t getting any, likely she isn’t. True, she and her family were the in-laws from hell. And it is true that Edward was honestly devout, seemingly to the point that he wouldn’t sleep with other women, either. But my hunch is that Edith’s “biological bad luck” is she married a gay man. (Also, later a saint…so now we got two gay saints in one review.)

Whatever its reason, Edward the Confessor’s lack of offspring sank the Anglo-Saxons. There was a concerted effort to uncover legitimate heirs of Alfred the Great’s line, but all that remained was a prince who was supposed to have been assassinated in Sweden as an infant, but who re-emerged as an adult in Hungary. Not to worry, however. Although Edward wasn’t effective in bed, he was efficient as to his succession, and he’d already named an heir, his cousin. French, but of the Saxon lineage: William, duke of Normandy, later the Conqueror.

In the end, the Anglo-Saxons kept it in the family. Even the gay ones did.