Handbook

Chapter 3: History

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AD 410–1066

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about 15 min

Quizzes

11 questions

Anglo-Saxons and Vikings: How England Got Its Name

What does the word England actually mean?

It comes from the Old English Englaland: "the land of the Angles". The Angles were not native to Britain. They were settlers who crossed the sea after the Romans left, from what is now northern Germany and Denmark. This chapter begins as they come ashore. Then come Viking longships, a king who let some cakes burn, and a Danish king who is said to have told the waves to stop.

1. 410The Roman army leaves; the Jutes, Angles and Saxons invade one after another
2. 563St Columba founds a monastery on Iona
3. 597St Augustine arrives in Canterbury from Rome
4. About 600The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms are mostly in place, mainly in what is now England
5. 789The Vikings' first raid
6. 793Vikings attack the monastery at Lindisfarne
7. 800sKenneth MacAlpin unites the north; Alfred the Great defeats the Vikings
8. 1016Cnut, a Dane, becomes King of England
9. 1066The Norman Conquest (next chapter)

The Romans leave, three tribes arrive

After the Roman army left in AD 410, Britain was invaded once more, this time by tribes from northern Europe:

• Jutes: from Jutland, in what is now Denmark.
• Angles: from the area where Germany and Denmark meet today.
• Saxons: from what is now northern Germany.

Their languages are the foundation of modern English. By about AD 600, the Anglo-Saxons had set up several kingdoms in Britain, most of them in what is now England.

But the Anglo-Saxons never ruled Scotland, or parts of western Britain, including most of today's Wales.

The newcomers also brought their own gods, and you still meet two of them every week. Wednesday is "Woden's day", and Thursday belongs to Thunor, the god of thunder, known in Norse myths as Thor.

Sutton Hoo: a king's ship under a mound

At Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, in the east of England, lies the grave of an Anglo-Saxon king. When he died, he was laid in a ship together with treasure and armour, and the ship was buried under a huge mound of earth.

The mound was opened in 1939, when the landowner Edith Pretty asked Basil Brown, a self-taught archaeologist, to dig into it. He found a ship about 27 metres long. The acid soil had eaten away all the wood, but almost every iron rivet was still in place, so archaeologists could trace the shape of the whole ship from them.

Nobody wrote down the dead king's name. The most likely candidate is Rædwald, King of East Anglia, who died in the 620s. The dig itself later became a 2021 Netflix film, The Dig.

Christianity arrives from two directions

Christianity had first reached Britain in Roman times, but when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, they were not Christians. During this period, missionaries (people sent to spread a religion) came to Britain to teach the Christian faith. They came by two routes, one in the north and one in the south:

• In the north, from Ireland:
  • St Patrick, who later became the patron saint of Ireland.
  • St Columba, who set up a monastery on Iona, an island off the coast of what is now Scotland.
• In the south, from Rome: St Augustine led a group of missionaries, and he became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

Why Rome cared about this far-off island is explained by a famous story. Pope Gregory I is said to have seen some fair-haired young slaves in a market in Rome and asked where they came from. Told they were Angles (Angli), he replied: "Not Angles, but angels (angeli)." The story was first written down about a hundred years later, so it is a legend, but it is easy to remember.

Gregory's missionary, St Augustine, landed in the kingdom of Kent in 597. The king's wife was already a Christian, so Augustine made Canterbury his base, and to this day the Archbishop of Canterbury is the spiritual head of the Church of England.

The Vikings: raiders from the sea

For almost two centuries after St Augustine's arrival, monasteries and churches spread across the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Then a new danger came from across the sea. In AD 789 the Vikings came to Britain for the first time. Their homelands were Denmark, Norway and Sweden. At first they came to raid towns on the coast, taking goods and carrying people off as slaves. Later some of them stayed and built communities of their own in eastern England and in Scotland.

The first visit went badly from the start. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records three ships landing at Portland in Dorset, in the south of England. The king's local official (the reeve) took them for traders and rode out to tell them to report to the king's town, and they killed him on the spot. It is the first recorded Viking attack on England. Oddly, the Chronicle calls them "the first ships of Danish men" while saying they came from Hordaland, in Norway: at the time the English often called all Vikings "Danes".

Alfred the Great: the only native English king called "the Great"

Facing the Vikings, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England came together under Alfred the Great, and he defeated the Vikings.

In 878 Alfred beat the Viking leader Guthrum at the Battle of Edington. Guthrum surrendered and was baptised as a Christian, with Alfred as his godfather.

Alfred came close to losing everything first. Early in 878 the Vikings caught him by surprise, and he had to hide in the marshes of south-west England. The story goes that he stayed with a peasant woman who asked him to watch some cakes (small loaves) baking by the fire. Alfred was so busy thinking about his kingdom that he let them burn, and the woman, who had no idea he was the king, told him off. It is a legend, not something written down at the time, but almost every British child has heard it.

The Danelaw: Vikings in place names

Many Vikings settled for good, above all in eastern and northern England. This area was called the Danelaw, which means the area where Danish law applied.

Even today, many place names there come from the Viking languages, such as Grimsby and Scunthorpe. Over time the Viking settlers blended in with the local people, and some became Christians.

Look closer and the Viking roots show up everywhere. In the Domesday Book, Scunthorpe is written Escumesthorpe, "Skuma's farm", and the -by in Grimsby is Old Norse for "village". Everyday words came too: sky, egg, knife and even they. Window was once vindauga, a "wind eye": a hole in the wall that let the wind in.

The north: the name "Scotland" appears

England was not the only target. In the north, the danger from the Vikings made people rally behind a single king: Kenneth MacAlpin, also known as Kenneth I. From this time on, people started to call the country Scotland.

Kenneth's royal family traced its ancestors back to the area around Iona, St Columba's island, so Iona later became the burial place of Scottish kings. Dozens of early kings of Scotland are said to lie in its graveyard.

Cnut: the Danish king who told the waves to stop

Further south, after Alfred, Anglo-Saxon kings went on ruling what is now England, apart from one short period when Danish kings sat on the throne. The first of them was Cnut, also called Canute. He is often known as Cnut the Great.

Cnut became King of England in 1016. Later he also became King of Denmark and King of Norway, ruling a great kingdom around the North Sea until his death in 1035.

Cnut is best remembered for a story about the sea. He had his throne set down on the shore and ordered the rising tide to stop, and the water came in anyway and wet his feet. People often take this as a joke about his pride, but it originally meant the opposite: he was showing the courtiers who flattered him that a king's power has limits, and that only God can command the sea. The story first appears about a hundred years after his death, in the work of the 12th-century historian Henry of Huntingdon, so it is a legend.

After Cnut and his sons died, the throne went back to the Anglo-Saxons and passed to Edward the Confessor. When Edward died without children in January 1066, three men rushed to claim the crown. The next chapter starts there.

Chapter summary

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