The Migration Era
(The below was written some years ago. I’ve left it untouched, and published it as the first two blogs of this website.)
Now I know the question that is most pressing on your lips regarding the English in the migration era; did the man bun make it into the 4th and 5th centuries?
The evidence is not great; various descriptions of Germanic peoples and hairstyles from around the migration age are given, especially by Sidonius Apollinaris, a Gallo-Roman aristocrat, poet and later bishop, but nothing that harks explicitly back to the Suebian Knot.
As for the people who make up the English today, we are made up of not just the Angles but a number of different Germanic tribes. Saxons, Jutes, most likely Frisians and other Germanic tribes. During the migration era, Saxon raiders were causing trouble along the Gallic coast (and the British coast), described by the Gallo-Roman bishop Sidonius Apollinaris in his letter to his friend Namatius in AD460 as thus:
“look-out for small curved pirate ships of the Saxons in whose every oarsman you think to detect an arch-pirate. Captains and crews alike, to a man they teach or learn the art of brigandage; therefore let me urgently caution you to be ever on the alert.
For the Saxon is the most ferocious of all foes. He comes on you without warning; when you expect his attack he makes away. Resistance only moves him to contempt; a rash opponent is soon down. If he pursues he overtakes; if he flies himself, he is never caught. Shipwrecks to him are no terror, but only so much training. His is no mere acquaintance with the perils of the sea; he knows them as he knows himself. A storm puts his enemies off their guard, preventing his preparations from being seen; the chance of taking the foe by surprise makes him gladly face every hazard of rough waters and broken rocks.
Moreover, when the Saxons are setting sail from the continent, and are about to drag their firm-holding anchors from an enemy’s shore, it is their usage, thus homeward bound, to abandon every tenth captive to the slow agony of a watery end, casting lots with perfect equity among the doomed crowd in execution of this iniquitous sentence of death. This custom is all the more deplorable in that it is prompted by honest superstition. These men are bound by vows which have to be paid in victims, they conceive it a religious act to perpetrate this horrible slaughter, and to take anguish from the prisoner in place of ransom; this polluting sacrilege is in their eyes an absolving sacrifice.”
[The Letters of Sidonius by Sidonius Apollinaris, Ormonde Maddock Dalton. Publication date 1915; Publisher Clarendon Press]
Essentially the ancestors of the modern English were Vikings before it was cool. They were making themselves a pain in Europe’s backside even before football was invented.
The image bought to mind from the above passage makes for a terrifying account of our ancestors. But, of course, these and earlier observances come from Rome in the first two instances (part 1 of this blog), who in the main were enemies of the Germanic peoples and a Gallo-Roman aristocrat who was witnessing first-hand the Germanic incursions of the Western Roman empire. It also has to be remembered that the Romans were no less cruel, more sophisticated, but still cruel.
So what were the forces which directly or indirectly led to the formation of the English identity as we understand it today? How did these Germanic tribes end up in Britain?
One of these ‘forces’ lay way out in central Asia and was put in motion, as some have postulated, by a Chinese victory against a tribe harassing their northern border, a tribe called the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu). It was the Xiongnu that led the Chinese to build some parts of their ‘Great Wall’, and it is a common convention amongst historians to identify Xiongnu as the Huns. China’s victory against the Huns spurred them to make their long march westwards, ultimately bringing them into the very heart of Europe.
Geography and history show that the idea of Europe as a continent is a rather flimsy notion. If you view the Eurasian landmass on a map, there are no natural barriers between Europe and Asia, no impassable mountain ranges, and no seas; if you are on the Eurasian Steps, you turn west for Europe or East for Asia. Moreover, many tribes in the past had migrated across Eurasia, and it was no different for the Huns and the Mongols who followed them centuries later.
The Huns’ long march westward created a catastrophic domino effect as various tribes fled in their wake, these fleeing tribes themselves displacing other peoples as they went. The Anglo-Saxons moved on to what they saw as easy pickings, a defenceless Britain recently abandoned by the Roman Empire, filled with rich lowland pastures and farmlands.
So if a Welshman does want to lament his lot, first blame the Chinese, then the Huns, then the Goths and various other tribes, most lost to history, and finally the English for the Anglo-Saxon invasion.
So how did the Anglo-Saxons view their own origins? Our modern historical understanding has been compiled with the benefit of ancient written sources and Archaeology. However, ancient peoples are want to invent their own origin stories in the absence of any academic practices. The Old English knew of their recent origins on the continent, and the Angles and Jutes were very much part of the Scandinavian world. We see this in Old English literature, where some settings are set around the Baltic Sea; Beowulf, for example.
Beyond this recent (from the Anglo-Saxon’s perspective) historical knowledge, any further accounts drifted off into the semi-mythological and finally mythological. The English aristocracy often traced their ancestry back to the pre-Christian gods such as Woden and Saxnot.
We also see the Angles and possibly the Jutes mentioned in old Norse literature; though written down relatively late, these writings can hold surprisingly ancient accounts, for example, the Gothic wars against the Huns.
The 12th-century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus alludes to a semi-mythological beginning of the Angles in his Gesta Danorum. Angul is the Ancestors of the Angels, and his brother Dan is the ancestor of the Danish; Angul and Dan’s father is King Humblus. King Humblus was possibly the same as King Humli of the Hervarar Saga, a Saga where one of the main themes is the wars of the Goths with the ancestors of Atila, which brings us nicely back to the Huns. Part of the Hervarar Saga takes place around a forested area in Ukraine called Mirkwood (sound familiar?), which separated the Huns and the Goths.
The geographic scope of the Germanic diaspora in the migration age is quite mindboggling, and yet they still shared their stories amongst themselves, from the Eurasian Stepps to the Atlantic coast.
Old English literature harks back to a pan-Germanic mythos where various characters are seen again and again under variations of the same name. Take Weyland the Smith, known as Weland in Old English, Volundr in Old Norse, Velent in Old Frisian, Wieland der Schmied in Old High German. The Proto-Germanic source of all these derivates is Welandaz, i.e. the crafting one. Weyland’s story is found in both Norse and English literature.
England’s ties with their Scandinavian neighbours ran deep and were later reinforced by the Viking invasions. Ironically, another Viking invasion would permanently sever these relations, ending Anglo-Saxon rule. While nominally of Viking descent, the Normans were fully assimilated into French culture after carving out a kingdom in Northern France, and the tragic events of the Norman invasion finally snuffed out the last remaining flicker of the Old English period.
This dramatic cut from Scandinavian Europe and the drawing of England into an ascendant French world cut the English from their Germanic origins; the ruling class from 1066 was not of English ancestry, spoke only French and introduced their own culture. Repression of the English, after various uprisings against the Normans, led to the death of around 100,000 people during the harrying of the North.
Within a few short years of the Norman invasion, the entire Old English aristocracy had been replaced forever. Some of them ended up in Scotland, Ireland and Norway. Others made their way to the Byzantine empire to serve in the hitherto Viking dominated, elite Varangian Guard. A small English diaspora existed in the Byzantine empire for a couple of hundred years after 1066, possibly around Crimea, the same area the Goths and the Huns fought over hundreds of years earlier. The English refugees founded towns called New York or New London, according to the Játvarðar Saga, before gradually assimilating into the general population. This land was called, if you are to believe the sources, Nova Anglia or New England.
Much of England’s lands are still held by the descendants of those Norman invaders, almost a thousand years later. And with the Normans, a layer of government largely indifferent to the common Saxon. May of our Celtic neighbouring countries hold the English in contempt for historical injustices, as the dominant force in these isles, the Anglo-Normans, looked to subjugate them. I would argue that the English were rather just the first victims in these isles of Norman aggression.
