Abstract
The origins of English kingship lie in the fitfully-lit, if no longer pitch-dark years of the fifth and sixth centuries; the age of the adventus Saxonum and the English settlements, where archaeologists tread warily and historians venture at their peril.2 Sources for these centuries are not completely lacking, but they are fragmentary, partial and ambiguous. Continental writers of the fifth and sixth centuries occasionally refer to events and people in Britain, but indigenous sources are few and mostly composed much later than the events they describe. We must wait until 731 for Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle was not put together until the reign of Alfred (871–99).3 The Historia Brittonum, attributed to the Welsh scholar Nennius, was assembled earlier in the ninth century, and the Annales Cambriae may be contemporary for the seventh and eighth centuries, but not for the fifth and sixth.4 The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britonum) was written in the middle of the sixth century by the British monk and priest Gildas, but its usefulness is vitiated by uncertainty as to precisely where Gildas lived, and by the fact that he was not (and did not claim to be) an historian; the work is a polemic on the abuses of contemporary British kings and churchmen, and moral concerns colour its historical content.5 Moreover Gildas had little interest in the English except in their role as the instrument of God’s punishment upon the sinful British. The archaeological record for the fifth and sixth centuries is scarcely more tractable. Numerous modern accounts have been constructed upon these materials, many of them plausible, some mutually exclusive; but in general it is hard to disagree with the conclusion of J. M. Kemble that ‘the genuine details of the German conquests in England [are] irrevocably lost to us’.6
Now when the Saxons subjected the land to themselves, they established seven kings, and imposed names of their own choice on the kingdoms.
(Henry of Huntingdon)1
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Notes
For the archaeology see Martin Welch, Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1992), and the review by John Hines, Medieval Archaeology, 37 (1993), 314–5.
D. N. Dumville, ‘Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend’, History, 62 (1977), 173–92
Barbara Yorke, ‘Fact or fiction? the written evidence for the fifth and sixth centuries AD’, ASSAH, 6 (1993), 45–50.
Latin text and translation in John Morris (ed.), Nennius: British History and the Welsh Annals (Chichester, 1980) and see D. N. Dumville, ‘The Historical Value of the Historia Brittonum’, Arthurian Literature, 6 (1986), 1–59.
Michael Winterbottom (ed.), Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works (Chichester, 1978); see M. Lapidge and D. N. Dumville (eds), Gildas: New Approaches (Woodbridge, 1984); Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘Gildas and the Anglo-Saxons’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 6 (1983), 1–30.
J. M. Kemble, The Saxons in England (London, 1849) i, p. 22.
Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘The Settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle’, ASE, 12 (1983), 1–41.
The West Saxon adventus has most recently been recalibrated by D. N. Dumville (‘The West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List and the Chronology of early Wessex’, Peritia, 4 (1985), 21–66).
The Anglian collection was put together in Mercia in 796, but probably derives from a Northumbrian collection made between 765 and 774; it contains the royal genealogies of Bernicia, Deira, Mercia, Lindsey, Kent, East Anglia and Wessex, with regnal lists for Northumbria and Mercia (D. N. Dumville, ‘The Anglian Collection of Royal Genealogies and Regnal Lists’, ASE, 5 (1976), 23–50).
Kenneth Sisam, ‘Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 39 (1953), 287–348
D. N. Dumville, ‘The West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List: Manuscripts and Texts’, Anglia, 104 (1986), 1–32
Barbara Yorke, ‘The Kingdom of the East Saxons’, ASE, 14 (1985), 1–36.
M. O. Carver, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Sutton Hoo: An Interim Report’, in Carver (ed.), The Age of Sutton Hoo, pp. 343–71; but see also Kirby, Earliest English Kings, p. 66. It has been proposed that the Sutton Hoo burials commemorate the East Saxon, rather than the East Anglian kings (Michael Parker Pearson, Robert van de Noort and Alex Woolf, ‘Three Men and a Boat: Sutton Hoo and the East Saxon Kingdom’, ASE, 22 (1993), 27–50.
For the problems of assessing ‘wealth’ and its relation to ‘status’, see Edward James, ‘Burial and Status in the Early Medieval West’, TRHS fifth series, 39 (1989), 23–40
Dumville, ‘Essex, Middle Anglia and the Expansion of Mercia’, p. 129; Wendy Davies and Hayo Vierck, ‘The Contexts of the Tribal Hidage: Social Aggregates and Settlement Patterns’, Frümittelalterliche Studien, 8 (1974), 223–93.
Dumville, ‘Essex, Middle Anglia and the Expansion of Mercia’, pp. 122–40 (the quotation is on page 130); see also Wendy Davies, ‘Middle Anglia and the Middle Angles’, Midland History, 2 (1973–4), 18–20.
For Wroxeter, see Pretty, ‘Defining the Magonsæte’, pp. 171–83, Gelling, ‘The Early History of Western Mercia’, pp. 186–7; for Chichester, see M. G. Welch, Early Anglo-Saxon Sussex, BAR British series, 112 (1983), 247–50.
The minimalist approach has recently been stated by Nicholas Higham, Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons (London, 1992), but see the review by John Hines in Medieval Archaeology, 37 (1993), 314–18.
VG chapter 1; Hugh Pagan, ‘The Coinage of the East Anglian Kingdom from 825 to 870’, BNJ, 52 (1982), 41–83
Susan Reynolds, ‘What do we Mean by “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxons”?’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 395–414).
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© 1999 Ann Williams
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Williams, A. (1999). Through a Glass Darkly: The Origins of English Kingship. In: Kingship and Government in Pre-Conquest England c.500–1066. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27454-3_1
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