The seven centuries we call the Anglo-Saxon period were a formative time for English society. Between the fifth and 11th century, many things first took shape that are still to some degree recognisable as those the Anglo-Saxons knew: the English language, the settlement of most of our towns and cities, the monarchy, the national church, and the kingdom of England itself. As the subtitle of Marc Morris’ book asserts, a history of the Anglo-Saxons is a history of the beginnings of England — and with English identity under fierce scrutiny, there couldn’t be a better time for a thorough and accessible account of this important period.
That’s what Morris superbly provides. His lively narrative takes us through centuries of immense political change, telling how an assortment of settler communities in a post-Roman wasteland arriving in Britain from northern continental Europe developed — via generations of warfare — into an administratively sophisticated, cultured and unified kingdom.
For the most part Morris adopts a biographical slant, centring his chapters on a single character whose life is used to illuminate their times. The establishment of Christianity in the seventh century is entertainingly told through the life of the combative bishop Wilfrid — cosmopolitan in outlook, but with an impressive gift for making enemies. The eighth century is the time of the expansionist Offa, king of Mercia, building a hard border against the Welsh with his famous Dyke; the slow growth of English identity is tracked through the lives of Alfred the Great and his descendants as the centre of political gravity moved, inexorably, to the south of England.
This approach works neatly, giving us characters to follow, and bringing these men and their changing society alive. That they are all men is unfortunate, if hard to avoid; as Morris says, there are few Anglo-Saxon women whose lives we can trace in as much detail as this.
But he misses some opportunities to highlight the influential women about whom we do know a great deal. It would be hard to tell from this book, for instance, that a woman named Æthelthryth, mentioned once or twice in passing, was in fact the most important female saint Anglo-Saxon England ever produced, whose family and legacy are very well attested in medieval sources.
Better known as Etheldreda of Ely, she founded and led a major religious house, and headed a network of prominent women whose influence spread across the 7th-century English church. She’s not the only important woman who gets a surprisingly perfunctory treatment here; records for the lives of Æthelthryth and women like her are far from scanty, and they deserve a place in this story too.
Morris’s narrative focuses largely on the deeds of kings and bishops, with much briefer treatment of the wider intellectual, literary or cultural environment of Anglo-Saxon England. Despite the persistent myth that these were the “Dark Ages”, we have plentiful sources for these aspects of Anglo-Saxon history: there’s much more that could be said about the lives of those outside the political elite, such as a consideration of changing religious practice or the period’s rich poetic traditions.
Yet it’s to Morris’s credit that he doesn’t turn any of these men into heroes. Over the centuries, the Anglo-Saxon period has attracted a huge amount of mythmaking: romantic stories of freedom-loving Saxons, doomed to defeat by the tyrannical Normans at Hastings, have been seized on by political movements from the Levellers to the Chartists, as well as, more recently, rightwing US politicians. All this has little to do with the Anglo-Saxons themselves, only what later times have projected back on them.
When it came to such mythmaking about history, Anglo-Saxon writers themselves were canny and clear-eyed. The period’s greatest poem, Beowulf, might look like a monster-fighting epic but it’s really about the challenge of facing up to history: the poet looks back on a pagan society gone forever, feeling simultaneously charmed and repulsed by an age he sees as both more glamorous and more cruel than his own enlightened times. Even as it celebrates the achievements of powerful men, the poem wants us to remember that the mightiest are still human and often deeply flawed; the poet of Beowulf would have completely understood why Churchill’s statue has lately become such a flashpoint of controversy.
Such mingled admiration and revulsion is much the experience of reading The Anglo-Saxons. Morris is no romantic, and there are no heroes here — just ambitious and violent men, who wrote the first chapter in a story we’re all still living.
The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, by Marc Morris, Hutchinson, RRP£25, 508 pages
Eleanor Parker is lecturer in Medieval English literature at Brasenose College, Oxford
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