Certain words have a tendency to change their meaning on a regular basis. These include the words “nice”, “silly” and “gay”. Interestingly these three words also tend to overlap in meaning. “Nice” in its earliest form meant “ignorant”, “silly” meant “blessed” at an early stage and “gay” has recently shifted to mean “lame” in the pejorative sense. Even the word “blessed” has shifted to mean “silly” in the contemporary sense. Another set of words like this, but rather distant from that triad in sense, is “Goth”, “Gothic” and the like.
Starting with proto-Indo-European, the stem “jhew-” meant “pour” and gave rise to the Greek “chyme”, which describes the fluid food becomes while it’s being digested. A D was added to this, making “jhewd-“, also meaning “pour” although presumably it was inflected or altered to a slightly different meaning. This became “hundo” in proto-Italic, meaning “I pour”, which became “fundo” in Latin, possibly due to another form. In Proto-Germanic, this word became “geutanã” (I can’t find the “a” with a hook underneath it), meaning “(to) pour” (there are two infinitives in English but not in many other Germanic languages), ultimately leading to the English “gut” and “ingot”, and related to the Proto-Germanic “Gautaz”, a mythical figure whose name means “he who pours out libations” and is connected to the word “God”. Some Germanic tribes have mythical founding figures. If you trace the Anglo-Saxon monarchs far enough back, you get to Woden, who is alleged to be Hengest’s great-great grandfather, meaning that the current King seems to be able to trace his ancestry back to a pagan god.
The Goths seem to be named after such a mythical figure, and the word Goth tended to float around the Germanic people, giving its name to Gothenburg, the Gutnish dialect or language, the Geats mentioned in ‘Beowulf’ and the Jutes who settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight and were later massacred. The Goths themselves were a Germanic people like the Vandals, Norse, Angles, Saxons, Alans, Burgundians and Franks, but unlike them they fell upon such hard times that they were eventually completely lost. They called themselves (that phrase will become important) the “Gutþiuda”, which was also their land’s name. They crossed the Baltic and settled along the Vistula. Wulfila, whose name means “wolf cub” or “wolflet”, evangelised them in the fourth Christian century and converted them to Arian (not Aryan) Christianity, which includes the heretical belief that Christ was created and hadn’t existed ab aeterno. This led to the printing, and yes it was printed though with separate stamps, of the Codex Argenteus, a Gothic gloss of the Bible, which is the main source for the Gothic language today. All that said, their chief claim to fame was when the first king of the Visigoths Alaric I and his army reached the gates of Rome, at which point it’s famously been said that the people inside the city spoke a language with fewer inflections than the people outside it. This is probably true. It’s also tempting to believe that the fall of Rome was caused by the decay of the Latin language, with the existence of a more fusional language as spoken by the Visigoths somehow leading to a military advantage. Perhaps they were able to think more quickly than the Romans, or their conversations about strategy were faster because of it? I don’t take this idea seriously at all but I kind of wish it were true. It makes the idea of prescriptive grammar, that is, the notion that correct usage ought to be a certain way such as having no double negatives, saying “should have” rather than “should of”, or not overusing the word “like”, seem more valid. There is an argument, which I think doesn’t work at all in most cases, that that kind of grammar promotes clear and rational thought. All of this is rubbish, probably.
The actual reason Rome fell, according to Edward Gibbon, was that the Empire’s adoption of Christianity led to people focussing on the hereafter rather than trying to keep it going. If that’s true, it suggests that the Goths, being Arian Christians, were not so affected by it. In that case, is there some implication of the idea that Christ was “begotten and made” as opposed to “begotten, not made”, which would’ve led to them behaving differently. Another hypothesis is that the horseshoe was invented and made their exploitation of horses more efficient, and that actually might make sense even with the explanation employing the faith, because maybe they’d invented the horseshoe before they became Christian. As far as I can tell, the front runners of hypotheses regarding the fall of the Roman Empire are to do with ecological unsustainability, such as the Empire needing to maintain Rome through pillaging other lands as it conquered them, but I’m no historian. It is notable, though, that Wulfila is said to have refrained from translating the books of Kings in the Bible because he thought it would encourage them to wage war, so maybe they were just more successfully violent and aggressive than the Romans at that point.
This incident is the cause of the first semantic shift in the word “Gothic”, where it refers to the likes of architecture. This is because historians at a later date perceived Roman territory as being taken over by the Goths, and this was indeed somewhat true, with for instance the Visigothic kingdom in the future Spain and the Goths taking control of the Italian peninsula. Hence the distinctive architecture and calligraphy of a particular time during the Middle Ages came to be called “Gothic”. Apparently some early clockwork timepieces are also described in this way. It went on from there to be used to describe a genre of tales set in Gothic buildings, and their aesthetic led in the twentieth century to the youth culture.
The Goths were a large section of Germanic-speaking people who have now completely disappeared along with their language. Although they spread, in two halves, from Portugal to the Crimea, they were ultimately conquered, although there are traces of their language in Italian and Catalan, the word “Catalunya” possibly being a corruption of a word like “Gothland”. Surprisingly, their language seem to have survived in the Crimea into the late seventeenth century CE. They had fallen upon hard times in the later fourth century, being treated harshly by corrupt Roman officials and having to sell their children into slavery in exchange for rotten dog meat. This led to a war, and later a massacre of the Goths by the Romans, so although my knowledge of their history is limited I can certainly see that they may have become very resentful of the way the Romans behaved towards them. I don’t know if this was actually worse than the way they’d behaved towards other nations though.
As I’ve said, the Codex Argenteus is the main large text surviving today. There is also the Skeireins, which seems to be a Gothic translation of a Greek commentary on the Fourth Gospel. Although this is better than a lot of other languages at the time, for instance early Germanic runic inscriptions in the Elder Futhark or Irish Oghams (which are also in Wales incidentally), it isn’t like there’s a huge extensive body of literature as with Ancient Egyptian, the Greeks and the Romans. Consequently there are big gaps in what’s known about Gothic, and to my mind the actual use of the language itself as opposed to what seem to be glosses (word-for-word “translations” from another language), which might therefore obscure many features of its grammar, is lost. However, it hasn’t vanished completely. It’s written mainly in Greek-derived script, like Coptic and Old Church Slavonic, with a few runes used to fill in the missing sounds. Oddly, it actually uses Ψ for Þ even though later Greek employed Θ for the same sound, presumably indicating that in the early fourth century that sound was still an aspirated T in Greek, but this still doesn’t explain why it didn’t adopt the rune, as English and Old Norse did.
Being the earliest Germanic language which is extensively recorded, Gothic is a fair guide to what the ancestor of English, Icelandic and German was actually like. It did have a few idiosyncratic features of its own, such as the initial sound “FL-” as in “flea” becoming “ÞL-“, and it’s the only language I’m aware of which has no separate words for “this” and “that”, but on the whole it preserves an earlier stage of Germanic than is otherwise available. This leads me to an oddity among Germanic which has been largely lost but brings to mind something quite distinctive and odd about European languages generally. Unlike many other languages, European ones, including non-Indo-European ones such as Finnish, are strangely reluctant to repeat words and syllables as a way of conveying meaning.
To illustrate what I mean, I once had a Punjabi student who, instead of saying “is very different”, used to say “differ-differ”. I presume this is a feature of Punjabi, which is an Indo-European language and I believe most closely related to Romani, the language complex of the Roma people, which however like other languages spoken in Europe doesn’t have duplication. In other languages, such as Malay, repeating a noun is used to make it plural, which is like many features of Malay and Indonesian bafflingly logical and makes speakers of other languages wonder why we bother with the kind of grammar we have. It does happen in English, as with “blah-blah”, “boogie-woogie” and “tutu”, but it tends to be quite informal and seems to have no fixed function. Yiddish does it to express contempt of course, and that’s been borrowed into American English. English varies the vowel sometimes, such as with the word “flip-flop”. Afrikaans, which is very close to Dutch indeed, uses it, which is interesting because it isn’t a European language. Outside Europe it’s both very common and has specific grammatical functions.
The ancestral Indo-European language did appear to use reduplication, in particular to express certain inflections of verbs. In Sanskrit, the Class III athematic verbs express the aorist, preterite and the intensive. Where these verbs can be traced to a cognate in Germanic, it’s possible that such a verb would also be reduplicative in our own ancestral language.
Well, Gothic does this! Germanic languages historically have two main types of lexical verb plus some other unusual ones such as the preterite-present classes, though one type has been lost from Afrikaans, Bislama and Tok Pisin. These are the weak and strong verbs. In English, weak verbs generally either add “-ed” or “-t” to form the preterite and the past participle unless there’s a T already at the end, so we have “generated”, “burnt” and “cut”. There are also a few contracted verbs in this class like “have” – “had”. English strong verbs are gradually disappearing, but inflect nowadays by changing the vowel in the stem in the past and often add “-en” with another vowel change in the past participle: “drive” – “drove” – “driven”. Over the history of written English, many verbs have passed from strong to weak, an example from my own lifetime being “thrive”, but a few have gone the other way, such as “dig”. English strong verbs as they are now are, as usual, not as distinctly conjugated as they used to be since the plural preterite used to be like the past participle, and before that was distinct from both it and the singular preterite.
Anglo-Saxon as she was written had seven strong verb classes. There were also dual pronouns, “wit” and “git”, for when there were two of someone, but no third person dual personal pronoun, but the verbs associated with them just used the plural. Gothic was, unsurprisingly, more highly inflected and did conjugate for the dual, something which is incidentally completely absent from Latin. I’ve seen it claimed that in the oldest Germanic, strong verbs were actually the main form of verb with weak verbs a minor feature of the languages, and extrapolating backwards this does seem to make sense but it’s a little hard to believe. The seventh class included the reduplicative verbs, of which there were two types. One changed the stem vowel, the other didn’t. The reduplication happened in the preterite. The verbs included: “haitan” – “hight” and “hey” (this is an interesting one); “laikan” – leap (the cognate is “lake”, meaning “play”); “slepan” – “sleep”; “letan” – leave, let go (cognate “let”); “tekan” – “touch”; “saian” – “sow”; “bnauan” – “rub”; “hahan” – “hang” (transitive only); “bautan” – “beat” (found as a loanword in Portuguese but possibly not in the bits of the Bible which survived); “trauan” – “trust”, believe; “gangan” – “go”, walk.
Leaving Gothic, at least for now, Old Norse also retained a few reduplicative verbs, including “róa” – “row”; “sá” – “sow”. The former was still reduplicative in Old Norse, the preterite being “rera” in the preterite active first person singular (“I rowed”), but the latter had undergone the common change of S or Z to R which occurred in Scandinavian and West Germanic, making the same part of the verb “sera”. This made the “-ra”-type ending and the similar endings for other parts of the preterite more like an ending for a small class of non-reduplicative verbs rather than reduplicative in themselves. That is, although the form of “row” was still reduplicative in form, it wouldn’t’ve seemed like it to the speakers of the language due to “sow” changing.
I’ve gone into these verbs in what is possibly quite tedious detail in order to test an hypothesis I had about them. I thought that reduplicative Germanic verbs tended to refer to repetitive actions, and to an extent I stand by this. Sowing seed, rowing and beating, for example, are clearly that kind of action. Sleeping could also fall into this category if it formerly meant something like snoring, and walking involves stepping forward repeatedly. It doesn’t seem to work for all of them. It is interesting that trusting, i.e. having faith, is in this class because some Christians see commitment to Christ as a one-time thing and others say that the perseverance of the saints is like someone holding onto a rope being saved from drowning, and it could be said that faith waxes and wanes in a cycle and is therefore a repeated rather than continuous action. Hence trusting in the Lord is something one has to do more than once. One of the many peculiar things I do is to say the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic, and if it gives me other insights like this, it’s definitely worthwhile. The others are not so obvious, but there is another distinctive feature which still shows traces in English. One of these is the verb “hang”, which we use in both strong and weak forms: hanged for execution and hung for the more benign action. Hence there is a distinction of some kind here which is unique in English so far as I can remember. The other is the remarkable verb “hight”, which is one of the two last traces of reduplicative verbs in English, and also the only synthetic passive in our language. English passives are almost always in the form “be called”, “be taken” and so forth, but “hight” is a passive in itself, and also looks suspiciously like it would’ve been “hey” in the active present. Hence when we say “hey”, coincidentally or not, we seem to be using the active voice of “hight”. It should actually be “hote”, which was a real English word. Moreover, the “GH” in “hight” descends from the Anglo-Saxon H in “heht”, which is a remnant of the reduplication which produces the likes of “haihait” in Gothic, although the passive is not reduplicative in Gothic and in fact it’s a preterite in English.
The other apparent remnant of such verbs in English is the past tense of “do” – “did”. This, however, is rather obscured by the development of all the weak verbs which use the “-ed” ending in the past, which in fact has been thought by some to be a descendant of an appended “did”, or rather its ancestor, although that idea may have gone out of fashion. If so, it’s a bit like the Old Norse “row” and “sow” extended to the whole weak verb system. Also in that class in Old English are fon – seize, preserved in its past tense as “fang”, which is no longer a verb, and also in the phrase “new-fangled”, and “feallan” – “fall”. These are not repetitive actions. “Hang” actually used to be the past participle “hangen”, the present being “hon”.
In English then, all this is, like the traces of the instrumental case, a tiny island of the way things used to be in the ancestor of our current language, except that this time it doesn’t survive in present day English at all unless you count “did”. “Hight” is no longer used, although Shakespeare did employ it.
All of this, that is the instrumental and the traces of a synthetic passive and reduplication in English, makes me feel like there could be a familiar-sounding version of modern English which nevertheless (remember?) drinks of the ancient font of our tongue in such a way that it’s more reminiscent of the ancient phase of the millennia-long string of parents and children, each of whom could understand each other, stretching back into prehistory, than of how we speak today. After all, we all know what led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, don’t we?
I attempted to watch the 2021 (CE) ‘Dune’ last night and had high expectations. I was disappointed and gave up after an hour or so. However, I should point out I was of necessity watching it in HD rather than 4K on an 80 cm telly without surround sound, about which I was already trepid due to the fact that it seems to be very much a cinematic experience. The best, or possibly only, way to watch it is probably in an IMAX cinema.
I’ve been putting it off for a while. When it was first released, the Covid issue and other reasons why I’m tied to this house prevented me from going to see it as it was “intended”, but I heard good reports about it. Later on, the rental price was ridiculously high, at something like £15.99, which was also off-putting. I can understand the need to recoup costs in difficult circumstances, so I’m not just going to put that down, as many others have, to greed on the part of the studio. I do wonder if the strategy worked, since it’s now been reduced.
But then I ask myself, if a film relies on spectacle for its impact, is it actually worthwhile anyway? Sometimes I think it is. For instance, there’s an ’80s film I can’t track down about a woman going blind which is visually very lavish because it emphasises what she’s losing. I also understand that another SF film, ‘2001 – A Space Odyssey’, hugely benefits from being seen in its original form in Cinerama. Incidentally, a number of films made in the late ’60s and early ’70s have a “trippy” scene like the one in ‘2001’, such as ‘Charly’ and ‘Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory’, with the tunnel scene, which very much chime with the Zeitgeist and exploit the medium of cinema well. I’m not sure how the parents of the children watching ‘Willy Wonka’ would’ve felt about the likelihood that that scene may have packed the auditorium out with a load of long-haired smelly hippies, as they would’ve seen them, but there it is.
I actually feel quite strongly that science fiction cinema should be low-budget and have low production values. ‘Primer’ and ‘The Cube’ both have tiny budgets. ‘The Cube’ mainly involves a single set lit in different ways to make it look like different rooms and cost only $350 000. ‘Primer’ was much lower, at $7000. Even ‘Dark Star’ only cost $60 000, although that was mid-’70s so in 2021 dollars that would be 350,000 (I’m having trouble with the blog editor messing up number formatting here). SF is a number of things, but for me two aspects of it are crucial. One is that it’s a genre where ideas replace protagonists, or perhaps are the protagonists, as with the Big Dumb Object approach seen in ‘Rendezvous With Rama’ and ‘Ringworld’, but often in more abstract ways as in ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’. The other is that it has to be fiction whose plot depends non-trivially on the setting. I came up with this criterion specifically to exclude ‘Star Wars’, which I hate and despise, from the genre. The ‘Star Wars’ franchise has many issues, but a significant one is that it attempts to tell sword and sorcery fantasy tales in a space opera setting to demonstrate that certain aspects of the human condition are eternal and universal, and this means that the setting only exists to demonstrate that things are still the same, even though the characters don’t even share ancestry with Homo sapiens. There is nothing wrong in principle with fiction whose plot is independent of the setting or even trivially dependent upon it, although I suspect that the execrable ‘Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency’ is this so there is a risk of poor quality because of that, but it does place it outside the genre.
‘Dune’ was significantly heavily plundered by George Lucas for ‘Star Wars’ although the latter has many other elements which are not linked, such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and probably Tolkien too. This is unfortunate for a 2021 film though, because it may give the viewer the impression that it’s derivative rather than ‘Star Wars’. It’s very like the tendency for children’s CGI films to be pre-empted by inferior copies being released earlier because they take less time to render than the better quality Pixar films, which happened a lot in the ‘noughties. Without the awareness that Frank Herbert invented a lot of the tropes which ended up in George Lucas’s films, ‘Dune’ looks like a rip-off of that franchise, when it very much is not.
The problem with big budgets in films is that they are often used to make them visually impressive while detracting from the quality of the script and plot. It would be unfair to accuse ‘Dune’ the film of having too many fight scenes because the book also has those, but I remember thinking that the film of ‘Prince Caspian’ was completely ruined by having a ridiculously long battle scene in it, presumably because it needed to compete with ‘Lord Of The Rings’. Herbert did take pains to force his future universe to behave as if it was like our world of a few centuries ago, by outlawing AI and contriving to make melée weapons necessary, so the presence of long, tedious fight scenes and a fair bit of associated machismo is at least in keeping with the tone of the book. This is also balanced by the rôle of soft power and women in the story, although to describe the manipulations of the Bene Gesserit as “soft power” isn’t really accurate. At the same time, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with a film mainly being a spectacle, and it might even make sense to go further in that direction to keep cinemas alive.
One way in which ‘Dune’ bucks the trend, inherited from the novel itself, is its positive portrayal of Middle Eastern culture and the associations with Islam. Being written in 1965, Herbert’s story long pre-dates the resurgence of Islamophobia in the ‘noughties. That said, it does very much portray religion as primarily an instrument of social control, although there is also the apparent existence of psi abilities. In the film, the latter is clearly present. The author appears to treat Arab culture and Islam respectfully throughout the first novel (I say that because I haven’t read any further). It’s refreshing to see that done in a 2021 Hollywood blockbuster.
I’ve got this far without mentioning the David Lynch version! One of the many problems with that appalling version was that it had an all-White cast when none of the protagonists in the novel were White. This is addressed to some extent in the casting of Villeneuve’s version, although it would be difficult to portray the thorough mixing of ethnicities the novelist assumes to have happened in the many intervening millennia. Evolution has also altered Fremen physiology, so there are biological differences, some of which are genetically engineered, and there are also millennia-long breeding programmes which are supposed to reach their climax in the birth of Jessica’s daughter, but the problem is that she chose to have a son first.
One positive from the previous film is that it at least attempts to portray the space-folding technique used to travel between the stars, although in a very weird and off-putting way. This is completely absent from the new version, which is significant because Spice is economically central to the Imperium as a means of enabling interstellar travel. It would’ve helped to have shown that in order to emphasise the in-universe realities of its central position.
Herbert advocates a right-wing position in his novel, that the basic state of human society is feudal. He was also writing against Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series, where sociological predictability is central and the emergence of a mutant who can influence society through their new abilities disrupts the plan for preserving civilisation. This was a quasi-socialist position, although Asimov was merely a liberal. Herbert’s reply to Asimov is to portray a society where an individual mutant, or at least a carefully bred sport whose existence depends on an individual decision to go against the plan, makes a huge positive difference to a society. The way Hollywood works is to have heroines and heroes struggle against enormous difficulties and achieve resolution through strength of character, although there is sometimes emphasis on teamwork and family values too. ‘Dune’ lends itself fairly well to this approach. The approach, however, seems to be carefully engineered to bring a situation which reproduces the social conditions of the European Middle Ages. The emphasis on families wielding power can be seen as arising from powerful companies, as it sometimes does today, but on the whole large capitalist enterprises are more democratic than that because of shares and floatation on the stock market. I don’t think it’s really explained how humanity ended up back in the position of having powerful houses, religious organisations and guilds controlling everything when it had become thoroughly capitalist by the twentieth Christian century.
All this, though, may be the reason I didn’t enjoy the film. It’s a bit like ‘The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe’ in a way. You get to the very end of the span of time during which intelligent life exists, and the economic system is still as it ever was, there has never been a utopia and so forth. Likewise, ‘Dune’ is estimated to be set something like 30 000 years in the future, which is a lot closer to the present day, but the basic social order is not criticised so much as taken as a given. I think I would prefer a world to be presented either as a utopia or dystopia. That said, it may be more realistic to recognise the future as neither, and again this chimes with what political conservatives would see as realism. Moreover, this was in the original novel. If it comes across in the film too, that would seem to be a successful adaptation rather than either a failing or a negative aspect of the work.
When it comes down to it, what I think has happened is that I haven’t really seen ‘Dune’ and may not in fact ever do so. In order to see this film, you have to go to the cinema, and possibly to an IMAX to watch it. I didn’t do this, so maybe I haven’t got any valid grounds for criticism. Nonetheless I did rapidly lose interest. My fault probably.
First of all, a confession. I don’t know a huge amount about history in the Dark Ages and most of what I do know is biassed towards what is now England. Moreover, much of what I do know is based on linguistics rather than straightforward history. Nonetheless I’m going to have a go at this.
Roman Britain had been one edge of the Empire, and it has that in common with very far-flung parts of Afro-Eurasia such as the northern Sahara, the Middle East and the Caucasus. There is still to some extent a cultural unity between the areas which used to be part of it and I have only ventured out of the former territory of the Empire to the north and west, namely Ireland and Scotland. The rest is unknown to me, and that emphasises, I think, how huge it really was. There have been bigger ones of course, notably the Mongols and the British had them, and the Songhai Empire in Afrika was twice the size, but this is more about the sheer size of this planet than celebrating their “achievement”, although there were positives.
There are of course many hypotheses about the Fall of Rome. I read Gibbon as a teen and am therefore aware of what he said about it, but I don’t know if it stands up to contemporary scrutiny. I do strongly suspect that Christianity had a rôle because it only lasted about a century after the Empire became Christian, so I would agree with some others in saying that because the Empire had adopted the Christian faith, they turned their backs on doing things in this life in the expectation that they would be in Paradise, from their perspective, soon after death. The offence of suicide was, I understand, created by the Church in order to stop people from rushing it and getting to the Hereafter more quickly at about that time too. I also disagree that this is a sensible interpretation of Christianity, although it is one which has plagued the world ever since and there’s a case for saying it helps people cope in dire personal situations. Other hypotheses include the idea that the army had recruited so many Germans (that’s “us” by the way, to a limited extent, but it would’ve included people the first speakers of our language would have easily understood and been able to have conversations with) that they effectively had an enemy army on their own soil, that the Empire had to feed Rome and was doing so by conquering ever more distant territories and having to bring stuff back over ever greater distances (that seems to be what Asimov thought), and even that the barbarian invention of the horseshoe enabled them to fight back against the Empire and invade it more successfully. I neither know what happened nor if there’s a consensus on this matter.
I’m going to start with the Caistor-by-Norwich astragalus. This is a bone from a roe deer dating from between 1175 and 1225 AUC – okay, I’ll explain that dating. AUC is ab urbis conditæ, “from the founding of the city”, the dating system used in the Empire, and numbers its years from 753 BCE, so those dates are in the fifth Christian century. Anyway, this bone has runes from the Elder Fuþark scratched on it, reading “ᚱᚨᛇᚺᚨᚾ”, “roe” or “RAIHAN”, and notably has only one bar on the H or Hagalaz (“hail”), meaning that it predates the appearance of English runes, which have two bars on it. It may have been imported from Scandinavia or be a sign of Germanic presence in Britain. There is also evidence that Germanic tribes were settling along eastern rivers from the mid-twelfth century AUC onward, so the transition may not simply have been belligerent or a dramatic conquest.
This next bit I remember learning at school, so I presume it’s practically common knowledge for any Sassenach. Some time around the turn of the thirteenth Roman century or about 450 CE, Britain made a final appeal to the Roman army for defence against the Picts and Scots, but Rome couldn’t spare any resources. It reads as follows:
Agitio ter consuli, gemitus britannorum. […] Repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur.
To Agitius [or Aetius], thrice consul: the groans of the Britons. […] The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death, we are either killed or drowned.
Vortigern, a Celtic chieftan, then invited Hengist and Horsa to this land to aid him in defeating the Romans. Hengest and Horsa may in fact have been the same person – this is all from Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, written around 731 CE (incidentally, Bede is also responsible for inventing the current calendar dating system from the birth of Jesus and got it out by about four years, so that year number is his fault and reflects his considerable influence on the human world). I’m not now going to rely on anything but my own memory. My understanding is that Hengist and Horsa came over with a number of German tribes, substantially from the area around Angeln, hence the name “England”, including the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, the last being inevitable but not mentioned in chronicles of the Dark Ages for some reason, fought alongside the Celts and then with them, after which they settled here and proceeded to have the audacity to call the Celts living here the “Welsh”, meaning “foreigners”. I think this may say a lot about the White English mindset, and it reminds me of the stereotype of our own emigrants going over to the Med and refusing to learn the language, and basically just enjoying the sunshine while feeling the place is infested with “furreners”. It’s a bit like Basil Fawlty’s opinion that his hotel would run just fine if it weren’t for all the guests.
Anyway, what they call Sub-Roman Britain would’ve been an interesting place. It would’ve included, for instance, Christians and also Black people, and people able to write in the Latin script as we do today. Britain had had a Black governor and the Empire a Black emperor by this stage, because racism was not based on skin tone or anything else like that in the Roman world. There are known to be Black people in Roman Britain because DNA tests on remains dating from that era demonstrate that this was so, and there are still families, in rural Yorkshire for example, which have no significant genetic input from outside the area for many centuries and yet could only have had ancient Black ancestry. Again using my fairly unreliable memory, I think people identify reliably as Black once at least a quarter of their genes are of Black Afrikan origins. The concept of ethnicity was different in any case back then, and there was certainly active racism – for instance, the word “barbarian” is racist and similar to “Hottentot” in that it mocks the sound of the language spoken by a particular group – but wasn’t centred around skin tone. Given the twenty-five percent genetic characteristic, a Black person born in Roman Britain in about the year 400 CE, assuming they conceived children with a White person, could have notably Black grandchildren born in around the year 460 CE who could have survived into the mid-sixth century. I mention this to emphasise that sub-Roman Britain would have been ethnically diverse to some extent in modern terms. Remains of a young Black girl have been found in a tenth century grave and Vikings are known to have brought Afrikan slaves back in the ninth, who were referred to as “blue men”. Black people have been here for longer than the Germanic tribes have.
Concerning religion, although Roman Britain had been officially Christian, there were pagan temples in the West of Great Britain, and once the Germans had invaded it returned to paganism. There was also a firm division between urban and rural environments, in that the towns were more Roman and the countryside more Celtic. Hence Canterbury, Wroxeter, London and a few other places would still have had people in them speaking British Latin, of which there’s practically no trace. British Romance is one of several “submerged” Romance languages which have disappeared completely, leaving hardly any written or other record, the most important other one being in Africa and Libya, which seems to have been a little like Spanish. British Romance is likely to have been very radical compared to Classical Latin because it was so isolated from the rest of the Empire and also quite distant, so it may have had features in common with the ancestor of French, Gallo-Romance. The rest of the populace would have spoken a Celtic language similar to Welsh rather than Irish. It used to be thought that there were non-Indoeuropean tribes as well but that’s now been discredited.
The population of Britain at the end of Roman occupation was around 3.6 million, but suffered a sudden crash in numbers as Rome fell. 125 000 of those were Roman military and their families, so the Latin contribution to British culture might be thought considerable, but one of the differences between much of the continental Empire and Britain was that the former continued to be Christian and was therefore preserved to some extent by the social structure of the Church hierarchy, whereas in Britain this was destroyed by invasion. This also led to the rapid “Germanisation”, to coin a phrase, of the settlements as there were no longer any clergy. One reason for the population crash may have been a series of epidemics, including the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death and smallpox, which arrived from India at about that time.
There are a couple of linguistic quandaries about Britain stemming from this time. One is the question of why a Romance language didn’t develop here, but it’s fairly easy to explain that because of the general trashing of the Roman element. Harder to explain is the absence of a Celtic tongue spoken over the whole island today, because at the time, even after the Germanic tribes settled here, many people would’ve been speaking British. Celtic culture, such as it is, is reflected in the presence of Cambria, modern-day Cumbria, in the northwest of what is now England, and Yr Hen Ogledd into Strathclyde up to the Antonine Wall in what became Scotland. Cornwall and some of Devon also stayed Celtic. These regions were all P-Celtic rather than Q-Celtic, and spoke a language now referred to as Cumbric, traces of which survive in placenames and the counting rhymes used by shepherds in the North of England, from which it can be gleaned that it used a virgesimal system like other Celtic languages – base twenty.
Before the emergence of the Heptarchy, there were more than two dozen nations in Great Britain, although this is probably better understood as loose agglomerations of tribes. In the south and east of the island up into today’s Northumberland, they would’ve spoken various dialects of Anglo-Saxon, although they were heavily influenced by the fact that they had been different tribes already before they crossed over into Britain. They were aware that there had been a great fall from the Roman condition. The imperial level of technology was about the same as it would be just before the Industrial Revolution. For instance, there is even a third Christian century printed version of the Bible in Gothic, they were able to make concrete and there were rudimentary mechanical computers for navigation, automatic doors, vending machines and so forth. All this knowledge was lost, and this is expressed in the poem ‘The Ruin’, composed in the eighth century:
Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon; burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc. Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras, hrungeat berofen, hrim on lime, scearde scurbeorge scorene, gedrorene, ældo undereotone. Eorðgrap hafað waldend wyrhtan forweorone, geleorene, heardgripe hrusan, oþ hund cnea werþeoda gewitan. Oft þæs wag gebad ræghar ond readfah rice æfter oþrum, ofstonden under stormum; steap geap gedreas. Wunað giet se …num geheapen, fel on grimme gegrunden scan heo… …g orþonc ærsceaft …g lamrindum beag mod mo… …yne swiftne gebrægd hwætred in hringas, hygerof gebond weallwalan wirum wundrum togædre. Beorht wæron burgræced, burnsele monige, heah horngestreon, heresweg micel, meodoheall monig mondreama full, oþþæt þæt onwende wyrd seo swiþe. Crungon walo wide, cwoman woldagas, swylt eall fornom secgrofra wera; wurdon hyra wigsteal westen staþolas, brosnade burgsteall. Betend crungon hergas to hrusan. Forþon þas hofu dreorgiað, ond þæs teaforgeapa tigelum sceadeð hrostbeages hrof. Hryre wong gecrong gebrocen to beorgum, þær iu beorn monig glædmod ond goldbeorht gleoma gefrætwed, wlonc ond wingal wighyrstum scan; seah on sinc, on sylfor, on searogimmas, on ead, on æht, on eorcanstan, on þas beorhtan burg bradan rices. Stanhofu stodan, stream hate wearp widan wylme; weal eall befeng beorhtan bosme, þær þa baþu wæron, hat on hreþre. þæt wæs hyðelic. Leton þonne geotan ofer harne stan hate streamas un… …þþæt hringmere hate þær þa baþu wæron. þonne is …re; þæt is cynelic þing, huse …… burg….
This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying. Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers, the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged, chipped roofs are torn, fallen, undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses the mighty builders, perished and fallen, the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations of people have departed. Often this wall, lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another, remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed. Still the masonry endures in winds cut down persisted on__________________ fiercely sharpened________ _________ ______________ she shone_________ _____________g skill ancient work_________ _____________g of crusts of mud turned away spirit mo________yne put together keen-counselled a quick design in rings, a most intelligent one bound the wall with wire brace wondrously together. Bright were the castle buildings, many the bathing-halls, high the abundance of gables, great the noise of the multitude, many a meadhall full of festivity, until Fate the mighty changed that. Far and wide the slain perished, days of pestilence came, death took all the brave men away; their places of war became deserted places, the city decayed. The rebuilders perished, the armies to earth. And so these buildings grow desolate, and this red-curved roof parts from its tiles of the ceiling-vault. The ruin has fallen to the ground broken into mounds, where at one time many a warrior, joyous and ornamented with gold-bright splendour, proud and flushed with wine shone in war-trappings; looked at treasure, at silver, at precious stones, at wealth, at prosperity, at jewellery, at this bright castle of a broad kingdom. The stone buildings stood, a stream threw up heat in wide surge; the wall enclosed all in its bright bosom, where the baths were, hot in the heart. That was convenient. Then they let pour_______________ hot streams over grey stone. un___________ _____________ until the ringed sea (circular pool?) hot _____________where the baths were. Then is_______________________ __________re, that is a noble thing, to the house__________ castle_______
This is widely believed to be a description of Bath or Chester. In other words they knew what was possible but they didn’t know how to do it. To me, this poem comes across as rather like ‘Ozymandias’, and it may be enlightening to remember that for a very long time everyone was expecting the world to end quite soon. Much has also been forgotten, or was at least unknown to the poet, as the description of mead-halls for example clearly indicates they are projecting quite an English image of what life must’ve been like back then. But this is still in the future of my narrative, and living memory of Roman Britain would have persisted until the late fifth Christian century at least. Judging by my own family history, the earliest heirlooms I’m aware of as a fifty-three year old in 2021 date from 1778, so that gets us to the mid-seventh century CE. By that time, the future England had become Christianised. It’s quite something to contemplate what it must’ve been like living in a time when one was fully aware of the heights from which civilisation had crashed in such a short interval. The scenario is almost post-apocalyptic.
Writing persisted in a limited form as runes and oghams, carved on stone, wood, bone and ivory. Oghams were in use in the west, particularly in Pembrokeshire, and there are said to be Druidic alphabets, but these are probably invented in modern times. Anglo-Saxon developed its own runes from the Elder Fuþark, a script in which I’m as adept as Latin due to an intense interest in my adolescence. Each letter has a name referring to a concept in the Rune Poem, which was Christianised after the arrival of Augustine in 597 CE, and they were for a time used as ideograms in English Latin script writing, after the manner of the ampersand and Tyronian “et”.
The Frisians are obscure and forgotten, but show up in analyses of our DNA. They had problems with the Franks and their land tended to get flooded, so they colonised the Kent coast, but their genes mainly show up in the English Midlands. They are in fact genetically indistinguishable from most of the White population of the Midlands. A different issue affects the Jutes. This folk was from Jutland, which is the modern Danish peninsula also including Schleswig-Holstein. The name is cognate with “Goth” and also the “Geats” of Beowulf. The Jutes also settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight and Solent, but seem to have suffered some kind of genocide after being invaded in the seventh century CE. The Kingdom of Kent was originally Jutish. The “Maid Of Kent” and “Kentish Maid” division, much eroded nowadays by the growth of Greater London into the county, is thought by some to be derived from the Jutish presence in the east of the kingdom and this is also said to have been reflected in dialect differences through the county, although nowadays this is not very strong. I think there probably was a genocide practiced by the West Saxons on the central South Coast and I suspect it was to do with their reluctance to convert to Christianity.
At this point I’m acutely conscious of my ignorance of British history beyond what has become England. I’m aware of a trans-insular kingdom called Dal Riata in the north between Ireland and Scotland, but I can’t presume to know much more than that. In the future England the Heptarchy arose. This consisted of seven kingdoms: Wessex, Mercia, Kent, Essex, Northumbria, Sussex and East Anglia. One thing I don’t understand about this is where Middlesex came from, because it sounds like it ought to have been a kingdom on a par with Essex and Sussex (Wessex was much bigger) but apparently it was a province of Essex, which was ruled over by two kings at a time, so possibly Middlesex was the western king’s territory. It’s also notable that there’s a concentration of small kingdoms in the Southeast and the others are much larger, which I’d put down to differences in climate and terrain along with proximity to the mainland. The idea that there was a four-century period of seven easily identifiable kingdoms is an imposition made in the later Middle Ages, as is perhaps evidenced by my confusion over Middlesex. There were smaller kingdoms such as the Middle Angles, Magonsæte and Hæstingas, in Leicestershire, Worcestershire and Sussex respectively. It’s said that it would still be possible to consider the kingdoms separate into the tenth century. But there is another process to be considered in English history at this time: the Christianisation of this island.
Augustine arrived in Kent in 597 CE, becoming the first Archbishop of Canterbury, famously because of a pope’s pun about the Angles looking like “angels” and then discovering that they weren’t Christian, or so it’s said. At the same time, Irish missionaries were converting people in the northwest. There had also been a Pelagian civil war in late Roman times in Britain. The Pelagians were a heterodox religious movement which rejected the notion of original sin and believed in salvation by works, and therefore had a more positive view of human nature, believing, for example, that unbaptised babies didn’t go to Hell. This was long gone by the time Augustine got here. It’s worth bearing in mind that less than two centuries passed between the fall of Rome and his arrival. He is also said to have founded the King’s School in Canterbury, which is therefore the first place since Roman times that Latin script was taught.
Due to invasions by the Norsemen from the late eighth century, the English people found it necessary to unite against a common enemy, although both Wessex and Mercia had become very strong by that time. Most written English from this period was in the West Saxon dialect, which is not the direct ancestor of Modern English, which is Mercian. Moreover, insofar as there was a capital, it was for some time near Winchester rather than in London. The Danes invaded and succeeded in settling in the modern Midlands, establishing five boroughs known as the Danelaw. These were Leicester, Lincoln, Stamford, Nottingham and Derby, and can be identified by the use of the “-by” suffix in many of the place names in this area. Due to the facts that the Danes settled here and that English as spoken today is descended from this dialect, which incidentally is not now considered standard, present-day English contains many Danish words and constructions, and it’s even been argued that English is not West Germanic at all but Scandinavian.
One fairly common way of marking the start of English history is by considering the accession of Egbert to the throne of Wessex in 802, because he ended the dominance of Mercia and Northumbria, then united all of England under Wessex, which persisted for the next two centuries. The famous Offa of Mercia’s son in law Beorhtric had exiled him to France, where he may have married one of Charlemagne’s relatives. Most people of European descent today are descended from Charlemagne. This wife then poisoned Beorhtric and Egbert returned to Britain and claimed the crown of Wessex. In 825, he defeated the King of Mercia at the Battle of Ellendune in present-day Wiltshire, claimed Essex, Sussex, Surrey and Kent, and then East Anglia. Having taken control of the mint in London, he was able to issue coins in his name as the king of Mercia, and Northumbria accepted his lordship. Then in 830, Wiglaf took control of Mercia and wrested some of the power back from Egbert, but by that time the Danes were becoming a greater threat and Egbert fought several battles with them. He conquered Cornwall in 838. Once he’d done that, he summoned a meeting called the Council of Kingston where he gave lands to the sees of Canterbury and Winchester in return for the Church’s recognition of his son Æþelwulf. At the time, the Church was responsible for writing the wills of kings and determining their heirs. That, then, is how England began, although at this point a great deal of it was under Viking rule.
Æþelwulf became king on Egbert’s death in 839 and gave Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Essex to his son Æþelstan. He defeated the Danes in Surrey in 851, then married his daughter Æþelswiþ off to the Mercian King Burgred, thereby uniting the Mercian and West Saxon monarchies. While he was on the mainland marrying Iudiþ his daughter to Charles the Bald and sending his youngest son Alfred to Rome, Æþelstan died and was replaced by Æþelbald, his brother, who forced him to abdicate, who then married his sixteen year old stepmother Iudiþ. I have to admit I find this bit very confusing and disturbing although that marriage was later annulled. Æþelbald died in 860 and was succeeded by his brother Æþelberht. The word “æþel”, by the way, means “high-born”, and is often written as “ethel” in these names. The next brother to become king was Æþelred I in 865, not to be confused with the later Æþelred the Unready who came a century later. It’s notable here that the succession preceded “horizontally” rather than “vertically”, which I’m guessing is due to deaths in battle and perhaps other causes. When he died in 871, which didn’t seem to be in battle so maybe I’m wrong, he left two sons who, had they lived to adulthood, would probably have become kings, but instead Alfred became king – Alfred The Great.
By Alfred’s rule, the Mercians had bought the Vikings off by ceding them the Danelaw. Alfred’s English is to me and probably most people the standard dialect of Old English although it is now long since dominated by Mercian English. Some of its features survive in the Yeovil area, though even that style of the language cannot really be said to derive directly from it. Nonetheless it had its day in the Sun. Alfred is well-known for being educated and scholarly, and this still shows, but because the kingdom was under attack he didn’t end up getting to do much with it. He’s also known for accidentally letting some cakes burn a woman had asked him to take care of who didn’t realise he was king because he was distracted by the fact that he was in the middle of waging a war. She took umbrage at him and was then mortified when she found out who he was, but he said he was the one who should apologise. He’s also the only king in English history to whom the epithet “The Great” has ever been applied. He idolised Charlemagne and tried to model himself after him.
I’m aware that the bloke was probably a typical patriarchal tyrant, but I have a soft spot for Alfred because I’ve read a lot of his words. He translated various works into English, including Bede’s. This may have been because the Viking raids were perceived as divine punishment and he wanted to rekindle reverence through learning. It’s an odd juxtaposition to today’s sensibilities. He also supervised ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, which was copied and circulated, and continued to be updated until 1154 in Peterborough, and advocated for education in English. He even translated parts of the Bible.
Anglo-Saxon handwriting and calligraphy is much clearer than some later hands. It isn’t cursive and resembles printed matter in some ways. Alfred’s English has a kind of rustic sound to it which would be absent from Mercian or Northumbrian of the time. Y and I were still distinct, unlike later in the millennium when they began to be used as if they were the same letter. The Latin alphabet as written by him borrowed “Þ” and “Ƿ” from runes, as opposed to some other versions of English which used “UU” for what is now written as “W”.
Anglo-Saxon literature is mainly verse. It includes a number of extremely bawdy riddles which use a lot of double entendres, which seems to be the start of the long kind of “smutty” tradition which we know from the Carry On films, and whereas they’re nothing to be celebrated they are at least the last gasp of a tradition leading up to them which began over a millennium previously. There’s also the very obvious epic ‘Beowulf’, which has always puzzled me because it seems to portray the Danes in a really positive light, and I can’t imagine that going down well with anyone. English used a lot of kennings at the time, like the Icelandic Eddas, where “hron-rad” – “whale-road” – and many other coinages means “sea” and “heofen-candel” – “heaven candle” – for “Sun”. There’s also a poem called ‘The Wanderer’ which puzzles me as it refers to a retainer’s woe that his lord and companions were killed in battle and he is now alone, because there’s a very strong sense of passionate love and longing in it which is refreshingly divorced from a sexual or romantic context but seems to me to be a kind of idealised view of how someone might view their better. It makes me wonder whether our way of looking at such relations between nobility and serfs, and the like, far from being romanticised, actually fail to capture the genuine feeling of care and love which the poor may have had for the rich, which is a very foreign idea to a twenty-first century mind.
Alfred the Great died in 899 and was, for once, followed by his son Edward, whose name is interesting as it’s the first time a regnal name is familiar to us from lists of monarchs post-Conquest. He recaptured first Mercia and then Northumbria. His son and successor Æþelstan became king in 924 and fought the Battle of Brunanburh, where he defeated an alliance of Olaf Guþfriþson of Dublin, Constantine II of Scotland and Owen, King of Strathclyde. This didn’t unite the island of Great Britain but did ensure the integrity of England. I’m aware of two things here. One is that it’s a shame that we only ever seem to hear about battles. The other is that I like to hear the other side on this. I don’t expect the other kings to have been particularly magnanimous to their own subjects, and this is probably about people fighting over land while the majority of the country continues in penury and misery, and again that calls the oddity of ‘The Wanderer’ to mind.
Æþelstan was succeeded by his half-brother Eadmund in 939, known today as Edmund I, as opposed to the later Edmund Ironside. During his rule, Olaf Guþfriþson conquered Northumbria and invaded Mercia, but was confronted at Leicester and a peace was brokered by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. He took the territory back after Olaf’s death. Then, in 945, he captured Strathclyde and handed it over to Malcolm I of Scotland, establishing a peaceful relationship between the two nations which kept the border relatively stable for a while. I don’t know much about history but it sounds like this ended up being honoured in the breach more than the observance. Then, in 946, a convicted robber and outlaw called Leofa attacked Eadmund’s seneschal and as the king defended his servant, he got stabbed to death in the ensuing fight. However, this is disputed and it’s also claimed he was assassinated.
His brother Eadred then came to the throne and two years later Erik Bloodaxe, who had killed two of his brothers to get Norway and was ejected by a third brother, seized Northumbria. Eadred forced him out but the Northumbrians then sided with Amlaíb mac Sitric, a Norse-Gael who was king of Denmark and Ireland, then deposed him in 952 and invited Erik Bloodaxe back in. In 954, they pushed him out again and he died in battle soon after, leaving Eadred with the nation once again. Eadred then came down with a chronic gastrointestinal complaint that forced him to survive by sucking the juices out of his food and died at the age of thirty-two.
Since he had been unmarried and had no children, his nephew Eadwig took the throne. At his coronation, Eadwig left the ensuing banquet with a female relative and her daughter Ælgifu, apparently to engage in a threesome and when Archbishop Oda the Severe remonstrated with him about disgracing himself at his coronation, he sent both him and St Dunstan into exile. He then married Ælgifu but Oda annulled the marriage on account of them being too closely related. He then purloined the other royals of their possessions, gave away ninety pieces of land and plundered the Treasury. He only ruled for four years but by the time he died at the age of nineteen, the kingdom only extended as far as the Thames.
Edgar, his younger brother, was already king of Northumbria and Mercia when he took over, thus reuniting England. He was also very young, becoming king of England at the age of sixteen. He brought Dunstan back and founded forty monasteries, so it sounds to me like he was trying to make up for what his brother had done. His time was free of Viking raids but he plundered Thanet and may have killed a romantic rival by “accidentally” impaling him with a javelin. He also humiliated six kings of Scotland, Man and Wales by having them row across the Dee and introduced press-ganging for the navy. Although he presented an image of piety to the public, he married his sixteen year old stepsister Eþelfleda Eneda and got a nun, Wilfrida, pregnant. After that, Dunstan suggested he do penance by not wearing his crown for seven years, with which he complied. The nun’s daughter and his, Eadgyþ of Wilton, herself became a nun and was famed for her beauty, sanctity and learning. Dunstan had a premonition that she would die in three weeks and she did so, after which she was said to appear in a vision to her mother, and both of them were made saints. Edgar was known as “The Peaceable” by comparison with his predecessors.
After Edgar’s death in 975, his son Edward was king for three years until he was apparently murdered by his stepmother Eþelfleda at Corfe Castle in Dorset. His kingship was disputed despite him being Edgar’s eldest, with some wanting his legitimate half-brother Æþelred to be king, but he was supported by Dunstan and Oswald, the archbishops of Canterbury and York. He was only sixteen when he was murdered, later became a saint, and was followed by the much better known Æþelræd The Unready, who was ten at the time.
Æþelræd’s name is a pun. “Æþelræd” itself means “nobly advised”. “Unræd”, on the other hand, means “badly advised” because the “un-” prefix could be used not only to negate but also to judge negatively, so it’s kind of pejorative. The reason he was “unready” was that he left his brother unburied for three years and didn’t punish his brother’s murderer, which made him very unpopular. It was rumoured that he might have been involved in the murder. He was also afraid of candles because his mother used to beat him with them. The public disquiet at his becoming king allowed the Vikings to take advantage of the poorly-defended country and Æþelræd sought to pay them off to leave it alone. This only encouraged them to continue to invade and he was forced to flee the country to Normandy. Sweyn Forkbeard successfully took over England in 1013 but died after a fall from his horse on 3rd February 1014, enabling Æþelræd to return as king. He then died during a series of battles with Cnut (Canute), enabling Cnut to become king of England.
Cnut is of course famous for his publicity stunt of attempting to prove that God was sovereign over all by pretending to order back the tide, which may not have happened. He was then said to have hung his crown on a crucifix and never wore it again. A less elaborate version of the tale says that he just did the last bit. Although he was Danish, he became considerably Anglicised during his time, and filled his court with English nobility. He also agreed to “rule according to the law of Edgar”. It all sounds a bit like the Georgian Era to me. Unlike any of the Georges though, he tried to conquer Norway but was opposed by a Swedish-Norwegian coalition, although he did succeed in a way. He then got fealty from Scotland, meaning that at one point he was King of Britain and all of continental Scandinavia.
Cnut died in 1035 and was replaced by Harold I, also known as Harold Harefoot. This is not Harold who was killed by William the Conqueror. Cnut’s son Ælfred Æþeling made his way from Normandy, where he had been born to his mother Emma of Normandy, to claim the throne but was captured and brought to Harold, who had his eyes taken out and he died in the process. Hardicanute, another of Cnut’s and Emma’s sons, took over when Harold died in 1040 and was buried at Westminster, the first monarch to be interred there. Hardicanute, however, had him dug up and thrown into a bog. Hardicanute was unpopular. He imposed heavy taxes to pay for his ships and when two tax collectors in Worcester were killed, he gave orders that all men in the county be killed and had Worcester burned to the ground. He was not generally healthy and in 1042, he died of alcoholic poisoning owing to overindulgence at a wedding reception. By that time, he had sent for his brother, Edward, later known as “The Confessor” from Normandy to take over the kingdom. As Edward had been brought up in Normandy, he had a lot of Normans in his court, which annoyed the royal houses of England. The Earl of Wessex, Godwine, married his daughter to Edward in an attempt to get the English houses in with the King again, but in 1051, with Leofric or Mercia’s help, Edward had the earl exiled and the couple separated. The year after, Godwine returned to England with supporters and forced Edward to compromise, allowing Harold II, yes, that Harold, to be the successor. Edward the Confessor was made a saint because he was the first monarch to touch for the King’s Evil, a practice which continued until James II of England. William III of William And Mary, who I mention here, refused to do it, but it was practiced for over six centuries.
Harold II became King on 4th January 1066 and the rest is history. Unfortunately, Edward the Confessor had promised the crown to two different people. The population of England in 1066 was 2.5 million.
I want to turn my attention now to the wildlife of Great Britain during this period. The Romans had introduced the house mouse, which is why it has a Latin name in English, but there were no rabbits at this time, since they are Iberian. The only native lagomorph here is the mountain hare, although the Romans had also introduced the brown hare. British wolves were not affected by insular dwarfism and were therefore disproportionately large relative to the other animals. Either Æþelstan or Edgar imposed a fine of three hundred wolf skins a year on the Welsh king Hywel Da, although that was in Wales. Some criminals were expected to provide a certain number of wolf tongues per annum on pain of death. Wolves in Scotland probably died out in about 1400 although it is claimed that there was a wolf in Morayshire killed in 1743.
Brown bears have a rather complex history here. The Romans imported them for fighting but there may also have still been native bears at that time. There is evidence of bears in caves in Yorkshire around a century after the Roman Empire fell. They were rare in Scotland, Wales and the East Midlands of England but more common in Yorkshire, these being today’s divisions of the island. Bear claws have been found in Anglo-Saxon funeral urns and the arrival of the Romans caused the bear population to increase. After the Norman Conquest they were used for bear-baiting, but apparently not during the Anglo-Saxon period, and they were also kept for medical purposes.
Wild boar have a somewhat similar history to bears, with a native population waxing and waning but being replaced or topped up by escaping pigs. They seem to have died out in the seventeenth century, but have been back for a while since then. They were becoming rare by 1066, as William the Conqueror introduced a law forbidding the killing of wild boars.
Beavers, who have been reintroduced here recently, died out in about 1600. They were last referred to in 1526.
There are probably a lot of other aspects of the Dark Ages I haven’t covered, and I’m acutely aware that I haven’t talked much about Scotland or Wales, which is entirely because I know practically nothing about their history during this period. I also focussed rather heavily on royalty because that tends to be more clearly recorded. The term “Dark Ages” wasn’t invented until the fourteenth century, so unlike the Iron Age, people didn’t actually think they were living through it when it happened, although they did seem to be aware of a materially better standard of living before their own time. There’s also a Protestant bias in describing them as such, due to the Church being so dominant and mainly unchallenged. I have to say I’m pretty much fine with that idea. Later on, the main reason was the lack of written records. This seems to apply to Britain during the time runes and oghams were the main scripts in use here, and it is quite difficult to tell what was going on except through archæology. As I’ve mentioned though, the actual period during which there were apparently no continuous texts lasted less than two centuries and during that time oral history would’ve bridged the gap to some extent. It isn’t clear to me whether the situation was in fact more brutal than later in the European Middle Ages, but certainly the way royalty behaved in the tenth and eleventh centuries seems to have been pretty extreme.
Writing this has really revealed to me how little I know about this time. In particular, I would like to know more about the climate and ecology, and the lives of ordinary people. I’m aware, for instance, that the Danelaw was supposed to be less oppressive than the Anglo-Saxon system, but that could just be rumour. So for now I’ll leave it there, but there might be more.
A Box Of Chocolates 