Philobiblon

In England, and only in England, they entirely replaced the culture they found. This is England’s founding uniqueness. It explains why the modern English find their immediate neighbour-language, Welsh, utterly strange, yet can still almost understand German swearing from around 850ad: hundes ars in tino naso, meaning (of course) hound’s arse in thine nose.

So why did the Germanic migrants only stay Germanic in England? Partly, it was because Britannia had already declined and fallen into a land run by local warlords whom Gildas calls tyrants. All the incoming English found were ruins – and seeing nothing worth adopting, they stuck to their own culture. They could do so because of the other vital difference: the sea.

The Channel didn’t protect Britannia: it made total conquest possible. Elsewhere in Europe, the Germanic conquerors were all-male war-bands. An entire tribe – old people, nursing mothers, small children and all – couldn’t survive long overland journeys through hostile territory. The English, though, could ship whole clans across to the Saxon Shore in a day or two, landing at well-built, long-familiar Roman ports.

Everywhere else, the single male Germanic warriors intermarried with local women, so the Latinate languages – and Christianity – survived. The English brought their own women-folk with them, so they stayed English pagans.

It’s clear that in Wessex, the Romano-British resisted enough to cut genuine deals with the English at the highest level. Several names in the royal Wessex genealogy sound distinctly Celtic: 15Cerdic, Caedwalla, Cenwahl, Caelin. The first great English historian, the Venerable Bede (d.735ad), comments that Caelin (who led his tribe to a great victory over what sound like Gaelic warlords at Dryham, near Bath, in 577ad) was known in the speech of his own people – i.e. perhaps the native waelisce – as Ceaulin. Remarkably, the laws of King Ine of Wessex (c.700ad) survive, showing that he ruled over two cultures: the waelisce were generally second-class citizens, but they were still protected by law and some were major landowners, classed even above landowning English freemen (only 5-10% of the English ever actually owned land). Most strikingly of all, Ine could call on the cyninges horswealh, which translates neatly as The King’s Welsh Horse. At Lady Mary Church in Wareham, the evidence for the survival of prosperous Romano-Britons is set in stone: five memorials, inscribed with lettering clearly Celtic in origin, dating from as much as 350 years after the start of the English conquest. So the Romano-British of lowland Britannia were neither killed nor driven out. Instead, led by their elites, they adopted Englishness – and eventually the language – from the top down. Almost from the start, English identity wasn’t a racial fate, but a political choice – a hard choice, no doubt, but a choice

By 601ad Ethelbert had given in to Augustine, or the Franks, or his wife, and converted. He now set down the laws of his lands in writing. They stress the privileged position of the Church in society, and lay down in great detail the fines for various acts of rape and violence (12 shillings for cutting off an ear; 50 shillings for knocking out an eye; 12 shillings for having sex with a nobleman’s maid – but only 6 shillings if she is a commoner’s maid). Here is civilisation coming in at ground zero.

These laws were written in English. This was unique: all the continental Germanic nations wrote down their laws in the prestige-language, Latin. In England, almost nobody spoke Latin anymore, so the everyday language was, from the dawn of literacy, given the awesome privilege of being written down. Until the Norman Conquest, the English, alone in Western Europe, were ruled in their own tongue.

St Boniface (c.675-754) led a counter-invasion of the old English homelands in 18Germany: still able to talk to the Germans without a translator, he made good progress before winning martyrdom. Alcuin of York became the most trusted political advisor to Charlemagne. Astonishingly, their personal correspondence survives, showing how the English churchman advised the great Frankish king during his restoration of the Roman Empire in 800ad.

The practice of furnished burials came to an abrupt end in the ad 670s-680s. The disappearance of these rites coincided exactly with Theodore of Tarsus’s period as primate… a far more radical shift in burial practice among the general population than previously considered possible.

Somehow, Alfred’s Wessex had a unique resilience, perhaps because it had been born as an almost equal, law-based fusion of invading English and resident Romano-British elites. The memories of rural people easily span a mere couple of centuries.3 It may be that Alfred of the Cerdicingas (as the Wessex royal family styled itself ) was able to call, at the vital moment, on older, deeper loyalties than other English kings.

Much of the North and East felt more kinship with the Vikings than with the Wessex dynasty. This made an effective national resistance impossible. Instead, the Vikings were paid danegelds to go away. Unsurprisingly, they came back for more. Appeasement corrupted English society because Aethelred used his favourites as tax-gatherers, and they took their own cut: no more danegelds, no more cut. Small wonder the Chronicle for these years repeatedly laments that plans to confront the Danes were undone by treachery.

Aethelred did make one bold strategic move, and it set wheels in motion that would decide the fate of English England. The Danish raiders often used ports belonging to Duke Richard of Normandy, whose own Viking ancestors had settled there only 90 years before. To bring the Normans onside, Aethelred married Richard’s sister, Emma of Normandy, in 1002.

His Norman alliance secured, Aethelred tried to solve England’s Danish problem. In November 1002, he ordered the massacre of all the Danish men who were among the English race.4 It backfired spectacularly because one of the dead was the sister of Sweyn, King of Denmark. Raiding England now became official Danish state policy, and the cost of the danegelds spiralled.

For the next decade and more, the English were robbed, under the guise of legal process, in courts run by Normans where the natives were only allowed to answer specific questions and had to use translators. The Domesday Book (1087) – named by the English themselves, because (it was said) you had no more chance of disputing it than you would have on Judgement Day itself – set it all down. By William’s death, only about 5% of England remained in English hands.

The lack of resistance by the English, who outnumbered the Normans by about a hundred to one, bewildered the invaders. 40Two early Anglo-Norman historians, both with English mothers, shook their heads in disbelief. William of Malmesbury (c.1095-1143) wrote of miserable provincials… so feeble that they failed after the first battle to seriously rise up and make an attempt for their freedom. Ordericus Vitalis (1075-c.1142) depicts the English as interested only in feasting and drinking, caring nothing for freedom.

Luckily for English pride, however, there are good reasons.

1. THE NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE. No English leader except, briefly, Athelstan, had ever been able truly to mobilise the whole country.
2. LACK OF NATURAL REDOUBTS. Most of Southern England was near-perfect country for the invincible new Norman cavalry.
3. NO FUNCTIONING NATIVE ELITE. The English elite had been corrupted by Aethelred, Danified by Cnut, decimated at Hastings, and had finally fled the country in c.1076.
4. THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD. By 1100 the skeletons of ordinary Englishmen were distinctly taller than in 1000. No peasantry rebels if their bellies and barns are full.
5. THE CHURCH. It alone had given Anglo-Saxon England any real unity. Now, it was fully on the side of the Normans.
6. CIVILISATION. The English had lived through decades of blood-boltered Anglo-Danish politics. Even after the Conquest, Earl Waltheof was still having rival Englishmen murdered as they sat down to dinner. The Chronicle itself, though listing William’s acts of brutality and greed, reminded English readers that betwixt other things is not to be forgotten that good peace which he maked in this land. Any king who maintained law and order was better than what had gone before.

With Eleanor’s treasure backing him, Henry crossed the Channel. In July 1153 his army faced Stephen’s across the Thames at Wallingford, but there was no fight. Chivalric deterrence operated in 12th-century Europe: the heavy cavalry charge was matchless when it came to mowing down hapless foot-soldiers, but if steel-clad horsemen met head-on at a combined speed of over 40mph, the result was mutual aristocratic destruction. The Church brokered a deal: Stephen would keep the throne but Henry would inherit.

By 1180, the English elite had refashioned themselves in the image of their masters by making the great leap of adopting French language and culture. This is typical of what happens in a colony. 

De Montfort allowed the captive Henry to remain king, with all decisions subject to approval by Parliament. But when Prince Edward escaped and gathered an army of disaffected nobles, he was doomed. At the Battle of Evesham on 4 August 1265, the chivalric values of the age were suspended. De Montfort had dared to enlist the common people: now he was treated as a common rebel, and targeted by a 12-man hit-squad who 65hacked him to pieces. Virtually all his followers were slaughtered on the spot. Henry III himself, a prisoner in de Montfort’s ranks, was almost killed by accident because he wasn’t wearing the badge Prince Edward had chosen to mark out his own men – the St. George’s Cross. The national banner of England was born at the defeat of the first man who’d appealed in English to the English since 1066.

The following year, after the failed Epiphany Rising, supporters of the deposed Richard II (still alive in captivity) fled to Cirencester. The gang included some of the highest nobles in the land. In previous generations, awe of the Normans might have cowed the townspeople. But now the Englishmen of Cirencester grabbed their bows and pinned the aristocrats indoors all night with a hail of arrows. The next day, defying orders to bring the rebels before the king for judgement, the Gloucestershire men led the captured aristocrats ignominiously away on foot, while they themselves rode their horses. Then they smoot of the lordis heddis. For the first time since Durham in 1069, a company of fully-armed aristocrats had been defied, defeated and slaughtered by English commoners.

Shrewsbury on 21 July 1403 It was the most important battle on English soil since 1066, and the history of the nation turned on tiny differences in the flights of two arrows. For the first time, the English used their fearsome longbows on each other. Henry Hotspur, son of the Earl of Northumberland, was killed, and with his death his army lost heart. Prince Hal – the future Henry V – was pierced beneath his eye, but stayed on the field until victory was won. Five or six inches of the arrow stuck fast in his skull for weeks. He was eventually saved, in a near-miraculous operation, by the surgeon John Bradmore.

English unity had been saved, but the price was a serious transfer of power to Parliament. Henry had needed its support to get through the crisis, and MPs took their chance: in 1406, the Lords and Commons sat for a record 139 days, including the first ever all-night sitting, and forced the King to subject even his household expenditure to inspection. Henry desperately tried to revive the royal authority in the traditional way – war with France – but his campaigns were abject failures. Sick and worn out, he died in 1413, having caught his son trying on the crown while he was (just) still alive.

War of the Roses The wars caused surprisingly little damage to the English economy. For a century beforehand, the English had done all their fighting in France. Warriors on both sides knew that the castles and towns of England had hopelessly outdated defences, so instead of retreating behind walls, they chose to settle things in the open field. As a result, aristocrats had fallen like nine-pins but there had been no great sieges, little laying-waste of the countryside, and not much interruption of trade. 

Two years later, in 1485, the second-last successful invasion of England set out from Harfleur on 1 Aug, landing at Milford Haven in Wales. Henry was part-Welsh, which meant he had two out of the three power blocs of the Tripartite Indenture of 1405 in his pocket: it was now the South and the Welsh against the North. When the forces met at Bosworth, Richard saw his allies wavering. He risked all on a direct personal charge at Henry, who took cover amidst his French mercenaries until Richard’s key commander, Sir William Stanley, made the vital decision to turn his coat. 

Henry VII wasn’t just Welsh: he was as self-consciously European as any medieval king. He had spent the past 14 years in France, and modelled himself on modern French royal taste. That meant Renaissance Humanism, whose signature was a new, rational statecraft (as described by Niccolo Machiavelli) in which kings were to be served and guided by an elite who had studied the Classics.

For the next 400 years, the entire English upper class was expected to have good French, decent Latin and a smattering of Ancient Greek. Anyone who could speak only English was proletarian, hoi polloi, not comme il faut – and if you didn’t understand those insults, well, it just went to show. Oxford and Cambridge demanded both Ancient Greek and Latin from all applicants until 1919, with Latin still required until 1960.