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The Anglo-Saxons summary

Name: The Anglo-Saxons
Rating: 4.7 (192 reviews)
Author: Marc Morris

Marc Morris

The Roots of England

4.7 (192 ratings)

39 mins

What is The Anglo-Saxons about?

The Anglo-Saxons (2021) is a history of the Germanic warriors and settlers whose arrival in Britain in the sixth century changed the course of the island’s history. Beginning with the collapse of Roman rule, it charts the rise of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, their conversion to Christianity, and the gradual unification of the country that became known as England. Along the way, it sheds light on the development of England’s language, culture, cities, and political and religious institutions.

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The Anglo-Saxons
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Key idea 1 of 14

What’s in it for you? Learn how the Anglo-Saxons made England.

Look at a map of Europe in 400 AD and you won’t find a country called England. Nor will you find anything recognizably English in the territory that was later given that name.

The laws are Roman and the locals speak a mix of Celtic languages and Latin. Urban settlements don’t have winding lanes and thoroughfares, but rigid grids. The English language doesn’t exist.

Fast-forward to 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest, and you’ll find all the familiar markers of England. The countryside is divided into shires, sheriffs keep the peace, and the locals speak a tongue that’s more or less comprehensible even to us.

What changed? The short answer is that the Anglo-Saxons who settled on this island after the year 400 made England. How? That’s what we’ll be looking at in these blinks.

Along the way, you’ll learn

how the Romans lost control of Britain;
where the Anglo-Saxons came from; and
how the foundations of modern English culture were laid.

Roman Britain – a civilized island.

November, 1992. We’re in Suffolk, a county in southeast England, where a farmer has just lost a hammer in one of his fields. A stubborn man, he borrows a metal detector and goes looking for it.

He finds something much more valuable: a treasure hoard containing 584 gold coins, 14,000 silver coins, and hundreds of decorative objects. Luckily for us, the coins are well preserved. Based on the emperors engraved on them, we can tell they were minted just before 400 AD.

A fraying empire – the last days of Roman rule.

Roman rule was a contract. The conquered laid down their weapons and pledged loyalty to the conquerors. In return, they received a share of the imperial spoils.

Peace was the cornerstone of this agreement. Without peace, Roman civilization meant little: orderly towns with bathhouses aren’t worth much if you can’t prevent marauding invaders from sacking them, after all.

Pirates and pioneers – the sudden arrival of the Anglo-Saxons.

The Picts and Scots who plundered the west coast and broke through Hadrian’s Wall were well known to locals. That’s no surprise: they’d been around since the early days of Roman rule.

The Germanic groups on the east coast were different. Their arrival was sudden and shocking. Who were these people, and what were they doing in Britain?

“Barbarians” at the gate – Roman civilization through Germanic eyes.

Language can help us understand complicated historical developments.

French and English, for instance, both emerged in a similar historical context – the context of conquest, when Germanic “barbarians” invaded the Roman provinces in the fifth century. But that’s where the languages’ similarities end.

Blood and guts – the violent world of the early Anglo-Saxons.

Early Anglo-Saxon settlers left a light footprint on the historical record for a simple reason: their material culture resisted preservation.

Their halls and huts, for example, were short-lived timber constructions. Flimsy fences marked the boundaries of fields and most everyday objects were made of wood, fabric, or leather. Little of what they built or made between roughly 400 and 600 AD survived long enough for archeologists to dig it up.

How to bury a king – Rædwald of East Anglia.

By the early seventh century, Britain had been divided into dozens of warring kingdoms. Rulers and clans fought for wealth and prestige. The risks to life and limb were great. But the rewards were great as well.

To get to that, however, we need to return to Suffolk – the county in which we met that stubborn farmer who went looking for a hammer and found a treasure trove.

Returning to Rome – the reemergence of British Christianity.

Late sixth-century Britain was a land of many gods.

Some Britons still worshipped ancient deities associated with landmarks or sacred objects like trees and rocks. Then there were the gods introduced by conquerors.

Bishops and barterers – the renewal of British cities.

There were lots of good reasons to build a city where the Romans built London.

Take the Thames. It’s deep and wide enough to be navigable, which gives you access to the North Sea and its trade networks, but not too broad, which means you can build bridges across it. The banks are flat and firm – just what you need if you want to enclose a city behind three miles of sturdy stone wall.

The calm before the storm – peace and prosperity in the eighth century.

Mercia was a large kingdom. It extended from London in the south to the Humber in the north. From west to east, it covered every blade of grass between the Welsh frontier and the Norfolk coast.

Its true influence, however, exceeded even these far-flung geographical markers.

The northern storm – the Viking assault on England.

One of the best written sources for our period is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Compiled by royal request in the ninth century, it’s a wide-ranging, though incomplete, chronological summary of events.

The pages concerned with the year 789 contain an ominous entry. It records that three longships appeared in Northumbria and landed a party of raiders, who then killed a government official. After this attack, references to seaborne raiders become increasingly common in the Chronicle.

Stemming the Viking tide – Alfred the Great’s first act.

Mercian power didn’t outlast Offa. After his death in 796, Mercia was eclipsed by a rising star: Wessex, the land of the West Saxons. This kingdom in the southwest of what was now called England prospered in the eighth century; in the ninth, it expanded.

In 814, Wessex annexed Celtic Cornwall and laid claim to its wealth of mineral resources. Over the next decade, Kent, Essex, Surrey, and Sussex met the same fate. Northumberland remained nominally independent, but it also recognized the overlordship of Wessex’s rulers. Subjugating rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was one thing – stemming the incoming tide of Viking armies was a taller order.

The making of the English nation – Alfred the Great’s second act.

Alfred’s response to Scandinavian raids and invasions changed England’s built environment.

Viking soldiers were well organized, swift, brave, and often all but unstoppable on open ground. They weren’t especially good at besieging fortified settlements, though. England’s wics, which had sprung up outside the walls of old Roman settlements, gradually moved inside them.

The final act – Danish and Frankish kings in an English kingdom.

The action that leads us to the final act of our drama takes us first to Scandinavia. The Danes and Norwegians have united, creating a Nordic superpower. Its eyes are set on England.

The “King of the English” – the name given to each of England’s rulers – is Æthelred. His reign begins in 971. It’s his job to repel the coming Viking invasion. It does not go well.

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About the Author

Marc Morris is a historian of the Middle Ages and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. A well-known broadcaster, Morris presented Castle, an acclaimed TV series shown on Channel 4. His previous books include The Norman Conquest, a history of the French duke who conquered England, and A Great and Terrible King, a study of Edward I.

Who should read The Anglo-Saxons?

History buffs
Anglophiles
Medievalists

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