Once finishing Lloyd Liang’s book ‘The Origins of Britain’,
it was tempting to go straight onto his sequential book ‘Celtic Britain’. If I
had not had my fill of archaeological evidence for the time being then this is
exactly what I would have done. Instead, I decided it was time once again to
turn to the Saxons, and to go to the earliest point in time; this being the arrival
of Hengest. When reading Leonard Dutton’s work on the power struggles in the
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, I was most excited with the coming of the Saxons and the
crisis developing in Britain. A time in which the Romano-British had both
enemies within and without, and ultimately their inability to put differences
aside and unite against a common enemy proved to be their downfall once more. I
understood when picking Bryan Evans’ book up that there was very little
information available on Hengest, and that it is even a possibility that the
legendary figure did in fact not exist at all, as explored and debated in the
book he could well have been manufactured as part of an origin Myth.
The events prior to the arrival of the Saxons capture a
great deal of atmosphere, and much more detail than was contained within
Leonard Dutton’s work. It goes through all the events surrounding the battle of
Catalonian Fields, giving the right amount of depth to the important peoples
involved during the battle. Interestingly, Bryan Evans differs from Leonard
Dutton on the importance of Votigern’s concerns that Rome might return to
Britain. Dutton says that Votigern invited the Saxons with the sneaking
intention to use them against Rome when they decided to return, but that he
realised all too late the mistake he had made (that a Roman return was
impossible) once he had given the Saxons a foothold in Kent. Bryan Evans doesn’t
attempt to contradict this, but he does mention an alternative which I found
most captivating. He assumes that many elements of the Roman style of
government still persisted in Britain after they separated from the empire, and
that the British government simply adopted the conventional Roman policy for putting
a stop to foreign invaders. The Picts, Irish and Saxons were frequently raiding
over the border and on the coast, and so the Romano-British administration created
Foederati troops like their cousins
back on the continent. This will have removed much of the threat of the Saxon invaders,
as they now became the mercenaries; their might used to destroy the Pict and
Irish invaders. This policy proved in the end to carry more negatives than
positives, as is seen with the decline of Rome in general, when you fail to pay
your mercenaries then they become a law unto their own.
Hengest himself is said possibly to have been a Foederati soldier in the service of Rome
on the mainland in Gaul prior to coming into the service of Votigern. Evans puts
forward this hypothesis during a chapter scrutinising the validity and meaning
of the Finnsburg fragment. The Finnsburg fragment being 48 lines of an
Anglo-Saxon poem discovered by George Hicks in 1700. It was quickly copied down
but then subsequently lost almost right away. Whether this poem truly existed
does not seem to be disputed by historians, as George Hicks was renowned for translating
a lot of Anglo-Saxon literature throughout his career, and the fragment contains
all the usual translation mistakes that his other work accommodated. The latter
events of the poem are also known to us through an episode in Beowulf when the poet
speaks of the story of Finn and Hengest in the great hall. The part of the story
which is available to us speaks of the leader Hnaef and his second in command,
Hengist, being besieged in a great hall by the warrior Finn. The author picks
over the piece and deduces some interesting likelihoods about the events
Hengest found himself in. The problem with the poem is first of all proving that
the Hengest in the fragment is one and the same as the Hengest who become king
of Kent. Secondly we also have to assume that the events in the poem are a
fictionalised account of some historical events. Bryan Evans makes a great case
in favour of the events being real, and that this is the same Hengest that
arrived with Horsa on Thanet. This is not a case I shall make here, as I don’t
believe I could do it justice, but he does spend a good deal of the book
analysing how legitimate contemporary sources are.
Coming to the chapter about contemporary sources; Evans takes
Gildas, Nennius, Bede and the Chronicle; giving them a thorough going through
in relation to how accurate and seriously we can take them. Gildas’ work ‘On the Ruin of Britain’ was never meant
to be intended as a source of history, but was in fact a polemic of the day
reeling against the sins of Britons and the acts of decadent kings; and so it
comes with many of the biases any political treatise would have. Evans makes
the point however, that if looked at in the correct light then one can pick
gems of correct information out from these sources. I may have mentioned this
once before in a previous post, but the importance that Bede placed on careful attention
to the truth in his book ‘History of the English Church and People’ is
something that I believe every historian of early medieval England is eternally
thankful for. Obviously Bede is not infallible, but he is a strong exception of
the times and his work should be taken very seriously. In fact where Bede has used
the oral tradition as a source for information, he even makes it clear that it
is not certain that these events happened, but ‘that it is said’ that they
happened. Bryan Evans follows up with analysing the oral tradition which
stretched back hundreds of years, and he concludes that although there will
have been many mistakes, the oral traditions will have been much more honed and
accurate than oral tradition in a nation which could rely on literacy to
replace memory.
There is one other area of which I found interesting enough
to mention. It was an analysis of the origins of the Anglo-Saxons prior to the
migration, as well as the size of the migration. It was said the decline of the
Roman Empire happened during a mini-Ice Age, and although Bryan Evans does not
mention this, he does talk about the erratic changes to the sea level. This can
be demonstrated through the archaeological records which show that Saxon
settlements on the coast of Old Saxony were built up on mounds of earth to survive
the rise and fall of these changes. This combined with the pressure from the expansion
of the Huns is said to be some of the reasoning for the Saxons search for a new
homeland. The estimates for immigration given by Bryan Evans is around 50,000 –
100,000 Anglo-Saxons and Jutes settling in England, compared to a native
population of around two million. The enigma is that modern DNA tests give a result
of just over 50% Anglo-Saxon DNA for the average Englishman. According to Evan
this percentage could not be achieved with such small numbers, but he gives a
few hypotheses including an apartheid system which would have reduced the birth
rate of native Britons and thus favour the rate of the Saxons.
When I purchased this book I was sceptical of a number of
things. First that the information available for Hengest was so negligible that
the book would have very little to do with the actual man, and more with the
times in which he lived. This was in part true, but all the information presented
was incredibly interesting and all related to the search of identifying Hengest
and the life he led. The author also reconstructed the Finnsburg saga and
filled in the gaps himself to create a frilling story, and although the cover art
is truly atrocious and there are frequent typos located within; I have to say
that this is the best Anglo-Saxon history book to date that I have read. There
appears to be an air of professionalism that the publishers, ‘Anglo-Saxon
books’, has about what it chooses to print, and I will be certainly checking
out more of their products in the future.
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