Sunday, 1 October 2017

The Life and Times of Hengest by Bryan Evans

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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