EUROPE in the EARLY MIDDLE AGES

Europe in the Early Middle Ages

Knock, Knock, the Ango-Saxons have Arrived

Invasions that had so plagued peoples before 500 CE were still taking place. In the mid 500s, waves of Germanic people -- Jutes and Angles -- from what today is Denmark, and Saxons from northern Germany, invaded England again. They came under military leaders and settled on the eastern shore. They warred their way westward up the Thames River, looking for more land to cultivate, taking lowland and leaving less desirable lands in the hills to the Celtic Britons. And they moved inland at Britain's narrow neck in the north, along the Humber River and its tributaries. In the south of England the Britons managed to temporarily stop the Anglo-Saxon advance. The Britons counterattacked with cavalry, which was effective against the horseless Anglo-Saxons. Victories against the dreaded Anglo-Saxons made the cavalry commander a hero, and legend turned him into a king -- King Arthur.

With humanity's proclivity toward fantasy, in centuries to come poetic tales about Arthur would describe him as an emperor, then a god who rode through the sky and slew giants. A British monk, Geoffrey of Manmouth, pretending to write history, would describe Arthur as an emperor from a place called Camelot, and he would write of Arthur defeating the Irish and the Scots, conquering Norway and Denmark, marrying a noble woman named Quinevere and then conquering France.

Victory by the Britons was temporary. Entire communities of Britons were massacred. Britons again fled into the hills. They fled from England into North Wales, to Ireland and across the channel to what is now called Brittany. Some from England were sold into slavery, Pope Gregory finding boys from there on the slave market in Rome. [READER COMMENT]

South of Hadrian's Wall on the eastern side of the island, most of the Romanized population disappeared along with Roman institutions and Celtic names for places. On the western side of the island, the Britons survived in greater number, and the names of rivers there remained in the language of the Britons. Celts survived in West Wales (Cornwall) and in hilly Scotland, which was barely touched by the invasions, the Celts driving out those few Anglo-Saxons who had invaded there. And Celtic people survived in Ireland, which had remained safe behind what would be called St. George's Channel. And, with the Celts, Christianity survived, especially in Ireland, where Catholic scholarship continued to flourish.

Christianity Returns and Vikings Invade

What had been Roman ruled Britain was divided among Anglo-Saxon kings -- warlords surrounded by men who were preoccupied with fighting, valor and loyalty. The Anglo-Saxons were largely illiterate. They viewed the god of the Christian Britons with contempt for having failed his people, and they brought with them from the continent gods that were similar to the gods of other polytheistic societies. There was a god of battles, Tiw, whose name contributed to the word for the third day of the week, Tuesday; a war god named Woden, whose name became a part of the word Wednesday; a god of thunder called Thunor, which became Thursday; and a goddess of fertility named Frig, which was the source of the word Friday.

The Anglo-Saxons saw the world as driven by spirits and magic and saw consciousness and spirit in just about everything that moved or existed. They worshiped trees, wells, rivers and mountains. They believed in good spirits and evil spirits -- gods and demons. They believed in hideous monster spirits called ogres, malicious ghost-like spirits called goblins, and they believed in mischievous elves. Among their myths was the story of Beowulf, a hero victor over a savage monster named Grendel and Grendel's dragon mother.

An Anglo-Saxon called Ethelbert (Aethelbert or Aethelberht), son of the warlord Eormenric, took power in 560 in a kingdom in southern England called Kent -- one of the older if not oldest Anglo-Saxon settlements in England, dating from the mid-400s or a couple of decades earlier. Contacts between the Anglo Saxons and the people on the continent had been maintained, and the young Ethelbert married the Catholic daughter of the king of Paris, Charibert, a descendant of Clovis. Ethelbert allowed his bride, Berta, to bring to Kent a Frankish bishop as her chaplain.

More than thirty years later, Pope Gregory I was hoping to make England Christian again, and he sent a group of monks to Kent to evangelize. The aging Ethelbert overcame his fear that the leading monk of the group, Augustine, would do witchcraft against him. He welcomed Augustine, who converted him. Within a year, several thousand of Ethelbert's subjects asked to be baptized.

Augustine persuaded Ethelbert to create a code of laws based on Roman law. These laws had punishments that differed according to class. Killing a nobleman brought a fine of 300 shillings, a commoner 100 shillings, a freedman from 40 to 80 shillings, and the fine for killing a slave might be 50 shillings. The fine for copulating with a maiden belonging to the king was fifty shillings, with a nobleman's serving woman twenty shillings, with an earl's serving woman six shillings. If a freeman stole from another freeman he paid a fine three times the value of what he stole and a fine to the king. Under Ethelbert, family members were considered responsible for one another, and members of an extended family might be required to help pay the fine of any family member.

War and the Hegemony of Northumbria

Augustine died in 604, and Ethelbert, after fifty-six years of rule, died in 616. Many of Ethelbert's subject who had converted to Christianity relapsed, leaving little gained but the town of Canterbury as England's center of Christianity. Edwin, the Anglo-Saxon king of Northumbria from around 616 married a princess from Kent -- Aethelberg, the daughter of Ethelbert -- who was Catholic. He promised to respect her faith, and in 625 she brought with her to Edwin's capital, York, one of the Roman missionaries, Paulinus, who had arrived with Augustine from Rome twenty-four years before. Edwin and Aethelberg had a daughter, and Edwin agreed to his daughter being baptized a Christian and promised that if Christianity gave him a victory in a coming war that he too would convert to Christianity. Edwin returned from war triumphant, but he continued to hesitate. Finally in 627 he accepted Christianity for himself and his subjects, who apparently had little say in the matter.

As a result of his victory in various wars, Edwin the Christian was the most powerful king in England. Resenting Edwin's power was the king of Mercia, Penda, a pagan. King Penda allied himself with his neighbor to the west, North Wales, a kingdom of Celts under a Christian king named Cadwallon. Together, In 632, they defeated Edwin, and Edwin's head was put on display in York.

Edwin's successor in Northumbria was a Christian named Oswald, under whom Northumbria, in 633, rallied and defeated Cadwallon of North Wales -- a Christian king against another Christian king, and the last of the great battles between Celts and Anglo-Saxons. Then Oswald warred against King Penda, and in 641 Oswald met the same fate as had Edwin: death and decapitation. But a few years later Oswald's younger brother, Oswui, rallied Northumbria again and defeated Penda, and Northumbria remained the greatest power in England.

The Church Triumphs and Wars for Hegemony Continue

In the mid 600s Christian missionaries from Ireland began evangelizing across England. Catholicism had won prestige with the victory of Northumbria, and monotheism suited monarchy better than did a religion with many gods and numerous local shrines. The kings in England were inclined to welcome a religion whose scriptures described and supported monarchy. The king of Essex, Sigebert, influenced by Northumbria, converted to Christianity in 653, and Christianity spread into Mercia. Much of England was on its way to learning from the missionaries a sense of organization, and, within the Church, order was enhanced in 669 with the appointment of Theodore of Tarsus as archbishop over the whole of England.

But unity was not achieved. Civilization continued much as before -- divided among kingdoms with no solid agreement as to who should rule where. Each of the Anglo-Saxon kings believed that his rule had origins in the god of his ancestors and that he, therefore, should not to be subordinate to any another king.

Wars continued through the 700s and into the 800s. The kingdom of Mercia emerged as the dominant power in England. And with more warring, in 825 supremacy passed to the kingdom of Wessex, at Winchester.

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