Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. It is believed that the mission was inspired by the pope meeting a group of fair-haired youths in Rome. He asked them who they were and what their country of origin was. They answered that they were Engles, Angli in Latin. The pope is said to have remarked that he saw them not as Angli, but Angeli, that is angels. The papal mission was led by St. Augustine, and the missionaries made their base at Canterbury. The king of Kent, Ethelbert, fearing magic, insisted that his meeting with the missionaries take place beneath an open sky. Out of this came the grant of a place in Canterbury in which they could live and had permission to preach. Soon there were many converts, old churches began to be restored and new ones built. After a year Ethelbert himself became Christian. Augustine was consecrated Bishop and later Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet, that mission was only the beginning of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, a task that took most of the 7th century to achieve.
Monasteries such as Canterbury became centres of teaching and learning, where both Greek and Latin were taught, as well as so called Seven Liberal Arts that included the trivium – grammar or the art of writing, rhetoric or the art of speaking and the dialectic, the art of reasoned argument – and the quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. The most famous of all these scholars was the monk Bede (better known as the Venerable Bede), who wrote the History of the English Church.
Thus, by the 8th century a new society, deeply Christian, had come into being, only to face a new wave of invasions as fierce Northern people, the Vikings, began to attack from beyond the seas.
The story of Viking invasions is dramatically told in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which traces how these raids accelerated during the second half of the 8th century. The Vikings were a people from Scandinavia, mainly Norway, Sweden and Denmark, whose life originally consisted in working the land and fishing, but who went on to attack and later settle in Britain, Northern France, Russia, Iceland and Greenland. One of the basic reasons for their endless raids was that their homelands no longer produced enough to support them. Another was the nature of their society that glorified fighting. The Vikings were pagan and believed that the gods rewarded fighters above all and that bloodshed and death in battle were the true paths to wealth and happiness.
One by one the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons fell until there was only Wessex left, where a young man called Alfred came to the throne in 871. [15] During his reign, which lasted almost thirty years, the advance of the Vikings was stopped and the foundations of what was to become the kingdom of England were laid. We can easily trace where the Vikings settled, areas of the country known as the Danelaw, by the endings to the place names. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon endings were ‘hams’ and ‘tuns’ (homes and towns), the Vikings had their ‘bys’ and ‘thorpes’.
After being defeated by Alfred, the Vikings held the north and East Anglia, while the kingdom of Wessex gradually expanded to embrace all the southern Anglo-Saxons. In 886 Alfred captured London. In the peace he made with the Danish king the English and the Danes were accepted as equals and for the first time there is reference to ‘all the English race’.
Alfred took important steps to ensure the defence of his kingdom. He realized that the Anglo-Saxons must develop sea-power, so he ordered the construction of warships. Even more important was the building of a network of defended enclosures, ‘burhs’, in which people could seek safety along with their goods and cattle. These were strategically placed and were either on the site of old Roman towns or carefully chosen to be new ones. We can trace many of them today in place names that end in ‘borough’.
Alfred was succeeded by three strong kings who took up the task of creating and consolidating the new kingdom of England. His son Edward the Elder first reconquered the whole of East Anglia and the eastern Midlands and then, by 920, all the lands as far as the Peak District. During the reign of Alfred’s grandson Athelstan the Viking invasions renewed, with the aim of setting up a northern kingdom based in York. In 927 Athelstan defeated them and soon established himself as a single king ruling both north and south, in effect the first king of England as far as Northumbria. A single currency was introduced for the kingdom and many new laws were made. During the reign of Edgar (959–975) the Roman-style ceremony of crowning and anointing the king appeared. In this ceremony it wasn’t the crowning by the bishop which was the most important act but the anointing of the king with holy oil in the same way as priests were anointed. This act set him apart from ordinary men, making him Lord-anointed. Yet, in spite of the king’s enhanced status and the mystique surrounding the monarchy, one of the fundamental principles of Anglo-Saxon society, which was to run down through the centuries, was that effective government should be based on a dialogue between the ruler and the ruled. At the top level it was reflected in the fact that Anglo-Saxon kings were always elected, from a member of the royal dynasty. That was the task of the great magnates, both nobility and upper clergy, who made up the king’s council called Witenagemot (from witena: Old English genitive plural of wita ‘councillor’ + gemot ‘meeting’). Also, all the English counties and shires took shape during this period; they were divided into smaller units called hundreds, each one of which had a kind of court (moot), where justice was administered by the king’s representative together with those who lived in the area.
Another fundamental principle of Anglo-Saxon England, which was to be important for the future, was that the kings were expected to live ‘of their own’, that is from the income received from the vast estates which they held as the country’s richest landowner. At the same time a system of universal taxation gradually began. This was the direct result of the attacks by the Norsemen that resumed under the weak king Ethelred, who decided to buy off the invaders with large sums of money called ‘Dane-geld’. Everyone had to contribute towards this; the money was collected from all over the country in carts and delivered to the king’s treasury at Winchester, the capital. Although these taxes were the result of a crisis, they set a precedent: everyone should be taxed to meet certain common needs such as war. Yet, since the kings were expected to live ‘of their own’, taxation was to be exceptional for many centuries, and was perceived as such by the people.
In the early 11th century the country was scourged by a new wave of Vikings, the Norsemen.
In 1009 Sweyn, king of Denmark, landed at the head of a vast army and by 1013 all the nation regarded him as full king. Ethelred fled into exile. But then Sweyn died and in the confused period that followed Ethelred died too. His son’s reign lasted for just seven months, and after his death the Witenagemot elected Sweyn’s son, Canute, to be king (1016–1035). Thus England entered the 11th century as part of a huge Scandinavian empire which embraced Denmark, Sweden and part of Norway. Canute, who had begun his life as a bloodthirsty warrior, transformed himself into an ideal Anglo-Saxon king. His greatest innovation was to divide the entire country into four great earldoms each presided over by an earl.
In 1042 Ethelred’s son Edward came to the throne as Edward II, often referred to as Edward the Confessor. He was a competent and wise monarch, ruling England for twenty-four years and leaving a united country to his successor. Edward the Confessor was a deeply pious man, and it was in his reign that Westminster Abbey was constructed. On his deathbed he nominated his brother-in-law Harold, Earl of Wessex, as his heir. After Edward’s death Harold was duly elected by the Witenagemot. He was a man of strong character and a brilliant soldier, so everything seemed to indicate that the Anglo-Saxon kingdom would continue as before. However, there was another claimant to the throne. He was William, Duke of Normandy (a duchy in Northern France). William’s claim to the Anglo-Saxon throne was in fact extremely remote, he was just a great-nephew of Edward’s queen, but he maintained that Edward himself had promised him the crown as early as in 1051, and moreover Harold had sworn allegiance to him as his future king during his visit to Normandy in 1064. The latter visit is surrounded by mystery and there is nothing to prove William’s claims beyond his assertion. Anyway, in the second half of the 11th century the Normans had a vitality that other peoples lacked. William was also a master of propaganda and diplomacy. He succeeded in persuading both the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope of the justice of his cause. Harold, on the other hand, was at a disadvantage, for, being threatened by the Norwegians and
