on October 10, 2026, 11:58 pm
How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons
by Nicholas J. Higham.
Yale, 368 pp., £25, March, 978 0 300 25492 1
English history began in 449 – according to Bede, at least. In that year, he writes in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (c.731), three warships of the Anglorum siue Saxonum gens (tribe of Angles or Saxons) sailed to Celtic Britain at the invitation of the local king, Vortigern, to help protect the island from Germanic invaders. Under the command of the brothers Hengist and Horsa (both names mean ‘horse’), these mercenaries soon amassed an inuincibilem exercitum (invincible army), rebelled against their employers and conquered the island themselves. Though Bede still listed ‘British’ (by which he meant an old version of Celtic) as one of Britain’s five languages, along with English, Pictish, Scottish and Latin, by his lifetime the Britons had been marginalised to the remotest northern and western corners of the island, or else subsumed by Anglo-Saxon society. It’s possible he never heard the old language spoken.
For the sixth-century British monk Gildas, author of the only surviving near contemporary account of the invasion, the Anglo-Saxons were not so much an unbeatable army as ‘dogs’ and ‘thieves’ who spread across the island like a ‘virulent plant’. But he didn’t think their occupation would be permanent. A religious and political agitator, Gildas believed that the pagan Anglo-Saxons had been sent as divine punishment for the Britons’ sins, and would be defeated as soon as the islanders got God back on their side. He thought he stood on the cusp of an era of moral and political regeneration. In reality, he was the last chronicler of a culture that was about to fade away.
The transformation that took place during the two centuries between Gildas and Bede is startling. Gildas grew up in an elite society which in many ways looked Roman. Some of the wealthy had villas; many spoke Latin and prayed to a Christian god. Bede was the inheritor of a world in which their equivalents lived in small wooden halls, worshipped Woden and drank ale from aurochs’ horns (though by his time they had converted back to Christianity). None of these changes was inevitable. When similar cultural encounters took place elsewhere in Europe, it was often the Roman ways that prevailed. After straying into Gaul, the pagan Franks ended up adopting the language and religion of their hosts, becoming kings of polities that looked much as they had in the preceding centuries. Old English, by contrast, borrowed no more than a handful of words from British. (A few, such as ‘bin’, ‘crag’ and ‘tor’, have survived.) Over the course of a century and a half the English erased the old society from the island’s lowlands, founding a Germanic enclave in what had been Celtic land for more than a millennium.
How this happened remains obscure. After the withdrawal of the Romans, the quality of the archaeological record drops off so precipitously that archaeologists often describe the period simply as ‘sub-Roman’. Apart from Gildas, there are few written sources to help fill in the picture. The historian F.M. Stenton, in his magisterial Anglo-Saxon England (1943), went so far as to say that ‘between the end of Roman government in Britain and the emergence of the earliest English kingdoms there stretches a long period of which the history cannot be written.’ In How England Began, Nicholas Higham takes a less pessimistic view. Bringing together decades of research, he gives as complete an account as is possible of the transition from Roman to British to Anglo-Saxon England. It’s an impressive demonstration of how far the discipline has advanced since Stenton’s time, in both the quantity of material unearthed and the sophistication with which it has been analysed. But it’s also a reminder of how much our understanding of this period still depends on tenuous evidence and educated guesswork.
Britain was under Roman rule for four centuries, from 43 AD to around 410. Yet it was always an awkward, peripheral part of the empire. Romans seem to have regarded it as a cold, rainy place whose inhabitants were ‘savage ploughmen’ (in the words of the poet Rutilius Namatianus). This had initially been part of the attraction. To Claudius, facing political and military instability, the subjugation of such an inhospitable island must have seemed a way to shore up his hold on the throne. Suetonius may have claimed that the Britons submitted ‘without any battle or bloodshed’, but the emperor’s pride in his achievement is obvious from the friezes he commissioned to commemorate it, which have been found as far away as Aphrodisias in what is now Turkey, and from the naval crown he had placed on the gable of his palace in Rome. According to Suetonius, incorporating Britain into the empire meant ‘having passed, and, as it were, conquered the ocean’.
The things that made Britain an attractive prospect for conquest made it a less pleasant place to govern. In its early years the province ran a substantial tax deficit, its yield falling far short of the cost of maintaining an army there. Though it eventually started supplying Continental troops with grain and wool, the climate was too cold for the crops the Romans really valued. Olives didn’t take; the wine wasn’t as good as it was back home. Other industry remained limited. Mining, smelting, brewing, salt extraction and potting, Higham writes, ‘were often seasonal and none was large in scale’. Despite building cities, roads, ports and villas that surpassed anything constructed in the next millennium, it seems that the Romans never established themselves in Britain quite as enthusiastically as they did elsewhere.
Britons, in turn, never established themselves in Rome quite as enthusiastically as other provincials. Roman rule, of course, reshaped British society. Military tribal hierarchies gave way to civilian Roman ones; elites spoke, dressed and educated their sons according to the fashions of the imperial capital. Yet Britons kept their insular identity and never participated much in what Higham calls the ‘imperial project’. Most governors were parachuted in from abroad: before 400, no native Briton seems to have made it beyond the rank of centurion. The poor, rural communities that made up the bulk of the populace stuck overwhelmingly to their mother tongues; in the more isolated regions, they probably didn’t speak Latin at all. The medieval myth that Britain was named after Aeneas’ descendant Brutus – and thus had classical origins stretching back to before the Roman invasion – would not, at this time, have pleased many people. (The story’s source seems to be Isidore of Seville’s suggestion in the sixth century that the island got its name from the bruti, or brutes, who lived there.) When Gildas reflected on his island’s history a little more than a century after the empire receded, he had a clear understanding of its people as British, not Roman – even if that understanding was informed by the classical concepts of gens (people) and patria (fatherland).
Some scholars have understood the ‘fall’ of Roman Britain in terms of this insular identity, as the result of a revolt by nativist provincials. Higham paints a more complex picture of an island ‘slipping out of Rome’s grasp due to government ineptitude, regional tensions, external attacks and difficulties in tax collection and army recruitment’. In the fourth century, amid the tumult of the empire’s power struggles, the Romans had temporarily lost control several times. As different parties jostled for the throne, and barbarian armies made incursions into imperial territory, Rome had on various occasions recalled troops to the Continent, leaving Britain to fend for itself. But the Romans had always returned. When Scottish and Irish warbands came down from the lands beyond Hadrian’s Wall, or Saxon raiding parties attacked from across the North Sea, imperial legions had ultimately come to the rescue. In the first decade of the fifth century – a period of Visigoth attacks and attempted usurpations – the British garrison rebelled under its leader, Constantine, and marched off to Gaul in the hope of installing him as emperor. Nothing suggested to those staying behind that this time the legions would not come back. For decades the provincial elites left in charge kept administering the island under the assumption that imperial rule would eventually return, appealing to Rome when they were under attack and refraining from ostentatious displays of independence. Roman bureaucrats, for their part, continued to include the old British garrisons in their imperial inventories. ‘What, in retrospect, looks like a critical moment,’ Higham writes, ‘was unrecognisable as such at the time.’
During this bizarre interregnum the young were educated in grammar and rhetoric, preparing them for careers that no longer existed. Remote garrisons maintained their internal hierarchies, but no longer had an emperor to whom they owed loyalty. A veneer of romanitas was everywhere: St Patrick, the most famous Briton of this generation (and one of the few whose life we can reconstruct in detail), had a classical name (Patricius), was the son of a decurion (councillor) and grew up in what he humbly described as a villula (small villa). Yet the world to which those identity-markers belonged was disappearing. Patrick and his compatriots traded with an ever dwindling supply of clipped Roman coins, stored their food in patched-up Roman pottery, lived in the shells of Roman towns. With the collapse of the imperial economy, much skilled industry disappeared. Mining and smelting declined, so swordsmiths worked with scraps of recycled metal. More mundane items such as nails stopped being produced altogether. Farmers had such difficulty acquiring tools that some simply switched to raising livestock. Gildas described the Britons in this period as ‘frightened chicks’.
Higham, however, is keen to stress the positives. ‘The picture is increasingly one of late Romano-British communities evolving,’ he insists, ‘not collapsing.’ Freed from the pressures of taxation, farmers were able to grow the crops they wanted, rather than those demanded by imperial administrators. Diets may even have improved. And the departure of the Romans didn’t mean that the Britons were cut off from the rest of the late antique world. Clergy participated in Continental theological debates. Educational standards seem to have remained high. A Gaulish bishop who visited the island in the middle of the fifth century encountered a lively landscape of churches, crossroads, fields and towns. It was around that time that the old Roman structures began to coalesce into a patchwork of kingdoms. Roman titles and offices evolved into distinct aristocracies: in the north, garrisons morphed into warbands; in the richer lowlands of the south, larger polities seem to have developed out of the relatively centralised classical structures of government.
It is into this society that the first of the ‘Angles or Saxons’ arrived. Though the events surrounding their appearance remain mysterious, Higham agrees with Bede and Gildas (and most modern scholars) that they were invited by the early British kings. One of the knottiest issues facing the rulers, he writes, was ‘how to both maintain social order and secure themselves against external attack, pending the return of imperial troops’. British society had been demilitarised for centuries, and many of its experienced soldiers had disappeared with the imperial forces. Equipping an army can’t have been easy at a time when farmers were struggling to get decent ploughs. Gildas thought the decision to task outsiders with the island’s defence was an act of ‘desperate and crude mental dullness’, but at the time it must have seemed uncontroversial: Romans had for many years been hiring barbarian foederati to protect the northern frontiers.
The archaeological record over the next century and a half shows Anglo-Saxon settlements spreading like inkblots across the British landscape, starting in the south-east (where the mercenaries may originally have been stationed as coastguards) then moving gradually north and west. By the late ninth century, the English kingdoms stretched from Exeter in the south-west to Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth in the north-east. (Like the Romans, the English didn’t make it to Strathclyde and the lands beyond the Forth, which remained culturally Celtic.) Two questions in particular have been the subject of debate. How did the incomers g0 from being a few small rebellious bands to a dominant cultural and economic force? And what happened to the Britons?
The traditional account follows Bede’s description of the Anglo-Saxons’ raising an army, massacring or displacing the natives and filling the empty land with Germanic farmers – what the historian David Dumville once described as a ‘cultural genocide following resisted invasion and colonisation’. Reading the early notices in the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, it’s hard to disagree. ‘In this year Ælle and his three sons, Cymen, Wlencing and Cissa, came with three ships to the land of Britain,’ the entry for 477 states, ‘and there killed many Britons and drove others in flight to the wood.’ By the time the annal was put to parchment in the ninth century the British had been rechristened wealas (foreigners), a term that was soon used to refer to slaves and which eventually provided the name for Wales, a Celtic stronghold beyond the grasp of the English kings. One of the more unflattering Old English riddles hinges on a double entendre about a wonfeax Wale – a dark-haired slave girl, or a dark-haired British woman – who has been feorran broht (brought from afar). That the woman in question is described as alien suggests that the perceived connection between the British and their old heartlands had been comprehensively severed.
Many Britons appear to have fled to Wales in the fifth and sixth centuries. Linguistic evidence shows that Latin speakers – the former elites – retreated west, where they fortified old settlements and reoccupied abandoned Roman forts. Welsh court poets began calling the lost lowland territory ‘Lloegyr’: a foreign land, inhabited by foreign people. Other Britons went to the Continent, establishing enclaves in Galicia and Brittany (where Celtic Breton is spoken to this day). Yet Higham persuasively rejects both the idea that the Anglo-Saxons had a large army and that the Britons were fully displaced. Drawing on archaeological and legal evidence, the picture he paints is of a steady trickle of small warbands crossing the North Sea, settling in fertile valleys, killing or expelling the local landowners and subjugating the peasants.
These first ‘Anglo-Saxons’ were far from homogeneous: analysis of DNA in early English graves shows they came from as far away as Norway and Gaul. And, at least initially, this was not a total conquest. Some areas remained under nominal British control as late as the seventh century. Parts of Hertfordshire, for instance, seem to have resisted English encroachment for decades, stubbornly remaining in their old Roman towns and worshipping their old Christian cults. The name of the small river Beane, which winds from Stevenage to Hertford, probably comes from a Brittonic word akin to the Welsh bychan (‘little’). Members of certain early royal lineages later claimed by the English had distinctly British names: Cerdic, the first king of Wessex, whom Alfred the Great claimed as an ancestor, and the Mercian kings Pybba and Penda. The name of Æthelwealh, the last independent king of Sussex in the seventh century, translates to ‘noble Briton’. It’s not known whether these men were part Celtic by descent, or simply named in an insular tradition. But Higham suggests that this was a time of ‘strong regional identities, some of which may have been more or less British’.
Subjugated islanders probably made up the majority of the population in the new English enclaves. They are almost invisible in the archaeological record, however, which is dominated by the free English farmers, or ceorls (churls), who ruled over them. Although in time the word ‘churl’ would carry distinctly unaristocratic associations, the richer among the early ceorls were served by enslaved cupbearers and commanded dependants known as hlafæta (loaf-eaters). Higham sees them as central to the spread of Englishness. It was through the ceorls, he argues, that the English language, customs and material culture became markers not just of ethnic identity but of social position. Over a number of generations, as the ceorls conquered and exploited more and more British-held lands (which in time cohered into the first Anglo-Saxon kingdoms), their mores came to be adopted by anyone seeking higher status.
Yet it remains curious that in the following centuries Britons comprehensively abandoned their ancestral language and traditions. In the final part of the book Higham proposes two explanations. The first is economic: ‘Continuing to be British under “Anglo-Saxon” control was expensive.’ By the early seventh century, it must have been clear that Gildas’s predicted expulsion of the English canes was unlikely ever to materialise. Many of those still holding out ‘may well have tired of waiting ... and begun to assimilate’. The second explanation is religious. When, from the sixth century, the English began to convert, one of the main distinctions between indigenes and incomers fell away. And after the start of Augustine of Canterbury’s mission in 597, the Church in Rome began clamping down on indigenous practices, such as the local appointment of bishops and alternative ways of celebrating Easter. British clergy were sidelined and British saints’ cults pronounced heretical, or else replaced with English or universal alternatives. By the 660s Pope Vitalian could describe the Northumbrian king Oswiu as a champion of the ‘true and apostolic faith’. So much of British identity up to this point had been tied up with ancestral religious practices and a sense of difference from the ‘barbaric, pagan oppressors’. But after the English became ‘a Christian nation closely associated with Rome’, Britons began to ‘swap their existing worldviews for the Anglo-Roman alternative’.
Both explanations are plausible. Neither is satisfactory. Cultural assimilation is never as simple as swapping worldviews. And as we know from other examples, it is rarely an absolute, one-way process. In early modern Wales, for instance, the hen iaith (old language) prevailed among the lower classes even after the aristocracy switched to English. Why didn’t something similar happen in the lowlands? And why didn’t assimilating Britons leave more traces in the English language? The disappearance of the British language and customs from medieval England is a remarkable fact of history. Quite how it happened remains – despite Higham’s efforts – impossible to say.
For Stenton, the period between the fifth and eighth centuries could be studied in one of two ways: ‘either as an epilogue to the history of Roman Britain or as a prologue to the history of Saxon England’. One of Higham’s great achievements is to show the value of taking a longer view. This highlights the continuities: Roman influence didn’t disappear with the empire; Britons didn’t vanish with Hengist and Horsa. ‘Roman metalworking techniques,’ Higham writes, ‘bled into “Anglo-Saxon” ... suggesting craftsmen adjusting to whatever markets were available to them.’ Romano-British objects have been found in early English burial grounds. Even the first English poet, Cædmon, had a British name.
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