Category: Storyline

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So it’s 568. And things in what will someday become England are still chaotic. Remember what was going on up north in Bernicia? Where Ida, who was probably part of some sort of Anglian group, had taken control of Bamburgh, then he died, and then his sons started taking over for him? Well, that’s still going on. It looks like Adda is probably dead. Maybe. It’s really muddy. And like I mentioned earlier, he probably was the king who was fighting with the Brits and killed a number of their kings… maybe… But sometime around now, Adda is no longer king of Bernicia and the throne is held by his brother: Aethelric. We think.

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Alright, so when we left off, Cerdic and his son had recently arrived on the island and the Battle of Mons Badonicus had just taken place. So that’s exciting. And Gildas says that it was followed by peace, and procopius tells us that Germans were fleeing from Britannia as late as about 30 years later. And from the archaeological record, and the scattered references in written texts, it doesn’t seem like there were a lot of military warbands invading… but rather, as we will discuss in this episode, this looks more like farmers who were migrating. And this might have been happening for quite some time, since we’re told the Saxons had been landing on British shores for at least 100 years.

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Right, so here we are right in the middle of all the drama and bloodshed that has been called the Anglo Saxon invasion. We have famous names such as Hengest and Aelle showing up.

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Ok, it’s been a while since we’ve spoken about the story. Instead, we’ve been chatting about the culture and the people, we’ve been speaking about digs and hoards, we’ve been discussed booze and horse dung. But we haven’t spoken too much about the politics of the time.

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Ok, we’ve been getting pretty deep into the weeds and have been getting farther and farther from a coherent story. On the one hand, the culture is the story, but on the other hand it’s hard to get attached to a story if you forget who we are talking about and the people involved. So I thought that now would be a good time to tell a story about a community that was living in the early post-Roman era. After all, I’ve been spending a lot of time telling you how things weren’t as bad as you imagine so I might have given you the impression things were fine. They weren’t. Especially in the early parts, people were sickly, their lives were bleak, and it was a scary and violent time to be alive. That isn’t to say that people in the Roman era, especially the poor, were healthy and happy… it looks like they were also in pretty dire straights when compared to their Iron Age kin. But I think it’s important to put some of this stuff into context and remember that, while things weren’t necessarily as awful and culturally devoid as people might imagine, things were still pretty rough. Especially in the early parts.

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Ok, so last week I left you on a bit of a cliffhanger. We talked about the invasion stories and I alluded to how some people don’t believe that there was an invasion, but I didn’t really go into a serious analysis of the evidence as it relates to it.

But worry not, this entire episode is going to consist of nerdy analysis as well as a story about a miracle that doesn’t seem particularly miraculous. So lets get into it!

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So to start with I’m going to try to compile the various accounts and stories we have of the Anglo Saxon invasion into a single narrative. As you might recall from prior episodes, this means that I’ll be drawing from some rather unreliable sources. But I think that telling the story in a single cohesive fashion will be useful. After that, I’ll break it down and we can discuss evidence supporting or contradicting the story.

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So today we’re going to do a forest view of what we’ll be talking about over the next few months. And then, after this episode, we’ll be getting down into the trees. I figure this is the best way for you to have a firm grasp of what is going on and what I’m talking about, since this is a pretty murky area of history.

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