THE FOLIO SOCIETY

In the 'dark ages' between the fall of Rome and the high Middle Ages, the most sophisticated and distinctive culture in Western Europe belonged to the Anglo Saxons. Although they ruled England for 500 years, today only tantalising fragments of their art, myth–making and poetry remain. Their legacy, however, has proved enduring, forming the very cornerstones of Englishness.

From the Lindisfarne Gospels to the riddles of the Exeter Book, the Anglo–Saxons continue to fire our imaginations. Modern archaeology has made many significant discoveries, but nothing can bring the people of dark–age England as vividly before us as their own writings – the law–codes, letters, herbals, histories and poems which have survived the centuries.

Divided into 3 volumes, this newly commissioned set covers Anglo–Saxon history from the early 5th century when the first tribes swept into Britain, through a golden age of culture, their long struggle with the Vikings, to the Norman conquest and its aftermath.

England's earliest history revealed

Volume 1. The Coming of the Anglo–Saxons

Romans abandoned Britain at the beginning of the 5th century, sporadic raids by Germanic tribes turned to invasion and settlement. Beowulf and other poems reveal the character and legendary past of the Anglo–Saxons, but the actual events of those early years would be unknown were it not for two notable sources: the Anglo–Saxons Chronicle and Bede's writings.

In these accounts, we see how numerous petty fiefs coalesced into powerful kingdoms and converted to Christianity. Here were the seeds for a great flowering of Anglo–Saxon culture: monastic foundations in Northumbria produced artistic marvels including the Lindisfarne Gospels, while scholarship was symbolised by men like Alcuin, the tutor of Charlemagne, and Bede himself, 'the father of English history', writing in the monastery of Jarrow.

Face to face with the Anglo–Saxons

Volume 2. Anglo–Saxons Lore and Learning

Dates of battles alone convey little to us of what it was like to live in any given period of history - but the selection of poetry and prose collected here fleshes out the character of the Anglo-Saxons, their fears, passions and amusements. The absolute loyalty of a warrior to his lord, the pain of exile from hearth and family is found in the haunting laments The Wanderer and The Seafarer.

In the many Lives and works of Christian philosophy, we see a religious passion and love of learning that meant the Anglo–Saxons were as likely to 'travel the lanes of the sea' for God as for earthly gain. Although the devastating Viking attacks laid waste many monasteries, there was a renaissance of Anglo–Saxon culture under the patronage of King Alfred, who himself translated and adapted many works. Amid the great devout meditations and lyrical elegies, we also gain glimpses of the earthy humour and everyday concerns of Anglo–Saxon people in riddles, rhymes and conversation books.

From Viking raids to Norman conquest

Volume 3. The Fall of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms

The Viking sack of Lindisfarne in 792 rocked Anglo–Saxons England to its core. Viking raids devastated churches, villages and families and in Anglo–Saxon poetry of the time the Vikings were called 'the slaughter–wolves'. A series of Anglo–Saxon kings stood against them, sometimes winning victories, sometimes driven back, sometimes buying protection with tribute. Chronicles, Lives and poems offer tantalising glimpses of heroic deeds, but at the centre of all such tales stands King Alfred, an exceptional warrior whose reign would be remembered as a golden age.

The Anglo–Saxons met their end only indirectly through the Vikings, for the Normans were of Viking stock. King Harold fought off the army of his brother Tostig and the King of Norway at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, only to face eventual defeat at Hastings. Legends sprang up that King Harold had not died in the battle, but wandered the earth, alone and unrecognised, while other Anglo–Saxon folk tales, including that of Hereward the Wake, celebrate attempted rebellions and resistance to Norman rule.

Lighting up the Dark Ages

SIMON KEYNES

The Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data, found on the backs of the title pages of modern books on British history, defines the Anglo-Saxon period as extending from 449 to 1066. These were indeed traditionally the 'dark' ages, whether in the sense that relatively little is known of the period in general, or because they were perceived as benighted times which preceded the dawn of civilisation.

Unsurprisingly, the modern perception of this period is quite different. Historians are now the first to acknowledge that the very concept of an ‘Adventus Saxonum’ (449) emerged from a process of literary development leading from Gildas’s polemical tract On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain via Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and is seen from archaeological and place-name evidence to stand for a more extended and complex period of settlement.

And while the battle of Hastings (1066) was an event of the kind which had to be invented by the English to mark the beginning of their history, their influence across a period of over six hundred years was such that rather more than a battle would be required to mark its end. What happened in between was notable not for 'darkness' of any kind, but should be regarded as a deeply formative period in the history of Britain, which gave rise to much that persists to the present day.

For their part, the heroes and villains who used to populate the pages of any account of Anglo-Saxon history have given ground in modern historiography to a variety of themes and issues. The Anglo-Saxon settlements in the fifth and sixth centuries led to the emergence of the several kingdoms which lend vestiges of their separate identities to the modern regions of England; while the conversion of the English to Christianity in the seventh century helped significantly to make them aware of their common identity among the inhabitants of Britain, and lay not far behind some of the earliest expressions of a distinctively English culture, whether in poetry or prose, or (for example) in stone sculpture and the decoration of books.

In the eighth century the Mercians developed a form of political supremacy which depended heavily on their ability to exploit the wealth of London and the south-east. The West Saxons had similar aims, but set about them in different ways, and began in the ninth century to assert their own dominance across the south of England. External factors, whether benign, in the form of influences from the Continent, or malevolent, in the form of Viking invasions, served as further catalysts of change; and in the tenth century a combination of political, social, economic and religious factors, still imperfectly understood, led to the emergence of a unified kingdom of England, with its main artery along the River Thames and its heart in London.

When the Danes conquered England in 1016, they brought little themselves and took over a fully functioning administration; and when the Normans followed suit, fifty years later in 1066, they too were able to take advantage of what they found.

One of the particular attractions of this period for a modern reader arises from the variety and quality of the available source material. Bede's Ecclesiastical History, completed in 731, is by any standards a work of genius, driven by a serious purpose yet enlivened bymany a well-told tale, ranging fromthe discussion of the merits of Christianity at a meeting of the Northumbrian royal council, to the story of the first recorded horse race in English history. Views of English affairs in the mid-eighth and late eighth century come from the letters of Boniface and Alcuin, both expats active on the Continent. The layers of material brought together in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, first compiled in the late ninth century and continued thereafter by a succession of different hands, provide a ‘timeline’ for the whole period; and it is from this source that we learn of King Alfred's triumph over Viking invaders, of the trials and tribulations endured a hundred years later by King Æthelred the Unready, and of King Harold's campaigns in 1066. Further variety is provided by the Lives of the saints, including Cuthbert, Wilfrid and Guthlac in the late seventh and eighth centuries and Dunstan, Æthelwold and Oswald in the tenth century. No less interesting, and more highly charged politically, are the secular biographies of King Alfred, Queen Emma (wife first of Æthelred and then of Cnut) and King Edward the Confessor.Literary sources of these kinds are complemented by vernacular poetry and prose, often of the highest quality, and by other kinds of material, including law-codes, charters and coins.

Chronicles of the Dark Ages, selected by Richard Barber, brings together in three volumes many of the best and most immediately appealing of the written sources bearing on the history and culture of Anglo-Saxon England. The first volume covers the early period, from the fifth century to the eighth, and includes Beowulf (now playing in cinemas to appreciative audiences, starring Angelina Jolie, somewhat improbably, as Grendel’s mother); and the third covers the period from the Viking invasions in the ninth century to the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, including Archbishop Wulfstan’s famous sermon addressed to the English people at the height of the troubles which beset them during the reign of King Æthelred the Unready. The second volume, sandwiched in between, contains a variety of texts which convey a good sense of themes known to have exercised the Anglo-Saxon mind: the code of conduct observed among Christian warriors; the tribulations of exile and loss; ancient and obscure branches of learning; and understanding of the world around them. The texts as a whole transport the reader into the company of people who may be largely unfamiliar, but who acted out their lives in a landscape which is unmistakable; and they serve most effectively (in combination with the illustrations) to dispel any presumption that the Anglo-Saxon period was very much darker than our own.

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