378  

If we compare the development of British and Irish, however, we

can note some very basic features that may arise out of a super-
strate situation. The neo-Brittonic transition, during which British
was transformed into Old Welsh, Cornish, Cumbric and Breton,
comprised a number of stages; lenition (the softening of medial and
terminal consonants), apocope (the loss of final syllables), syncope of
medial vowels, spirantization and the development of a new quan-
tity system, in that order.155 Sims-Williams would modify this slightly,
dividing “lenition” into two stages “first spirantization” of b, d, g and
m, and then “voicing” of p, t and k.156 Similar, though not in all
cases identical, changes occurred in the transition from Primitive
Irish (the language of the bulk of ogham inscriptions) to Old Irish
(the language of the earliest manuscripts). The transformations in
Irish probably occurred at a slightly later date than the comparable
ones in British, although the two sequences seem to have over-
lapped.157
Despite the similarity of the phonological transformation of the
two languages, however, the morpho-syntactical structures failed to
keep pace with one another. In Welsh the neo-Brittonic transition
is characterised by the complete collapse of the case system and a
massive simplification of the verbal system. This has been ascribed
to the effects of apocope,158 but since apocope occurred also in Irish
which retained much of its grammatical complexity this seems
insufficient explanation in itself.159 One possibility, though at present
unprovable, is that this was, in part at least, the result of a massive
switch to Old Welsh by preferential Romance speakers who, as the
social elite, exerted influence on subsequent development of the lan-
guage in disproportion to their numbers.
Turning to the archaeological record it is interesting to note that
the switch from Insular Romance to Welsh as the language of the
elite coincides with the falling off of imported ceramics from the
Mediterranean and western Gaul.160 Ewen Campbell has suggested

155
Jackson, Language and History, pp. 695–6.
156
Sims-Williams, “Dating the Transition”, pp. 220–1.
157
Ibid., pp. 230–6.
158
Jackson, Language and History, p. 691.
159
Cf. D.E. Evans, “Insular Celtic and the Emergence of Welsh”, Britain 400–600:
Language and History, ed. A. Bammesberger and A. Wollmann (Heidelberg 1990) pp.
149–77.
160
A. Lane, “Trade, Gifts and Cultural Exchange in Dark Age Western Scotland”,
   379

that it is the ending of this exchange which causes various trans-

formations in the archaeological record of western Britain, such as
the abandonment of central fortified sites in Cornwall, and perhaps
Wales, and widespread changes in ecclesiastical art and architec-
ture.161 An alternative scenario might locate agency with the Britons,
since in the Gaelic World these overseas contacts continued and even
expanded, suggesting that there was no problem with supply.162 If
supply was not in issue then it is perhaps demand that we should
consider.
The adoption of a vernacular identity may also, as noted when dis-
cussing the Llandaff material, represent a shift in ideology. Distinctive
sociolects, and even more so language differentiation on the basis of
class, bespeaks a highly stratified society in which the aristocracy are
primarily exploitative. This is probably one reason why the bulk of
the lowland British population are so hard to identify in the archae-
ological record; their land-lords did not leave them with much to
leave us. The social transformation in the West, c. 550–650, can be
seen as the replacement of an exploitative consuming aristocracy,
which had developed under the aegis of the Empire, by a series of
localised, kin-based, redistributive chieftaincies, much like those which
were simultaneously transforming themselves into stratified societies
in Anglo-Saxon England.

Conclusion

Thomas Charles-Edwards has pointed out that the position of Irish

in Dyfed may well have been analogous to that of Insular Romance
throughout the highland zone.163 He points to the fact that the Class
I stones are mostly in Latin, but that a few, principally in western
Dyfed, southern Ceredigion and Brycheiniog, were also in Primitive
Irish. This is in stark contrast to the absence of British inscriptions.
He infers from this, and from the failure of Irish to survive as the

Scotland in Dark Age Britain, ed. B.E. Crawford (St Andrews 1994) pp. 103–15, here
p. 107.
161
E. Campbell, “Trade in the Dark Age West: a Peripheral Activity”, Scotland
in Dark Age Britain, ed. B.E. Crawford (St Andrews 1996) pp. 79–93, here pp. 86–7.
162
Ibid., p. 86.
163
Charles-Edwards, “Language and Society”, p. 704.
380  

language of south-west Wales, despite the retention of a royal dynasty

of Irish origin, that the position of Irish was similar to that of Latin
or Romance. This linguistic history of the Demetian kingdom is of
course typical of the histories of the barbarian kingdoms of Late
Antiquity: a military aristocracy takes over the government of a
region and whilst maintaining their separate identity and language
for a generation or two they gradually assimilated with the local
population, adopting their language and belief systems.164 The same
thing happened with the Franks in most of Gaul, the Goths in Spain
and the Langobards in Italy. In much of western and northern Britain
the native Roman aristocracies seem to have undergone a similar
process so that in many respects, material, sociological and linguis-
tic, the ethnogenesis of the Britons and the establishment of British
regna can be seen as a descent in barbarism.

164
For a fuller discussion of the Demetian kingdom see Thomas, Mute Stones, pp.
51–112, and Charles-Edwards, “Language and Society”, pp. 717–36.
 ANGLO-SAXON GENTES AND REGNA

Barbara Yorke

Problems and sources

A century ago the question of the circumstances surrounding the

emergence of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms appeared to be quite adequately
answered by Gildas’s account of the adventus Saxonum with some addi-
tions by Bede.1 According to a combined account from these writ-
ers, after Britain’s ties with Rome had been severed, Vortigern and
his council hired Saxons who were attacking the east coast to fight
for them, but the Saxon forces eventually grew strong enough to
seize power for themselves. Bede located these events in c. 450, and
claimed that the first kingdom founded as an immediate result of
the coup was that of Kent. At the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury this appeared to be a believable, straightforward account, and
one with possible parallels in other areas of the former Roman Empire
in the west. Unfortunately not one aspect of it has emerged unscathed
in more recent historiography,2 and it is no longer generally seen as
an adequate explanation for the changes that occurred in eastern
Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries, let alone for the emer-
gence of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Even though it has been generally
accepted that Gildas’s account must have some validity, uncertainty
about when and where he wrote, and over whether events he de-
scribed took place in one part of the country consecutively or con-
temporaneously in different parts of the country, not to mention the
problems in interpreting his highly rhetorical style and exhortatory
reasons for writing, have all tended to cast doubt over the wisdom

1
Gildas, The Ruin of Britain and other works, ed. and transl. M. Winterbottom
(London-Chichester 1978) pp. 97–8; Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum 1,15,
ed. B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors [Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People]
(Oxford 1969) pp. 49–53.
2
P. Sims-Williams, “Gildas and the Anglo-Saxons”, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies
6 (1983) pp. 1–30; id., “The settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle”, Anglo-
Saxon England 12 (1983) pp. 1–41.
382  

of placing too much reliance on his relatively brief narrative passage

concerning the Saxon adventus.3 Bede stands suspected of promoting
Kentish and archiepiscopal interests in assigning the leadership of
events to the supposed Kentish founding fathers, Hengist and Horsa,4
or of furthering the idea of an united Christian gens Anglorum through
an account that assigned a common origin to all the Anglo-Saxon
peoples of Britain.5 With other written references to events in east-
ern Britain between c. 450 and 590 being only brief, and so throw-
ing little light on what had occurred,6 the onus for studying this
period has fallen on archaeology with claims that in the absence of
adequate written records fifth- and sixth-century Britain should be
treated as a “prehistoric” period.7 The result has been to suggest
that the immediate post-Roman history of eastern Britain followed
a very different trajectory from that of other former provinces of the
Roman Empire. In the initial planning of the symposium that gave
rise to this volume, there was some doubt over whether the Anglo-
Saxon kingdoms qualified for inclusion, so deep-rooted is the cur-
rent assumption that the severance of Britain from the empire in
c. 410 was a decisive cut-off point so that when Anglo-Saxon king-
doms finally emerged at the end of the seventh century it was in a
context that owed little or nothing to Britain’s Roman heritage.
Behind much archaeological interpretation one can trace the
influence of a model that assumes a complete systems collapse of
the former Roman Empire and its supporting structures in eastern
Britain.8 Through explicit or implicit use of this model it has been
possible to assume that a new society emerged, composed of some
Germanic incomers (the scale of immigration is still hotly debated)
and of formerly oppressed British farmers, that lived for a while

3
See, for instance, discussions within Gildas: New Approaches, ed. M. Lapidge and
D.N. Dumville (Woodbridge 1984) and N. Higham, The English Conquest. Gildas and
Britain in the Fifth Century (Manchester 1994).
4
M. Miller, “Bede’s use of Gildas”, English Historical Review 90 (1975) pp. 241–61,
here p. 254.
5
N. Brooks, Bede and the English ( Jarrow 1999) pp. 4–5.
6
D.N. Dumville, “Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend”, History 62 (1977)
pp. 173–92.
7
C. Arnold, The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (2nd edn., London 1997).
8
C. Renfrew, “Post collapse resurgence: culture process in the Dark Ages”,
Ranking, Resource and Exchange. Aspects of the Archaeology of Early European Society, ed.
C. Renfrew and S. Shennan (Cambridge 1982) pp. 113–5.
  - 383

without hierarchies beyond those that could be found in individual

households. What the archaeological evidence seems to show is that
the bulk of the population lived in rural hamlets where the indi-
vidual farmsteads were characteristically uniform in size and form.9
Cemeteries were organised into burial plots based around these house-
holds where differential burial might reflect variations in status due
to age, gender and economic role within the farmstead unit.10 A
clear change occurs in the character of the evidence in the latter
part of the sixth century, with a much more marked demonstration
of hierarchy in both settlement sites and cemeteries,11 that seems to
coincide with the point at which the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms known
from written sources of the seventh and eighth centuries appear on
the historical horizon.12 An influential archaeological model used to
explain how kingdoms could have emerged from the starting-point
of scattered farmstead units is that of peer-polity interaction.13 It is
a model that ultimately derives from anthropological study of very
diverse groups from outside the western European world.14
Archaeology can undoubtedly reveal much about society in the
eastern half of England in the fifth and sixth centuries, but there

9
D. Powlesland, “Early Anglo-Saxon settlements, structures, form and layout”,
The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective,
ed. J. Hines (Woodbridge 1997) pp. 101–24; H. Hamerow, “The earliest Anglo-
Saxon kingdoms”, New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 1: c. 500–700 (Cambridge
forthcoming).
10
H. Härke, “Early Anglo-Saxon social structure”, The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration
Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective, pp. 125–60; N. Stoodley, The
Spindle and the Spear: A Critical Enquiry into the Construction and Meaning of Gender in the
Early Anglo-Saxon Inhumation Burial Rite, British Archaeological Reports, British series
288 (Oxford 1999).
11
J. Shephard, “The social identity of the individual in isolated barrows and bar-
row cemeteries in Anglo-Saxon England”, Space, Hierarchy and Society, ed. B. Burnham
and J. Kingsbury, British Archaeological Reports, International series 59 (Oxford
1979) pp. 47–79; C. Scull, “Social archaeology and Anglo-Saxon kingdom origins”,
The Making of Kingdoms, ed. T. Dickinson and D. Griffiths, Anglo-Saxon Studies in
Archaeology and History 10 (Oxford 1999) pp. 7–24.
12
For instance, the evidence of the royal genealogies is apparently consistent with
the first royal houses coming into existence in the latter half of the sixth century;
D.N. Dumville, “Kingship, genealogies and regnal lists”, Early Medieval Kingship, ed.
P.H. Sawyer and I.N. Wood (Leeds 1977) pp. 72–104, here p. 91.
13
For a clear, balanced acount of how the model might have worked in Anglo-
Saxon England see C. Scull, “Archaeology, early Anglo-Saxon society and the ori-
gins of kingdoms”, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 6 (1993) pp. 65–82.
14
See, for instance, T. Earle, “Chiefdoms in archaeological and historical per-
spective”, Annual Review of Anthropology 16 (1987) pp. 279–308.
384  

are grounds for asking whether it is capable of providing the whole

story. One of the advantages of the type of comparative study that
has given rise to this volume is that it provides an opportunity to
review aspects of the emergence of Germanic kingdoms in eastern
Britain in the context of potentially comparable developments in
other areas of the western empire, and so to reopen the question of
a link between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the late Roman dio-
cese of Britain. Historians have on the whole been more concerned
than archaeologists about an apparent divergence between the his-
tory of Britain and that of other former Roman provinces in the
fifth and sixth centuries, and with the concept of an apparent power
vacuum between c. 450–c. 550.15 The picture drawn from the archaeo-
logical evidence can also begin to sound dangerously like the Tacitean
society of Germanic free peasants so in vogue in the nineteenth cen-
tury, and the competition for power in the peer-polity model like a
Darwinian battle for the survival of the fittest compressed into a rel-
atively short time-span. The furnished cemeteries of the late fifth
and sixth centuries have been a natural focus of research, especially
in the last two decades, but they do not necessarily represent the
practices of the whole of society. For instance, not only are there
unfurnished burials within these cemeteries, but also entire ceme-
teries without grave-goods in the eastern half of England that seem
to have been in use during the same period, suggesting that modes
of life (and death) were not as uniform as is sometimes implied.16 It
may be that archaeology shows us only a partial picture, and it is
a moot point whether political systems always have an impact that
is discernible in the archaeological record. How much of the com-

15
E. James, “The origins of barbarian kingdoms: the continental evidence”, The
Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. S. Bassett (Leicester 1989) pp. 40–52; G. Halsall,
“The origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: a Merovingianist speaks out” (unpublished
lecture, Institute of Historical Research, London 1995).
16
R.A. Chambers, “The Late- and Sub-Roman Cemetery at Queensford Farm,
Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxon.”, Oxoniensia 52 (1987) pp. 35–69; T. Williamson, The
Origins of Hertfordshire (Manchester 2000) p. 70 (Verulamium). Such unfurnished ceme-
teries are, of course, difficult to date without recourse to scientific techniques like
radio carbon dating (used at Queensford farm) and so many similar cemeteries may
have failed to be assigned to the correct period or before the twentieth century
may not even have been recorded. Similarly there is evidence for occupation dat-
ing to fifth and sixth centuries at late Roman villas and other Romano-British sites
which has produced little that is distinctively “Germanic”—see, for instance, K.R.
Dark, Britain and the End of the Roman Empire (Stroud 2000) pp. 62–9.
  - 385

plexities of Frankish history in the late fifth and sixth centuries could
have been constructed from the archaeological record alone? The
lack of detailed written accounts is something that means there will
always be uncertainty over many of the aspects surrounding the
emergence of Anglo-Saxon gentes and regna, and that some of the
questions posed by the organisers of the symposium will have to go
unanswered. The issue of some of the general assumptions about
developments in the eastern half of Britain in the fifth and sixth cen-
turies, fuelled by recent archaeological studies, will be central to the
discussions that follow.

Angles, Saxons and Jutes: gentes before and after migration to Britain

Bede’s gloss on Gildas’s description of the Anglo-Saxon adventus

described the new arrivals as coming de tribus Germaniae populis for-
tioribus, id est Saxonibus, Anglis, Iutis.17 It has been noted that Bede’s
Latin vocabulary in this passage differs in a number of respects from
that he customarily used in the Historia Ecclesiastica, leading to the
suggestion that it represents an addition he received, perhaps from
Canterbury, at a relatively late stage in the work’s composition.18
Nevertheless populi is a word that he employed, together with natio,
as a synonym for gens.19 Whether Bede composed the passage or not,
we can take it that he accepted that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes
could be identified as distinct gentes. Indeed, earlier in the same chap-
ter he wrote of the Anglorum sive Saxonum gens when adapting Gildas’s
text. The existence of peoples called Angles, Saxons and Jutes on
the North Sea littoral, in what is now northern Germany and south-
ern Denmark,20 as well as in Britain naturally led in early studies of
the fifth and sixth centuries to the expectation that there had been
a simple migration of gentes.21 However, more recent considerations

17
Bede, Hist. Eccl. 1,15, pp. 50–1.
18
E. John, “The point of Woden”, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 5
(1992) pp. 127–34, here p. 129; Brooks, Bede and the English, pp. 11–2.
19
P.F. Jones, A Concordance to the Historia Ecclesiastica of Bede (Cambridge Mass.
1929) pp. 311–2; 403–4; J. Campbell, Bede’s Reges et Principes ( Jarrow 1979) pp. 3–4.
20
I.N. Wood, “Before and after migration to Britain”, The Anglo-Saxons from the
Migration Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective, pp. 41–64.
21
See, for instance, J.N.L. Myres, “The Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes”,
Proceedings of the British Academy 56 (1970) pp. 1–32.
386  

have suggested that matters were not so straightforward and that, as

seems to have been the case with several other Germanic peoples
discussed in this volume, continuity of name may conceal major
changes in the constitution of a gens after migration from the home-
land and settlement in a Roman province.
Archaeological evidence from the fifth century, in the form of arte-
facts, funeral rituals and building traditions, shows without doubt
that there was migration to eastern and southern England from the
traditional homelands of the Anglo-Saxons in north Germany and
southern Scandinavia, even if the scale of migration is still a matter
of debate.22 Language change in the eastern half of England whereby
Old English dialects appear to have totally replaced Latin and Celtic
as the lingua franca also supports the idea of significant migration even
if there is also debate over the scale and social level of migration
needed to bring about such change.23 In the eastern (Anglian) dis-
tricts of England there was a predominance of people who appear
to have come from continental Angeln in modern Schleswig-Holstein,
and even some archaeological and environmental support for Bede’s
claim that the area was heavily depopulated as a result.24 But Angles
were not the only Germanic migrants into the area. Böhme’s map-
ping of brooches from the Saxon homelands shows a wide distrib-
ution throughout eastern and southern England, and that they were
not confined to the areas that were identified as “Saxon” in later
kingdom names.25 A broader span of archaeological evidence sug-

22
J. Hines, “The becoming of the English: identity, material culture and lan-
guage in early Anglo-Saxon England”, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 7
(1994) pp. 49–59; C. Scull, “Approaches to material culture and social dynamics
of the migration period of eastern England”, Europe Between Late Antiquity and the
Middle Ages, ed. J. Bintliff and H. Hamerow, British Archaeological Reports, Inter-
national series 617 (Oxford 1995) pp. 71–83; Hamerow, “The earliest Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms”.
23
J. Hines, “Philology, archaeology and the adventus Saxonum vel Anglorum”, Britain
400–600: Language and History, ed. A. Bammesberger and A. Wollmann (Heidelberg
1990) pp. 17–36; M. Gelling, “Why aren’t we speaking Welsh?”, Anglo-Saxon Studies
in Archaeology and History 6 (1993) pp. 51–6; T.M. Charles-Edwards, “Language and
society among the insular Celts, A.D. 400–1000”, The Celtic World, ed. M. Green
(London 1995) pp. 703–36.
24
M. Gebühr, “Angulus desertus?”, Studien zur Sachsenforschung 11, ed. H.-J. Häß-
ler (Oldenburg 1998) pp. 43–8; Hamerow, “The earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms”.
25
H.W. Böhme, “Das Ende der Römerherrschaft in Britannien und die angel-
sächsische Besiedlung Englands im 5. Jahrhundert”, Jahrbuch des Römisch-Germanischen
Zentralmuseums Mainz 33 (1986) pp. 469–574.
  - 387

gests that people were migrating to Britain in the fifth century from
other Germanic areas besides those of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.
Franks, Frisians and Norwegians are among those who appear to
have entered the country.26 Bede also seems to have been aware that
many different Germanic people may have migrated to Britain for
in a later chapter he wrote, of an individual involved in sending
missions to Germania, that in Germania plurimas noverat esse nationes, a
quibus Angli vel Saxones, qui nunc Britanniam incolunt, genus et originem duxisse
noscuntur.27 There has been much debate about problems involved in
the interpretation and validity of the list that Bede provides which
names Frisians, Rugians, Danes, Huns, Old Saxons and Bructeri.28
Whether the peoples have been correctly identified or not, what is
of central interest is that Bede appears to claim that Anglian and
Saxon identities in Britain emerged as a secondary development as
a result of various different Germanic nationes migrating to the province.
Archaeological evidence from the sixth century seems to be broadly
in agreement with this claim. Material culture and traditions of build-
ing and burial do not seem to have been translated wholesale from
any one area of Germany to eastern Britain.29 Rather former ways
of doing things were adapted and new hybridised forms emerged
that drew not only on disparate North Sea backgrounds, but also
probably on Romano-British skills and practices, though there are
differing views on the Romano-British contributions to such aspects
as the Anglo-Saxon building tradition or the quoit brooch style.30

26
Hines, “The becoming of the English”; H. Hamerow, “Migration theory and
the Anglo-Saxon ‘identity crisis’”, Migrations and Invasion in Archaeological Explanation,
ed. J. Chapman and H. Hamerow, British Archaeological Reports, International
series 664 (1997) pp. 33–44.
27
“He knew that there were very many peoples in Germany from whom the
Angles and Saxons, who now live in Britain, derive their descent and origin”; Bede,
Hist. Eccl. 5,9, pp. 476–7.
28
W. Pohl, “Ethnic names and identities in the British Isles: a comparative per-
spective”, The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographic
Perspective, pp. 7–40, here pp. 14–6; Wood, “Before and after migration to Britain”,
pp. 44–5; 55–8.
29
P. Sørensen, “Jutes in Kent? Considerations of the problem of ethnicity in
southern Scandinavia and Kent in the migration period”, Method and Theory in
Historical Archaeology—Papers of the Medieval Brugge 1997 Conference, ed. G. de Boe and
F. Verhaeghe (Zellik 1997) pp. 165–73; C. Hills, “Did the people of Spong Hill
come from Schleswig-Holstein?”, Studien zur Sachsenforschung 11, pp. 145–54.
30
A. Marshall and G. Marshall, “Differentiation, change and continuity in Anglo-