The Auldest Tung

The Preamble

Germanic people probably first came, at least in numbers, if small numbers, to Britain, north and south, quite possibly including Scotland as far as Antonine Wall or even the Perthshire Gask, as soldiers recruited by the mid-4th Century to the then Roman army. Some of them may even have stayed to an extent, blending into the background culture, before more still arrived, the first probably freelancing, as soldiers of fortune fed by the bounty they could carry off, but then by invitation from Britons, as mercenaries still but paid, if with land, and this time, it is said by some, specifically to southern Britain and precisely to Thanet at the eastern extreme of Kent.

They came according to the accounts of Roger of Wendover, admittedly writing in the 13^th Century so hardly contemporary, in three boats so sixty, perhaps seventy-five men in all. Moreover, their coming was to a Britain that was rather different in form, geographically to the one we know today, a form, which would have a profound effect on the way political entities were and would be shaped. In Scotland the Carse, a derivation of the word for marshland in ancient and modern Welsh alike, extended from the Firth of Forth almost to Loch Lomond in the west and north beyond Stirling and was throughout far wider than the present river and its estuary. And in England the watery incursions were still more notable.

Thanet itself was an island. Today’s Romsey and Pevensey marshes were largely underwater, sea incursions cutting deeply into the hinterland. Both too included islands as indeed their names imply. The Thames was far wider at its mouth and stretched further inland, beyond Bermondsey to Battersea, both also islands. In what would become East Anglia today’s Gorleston and Lowestoft shared yet another island, behind which was an inland sea that stretched east to what is present-day Bungay, then probably itself on an island, and north-east almost to pre-existing Norwich. The Wash was four times its current size dotted once more with islands including Spalding and Ely with Huntingdon and Cambridge on its southern shore and Peterborough and Bourne immediately to its west. Moreover it reached as far north as almost to Lincoln and its great rivers, the Ouse, the Welland, the Witham, effectively emptied into the sea twenty to forty miles before they do today. In Somerset too the Levels reached as far south almost as Ilminster and stretched east-west from the Mendips to the Quantocks, whilst the Severn estuary was broader and cut deeper into Gloucestershire. And finally today’s Humber estuary was wider into the sea in the east and to the west opened into a vast, be it brackish lagoon with Doncaster and Gainsborough on its southern shore, Leeds to its west, the Yorkshire Wolds to the east, York just to the north and the mouth of the Trent again twenty miles or so further upstream than now.

It meant that on a micro-scale South Wales was better protected from incursion from the east, the land-bridge to Devon and Cornwall beyond was just thirty-five miles wide, half what it is today, and both were therefore more easily hold-able by the native British. Then in Scotland the land was almost cut in half with the North, i.e. beyond the Forth, tantamount to being an island, on which, Caledonia, by dint of mountain, lake and river was a largely impenetrable and almost separate country. Moreover, in the east of what we now know as England, Angle- or Ingle-land and, it has to be noted and pronouncing carefully, never Sax-land, Suffolk and Norfolk were largely separated physically, the Wolds of Lincolnshire and of Yorkshire were peninsulas and narrower, West Yorkshire was a thin strip of land between, as previously mentioned, effectively a shallow, inland sea and the Pennines, whilst Southern Lincolnshire was mostly not there at all with its shoreline and therefore also the western one of The Wash not far east of Grantham and Boston again an island. And finally half of Bedfordshire, if not actually perpetually underwater, then was also distinctly damp as far as the north Chilterns and coastal Essex had a distinct north and south. This, whilst on a macro-scale Britain, the island, as a result consisted of three parts, the afore-mentioned Caledonia, Brittia, the country south of the Forth-Clyde Firths and north of a line between the Humber and the Mersey and Britannia, giving a whole new meaning to Rule Britannia, all that was south of that same line.

And it was into this much water-partitioned island that perhaps as early as 374 AD or as late as about 450 AD but more likely shortly after the Romans left in 410 AD that Germanic-speakers not in Roman employ first arrived, be it in dribs and drabs and supposedly temporarily but actually to stay. And although it was reported by 441 AD in the Chronica Gallica that,

“the British provinces…..are reduced to Saxon rule”,

it is also said they, the newcomers, although an increasing annoyance, indeed danger, were neither in control or “Saxons” at all, an assertion supported even by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, the Saxon manifesto itself. It states its people’s first arrival was in 495 AD and long after battles, major in context but small in participant numbers, had already been fought by and between other Germanic arrivistes and their erstwhile employers almost forty years earlier as a minimum and therefore seems to leave, at least  in wider Anglo-Saxon analysis, only one alternative. It is that the first arrivals, or at least the first arrivals noted, had to be, if not Saxon then Angles, i.e. from Angeln, Anglia, now in Germany but then and now perhaps best described as being in southern Jutland.

Yet, here too doubt is cast by the names of the leaders of those known same, first arrivals, the brothers Hengist or Hengest and Horsa. They, the names meaning stallion and horse respectively, are said by some to be Frisian in origin, with, I remind you, Frisia then only in part geographically close to today’s with no extension into southern Jutland but definitely neither Anglia or Saxonia. However, other sources give the two brothers’ origins as Jutish, so, whilst still most definitely neither Anglian or Saxon, from considerably to the north. And then too there is complication of the legendary Battle i.e. skirmish, of Finnsburg, which seems to throw all the pieces back into the air once more. Said to have taken place in about 450 AD in Old Frisia it pitted not once but twice visiting Danes and unspecified allies, perhaps in all sixty in number, of which a Hengest is one, against local Frisians plus presumably passing Jutes. The former are eventually the victors, the Danes return home but not necessarily perhaps non-Dane Hengest, who with some men, potentially arms-for-hire, may simply have moved on.

However, here at least there might be fairly simple explanations. Firstly, with regard to the “Saxon” confusion in a note to Roger of Wendover work on the era in question it is observed that,

“Saxons did not arrive all at one time, …………, but in different and unconnected bodies, and at different periods, extending over the space of over a hundred years.”

In other words in his terms (outwith the obvious, i.e. again as per the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles the main body of Saxon arrival was from 500 to 600 AD) and as appears to be the case elsewhere in Wendover’s account and, indeed, elsewhere period, the term “Saxon” has to be seen as generic. It covered groups, which shared Germanic origins but were not tribally identical, yet spoke variations, not necessarily very different variations, of an otherwise largely common, non-Scandinavian language and whose first arrivals would indeed have have been over the best part of a century, so, depending on the version accepted, from approximately 375 to 480 AD or from 450 to 550 AD.

Secondly, Hengest is a name that is also more or less generic in all today’s Germanic languages from North Cape to the Brenner Pass and Finland to the French border and presumably therefore in their antecedents. Our Hengest could have as easily been Frisian as Danish, Saxon, Jutish or anything in-between or beyond. The tribal lands abutted each other, not with the same physical borders but in the same fashion they to an extent still do now. The border between today's northern Nord Friesland, North Frisia, and the district to the east is the once broad but now just twenty-yard-wide River Treene, that neighbouring district is Schleswig-Flensburg, which contains all of what is now called Mitte Angeln, Middle Anglia, perhaps the not original but probably the final Continental home of the Angles and together they form the narrowest point of South Jutland. Furthermore, modern Middle Frisia south of the River Elbe still has as its eastern neighbour North Saxony just as in the past north of the Elbe the southern part of today’s North Frisia abutted northern Saxonia to the east.

It means there was, by Wendover and others, and still is, by sloppy historical analysis, plenty of scope for crossover, misreporting of origin and general confusion as a result. And just to add a little more to the mix modern North Friesland and Mitte Angeln are both south and north of four more areas of etymological interest; respectively Ugloe, on the Treene still but further upstream, Stapel, where again the Treene joins the Eider, of duck-fame, to flow south-westward into the North Sea, and the high-grounds of Wohlde and Berge.