The Auldest Tung

Amble II - Saxons

And it is to those Saxons we now turn, again viewed, at least initially, through the contemporarily conventional window. It seems pretty certain that their appearance on the scene, at least the English south-coast scene, was in or about 494 AD. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles say so and it fits. However, for all that has been written by English historians since, it was with less bark, and more whimper. Moreover, there are two versions of that appearance. The Chronicles state that they arrived. Its account is that a certain Cerdic and his son, Kineric, landed at a spot called Cerdic’s Ore, Cerdic’s Shore, said to be on the Hampshire coast near Southampton, I suggest the Hamble, and they came in five ships, so perhaps 125-150 men. However, there is also a theory that this version is an early example of fake news and in fact they were, at least in part, already there, a Saxon/Germanic-British grouping from the Roman period, which had emerged in the area with some hold on power and who then recruited help from outside. Either is feasible, not least in the case of the already resident presence that could be the semi-integrated continuation from up to a century and a half earlier of soldiers recruited by the Romans or mercenaries by the British, the Saxonesque Attacotti. However, which is correct matters little. It is the date not the means that is pivotal, as is the probability, indeed almost certainty, that one way or another there was still significant contact with homeland Saxonia.

Then there is another date soon after, which also deserves mentioning. It is a second arrival again recorded in the Chronicles and having taken place in 501 AD of two non-specifically Germanic ships, so perhaps fifty men. It took place probably near Portchester at the head of the now Portsmouth harbour, and is curious on three fronts. Firstly the new boys on the block were probably not Saxons, otherwise the Chronicles, essentially Saxon propaganda, would have said so and they were small in number. And then there is where they landed. It was from the account, where there was native resistance so in clearly British territory there and to the north and also between the already-installed Angles a short distance to the east, the quagmire of the extended Portsmouth/Chichester harbours to the south and south-east and the Saxons perhaps initially of the Hamble to the west, who may have also begun to settle the upper Meon valley, to the north-west. In fact the arrival may have been an attempt to create a wedge, albeit a Germanic one, between all four, a first move by local Jutes to extend coastal reach, even to pre-empt Saxon expansion, with final settlement not at Portchester itself but the other side of Portsmouth Island at Langstone. It would not work but might also be seen as the first stone cast in the considerable territorial flux in much of southern England that over two generations more, so seventy-five years in total, and would see the political jigsaw of England as a whole being re-cut piece-by-piece and, as a result, that of what matters ultimately here, eastern Scotland, also reshaped.

First there was Kent. On the death between 534 and 540 AD of Octa, the fourth Germanic leader there and the third and last son of Hengest to rule, his successor, Eomenric, seems to have been still Germanic but neither Frisian or Jutish nor, indeed, a mix but to have strong Frankish connections, a Frankish name and therefore perhaps a Frankish mother. That in itself would say something about the cross-Channel strength of intra-Germanic connections and perhaps even attracted Frankish settlement from their heartland immediately south of Flanders, Flemings from the part of Flanders itself under Frankish control and even from the southern remnants of Old Frisia immediately to its north.

Then there was Wessex or what was at the very beginning of the process of becoming Wessex. Now it might have been that they, the West Saxons, came as reported, as independents, who took themselves, initially at least, away from other Germanic settlement into the backwaters of South-East Hampshire up the Rivers Hamble and Meon. Alternatively, if they were already there, they could have been jockeying for local power and had brought in more armed men, Cerdic and Kineric’s men, from the old homeland to help the cause. There is even the possibility, firstly, they could have come as or become vassals of Ella and been allocated, outwith his existing lands, territory from the coast to the upper Meon that was nominally British and, secondly, so it might have stayed except for one important factor. However many Angles, Anglics, Frisians Jutes and Frutes there were in their homelands there was a multiple of that number of Saxons in theirs and with their own pressures. And with presumably one or two new settlements in place over they came and began after a decade, presumably of consolidation, to push outwards.

In 508 AD, thirteen years and by our measure twenty-five to thirty kilometres away, in what seems to have been the first wave a British force is said to have been defeated at Netley. But here there is a problem. There are five within striking distance. The first three, Netley, Old Netley and Netley Hill, are on the west bank of the mouth of the River Hamble so all possible both in terms of time and distance, if the trouble was local. Less likely is the one at Old Basing, well inland to the north. Then fifth there is Netley Marsh. It is at the head of and on the other side of the Solent, close enough to settlements to be perhaps uncomfortable for the Jutes, who might have lived there, yet just ten miles away so still in range and most importantly strategic for what over the next two decades, a generation, would follow. In about 519 AD the Saxons had a further victory said also to be over the Britons possibly ten more miles to the west at North Charford on the Hampshire Avon and a third success in 527 AD somewhere beyond over the same foe. And about that same year the West Saxons seem both to have become an identifiable grouping, distinct to other Saxons, and also to have changed direction. It manifested itself in the invasion and taking in about 530 AD of Jutish Isle of Wight, the first overt example of Germanic on Germanic. It also seems to imply that some or all of the Jutish territory on the mainland side of the Solent including Portchester/Langstone was probably already under Saxon control. Its peoples were either “cleansed”, move on or absorbed. However, it remains noticeable that there seemed as yet to have been no coastal expansion eastward into Anglic territory.

And then there was the question of timing. In 498 AD the British leader, Aurelius, is said to have been died at Winchester by poison administered by a “Saxon”, the city presumably then still being British. As a result the northern Germanics, Octa and Eosa/Abissa, re-emerged in rebellion coming south from the Scottish Lowlands to York, at first, it is said, with some success but ultimately over the best part of a decade defeat and capture by the new British leader, Uther Pendragon. However, they were not executed and in 509 AD escaped to whichever homeland was actually regarded as theirs still, raised more troops and returned to seemingly great effect. They marched south, having therefore again landed in the north, and by 510 AD Britain was said to be under general threat, one which was only rebuffed by the defeat and deaths in 511 AD said to be of both Octa and Eosa at or near St. Albans. 

It might then have seemed that the native Britons were once more in control, at least on a macro-scale. But, of course, as events would eventually show that not to be the case. In any case on a micro-scale there was still activity and change. In 514 AD two grandsons of that first Saxon leader, Cerdic, had sailed two ships so with perhaps fifty men in all “westward”, landing and seizing what was there. Where and why they went is unspecified but it was notably by sea, possibly simply, if exaggeratedly, to the other bank of the Solent but perhaps as far as Lymington and its estuary and potentially can be seen as a first move against and in the encirclement of the Jutes. And that same year saw Ella, the leader of the Angles, who had occupied the land from Selsey to Pevensey, also reported to have died, replaced by his son, Cissa, his base being Chichester. And it is where the Wendover account is from 516 AD for a while at least taken over by what is perhaps most simply described as Arthurian legend.

Luther Pendragon, Arthur’s father, British leader before him, younger brother of Aurelius, is thought to have died, again poisoned, in the first, the late first, or the second, very early second, decade of the 6^th Century. The reasoning is that his son is said to have been crowned as successor by Bishop Dubricius at Caerleon and he, the bishop, died on 14^th November 611 AD. But there was a problem. Arthur was probably just eleven years old at the time. It is therefore entirely plausible that the Germanics saw it as an opportunity to bring over more of their kind and build expansion on them, yet there would inevitably been some delay and the interim for Arthur, or rather his generals, proved to be a period of remarkable success, initiating a generation of reversal of British misfortune. Legend has it that in 516 AD the British achieved a great victory at Badon but over whom is not clear. What seems clearer is that Arthur was by then probably about fifteen, so at least on the cusp of manhood, and that “Saxons”, or at least some “Saxons” under the new leadership of a certain Colgrin were confronted on the River Duglas, probably in Lincolnshire, but again it at this time does not really matter. What does is that Colgrin, either just arrived from the other side of the North Sea or the successor to Hengist, Octa and Abissa as leader of some or all of the Germanic peoples already installed around and north of Humber, was defeated and retreated. But notably he went not to Malton, Filey or Flamborough in the Wolds but to York, which suggests by then the city, although said to be waterlogged and no great prize, had been effectively abandoned by the Britons or already taken from them.

Germanic reinforcement then arrived by sea, which similarly suggests Filey, Flamborough or via the Humber estuary, was also trounced, at which point Colgrin sailed off, presumably home, wherever that might have been, regrouped and in 517 AD, so the following year, with another large force landed further north, said to be specifically once more in “Scotland”, and began to move south. The Britons sensibly withdrew, from Brittia seemingly into Britannia, received reinforcement in numbers and a year later still returned to take on the new force at the border between the two near Lincoln. And again they were victorious and so comprehensively that the Germanic remnants on payment of a tribute were also obliged to return to their again unspecified homeland.

However, for all the British success there is nothing to say that there was real control of the north of England, particularly the north-east above York, or indeed parts of Britannia. Colgrin and others were in 520 AD to return to take on the British this time neither in the north or the south but now in the south-west, principally attacking Bath, presumably from the sea via the Severn estuary and the Somerset Avon. Yet once more they were defeated, perhaps at the actual battle of Badon with Arthur by then a young man of twenty so now of fighting age. Indeed both Colgrin and his brother were killed and the remnants of their force now under Cheldric were said to have been pursued right back overland eastwards and to the Isle of Thanet, which is telling in three ways.

Firstly, with all but one of their leaders dead, there in the first Germanic stronghold in the South they were obliged to surrender. Secondly, the Kentish king, then still Octa son of Hengest, noticeably failed to help them. Nor did the West Saxons or the Angles of Sussex, which suggests that for all of Colgrin and his followers being Germanic they either were not allied closely enough tribally to be worthy of support or were deemed politically expendable. And thirdly it is precisely the time when the territories, said to be at least originally Anglic, of the North and South Folks, Norfolk and Suffolk, of Mercia, the “border lands” but the borders of what, and of Northumbria, with its extension into Scotland, started to form, consolidate, even to expand, with the inference they were being bolstered by populations no doubt still being driven by weather directly from the Germanic homelands but equally possibly by Germanic peoples from Southern England obliged to move by a new political reality being carved out generally by the pressures of British success and perhaps also by aggressive, locally-invasive West Saxons.

And there is, indeed, some indication that British success over the generation from 516 AD did have an effect. Germanic rulers, Cerda, Aella and Cisse and said Octa seemingly kept their heads down and were ostensibly quiet. Germanic populations seemed constrained, concentrating on local matters. It was only under Keneric, the son of Cerdic, the one said to have led the Saxons to Britain but almost twenty years after his death in 533 AD, and also with a British return in the mid-540s to infighting after Arthur, that firstly in 552 AD to the west Sarum, Salisbury, was occupied. Then to the north-west in 558 AD Barbury Castle south of Swindon was captured and with the beating of the local Britons Wiltshire also taken into the West Saxon orbit. And it also seems that at some point, possibly in 571 AD with the Battle of Dyrham in South Gloucestershire, West Saxon control was once more extended, if temporarily, across the valley now of the upper Somerset Avon into the Cotswolds and that by about 577 AD first Cirencester than Gloucester and Cheltenham and the Severn reached.

However, in the meantime on Kineric’s death in 559 AD his two sons, Ceaulin and Cutha, had also turned in their sights on a foe in origin and location fully 180 degrees away on the other side of their father’s range. From the west they are said at the Battle of Wipandun in 568 AD to have taken on and beaten a supposedly Kentish but probably East Saxon and Kentish force encroaching from the east. The battle-site was once said to have been Wimbledon but that reading has since been cast into doubt. It is now said by some to have been Whipsnade by Luton and could strategically equally be Wippendell by Hemel Hempstead, then known as Haemele, which precisely mattering little. Each is in the something of the no man’s lands that seemed to exist on the now Hertfordshire-Bedfordshire border but with both clearly in or near the Chilterns and making the taking in 571 AD of Aylesbury, Limbury, i.e. Luton, and Bedford by the victors equally feasible.

Yet it is a curious historical episode, firstly because it marks the second occasion, on which Germanic fought Germanic, with all that says about then perceived tribal, even Saxon on Saxon and other distinctions, second because it went no further, both parties seeming simply to step back. Essex seems to have settled for the Chiltern foothills and encircling Middlesex instead. And for Wessex, when Dyrham followed some six years later, it was after a cross-country campaign that seemed before Cirencester, Gloucester and Bath to involve retaking, ostensibly but not necessarily from Britons, Bedford and Aylesbury, the taking of Leighton Buzzard in between and then Benson and Eyesham in Oxfordshire, all in territory that had been in theory Saxon anyway. In fact it looks from this distance more planned withdrawal than even consolidation. Moreover, it had every appearance of being done looking over the shoulder, by over-carefully tip-toeing along the rivers that were perhaps already beginning to be forming the border between themselves and a something emerging immediately to their north but was not coherent enough yet to be called Mercian.

Indeed, it even could be said to have been the trigger to a period of Saxon unravelling. In or about 584 AD Wessex is said to have been defeated by Britons, but perhaps at the behest of Mercians and other Germanic elements, at Stoke Lynn north of Bicester in Oxfordshire and then at Fretherne south of Gloucester on the northernmost side of a triangle of “lows”, “loes” and “los” spanning the Servern as it narrows. Furthermore in 586 AD through marriage the East Saxons, Essex and by increments Middlesex, decided openly to ally themselves with Kent, when Wessex would surely seem a more tribally obvious combination. And finally the Hwicce, the mixed “Saxons” and Britons of South Gloucestershire seemed after Fretherne and around 600 AD to have changed sides, allying themselves with Mercia, which had the effect of reversing the polarity of the Severn and Wye. What had been Southern was now Midland and has arguably remained so ever since.

It seems clear therefore that power, Germanic power at least, either side of the beginning of 7^th Century, as might have been expected on the basis of potential sheer numbers, lay not at all with the Saxons of Southern England, specifically Wessex, but further north with repercussions tribally, politically and perhaps even to a considerable degree linguistically that, I would argue, continue to this very day. In fact the only good news for the West Saxons was that supposedly Anglic Sussex on the death of its king, Cissa, son of founder Ella, allowed itself in 590 AD to be subsumed not into its neighbour to the east, Kent, that was perhaps by then too Frankish for its liking but its neighbour on the other side. Anglic Sussesx became Saxon Sussex.

It was a change that would in time have extensive political repercussions yet might well have had it origins eighty years earlier, beyond Cissa and in the time of Cerdic. And the reasons are as follows. It has to be assumed that on landing/emerging in Southern Britain Saxons had needed time, perhaps a decade to establish themselves in their new territory in the Meon Valley based on East Meon and the Hamble Valley, centred perhaps around Curbridge. It also seems sensible to assume that with growing numbers that territory would have expanded, if only by force majeur at more or less the normal, i.e. Danish, pace but relatively locally and with a recognition by the West Saxons that it was should and could not exclusively be at the expense of the British, at least not without repercussion, and that timing had to be canny.

As already said, the Battle of Cerdic’s Ford, thought to be North Charford on the upper Hampshire River Avon, at which Saxon defeated Briton took place in 519 AD. North Charford is thirty miles almost due west of the Hamble and Meon, or at our rate of Dano-Germanic advance, twenty-four years. Add twenty-four to 495, 495 AD being that of the Saxon arrival, and the result is exactly 519. Retaliation might have been expected but perhaps correct judgements were taken that, firstly, the British had their hands full with Colgrin in the north and they would have to let it pass this time but not if there were a repeat and, secondly, any other expansion would have to be elsewhere, which meant Germanic on Germanic.

In 530 AD still under Cerdic the Jutish Isle of Wight was annexed. Its stronghold of Carisbrooke was attacked and taken, Carisbrooke being on the Cowes inlet into the centre of the island, the River Medina, the mouth of which lies opposite and is reachable from the mainland from Lymington to the west, Portsmouth and Portchester to the east and Southampton to the north. Lymington is twenty miles or roughly sixteen years from North Charford, giving a date for its reaching of 535 AD and too late for the Wight invasion. However, Southampton, Portchester, Titchfield, at the then head of the Meon estuary, and Netley on the Hamble are between ten and twenty years even from the upper Meon, so all allowing plenty of time from 495 AD for Saxon expansion, including that Battle at Netley, to the coast and from departure points there for the crossing to Cowes and the invasion beyond a decade later.

It all casts a somewhat different light on Cerdic’s time as Saxon leader. Far from being one of little activity there is every possibility of planned expansion locally firstly south and south-west, then west, south-west once more and finally south again but this time across the water and all under the radar. Which leaves the north and east. There is frankly little evidence of northern or rather north-eastern expansion by West Saxons, where the Weald seemed the barrier, but to the east the story is entirely different, not in terms of recorded events but topographically. From the Meon to the hills above Chichester is not quite twenty-five miles or twenty years. And from there to the River Arun, the estuary of which then began at Pulborough and was in places a mile wide, it could have been perhaps eight years more, twenty-eight in total. Then from the Arun to the Adur is twelve years, from there to Lewes on the Ouse perhaps fourteen and from Lewes to Pevensey much the same again, half to Mercredesburn and half beyond. It means Meon to Pevensey could have been sixty-eight years probably as a minimum with some evidence at every stage of potential Saxon presence but two questions left hanging. When and with what effect?