The Auldest Tung
Positing Populations and Pressures
And it is this question of numbers that seems to be another area, where historians have not apparently done the basics as well as might be expected. It is, of course, out of the question to know what the populations of countries and regions were at the time being considered here. There were no censuses. But reasonable estimation is not impossible and although the truth is that today we are somewhat blinded by the sheer enormity of modern populations some sight needs to and can be restored.
Although presently officially 5.6 million people are said to live in Denmark and in the province of Skane in Sweden there are a further 1.345 million, so more or less 7 million altogether, the Greater Danish population in the year 1000 AD, when Skane was Danish, is estimated at just 620,000, or only a little more than a twelfth. By comparison England is thought to have had in that same era 1.25 million, so twice as many, Scotland 300,000 and Ireland 630,000. And it is Ireland that here becomes critical since it is also estimated that between the years 500 and 600 AD it had 400,000 inhabitants. Therefore, although it is hardly scientific, it could mean that perhaps the number of people in Greater Denmark in the middle of the first millennium AD may have been of the order of 390,000, in England a fraction under 800,000 and in Scotland just 190,000. Translated into fighting men that is perhaps 130,000 in England and Scotland just 32,000 and an actually feasible muster of half those figures at the very most.
It also means that whilst the modern Danish population density is about 136 per square kilometre in 500 AD it was perhaps 9, whilst in England it was only 3.5 and in Scotland 2.4 and in all three countries there was what we almost no longer have, space, most of which in one way or another, wooded but with a good axe, a strong arm and some can-do clearing land was always possible. Furthermore, the current population of Schleswig-Holstein, the German province in which modern Angeln is to be found, is 2.89 million in an area of 15,760 square kilometres, a density of 183, and of Lower Saxony just under 8 million in 47, 614 square kilometres, 168 people per square kilometre. And we can extend the analysis further still. The counties in Germany of Schleswig-Flensburg and of present-day North Friesland, precisely the areas that are of greatest interest in terms of Angles and neighbouring others, have a combined area of just over 4,100 kms2 and a population of just over 360,000. It means a density of just 88. And here comes the slightly tricky bit. Extrapolating the modern Schleswig-Flensburg and North Friesland figures to 500 AD means a total population there of perhaps 25,000, of whom a maximum, about a sixth or marginally over 4,000, 50% men, 50% women, one third too old, one third too young, would have been what again is for us in looking at Germanic Britain most pertinent, again men of fighting age.
Such calculations, even recognising the limitation of the assumptions involved, really do put in context the potential numbers of fit, armed men, who could at best been involved in any military invasion of Briton in the 6th Century. In fact, frankly it says unequivocally there was no possibility of such an invasion only of the creation of a bridgehead, hardly even bridgeheads, one at a time and then a gradual expansion from it or them with reinforcements brought in over time. Furthermore they also in the same way allow us to estimate what such an expansion would have faced. Kent, the county, to which the first Germanic arrivals were reportedly invited, would have been about 3% of the land area of England and therefore with a population as small as 23,000, maybe 30,000 at the most, with perhaps 5,000 warriors as a maximum amongst them. They are numbers that are remarkably similar to those of the whole of Schleswig-Flensburg and North Friesland combined and, whilst the two of them might have been sufficient it to make it a fight, it clearly left Angeln, or at least Mitte Angeln, on it own considerably understrength. It might have had a native population of just 6-7,000, so 1,100 fighting men with perhaps a maximum of 300, yes, 300, in reality available at any one time for foreign expedition and unlikely, as English history nevertheless portrays it, to have had any chance of being much more than a pin-prick never mind overwhelming Britain at a stroke. Indeed, even with the addition of what it might have been possible to raise as a maximum fighting force from the whole population of the region we today know as Lower Saxony, about 50,000, never mind that from what is actually relevant, just its coastal areas, a third of that figure, so 17,000 and a grand total of 20,000, it should still have been virtually impossible. Admittedly three centuries later the Great Heathen Army might have necessitated that number but its campaign was over the best part of a decade and a half and even then was not enough to hold onto its gains permanently.
Yet the virtually impossible happened. Britain, or rather England, was within two and half centuries of the departure of the Romans overwhelmed by Germanic tribes that today we call Anglo-Saxon. And the incursions and take-over were done in a wave or rather waves that seem to have had a force all their own but in reality had three drivers, climate, geography, population and climate once more that inter-acted as follows.
Initially the storm-surges leading to sea-level rises and inundations that have been already posited would by definition have affected the most vulnerable areas first. They are now Dutch and were Old Frisian and it seems potentially under at least peripheral pressure from perhaps as early as the 3rd Century but with the possibility of its people moving inland. But encroachment continued through the 4th until the 5th or even 6th Centuries not only producing a far larger uninhabited area but more people, with now not just nowhere to go but seemingly having gone nowhere, at least not in any numbers.
And the same would have been true coastally further north. Although parts at least of Angeln would not have been affected directly, they being simply too high, the folk in the areas immediately to the west of Mitte Angeln, in today’s North Friesland and Stapel and even southern Ugloe, would not have been so lucky. Potentially everybody could gain by the 5th and 6th Centuries have been forced out and might might have thought to head northwards. But from there there was for the same climatic reasons pressure of movement of people southward. South-west too would have been as flooded as from where they had come. They could have tried to move south and south-eastwards but there was probably pressure northwards as the Elbe estuary for the same climatic reasons expanded both in length and width and in any case there was first the Dannewerke and then the Jutland Traps. In such circumstances the most obvious direction, indeed the only one then would have been eastward and therefore into the higher ground of northern Ugloe and Angeln or south-east into what is now Wohlde, Berge and even Daenischer Wohlde beyond. As many as 11,000 or 12,000 souls might have been on the move, in itself seemingly not a large number in today’s terms, but both physically and economically overwhelming in the context, say, of Angeln’s 6-7,000 inhabitants. For every one of them there was at least one outsider, perhaps two without the means to feed and resource themselves.
In such circumstances its seems reasonable to assume there would have been certainly shortage and quite possibly friction. It also seems not unfeasible, as is so often the case including today with, for example, Syrians and others on Greek islands, that there would have been a build-up of pressure for the same newcomers to move on but with them by now having just one option. That was back not to but onto the North Sea in whatever could have been found in terms of boats fit enough to carry them little by little south-westwards along the coast with perhaps the first real dry landing, Flanders, already inhabited by Germanic peoples, so problematic and the potentially softer-seeming option of the parts of Britain opposite and non-Germanic the second.
Such a scenario might even offer an alternative explanation of the arrival of Hengist and Horsa, and their two or three ships and perhaps just forty to sixty hands in 449-ish AD. They had not come, or at least not entirely, as in some accounts on the basis that they were invited to flight for Briton against Briton. Neither had they arrived to fight Britons per se or even that they were speculative swords-for-hire direct from Finnsburg. But actually they had landed as what might be read into the Saxon Chronicles to be a motley advanced party, from not one but several Germanic, tribal sources, looking for place of refuge and testing the reception or as in other explanations the first but not the last of just as Germanic and at first equally motley but later more identifiable groups, invited or otherwise, arriving as refugees at a niche entry-point. Read Jutland for Libya or Turkey and Thanet for Sicily and Lesbos.
Whichever is the case, admittedly based on flight of fancy rather than fact, it might explain Reading Streets on Thanet and in West Kent as places not of Angles, Jutes or Frisians, even Saxons but of specifically Reudingi. It might also explain again on Thanet, why even today there are in addition a “-down”, a “-stone” and an “-ing”. And it might even explain why in the probable first wave of expansion beyond Thanet into south, rather than north-east Kent, after what has proved to have been one of the key battles in British history but was in reality a skirmish, the first Ebbsfleet, there is a Weddington, a Staple, a Flemings and a Goldstone. The first is perhaps the town of the Wedd-ing, the Wedd-people, those from the Waddenmeer, the Wadden-Lake, area of current North Frisia, the second from still-existing Stapel or Stapelholm, the district on the Teene River between North Frisia and Mitte Angeln, a land-locked area now but with a derivation from Staple-Islet and then a drowning island, the third from Flanders, today’s west and north Belgians, and/or Dutch Brabantians and the last a possible marker of Jutish settlement.
Indeed that same first Ebbsfleet that took place in 465/6 AD, so some 15-16 years later, adds a certain amount of weight to this idea, if not in terms of the origin of the Germanic peoples involved, but the reality of their numbers. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles state that Hengest, a kinsman, Aesc, and others fought a group of Welsh, i.e. Britons, “welsh” even today simply meaning foreigner in German. Twelve of the Welsh leaders were recorded as slain and also one of Hengist’s. Hengist at the time was, if on first arrival and in 449 AD he had been presumably between 20 and 30, perhaps then aged from 35 to 45, which would have made him on his death in 488/9 AD 60-70, so Aesc may have been his son or nephew but unlikely but not impossible to have been, as also suggested, his grandson. And it is also thought that a total of as few as 200 fighting-men actually took part, which on the basis of 100 each side, suggests, with an equal number of reserves held back to protect what was already controlled, a total Germanic, armed-strength of 200. It was more than the original sixty of a decade and a half earlier but, if by then there were also women in place and children, be they Germanic or British/Germanic, the total population on Thanet might have swollen to 1000 or so, be stretching the then island to its limits and necessitating Lebensraum.
But there is no obvious evidence of Angles in the first group or the initial follow-ons. And when Angles did arrive it would appear to be elsewhere and later, almost a decade later in 473 AD. That was when three boats so between perhaps fifty and seventy-five men under the command of a certain Aella’s are said to have made shore at Selsey Bill. It was also clearly speculative. There was no invitation. They met recorded local resistance. Yet they managed to establish a bridge-head, through which reinforcements were in time clearly brought and from which they were able over the next fifteen years to break out then defeat opposing forces probably incrementally first on the West Sussex coast between hill and sea and then in southern East Sussex. To do so they would have had more or less to match the opposition musters available, perhaps based on the Kent example a maximum of 600, so have been potentially permanently 500 at the very least. That should have been possible given the posited population of Angeln at the time but would nevertheless from the beginning have required six percent or so of potential Anglic fighting-strength, rising to forty percent or even perhaps a half. In proportion to the available resources it has all the appearances of a marginal and even, if defeated, of a potentially ruinous venture not just for the Angles as a fighting force but as an entire people. It suggests sheer necessity rather than simple avarice, a necessity that even for the seemingly relatively secure Angles had built over the previous ten years to breaking point with as the causes, I suggest, continuing social disruption due to on-going people movement towards, into and/or through their land and more general climate change having an increasing effect even on dry ground in terms of incremental loss of agricultural productivity. In other words it was a combination of first the Angles themselves not being able to resist external people pressures, then Anglic lands unable to support both Angles and newly arrived incomers, with perhaps as much as a third of its population having to leave, and finally the Anglic lands unable to support even those that remained with them, the rest, repeating over the next two to three generation the earlier exodus with Britain, largely England, as before the only onward option.