Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 800-1066

A E Redgate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317805342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Using a comparative and broad perspective, Religion, Politics and Society in Britain 800-1066 draws on archaeology, art history, material culture, texts from charms to chronicles, from royal law-codes to sermons to poems, and other evidence to demonstrate the centrality of Christianity and the Church in Britain 800-1066. It delineates their contributions to the changes in politics, economy, society and culture that occurred between 800 and 1066, from nation-building to practicalities of government to landscape.

The period 800-1066 saw the beginnings of a fundamental restructuring of politics, society and economy throughout Christian Europe in which religion played a central role. In Britain too the interaction of religion with politics and society was profound and pervasive. There was no part of life which Christianity and the Church did not touch: they affected belief, thought and behaviour at all levels of society.

This book points out interconnections within society and between archaeological, art historical and literary evidence and similarities between aspects of culture not only within Britain but also in comparison with Armenian Christendom. A. E. Redgate explores the importance of religious ideas, institutions, personnel and practices in the creation and expression of identities and communities, the structure and functioning of society and the life of the individual.

This book will be essential reading for students of early medieval Britain and religious and social history.

Part I

Britain c. 800–c. 1066

1 Britain in c. 800 and in c. 1066

Changes and continuities

Introduction

People interested in Britain between 800 and 1066 face several challenges. One involves terminology and categorisation. In general, in modern and popular understanding the words England, Scotland and Wales signify three distinct countries and nations; their historical inhabitants were, respectively, English, Scots and Welsh; their experiences included periodic invasion and immigration by foreigners. Furthermore, ‘England’ and ‘English’ are often used as if interchangeable with ‘Britain’ and ‘British’, despite England’s having land borders with Wales and Scotland, running roughly along lines from Bristol in the south to Chester in the north, and from Carlisle in the west to Berwick-upon-Tweed in the east.

The historical reality was very different. Communication depended on travel. In pre-industrial societies, communication without travel is limited to signalling, for example using beacons. In such societies travel by boat, where waters are navigable, is easier and faster than travel by land even where the terrain is easy. Navigable waterways consequently stimulate the cohesion of the lands through which they run rather than their separation, though they may also serve as visual markers of limits of influence. Ranges of mountains or high hills do the reverse. Consequently, the cultural and political units that we might expect to see in early medieval Britain are very different from its modern ones or even subdivisions of them.

Physical geography implies that the ‘building blocks’ of British history should have been six units. One, straddling the valley of the River Thames and the English Channel would have united present-day south and south-east England with northern France and The Netherlands. Devon, Cornwall and south Wales, united by the Bristol Channel, seems more likely than modern Wales, since travelling overland from Wales’ south-east coast to Anglesey off its north coast would have taken eight days.¹ A third natural unit would have combined north-west England, south-west Scotland, the Isle of Man and northern and eastern Ireland, centring around, and united by, the Irish Sea. Likewise, the North Sea links the far north of Scotland with Scandinavia. Fifth, the combinations of south-east Scotland with much of northern and eastern England and sixth, of north Wales with midland England seem geographically plausible.

Sometimes these theoretical units were historical realities. The ninth-century Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex (the West Saxons) was based in the Thames valley but encompassed Kent after c. 825. It was far less significantly involved with northern England than it was with the lands across the Channel, which were ruled by the successors of the Frankish Emperor Charles, now known as Charlemagne (emperor 800–814). In the early tenth century, due to West Saxon success against Viking invaders and to the fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire, Wessex’s King Aethelstan (924–939) was the most powerful king in western Christendom. He extended his influence across the Channel, to Brittany. He subjugated, temporarily, what is known nowadays, though not at the time, as the Viking kingdom of York. Originating in Scandinavian conquest and settlement in 876, and lasting until 954, this kingdom stretched, probably, from (modern) Sheffield and Manchester in the south to the River Tees in the north. Its connections with the Viking kingdom of Dublin, in Ireland, were so close that the two sometimes look like halves of the same polity. Another Scandinavian unit dates to the late tenth century. In c. 980 the Norse earldom of Orkney in the north of Scotland was established. Perhaps originally under Danish control, by the mid-eleventh century it had passed to Norway.

The earlier Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, of which York had originally been part, had included north-west England and territory north of Carlisle and of Newcastle-upon-Tyne up to the Firth of Forth – that is, the region of Edinburgh. Thus Scottish history and heritage contain English elements. These include Northumbrian rule; involvement in Northumbrian and wider Anglo-Saxon concerns and developments; saints who worked in northern Northumbria, notably the seventh-century King Oswald and monk-bishop Cuthbert; sculpture; and some English poetry, notably The Dream of the Rood. A version of this poem is inscribed on the eighth-century north Northumbrian Ruthwell Cross. Conversely, English history includes the history of part of Scotland. In southern Britain, Devon and Cornwall constituted a separate kingdom, Dumnonia, for several centuries. It resembled Welsh rather than Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and had significant contacts with Brittany. Other kingdoms too were, at various times, located on the western side of the island, up to and including the region of Glasgow and across to Edinburgh. They include Rheged in the Carlisle and Lake District area, and Strathclyde and Dumbarton to its north. It is these western kingdoms that are properly called British, distinguishing them from the Anglo-Saxon polities of eastern Britain.

The Anglo-Saxons shared a Germanic language, Old English, the Britons a Celtic one. Since the vicissitudes of political history caused some elements of northern British culture, and people, to move to Wales, Welsh history and heritage includes Scottish elements and vice versa. The poem known as The Gododdin has a north British subject, an early-seventh-century raid from Edinburgh into Northumbria, and may be contemporary with it, but it is written in Welsh, and was preserved in Wales. Over the centuries, Scottish as well as Welsh and Cornish enthusiasts have claimed the legendary King Arthur for themselves, locating his headquarters and significant parts of his career in their territory. As portrayed in later texts, Arthur is a figure of fiction, but quests for the historical Arthur start with our earliest known references to an Arthur. The first is a single one in The Gododdin; others are in the Latin History of the Britons written by a Welsh scholar, who may have been called Ninnius or Nennius, c. 829–830.²

Names that are familiar to modern readers are often misleading in themselves though their history can be illuminating. Behind ‘Wales’ and ‘Welsh’ lie Germanic words that probably originally signified ‘descendants of the former citizens of the Roman Empire’ rather than Celts.³ Old English wealh was used in the law code that was attributed by the West Saxon King Alfred (871–899) to his seventh-century forebear King Ine to mean both ‘Briton’ and ‘slave’, and in tenth-century texts it meant ‘slave’. This development reflects the Welsh–Anglo-Saxon relationship in the ninth, and especially the tenth, centuries when Wessex extended its power into Wales.⁴ What the Welsh, then as now, called themselves was very different, Cymry, meaning Britons. This name was also applied to Britons elsewhere in Britain, which British writers regarded as their heritage. The fact that ‘England’ means land of the English may partially explain its frequent current misuse, to refer to Britain. The dominance of England and of the English language and people in today’s British government and culture perhaps makes this seem natural and accurate to those who do this. But ‘England’ is not merely a polity whose size, location and power within Britain changed between 800 and 1066. Its very existence depends on a prior existence of ‘the English’, that is, a group and regime that thought of itself and was perceptible by outsiders as English, as opposed to, say, West Saxon or East Anglian or Cornish. And there was a time when there was no such thing as the English. In the making of an English people and an England the West Saxon king Alfred and his tenth-century successors played a major role. As for ‘Scotland’, literally land of the Scots, this actually means the land of the Irish, because Scotti was Latin for Irish. For several centuries much of western Scotland was part of the Irish kingdom of Dál Riata, whose base was in eastern Ireland. North-east Scotland on the other hand was contemporaneously the territory of the Picti (Picts), a Latin word meaning painted people. The Picts’ origin used to be an historical conundrum. Now, however, they are thought to have been the indigenous inhabitants of the lands beyond the frontier of Roman Britain who did not succumb to Romanisation, in contrast to other British groups....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Note on References
• Maps
• Part I Britain c. 800–c. 1066
• Part II Beginnings Identities and communities
• Part III Ends The structuring of society
• Part IV Means Order and individuals
• Bibliography
• Index