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Chapter 7.3: Notes on
the origin of the English people
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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Aelle was remembered by the
English, but had no prestigious descendants; this
would be natural if Ambrosius had destroyed him
as Geoffrey says. The difficulties of
relying on Geoffrey of Monmouth, great
imaginative writer and immense hoaxer, are
obvious, but I believe that at least part of his
account of the hero are historically-based.
Ambrosius enters Britain with a host of
Armoricans; kills Vortigern by fire in his
fortress; raises the standard of revolt against
"Hengist", that is whoever was the
leader of the Saxons at the time - almost
certainly Aelle; fights two successful battles;
captures and executes the Saxon leader; and
receives the ceremonial submission of the
remaining Saxons, who probably accept Baptism,
allowing them to remain in "the deserted
parts of Britain". But it was a false
dawn. Ambrosius died, of illness if we can
believe Geoffrey; his settlement collapsed; the
war burst out again, to go on for many, many more
years to come. The Saxons were by now too
firmly established to be expelled, and, what is
more, they held the most fertile and
strategically advantageous regions - the grain
country of East Anglia, the mouths of various
rivers, and possibly Kent. Gildas, who
describes the intractability of their presence
with the typically superb image of claws dug
inextricably in Britain's soil, dates the war's
ending to about the time of his own birth, that
is in the early sixth century; which, beginning
from 468, gives us a bare minimum of fifty years
of conflict!
Aelle's lack of heirs raises a
certain echo in a vague hint in Nennius (ch.56)
about the Saxons bringing over their king to rule
over them; and in an English claim, to be
reconstructed from royal pedigrees, an allusion
in the Life of St.Guthlac, and another in Beowulf,
that the earliest royal house of England came
over from an illustrious line in what is today
southern Denmark, through a certain Icel. He
turns up in the dynastic lists of Mercia, and he
is explicitly said by a first-rate source - the
English Latin Life of St.Guthlac - to have
been the first king of the dynasty. His
line is claimed to go back to the well-attested
Scandinavian hero, English Offa, Danish Uffi,
and his name also seems connected with
Icklingham, a royal site in East Anglia.
John Morris (who, alas, believes
in the historicity of Hengist and Horsa)
attractively argues that the line of Offa and
Icel moved from Jutland to rule in Britain, and
was subsequently expelled from East Anglia by
intruders from Scandinavia, only to establish
itself in Middle Anglia. Alas, as so often, he
takes surviving documents at face value, which
weakens his analysis. It has been shown
that Old English dynastic lists are formulaic
documents showing the descent of the then ruling
monarch from fourteen generations of kings and
heroes, which often led to collapsing previous
lists together, missing several generations.
And that is apart from purely fictitious
pedigrees such as that of Wessex, whose kings
seem to have tied their more-than-dubious lineage
to the better established genealogies of East
Anglia, their close ally
against the Mercians in the seventh century.
Nevertheless, a good case may be
made for Morris' theory of an original
"Iceling" dynasty displaced from East
Anglia by intruders from Scandinavia but
successful in holding on Mercia. As late as
Procopius (530s), the Franks acknowledged only
one legitimate king for the Teutons of Britain,
the Angiloi. This does not mean that
there were no other Teutonic kings, but that
Frankish power politics in the island were based
on the recognition of only one. Fifty years
later, the situation had changed to the extent
that the same Franks now backed the Oiscing king
of Kent, whose probable upstart nature I
discussed in bk.6, ch.5. This suggests that
whatever all-English lordship had existed in the
days of Theudebert had now collapsed. In
point of fact, we know that the conquering
Teutons were fragmented into up to a dozen
independent kingdoms.
A trace of the upheavals this
caused in Frankish diplomacy may perhaps be found
in the circumspection of Gregory of Tours (the
dog that did not bark in the night, as far as
Britain and England are concerned) about the
marriage of the daughter of the Frankish king
Charibert. Charibert belonged to the
generation that followed the kings known to
Procopius; his father was Lothar I, who, in spite
of being Theudebert's uncle, survived him. Charibert
himself died in 567, and his daughter is none
other than Adelburg or Bertha, wife of
Aethelberht of Kent. Gregory himself seems
to have been an intimate of her mother,
Charibert’s widow, Ingoberga, whose last
will and testament he witnessed. A shrewd
observation by Ian Wood: “Both times that
[Gregory] mentions [Ingoberga], he refers to her
daughter, which would seem to be significant, for
Gregory is not in the habit of introducing
characters or even of reminding the reader of
family relationships for no apparent reason.
Although he says next to nothing about Bertha
[not even her name], Gregory seems to have
thought that she was worth a mention each time he
referred to her mother.”
Wood, however, does not seem to
have noticed that the two mentions are of
different character. In the first, Gregory
announces, without even saying her name, that a
daughter of Charibert had married "a man of
Kent" and gone to live there it seems very strange
that the bishop should not call bride and groom
by their titles - even though the groom was a
pagan - unless of course there were serious
sensitivities somewhere that would be injured by
admitting that Aethelberht of Kent was a king -
or at least a royal heir - and that his wife was
to become a queen. In the section on
Ingoberga’s testament, however, which cannot
have been written before 589, this
"man" suddenly is "the son of a
king of Kent".
Another likely trace of
sixth-century upheavals is in the archaeology of
East Anglia. Seventh-century East Anglia,
the land of the Sutton Hoo and Snape
ship-burials, is well known to have had links,
not with the Jutland of Offa and Icel, but with
mainland Scandinavia, and particularly with
prehistoric Sweden: the famous Sutton Hoo
face-mask helmet, among many other features of
the burial, has its closest parallels in burial
wares from graves in Vendel and Valsgärde, in
the ancient royal region of Uppsala. The East Anglian
and related pedigrees include an allusion to a
famous Scandinavian feud, recorded half a
millennium later by Saxo Grammaticus and the Saga
of Hrolfr Kraki; which suggests that the
dynasty of East Anglia may have claimed descent
from a hero called Hrošmund, who,
according to the English epic Beowulf, was
living with his father Hrošgar in the
Danish court of Heorot at a date
identifiable with the first quarter of the sixth
century. According to Beowulf's
time-reckoning, Hrošmund was a younger
contemporary of Hygelac, a historical king
known to Gregory of Tours as Chlochilaichus,
killed by the Franks in the 520s. If that is the
case, then his supposed flight to England would
come well within the time we are speaking about,
the second or third quarter of the sixth century.
By that time, the descendants of Icel must
have been in England for some while; if Hrošmund
was an ancestor of the Wuffinga East Anglian kings, they
must, like the Oiscings, have been late-comers to
the island.
It is remarkable and interesting
that the saga-writers, who wrote half a
millennium after the English accounts began to be
written down, and whom it is difficult to credit
with a similar mainly written tradition, still
had a lot to say about these kings (though the
fact that Saxo mistakenly splits his
"Rųrik" - Old English Hrešrik
- into two separate heroes, should warn us
against taking every one of their traditions
literally). Their traditions reversed the
values that can be guessed from the English
sources, Beowulf, Widsiš and the
East Anglian royal pedigree. According to
the English, Hrošulf was the traitor and
murderer of Hrešrik and responsible for
the presumable flight and exile of his brother Hrošmund,
whose tragic story was apparently claimed by the
East Anglians; in Saxo and the sagas, Hrošmund
is unknown, and Rųrik is a "man
without virtue" rightly slain by Hrolfr,
who becomes one of the greatest kings of legend -
Dumézil called him "the Charlemagne of the
north". This would of course make
sense if there had really been a family feud
between an uncle Hrošulf and his two
nephews Hrešrik and Hrošmund, and
English accounts came, at whatever remove, from
the defeated branch of the family, and Danish
account from the victorious.
We might add that the legend of
Hrolfr Kraki shows evident signs of being
rewritten from an original in which the king was
not nearly so admired. Hrolfr’s father
Helgi, a vicious raider and rapist, once raped a
young woman called Thora. A daughter was
born to her, and she called her Yrsa. Decades
later, Helgi came back to her island, and she
deliberately sent Yrsa to him, trusting in his
ungovernable lust: punctually, he raped and
impregnated her. When he found out that he
had had his own daughter, he killed himself; and
the son of that unhallowed union was Hrolfr.
In other words, Hrolfr was the instrument of
Thora’s vengeance on the royal house of
Denmark; and this tells us that the legend
originally saw Hrolfr, or rather Hrošulf, as the
man who tore the royal house apart and destroyed
or expelled the legitimate heirs - the tool of
Thora’s revenge through the generations.
In short, all these legends make best sense as
reflexes of real politics, and argue that the man
driven out by Hrošulf, Hrošmund, was a
real person, a member of the Danish Scylding
royal family, who fled the treacherous uncle who
murdered his brother and eventually founded a
lordship in British exile.
The picture is anything but clear,
however much scholarship is taken to the poem
– or to the East Anglian pedigree. Hrošmund
turns up in the pedigree’s fifth,
ultra-legendary generation. His father is Trygil,
whom Sam Newton plausibly argues to be another
name for the mysterious Scyld Sceafing, Beowulf’s
ancestor of the Danish kings; his
great-grandfather is none other than Caesar; and
his great-great-grandfather, Caesar's father, is
Woden - Wotan, Odin. The best that can be
said of such a king-list is that the East Anglian
kings wanted Hrošmund as an ancestor to
legitimate their royalty; it is not easy to
imagine a direct descent. But that, of
course, only strengthens the argument for the
Wuffingas being late and upstart rulers over East
Anglia. And if they were, how and when did
they get to rule a region where the English had
been masters without interruption since 442?
Morris' theory of alien interlopers from
Scandinavia gains ground.
The poem itself is clear enough,
however. The purpose of Beowulf is
unmistakeably to bring its hero into contact with
the most prestigious royal houses of the North.
Beowulf rescues the illustrious Hrošgar, king of
the Danes (at this point based mainly or wholly
on the islands) from a dreadful haunting, and, on
his mother's side, is the nephew of the famous
Hygelac of the Geats (from what is today Swedish
Götaland). A nephew on his mother's
side: a kind of kinship which comes familiar
after all our contacts with Celtic pedigrees,
where it almost invariably signals a pretended
kinship with a greater bloodline – could
this be the same kind of thing? Coulod
someone be claiming a patent of nobility through
Beowulf?
In rescuing Hrošgar from the
monster Grendel, Beowulf is paying off a debt of
gratitude established in the previous generation,
when Hrošgar paid off the wergeld for a man
killed by his father Ecgžeow. Evidently,
each gives what he has: the Danish king, the
splendour of whose hall Heorot is part of the
epic's theme, rescues Ecgžeow with his wealth;
and Beowulf - who only achieves great wealth at
the hour of his death, when he slays a dragon and
bequeaths his people the monster's hoard -
rescues him with his own right arm, "as
strong as thirty men" and practiced in
killing monsters. In fact, Beowulf is a
nordic Herakles, a wandering monster-slayer
travelling from coast to Baltic coast in search
of non-human enemies; in all the poem, he is
never shown fighting a human opponent.
While Hrošgar (Icelandic Hroarr)
and all the other kings mentioned in the story
are famous in later Northern legend, Beowulf is
quite unknown: no *Bijulfr turns up
anywhere in Saxo, Snorri or other sources. At
the same time, all the figures who feature in
Saxo and Snorri as taking part in great feuds and
dying dramatic deaths also do so in the poem.
Beowulf seems to have absolutely no effect on
these feuds, as if, though tremendous against
monsters, he were quite helpless to stop the
malignity of human beings. He does not even
rescue the sons of Hrošgar, to whom he had
implicitly promised protection and even
blood-brotherhood. Tragedies take place,
and royal houses fall, as if this immensely
powerful warrior king weren't there. The
inference is obvious. Northern historical
traditions were known in very similar terms,
across a gulf of centuries, to the English author
of Beowulf, to the Dane Saxo Grammaticus,
and to the Icelanders Snorri Sturluson and the
author of Hrolfs Saga Kraka. If
their tragedies carry on as though this
supposedly tremendous warrior had no impact
whatever on them, so that his presence in the
English poem cannot ward off the evil fate that
hangs over good people nor his absence in the
Scandinavian items make things any worse - in
short: if things end up happening as if he wasn't
there - then he wasn't there. He was no
part of the original tradition.
What we have here is a fictional
(or legendary) hero, in a fictional (or
legendary) context, but among largely or fully
historical kings. Hygelac and Hrošgar were
famous figures, Hrošgar's name was so
prestigious as to turn up in Italy a century and
a half later as Rothari, the great
law-giver who was one of the most successful and
significant Longobard kings (the Longobards came
from an area south of Denmark). The poem is
very concerned not to suggest that, because he
could not cope with the monster Grendel,
therefore he was a weakling: he is always treated
with the highest respect, and the point is made
that he has deserved his rescue at Beowulf's
hands, because he himself has rescued Beowulf's
father. It does the fictional Beowulf
honour to be received so well by the historical
Hrošgar, and therefore Hrošgar must remain the
glorious figure that pre-existent memories imply.
Now if Beowulf is an English
insertion into Northern historical legendry, this
insertion must have been done to serve someone's
purpose; heroes are not sent visiting all the
glorious royal houses of a heroic but
comparatively recent past for the fun of it, but
to establish someone's glorious past. Hence,
whether the legend of Beowulf begins with the
first redaction of the poem or whether the poem
casts previous accounts in high poetic form, it
represents the claim to high royal connections of
a royal house – surely an English one.
That Scandinavian legendry knew nothing of it -
and made no effort to connect its own heroes with
England - strongly suggests that these links are
invented; in other words, that the dynasty in
question can fairly be described as upstart.
The nature of the hero supplies
another hint. The monster slayers of
legend, especially in England, tend to be found
at the origin of dynasties and land-claims.
We remember that the most famous Greek
monster-slayers, Perseus and Herakles, are the
ancestors of the greatest royal lines; but closer
to home, and more to the point closer to Beowulf,
we find that the idea of monster-slaying is an
integral part of the English peasant's view of a
legitimate landlord family. At Bisterne,
Hampshire, an ancestor of the local squires, Sir
Morris Berkeley, killed a dragon and died of his
wounds, but his children and descendants took a
dragon to their ensign. In Scotland the
territory of Linton in Roxburghshire (a highly
Anglian area) became the appanage of John
Somerville of Laurieston when he killed a dragon.
In Brent Pelham it was Piers Shonks, the local
squire, and again he died of it - the dragon he
had killed was a form of the Devil himself; but
in Wantley, Yorkshire, More of More Hall, covered
from head to toe in spiky iron, beat the local
fire-breather up till he found his weak spot and,
surviving the experience, settled down to the
enjoyment of a local maid as the price of his
valour (the rather ribald story does not say that
they were married). In Slingsby, Yorkshire,
it was an unnamed member of the once-powerful
local family of Wyvill, while in Sockburn,
Durham, it was the noted Sir John Conyers, vassal
of the Bishop of Durham, and in Bishop Auckland
one of the local Pollard family. In
Deerhurst, Gloucestershire, the rank of the
dragon-slayer was more modest: a mere farm
labourer with the undistinguished name of John
Smith, whose descendants were untitled landowners
with a few tenants, but again the issue was
possession of land and protection of the local
people. The most interesting fact about
these stories is that almost all of them can be
attributed, beyond possibility of mistake, to the
local peasantry or tenants. These stories
are the peasant’s explanation of the
landlord's title to the land; that is, they
embody their expectation that the landlord will
not only give them orders and make use of them,
but also defend and protect them (though the
story of More of More Hall involves a healthily
sceptical mind about his reasons for doing so).
It is by protecting the helpless local commoners
against a terrible vision of chaos and devouring
hate, that the squire's ancestor has won the
land, and that is his descendant's title to it.
Beowulf should therefore
represent, in some sort, the beginnings and
justification of monarchy; only he does not.
He succeeds to the throne of the
already-established kingdom of the Geats. This
kingdom had a history - a grim one: it had
already twice been close to destruction. Before
Beowulf’s time, Ongenžeow king of the
Swedes had destroyed the Geatish king Heašocyn,
only to fall in turn under Hygelac; then Hygelac
himself had rashly invaded Frisia and Frankland.
Beowulf alone, it seems, had escaped that rout
thanks to his prodigious swimming powers. Hygelac’s
son Heardred succeeded to his father’s
throne; but when he fell in battle because of his
involvement in a Swedish feud - continuing the
theme of the grim fortunes of the Geats - the
crown fell into Beowulf's hands by default.
So far as we know, Beowulf was not of royal race;
but he had been more or less formally adopted as
a son, first by Hrošgar, and then by Hygelac
himself, because of his great deeds.
His foreign policy seems
remarkably peaceful. One wonders why
the poem has nothing to say about the
already-mentioned Danish feud between Hrešulf,
the cousin, and Hrešrik, Hrošgar's son and
heir; perhaps it happened while Beowulf was away
in Frisia with Hygelac. But though the
great and bloody feud among the Swedes is going
on under his eyes as he is king, he takes no part
in it. Nevertheless, his formidable
presence preserves the kingdom for decades: it is
when he falls fighting a fire-breathing dragon,
that his likely heir, Wiglaf, predicts that the
old hatreds of Swedes and Franks/Frisians will
destroy the kingdom. And in fact, the Geats
vanish from history.
Part of the whole poem is a sense
of great things already past their prime and
passing away. Hrošgar has built the great hall
Heorot to be a wonder of the northern world; but
apart that he himself is old and the hall has
drawn the murderous haunting of Grendel, the poem
foreshadows his nephew's murderous feud with his
heirs, renewed deadly war with the Heašobards,
and Heorot's destruction by fire. The
Swedish royal house sees one feud after another,
each ending in civil war; and no less a person
than the valiant Wiglaf, the young kinsman who
stood alone by Beowulf as he fought the dragon,
foretells the ruin of the Geats - and, the poem
assures us, foretells truly. Great things
are aging, they are beginning to pass away, to
fade, to die.
The poem is written from a
distinctly English and insular perspective,
contemplating the ancient continental north from
a position of inevitable distance; and this sense
of fading is part of that. The king of the
North are not a reality, but a great past already
(in the poet’s time, I mean) gone and
vanished. As for the monster-slaying
Beowulf, he leaves no direct descent. And
all this sense of the fading of the North’s
greatest age has its silent counterpart in the
world of the poet himself: the new, conquering
English people. While something great is
dying out on one side of the North Sea, something
else, unnoticed and even unmentioned, is rising
on the other.
When we realize this, the real
significance of the poem hits us like a blow.
It is the exact counterpart of modern historical
fiction, in which the modern world is the silent
counterpart, never mentioned (except perhaps in
an injudicious moment) but ever present, of the
ancient world it presents; and it presents the
epic past of the Germanic north to the present of
the Christian English kingdoms exactly as, say,
the novels of a Mary Renault evoke her idea of
the Greek past as a continuous commentary on her
own English world.
I would say, therefore, that the
monster-slaying hero does not so much found a
monarchy as foreshadow one; and that it is across
the sea. Beowulf himself is an ocean
crosser who never goes anywhere on foot if he can
reach it by boat, and a superhumanly powerful
swimmer; and it is somehow typical of his whole
monster-killing career, and his long and weary
path to kingship, that his first great deed takes
place during an epic seven-day swimming race
whose stakes appear to be the crown of what is to
become Norway. His rival, though weaker,
wins, because Beowulf is dragged under by sea
monsters and has to kill no less than nine of
them before he can escape, so exhausted that the
sea drags him away to the land of the Finns. It is only after
he has loyally served both Hygelac and his son,
not to mention killed every monster he could lay
his hands on, that he becomes king of the doomed
Geatish kingdom.
Beowulf is constantly described as
a Geat, but the fact that his father's feud was
"among" the Wulfings, mid Wulfingum,
must mean that Ecgžeow was a Wulfing. Following
K.Malone, Newton argues that the people who,
according to the poem, would not receive Ecgžeow
for fear of violence, and whose name is
hopelessly corrupt in the poem's text, were Wul(f)garas,
that is Wulfings. The status of the
Wulfings is rather ill-defined in the poem, but
if Beowulf was a Wulfing, then there cannot have
been an independent Wulfing kingdom at the time:
no Wulfing court is ever mentioned, though
Beowulf spends all the time he can spare from
monster-chasing at the court of the Geats, and
visits that of the Danes. Yet these same
Wulfings have made a series of prestigious
dynastic marriages: the house of Beowulf is
probably not the only one to be related to royal
houses.
The most notable of these
marriages, that of Hrošgar with the
"Helming", i.e. Wulfing, lady
Wealhžeow, clearly represents a confused
tradition; perhaps intentionally confused. Two
later nordic sources, the Hrolfs Saga Kraka
and Arngrimur Jonsson's summary of a lost Skjoldunga
Saga, tell us that Hrošgar 's wife was in
fact from England. Her name, in my view,
agrees: it shows traces of Britain. Wealh-,
as we will see in the next chapter, is the Old
English version of the common Germanic word for a
Latin-speaking Roman. Her name, in ordinary
Anglo-Saxon, would give the nonsensical Serf
of a serf or the humiliating serf of the
Welshmen or Romans, unimaginable for a woman
of royal blood; and it follows that, in spite of
the sound, the second part of Wealhžeow cannot
be the ordinary Anglo-Saxon žeow, serf,
bondman. -Žeow as part of a name is
also found in the Swedish king Ongenžeow,
who turns up in Icelandic sagas as Angantyr,
and this suggests that this -žeow as part
of a royal name is the English version of the
suffix -tyr, a particle for
"god" found in many of Ošinn's names as well as in words for
kings or earls. It was a highly
archaic form (deriving ultimately from the
ancient Indo-European *deiwos, i.e. god,
being of light) with strongly pagan connotations,
and may well have been forgotten and
misunderstood in a long-since-Christian England.
This, in turn, implies that the name of
Hrošgar’s queen had been remembered down
the centuries, from a pagan original, even though
its meaning was forgotten; it implies, that is,
that it was a historical name.
In my view, therefore, Hrošgar 's
wife is called "Queen (or goddess) of the
Romans", not a credible name - even as a
boast of successful piracy - for an
early-sixth-century daughter of a minor
Scandinavian house, but on the other hand quite
credible for an English queen, when English
monarchs would think of ruling wealhas -
whose meaning was already shifting from
"Roman" to "Welshman or
slave" - as a matter of course. On the
Nordic side, none of the ancient king's names
transmitted by Snorri and Saxo Grammaticus in
stories related to this period contains the
particle val, while quick perusal of an
index to Bede reveals a Coenwealh (the
victor of Wyrtgeornesburg) and an Ethelwealh
king of Sussex.
But if Wealhžeow, the Helming
lady, was from England, then she cannot have been
close kin to Beowulf; and in fact, though the
poem makes her a Helming, it does not make her a
Wulfing. On the other hand, it does make
her the mother of a hero whose name features in
the pedigree - however artificial - of the
Wuffing kings of East Anglia.
If her kinship has been muddied or
hidden, it was because there was something to
hide. Suppose, for instance, that the
Helmingas were the royal house of the Wulfingas
and had already moved to England, thus accounting
for the kingless status of Beowulf's Scandinavian
branch of the tribe(and for the two Helminghams,
both with strong early English connections, in
Norfolk and Suffolk); and suppose that her second
son Hrošmund, driven out of his kingdom by
Hrošulf's murder of his brother, decided not
only to go back to his mother's country but to
establish himself against his own mother's kin;
would that not be enough to want to cover up in
an account of the nordic heroic age that preluded
to it?
Beowulf would then represent the
ideal of Wulfinga royalty, devoted to duty,
valiant, invincible, but gentle to his people and
peaceful to his neighbours: a wonder-king whose
royalty is too perfect, perhaps, to have any
future in an imperfect world that can see the
horrible kin-slaughter and betrayal of the Danish
and Swedish royal houses, but who stands as a
shining example and paragon to all later kings of
his blood; and who, by proving that a Wulfinga
was fit to be a king, indirectly consecrates
their monarchy.
There are yet more dynastic
complexities. A probably very early source
makes "Wuffa" the founder of East
Anglia; more surprisingly still, it dates him at
571. The first reaction to this is of
course that this makes the whole hypothesis about
Beowulf and Swedish Wulfingas ancestry
fall to the ground; and yet that is not
acceptable either. The relationship between
Sweden and East Anglia - and specifically the
East Anglia of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, that
is of the early seventh century - is really too
well established to be denied; and the
three-sided relationship between Beowulf,
Scandinavian seaways, and East Anglia, seems a
better bet than any alternative proposal for the
origin of this obviously insular Germanic saga.
Beowulf, on many grounds, must originate
in East Anglia.
It is Nennius, of all people, who
comes to our rescue, by telling us that not
Wuffa, but Wilhelm Wehha, his father, was in fact
the first king of the East Anglians. His
genealogy is otherwise quite identical with that
of the manuscript Cotton Vespasian b.VI,
except for the very last king. Both are
gross oversimplifications of the list of
succession, managing even to miss the historical
figure of Redwald, the first Christian king.
Now both Wuffa and Wehha look like hypocoristic
(shortened) forms; in fact, nick-names; and it is
my impression, based on the perusal of a
dictionary of English place-names, that such
hypocoristic forms did not go with rank and
status. Place-names in brough, burgh
or bury, denoting strongholds and -
implicitly - political power, always seem to
carry a polysillabic personal name of the kind
familiar from heroic literature and king-lists.
Conversely, individual farms in -tun or -stead,
denoting no great amount of wealth or power,
frequently carry hypocoristic personal names.
The impression is that Wilhelm (William) had a
nick-name of this kind, and therefore did not
amount to much; he sounds like an upstart of some
sort. The connection with the royal
Wulfingas may have been quite artificial, or he
may have been a retainer promoted above his
station. That Wuffa, eponym of the
tribe, is said to be his son, only means that he
came to be regarded as the "father" of
the nation, that is that it, in some sense, owed
its existence to him. The genealogy makes
him the grandfather of the historical Tyttil
through Wuffa, but Bede mentions only Tyttil
himself and his son Redwald; it is not too
sceptical to ask whether the genealogy, so
thoroughly artificial elsewhere, is to be trusted
here.
What follows is speculative in the
extreme. But what we have is a suggestion
of an upstart ruler regarded as the father of his
people, who apparently takes power in the 570s;
some time before that, there is a suggestion of
dynastic turmoil connected with the possible
intrusion of an exiled Danish prince called
Hrešmund, son of a Helming princess from
England; even earlier, we seem to have a royal
house of Wulfing origin claiming descent from the
hero Helm, mentioned in Widsiš;
Wealhžeow is one of them. Earlier yet, it
is possible to suggest a claim for a house of
Icel, historically surviving only in Mercia; and
well over the horizon of dynastic descent, there
is the great yet faded figure of the first Breatwealda,
Aelle.
A chronological sequence seems to
suggest itself, and is by no means impossible in
view of other known events around the North Sea
and the Baltic, in every part of which the sixth
century - and especially its middle fifty years -
appear to have been a time of turmoil. The
first person we see is the first king of the
Saxons in Britain, Aelle. At some point
before 468, Ambrosius kills him and forces a
temporary submission on the Saxons, including
baptism. By 468, however, we hear of Saxons
fighting the British on the Loire; a few years
later, insular Saxons are raiding the coasts of
Gaul as far as Saintes, which indicates that they
are, one way or another, out of the control of
the Romano-British. At some point after
Aelle, we hear of ”kings” being called
in from the Continent to rule over the Saxons;
and of an Icel, of the race of Offa, king of the
Angles of Angeln. Icel is the first named
Angle in British history. Fifth-century
records such as Sidonius Apollinaris and the
Gaulish Chronicle call the Teutonic settlers in
Britain ”Saxons”; but by
Procopius’ time, they are called Angiloi,
Angles, and have only one king and one ethnic
identity. This suggests that the Angle
kings of Icel and Offa’s line had effective
control of most or all of the Teutons of the
island.
Following events are dominated by
a sequel of seaborne invasions. In the
520s, a famous king from the North, Hygelac or
Chlochilaicus, fell attempting an invasion of
Frankland and Frisia; Wiglaf's speech at the end
of Beowulf (we must remember that all the
events in the poem are invented, but interpolated
among real events) hints that the Geats
were then destroyed by Swedes and
Franks/Frisians, whether in a formal alliance or
in successive separate attacks. It is at
the same time that a most unreliable account from
Procopius makes the English invade the Varni, a
tribe south of Jutland; the story as he tells it
is absurd, but something did intervene to stop
the advance of Frankish interests in the form of
a dynastic marriage with the sister of the
otherwise all-conquering Theudebert I, and a
seaborne invasion does fit into the contemporary
pattern of violent feuds and large-scale naval
and land warfare. Again in the 520s,
according to the Wendy Davies-John Morris
conjecture, invasions from Scandinavia strike
Britain, especially East Anglia; according to my
conjecture, these are Wulfingas, related to those
Geats whose king Hygelac/Chlochilaicus is, at the
same time, trying it on with Franks and Frisians.
The effect is probably to separate East Anglia
from the rest of the English settlers –
Middle Anglia and the future Mercia – where
an Iceling Anglian dynasty remains ensconced.
The unity of the English/ Saxons falls apart.
It is certain, with no lying
Frankish ambassadors to confuse the issue, that
both the Danish and the Swedish royal houses were
rent at something like this time by major feuds
that caused repeated civil wars; their
protagonists, under such names as Hrolfr Kraki,
Hjorvaršr, Ali, Ašils and Angantyr, passsed
into legend and were remembered for centuries.
If the Wulfingas from whom the Helmingas of East
Anglia seem to have sprung were a sub-group of
the Geats and could count on the connection - as Beowulf
seems to hint - they would certainly have been
weakened by the defeat of their oversea cousins
in Frankland, let alone their final destruction;
and would then have made, with their tempting
cornlands, an attractive target for any exiled
Danish royal heir – let’s, just for the
heck of it, call him Hrešmund - who might boast
a dynastic claim through his mother. Finally,
a local hero of comparatively humble rank but
with some connection with the older Wulfinga line
might well have been able to overthrow the
usurping Danes and establish a new native
dynasty; his claims, however, were so slight that
he does not seem to have been able to decide
whether he and his people claimed descent from
the Wulfingas or from Offa the ancestor of Icel -
and compromised on a middle form, calling
themselves the Wuffingas.
Whatever construction is put on
the shadowy names and even more shadowy accounts
that reach us from a dozen legendary,
fragmentary, suppositious or downright mendacious
sources, one thing we cannot doubt: the sixth
century was a time of turmoil and instability.
Indeed, the turmoil seems to have started
independently of the Justinianic wars that
convulsed the Mediterranean: Justinian only began
his campaign of systematic invasion in the 530s,
but the fall of Hygelac is dated, however
dubiously, to 523 (Gregory gives no exact year,
and our earliest authority for the date 523 is
over a century later). This also seems to
correspond with the beginning of the chronic
instability and frequent civil wars of the
Frankish kingdom (or kingdoms), whose internal
politics, as far as violent feuds and kin-slaying
go, was little different from contemporary
Swedish or Danish realities. It is no
wonder that archaeology suggests that North Sea
trade virtually collapsed during this period, and
that when it started again - in about the last
decade of the century - it was centred about
largely new centres such as Quentovic, Dorestad
and Hamwih (later Southampton). The only
exchanges shown by archaeological finds are
political, in the form of diplomatic gifts; which
corresponds with the picture of Beowulf
(with its ceremonious embassies of young warriors
and exchanges of gifts) and what can be gathered
from contemporary sources.
This turmoil seems to have
affected whatever Teutonic monarchy or monarchies
were established in Britain, and there is no
reason to deny that, at some point in this
period, East Anglia was separated from the rest
of England and became a separate kingdom.
Something of the kind may have happened to Kent,
perhaps under Frankish pressure, ending in the
rise of the Oiscing dynasty. This violent
instability on the Teutonic side is to be
remembered when we come to reconstruct events on
the sixth-century British side; apart from
anything else, it mirrors Gildas' descriptions of
such things as Maglocunus' murder of his uncle,
the "frequent" murders of simoniac
clergymen, and the unhallowed feud in the
Dumnonian royal house.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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