Relations between Angles and Saxons

[Justin of the New Yorkii]

Does anybody know if the Angles and Saxons coordinated their attacks on Britain as allies, or were they two independent, sovereign groups competing for the same land? Or did they have a sort of vassal or mercenary-state arrangement?

[Agraes]

Categorising who was an Angle and who was a Saxon is no easy task. The first real anglo-saxon kingdoms won't really emerge untill the end of the 6th century in eastern Britain. That's to them we can ascribe an "Angle" or "Saxon" ethnicity. Before what we have are tribes, or even familial groups, settled here and there. We however can see broad cultural differences between what will be the 'Angle' zone, and the 'Saxon' zone. Kent also shows a lot of influence from Jutland and then from Frankish Gaul. Those differences are mostly known from female dress ornaments such as broochs. This is really well described in Penelope Walton Rogers' book, Cloth and Clothing in early Anglo-saxon England.

From a political point of view, several authors tend to reject the idea of a fast germanic polical takeover in eastern Britain. We have evidence for Romano-British towns even in the 6th century in those regions. And when we see small germanic communities near those towns, it seems logic to think those settlements were there as 'allies', not as opponents. In some places, the germanic federates may have took the power in the 5th century. In other, they remained loyal to their British masters.
Best read on this would be Ken Dark Britain and the end of the Roman empire.

Stuart Laycock has recently, mostly in his book Britannia: the Failed State, a theory of a "Bosnian end to Roman Britain". That is that when the Roman governement left (or was chased) in the early 400's, pre-roman tribal rivalities re-emerged. Neighboring civitates start to compete for power, and this led to the welcome of the first anglo-saxon as federates (this possibly of course with external threats such as Picts and Gaels). Stuart Laycock shows that the first anglo-saxon settlements are mostly concentrated on eastern Romano-british civitates borders. For him, some of those civitates will ultimately evolve into the Anglo-saxon kingdoms, adopting a germanic culture. Some exemples are Wessex and the civitas of the Atrebates, East Anglia with the Iceni or Kent... with the Cantii :wink:
We well know the history of wars between the Anglo-saxon kingdoms. It may started as wars between competiting germanic groups and their Briton masters.

I find his views really convincing. That may answer your questions about Angles and Saxons beeing either allies or at war with each other. The civitates probably invited different germanic groups to defend themselves against their neighbors, and those germanic groups had probably few scrupule fighting each others. They may even had been foes in Old Germania...

[Justin of the New Yorkii]

Thanks a lot Agraes for a very helpful response. You're absolutely right about the difficulty of sorting these groups out. All I know is that one of the sources (can't remember who right now) said the Angles packed up their entire nation and left their homeland empty, while the Saxons came as individual groups looking for new lands.
Makes me wonder why the Angles left and how willing they were to leave. There were so many refugee crisis during that time it can be hard to determine why specific groups chose to go where they went.

[authun]

Does anybody know if the Angles and Saxons coordinated their attacks on Britain as allies, or were they two independent, sovereign groups competing for the same land? Or did they have a sort of vassal or mercenary-state arrangement?

The term 'Saxon' is only used in roman or gallo roman sources before the 6th cent. and appears to describe any north sea germanic speaker who is not a Frank. We have one mention of Jutish Saxons in Flanders which may reflect an attempt to distinguish between different 'saxon' groups, but it is the only such description and it is not clear if that is what it means.

The 'saxons' almost certaiinly didn't think of themselves as Saxons. Even by the time of Charlemagne in the 8th cent. when the Franks thought in terms of 'saxons', they were an alliance of several dozen tribes. Widdukind for an example, described as a Saxon king, was of the Westfali. Dithmarser, Stormanner, Ostfali etc were other groups, all called Saxons. By the 9th/10th cents, these conquered saxons thought it fit to write up their own history and started with the question, where did the saxons come from? Widdukind of Corvey, possibly a grandson of the above, stated, 'there are many stories. Some claim they are Danes, some that they are descended from the armies of Alexander [the Great].'

Similarly, the Angles too may not be confined to the modern day area of Anglen in Schleswig (but not Holstein). They are nearly always mentioned along with the Warnians. The area was largely deserted and often climatic changes are cited. However, the area is of strategic importance and had been the focus of attacks in the 3rd and 4th cents AD and in the mid 6th cent. we see a change in the archaeology and culture. Military pressures therefore may have played a part.

The early pottery in the Yorkshire Wolds show very strong stylistic similarities with those found in Anglen and on Fyn and are different from the later fused north sea styles found south of the Elbe. Although Anglen was not completely deserted many people did leave but this was over a century before the adventus so, they must have been somewhere else for a hundred years or so. Another interesting observation is that early graves in Yorkshire, but not exclusively so, produce metalwork which has an origin in southern Scandinavia, especially south east Norway. These people too may have formed a portion of the group known as 'the Angles'.

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[authun]

There were so many refugee crisis during that time it can be hard to determine why specific groups chose to go where they went.

Haio Zimmermann thinks one possible reason is the advantageous climate in Britain for rearing cattle. Britain is affected by the gulf stream and has warmer wetter winters which means cattle don't have to be wintered in byres. Enough biomass grows for outwintering except for the coldest of days which rarely last more than a few days. On the continent, cattle stalling is necessary. This means that summer months must be used for growing hay to feed the cattle in winter on a much larger scale than in Britain, in addition to growing food for their own needs. With the collapse of the villa economy in Britain, land became available in some places and proved to be an attractive prospect for those having to work even harder on the continent due to the onset of colder conditions.

http://www.nihk.de//downloads/5/favoura ... arming.pdf

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[Ron Andrea]

So, we're suggesting that the division among Angles, Saxons, Jutes, etc. may have been a result of their migration/conquest of Britannia, not previous existing differences? :?

[authun]

So, we're suggesting that the division among Angles, Saxons, Jutes, etc. may have been a result of their migration/conquest of Britannia, not previous existing differences? :?

We don't know who or what is meant by Saxons other than, on the Continent, they are associated with northern Germany and the North Sea and in Britain, the term is used by Celtic speakers to describe any germanic speaker, though sometimes they are more specific and do refer occasionally to the Angles.

The relationship between the Angles and Jutes can only be guessed at. On the Continent, there are stylistic differences between the north and south of Jutland and these appear in Britain also. However, both groups may share a similar language which is possibly different from that of the Saxons. There is only scant runic evidence but southern Scandinavia shows that a common runic tradition exists as far as the river Eider around 400AD. The runic tradition south of the Eider is slightly different. One would normally place the Jutes and the Angles north of the Eider and the Saxons, if correctly identified, south of the Eider. We don't know how much difference this made to the spoken idioms however.

The differences that we see between the Angles and Jutes in Britain in the early years fades quickly and we then see styles which are generally termed 'north sea group' replacing them. This term describes the mixed or fused styles which appear in many parts around the north sea. The inference is that the groups mixed on the continent too, creating new alliances etc. and that some of these peoples came to Britain also, but they were later and were following the earliest settlers to Britain, who had kept their more distinctive styles.

So, it's the other way around. They all become English, whatever they were called on the Continent and wherever they lived. Ultimately, this is tied to the question of the origin of the germanic languages and culture. Does it come out of Jastorf or does it start in southern Scandinavia during the bronze age? It is a topic which is still hotly debated.

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[Ron Andrea]

Excellent. Thank you. I didn't think that was true, but the drift of the conversation seemed to suggest it.

If the Angles (and Jutes) and Saxons came from areas distinct enough to have a river designated as the cultural dividing line, they may have been differed enough to maintain those differences across the North Sea. Since all the maps I've seen show a scatter of settlements, that seems unlikely, especially as they had a common foe (the Britons) and occasionally joined to act against him.

Hard to track linguistic differences in groups whose only written records were made by Latin speakers/writers. Of course, by the time The Anglo-Saxons had becomes the English (and were writing their own chronicles), they were being pressed westward by the Danes and may--or may not--have found common cause with the Britons they'd conquered a century or two before.

Of course, then we get into the whole question of what kind of Britons were the sub-Roman Britons--degenerate Romans, re-emergent Celts, hybrid? (All speaking culturally.) But that may not be germane to issues of Germanic identity. (I suspect the Britons didn't differentiate among the Germans. All Germans would have been nasty Barbarians to them. Except, of course, when you wanted them to fight your other enemies, the Picts.) :wink:

[Dan Howard]

One of my lecturers reckoned that most of the invaders were Friesian.

[authun]

One of my lecturers reckoned that most of the invaders were Friesian.

Frisia, particularly the coastal areas but also including parts of the interior, appears to become depopulated by 300 AD. Repopulation occurs in the 5th cent AD. and likley included the same, or similar, north germanic groups who settled in Britain. The new settlers became known by the geographic area that they moved into. We don't know where the Frisians of the 1st and 2nd cents. went and it seems unlikely that they are the same group as their successors.

For a discussion on why the new settlers became known as Frisians, see 'The early-medieval use of ethnic names from classical antiquity. The case of the Frisians' in Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity, http://www.josbazelmans.nl/attachments/ ... ennaam.pdf

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[Ghostmojo]

I would add that it is largely received wisdom that has kept the terms Angle and Saxon alive when referring to England's development away from being just a part of ancient Britain. It is true that other groups were involved in settlement as well, most notably Frisians and Jutes. Others arrived in smaller groupings (possibly Flemings and Franks) but seem to have been assimilated by the larger ones.

The main point to make immediately is that they seem to have been male warrior bands. There was no massive wave of immigration. Recent genetic studies have shown fairly conclusively that only 3% of English people today can trace their bloodline back to these guys. Therefore, the notion that our nation is Anglo-Saxon is far from the truth. A better term would be Anglo-Saxon influenced/dominated/led. They certainly influenced the culture for a considerable period - but so did the Vikings and other Norsemen who arrived later and also the Normans who arrived even later. The Normans again were a conquering minority elite. They were eventually subsumed by the dominant English culture even though their Frenchified ways held court for successive generations. Ultimately they went native rather than the masses ending up speaking Norman French. The Norse and Danes, however did arrive in huge numbers and are probably the first group to have done so since the end of the previous Ice Age.

The Angles seem to have come from southern Denmark (which possibly relates them to the later Danish arrivees) and the Saxons from northern Germany, with the Jutes clearly from the area we came to call Jutland. There may not have been an awful lot of difference between them genetically/racially. What none of them appear to have done was to have brought substantial numbers of women or children with them - if indeed any at all. It seems they were opportunistic warrior nomads who thought they'd make a go of it in Britain. They may well have been racially and culturally connected to the existing inhabitants of parts of England anyway. That may have made their transition that much easier.

What Gildas claimed about massive inroads by these barbarian hordes was largely tosh made for political reasons.

[authun]

Recent genetic studies have shown fairly conclusively that only 3% of English people today can trace their bloodline back to these guys.

There is no peer reviewed publication which states that and the lowest estimate is 54% for England calculated by Capelli using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. If you know of any other peer study, perhaps you could provide the reference.

If you refer to Oppenheimer's popular book, it is not peer science. He creates clusters, but does not explain how he defines those clusters. The assignment of 6 STR values, for he largely uses Capelli's published dataset, to define groups is arbitary and cannot be tested. Moreover 6 STR values is totally inadequate for predicting valid groups. Predicting haplogroups from STR values is in any case difficult, especially for R1b which is roughly half of western europe and anything less than 37 or 65 is a waste of time. None of the 20 or so SNPs in the R1b or I groups which have been discovered since 2005 are predictable from the dataset that Oppenheimer used.

Moreover, Oppenheimer uses Wilson's paleolithic Basque hypothesis which, Wilson warns, 'there is no proof of this'. That hypothesis, which proposes that the paternal lineages of the Basques represent the paleolithic population in the Iberian ice age refugium, is not even based on yDNA at all. It was based on linguistics, mtDNA lineages and blood groups. Linguists will not project the Vasconic language further back in time than the 2nd millenium BC, only a small number of the mtDNA lineages predate the neolithic and the blood type is also common in the near east. The leading researcher into the yDNA lineages of the Basques, Santos Alonso, stated in 2005, before Oppenheimer published his book, "Contrary to previous suggestions, we do not observe any particular link between Basques and Celtic populations beyond that provided by the Paleolithic ancestry common to European populations, nor we find evidence supporting Basques as the focus of major population expansions." (Santos Alonso, 2005, The place of the Basques in the European Y-chromosome diversity landscape).

Since that date all the data show that the modern Basque population is just as heavily influenced by events since the neolithic as any other european population.

The problem for any author attempting to popularise genetic anthropology was summed up in this review of Oppenheimers book in 2006:

"Unlike physics or other established sciences, where popularizers work against the background of well-established theories, HPG popularizers are working with a field that is fairly new, and where many theories are fiercely debated. As a result, they run the constant risk of either presenting elaborate theories that are demolished by newer findings, reading more to the evidence than is warranted by the facts, or dumbing down the material to such a degree, that anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the field loses all interest."

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