The Anglo-Saxons in the British Isles & Virginia
Part 1

3,103 words

Part 1

The settlement of Virginia, and the rest of North America, was similar in many ways to the settlement of Britain by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; three Germanic tribes that combined to become the Anglo-Saxons or the English. In both places, Anglo-Saxons became the dominant people of the land. There are, however, some important differences between what happened in Britain and what happened in Virginia. Understanding those differences can give the reader insight into the culture of America and the wider English-speaking world, the nature of racial conflict, as well as how social class and business interests influence race relations.

The Not-So-Friendly Mercenaries

The Roman Empire started to fall apart in Western Europe in the late fourth century. In 410 the internal disorder and external invasions were so bad that Rome’s Britannia Province – today’s England and Wales – became an independent state. Independent, however, without an army or a recent history of self-rule.

The lack of an army created a power vacuum in which Picts from Scotland began attacking. Their outrages are described in The Ruin of Britain, published by Gildas in the late fifth or early sixth century:

[After the Roman army left], the terrible hordes of Scots and Picts eagerly come forth out of the tiny craft [cwrwgs] in which they sailed across the sea-valley, as on Ocean’s deep, just as, when the sun is high and the heat increasing, dark swarms of worms emerge from the narrow crevices of their holes. Differing partly in their habits, yet alike in one and the same thirst for bloodshed…these nations, on learning the departure of our helpers and their refusal to return, became more audacious than ever, and seized the whole northern part of the land as far as the wall, to the exclusion of the inhabitants.

The threat of the Picts was multidirectional, but the main concern seems to have been the seaborne piracy. In response, the Roman Britons hired Germanic Anglo-Saxon mercenaries to protect them, deploying them to what is now Kent in southeastern England. Kent is region is where the River Thames meets the sea. Pirates would seek to attack the area since it was wealthy, had penalty of shipping, and was easy to get to and away from by watercraft.

It should not be surprising that the Roman Britons would hire Anglo-Saxons as soldiers. The Roman Imperial government had employed Germanic people in the Roman Army for centuries. Archeologists have discovered graves of Saxons wearing Roman armor and buried in boats in Germany and Denmark that date from before 400. It is possible, therefore that many Saxons had served in Roman Britain as soldiers before the Anglo-Saxon invasion itself. The Roman Britons obviously feared the Picts more than the Anglo-Saxons although both British tribes spoke the same Brythonic language.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicle states:

And in their days [the Anglo-Saxon Chieftains] Hengist and Horsa, invited by Vortigern king of the Britons, landed in Britain on the shore which is called Wippidsfleet; at first in aid of the Britons, but afterwards they fought against them. King Vortigern gave them land in the south-east of this country, on condition that they should fight against the Picts. Then they fought against the Picts, and had the victory wheresoever they came. They then sent to the Angles; desired a larger force to be sent, and caused them to be told the worthlessness of the Britons, and the excellencies of the land. Then they soon sent thither a larger force in aid of the others. At that time there came men from three tribes in Germany; from the Old-Saxons, from the Angles, from the Jutes.

The Anglo-Saxons first settled in the eastern region of Britain. The most numerous of the Germanic tribes was the Anglos, who eventually gave their name to the whole country.

The Anglo-Saxons were able to conquer the Roman Britons mainly because they were economic generalists – one could even call them survivalists. In addition to being good soldiers, they could build a house, plow and plant a field, and watch over a flock of sheep. The Roman Britons were unable to match this economic versatility, and when Roman government collapsed, so too did their society. The Anglo-Saxons were also skilled in the trades that counted in a politically unsettled time. The Anglo-Saxons in northern Germany and Denmark were excellent sailors. They could cross the North Sea in three-and-a-half days in well-built boats.

The Anglo-Saxon’s boats were part of a broad package of technological advantages they had over the Roman Britons. This included their swords, which were made from several different types of iron welded together after being heated and twisted. This made the swords strong, flexible, and sharp. Contrast this with the legendary King Arthur, the Roman Briton who resisted the Anglo-Saxons. King Arthur “drew the sword from the stone,” which is likely a poetic description of swords made from molten iron poured into a stone mould. Such a blade would have been brittle.

The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain took centuries. Scholars are uncertain if the Anglo-Saxons replaced the Roman Britons or absorbed them through acculturation and intermarriage. It is likely that large parts of Roman Britain were depopulated in the wake of the collapse of Roman rule, which would have allowed Anglo-Saxons to bring their families and set up their own communities in empty areas so there was no integration with any Roman Britons. It is also known that many of the Roman Britons moved to Brittany, where their language and culture thrives today, as well as northern Spain. Even with modern DNA studies, it isn’t entirely certain what happened. Probably in some places the Anglo-Saxons completely replaced the native Roman Britons, in other places, they absorbed them. The Anglo-Saxons could also make a living on the land which the Roman Britons did not use.

King Offa and his men build a berm between Wales and the Kingdom of Mercia.

The native Roman Britons who didn’t move to Brittany or northern Spain retreated to the mountainous, western part of Britain, which the Anglo-Saxons came to call Wales, after their word for “foreigner.” Wherever the Germanic people settled next to non-Germanic people, the region came to be called by a “wha” sounding name, such as Wallonia and Wallachia. Eventually the English built a berm called Offa’s Dyke between England and Wales. English settlements on the Welsh border were also fortified.

The region of England on the Welsh border consisted of fortified settlements.

The fortifications were not due to nationally organized Welsh resistance to the English. Wales was ruled by a shifting collection of warlords. The fortifications were a best-practice method of living in an ethnic frontier zone, especially where one side of the border was ill-governed. Brigands, either Welsh or English, were a natural menace in such a circumstance.

The Normans & the Expansion of the English

The Anglo-Saxon settlement of England is part of a much wider migration of armed groups from Scandinavia and Northwestern Europe. The final wave of which was the so-called Viking Age. This is when Scandinavian pirates raided the wealthiest parts of Europe while settling in parts of Ireland, Russia, Britain, and most importantly, France.

The part of France which the Vikings colonized became Normandy – a self-ruling Dutchy.

In 1066, England’s King Edward the Confessor died without issue. Harold Godwinson, the most powerful man in Britain, claimed that he’d been given the crown just before Edward died. However, William of Normandy also had a solid claim – Edward and William were cousins. Harold and William met in battle at Hastings, and William emerged triumphant.

The Normans became England’s new aristocracy, and this changed everything. Before William, it was not unusual for Anglo-Saxon nobles to murder each other over trivial political differences. After William’s arrival, the new Norman aristocracy would have falling outs, but those differences rarely ended in fatalities. England was also continuously invaded prior to the Norman Conquest. At one point, a Danish army occupied half the country. Harold Godwinson was, to put it frankly, a member of a group of Englishmen who had collaborated with foreign occupiers before William’s Conquest. His family had intermarried with the family of King Cnut, who was a Dane who’d killed many English nobles to stabilize his rule. After William and his Normans won at Hastings, the invasions stopped.

The Normans were not all that different from the English in a racial sense, and soon the Normans became the Anglo-Normans, and eventually they merely became the English upper class and royal elite. By the time of King Edward I, the Norman aristocrats had aligned the government with the interests of the common Anglo-Saxons. By whatever name they went by, the Norman aristocrats led the common English folk in settling other parts of the British Isles shortly after their arrival.

In 1092, Norman William Rufus,

…anxious to proclaim and underpin his title to the southern Brythonic speaking region of Cumbria, founded a castle at Carlisle, posted a detachment of knights there, and, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘sent thither a great multitude of lowly folk with woman and cattle to dwell and till the land.’ Some twenty years later Ceredigion in west Wales witnessed a similar scene but with two noteworthy differences – the mastermind behind the operation there was a great aristocrat, Gilbert fitz Richard of Claire in east Anglia…and the colonists (again in the words of the chronicle) ‘brought in to fill the land’ were specifically identified as English, Saxons. [1]

The Norman led English expansion in the British Isles wasn’t driving one group away and populating it with another, so much as investors – Normans – working with common English settlers – to populate empty ground. Exact population figures are difficult to come by in the areas outside of England, but it is likely the populations in the areas the English moved to were not large. “Even the Welsh chronicle conceded that when the English settled in west Wales in the early twelfth century, they found a ‘land which was before that, as it were, empty.’” [2] This explains why the western part of Wales is mostly English-speaking today. It’s been that way since the English expansion in Britain that took place after the Norman Conquest.

The English expansion into Wales, Ireland, and the other parts of the British Isles was aided by the Anglo-Saxon legal system. English Common Law found justice for murder victims through a trial by jury. Juried trials eliminated costly blood feuds. Juried trials and the precedent-based logic of English Common Law legitimized English rule across the Isles, especially in Wales.

Before the reign of Edward I, Scotland could have joined with England. Lothian, in the southeast corner of Scotland, was settled by Anglo-Saxons in the fifth century just like England was. The merge didn’t happen because of a series of unfortunate deaths in Royal family of Scotland. This turn of events led to a failure to unite the crowns of Scotland and England and set off, by accident of circumstance, centuries of warfare between the two kingdoms.

The most successful English colonies in the British Isles became known as Little England beyond Wales, in what is now the southern part of Pembrokeshire, Wales. There, around 1113, an Anglo-Saxon society emerged from a group of English settlers from southwest England, a Norman upper class, and Flemish merchants.

The area of southern Pembrokeshire was colonized by a mix of people who can be called Anglo-Saxons.

R.R. Davies writes,

The settler communities in Wales and Ireland likewise protected, fostered, and promoted their English identity vociferously and defiantly. Thus when Edward III declared in 1357 that ‘both the English born in Ireland and those born in England and dwelling in Ireland are true English,’ he was reaffirming what the English communities in Ireland, and for that matter Wales likewise, believed to be self-evidently true.[3]

There was so much English settlement in Scotland, Ireland and Wales during the initial Anglo-Saxon settlement and after the Norman Conquest that it is likely that many proud Welsh, Irish, or Scottish people living today have a great deal of ancestry deriving from the mercenaries of Denmark and northern Germany. This probably explains why figures such as Enoch Powell, who was from a Welsh family, could be such an effective English ethnonationalist.

Jamestown

The Anglo-Saxon expansion in the British Isles in both the fifth century and the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest would be repeated in Virginia, but with many smaller differences and one critical difference – race. The Welsh, Irish, and Anglo-Saxons were of the same race and only had minimal ethnic differences. The English and Scots were even closer ethnically. It is also clear from the historical record that the Roman Britons were more comfortable with armed Anglo-Saxons in their midst than armed Brythonic Picts.

The Indians living in Virginia were racially different, and neither race was comfortable in the presence of the other. The English also had less of an understanding of the land and climate of Virginia than the Anglo-Saxon mercenaries had of Roman Britain. The English also had a much longer journey to Virginia by sea, too. Even the exact location of Jamestown would be unknown to the colony’s sponsors in England until the ships that brought the first colonists there returned. The first English in Virginia were in a more desperate situation in Virginia in 1607 than the Anglo-Saxons moving to Roman Briton in the early fifth century or Ireland after 1066.

In the same way that the Anglo-Saxons (probably) had better swords, plows, and boats than the Welsh, the English had a technological advantage over the Indians, albeit unquestionably greater than the Anglo-Saxons had over the Welsh. In the same way that the English moved into mostly empty territory in western Wales after the Norman Conquest, the English arriving in Virginia also sought to avoid any antagonism with the Indians by deliberately setting the center of their colony on “waste ground.” In 1607, James Fort was positioned on a strip of land that was almost a swamp.

Powhatan and his warriors destroyed the Chesapeake Tribe after he received a prophecy that a nation would arise out of the Chesapeake Bay to destroy him. This prophecy came about just before the English arrived.

The key Indian chief was Powhatan. He’d received a prophecy that a nation would emerge from the Chesapeake Bay and destroy his people, and in response he’d waged a genocidal campaign against the Chesapeake Indians. When the English arrived, he didn’t see them as the threat described in the prophecy. They had advanced technology but couldn’t feed themselves. Nonetheless, relations with Powhatan and the Indians became poisonous almost immediately. English attempts to get food from Powhatan’s people caused continuous friction, and occasional violence.

Had the colony not been backed by a company which could generate capital by selling shares in London thereby having the money to pay and transport shovel-loads of new colonists to Jamestown, the effort would have ended in failure within a few years. The colony’s most critical early leader who brought a shovel-load of new settlers in the nick of time was Sir Thomas Gates. His ship, the Sea Venture, was severely damaged in a hurricane, but he still made it to Bermuda. There, he kept the colonists together and they built two ships from native cedar boards and parts of the Sea Venture and then sailed the new ships to Jamestown in 1609. Gates and company sailed into a colony which was in great distress and on the edge of starvation. The colony would have been abandoned, but Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, arrived with a doctor, more colonists, and more supplies, and the colony was saved.

Aside from mere survival, three important things occurred that set the tone for future race relations and further English settlement in North America. The first was that the English came to believe that the Indians were Satanists practicing human sacrifice. A settler named William White spent some in an Indian village and partially saw a ceremony where he believed young boys were killed and their bodies burned. Many modern scholars believe this was a coming-of-age ceremony, but this might not be true. It is certain that some of the Indian tribes, including the advanced Aztecs, regularly sacrificed boys. If a society practices polygamy, then the surplus boys must be somehow removed. Creating a human sacrifice ritual is a way to do so.

Regardless of whether or not the Indians practiced human sacrifice or were engaged in “coming of age” rituals that appeared like human sacrifice, the religious differences between the English and Indians were irreconcilable. Unlike the Anglo-Saxons who eventually adopted the Christian faith of the Roman Britons, the Virginia English did not adopt any aspect of the Indian’s religion.

The English also didn’t practice intermarriage. The famous marriage between John Rolfe and Pocahontas was controversial and unusual. The controversy around this marriage eventually took on a religious edge. Reverend William Symonds, a minister for the Virginia Company, preached an early form of Christian Identity, insisting that the Englishmen not marry Indian “Canaanites.” Alfred A. Cave writes,

Despite the marriage of Rolfe and Pocahontas, Indian maidens were not esteemed as prospective wives by respectable Englishmen in the colony, and those who did engage in illicit romances that crossed the color barrier were the object of scorn. [4]

John Rolfe marries Pocahontas. There were proposals from Virginia Company officials in England for the English to marry the Indian women to ease relations, but these ideas were rejected in the real world. The marriage between John Rolfe and Pocahontas was as controversial in its day as such marriages continue to be presently. The progeny of John and Pocahontas married other English Virginians for generations. Today, Pocahontas is a symbol of white American culture, but only because this marriage was the exception, not the norm.

The Virginians also started to project military power, even when the colony was a malnourished all-male mining camp whose leadership would, on occasion, die by torture when captured by Indians. In 1609, the Virginia Company hired Sir Samuel Argall to find a shorter and safer way from England to Jamestown. He found just such a route which went north of the Spanish West Indies. After accomplishing that goal, in July of 1613, he went on to destroy a French Jesuit mission in what is now Maine. This made New England free of French settlement and allowed the Mayflower Pilgrims to create their City on a Hill later.

Notes

[1] R.R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093 – 1343, (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 145

[2] ibid. p. 153

[3] ibid. p. 145

[4] Alfred A. Cave, Lethal Encounters: Englishmen and Indians in Colonial Virginia, (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2013) p. 98