The Vikings and Saxons gave thanks for all of the food they had to survive the winter, thanked Odin, and looked forward to the new year when Spring would make the crops grow again. It also became the date that was chosen to celebrate the birth of Jesus, Christmas, when the Saxons and then the Vikings changed their religion to become Christians. Here are some facts about the Anglo-Saxons and Christianity. The early Anglo-Saxons were pagans and believed in many different gods, as well as being superstitious. Magic rhymes, stones or potions were thought to protect people from sickness and evil spirits. Anglo-Saxon Britain became Christian around the end of the 6th century.
Julius Caesar led the first Roman invasion of England in 55 BCE, but it wasn’t until 43 CE, under the Emperor Claudius, that a successful invasion brought Britain under Rome’s control as a colony. Roman rule over Britain lasted for more than three hundred years. It was during the Roman period that Christianity first came to Britain: in Book 1, Bede mentions the martyrdom of St. Alban, during the reign of Diocletian (1.7), and the rise of the Pelagian heresy in Britain in the 4th century (1. 10).
- 1 of 7 videos from the Stone virtual Christmas season. This is the Stone Literary Christmas event with an introduction by Amanda and an Anglo Saxon Christmas.
- KS2 children are introduced to the Anglo-Saxons in Britain from Year 3, then build on their knowledge up to Year 6. They will learn about Anglo-Saxon art as they explore village life and village culture in the Anglo-Saxon period. People have been drawing inspiration from Anglo-Saxon art for centuries now, for its detail and sheer skill.
After the collapse of the Roman Empire and the withdrawal of Roman legions from Britain in the fifth century CE, Britain came under increasing pressure from Germanic and Pictish raiders. The Germanic tribes crossed the sea from their homeland in northern Germany, while the Picts crossed the former Roman frontier from what is now Scotland. In the Historia (1.15), Bede discusses the coming of the Germanic tribes—the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—and their division into separate kingdoms in Britain: Jutish kingdom of Kent; the kingdoms of the West Saxons (Wessex), East Saxons (Essex), and South Saxons (Sussex); and the Anglian kingdoms of the East Angles, Northumbria, and Mercia (including the Middle Angles). There were other minor kingdoms (Bede later mentions Lindsey and the kingdom of the Hwicce, for example), but these seven major kingdoms were the most significant and powerful, and the conflicts between them provide the political context for Bede’s Historia (map).
Because he was born and lived his entire life in Northumbria, that Anglian kingdom north of the Humber is his primary focus for much of the work. Northumbria was originally divided into two kingdoms: Bernicia (extending roughly from the River Forth in the north and the River Tees in the south) and Deira (extending from the Tees to the Humber) (map). Northumbria was briefly unified under Æthelfrith, king of the Bernician dynasty, and again under Edwin, of the Deiran dynasty, who defeated Æthelfrith in battle in 616 CE. After the death of Edwin in 633, the kingdom split again until it was reunited roughly a decade later by Oswiu, the son of Æthelfrith.
Much of this period was marked not only by internecine fighting between the Bernician and Deiran dynasties, but also by the contest for overlordship with the Mercians to the south. Both King Edwin (d. 633) and King Oswald (d. 642) were killed in battle with Penda, the powerful pagan king of Mercia. With his defeat of Penda at the Battle of Winwaed in 655, Oswiu of Northumbria established himself as the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kings. Penda’s death marked the end of pagan rule in Mercia.
Bede records that in the period of upheaval after the departure of the Romans from Britain, a Christian mission under St. Germanus came to Britain to combat the Pelagian heresy (1.17–21). But little could be done to stem the tide of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, which brought with it the pagan worship of the Germanic gods Woden and Thunor. The Britons who remained Christian looked westward to Ireland, where a bishopric was established in the fifth century under Palladius (1.13). Irish Christianity developed a number of traditions independent of Rome—notably, the method of calculating the date of Easter—that would put it at odds with the Roman Christianity that took hold among the Anglo-Saxons a century and a half later. Thus, when Augustine’s mission arrived in Kent in 595, it faced the challenge of overcoming both Anglo-Saxon paganism and British (Irish) Christianity. With the exception of a story about King Edwin’s chief pagan priest Coifi (2.13), little attention is given to the pagan religion. Bede considered the conflict with the British Christians over the date of Easter a much more serious issue.
At the same time, Bede recognized and appreciated the importance of the Irish for the establishment of the Church in his native Northumbria. After the death of Edwin, Northumbria’s first Christian king, the Northumbrian church fell into disarray—its bishop, Paulinus, fled to Kent—until Oswald brought in Aidan, a monk from the Irish monastery of Iona, to reintroduce Christianity to Northumbria. Aidan’s abbey on the island of Lindisfarne became an important center of missionary activity and of learning. The scriptorium at Lindisfarne produced the magnificent Lindisfarne Gospels in the early eighth century.
The illumination of the Lindisfarne Gospels shows the strong influence of Celtic art. At the same time, it has been suggested that the Codex Amiatinus, produced at Bede’s monastery at Jarrow, exhibits the influence of Coptic art from Egypt (Mayr-Harting 1972, 155). That communities on the isolated Northumbrian coast could exhibit such diverse influences demonstrates the international nature of the Church, and the importance of trade and communication between distant parts of the Christian world. It is no coincidence that many of the most important monasteries were founded on the coast, near good harbors and landing places that facilitated trade.
Although the conversion of the rulers of Anglo-Saxon England took place fairly rapidly between Augustine’s arrival in Kent in 597 and the conversion of Wessex and the Isle of Wight roughly a century later, it must be assumed that pagan beliefs and practices persisted among the common people. For example, although Æthelbert of Kent converted to Christianity in 597, in 640 Eorcenberht of Kent found it necessary to order the destruction of pagan idols. At the same time, there was an adaptation of some elements of paganism to a new Christian context. This kind of syncretism was encouraged by Gregory the Great, the pope who sent Augustine to Britain. In a letter to Mellitus, a member of Augustine’s mission, Gregory encourages Mellitus to convert pagan temples into churches, and to adapt some pagan rituals, such as animal sacrifices, to Christian purposes: “Thus while some outward rejoicings are preserved, they will be able to share more easily in inward rejoicings” (HE 1.30; trans. Colgrave and Mynors). Syncretism was a tool for weaning the English people from paganism.
The Church and the Anglo-Saxon kingship became mutually supporting institutions. It was through a dynastic marriage between Edwin of Northumbria and the daughter of Æthelbert of Kent that Northumbria was initially converted to Christianity. The Church brought with it a hierarchy of leadership, a developing monastic and episcopal infrastructure, and international connections that secular rulers could leverage to support and extend their own power. Christianity became a unifying force in Britain.
Discussing the importance of monasticism—and especially of convents founded for aristocratic women—Henrietta Leyser writes: “In exactly which ways their communities helped to consolidate both the newly emergent kingdoms and the new faith may even now not be fully understood, but it is abundantly clear that the contribution of royal women, both as abbesses and mothers—and often as both—was crucial” (Leyser 2016, 19). She cites the example of Seaxburh, the daughter of King Anna of East Anglia and widow of Eorcenberht of Kent (d. 664)—the king who demanded the destruction of pagan idols. Her daughter Eorcengota was a nun in the community of Faremoutiers in Gaul. Her sister Æthelthryth, though married to King Ecgfirth of Northumbria, refused to consummate her marriage, and retired to the monastery at Ely. Her sons with Eorcenberht, Ecgberht and Hlothhere, succeeded their father as kings of Kent; her daughter Eormenhild married Wulfhere, the first Christian king of Mercia (and after his death followed her aunt Æthelthryth and her mother Seaxburh as abbess of Ely). The example of Seaxburh suggests how dynastic marriages and political alliances went hand-in-hand with the spread of Christianity in England.
Ely, of which Æthelthryth was the founding abbess, was a double monastery—a monastery with separate accommodations for women and men, and headed by an abbess. Double monasteries were a distinctive feature of monasticism in Gaul, which inspired the establishment of the institution in Anglo-Saxon England. In the selections from the Historia collected here, we will encounter four double monasteries and their abbesses: Hild’s Whitby (Streanaeshalch), Æthelthryth’s Ely, Æthelburh’s Barking, and Æbbe’s ill-fated Coldingham. Bede saw the fire that destroyed Coldingham as evidence of the immorality that was bred when men and women shared the same house, and, indeed, the foundation of new double monasteries was forbidden by the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 because living together in a double monastery “becomes a cause of scandal and a stumbling block for ordinary folk” (Canon 20).
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle ponders some of the best of the Anglo-Saxon riddles from the Exeter Book
Anglo Saxon Christian
As I’ve remarked before, it’s a sobering thought that all of the Anglo-Saxon poetry that has survived is found in just four manuscripts which escaped the ravages of time, the pillaging of the Vikings, and the censorship of the Church: the Cotton manuscript (which is our sole source for the long heroic narrative poem Beowulf), the Vercelli book, a collection of manuscripts of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the Exeter Book. Of these, the Anglo-Saxon poetry found in half of these, the Vercelli and Bodleian manuscripts, is exclusively religious: indeed, it’s little more than dramatic paraphrases of Old Testament stories or of Saints’ lives, as Michael Alexander notes in his informative introduction to his translation of Anglo-Saxon verse, The Earliest English Poems (Penguin Classics). That leaves the Cotton manuscript (whose Anglo-Saxon poetry comprises Beowulf and nothing more) and the Exeter Book. And it’s the Exeter Book that yields a whole host of smaller masterpieces of Old English verse, from ‘The Dream of the Rood’ to ‘The Battle of Maldon’ to ‘The Ruin’ to ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Seafarer’ and the celebrated riddles.
The Anglo-Saxon riddles are especially interesting. Far from being idle brain-teasers to divert people for half an hour during their lunch break or provide a topic of conversation at Christmas dinner, the riddle, to the Anglo-Saxons, was a serious and enigmatic poetic form, designed to defamiliarise and alienate by depriving a thing of its name or giving an animal a ‘voice’ with which to speak to us. Many of the riddles in the Exeter Book bear this out (and I am indebted to Michael Alexander, and his excellent pocket translation of Anglo-Saxon verse, The Earliest English Poems (Penguin Classics), for this observation). But this is not to say that some of the riddles aren’t, quite frankly, bawdy and rude. And they are meant to be diverting, even if some of them clearly have a religious aspect (generally the less successful one) and are a tool for learning. It’s part of the fun of the Anglo-Saxon riddle that we’re not entirely sure what we’re going to get.
The fun also comes from the fact that the riddles in the Exeter Book didn’t come with their solutions printed (or rather handwritten) alongside the riddles themselves; like a dodgy puzzle book bought off a market stall for 20p, we have the puzzles but can only guess at what the answers were meant to be. In some cases, no satisfactory solution has been found.
Anglo-saxon Christmas
The Anglo-Saxon riddles contained in the Exeter Book were probably written in the early eighth century. Below, I’ve included some of the best Anglo-Saxon riddles from the Exeter Book, followed by the most commonly proposed solutions. I’ve numbered them first, second, third, and so on, for the sake of matching riddle to solution, but in the Exeter Book they have different numbers.
First Anglo-Saxon riddle: what hangs down by the thigh of a man, under his cloak, yet is stiff and hard? When the man pulls up his robe, he puts the head of this hanging thing into that familiar hole of matching length which he has filled many times before.
Second Anglo-Saxon riddle: I am a wondrous thing, and to woman I am a thing of joyful expectation, to close-lying companions serviceable. I harm no city-dweller with the exception of my slayer. My stem is erect and tall – I stand up in bed – and I am whiskery somewhere down below. Sometimes a countryman’s attractive daughter will venture, bumptious girl, to get a grip on me. She assaults my red self and seizes my head and clenches me in a cramped place. She will soon feel the effect of her encounter with me, this curl-locked woman who squeezes me. Her eye will be wet.
Third Anglo-Saxon riddle: I saw a woman sit alone.
Fourth Anglo-Saxon riddle: The wave, over the wave, a strange thing I saw, thoroughly wrought, and wonderfully ornate: a wonder on the wave: water became bone.
Fifth Anglo-Saxon riddle: I saw two wonderful and weird creatures out in the open unashamedly fall a-coupling. If the fit worked, the proud blonde in her furbelows got what fills women.
Proposed solutions: first riddle (key), second riddle (onion), third riddle (a mirror – although this one-line riddle remains one of the most contentious and other solutions are possible), fourth riddle (ice), fifth riddle (a cock and hen).
I am indebted to Michael Alexander’s wonderful The Earliest English Poems (Penguin Classics) for these riddles and many of the proposed solutions.
Oliver Tearle is the author of The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History, available now from Michael O’Mara Books.