An extract from Etheldreda’s World: Princess, Abbess, Saint:
Etheldreda’s Folk
A dozen or so generations before Etheldreda was born (about 636) – the weather took a decided turn for the worse. It got colder: a lot colder. It got much wetter. And it kept on getting worse. In 536-40 and 547, a number of volcanic eruptions precipitated the worst volcanic winters in the last 2000 years and a drop in summer temperatures in Europe of up to 5o C. Cultivation, which in the long preceding warmer period had spread to the more marginal lands and the higher latitudes of Europe to feed a growing and more affluent population, became more difficult. People started getting hungry, and hungry people are more prone to disease. And they get quarrelsome, and restless. Millions died.
That is part of the background to the extraordinary upheavals and mass migrations of people across Europe and Asia in the fifth and sixth centuries. These hungry people were being displaced by other hungry, and aggressive, people from further east. In the west the peoples of what we now call Frisia, Saxony, North Germany looked across the grey sea to the apparently kinder and richer land of Britannia. Many of their kin knew it well, of course, for they had been trading with it for generations, and some of the menfolk had taken service in the Roman army there. They began to come over with their families, then their extended families and thralls, to settle, first in small numbers, then in larger ones, and they were not always welcome even when there were tracts of land empty: Britannia too had suffered and many people had died of disease and starvation. When I was at primary school we called this the Anglo Saxon invasions: but it was much less organised than that word implies. Think of them as boat people, refugees, a growing tide of them. In the fourth century the Romans built a chain of forts round the south-east coast, the Saxon Shore, to try to stop them. They failed. The migrants were our forebears.
By the late fifth century, when things started (and continued) going really wrong all over Europe, much of Gaul and Britain had been Christian for a good long while. Most of the newcomers were not. They worshipped the old Germanic gods, Thor the Thunderer (by far the most popular), one-eyed Woden the All-father, Freyja patroness of love, beauty, sex, but also of war, gold, magic and prophecy (her animal, it sems to me appropriately, is the cat), Tiw (war and combat, whose animal is a wolf) and Frey, associated with kingship, peace, weather and fertility. (Statuettes of Frey nearly always show him with a massive, indeed improbable, erection: forget about good manners in the ancient world.) To them sacrifice was made, of animals certainly, but also of men and women and children: we know that human sacrifice was still being offered in Uppsala in Sweden in the middle of the twelfth century, when a few hundred miles to the south the miracle of Gothic stone was aspiring to express the Uncreated Light. Human sacrifice was far from unknown in the pagan parts of Not-Yet-England. Burials and cemeteries of the newcomers show that many of them were indeed pagan – though grave goods in some of the richer burials show that they had had contact with Christian realms like Byzantium.
These were Etheldreda’s people – her ancestors just a few generations back. They were certainly not barbarians, with all that word implies, as most Roman and immediately post-Roman writers represent them. Their art, as the objects found in graves show, was among the best and most technically accomplished in Europe. They gave us the bones of the language we speak, they named our days of the week by the old gods. We call the greatest of Christian festivals by the name of their fertility goddess Eostre. They gave us a concept of law which grew into the Common Law, a bottom up law, so to speak, rather than top down like Roman. Their genes still live on in so many of us: if you work out that in Britain, into which there was no significant immigration between the Norman conquest of 1066 and the 1940s, everyone born (as I was) in that decade has at least 1,073,741,824 forebears. There will be duplicates, of course.). It is easy to see that if we go back a further 500 years – when we have 35,184,372,088,832 – whenever we dig up a Saxon cemetery to build yet another housing estate the bones we find will be those of Auntie Æthel or Uncle Ecgbert.
They also brought with them their stories of lands on the cold Baltic shores they had left, their legends, their myths and epics, for it is by story and myth and ritual that a people creates and knows itself. We do not know how many great poems there were – some may not have been written down – and only one has survived, its single MS rescued from a disastrous fire in Ashburnham House in London in 1731. We do not know that that survivor, Beowulf was even the best, though its poetic techniques indicate a very sophisticated tradition indeed. But this great Old English poem is set in Sweden and what is now Denmark, and never mentions Britain or the new land the Angles and Saxons have settled – rather as some of the best versions of ballads composed (God knows when) on the Scottish borders were found by researchers still being sung in the Appalachians of America a couple of centuries after the colonists had moved there and forgotten the rolling land between Solway and Tweed. Beowulf is relevant to our story, for, as we shall see, it is connected with Etheldreda: she may even have known – probably did know – a version of it.
The newcomers – all speaking versions of the same tongue, but from different homelands – settled, grew prosperous and powerful, and coalesced into little kingdoms, sometimes in alliance, sometimes at loggerheads. To the west were the Christian princedoms of the people who called themselves Cymry, ‘The People’, whom the newcomers called wealhas, which means ‘foreigners’: the Welsh. The West Saxons, the South Saxons, the East Saxons, the Middle Saxons, the East Angles, the People of the March (aka Mercia), the North Folk, the South Folk… we still remember those little family businesses (for family and lineage were crucial) in our county names.
Copyright: Charles Moseley 2023