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Anglo-Saxon England
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A feature of recent work on early Anglo-Saxon England has been an emerging consensus that a substantial British population was subsumed under and persisted within Anglo-Saxon territorial boundaries as they expanded to the west and north. In such circumstances, it has been argued, British identity and culture continued within the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. If there was a substantial British substrate, some evidence of their continued presence and influence should certainly be expected. The concept of continuity... is one fraught with problems concerning both its meaning and the evidence that would be necessary to establish such an eventuality. This is particularly the case in the ecclesiastical domain, where it is currently popular to assert that the Anglo-Saxon border kingdoms - Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria - were exposed to a considerable degree of British ecclesiastical influence prior to the arrival of Roman and Irish/Columban missionaries. The aim of this paper is to explore some of the difficulties associated with the term 'continuity' by examining the case of Sherborne, an early West Saxon monastery in Dorset, and the claim that it originated as a British community called Lanprobi.
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The only music from Anglo-Saxon England which still survives and can now be deciphered is music setting Latin liturgical texts. Almost all this liturgical music is plainchant (or plainsong): monophonic music consisting of a single unison melodic line without harmony and usually sung without instrumental accompaniment. Before the arrival in Kent in 597 of St Augustine, Pope Gregory the Great’s missionary to the English, Celtic chant (about which we know very little) would have been in use in Britain among Celtic Christians and those Anglo-Saxons whom they converted. The Roman missionaries and their successors brought with them a knowledge of Roman liturgical and musical traditions, and these then gradually became established in England. In his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (completed 731) Bede tells how Augustine and his monks sang a litany at their meeting with King Æthelbert in the Isle of Thanet in 597 and how they chanted Deprecamur te, Domine as they approached Canterbury (Book I, ch. 25). That city soon became a centre for the study of plainchant, as did the Abbey of Wearmouth whose founder Benedict Biscop (c.628-90) is said by Bede to have brought John, Archcantor of St Peter’s in Rome, to teach Roman chant to monks in England (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, Book IV, ch. 18).
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Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon England began around 600 AD, influenced by Celtic Christianity from the northwest and by the Roman Catholic Church from the southeast. Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, took office in 597. In 601, he baptised the first Christian Anglo-Saxon king, Aethelbert of Kent. The last pagan Anglo-Saxon king, Penda of Mercia, died in 655. The Anglo-Saxon mission on the continent took off in the 8th century, leading to the Christianisation of practically all of the Frankish Empire by 800.
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In this original and revisionist interpretation of Anglo-Saxon England, Nicholas Howe proposes that the Anglo-Saxons fashioned a myth out of the fifth-century migration of their Germanic ancestors to Britain. Through the retelling of this story, the Anglo-Saxons ordered their complex history and identified their destiny as a people. Howe traces the migration myth throughout the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, in poems, sermons, letters, and histories from the sixth to the eleventh centuries.
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In Anglo-Saxon England, sons and daughters were considered equally important. The wergild (the fine paid for killing somebody) of men and women was identical, but for pregnant women it was 1.5 times the usual. This passage from "The Fates of Men" (as cited in Fell) illustrates attitudes to children:
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With time, the kingdoms were united, notably under Alfred the Great in the ninth century, when the Anglo-Saxons faced major opposition from Viking settlers in the east and north of England. By the 950s, one unified kingdom emerged.
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Anglo-Saxon England