Geoffrey Ashe: The Saints and the Kings

Geoffrey Ashe, Mythology of the British Isles (Methuen Publishing Ltd., 2002)


The English Inheritance: The Saints and the Kings [pp. 299-303]

Gregory, a Roman monastic founder, afterwards pope, was walking one day through the city’s slave market. He noticed some fair-haired, blue-eyed lads and asked what country they had come from. They were heathen Angles from Deira, the southerly portion of Northumbria. ‘Not Angles but angels,’ Gregory commented, ‘if they had the Faith.’ He planned a mission and even set out himself, but was prevented, first by a message from the Pope saying he was needed in Rome, later by his own election to the papacy.


As pope he dispatched a mission led by another monk, Augustine, which arrived in the island in 597. Augustine made his first contact with King Aethelbert of Kent, at that time Bretwalda. Aethelbert’s queen, Bertha, a Frankish Christian princess, had ensured that he would be granted a hearing. Aethelbert received the clergy in the open, because he feared that if he met them indoors they could use magic against him. With growing trust, however, the king housed them at Canterbury and finally adopted the new religion. While he made no attempt to impose it on his Kentish subjects, they gradually conformed. Augustine founded a Canterbury bishopric which was to become the Church’s headquarters in England. Progress, however, was slow and slight. Aethelbert arranged a conference with the Welsh bishops, but they had little interest in evangelising the old enemy, and Augustine’s attitude estranged them. They declined to cooperate in expanding his mission. Overtures to other kings by his aides and successors established only limited bridgeheads.


Many suppose that St Augustine converted England. Many even suppose that there were no Christians in this island before 597. The latter belief is manifestly false, and the former, though not manifestly so, is false none the less. Augustine’s only solid success was in Kent, and England’s Christianisation came from several sources, over nearly a hundred years.


The most promising extension from Kent, which happened in 625, was almost totally abortive. A priest from Canterbury, Paulinus, travelled north as chaplain to Aethelbert’s daughter, who was marrying the Northumbrian king Edwin, the fifth Bretwalda. After much wavering, Edwin summoned a council to debate a change in religion. He was persuaded when a councillor compared human life to the flight of a sparrow through firelight in a hall from darkness into darkness again - and urged the value of a doctrine that shone light into the obscurity before and after. But Edwin and his nobles had not been Christian very long when a Welsh invasion threw the north into anarchy. Edwin fell in battle, the queen and Paulinus fled, and hardly any of the neophyte Christians remained. The northern Angles’ true conversion was due to Celtic monks from Columba’s community, led by the humble and endearing St Aidan. They came at the invitation of King Oswald, who had taken refuge in Iona during the invasion, become a Christian there on the Celtic model, and returned to clear out the Welsh.


Oswald reigned at Bamburgh, formerly Din Guayrdi, perhaps the home of Lancelot. Once, when he and Aidan were at dinner, the king’s almoner reported that a number of his poor subjects were outside. Oswald handed the almoner a silver dish and told him to give them the food on it, and break up the dish itself so that each could have a fragment of silver. Aidan touched the king’s right hand and exclaimed, ‘May this hand never perish!’ and it never did; after his death it was enshrined in a silver casket and remained uncorrupted. Oswald died fighting Welsh and heathen Mercians in Shropshire, where Oswestry, Oswald’s Tree, commemorates a cross he set up. Miracles were worked by earth from the spot where he fell, and pilgrims carried so much away that they scooped out a pit. Oswald was revered as a saint in many places. He is the celestial patron of Zug in Switzerland.


The differences between Romans and Celts, notably over the fixing of Easter, came to a head in 663 at the Synod of Whitby. This was held at a religious community of Celtic type, with inmates of both sexes under an abbess, St Hilda. Oswald’s brother Oswy, who had followed him as king of Northumbria, presided. Wilfrid, abbot of Ripon and a strong advocate of Roman ways, appealed to the practice of the Church everywhere else, in conformity with the Pope, St Peter’s successor. As he put it, ‘The only people stupid enough to disagree are these Scots and their obstinate adherents the Picts and Britons, who inhabit only a portion of these two islands in the remote ocean.’ Colman, for the Celts, cited St Columba and others.


Arguments and precedents were tossed back and forth, till Wilfrid quoted Christ’s words to Peter, appointing him as the gatekeeper of heaven. Oswy turned to Colman: ‘Is it true that Our Lord said this to Peter?’ Colman acknowledged that it was. Oswy persisted: ‘Did he say anything like that to Columba?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then,’ said Oswy, with a smile of relief at having found a way to close the dispute, ‘I must rule in favour of Peter, or he may not let me in.’ So Rome won. Peripheral rumblings and mutterings lingered on, but the Church in England was henceforth united in its administration and practice, and governed from Canterbury.


Meanwhile, the slowly advancing West Saxons, themselves Christianised, had reached Glastonbury. The British monastery passed peaceably into their hands. It was the first institution in which the old and new people came together, with Christian continuity from ‘Arthurian’ times. Kings of Wessex made it a temple of reconciliation. After a while it attracted Irish scholars. The way was prepared for that fusion of traditions which gave the medieval Abbey its role in the formation of Arthurian legend.


Glastonbury’s first major patron was King Ine, a successor of Cerdic. In the ninth century it was a successor of Ine, Alfred the Great, who set England on course towards political unity, for which religious unity had laid the foundation. Alfred’s name, ‘Elf-rede’, hints at inspiration from good fairies. When he was crowned in Wessex, the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been overrun by marauding Danes, and little remained of Wessex itself. It was told in later days how Danish victories reduced Alfred to a wandering resistance leader; how he refused to give up; how he spied out the camp of the Danish chief Guthrum disguised as a minstrel; how he took refuge in Athelney in the Somerset marshlands near Glastonbury; how, when deep in thought, he let a cottager’s fire burn some cakes which she had set him to watch, not knowing who he was; how the Virgin Mary appeared to him with words of encouragement; how he raised a final army, routed Guthrum at Ethandune, and forced him to retreat; how he commemorated the struggle by having a White Horse cut, or even two; how he recovered southern England and founded a navy. Let it be added that because he kept Wessex in being when the rest of the kingdoms were effaced from the map, his heirs were able to extend their domain with no rivals, and to become sovereigns of a united England, destined, for better or worse, to draw the Welsh and Scots into a united Britain.


****


What may be called the ‘St Augustine delusion’ is the last of the modern myths requiring notice, and one of the stubbornest. In its crude form it really does assert that there were no Christians in Britain till 597, and then Augustine arrived, and converted all of the population that mattered. The crudity is sometimes toned down, but much of the delusion persists. An ironic feature is its stark contradiction of the other myth about Britain’s early Christianity, that a separate and admirable Celtic Church flourished over most of the British Isles, till intrusive ‘Romans’, who had never had any jurisdiction before, enslaved and perverted it.


Neither account is anywhere near to being true. Augustine’s Kent was at one pole of the conversion process, Aidan’s Northumbria at the other, and the rest of the kingdoms were subjected to various influences over a long period, some from Kent itself and the continent, some from the north, some from Ireland. The Historia Brittonum claims that despite the Welsh bishops’ holding back, a Cymric northerner named Rhun, a son of Urien, played a leading role in the first Northumbrian mission and officiated in some way at the baptism of Edwin.


Anglo-Celtic Christianity had much to be said of it, and the uniformity following Whitby brought both gain and loss. Thanks largely to the redoubtable Wilfrid, rapid advances were made in art and architecture. The appointment in 669 of a learned Greek, Theodore of Tarsus, as Archbishop of Canterbury, helped to give the Church a firm structure and intellectual force. In the early eighth century, Bede of Jarrow was easily the foremost scholar in Europe. But the freer, more imaginative Celtic spirit lost ground. The prevalence of the continental outlook, with its fierce rejection of the old gods and all that went with them, may be part of the reason why the Anglo-Saxons fell so far short of Celtic achievement in the creation of mythology.


Alfred the Great was genuinely extraordinary. Besides his dogged resistance to the Danes, and final triumph at Ethandune (probably Edington near Westbury, where the horse is), he gave the crown of the West Saxons a new kind of lustre, and impressed himself on history as a personality. When at peace, he lived in a modest-sized manor at Cheddar, not only hawking and hunting but acquiring enough expertise in both pursuits to give advice to his falconers and kennelmen. He collected Anglo-Saxon poems and songs, welcomed travellers, and listened to their reports of distant countries. To promote his subjects’ education he founded a school for the sons of nobles (sending his own to it) and brought foreign scholars to his court, including a Welshman, Asser, who became his biographer. Part of his programme was to inform the people about their own past, and to this end he sponsored a compilation of traditions which was the first version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He learned Latin, and presided over the translation of important books into ‘the language which we can all understand’ - an obvious thing to do, yet nobody had done it, and it was many years before anything comparable was done abroad.


He issued a code of laws drawn from the best of Kent and Mercia, as well as Wessex. Those he added himself were humane, limiting the custom of blood-feud, for instance. It will be remembered that according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, he copied laws from the ancient Britons; not so, but proof of the prestige which his code still possessed in Geoffrey’s time. That had been shown already by its adoption or imitation in other parts of England and Wales. To plan his work he invented a kind of clock, a graduated candle inside a transparent casing, which admitted air but kept out draughts so that the candle burned at a regular rate.


Several Welsh princes placed themselves under Alfred’s protection or became allies. Thanks to the Danes’ extinction of the other kingdoms, and their own waning, his son and daughter established their rule in Mercia, and his grandson Athelstan took over Northumbria. Athelstan routed a coalition of Scots, Irish and Norse, and was uncontested sovereign of the whole of England.


Alfred deserved the honour of a national epic, yet no one composed it. As a hero of legend Arthur leaves him so far behind that there is no comparison. The few Alfred legends, such as the anecdote of the cakes - probably bannocks - and his acceptance of the housewife’s rebuke, suggest that he was recalled as not only ‘great’, but human, good-natured and free from pride. Still, he had to wait a long time for a poetic celebration with any value. It came at last in G. K Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse, which conserves popular fiction about the Uffington horse being Alfred’s, by acutely postulating a pre-Alfred original which he restored. The Ballad is a perceptive and colourful mini-epic, with passages as fine as any poetry in English inspired by Arthur. Alfred’s companions in the poem rightly include representatives of Celtic and Roman traditions as well as Anglo-Saxon.

Geoffrey Ashe: Beowulf

Geoffrey Ashe, Mythology of the British Isles (Methuen Publishing Ltd., 2002)


The English Inheritance: Beowulf [pp.295-298]

Like the Scots, the Anglo-Saxons had their own minstrelsy. But with them, too, the first hero of legend in the new lands came from the legacy of the old. And he was not even one of themselves.


Beowulf is the only long Anglo-Saxon poem drawing its inspiration from pre-Christian antiquity. Its setting is in Denmark and thereabouts. In unrhymed alliterative verse, it begins by telling how the Danish king Hrothgar built a splendid hall. He named it Heorot. But when he had assembled his court in it, a frightful, half-human monster called Grendel started a series of raids, killing and eating Danish noblemen. Grendel lived in a cave under a lake. Wandering over the fens, he had seen Heorot and conceived a hatred for its lights, music and revels. The raids were his response, and he carried them out with impunity, because a devilish spell made him impervious to weapons.


Over a stretch of years he invaded Heorot many times, always after dark, and the Danes became afraid to go there except in daylight. At last Beowulf, a nephew of King Hygelac of the Geats, arrived by sea with fourteen companions and offered his help. Tall and handsome, a swimmer of unrivalled prowess, he had already dealt with water-monsters and believed he could defeat Grendel by strength alone. Hrothgar gave him leave to attempt it. That night the Geats lay down in the hall and waited. Grendel entered, slew one of them so quickly that Beowulf could not stop him, and devoured the corpse. Then he turned to Beowulf. The prince seized him in a wrestling grip. A fearful struggle ensued. The other Geats could do nothing to aid their leader, because their swords were useless against the demon. Eventually, Grendel wrenched himself free, leaving his arm in Beowulf’s grasp. He staggered back to the pool and reached his cave, but the wound was mortal.


The Geats hung the severed arm from the roof as a trophy. When the Danes saw it they rejoiced. The king and queen rewarded Beowulf’s party with many gifts. No one, however, had reckoned with a second monster, Grendel’s mother, who also dwelt under the lake and now came out to avenge her son. She carried off and killed one of Hrothgar’s most valued thanes. Hrothgar asked for Beowulf’s further help, and rode with him along the water-hag’s tracks, with a number of Danes and Geats following. One of the Danes lent Beowulf a sword called Hrunting.


The lake was a sinister place, with serpents writhing in it, and the head of the recent Danish victim lying on its rocky bank. Beowulf dived in, going down and down. Suddenly Grendel’s mother fastened her claws on him and dragged him into the cave, a sort of huge bubble enclosed by rock and lit by a fire. He soon found that the sword Hrunting made no impression on her. He attempted a wrestling hold as he had with her son, but stumbled and fell, and she broke free and attacked him with a knife. His chain mail saved him. Springing to his feet again, he caught sight of another sword, a gigantic one, taken in some earlier combat. Against this weapon the ogress had no defence, and he snatched it and cut her head off. Exploring the cavern in the firelight, he found the corpse of Grendel and cut the head off that too, to take back to Hrothgar. The blade of the sword melted in the venomous blood and he returned with the hilt only.


Most of the group at the lakeside had despaired of seeing him again, but he surfaced at last. Amid renewed Danish acclaim he took his leave and went home. Time passed. Beowulf became king of the Geats, and reigned prosperously for half a century. When he was not far short of a hundred years old he perished with glory, defending his people against another monster. This was a winged dragon that lived in the chamber under a burial-mould, guarding treasure stowed there by the last of the family possessing it. A runaway serving-man had crept into the chamber while the dragon lay sleeping and stolen a cup. The dragon began making forays and devastating the country with its fiery breath.


Guided by the thief, Beowulf traced it to its lair and approached behind a specially made iron shield. He had eleven warriors with him. When the dragon emerged, however, they all fled except for a youth, Wiglaf. With his aid the old king managed to kill the beast, but he was fatally wounded, and, having no son to succeed him, presented Wiglaf with his own armour and weapons and a gold necklace. Wiglaf brought some of the treasure out of the mound, and Beowulf1ooked at it, but died a moment later. The young man decided that it had been won at too high a price and no one deserved to have it. When the cowards returned he upbraided them scathingly. Under his direction the king’s body was laid on a funeral pyre and cremated, and the treasure was buried with his ashes under a tumulus called Beowulf’s Barrow, visible from far out to sea. So ends the tale.


Unlike Finn [MacCool], Beowulf was never acclimatised in Britain. A transfer of his Grendel exploit to Hartlepool, in County Durham, did not find favour.


Beowulf survives in a manuscript of about 1000 AD. Its date of composition is a matter of controversy. The Anglo-Saxon poet, like the Welsh author of the Pryderi tales, shows a personal Christianity in various touches and asides. He cites Genesis and even makes out that Grendel was descended from Cain. But his subject is pagan, and if his descriptions of artefacts are compared with items at Sutton Hoo and elsewhere, it is clear that knowledge of pre-Christian craftsmanship, as of the early seventh century, has gone into the poem’s making. King Hygelac can be dated after a fashion and puts the action earlier still. He is one among a number of named persons who occur in other contexts, though Beowulf himself does not. They include (not as a contemporary) a certain Hengest, possibly the Hengist with whom Vortigern made his fatal deal. Scandinavian parallels confirm the authenticity of the background. It is by no means certain, however, who the Geats are. They are generally located in southern Sweden, but they are not Swedes.


Heorot means ‘stag’. The derived English word is ‘hart’. Its explanation here may lie in royal symbolism. The abortive Hartlepool transfer was prompted by the first syllable of the place-name itself, basically heorot, with an allusion to stages on the headland.


So far as documentary evidence goes, Beowulf stands alone. The Anglo-Saxons in Britain never developed a real mythology. When the eighth-century poet Cynewulf composed narratives he turned to Christian themes, such as St Helen and the True Cross. Even such borrowing was restricted in scope. No Anglo-Saxon took the slightest notice of Arthur or anyone else in Welsh tradition. It was not till after the Normans turned Anglo-Saxondom into a different realm, in a new relation to the continent, that the island’s heritage began flowing together in England.


The Anglo-Saxons did make a contribution to Arthurian folklore. This was the Wild Hunt. Originally a gallop among the clouds by Woden and his Nordic companions, it became, in Britain, a more elaborate affair. Among the new huntsmen were Gwyn ap Nudd with his white, red-eared hounds, and Arthur himself in some spectral guise. The Wild Hunt spread to the continent as the Chasse Artu. The huntsmen summoned ghosts of the dead and the souls of unbaptised infants. Their visitations, especially with hounds (Gwyn’s or others), could be portentous of doom.


While the substance of Arthur’s literary legend owed the Anglo-Saxons nothing, several of the poets who enlarged it in English did adopt the alliterative verse-form, as in Beowulf. Though modified, this is the essential metre of three masterpieces: Layamon’s Brut, his epic rehandling of Geoffrey of Monmouth; the marvellous fairy tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and a pre-Malory Morte Arthure. England’s annexation of the Celtic hero did not, after all, involve a total setting-aside of ancestral Englishness. That was still a presence in format if not in matter. Moreover it was Malory, not any French or German romancer, who gave the legend a definitive form and handed it on to future generations.

Geoffrey Ashe: Woden’s Brood

Geoffrey Ashe, Mythology of the British Isles (Methuen Publishing Ltd., 2002)


The English Inheritance: Woden’s Brood [pp.291-293]

As British resistance weakened, the chiefs of Anglo-Saxondom consolidated their hold and pressed forward. Seven regional kingdoms took shape, so that incipient England has been spoken of as a Heptarchy. Nearest the continent was Kent, founded by Hengist under Vortigern’s auspices, a realm of Saxons and Jutes. Westward from it was Sussex, and west of that was Wessex. North-east of London was Essex. Those three names denoted the domains of the South Saxons, West Saxons and East Saxons. Beyond Essex was the kingdom of the East Angles. In the midlands was Mercia, and all the Anglian north was Northumbria.


Since the first rulers were heathen, they could claim loftier antecedents than their British counterparts, who, being Christian, could no longer say that their reputed ancestors were gods, even when they were. Saxon royal pedigrees, with a single exception, were traced to the head god Woden, whom Scandinavians knew as Odin. The exception was the East Saxon dynasty, and that was descended from another God, Seaxnot. Woden gave his name to Wednesday, and to several places where his worshippers settled before their Christianisation, such as Wednesbury and Wednesfield. A famous British earthwork is called the Wansdyke, Woden’s Ditch, because, when the Saxons reached it, they believed it to be superhuman.


Folk-memory did not reach far back. The royal pedigrees had few generations, and put Woden himself in the third or fourth century AD, with almost no history for the years between. However, while the kingdoms’ creators lacked a cohesive tradition or common purpose, they recognised a unity in the Roman-formed country they had come to, and expressed this in a title. Whichever Anglo-Saxon king was respected as paramount was the Bretwalda, the Britain-ruler. That distinction passed from kingdom to kingdom - from the South Saxon ruler to the West Saxon, from him to the king of Kent, from Kent to East Anglia, and then to Northumbria and Mercia and finally to Wessex again. At first the Bretwaldaship was hardly more than honorary, but with the passage of time it became a focus of power. Wessex, when it emerged as supreme, made England politically one. Present royalty is descended from the West Saxon house, and thus from its founder, whose name was Cerdic.


****


On the face of it, Woden in the genealogies is an ancestor-deity, as the Welsh Beli originally was. Yet they make him so recent that a real person may be involved, perhaps a patriarchal chief named after the God, like Brennus. All these kings claimed divine descent to assert a god-given right to whatever they had acquired in Britain. Most of the founders had been self-made, not the heirs of kings before the migration.Only the Mercian dynasty had an ancestor, Icel, who can be traced on the continent as a person of authority in the fifth century.


The Heptarchy is an approximation. Smaller kingdoms came into being and disappeared, taken over or merged with others. While there is no evidence anywhere for a mass genocide of Britons, the ethnic mix varied. Kent was more solidly ‘English’ than most areas. Northumbria, at the other extreme, was created by dominance of the new stock over a population not vastly altered. Wessex absorbed many Britons as it expanded, and gave them a recognised status in its laws, though not an equal one. But whatever the differences, the Anglo-Saxons’ ascendancy was a constant. Their language became the norm everywhere - Cornwall was the only part of England where another vernacular survived - and it evolved into English with very little assimilation of British words, though the old language persisted in geographical names, notably the names of rivers.


The Bretwaldaship, an unusual institution, had a touch of mystique. Its movement from one holder to another depended for many years on consent rather than force. The third Bretwalda, Aethelbert of Kent, was by no means the strongest of the kings. His contemporary Aethelfrith of Northumbria was a major conqueror, yet was never Bretwalda. This may have been because the Bretwaldaship did not at first extend past the Humber, but an implication remains of some sort of agreement, some hazy notion of proprieties and spheres of influence: Aethelfrith could not break into the system. Aethelbert’s Bretwaldaship may have been due to his reigning over the most civilised part of the country, with continental contacts lending prestige. The next Bretwalda was Raedwald of East Anglia, and in his case the wealth and foreign connections of his court, spectacularly revealed by the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, may have been decisive. The point is that power alone was not.


After Raedwald, however, the Bretwaldaship changed. Supremacy was confined to the three largest kingdoms, first Northumbria, then Mercia, then Wessex. The Bretwalda became more of an overlord, and the lesser kingdoms were absorbed. The final triumph of Wessex, and the descent of its dynastic title right through to the House of Windsor, give that dynasty’s origin a special interest. Its beginning was on Southampton Water, where the founder Cerdic is said to have planted himself late in the fifth century. His settlers and their immediate heirs, though attested archaeologically, seem to have been few. However, they pushed north and asserted control over larger Saxon bodies, forming a kingdom that grew swiftly from the 560s onward.


The early West Saxon annals are most confused, and almost nothing is known of Cerdic himself. Some writers have made him an opponent of Arthur, and involved him in the battle of Badon. This is fancy. But there is one intriguing fact, which no Saxon chronicler or genealogist would have invented. His name is not Saxon but British, and several Britons are on record who bore it. While he is given a Woden pedigree as a matter of course, the name hints at a family connection with Britons. An early term for the West Saxons was ‘Gewisse’, which meant ‘allies’ or ‘confederates’, but was taken to mean ‘Gewis’s people’; Cerdic therefore has a Gewis in his pedigree. Geoffrey of Monmouth, however, transfers the word to Wales and says Vortigern was the ruler of the Gewissei. He does not mention Cerdic, yet there are indications, as we have seen, that in using this word he is trying to handle a tradition about a title Vortigern held, and it may now appear that it was supposed to have passed from him to the West Saxon dynasty, perhaps through an unmentioned offspring of his Saxon marriage.


Quite seriously, Cerdic could have been a noble of mixed blood, with a foot in both camps. He might have recruited a following in Gaul. Emigrant Britons on the lower Loire were in contact with more-or-less subdued Saxon settlers. Cerdic, let us say, assembled a combined British-Saxon band in that area, and returned to Britain to carve out a domain based on his British status. Tiny at first, it grew into Wessex, and eventually into England and the United Kingdom. Modern royalty may be descended not only from the West Saxon sovereigns but, farther back, from Britons of the ‘Arthurian’ world.

Alfred the Great

In the foreword to her life of Alfred the Great (1958), Eleanor Shipley Duckett explains that her book is aimed at the typical reader of the era who knows little more about her subject than one or two anecdotes:

This is a very simple book. It is offered to those - and, of course, they are many in these busy days - who, if they were suddenly asked just what the name of Alfred the Great meant to them, would promptly answer with one or more of the following: ‘He conquered the Danes, whoever they were in those times.’ ‘Wasn’t he the king who burned some cakes in some woman’s cottage?’ ‘He dressed up as a minstrel and spied upon the enemy’s camp.’ ‘He cut out White Horses in the hills to celebrate his victories.’ ‘The tower in the park, the tearoom in the village, the statues in some towns, and the daffodils in my garden are named after him.’ ‘Didn’t he translate some old books?’ ‘Was he the king who started England’s navy?’ ‘Did he invent trial by jury?’ All these answers are honored by tradition; they rest, some on truth, some on romanticism; and all are dealt with here in their proper places.

It’s hardly scientific, of course, but this morning I separately asked four colleagues, all English and in their twenties, what they could tell me about Alfred. The first thought he might be ‘the patron saint of England,’ the second did not feel confident even to make a guess, the third pegged Alfred as a ‘King of England’ (half a point, definitely) but knew no more, and the fourth was quite sure that Alfred the Great had freed the slaves in America. None of the familiar anecdotes of earlier generations were known to this sample. Miss Duckett would have a fit!

And so would Alfred. He placed such value on learning that nobles under his rule felt compelled to take to the libraries to secure their status. He would attend judicial hearings and if the nobles’ judgements were not learned or seemed unjust to the common people he would admonish them, once delivering this assault:

I am astonished at this arrogance of yours, since ... you have enjoyed the office and status of wise men, yet you have neglected the study and application of wisdom. For that reason, I command you either to relinquish immediately the offices of worldly power that you possess, or else to apply yourselves much more attentively to the pursuit of wisdom.

The nobles were terrified at the threat to their power and

As a result nearly all the ealdormen and reeves and thegns (who were illiterate from childhood) applied themselves in an amazing way to learning how to read, preferring rather to learn this unfamiliar discipline (no matter how laboriously) than to relinquish their offices of power.

If a man despite his best efforts could not learn to read the King ordered that a family member or other literate person should be found to

read out books in English to him by day and night.

All quotes from Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred & Other Contemporary Sources, tr. and ed. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (Harmondsworth, 1983).

We can avoid the diversions and propaganda of our hostile elites by following Alfred’s example and advice, and immerse ourselves instead in the religious and philosophical literature of our civilisation, and co-operate in our studies to rebuild a sense of who we are and where we came from.

The English Defined

For the confused.

From James B. Minahan, One Europe, Many Nations: A Historical Dictionary of European National Groups. (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT. 2000. pp. 226-233.)

ENGLISH

POPULATION: Approximately (2000 e) 47,640,000 English in Europe, the majority in England, but with large populations in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland. Other large English populations live in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa.

THE ENGLISH HOMELAND: The English homeland lies in the south and southwestern parts of the island of Great Britain. England has some highland areas, including the Cumbrian Mountains, also called the Lake District, including the highest point in the country, Scafell Pike, 3,210 feet (978 m.), and the Pennine range in the north, but the remainder of the country is mostly fertile lowlands. The northern and western portions are generally mountainous. The coast is heavily indented, especially in the west, which has a milder climate than the rest of Northern Europe due to the Gulf Stream and ample rainfall. Most of the indentations are excellent natural harbors, easily accessible to deep-water shipping, a factor that has been decisive in the economic development and imperial expansion of the English. The major rivers are the Severn and the Thames. Moors and heathlands occur in many upland areas, in all covering about one-quarter of England.

The original vegetation in much of the English homeland was deciduous forest, with oaks as the predominant tree. But centuries ago human activity greatly reduced the forests and modified the landscape, leaving only small patches of the original woodlands. Most of the English countryside is farmed or used to pasture livestock.

The Kingdom of England forms a political unit of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is separated from continental Europe by the English Channel, the Strait of Dover, and the North Sea. The English homeland forms the largest part of the territory of the island of Great Britain, and shares the island with the territories of the Northumbrians and Scots in the north and the Welsh and Cornish in the west.

Kingdom of England: 50,333 sq.mi.-130,362 sq.km. (2000 e) 46,148,000—English 94% (including Northumbrians and Cornish), Pakistanis 2%, Indians 1%, West Indians 1%. The English capital and major cultural center is London, (2000 e) 6,214,000 (metropolitan area 12,843,000), the capital of England and of the Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

FLAG: The English national flag, the official flag of the kingdom, is a white field bearing a centered red cross, the Cross of St. George, the patron saint of England.

PEOPLE: The English are a Germanic people, the dominant nation of the British Isles and one of the major nations of Europe. The great majority of the English are descended from early Celtic and Iberian peoples and the later invaders of the islands, including the Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans. The descendants of a mixture of different European nations, the English culture and language have been influenced by the many invaders of the island, and each of the invaders from continental Europe left its mark on the culture and the language of the island. The population density of the English homeland is one of the highest in the world and is highly urbanized, with an estimated 77% living in urban areas in 2000. Among the prime traditions of the English are a fierce pride in their traditional freedoms, a unity against adversity, and an ability to bring opposing factions together in compromise. Pride in being English is another strong trait, even though the English show considerable diversity in traditions, habits, manners, and speech.

The English homeland, established as an independent monarchy many centuries ago, in time achieved political control over the rest of the island, all the British Isles, and vast sections of the world, becoming the nucleus of one of the greatest empires in history, which lasted until the mid-twentieth century. Called the British Empire, the reality was almost exclusive control by the most powerful people of the British Isles, the English, with auxiliary roles played by the Scots, Irish, and Welsh.

The English language, carried to the far corners of the earth by English adventurers and colonists, is now the most important of the world's languages and is spoken as a first language by some 350 million people and as a second language by another 150 million. The language belongs to the Anglo-Frisian branch of the Low German languages of the West Germanic group. Spoken in over a dozen regional dialects and many more subdialects in England, the language is also spoken by a majority of the population of the British Islands. Standard English, as spoken in the United Kingdom, is based on the London dialect, which became predominant in the fourteenth century. It has been estimated that the present English vocabulary consists of more than 1 million words, including slang and dialect expressions and technical and scientific terms, many of which came into use after the middle of the twentieth century. The English vocabulary is the most extensive in the world, although some languages, such as the Chinese dialects, have a word-building capacity equal to that of English. Extensive, constant borrowing from every major language, particularly Latin, Greek, French, and the Scandinavian languages, accounts for the great number of words in the English vocabulary.

The Church of England, a Protestant Episcopal denomination, is the state church and the nominal church of nearly three-fifths of the population. The denomination next in importance is the Roman Catholic Church, which has about 6 million members in England. Among the numerous Protestant denominations are the Methodist, Baptist, Unitarian, Congregationalist, and Society of Friends.

NATION: The New Stone Age, during which the practice of agriculture was begun, was marked by the arrival of the Iberians, or Long Skulls, who came from the European mainland about 3000 B.C. The island was the site of an ancient Neolithic society called the Beaker folk, established by 2500 B.C., which left its mark in the form of mound-tombs and henge monuments, particularly the famous monument at Stonehenge. These monuments attest to their social and economic organization as well as their technical and intellectual abilities.

The first lasting influence on English culture was the Brythonic-speaking Celts, who crossed from continental Europe in several migrations in the first century B.C. The Celts spread across the island, living in autonomous communities. With their iron weapons and two-wheeled chariots, the Celts dominated and absorbed the indigenous populations. Their religious elite, the Druids, came to dominate Celtic society.

The Romans under Julius Caesar attempted to invade the island in 55 and 54 B.C. but were repulsed by the fierce Celtic warriors. Roman rule was not imposed on the Celts of Britannia until the attack by the legions of Emperor Claudius in A.D. 43. The last of the Celtic kingdoms was subdued following the uprising led by Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, in A.D. 60.

The Romans built a system of roads that for the first time pulled the island's various communities together. Britannia developed as an important mining and military province. Roman culture was adopted by the urban Celts, who used the Latin language, and later some accepted the Christian religion. Magnificent cities and Romanized towns, connected by the Roman road system and protected by Roman soldiers, rivaled any in the Roman Empire. In the north the Romans eventually, in A.D. 123, built the defensive wall called Hadrian's Wall to protect the rich province from its northern neighbors, the Picts.

By the early fifth century, Roman Britannia was in considerable turmoil. Hadrian's Wall had been abandoned, and the Roman legions were being withdrawn to meet barbarian threats elsewhere in the empire. In 410 in an appeal to Rome for military aid, the Britons were refused, and Roman officials were subsequently evacuated. Without the defenses of the Roman legions, Irish and Picts attacked from the north and west, and Anglo-Saxons from the east and south.

After nearly four centuries of occupation the Romans left little that was permanent: a superb network of roads, the best England would have for 1,400 years; a number of urban centers; and Christianity.

The Anglo-Saxons and Jutes, raiding from continental Europe, invaded and colonized the area as Roman civil government collapsed, traditionally establishing their presence in England in 449. Thousands of refugees fled the Germanic onslaught, falling back on the western peninsulas, Wales and Cornwall, and crossing to Brittany in Gaul. Those Britons who remained quickly went back to their pre-Roman lifestyle. Roman towns were no longer habitable, so they moved back to the Celtic hill forts and refortified them. Christianity became a binding force, the last link to a more civilized world.

Of all the migrating Germanic peoples, those who imposed their identity most indelibly on the lands they conquered were the Anglo-Saxons. Unlike other migrating peoples who absorbed earlier populations, the Anglo-Saxons mostly displaced the native Celtic population and changed the ethnic map of the British Isles forever. Although some scholars claim that the modern English are as much Celtic as Teutonic in ancestry, English place-names and the English language show almost a complete lack of Celtic influence. The Celts driven westward were given a contemptuous name by the Anglo-Saxons—“Welsh, ” meaning simply “foreigners.” The loose alliance of Germanic tribes, called by the Romans the Anglii, Saxones, Frisii, and Jutae, collectively used the name “Englisc, ” a term that has survived almost unmodified. The term “Anglo-Saxon” was invented by the invading Normans as the name of the people they conquered.

The loose alliances of the invading Germanic tribes gradually coalesced into a number of small kingdoms, the so-called Heptarchy. Missionary efforts to Christianize the kingdoms resumed in the sixth century. Warlords, nominally Christian, ruled small, unstable kingdoms and continued some Roman traditions of government. Gradually, the kingdom of Wessex gained dominance among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Late in the eighth century, Vikings, called Danes in English history, began raiding the coastal regions, their raids growing in violence and severity. Anglo-Saxon unity was first successfully encouraged by Wessex king Alfred the Great, who finally defeated the Danes in 878. Alfred's victory effectively confined the Viking invaders to a region in the east called the Danelaw, where the Viking leaders distributed land to soldiers for settlement. Alfred's successors finally conquered the Danelaw and united England, but new Danish invasions in the late tenth century resulted in a defeat for the English, and by 1016 the Dane Canute ruled all of England as part of his Danish kingdom. Canute's Scandinavian dynasty died out in 1042, and the Wessex line, under Edward the Confessor, regained the English throne.

The disputed succession after the death of King Edward resulted in a new invasion from continental Europe, which led to the defeat of the Saxon English in 1066. The Normans, descendants of Vikings who had settled on the northern French coast, established a centralized, feudal state. The Norman domination of England mixed elements of the Saxon and Celtic past with the Norman and French and created a new culture. The Norman conquest of England ended the Anglo-Saxon period, which had emphasized the rights of free farmers. Military feudalism, brought from Normandy, was extended to all parts of the conquered kingdom. Norman French became the state language and remained so until the fifteenth century. Latin was used as the scholarly literary language.

Under Norman rule the farmers were reduced to near serfdom and were dominated by a hierarchy of Norman nobility. The Norman nobles came to hold autonomous power over estates granted by the Norman king. The freemen of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been responsible to their kings and were superior to the serfs; however, under Norman rule, the majority of the freemen were forced into serfdom or to dependence on the aristocracy.

The English kingdom acquired territory in France and in the late twelfth century conquered Ireland. However, the Norman homeland, Normandy, was lost to English rule in 1204. The rapid growth of towns was aided by charters sold them by the king, who needed money for conquests and religious crusades. An increasing conflict between the king and the nobles led to the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 by King John. Later in the thirteenth century a parliamentary system was established, and the centralized royal courts and legal system were reformed.

The decline of feudalism, starting in the later fourteenth century, led to the rise of cities and the development of an English middle class. A national secular culture began to emerge, and the English language, a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French elements, was adopted by the educated classes. The English, however, had distinct limitations due to the size of their island homeland and the limited type and amount of natural resources available. To fill their needs they developed into a nation of traders and seamen.

The Hundred Years' War between England and France, fought from 1337 to 1453, resulted in the loss of most of England's continental territories but reinforced the English national consciousness. English, after centuries of struggle for survival, reemerged as the court language in 1413. The Black Death, which first struck in English territory in 1348, finally brought an end to feudalism and serfdom even while the growth of the English towns gave rise to new commercial and artisan classes. The dynastic wars between the Houses of Lancaster and York, which plunged England into turmoil and political anarchy, were finally ended with the accession of Henry VII of the Tudor family in 1485.

The reign of the Tudors was one of the most glorious in English history. Henry VII restored political order in the kingdom and fostered the financial solvency of the crown. Henry VIII inherited a more powerful kingdom, a strong centralized government, and a full exchequer. One measure of Tudor power was the introduction by Henry VIII of the Protestant Reformation and establishment of the Church of England in 1534 with the English monarch as head of the church. As part of the Reformation in England, the orders of monks and friars were suppressed, and their properties were secularized.

England, under the rule of Elizabeth Tudor, Elizabeth I, entered a period of great maritime and colonial expansion in the late sixteenth century. The Elizabethan era, the English Renaissance, flowered under her rule, particularly in literature. Under Elizabeth's rule England changed from indebted state divided by religious strife to become one of Europe's great nations, its power sustained by a powerful navy. Elizabeth died childless after forty-five years on the English throne.

A long conflict with Spain, partly commercial rivalry and partly religious, culminated in the Battle of the Spanish Armada in 1588, although the war continued for another fifteen years. The defeat of the Spanish Armada led to commercial advantages. Supremacy at sea not only gained the English an empire but put the insular nation in touch with peoples the world over. New ideas and inventions returned to the island with English travelers and seamen, leading to rapid changes in the island society. Limited local workforces contributed to the invention of industrial machines and the earliest manifestations of what would later be known as the Industrial Revolution.

The Stuart line came to power in 1603 at Elizabeth's death, effectively uniting the thrones of England and Scotland. The efforts of the early Stuart kings to revive feudal dues were one factor in the religious and constitutional upheaval called the Puritan Revolution. The struggle of parliament to control the monarchy led to civil war in 1642. A parliamentary victory led to the eventual execution of King Charles I in 1648. The overthrow of the Stuart monarchy was followed by the establishment of a commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell from 1649 to the restoration of the Stuart line in 1660. The restoration was a popular reaction against Puritanism. In 1688 parliamentary supremacy was confirmed by the Glorious Revolution.

Religious and political dissidents, unable to gain influence in England, began to emigrate to the new American colonies. There dissidence finally led to the American War of Independence and the loss of the southern American colonies in the late eighteenth century, the greatest loss of territory to the growing British Empire.

The Act of Union in 1707 united Scotland with England and Wales in the Kingdom of Great Britain. The union, ending strife on England's northern border, allowed the English to concentrate on trade, where they outstripped the Dutch, and on their growing colonial empire, which set off a long rivalry with the French. In 1801 legislative union with Ireland was enacted, changing the kingdom to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

English society from the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century remained remarkably stable, despite enormous economic and social changes. Wealth and power remained in the hands of the aristocracy, the landed gentry, and the commercial classes in the growing cities and towns. The majority of the English population, agricultural and industrial workers, semi-illiterate and landless, lived under a paternalistic system dominated by the wealthy classes. Parliament, dominated by the aristocrats and gentry, concerned itself primarily with foreign affairs and private legislation on behalf of the ruling classes.

After 1760 the effects of industrialization rapidly changed English society. Social unrest grew among the working classes of the new industrial cities, mostly lying in the north of England. Miserable working conditions and widespread unemployment accompanied the Industrial Revolution. A new industrial middle class began to demand rights and parliamentary representation but did not extend their newly won rights to the working class. Fear of revolutionary unrest spurred the passage of the first of a long series of labor legislation in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1846 the last barriers to free trade were repealed.

Improved and expanded educational opportunities raised the working classes from misery. Political activity by workers organized into trade unions, courted by rival political parties, resulted in the enfranchisement of the working classes in legislation passed in 1867 and 1884. Full parliamentary democracy was achieved peacefully.

In spite of great changes in the social structure of the kingdom, much of the old England remained until World War I. The aristocracy was still the bastion of social and political power, and the working classes, although enfranchised, had received only a small portion of their economic demands. From 1906 to 1914 numerous new bills were passed that expanded the economic and welfare rights of the working classes.

World War I, which pitted Great Britain and its allies against Germany and its allies, decimated a generation of aristocratic officers, which greatly diminished the hold of the aristocracy over England's wealth. At the end of the war new attitudes and more militant trade unions promised a more equal distribution of the national wealth, but the Great Depression, which began in 1929, devastated the industrial areas and made farming unprofitable. Progressive social legislation was slowed by the depression and the hegemony of the Conservative Party. In 1932 the British government abandoned the policy of free trade.

In September 1939 Great Britain declared war on Germany and its allies. Following the fall of France in 1940, England was faced with invasion. The English rallied to face the German onslaught until the German threat was eliminated by German defeat in the air war, the Battle of Britain, in 1940-41. England served as a base for the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the beginning of the end of the war.

Increased education and the leveling effects of two world wars finally broke the rigid class system and opened opportunities to people of the lower classes. Under the Labour Party, welfare legislation between 1945 and 1951 brought numerous benefits to the English public. Although the Conservative Party gained control of elections in 1951, ending the development of the welfare state, medical care, secondary education, pensions, and employment benefits were already among the services available to all English citizens.

Industrial growth continued in England in the 1960s and 1970s, but England, shorn of its former colonial empire, lost its leadership role to other states, particularly the United States. A so-called special relationship between the United Kingdom, particularly England, and the United States marked a growing coincidence of world outlook and foreign policy among the countries of the English-speaking world. At the same time, the United Kingdom moved closer to continental Europe politically with its accession to the European Community in 1972.

The growth of nationalist movements in the non-English parts of the United Kingdom, particularly in Scotland and Wales, began to have an effect on the English in the 1980s. A feeling that the English had carried the burden of the state since its inception, only to be faced with nationalism and separatism on its periphery, triggered a modest reculturation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. English nationalism, long submerged in the British nationality, began to reemerge with demands for recognition of their special position within the United Kingdom.

The decline of heavy industry has greatly exacerbated the problems of the former industrial cities, particularly in the north of England. The southern counties have mostly converted to service industries and are thriving, while the English counties in the northeast and northwest remain the poorest, with higher unemployment and fewer services. The regional disparities have spurred the growth of regionalism and demands for the decentralization of the English government.