Geoffrey Ashe on the power of Myth for renewal

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


Epilogue [pp. 305-307]

William Blake in his conception of the giant Albion, ranged far beyond accepted legend. By making this island the source of the primeval world-order, he was able to present the giant as a symbol of humanity, Primordial Man. Yet he did not turn him into a pure abstraction. He kept in touch with the mythologies he transcended, and, in particular, with a leading figure in the mythology of Britain. He wrote:


The giant Albion, was Patriarch of the Atlantic; he is the Atlas of the Greeks, one of those the Greeks called Titans. The stories of Arthur are the acts of Albion, applied to a Prince of the fifth century.


That last sentence has an air of profundity, but what does it mean? Blake is referring to several things, but pre-eminently to an aspect of Arthur that we have glimpsed more than once. A major reason for his recurrent spell, in a variety of guises, has been his golden-age aura. Other legends express the same dream, but the Arthurian golden age has an extra dimension. The king is gone … but he is not gone for ever. He is asleep in his cave, or immortal in his magical island; he will return, and presumably bring the golden age back.


That Blake saw Arthur in this light is manifest from what he does with his Albion, chiefly in the prophetic book Jerusalem. He depicts the symbolic giant’s career in such a way that Arthur’s departure-and-return story becomes a reflection of it. Wise and glorious in his primary state, Albion goes spiritually astray and sinks into a deathlike sleep, in which he lingers for aeons. This is externalised in the ills that beset humanity through loss of vision: the apostasy of the sages, and their decline into historical Druidism, prototype of oppressive religion; war, division, perverted science, and, in Blake’s time, the factory system and the iniquities of wealth. But at last light breaks in, Albion awakens, humanity is reintegrated, the world is reborn in love and forgiveness.


Even apart from Blake, Arthur himself, in this aspect, is a distinctive contribution to world mythology. There is nobody else quite like him - no human hero, at least. Other legendary sleepers, who may or may not wake up, are very probably imitations of him. And in any case they do not carry his golden-age quality. What Arthur stands for is the idea of a long-lost glory or promise, plus a belief (as may be repeated here) that it is not truly lost; that it can be reinstated for a fresh start, with intervening corruption swept away. Belief of that kind is a real and potent motive force which is seldom given due weight as a factor in history. It has inspired, or helped to inspire, several of the most radical movements for change.


Thus, the sixteenth-century Christian reformers, both Catholic and Protestant, held that the Church once had its golden age of apostolic purity. Cumulative abuses had corrupted it, but the Reformation, however conceived, would abolish them and recapture the pristine rightness. Or again, Rousseau gave the French Revolution a driving mystique by his doctrine of a virtuous, long-ago natural society ruined by bad institutions, but capable of being restored by good ones. Engels and Lenin invigorated Marxism by adding what was not at first part of it, a classless idyll of ‘primitive communism’ at the dawn of history, which the Revolution could restore on a higher level by ending the long succession of class tyrannies. In India, under British rule, nationalists who favoured westernised progress made no headway with the masses. The leader who did rouse them was Mahatma Gandhi, who condemned westernisation and evoked a wiser pre-conquest India of village communes and handicrafts, and the need to re-create it.


More recently the same motif has appeared again in the work of some women prehistorians, drawing on the poetic insights of Robert Graves, but also on the work of so accomplished an archaeologist as Marija Gimbutas. Their view was foreshadowed some time ago by the ‘Goddess’ interpretation of the megaliths. Once, they claim, there was a ‘matristic’, Goddess-oriented epoch when both sexes had their proper status, and society had a basic balance and rightness. This was brought to an end by the advent of a patriarchal, male-dominated age of gods. Suitable enlightenment through an informed women’s movement can bring the lost rightness back.


These phenomena, and others like them, have nothing explicit to do with Arthur, and many of those concerned would reject such an association. The point, however, is that Britain has evolved a myth embodying a way of looking at things which has deep roots in human nature. Some might speak of an archetype. It may be reasonable, it may be misguided. It certainly calls into question the humanistic idea of progress. Yet it remains a fact, recurrent in history. Why this should be so, is a matter for debate. Perhaps we should see it as an affirmation of life against death, against a sense of things-closing-in, which is all too frequent and natural. The glory did exist once; therefore it is not a mere phantasm, an impossibility; it can exist again. To have created a myth expressing that affirmation, however irrelevant its literary trappings may seem, is a unique achievement for Britain’s story-tellers. Was it an accident? Or did it grow, as Blake implies, out of the whole character and life-span of Albion? Certainly, when he traced that life-span in the same terms, with an apocalypse of awakening at the last, he was creating a myth himself, in full harmony with the materials that came to his hand.

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.