A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons Read Online Free Page A

and Christian altars in the same temple. Nevertheless Bede would list him as one of the holders of the imperium. The truth is Rædwald was to play a decisive role in the history of Christianity in Bede’s world when he killed Æthelfrith of Bernicia at the Battle of the River Idle in 616 and so opened the way for Edwin, who would become Northumbria’s first Christian king. The victory on the Idle left Rædwald the most powerful ruler in the England of his day, yet he receives scant treatment in Bede’s history, written a century later. In fact he presented Bede, historian of God’s providential purpose, with various problems. Praiseworthy as the patron of Edwin and as an early convert to Christianity himself, the East Anglian king proved ambivalent towards that religion and, worse still, evidently reverted to paganism. Yet a later kinswoman of his, the saintly Æthelfryth, founder of the abbey at Ely, was for a time the queen of Ecgfrith of Bernicia.
    The transition from pagan to Christian made for complicated allegiances and was never smooth. There would be a momentary lapse back to the old ways even in Kent. Canterbury’s first archbishop was dead by the year 610. Thanks to him, Kent was to be the home of the metropolitan see of the church in England. He was succeeded by Laurentius.
    Kent: the first English government in action
     
    Kent was unusual in many ways. Alone among the intruder kingdoms, it took its name from the local pre-invasion population, the Cantwara. Local customs here would prove especially tenacious: the longest lasting, ‘gavelkind’, an almost specifically Kentish form of land-tenure, was not abolished until 1926. 8 In Kent, local community divisions were different. Elsewhere there were ‘hundreds’ and, later, ‘wapentakes’; Kent was divided into ‘lathes’ apparently centred on royal manors or vills. The principal seat of the king of Kent wasin a city, Canterbury (Cantwaraburh); it was in close secular contact with the Continent – archaeology has unearthed a profusion of Frankish luxury articles in Kentish graves of the sixth century; and now Æthelberht was to break entirely new ground for an English ruler: the promulgation of a written law code. It still survives.
    He enacted these ‘judgements’ we are told: (a) for his people, (b) following the example of the Romans, (c) with the counsel of his wise men and (d) had them written in the English language. They were still being observed, Bede wrote, in the early 700s. This all seems straightforward enough, but almost every item on Bede’s list presents problems. It is unlikely that ‘the Romans’ referred to are the lawgivers of ancient imperial Rome herself. Perhaps the allusion is to the great code produced a generation earlier at Constantinople by the Emperor Justinian. It seems more likely, however, that Bede has in mind the Germanic successors to Rome in the West. The Byzantines looked down on them as semibarbarians; Bede, a compatriot so to speak, would see in these opulent Germanic courts, with their garish trappings of would-be Latin gravitas, fit heirs to the Caesars, or at least to the Roman state in Gaul.
    For us, the most startling element of Æthelberht’s innovation appears if we reverse the order of Bede’s priorities. Though they follow the pattern of the Alaman and Bavarian customary codes on the Continent, it was, so far as we know, the first time a European vernacular was used for a legal code – by a matter of centuries. The other Germanic codes, like the Visigothic, Lombard or Burgundian, were in Latin.
    Talking of Æthelberht’s code, the editors of one edition of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History comment ‘These Kentish laws in their original form seem to be the earliest documents written down in the English language.’ 9 If they are right, it is reasonable to assume that the research and development needed to create a written vehicle for English was initiated by King Æthelberht, and for this purpose.