The Passage of Dominion

The English had inhabited part of Britain for about a half-millennium in 927. To be sure, a great variety of Germanic ethnicities could be met in the founding era of English history, as place-names and Bede’s evidence amply attest.Footnote ⁸ Collectively, they could be seen by their native British neighbours as Saxones (a Late-Latin name for a major alliance of Germanic-speaking peoples), as Garmani (Classical Latin Germani)Footnote ⁹ – a larger such ethnic identity (now defined linguistically), but also sometimes (on the evidence of Old-Welsh poetry) as Eingl (Latin Angli, Old-English Engle),Footnote ¹⁰ another Germanic people, who would eventually provide the name ‘English’ (englisc) for both people and language. It is clear already from seventh-century evidence that the most prominent peoples of early Anglo-Saxon England were Engle (Angles) and Seaxas (Saxons), whose origins Bede in 731 sought to pinpoint in what are now northern Germany and the Jutlandic peninsula of Denmark.Footnote ¹¹ From the evidence of material culture, it is apparent that the immigrants came from a yet broader North Sea zone extending from southern Norway to the Netherlands.Footnote ¹²

The circumstances which brought significant immigration from Continental Germania to Britain over a period of perhaps 150 years – I discount immobilist theories of the last generation, which crudely sought to deny such migration – had a shattering effect on the post-colonial polities and culture of the native British. It is, and will remain, a matter of vigorous dispute what happened to the indigenes in the new settler-colonial environment. There are some certainties. There was southward emigration which created new Britains in western Gaul (Brittany, ‘Little/Lesser Britain’) and in northern Iberia (Britoña in Galicia). (Less certainly, on one interpretation of toponymic evidence, there were widespread individual British settlements in post-Roman Gaul, especially along the North Sea/Atlantic coast; and the British migrations from southern Britain to Brittany may have continued for centuries.)Footnote ¹³ The British language disappeared from large areas of the southern half of Britain,Footnote ¹⁴ to be replaced by Germanic speech in dialects which eventually came to be known collectively as English. The material and social culture of those areas became that associable with speakers of Germanic languages.

In 731, Bede was in no doubt what had happened to the British. By a conventional Christian interpretation, the Britons’ criminal immorality had driven their God to bring them to the brink of extinction, by using the Germanic-speaking heathen invaders as agents of exterminium gentis, genocide.Footnote ¹⁵ For Bede, God’s new chosen people in Britain were the English.Footnote ¹⁶ In justification, Bede referred to the sixth-century British author Gildas, whose massive letter of admonition, De excidio Britanniae (‘The Ruin of Britain’), was a call for moral re-armament by a people whom he presented as God’s ‘latter-day Israel’ being divinely tested in its faith.Footnote ¹⁷ While a British elite remained convinced of its civilised superiority to the invaders, its members’ only satisfaction can have been that their culture had not been entirely eradicated. Roman Britain, still visible within the emerging English landscape, was already a distant memory in Gildas’s world, even though he himself was living testimony to a continuing romanitas in British Britain.Footnote ¹⁸

It is a long time since literal genocide was a preferred explanation of how a large part of Britain became England. A favoured theory – which could be heard enunciated over and over again during the last generation – was that a few Germanic-speakers who happened to be in late Roman or post-Roman Britain proved to be such superior and therefore powerful role-models that over the course of the immediately succeeding centuries the Britons hurried to shed their inherited culture and to adopt that which by the end of the sixth century we can recognise as English. Although this remarkable hypothesis was advanced with moral self-righteousness, we can see it to have been in all its essentials misleading (to put the matter no more strongly). If we were to set (an imaginary ancient-history committee of) the United Nations to investigate what happened to the native Britons in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries in terms of its Convention on Genocide (1948), it is difficult to imagine that the result would be other than a judgement that genocide took place. Part of that process would have been literal, involving a significant amount of bloodshed. Part might have involved an apartheid system restricting the indigenes’ access to resources and status.Footnote ¹⁹ Part would have been the creation of an environment in which the only hope of personal survival or advancement would have been assimilation to the mores of Germanic-speakers or to flee the Island, never to return. The overall verdict: cultural genocide following resisted invasion and colonisation.Footnote ²⁰

Even so, there remain many questions about the British conditions in which Germanic settlement began and to which the incomers had to adapt. Here I shall sketch out a dramatic scenario of systemic collapse which seems to me to provide a helpful interpretative context. The antiquated junior-school textbook image of the end of Roman Britain defined by Roman legionary field armies marching out in 409/10 to support their embattled colleagues in Gaul and Italy has nothing to recommend it, but scholars’ language continues to be defined by such a perception, which, in our sources, begins with Gildas.Footnote ²¹ There are two certain essential points. The first is that there were repeated rebellions by Imperial forces in Britain in 406/7, the last of which led to a usurping emperor, Constantine III (407–11), taking forces from Britain to campaign in Gaul (and subsequently in Iberia).Footnote ²² Second, at some point (perhaps around 410) in the lengthy reign of the legitimate emperor of the West, Honorius (395–423), the regular flow of coinage to support the army in Britain abruptly ceased.Footnote ²³ These two matters may be closely linked. It is likely that the sudden shock to the Romano-British economy produced dramatic results.

Less closely datable, but certainly within a couple of decades of the latter events, we see a collapse of mass production of goods in Britain and a loss of distributive networks. It is not certain which came first, but it is unimaginable that these changes are independent. No new money receipts and no new pottery (with its many functions) would have been severe developments. How cities and towns now fed themselves may have come into question. Certainly, archaeology has provided evidence to suggest the ending of some Roman social norms in urban Britain.Footnote ²⁴ We have evidence (as likewise in later-fifth-century Gaul) for the inability of owners of elite property to have their central-heating systems maintained adequately or at all. As urban life slipped from its predictable rhythms, an increasing uncertainty about survival in such contexts may have provoked an urban exodus. In those circumstances, governance is likely to have been exerted from different centres and over more restricted areas.

Barbarian military adventures are attested for this period of British history, both in 410 and in the early 440s.Footnote ²⁵ If we accept the testimony of the late-fifth-century hagiography of St Germanus of Auxerre, they were an issue in 429/30 also.Footnote ²⁶ A Marxist reading of the socio-religious history of early-fifth-century Britain, as partly seen through the eyes of an unreliable mid-sixth-century Byzantine historian, has produced a hypothesis of a root-and-branch revolt against Imperial authority structures and the ejection of Constantine III’s administrators in 409/10.Footnote ²⁷ As we leave contemporary evidence, circumstances necessarily become more difficult to evaluate, as this example shows. Nevertheless, we know that bacaudae – peasant rebels – were active and effective in western Gaul in precisely this period.Footnote ²⁸

A sudden decline in normality, prosperity and order in early-fifth-century Roman Britain would have created its own social, economic and political momentum. We do not need the very uncertainly attested suspension for Britain of Lex Iulia de ui publica (the ban on civilians bearing arms in the Roman commonwealth) by Honorius in 410 as an indicator of crisis. There are other indicators aplenty.

However, my earlier point about a growing localism – indeed, one could say ‘autonomy’ – in governance should exercise restraint over any temptation to generalise too eagerly. Considerations of place and time will always point to complexity. We should expect to see in all these circumstances both parallel and consecutive development of different perceptions of present and future and of different patterns of behaviour. Whether Britons saw Britain crashing out of the Roman empire at a particular moment or imagined that they were constitutionally or legally still part of it, even after the middle of the fifth century, or had very various simultaneous views at any moment, must remain a moot point in the absence of specific evidence.

A thought should be spared for an issue which has received all too little attention in the scholarly literature. What was the effect, beyond the frontier, of the collapse – whether sudden or progressive – of the Roman imperial diocese of Britain? It was Roman policy to manage the politics of frontier zones, which required good intelligence and (where possible) reliable local allies. Payment of subsidy, sometimes lavish, was an essential option in the maintenance of alliance. So too was forward military patrolling. When these ceased, the political landscape changed at once.Footnote ²⁹ Over the past two generations there has been a growing recognition that there was significant change in the mid-fifth century in the landscape of power in what is now southern and central Scotland. The Britons and (farther north) the Picts of these areas can be seen to have developed new types of fortified centres, often replacing larger hill-forts.Footnote ³⁰ New enemies emerged. New opportunities and alliances might be perceived. But in the deep frontier zone which the Roman army had once sought to manage, the money had dried up, just as in the early-fifth-century Roman diocese itself – and for the same reason: the Imperial fiscal tap had been turned off. In different ways, in a different society (or two: northern Britons and southern Picts), the consequences nonetheless must have been severe and the adaptation painful. And when, after the mid-sixth century, the English came calling, the pain was no doubt greater still.Footnote ³¹

We cannot avoid the question how it was that English, ultimately Germanic, language, social customs (including law and religion) and institutions came to prevail in a large part of Britain. Part of the answer is likely to lie in the circumstances in which Roman rule – or, perhaps even more, the Roman imperial economy – ceased in Britain. Our written sources for that period are poor, and what are sometimes taken as certainties are far from such. But we have seen that the evidence of material culture may be held to be decisive. The economy collapsed. Cash flow into the Roman diocese ended; industry and mass production ceased; communications (freedom of movement) and distribution broke down. Management of technology gradually became impossible as manpower and skills were lost; starvation became a problem, particularly in urban communities; civil violence became a significant issue; the cities and towns began to empty as normal life became impossible; population decline, probably severe, became inevitable. New governmental forces made themselves felt, ad hoc; barbarian raiding increasingly gave way to immigration.Footnote ³²

If we turn to Gildas, writing in the mid-sixth century in fear of further disasters, we find that cities were now empty; that the barbarian presence, which had provoked a diuortium in Britannia, was heavily felt; that civil war was endemic in British Britain; that Britons had emigrated. We do not have to accept Gildas’s historiography or his religious position: we must merely note what he took for granted in relation to his own time. The Roman era was a dim and distant memory, however prompted by the remains of the built environment of the Empire. Trade no longer flowed along the principal riverine arteries of southern Britain. There had been wars until relatively recently, which had drawn to a close around the time of Gildas’s birth, and he at least feared their resumption with newly catastrophic consequences.Footnote ³³

As we contemplate systems collapse, the end (in Britain at least) of an Imperial mode whose ways had dominated British life for four centuries (and yet no certainty that ‘Rome’ would not or could not return), we can suppose that the most heavily Romanised (and therefore the most urbanised and populous) parts of the diocese would have suffered disproportionately. In other words, we do not have to imagine that immigrant (or even indigenous) barbarians pushed Roman Britain over: whatever the merits of such an argument might be in relation to other parts of the western Empire, it is not necessary in Britain. One could even argue that systems collapse would have made Britannia a less attractive target for raiding and immigration. But we know that from the 360s to the 440s, for which we do have relevant contemporary evidence, Germanic barbarians were attacking Britain.Footnote ³⁴

Yet what is certain is, to take a long view, that the British-speaking Britons were not wholly conquered militarily from England until the thirteenth century and that they were not confined to Dumnonia (understood as Devon and Cornwall), Wales and what is now south-western Scotland until the mid-seventh century. As has long been acknowledged in modern scholarship, if we see English expansionism in Britain as a process, perhaps still on-going or perhaps having just passed its high-water mark in the later seventh century, then the first major stage took some two hundred years to be completed.Footnote ³⁵

In any event, ‘the passage of dominion’ from Britons to English, as it has been conceptualised since the time of Bede and thoroughly developed since 1100, was a lengthy process. In the eyes of twelfth-century writers it was brought to a close by the reign of Æthelstan as first monarch of England and tidied up by Norman domination of Wales and Scotland from 1093 in what has recently and rather unfortunately been called ‘The First English Empire’ (presumably because the writer thought that Saxons became English by Normanisation after 1066).Footnote ³⁶

Nomenclature

The terminology of historical peoples and their territories is often, perhaps always, fraught with difficulty, and this is certainly true in relation to ancient and mediaeval Britain. There are scholars for whom the word ‘English’ remains difficult to use in relation to the six centuries before 1066: for them, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is a favoured term of art, while for most students of the first millennium AD it is simply a period designation, ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ meaning England before the Norman conquest. It is as if there were in some minds a rule ‘Anglo-Saxon + French = English’! At the other end of the historical scale, there is a problem of knowing what to do about the opposition of meaning of Engle (‘Angle’) and Seaxe (‘Saxon’) when Latin Angli and Saxones could be used to mean one and the same thing (most easily translated ‘English’) but when in a document of 736 Suuthengle might be taken to mean ‘the Southern Angles’ (viz. the Mercians) or ‘the Southern English’.Footnote ³⁷ Angelcynn seems likely to have meant ‘the English people’ and, by extension, ‘England’ but in principle might also have meant ‘Angles’. The changing territory of Anglo-Saxon England can be held to be problematic in terms of nomenclature, and it is striking that modern Scottish historians (and some linguists of like mind) are still unwilling to allow that the English-speakers who were absorbed into ‘Scotland’ in the tenth and eleventh centuries might be called ‘English’ rather than ‘Angles’ or ‘Anglians’. This is rendered even more absurd by the circumstance that fifteenth-century native speakers of Scots called their language Inglis. But by that stage Scots was no more mainstream English than is twenty-first-century American.

It remains a fact that the land and the people came to be known as ‘England’ (Englaland, ‘land of the Angles’) and ‘English’ (Angle-ish). The implied defining role of the Angles in this process has yet to find convincing explanation. Are we to suppose that such ethnogenesis crystallised during the dominance of Southumbrian England by Anglian over-kingdoms from the time of Rædwald of the East Angles (?610s×627) to that of Æthelbald of the Mercians (716–57), perhaps even in one of the brief periods when the whole of England was in the hegemony of Northumbrian kings, Edwin (616×627–33) to Oswiu (651–8)?Footnote ³⁸ Yet Englaland itself seems to be a relative latecomer to the territorial vocabulary of Old English – and it should be stressed that Latin Anglia was not naturally used in England until after the Norman conquest.

In this context, the phrases rex Anglorum and rex Saxonum (which could mean either ‘a king of the English’ or ‘the king of the English’) need careful thought and sensitive interpretation. By extension, regnum Anglorum, ‘a/the kingdom of the English’, requires yet more cautious treatment. It has famously been pointed out that Pope Gregory I (590–604), the father of English Christianity, initiated a papal diplomatic usage of rex Anglorum for any English king; and that Pope has on this basis been heralded, however improbably, as the father of Englishness itself, the very author of an ethnogenesis.Footnote ³⁹

England, then, at its fullest extent in the mid-ninth century, was bounded on the south by the English Channel, in the west by the Cornish and Welsh borders, in the north-west by the ethnically British kingdoms of what is now south-western Scotland and in particular by the kingdom of Dumbarton (the precise boundaries and all the British players are uncertain), and in the north by the upland massif of Bannog (as in Modern Scots Bannockburn, the site of a famous battle in 1314), which provided the southern boundary of the over-kingdom of the Picts.Footnote ⁴⁰ The resemblance of this English territory to the effective dimensions of the Roman province, later diocese, of Britain (Brittaniae, ‘the Britains’, viz, ‘the Imperial provinces of Britain’, in Classical Latin) is very striking, and it is arguable that in this respect the Roman heritage was of great importance in the Middle Ages in respect of the formation of kingdoms, ethnic identities and imperial aspirations. Latin Brittania (Classical)/Britannia (mediaeval) was therefore either Great Britain (the island as a whole) or the territory dominated by the Romans: it is worth remembering that up to one third of the British landmass, what is now northern Scotland, was never incorporated into the Roman empire.

It is necessary always to grasp that in the earlier Middle Ages Britain was a place of considerable ethnic complexity and even greater political diversity. That said, we must equally remember that the very idea of Britain was a driver and moulder of political thought and action, a name for a contested world of its own. The Britons held it to be their own sphere (although mediaeval Welsh literature allows that the name Britain may exclude the Pictish north, above the Antonine Wall or above Bannog).Footnote ⁴¹ We find, however, the Britons of the earlier Middle Ages able to refer to any of Britoña, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, or British-speaking northern Britain (of which the kingdom of Dumbarton would have been the northernmost) as Britannia without qualification. For them it was an affirmation of inherited culture, an unwillingness to release that, but also a pointed reminder of what had been lost.Footnote ⁴² At the end of the ninth century, as the inhabitants of what is now north-eastern Scotland started to shake off the unwelcome embrace of the vikings of Dublin, we begin to meet kings of Alba, an Old-Gaelic name meaning ‘Great Britain/the island of Britain’.Footnote ⁴³ Again, we must recognise the note of aspiration – and in its rulers we see the lineal ancestors of the later kings of Scots.Footnote ⁴⁴ All these contested Britain with Germanic speakers, first the English and then Viking-Age Scandinavians. Over the course of early Anglo-Saxon history, English regional over-kings, inspired by stimuli which historians still dispute, enjoyed a developing rhetoric of rule of Britain in their competition for dominance. In a document of the year 736, already mentioned, Æthelbald, (over)king of the Mercians, has the styles rex Britanniae (‘king of Britain’) and rex … omnium prouinciarum quae Sutangli dicuntur (‘the king of all the kingdoms which are called Southern English’), a formula which can be connected directly with what the recently deceased Bede had to say in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’) about seven over-kings who intermittently dominated the Midlands and south of England from Anglo-Saxon proto-history to the time when he wrote.Footnote ⁴⁵ A century and a half later, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (published in 892) gives us in a crudely augmented version of Bede’s list the vernacular equivalent of Æthelbald’s rex Britanniae – brytenwealda (‘ruler of Britain’).Footnote ⁴⁶ In Bede’s terms, the West-Saxon kings who received the submission of their East-Anglian and Mercian counterparts, making themselves over-kings of the English Midlands and south, would have joined this list of exceptionally powerful rulers: Ecgberht (829/30), Edward the Elder (899–924), Ælfweard (924) and Æthelstan (924/5–927). In as much as kings from 927 to 1066 continued (albeit with occasional viking-induced disruption) to dominate this Southumbrian area, they might also have rejoiced in such a title. However, it is from 927 that we have explicit evidence of the deployment (in Latin) of royal styles of entitlement to rule Britain.

An English claimant to be a ruler or king or emperor of Britain must have his outlook examined closely. Given the variety of meanings, in that period, of words translatable as ‘Britain’ – any one of the British-speaking territories, the Roman imperial diocese at its fullest extent, the island of Britain – a premature, insufficiently contextualised interpretation could be very misleading.Footnote ⁴⁷ Another dimension is provided by parallel usage in Ireland in the earlier Middle Ages: from 642 (an obituary notice) we encounter from time to time persons given the title rex Hiberniae /rí Érenn (‘the king of Ireland’), who show no sign of having dominated an area any larger than (at best) the northern half of that island.Footnote ⁴⁸ We see in Gaelic literature in Latin the transfer of this kind of ideology to Britain when Northumbrian over-kings were dominant in England.Footnote ⁴⁹

In sum, political theory and practice could cross borders between ethnicities as well as between polities of shared ethnicity. Christian evangelising missions and political exile provided two conduits for such transfer. Even negative views about neighbours did not offer a defence against reception of new ideas. The language of ethnic and religious differences does, however, present a reminder of the points at which lines might be drawn.

Within Britain, the English had three sets of ethnically differentiable neighbours in the early Middle Ages – Picts (Old-English Pehtas), Gaels (Old-English Scottas) and Britons (Brettas), joined by a fourth in the Viking Age, Scandinavians (Dene).Footnote ⁵⁰ Attitudes to these neighbours would vary with time, place and political circumstance, and these attitudes might have been variously different between seculars and ecclesiastics. What is clear is that in Anglo-Latin political discourse any one of them might be called barbari (‘barbarians’). In late Roman terms, any one of them (save those Britons counted as Roman provincials, therefore ciues, ‘[Roman] citizens’) might be accounted thus, including any one of the Germanic peoples who contributed to the post-Roman population of Britain. It is striking that this language could be adopted and applied to their Insular neighbours by the (newly) Christian English, whose heathen forefathers their Italian evangelists would certainly have regarded as barbari. It is no surprise that the Britons called the English barbarians, and it is striking to find Gaelic writers also able to use it of the English.Footnote ⁵¹ We should perhaps (except in the case of the grim Anglo-British relationship) not read too much meaning into the word, perhaps regarding it simply as a way of affirming the user’s sense of his own civility over against his neighbour.

However, one exception to this must be recorded, also in the context of Anglo-British interaction. Much effort has been expended in recent years on lightening the dark picture of mutual racial hatred between the two peoples, and there has been significant gain in the quality of our understanding of the existence of a complex interrelationship.Footnote ⁵² But, if we are to have a generalisation, it remains the case that the default position on either side was characterised by contempt and racial hatred. The word which has become ‘Welsh’ in Modern English, and therefore both a straightforward ethnic label for the inhabitants of a precisely defined geographical and constitutional space and for the indigenes’ original language, had, however, a darker earlier history. Old-English wealh (plural wealas, adjective welhisc) was a word which denoted a foreigner, particularly one of Roman heritage and Romance speech, who was worthy only to be a slave – indeed, it became a standard word for ‘slave’. This is part of a much larger Germanic picture and can be seen (for example) on the Germanic-Romance linguistic frontier in Belgium.Footnote ⁵³ What is striking is that in the conversion of this word into an ethnic label in Britain (as Wealh, Wealas, therefore), it became specialised into a description of Britons who inhabited what is now consequently Wales, with the Bretons (Suðbryttas, Lidwiccas) and the North Britons (Cumbras) receiving different names of a non-negative character and the Cornish (Westwealas, but in time Cornwealas from which developed Modern-English Cornwall) having their ‘Welshness’ qualified.Footnote ⁵⁴

New Societies, New Polities

In sum, the English polity or polities, once established in Britain, must be regarded as intrusive on a previous sub-Roman order, the immigrant presence in the context of system collapse inevitably provoking severe tensions, indeed interethnic hostilities, and leading to a radical political reordering in an ethnogenetic (not to mention ethnonemetic) context. One of the long-standing problems of general interpretation of this process has been whether or not to insist on comparability with the better-documented history of other regions of the western Roman empire which were conquered and settled by Germanic-speaking groups, in Gaul, Iberia, North Africa and Italy. Here I take the view that, while the insights gained by comparison are to be welcomed and developed, there is no merit in insisting that the course of history in Britain and any other sub-Roman region must have been essentially similar.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, it is apparent from the outcome – in terms of language, political and social culture and material culture – that British history has many important differences from that of the other Roman regions in which Germanic-speaking peoples established themselves in the fifth and sixth centuries. There are many reasons for these differences, extending from the circumstances of late-fourth- and earlier-fifth-century Britain to the nature of the immigrant population which had by the mid-seventh century defined a very new cultural map of Britain.Footnote ⁵⁶

The ways in which the new polities and societies were established in Britain, and their interactions with and effects on the indigenes, remain very uncertain; interpretation has been, and has continuing potential to be, acutely controversial.

From such a base we begin the history of Anglo-Saxon England. As we gain contemporary evidence of its society – evidence which is very thin for the first seventy to one hundred years from the despatch in 596 of the first evangelising mission from Rome – two features of governance may be observed. We see aggressive regional over-kings locking horns with one another, and in these the historian may be tempted to see the heirs of leaders who commanded significant barbarian forces in fifth-century Britain.Footnote ⁵⁷ But, second, at the same time we see dependent royalty operating at a much more local level, and, as we see more of early Anglo-Saxon England, that evidence increases and diversifies variously. These more local rulers have usually been less interesting (indeed, all too often invisible) to historians, especially in the twentieth century, and it is only in the last twenty-five years that there have been some attempts to write their histories.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nevertheless, historians’ focus has remained resolutely on their transience as the English marched their inevitable way to national identity, a monarchy and a nation-state.

In 1974, a hypothesis was advanced that parts of early Anglo-Saxon England might not have been ruled thus.Footnote ⁵⁹ This is a useful reminder that Germanic-speaking peoples can be seen in chequered relations with kingship.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Germanic word which gave English ‘king’ (Old-English cyning, later cyng) was not one whose etymology conveyed such a notion or had great time depth, unlike Welsh rhi (a word now long since abandoned) or Old-Gaelic rí, cognate with kingly words in very various Indo-European languages.Footnote ⁶¹ Furthermore, comparative study suggests that the ‘free Germanic peasant’, much derided in recent generations, deserves further and positive consideration.Footnote ⁶² How the Germanic-speaking immigrants were led in their migration to Britain – if they were – is not known, and very different hypotheses have been advanced over the last century. Indeed, the effects of migration on political organisation have received too little attention both in general and in particular relation to this period.Footnote ⁶³

Two moments at which this focus might have changed proved illusory. In 1905, Hector Munro Chadwick, Germanic philologist and all-round Anglo-Saxonist (to say nothing of his other remarkable achievements),Footnote ⁶⁴ published a variously groundbreaking book, Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions. It contained the first detailed study of English local kingship. The book was damned by Frank Merry Stenton in an extraordinary and immediate review:Footnote ⁶⁵ historians of Anglo-Saxon England thereafter largely avoided it until the 1960s, thus perpetuating the traditions which serious engagement with Chadwick’s work would have disrupted.Footnote ⁶⁶ One of the few references (and even fewer positive references) to Chadwick’s Institutions in the intervening half-century was made in 1937 by J. E. A. Jolliffe (1891–1964), whose historical interests were especially devoted to the study of English local institutions, their origins in what he called ‘the era of the folk’ and their development in English constitutional history.Footnote ⁶⁷ No English historian was better placed than Jolliffe to appreciate and develop Chadwick’s insight. Yet he was unable to find a consistent place for the petty kingdom when seeking to articulate England’s ‘constitutional history’: he faced the constant distraction of feeling the need to raise his eyes to higher levels of rule, and he repeatedly stressed the alleged appointed nature of local kingship.Footnote ⁶⁸ Only in the last generation has a more sympathetic attitude been taken to local, sub-regional and regional kingdoms and their various interactions. Even so, that interest has remained more descriptive than structural, concerned less with their function in the governance of Germanic-speaking Britain than with a few of their individual histories within a predetermined movement of political history towards a known destination.

Our contemporary written sources begin to thicken – that would not be difficult! – from the late seventh century with the advent of royal diplomas, ‘The Tribal Hidage’, further correspondence, chronicles and (in 731) Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History’. The list does not, of course, end with Bede. In these sources taken as a whole, numerous kingdoms can be seen. But historians have tended not to be curious about this phenomenon and therefore not to see much of what is on the surface, let alone what might lie just beneath it. Comparative approaches have not been exploited. The reason is again that a long-term, overarching structure of interpretation has inhibited free thought and critical enquiry. In short, the idea of the nation—which underpinned the English (and subsequently the British) nation-state – has long rendered irrelevant deeper probing of the origins and early history of English political organisation.

A crucial early witness is provided by a royal diploma of the 670s, preserved in the archives of Chertsey Abbey through the Middle Ages, augmented and at length incorporated in the abbey’s cartulary-chronicle in the second half of the thirteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although both the royal style of the donor and a confirmatory subscription acknowledge the importance of a regional over-king – Wulfhere, over-king of the Mercians (658–75) – this is a charter peopled by local kings (subreguli), perhaps themselves of various grades of royalty. This donor was one Frithuwald of the kingdom of the men of Suthrige (the Southern District, now [Co.] Surrey), Fritheuualdus prouincie Surrianorum: his grant was to enhance the endowment of the minster (monasterium) which had first been built under King Ecgberht (presumably Ecgberht I, [over]king of the Cantware, 664–73). Frithuwald’s grant was massive – a substantial slice of northern Surrey, constituting much of the prouincia (‘kingdom’) of the Woccingas, as far north-westwards as the boundary of the kingdom of the Sunningas. The size of Surrey at this date is a matter for dispute, but the formation in -gē (cf. German Gau, ‘district’) is characteristic of south-eastern England before about 700: Kent, for example, has a number of such units which seem to have been kingdoms.Footnote ⁷⁰ Names in –ingas (‘followers/dependants/descendants of’), with the leader’s name preceding, likewise seem to have been early kingdoms (but the date range of their creation remains controversial). Within Surrey, we meet a number of -ingas units: with the aid of this document, we can see the frontier between Surrey and Berkshire (where the territory of the Sunningas began), as well as within Surrey at the Fullingadic, the boundary of the Fullingas. It has been well remarked that, from study of local political organisation, ‘What emerges most strongly … is the stability of the early’ units of such sort.Footnote ⁷¹ It has sometimes been argued that Frithuwald was a representative of a type of early Mercian regional deputy of royal status – in other words, probably not a native of Surrey, which had only recently come under Mercian hegemony.Footnote ⁷² King Wulfhere would on this argument have represented the next grade on an ascending scale of Anglo-Saxon royalty. One of the various striking features of this diploma is found in the witness-list, of which a section is explicitly devoted to subreguli: there are four, of whom Frithuwald is the first, followed by Osric, Wigheard and Æthilwald. It would be possible to argue that these royals were equivalents of Frithuwald in other districts of Wulfhere’s over-kingdom, were other local kings in ‘the kingdom of the men of Suthrige’ and/or were other local rulers of neighbouring minor kingdoms (such as the Sunningas). This diploma reveals a world of lesser kings and of petty kingdoms: the word which the author of this diploma used for such a kingdom was prouincia.Footnote ⁷³ For Bede, that word was characteristically (but by no means exclusively) restricted to the (over)kingdom of a regional over-king – of the Bernicians, the Deirans, the East Angles, the East Saxons, the Mercians and suchlike: he usually employed regio to describe a more local kingly unit.Footnote ⁷⁴ Here, as in other charters, prouincia is used of a broader range of kingdom types. But the crucial point is that these words describe kingdoms and that the minor kingdoms were the building blocks of larger regional over-kingdoms, themselves of very varying degrees of size and importance.

We can recognise such units across the length and breadth of early Anglo-Saxon England, although our sources are unevenly distributed across time and space.Footnote ⁷⁵ Toponymic evidence is of particular importance, as have been local studies of patterns of rights and dues, of relationships within and between estates.Footnote ⁷⁶ It is clear that England in the early Middle Ages had a culture of plural, multiple kingdoms. By extrapolating from the size of local territories described in early Anglo-Saxon texts as regio and/or prouincia and/or having names in -gē or -ingas, we could start to draw a map of the local polities of England before the Viking Age and provide a very different, fresh analysis of the culture of the early English polity as a whole: we might find that even a partial map would show kingdoms numbered in three figures. Such an exercise would help us to enhance our appreciation of a middle-ranking tier of over-kingdoms which are at present poorly understood.Footnote ⁷⁷ Comparison with neighbouring or related societies would help us to grasp something of the factors tending to stability and instability in such polities. A model has been offered, generated from the history of the Mediterranean (and particularly the Hellenic) world in Antiquity, of ‘peer-polity interaction’ which could be very usefully tested, with some of its manifest inadequacies probed, against the evidence of the Insular (and Scandinavian) societies of the earlier Middle Ages.Footnote ⁷⁸

An obvious point of comparison, crossing an evident linguistic and cultural divide but into a neighbouring society with which the early English interacted, is provided by Gaeldom – Ireland and Gaelic (north-western) Britain – in the early and central Middle Ages.Footnote ⁷⁹ A recent analysis of the evidence of one major class of written evidence has revealed that throughout that period Ireland (by far the greater part of Gaeldom in the early Middle Ages) had a minimum of 600 to 650 kingdoms.Footnote ⁸⁰ It has been well observed that ‘[e]arly medieval kingship was naturally small-scale’ and, if somewhat less happily for England at least, that ‘In Ireland … dynasties expanded only to segment, whereas the rulers of expanding English kingdoms were careful to deny the royal aspirations of their fellow kinsmen’, that ‘Irish royal dynasties could expand as much as any Anglo-Saxon counterpart, but that their need to maintain the [royal] status of as many as possible of their branches ensured that the primary kingdoms remained small.’Footnote ⁸¹

A recurrent joint difficulty in analysis of such developments is the question of what is primary and where to start the story. For these purposes, the advantage of study of the English polity is that it did not exist before the fifth century. What happened in the fifth and sixth centuries will have been of literally fundamental importance. At the time of the appearance of written evidence, in the generation from the mid-590s to the mid-620s, we can see a regional over-kingdom based in East Kent and a glimpse of a subordinate (and ethnically different – Saxon) kingdom (over-kingdom?) in West Kent, which was judged worthy of its own bishopric at Rochester.Footnote ⁸² If Bede’s testimony about this generation, written more than a century later, has aught to commend it, then the East Kentish over-king also dominated the East Saxons and East Angles and indeed as far as the River Humber, as well as having diplomatic influence of an unspecified character which reached as far west as the southern boundary of the Hwicce in the south-western Midlands (presumably Gloucestershire).Footnote ⁸³ Soon afterwards, papal correspondence tells us of the major kingship of Edwin, king of the Deire, and similarly of Eadbald (Audubaldus) of Kent gentibusque ei subpositis, ‘with the peoples subject to him’, still an over-king though not in his father’s league.Footnote ⁸⁴ In other words, on the earliest available evidence, major over-kingships had come into existence not later (but perhaps also not earlier) than the late sixth century.

Whether such over-kingships had existed from English origins in Britain or had grown as the English polity had developed is a question that has divided scholars. This issue returns us to uncertainties about the effects of migration and of the impact of whatever British polities were encountered by the settlers. One could imagine small communities of free peasants making a crossing to Britain or groups characterised by having a clear leader or both in parallel.Footnote ⁸⁵ Whichever of these three options one chooses, the fact remains that in our earliest written sources we can see structural gradations of kingly power. If the toponymists’ current arguments in historical interpretation of -ingas place-names have merit, they (and therefore the local kingdoms bearing such names) were not created in the primary phase(s) of Germanic migration into Britain.Footnote ⁸⁶ But that does not of itself dispose of the possibility that comparable units were already in existence, characterised for example by place-names in -gē.

When English regional (over)kingdoms come into view, some have an origin reported as an act of creation by a more powerful over-king. The over-kingdom of the Middle Angles is a case in point, constituted (according to Bede) by Penda, king of the Mercians (ob. 655), for his son Peada.Footnote ⁸⁷ This has led to rather adventurous suggestions that all such units in the Greater Mercian over-kingdom created by Penda derived from over-kingly acts of will. On that argument, King Frithuwald’s subkingdom in Surrey would be another such, if smaller and less complex than the subkingdom of the Middle Angles, which was itself a substantial over-kingdom. The kingdom, perhaps over-kingdom, of the Magonsætan (in what is now Herefordshire) within the Mercian over-kingdom is another case in point, but its rulers and their mode of rule are not well documented; it did, however, acquire a bishopric (at Hereford) in 676, with a pontiff translated from Rochester.Footnote ⁸⁸ Much better reported is the neighbouring kingdom (probably over-kingdom) to the east, that of the Hwicce, which came in 680 to have a bishopric at Worcester. In its charters, the kingdom of the Hwicce is classically represented as having up to three kings at any one time. It is not known whether each had responsibility for a particular area or constituency within the kingdom or whether the kings ruled as a committee concerned with the whole. The origins of this kingdom are quite unknown but may have occurred in a context of dispute between (West) Saxons and Angles with different ethnic components belonging to this unit. Within it, -ingas units are visible.Footnote ⁸⁹

A superficially similar case is the kingdom of the East Saxons, for long a core part of the Mercian hegemony, but with an older and a more complex organisation. It lost the territory dependent on London, whose people came to be known as ‘the Middle Saxons’, annexed to the Greater Mercian over-kingdom in the early eighth century;Footnote ⁹⁰ Surrey may have been the East Saxon kingdom’s ‘Southern District’ if it existed with that name before a Mercian takeover in the third quarter of the seventh century.Footnote ⁹¹ West Kent, which was an object of interest to East Saxon dynasts in the later seventh and eighth centuries, may have been an earlier example of the same. -ingas units are visible across the kingdom of the East Saxons and have been an element in the assignment of a chronology of the type. Its three rulers as seen in the early seventh century may have exercised authority as a committee but may equally have been responsible for three parts: the core, Middlesex and Surrey, and West Kent. It cannot by that date have been the creation of a Mercian over-king.Footnote ⁹²

Here our focus is on different sizes and types of kingdom (or over-kingdom). What they all have in common is domination by a powerful regional over-kingship, but their origins have been differently explained. Their internal constitution suggests the existence of subkingdoms as a routine part of their structure. Although some subkingdoms had relative longevity, it may be the case that ‘the early regiones [were] organic entities combined and recombined like building bricks to form more transient territories’.Footnote ⁹³

If we look to a yet larger level of political organisation, we meet those over-kingdoms – of the Northumbrians, the Mercians and (eventually) the West Saxons – which intermittently (but seemingly in turn) dominated first the English as a whole (from the 620s) and then (from the late 650s) the Southumbrian political scene.

The Northumbrian over-kingdom we can see under construction, from the kingdoms (probably over-kingdoms) of the Bernicians and Deirans, from the late sixth century to 679; these players are given extra life by being at the core of Bede’s historical narrative.Footnote ⁹⁴ That construction was not solely northern or English but involved continuing conquests of Britons and ferocious struggle with the growing over-kingdom of the Mercians. In the process, a ‘Transhumbrian’ political formation was probably destroyed. There has been relatively little discussion of the building blocks from which the Deiran and Bernician over-kingdoms were previously constructed, and indeed the frontiers of both peoples remain in part uncertain.Footnote ⁹⁵

A Mercian over-kingdom has seemed to be the work almost of one man, King Penda (ob. 655), who emerges from Midland proto-history in league with Britons as an implacable opponent of Bernician and Deiran expansionism and a voracious conqueror of England between the Thames-Severn line and the Northumbrian frontier. ‘Greater Mercia’, as his construction has come to be known, continued to grow after his death, reaching deep into south-eastern England. The fate of the political elites of the peoples, large and small, drawn into this hegemony is a subject which deserves a great deal more scrutiny, not least in its possible implications for Mercian governance in the ninth century.Footnote ⁹⁶ As we have already seen, some of the middle-size kingdoms within ‘Greater Mercia’ have been held, if controversially, to be creations of the uppermost level of Mercian over-kingship: that is almost certainly true of the over-kingdom of the Middle Angles, which had longevity in defining a bishopric with its seat at Leicester from 737, but is largely invisible to us as a political entity within a few years of its creation by Penda in the mid-650s.Footnote ⁹⁷ It is here that the remarkable but enigmatic document, untitled but known to twentieth-century scholarship by the desperately unhappy name of ‘The Tribal Hidage’, is a capital witness.Footnote ⁹⁸ It begins by stating an original Mercian territory (presumptively in Staffordshire)Footnote ⁹⁹ but is in its essentials an assessment list of the Middle-Anglian peoples, up to twenty-three often tiny political units stretching in an arc from southern Lincolnshire to eastern Oxfordshire, whose allegiance must have been contested in the east with the East Angles and in the south with the West Saxons in the seventh century.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When Wulfhere, over-king of the Mercians 658–75, led an army with thirty duces regii into the North, most of those ‘royal ealdormen’ (or ‘kingly war-leaders’) may have come from ‘the Middle Angles’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The West-Saxon over-kingdom seems to pose some rather different problems. There are two of great importance. In 731, Bede wrote of the Christianisation of the West Saxons as occurring in synchrony with that of the Northumbrians through the efforts of the over-king of the latter, Oswald (634–42), whose hegemony extended over the West Saxons:Footnote ¹⁰² introducing the West Saxons for the first time in an extended narrative, Bede wrote gens Occidentalium Saxonum qui antiquitus Geuissae uocabantur (‘the West Saxon gens, who were of old/originally called Geuissae’) – Bede elsewhere always employed a Latin masculine form *Geuissi: one is bound to wonder if this is a vernacular formation doubly analogous to Lindissi, Lindissae (Lindsey). Where Bede used the name suggests that he considered it current from the 610s to the 680s.Footnote ¹⁰³ If this is correct, the renaming occurred in Bede’s lifetime and is an interesting historical example of ethnogenesis, perhaps attributable to the long reign of King Ini (688/9–725/6).Footnote ¹⁰⁴

There may be a connexion with the second problem needing consideration here, for which once more Bede’s ‘History’ provides the starting point. Ini’s predecessor, Ceadwalla (685–8/9), is represented as a bloodthirsty warlord who was responsible in his brief reign for some major political upheavals across the deep south of England. According to Bede, ‘When [King] Cenwealh [642–72] had died … subreguli took the government (regnum) of the gens (‘people’/‘nation’); having divided it among themselves, they held it for about ten years’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ There have been two rival interpretations of these events: either the kingdom, normally ‘united’, ‘fragmented’; or we have here an explicit glimpse of normality, a body of local rulers, usually acknowledging an over-king, dispensing with that practice for a decade or so.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ There is much other evidence for petty kingship among the West Saxons in the seventh century. This period ended when Ceadwalla stormed to power. Bede continued the story: ‘the subreguli having been defeated (deuictis) and removed (amotis), Ceadwalla received the over-kingdom (imperium)’. While sub-kings are certainly known from eighth-century Wessex, Ceadwalla’s reign may have marked a moment of transition in their constitutional status.

When, in 825–8, Ecgberht, king of the West Saxons, relieved the Mercian over-kings of their south-eastern subkingdoms – Surrey, South Saxons, Kent, East Saxons – and ended such local royal rule, intrusive Mercian in Kent but native kingship of the East Saxons, he seems to have terminated the tradition of English (or, at any rate, southern) petty kingship.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ There would be some appointed sub-kings until the end of the century, and there would be dominance of one king(dom) by another; on the face of it, however, petty kings were now creatures of the past.

It is certain that the idea of empire (imperium) played significant and varied roles in Anglo-Saxon political life. If an emperor was a king of kings, there was empire aplenty in that period. Charles Plummer usefully expounded Bede’s understanding of the contrasting pair of kingship (regnum) and empire/over-kingship (imperium).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Bede’s employment of imperium (the power exercised by one king[dom] over another or others) bears particular examination, for he could use it of the internal constitution of kingdoms (as here, concerning Ceadwalla) as well as the relationship of one (over)kingdom with another or others.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

An ad hoc relationship of one over-king with another (and so on) may be conveniently and clearly illustrated by Bede’s treatment (for reasons of Church history) of the affairs of the South Saxon kingdom in the 670s. The over-king of the South Saxons, Æthelwealh, was subject to Wulfhere, over-king of the Mercians (658–75) and brytenw(e)alda, at whose instance Æthelwealh was converted to Christianity. His Christian wife, Eafe, was of the royal line of the (over)kingdom of the Hwicce. In token of Æthelwealh’s baptism, Wulfhere gave him (donauit illi) two kingdoms (prouincias), namely, those of the Wihtware and Meonware, according to Bede Jutish kingdoms in which the Gewissi/West Saxons had an interest. Eventually, Æthelwealh was killed by Ceadwalla in 680×685, but the latter was driven out by two of Æthelwealh’s subordinate kings (duces regii), Berhthun and Andhun, who then took power. Eventually, Ceadwalla returned as king of the Gewissi (685–8/9) and reduced the South Saxons to tribute, a relationship which remained stable under Ceadwalla’s successor, Ini (688/9–725/6), thus providing a forty-year ‘interruption’ of Mercian dominance of the South Saxons and an end to Mercian/South Saxon dominance of the Iutae of Hampshire.Footnote ¹¹⁰

On the evidence of their diplomas, some kings’ administrations were more prone to use imperial language than others. But it is clear that the contextual strands of thought were various. The place of the English in a larger Christian polity, with its Roman roots, was one such. An idea of Britain (and its islands) as another world, a potential empire of its own, was another.Footnote ¹¹¹ The relationship of English kingdoms to non-English peoples of Britain (and, later, Ireland), and in particular to an imagined polity of Britannia, was a third. But the simplest underpinning of the idea of imperium was provided by Bede or his source(s) of inspiration: kings who wielded power over other kings held imperium; that might be the power of one major supra-regional over-king over another, or it might be of kings who stood at the head of complex polities which encompassed numerous petty kingdoms (and perhaps also intermediate over-kingdoms) in a relatively stable constitutional framework. It might indeed (if Bede had written more about petty kings) have been used for the dominance of one petty king over two others.

‘International’ relations therefore operated at a variety of levels within the Anglo-Saxon polity as well as between English, Britons, Gaels, Picts and (in the Viking Age) Scandinavians. This was made absolutely explicit in a classic paper by Molly Miller.Footnote ¹¹² A long-used and very crude English translation of Bede’s political terminology of power, office, status and territory – only very slowly (and often reluctantly) given up since the 1950s – has left a language of provinces and ealdormen (or indeed dukes), for example, providing the conceptual framework for historians’ reading of the early Anglo-Saxon polity. The failure to engage with H. M. Chadwick’s work in the half-century after 1905 left the writing of the Verfassungsgeschichte of England in ‘big government’ mode. Where kingship and government might have been recognised as having their roots at local level, a top-down reading of the polity has almost universally prevailed. F. M. Stenton’s classic and contemptuous treatment in 1943 of the kings of the Hwicce sums up that approach;Footnote ¹¹³ yet he was merely the most distinguished inheritor and purveyor of this long-standing outlook.

Twelfth-century historians provided an interpretative framework for early Anglo-Saxon political history in the concept of The Heptarchy.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Duly tweaked and republished in early modern England, this concept prevailed until challenged in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Even those who have since then given precise and detailed treatment of polities more local than those of the Northumbrians, Mercians and West Saxons have barely looked beneath the ‘Heptarchic’ surface. Scholars have also treated the major (over)kingdoms as territorially defined (East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, Wessex) despite the language of peoples being the universal Anglo-Saxon discourse. It has mostly been in very local studies, with landscapes and their functions at the centre of enquiry, that a more grounded, realistic assessment has begun hesitantly to emerge,Footnote ¹¹⁶ though again with an inadequate conceptual vocabulary, as (for example) the reappearance of the woeful discourse of ‘tribe’ and ‘tribal’ has indicated.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The tetrarchy in which the Anglo-Saxon polity was organised in the middle quarters of the ninth century and in which condition it was destroyed in the years 865–78 may have been four unitary kingdoms or monarchies (although it has recently become clear that our appreciation of Mercian governmental forms has long been inadequate).Footnote ¹¹⁸ However, behind those four kingdoms which comprised mid-ninth-century England lay a political history of significant complexity whose dynamic has, we can now say, never been well understood. Furthermore, as one marked trend in the subject is to argue for ever bigger, more intrusive, government at ever earlier dates,Footnote ¹¹⁹ it is arguable that understanding continues to be postponed. That there was a dynamic to the political system of England in the early Middle Ages, capable of delivering executive authority to kings and phases of reduction of kingly status and therefore of competition for royal power, seems clear, but that we yet understand structures and processes seems much more doubtful.

Received Narrative and Teleology

The received narrative of early Anglo-Saxon political history, of a gens Anglorum or English people developing in a pattern of successive dominant over-kingdoms, is essentially Bede’s, as augmented for the ninth century in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A division of north and south was also in this way part of Bede’s political heritage.Footnote ¹²⁰ Whether Bede expected or desired that a monarchy of the English should be the eventual outcome of successive supra-regional over-kingships is far from certain, but he might nonetheless reasonably be described as an English nationalist in his political outlook.

A common feature in the writing of European national histories has been the power of a modern identity to determine the nature of historiographyFootnote ¹²¹ – which continues apace in the cause of ‘the European project’ – and this has been manifest in the writing of English history. Everywhere in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English historiography is a sense of the inevitability, and indeed the desirability, of union of all the English. Given that the monarchy was achieved in 927 (although there has been a marked reluctance from the later sixteenth century until recently to acknowledge King Æthelstan’s place in that history),Footnote ¹²² it is inevitable that all the effort in this direction should have been concentrated in Anglo-Saxon history. One of the games which historians have played in that cause has been to identify crucial antecedents to union, including major conceptual steps forward.

To this cause has been recruited the unlikely figure of Offa, over-king of Mercians in 757/8–96.Footnote ¹²³ Various forged diplomas in his name have given him an uncompromising title of rex Anglorum.Footnote ¹²⁴ When the facts of forgery had eventually been digested by scholarship, a legend of Offa had already grown deep and resilient roots. The textbooks of the 1930s and 1940s, still current in the 1960s, reflected this legend: for Jolliffe, ‘Offa was clearly driving towards a lasting kingdom of the English … The death of Offa stopped that normal development of a general English crown and title in which enlightened contemporaries had placed their faith.’Footnote ¹²⁵ ‘“England” as a political fact was now emerging under the direction of a king whose political vision far transcended provincial limits and local interests and revealed a remarkable conception of the duties and potentialities of kingship’, wrote G. O. Sayles; and with more than a nod in what would be the direction of the next generation’s increasing identification of interaction with Continental powers as indices of virtue and importance, ‘It was his drive towards the south-east of England, towards that part of the English Channel [coast] which came closest to the Continent, that reveals his vision and proves his ability to achieve his ambitions.’Footnote ¹²⁶ Another generation later, this general approach to Offa, in its thoroughgoing improbability, has not changed in any essential. There is not space here for the necessary reappraisal, but one may advertise instead a view that almost every recorded action of Offa is testimony to his failure to hold or usefully develop what Æthelbald, his long-term predecessor, had built and points the way to the ultimately terminal decline of the Mercian hegemony.Footnote ¹²⁷

The most important over-kings of early Anglo-Saxon England can in the eighth century be seen expressing their power in terms of a relationship with Britannia, Brytene. It might be said that to be (or to think oneself) the most important king in Britain did not logically require him to hold every constituent part of England or to separate any number of sub-kings from their royal status. The absence of straightforward evidence for routinely continuing kingship of the East Angles from the mid-eighth to the mid-ninth century might be held to indicate a radical move in that direction; however, Offa’s murder of Æthelberht, king (perhaps over-king) of the East Angles, in 794 provides a strong negative indication.Footnote ¹²⁸

A more direct, and variedly attested, pointer to major change in approach is provided by the politics of 829/30. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (829), ‘And that year King Ecgberht conquered [both] the kingdom of the Mercians and everything south of the Humber, and he was the eighth king who was brytenwealda’, and (830), ‘In this year Wiglaf again obtained the kingdom of the Mercians.’Footnote ¹²⁹ A temptation to read the East Angles too into the geographical statement of conquest should probably be resisted. If Wiglaf was driven out and his kingdom annexed to that of the West Saxons, that must indeed have been a remarkable development. The Chronicle is not merely a propagandist organ here, for we have a Mercian regnal list and a charter of Wiglaf himself – issued ‘in the second year of my second reign’, 831 – which carry the same message.Footnote ¹³⁰ (What occurred in 829 recurred ninety years later, in 918/19, but with a very different outcome.Footnote ¹³¹) The only alternative interpretation would be that Wiglaf was replaced as king in 829 by a deputy who could not stay the course – but of such a royal there is now no trace. The conquest of the Mercians, followed by pre-emptive submission of the Northumbrians and (830) successful aggression against the Welsh (whatever one makes of this last), has been quite sufficient to gain Ecgberht an elevated place in histories of EnglandFootnote ¹³² – although it must be said that it was his role as progenitor of a remarkable dynasty which is his principal legacy.

The end of petty kingship in England is often cited as a major constitutional achievement of Offa. In fact, it was not in his power to achieve that among the West Saxons and Northumbrians, if local kingship still survived in these two kingdoms. The kingship (once an over-kingship) of the East Saxons, the Mercians’ most loyal long-term allies, outlived Offa by some thirty years. But once it was gone (following West Saxon conquest), we have (as yet, at least) no evidence for sub-kingship in the tetrarchic kingdoms of the mid-ninth century, save as a training ground and an apanage for the heir to the West Saxon throne.Footnote ¹³³ Over the course of early Anglo-Saxon history, there were clearly periods in which succession or access to royal title came to be restricted in one over-kingdom or another. Only the last of those (in Offa’s reign) has received any sustained analysis, but premature conclusions have been drawn.Footnote ¹³⁴

An English monarchy was achieved in the tenth century. The knowledge, and the millennium-long celebration, of that constitutional fact has had an all-pervasive impact on the writing of Anglo-Saxon history. Since the mid-sixteenth century, modern scholars on the whole have had neither taste nor time for local or lesser grades of royalty in English history; indeed, most historians have probably not even noticed that they were there. Where they have, the meaningless but pejorative adjective ‘tribal’ makes a rapid appearance.Footnote ¹³⁵ Yet it was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which gave us our conceptual tools for dealing with them, derived not least from colonial experience in Ireland and the New World: that the scholar today can speak of ‘petty king(s)’ and ‘petty kingship’ (Kleinkönig[e], Kleinkönigtum in the German historiographical tradition) and of ‘mesne (over)kings’ and ‘superior (over)kings’ is due to encountering in a colonial context a phenomenon analogous to that seen in early mediaeval Europe.Footnote ¹³⁶ As we have noted, when H. M. Chadwick attempted to initiate a twentieth-century discussion of grades of early English kingship, his work was belittled and frozen out of mainstream historiography. After all, the direction and destination of England were well known: why worry over distracting constitutional complications? Had not John Milton spoken truly of ‘battles of kites and crows’ which signified nothing?Footnote ¹³⁷ Even though the study of Anglo-Saxon history is a business very different from fifty years ago, there are few students of history or archaeology who are interested in asking penetrating questions about early governance. The inevitability of English union (and then of British union) as a historiographical concept is a derivative of much later political desires or necessities; it has derailed scholarly interaction with the evidence for pre-union, pre-monarchical political organisation among the English.

Two more modern tendencies may be observed. From the 1980s, British archaeologists began to speak, in imitation of neo-evolutionist American anthropologists of the 1960s and 1970s, of a succession of stages of increasingly complex human political organisation. There are internal variations, such that one group might speak (unfortunately) of a ‘tribal’ phase, while another rejects that category.Footnote ¹³⁸ One might think that it could be helpful to have Anglo-Saxon archaeologists writing of chiefdoms in this context; but, in common with their peers in Scandinavia, they seem to have succumbed to a desire to find precocious ‘states’ at every turn, both an unhappy use of language and almost certainly an over-egging of the evolutionary pudding.Footnote ¹³⁹ And it seems that, in this context, kingship is being frozen out of anthropological discourse, a grave error.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Second, one may observe such desire for universals in a discourse of comparative history, particularly of European societies, which has increasingly come to be associated with the European project. The result is that the lesser grades of kingship are in such schemes rapidly assimilated to aristocratic status. This has led to a writing-out of the royal dimension of sub-national government, a dimension which has its own particular importance as a cultural, religious, social and political phenomenon.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Writing England: Bede, Alfred, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Peter

It has long been recognised that Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), published in 731, was written in national mode and had a profound impact in the development of an English Church, which, in turn, probably affected political development. It is not easy to produce a wholly satisfying answer to a question about what inspired Bede thus. It was probably study of the encyclopaedia of Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae seu origines (‘Origins’), which enabled Bede to find a consistent descriptive language to adapt to the politics and social organisation of Germanic Britain.Footnote ¹⁴² While an interest in Britannia as a politico-geographical concept manifested itself intermittently in Anglo-Saxon history, occasionally with greater force and point, a concept of the English and subsequently of England was what at length proved more continuously compelling.Footnote ¹⁴³

We do not know when the dynasty founded by Ecgberht, king of the West Saxons (802–39), began to think of the creation of a kingdom of England; but we seem to find its most audible representative, King Alfred (871–99), sponsoring an adaptation of Bede’s ‘History’ in Old English, and the king himself was content to write of England as a whole, using the phrase geond Angelcynn (‘throughout England’) quite naturally and of Englisc as his language.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ It has even been argued that he declared himself king of all the English, whether those not in subjection to Scandinavian conquerors or to all ethnic English regardless of their political situation.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ And it is to Alfred that we owe a political and/or ethnic formulation of the nature of his (over)kingdom from the mid-880s, when he began to style himself king of the Angolsaxones or Angulsaxones (we also find rex Anglorum et Saxonum and Anglorum Saxonum rex), presumably in general ‘king of the Angles and Saxons’, although finer shades of interpretation are possible.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The term ‘Anglo-Saxons’ is first found in Frankish Latin about a century earlier to distinguish the Saxons of England from those of Saxony, but that was hardly its purpose in Alfredian usage.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is in its earliest recoverable form a text written and published in the West Saxon over-kingdom in 892, therefore in Alfred’s reign.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ At various times it has been regarded as Alfred’s own work or sponsored as his political mouthpiece or as a product of his court; but another view, never successfully refuted, is that it was written elsewhere in his kingdom, albeit with knowledge of and from the royal court.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In the Chronicle of 892, neither Englaland nor Englisc /englisc is to be found (Engle are in annal 473), but Angelcynn and Angelcynneslond were both used to convey the sense of ‘England’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ However, overall it might be said that the Chronicle is focused most thoroughly on what has been called ‘Greater Wessex’ (the Saxon polity achieved in 825×828: southernmost England, including Essex) – not surprisingly, given the context of frequent and existential conflict with vikings in that region.

The national territory comes very sharply into focus almost on the day of the national kingdom’s creation. King Æthelstan, at Eamontbridge on the frontier between the Northumbrians and the British (but Scandinavian-dominated) kingdom of Strathclyde for a council of northern kings on 12 July, 927, had in his entourage (like his great-grandfather Æthelwulf) a Continental secretary, one Peter.Footnote ¹⁵¹ We have a short letter-poem written by him in Æthelstan’s name, directed to the Queen Mother and the prince (Latin cliton, representing Old English æðeling) at the royal court in the south. It is unambiguous in its announcement of Æthelstan’s creation of England, Saxonia, ‘now made whole’ (iam … perfecta), with himself as monarch.Footnote ¹⁵²

The Viking Age

Vikings’ activities in England, which might have seemed a mere irritant or an urgent God-sent warning in the 790s, finally blew away the early Anglo-Saxon polity, now a tetrarchy, in the years from 865 to 878.Footnote ¹⁵³ There was a brief period, in the first half of 878, when all England lay in Scandinavian hands, the royal family of Dublin being the most identifiable and perhaps most prominent of the conquerors.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In spite of the iconically English story of King Alfred and the cakes – set in a period when the defeated Alfred, his kingdom taken from him, planned and waged a guerrilla war from the marshes of Somerset to recover his inheritance and perhaps turn the tide – modern English historians have never acknowledged what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in its annal for that year says bluntly:Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Bishop Asser, translating the text soon after and adding to it (as long as we do not think of him as a forger of c. 1000),Footnote ¹⁵⁶ softened this very slightly but added to it some further elaboration of the reality of guerrilla warfare:Footnote ¹⁵⁷

The West Saxons had at last been conquered. Historians have excused Alfred’s earlier payment of tribute as buying time to build an effective defence. If there was such a policy, it failed. The brutal statement by the Chronicler has been refused acknowledgement by English historians who have preferred to accentuate the king’s guerrilla warfare as a token of continuity. But January 878 was indeed a moment of fracture. After 878, the West Saxon kingdom could never be the same again. Conquest and settlement by heathen vikings, and exile at their hands, had formerly been the fate meted out to the Northumbrians, East Angles and Mercians. The West Saxons were not to be exempt. This was part of a process of radical political and social change – including movement of population – which was occurring across Britain. Ireland had received viking settlement earlier than Britain, and its Scandinavian invaders – while not devoid of great ambition – could adapt easily from their own background to the local culture of petty kingdoms in the host country.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The one viking entity which would acquire greatest prominence in Insular politics, sinking its teeth deeply into Britain, was the kingdom of Dublin.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The coalitions of raiding armies which bit into Pictland, Strathclyde and England were, while potentially fissiparous, capable of great achievements. And the kings of Dublin maintained a contest for England into the era of Danish conquest under Swegen (Sveinn) and Cnut (Knútr) at the beginning of the eleventh century.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

There was, however, another side to the story: small-scale, local settlement, powerful enough to dominate an area but not having the strength in numbers and depth successfully to defy the approach of a determined leader of a substantial territorial kingdom. Whether in relation to the Hebrides or to eastern England, we can deduce the ninth-century establishment of small political units. Those in the Hebrides (and, later, Mann) – Suðreyjar, ‘The Southern Isles’, in Old Scandinavian – were knitted together into a fractious, unstable (over)kingdom called in Middle Gaelic Inse Gall, ‘The Islands of the Foreigners’. In the ‘Danelaw’ of eastern England, we find two substantial kingdoms (then still known to Anglo-Saxon observers as the East Angles and the Northumbrians), a possible league of small polities (‘The Five Boroughs’),Footnote ¹⁶¹ and a variety of minor polities (usually described as an army [here, folc]) focused on a fortified central place (burg /burh; the inhabitants were burgware). The process of settlement and land-taking can only occasionally be seen, however.

Much obloquy has attached to Lucien Musset’s bracketing together of the late Antique Migration Age (Völkerwanderungszeit) and the Viking Age.Footnote ¹⁶² An implication of the subtitle of his second volume, Le second assaut contre l’Europe chrétienne, was of a religiously inspired age of Germanic heathen warfare against Christendom, which is perhaps farfetched but deserves calm analysis. There is a serious point of a different order, however. The migration of Germanic speakers into sub-Roman Britain derived from what are now Denmark and southern Norway, as well as from areas farther south.Footnote ¹⁶³ In the Viking Age, just the same Scandinavian regions were the source of settlers in Britain. It is striking that Viking Age migration, unlike its late Antique counterpart, has not been denied, although there have been attempts to downplay its scale. What seems to have been delivered into England, after it had lost its complex native polity of layered kingships, was some Scandinavian petty kingdoms in Middle Anglian territory. Furthermore, if the received analysis of the social structure of the Scandinavian settlements is correct, the relationship of kings or earls and their farmer-soldiery was more akin to that of the English ceorl with his royal lord as we first meet him in the seventh century.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ On this basis, it is not difficult to see why the Scandinavians of Bedford, Hertford, Luton, Northampton, Leicester, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Stamford and Nottingham,Footnote ¹⁶⁵ though occasionally combining in pairs, lacked the ability effectively to resist the determined efforts of King Edward the Elder to reduce them to his authority. It had proved impossible in this context for the more powerful viking armies of the period 865–78 (or occasional major campaigns thereafter) to be re-created to help to defend the settlements and minor polities of the northern Home Counties and the East Midlands.

The Scandinavian kingdom of East Anglia and the minor polities of the rest of the southern ‘Danelaw’ were overthrown in campaigns lasting for nine consecutive years (912–20). Something of the same sort had to be done again, though in face of the Dubliners and Northumbrians, in the reign of King Edmund I, 939–46: in 942, all the historical territory of the Mercians was seized for the English crown, including ‘five boroughs’ (burga fife) – Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford and Derby, of which Lincoln and Derby had not been specifically mentioned in reporting the campaigns of the 910s.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Although the matter has proved controversial, the first major English responses to viking activity seem to have been initiated by Æthelwulf, king of the West Saxons (839–58). The religious response involved visits to Rome and royal decimation-offerings to God.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The political reply was to write a royal will which commanded a narrowing of eligibility to succeed to the kingship of the West Saxons, leaving Æthelwulf’s last-standing son to control transmission of the throne to the next generation.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ That son was Alfred, well groomed for the role by his parents but perhaps not expected to be the one who would be left standing. Unification of the English was an essential aspect of policy, leading to Alfred’s promotion of his ‘(over)kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’. Alfred’s military reforms created a network of fortresses, a standing field-army and a primitive navy. A series of other governmental reforms was designed to create a much enhanced kingship and royal administration. Finally, the crucial response, in the reign of Edward the Elder (899–924), was to secure the future by invasion and conquest of Scandinavian England.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Three dimensions of the historiography of the First Viking Age in particular deserve exploration.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ There has been some reluctance in principle among historians to accept the case for a long-term developing strategy on the part of the West Saxon royal dynasty from the mid-ninth century.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The focus on Alfred has been inevitable and entirely justified, even where it seems overly pious. But his father, in particular, is not to be overlooked.

The other two historiographical responses fall into the familiar categories of error. The invasion and conquest of the ‘Danelaw’, led by Edward the Elder, was for a long time described as ‘the reconquest of Scandinavian England’.Footnote ¹⁷² A mild observation of the absurdity of this formulation, made a generation ago,Footnote ¹⁷³ quickly and quietly led to its abandonment by most historians. The underlying thinking had been hopelessly anachronistic, based on the modern nation, supposing that the West Saxons could present themselves as if they were the natural heirs to the previous rulers of the conquered territories. In fact, West Saxon armies now embarked on the conquest, de nouo, of formerly Mercian regions, drawing them into ‘the (over)kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’ which Alfred had created thirty years earlier.

In an identically nationalist vein has been the treatment of the incoming Scandinavians. There has been a century-long obsession with divining whether particular viking groups were Danish or Norwegian (the Swedes never being allowed a significant role). It has been known since the seventeenth century that Latin Dani and Nordmanni were interchangeable in ninth- and tenth-century discourse. Likewise, the Old-Scandinavian words Danr and dönsk, applied whether to persons or to language, meant ‘Scandinavian’ rather than ‘Dane’/‘Danish’.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ This was also reflected in Classical Latin usage. However, the pressure for nationalistic interpretation has produced a skewed treatment of a potentially important question by requiring a reductionist approach. We can see that outlook developing particularly as Norwegian nationality became an issue in the run-up to independence in 1905.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

927: The Kingdom of the English and the Struggle to Hold It

The kingdom of the English was created by King Æthelstan in the summer of 927 through direct military action against the one remaining Scandinavian polity in England, the kingdom of the Northumbrians. It is part of the unsatisfactory oddity of the apparently original record in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for Æthelstan’s reign that it has no primary account of that year’s events. It is only in two much later texts, Versions D and E, each with a Northern dimension, that such appears, but in two apparently contradictory narratives. King Sihtric, Æthelstan’s brother-in-law since January 926, died, to be succeeded by King Guthfrith (Guðrøðr) II, who was then expelled by King Æthelstan. Version D is interesting in implying that Æthelstan’s control of the Northumbrian kingdom was endorsed by a treaty with Northern kings, among whom is numbered Aldred Eadwulfing of Bamburgh, the ruler of English ‘Bernicia’, whose line now probably had to renounce its royal status.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

We can see a conscious foreign policy developing in Æthelstan’s reign: the cultivation of relationships with Continental royal courts by successive marriages of his sisters; implacable opposition to the claims of kings of (Scandinavian) Dublin to rule at York, and military intervention in Scotland and France, thereby establishing – within a decade of the making of England – a practice which would last for 800 and 1,000 years respectively.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

The interested parties, against whom the new kingdom had to be held, were the Dubliners and the Northern powers: the kingdom of Strathclyde had since 871 been a satellite of the viking kingdom of Dublin; the kingdom of Alba (formerly of the Southern Picts) had a history of bitter hostility to the vikings of Dublin but was now in the hands of a ruler, Cosstantín/Constantine, who had become unfriendly to the approaching kingdom of the English and entered an alliance with the Dubliners;Footnote ¹⁷⁸ and the more remote polities (as seen from England) of the Hebrides and Mann (known in Middle Gaelic as Insi Gall, ‘The Islands of the Foreigners’), Muréb (Moray), formerly of the Northern Picts, and the Scandinavian earldom of Orkney and Shetland (including, on the mainland, Caithness and part of Sutherland). Mutual invasion, punctuated by treaty arrangements, seems to have become the norm of international relationships in northern Britain.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

Dublin remained a significant factor in this relationship until at least about 980. There were reverses when England was invaded by a coalition led from Dublin at the end of 939, immediately after the death of Æthelstan: ‘Northumbria’ and the Mercian/Midland ‘Danelaw’ were lost to the Dubliners for two to three years, in circumstances of which the campaigns of 1745/6 seem eerily reminiscent, and the Northumbrian kingdom proved difficult to hold for the next fifteen years.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

The historiography of that struggle to keep England intact by holding ‘Northumbria’ has produced some interesting twists and turns of interpretation. The role of Dublin has declined from a high point and then risen in importance again.Footnote ¹⁸¹ There have been some (but only some) significant developments in understanding the history of the kingdom of Strathclyde,Footnote ¹⁸² which had – invisibly in surviving written record – pushed southwards to the middle of what is now Cumbria between 871 and 927. The relations of Alba and Strathclyde (and England) were and are difficult to follow, and remain so until the last recorded appearance of a king of Strathclyde, at the battle of Carham-on-Tweed in ?1014.Footnote ¹⁸³

The English foreign policy was on the whole successful, but a militarily more sensible definition of ‘Northumbria’ in early Anglo-Norman England led to the first establishment of something like the present Anglo-Scottish border in the 1090s, with northward advance in the west and a willingness to hold an eastern border on the River Tweed.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ The struggle over the body of the much larger pre-Viking-Age territory of the kingdom of the Northumbrians and the difficulties which King William I faced in Yorkshire have encouraged observers of a ‘north-south divide’ in England to argue that the West Saxon and then Danish/Anglo-Danish kings who held the kingdom of the English from 927 to 1042 never succeeded in depriving the English north of its separate identity and incorporating it fully into their England.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

This arguable proposition can usefully be yoked to another. Some English historians have, over the past three-quarters of a century, found reason to downplay the success of the ‘English project’ of the dynasty of Ecgberht of Wessex. One very remarkable and high-profile manifestation of this was in F. M. Stenton’s treatment of the later tenth century in his classic Anglo-Saxon England, first published in 1943. He announced Edgar’s reign (959–75), seen by contemporaries and by twelfth-century historians as a high point of English governance and military power, as the beginning of a period of decline.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ More generally, one is bound to wonder whether modern historians most committed to the existence and promotion of an idea of an English nation from at least the time of Bede and those who had come to regard King Alfred as its father found the role of Æthelstan and his successors a tiresome distraction from and complication of a subject held to be already closed by 900. Indeed, even relatively moderate opinion has been doubtful about admitting the kingdom’s existence until it was uncontested.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ This rather bizarre approach must mean that the kingdom did not exist until William I secured it – but that was certainly not King William’s opinion!

Uí Ímair (‘The Descendants of Ívarr’), the rulers of Dublin, were formidable and tenacious opponents of the first seven kings of England. But what struck most foreign observers of the kingdom of the English before 1066 was its power and wealth.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Historians may debate whether or not pre-Conquest England was a state (archaeologists, on a quite different trajectory, seem to be thinking of the state as a useful description of eighth-century English over-kingdoms) or a pre-state society. It had a governmental apparatus which functioned predictably; but royal government had noticeable limitations in the face of entrenched local power, whether in Kent or in Durham. Nevertheless, its kings had the military might (and the supporting wealth) to deliver a substantial military punch when and where they wished to land it. It is hard to imagine that in those circumstances the Dubliners – however seriously they might be taken in England (whether by tenth-century kings claiming the right to rule Dublin or indeed Ireland or by an eleventh-century queen who was fluent in Irish)Footnote ¹⁸⁹ – could so disrupt the English polity (as they had in the later ninth century) as to call its new kingdom into question.

The origins of the kingdom of the English were of course various and reflected the travails of a long-developing body politic. Founded by settler-colonists on the wreckage of Roman Britain, Germanic Britain had at least 150 years’ development before it began to leave records which speak to us with relative clarity. I see nothing in the history of early Anglo-Saxon England which implies a nation in active search of a national kingdom or indicates an inevitable progression towards such an outcome. It was the long experience of a kingdom of the English, indeed of England, that in early modern times allowed the growth of such teleological thought. Perversely, perhaps, the effective creation of a British kingdom as the Tudors’ contribution to the island’s history convinced English historians of their nation’s God-given inheritance. In a climate of increasing nationalism, modern historians saw no reason to rethink this fundamental proposition. Only now, perhaps, in the aftermath of Empire (and indeed of ‘the European Project’), can the lengthy processes of the creation of both the kingdom of the English and the land of the English, England, be subjected to thorough analysis.Footnote ¹⁹⁰

Summation

I close by offering seven summary propositions.

1. 1. England began in the fifth century amid the wreckage of what had been Roman Britain; control of increasing amounts of territory was wrested from the British indigenes in a process which (in the language of the ‘Convention on Genocide’ of the United Nations Organisation) may be called ‘cultural genocide’.

2. 2. The ethnic and linguistic variety of Britain in the earlier Middle Ages was great (and included racial hatred between English and Britons) but was as nothing in comparison with the political complexity: Britain (a lively concept associated with imperial pretension) was a theatre of inter-kingdom as well as international politics.

3. 3. Early English kingship needs to be wholly problematised: at base, it was an intensely local institution (probably with hundreds of petty kings across England), but with rising layers of sub-regional, regional and quasi-national over-kingship; such a polity probably provided considerable local stability while allowing a significant dynamic at higher levels.

4. 4. The central but unacknowledged problem of interpretation has been that the received narrative of Anglo-Saxon political development has depended on a teleology, that the creation of an English monarchy (after however many centuries of polyarchy) was both desirable and inevitable, given the existence of the gens /natio Anglorum already recognised and defined by Bede in 731.

5. 5. Where between 802 and 927 the West-Saxon royal dynasty began to think of its members as potential kings of all the English we do not yet know. But we do have a letter-poem of 12 July, 927 (built on one from Charlemagne’s reign), formally and royally proclaiming the creation of the kingdom of the English.

6. 6. The years 865–78 marked a major turning point in the history of the English polity: Scandinavian conquest of all England (as of North Britain too) was in 878 briefly a reality, and the new Scandinavian-dominated polity incorporated some very old elements of socio-political organisation – notably the petty kingdom. It was the West Saxons’ recovery from conquest which eventually allowed their own conquest of England.

7. 7. When King Æthelstan created the kingdom of the English, this constituted a challenge to the kingdom of Dublin, whose power and influence in northern Britain were at once called fundamentally into question; the resulting contest was pursued vigorously through the tenth century but never succeeded in creating an existential crisis for the kingdom of the English, which proved resilient. The limits of England were defined by the relative strength and resolve not only of its own ruling elite but also by those of its neighbours, particularly in ‘the kingdom of Alba [Britain]’ (founded at much the same time as Alfred’s ‘kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’) on which Scotland was built.