two handbooks. They listed world events from ancient times to his own day and – in place of the chaos of different eras used then and for long after – they popularized what has become our standard means of dating by the year bc or ad. He was also, since he was unusually scrupulous both about naming his sources and quoting from them accurately, one of the pioneers of the footnote and the bibliography. He had a clear understanding of causation, and wrote in a plain style which was refreshingly different from – say – Gildas’s excitable rhetoric. Finally, Bede invented the idea of England, or at least the idea of the English as a single people. And he applied all of this to his late masterpiece, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which he finished only four years before his death. If the writing of history is one of the glories of England as a country and of English as a language (as I think it to be) then Bede, though he wrote in Latin, deserves an honoured place as the founder of a national tradition.
The British Gildas, like the Anglo-Saxon Bede, was a monk and he too wrote in Latin. But that is all the two men have in common. Otherwise, they and their works were as different as chalk and cheese. Gildas’s is a diatribe; Bede’s a sober history. The former is written in the heat and terror of events; the latter retrospectively, when the dust had begun to settle a little. But it is no emotion recollected in tranquillity; instead, Bede’s contempt for the vanquished British is as fresh as when the two peoples first met and took an instant and lasting dislike to each other.
And the British were by no means the only ones to detest the Saxons. The Saxons were part of the great diaspora of Germanic peoples, who first threatened the Roman Empire and then, in the fifth century, overran it. Their homeland lay in the north German plains between the River Elbe to the east and the River Ems to the west in a region still known today as Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony). Here, the North Sea coast is flat and low-lying and even the hinterland rises only to a hundred-odd feet above sea-level. The result is that the frontier between land and water is uncertain: there are marshlands and fenlands; great rivers which are tidal for scores of miles and huge storms which sweep in across the coastal flats. And, above all, there is the sea.
Even now, the sea is dominant. Then, it was omnipresent, both as a threat and an opportunity: it forcibly inducted the Saxons into the arts of seamanship; it also drove them out, to search for plunder and for territories in softer lands to the west and south. Here they struck terror, along the coasts of Britain and Gaul, from the Wash to the Bay of Biscay. ‘The Saxon’, wrote the Gallo-Roman nobleman Sidonius Apollinaris, ‘is the most ferocious of all foes.’ Their ships were long, clinker-built and with high, curving prows, each carved with the image of a sea-serpent. The men on board were strange in appearance too to those accustomed to Mediterranean build and coloration. They were tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed and with their blond hair shaved at the front, ‘till the head looks smaller and the visage longer’. Neither the sea nor shipwreck, Sidonius continued, held any terrors for them; nor did the common rules of humanity. Instead, at the end of each summer’s raiding party, they would drown one in ten of their captives as a sacrifice to their savage gods.
The Saxons first appeared in British waters in about ad 285, when the admiral sent against them, Carausius, rebelled against Rome and set up the first seaborne British Empire. His regime issued a remarkable series of propagandistic coins, and it was probably he who had the strategic imagination to conceive of the defensive scheme of the Saxon Shore forts. Subsequently, after Constantius Chlorus had re-established Roman power in Britain, the forts became one of the great frontier commands of the Empire, under a high military official known as the Count of the Saxon Shore. The Saxons, and their fellow Germanic tribesmen to the west, the Franks, also played a part in the penultimate act of Roman Britain, the barbarica conspiratio of AD 367.
There was another reason for the almost superstitious dread which the Saxons aroused: their unrepentant, aggressive and, it would appear, bloodthirsty paganism. For Rome and Empire had become Christian. This story too began in Britain, when on 25 June 306, in the great legion-ary fortress of Eboracum (York), the troops of Constantius Chlorus, who had just died, acclaimed his son Constantine as emperor. Constantine, known to history as The Great, completed the evolution of the Empire into an oriental despotism; his ‘conversion’ in 312 also began the transformation of Christianity from a savagely persecuted sect into the official religion of the Empire – including the province of Britannia. Basilica-like churches were built in the major British cities and British bishops took part in the Councils of the Church.
But, despite the Saxons’ ferocious credentials as heathens as well as barbarians, in the early fifth century it was the Picts and Scots who seemed the greater threat to post-Roman Britain. The result was one of the great miscalculations of history. Under the pressure of constant warfare against the Celtic invaders, the representative regime of the British cities had been quickly supplemented by the rule of military strongmen, who dignified themselves with the revived name of rex or king. And, in the middle years of the century, a certain Vortigern, whose name means ‘Mighty King’, may have established an overlordship over all Britannia.
Quite how the two forms of government, the royal and the representative, related to each other is uncertain. But, faced with renewed incursions from the Picts and Scots, both groups, according to Gildas, came together in the fateful decision. ‘Then all the councillors, together with that proud tyrant, … the British King, were so blinded’, Gildas reports, ‘that, as a protection to their country, they sealed its doom by inviting among them (like wolves into the sheep fold) the fierce and impious Saxons, a race hateful both to God and men, to repel the invasions of the northern nations.’ The Saxons, Gildas continues, who arrived in ‘three ships of war’, ‘landed on the eastern side of the islands, by the invitation of the unlucky King’ and there made their first settlement. The terms of Vortigern’s invitation gave the Saxons ‘an allowance of provisions’, handed over each month, in return for their military support.
This sounds like the kind of arrangement which the Romans themselves had frequently made with their barbarian neighbours. For relations between Rome and the barbarians were not simply of hostility. They were more complex – and ambiguous – than that. Indeed, they bear a striking resemblance to our own, equally ambiguous, attitudes to immigrants and asylum seekers. On the one hand, we fear them and the threat they pose to our way of life and security; on the other, we recognize the vital contribution they make to our economies by doing the jobs our own people won’t. The barbarians came to play a comparable role for Rome. For the people of the Empire soon began to disdain the hardships of the soldier’s life. Instead, the best soldiers were drawn first from the hardy mountain tribesmen of the Balkans and later from Germany itself. Whole tribes were settled on the border territories of the Empire in return for military service. And individual Germans rose far and fast in the imperial armies until they started to dominate the senior ranks.
And it was in some such role as hired mercenaries that the Saxons first settled in post-Roman Britain. The arrangement was always risky. But in Britain it encountered the additional difficulty that the Roman structures of administration and taxation, which alone could guarantee a regular handover of supplies, had been dismantled – either deliberately by the Romano-Britons themselves, or consequentially following the drying-up of coin supplies from the Empire. The results were predictably disastrous as quarrels broke out over the sufficiency and regularity of the supplies. Gildas claims that the Saxons deliberately played up the quarrels. But they could equally have interpreted the irregularities as a sign of bad faith on the part of their hosts. At any event, the Saxons first threatened and then carried out reprisal raids. Soon, these escalated into an all-out war of conquest.
In the war, the initial Saxon settlement, as Gildas saw with the blinding clarity of hindsight, had handed all the advantage to the invaders. It acted as a Trojan Horse, getting the Saxons past the coastal fortifications which served as the first and chief British line of defence. It was also a beachhead, enabling the Saxons to bring over reinforcements as and when they pleased from their homeland. The Britons could not fight against these odds and their towns were sacked and their populations massacred from east to west of the island.
Gildas may have witnessed a late example of such a sack:
All the columns [he writes] were levelled with the ground by the frequent strokes of the battering-ram, all the husbandmen