At Home - Bill Bryson [24]
The Jutes are completely mysterious. They are usually presumed to have come from Denmark because of the presence there of the province called Jutland. But a problem pointed out by the historian F. M. Stenton is that Jutland got its name long after any Jutes had departed, and naming a territory after people who are no longer there would be an act unusual to the point of uniqueness. In any case, Jótar, the Scandinavian word from which Jutland is derived, doesn’t necessarily, or even plausibly, have anything to do with any group or race. Bede’s reference is in fact the only mention of Jutes anywhere, and he never cites them again. Some scholars think that the reference is an interlineation added by a later hand anyway and has nothing to do with Bede at all.
The Angles are only a little less obscure. They do get mentioned from time to time in European texts, so at least we can be confident that they really existed, but nothing about them suggests any importance. If they were feared or admired, it was within very small circles. So it is more than slightly ironic that it was their name that came, more or less accidentally, to be attached to a country that they may only lightly have helped form.
That leaves only the Saxons, who were unquestionably a presence on the continent—the existence in modern Germany of various Saxonys, Saxe-Coburgs, and the like attests to that—though not a particularly mighty one either, it seems. The best Stenton can say for them is that they were “the least obscure” of the three. Compared with the Goths sacking Rome or the Vandals sweeping over Spain, these were pretty marginal people. Britain, it seems, was conquered by farmers, not warriors.
The invaders brought almost nothing that was new—just a language and their own DNA. No aspect of their technology or mode of living offered even a moderate improvement over what existed already. They can’t have been well liked. They don’t seem to have been very impressive. Yet somehow they made such a profound impact that their culture remains with us, more than a millennium and a half later, in the most extraordinary and fundamental ways. We may know nothing of their beliefs, but we still pay homage to three of their gods—Tiw, Woden, and Thor—in the names of our three middle weekdays, and eternally commemorate Woden’s wife, Frig, every Friday. That’s quite a line of attachment.
They simply obliterated the existing culture. The Romans had been in Britain for 367 years and the Celts for at least a thousand, yet now it was as if they had never been. Nothing like this happened elsewhere. When the Romans left Gaul and Spain, life went on much as before. The inhabitants continued to speak their own versions of Latin, which were already evolving into modern French and Spanish. Government continued. Business thrived. Coins circulated. Society’s structures were maintained. In Britain, however, the Romans left barely five words and the Celts no more than twenty, mostly geographical terms to describe features specific to the British landscape. Crag, for instance, is a Celtic word, and so is torr, meaning a rocky outcrop.
After the Romans withdrew, some Celts fled to France and founded Brittany. Some no doubt fought and were slain or enslaved. But the greater number seem simply to have accepted the invasion as an unhappy fact and adjusted their lives accordingly. “It didn’t have to involve a lot of slaughter or bloodshed,” my friend Brian Ayers, the former county archaeologist for Norfolk, told me one time as we stood looking at the field beyond my house. “Probably one day you would just look out in your field and see there were twenty people camped there, and gradually it would dawn on you that they weren’t about to go away, that they were taking your land from you. There were no doubt some bloody clashes here and there, but on the whole I think it was just a matter of the existing people learning to adjust to dramatically changed circumstances.”
There are various accounts of battles—one at Crecgan Ford (a place of uncertain locale) was said