London - Edward Rutherfurd [54]
It was soon after 400 AD that the hard-pressed Roman emperor withdrew the garrison from Britain, sending the island provincials only the bleak message: “Defend yourselves.”
At first, the islanders coped. True, there were raids from Germanic pirates, but the island’s ports and towns had defences. After a few decades, they started employing German mercenaries to protect them. Gradually, however, with the old trade from the Continent disrupted, things began to slide. Regional leaders sprang up. The mercenaries settled and sent messages to their kinsmen overseas that the island province was weak and fragmented.
They were north Germans – tribes from the coastal regions of today’s Germany and Denmark – Angles, Saxons and others, including, probably, a related tribe known as the Jutes. Most of these people were fair-haired and blue-eyed.
They came in a steady stream, extending their hold on England from east to west. Sometimes they were successfully resisted. Around the year 500, a Romano-British leader held the West Country against them, and his name, discovered by chroniclers long after, gave rise to the legend of King Arthur.
But despite these valiant attempts to preserve the old Romano-British world, within a century and a half of their first coming, the immigrants were masters of the English land. Wales in the far west and Scotland in the north they failed to colonize. Elsewhere, except in some place names and river names – Thames from Tamesis, for instance – even the old Celtic and Latin languages largely died out. The settlement evolved into several famous kingdoms: the Angles set up Northumbria and midland Mercia; in the south lay the Saxon kingdoms of Wessex in the west, Sussex in the centre, and Kent in the old peninsula of the Cantii. The huge, low-lying eastern tract of land across the estuary from Kent was divided in two: in the northern half were the Angles of East Anglia; in the south, the East Saxon King of Essex.
It was from East Anglia that Elfgiva was returning to her husband.
It was her childhood home. Every year she went there to visit her father’s grave. This time, in particular, she had hoped the visit would give her strength, and in a way it had. How happily she had wandered along the open coast where the broad flats and beaches were broken only by the long, low lines of sand dunes before they merged with the shallow waves. How she had enjoyed the salt breeze that came in, harsh and bracing, off the sea. They said the East Anglians lived longer than others because of it.
A little way inland lay the burial ground, a series of mounds, a few feet high, by a clump of furze and small trees whose tops had long since been brushed to flatness by the winds. She had spent several hours there during her visit. The largest of the mounds was her father’s grave.
How she had loved and admired him. He had travelled all over the northern seas and taken a Swedish bride. Such a bold seafarer had he been that when he died they had buried him in his boat in full regalia. She could hear his deep voice still. As he lay there now, with his long beard spread, was he dreaming of the heaving seas? Perhaps. And did the gods of the north watch over him? She had no doubt of it. Were they not in his very blood? Had not their people given their names to the days of the week? Tiw, the war god, had Tuesday, in place of Mars in the Roman calendar; Woden, or Wotan as the Germans called him, greatest of all gods, had the middle day, Wednesday; Thunor the Thunderer, Thursday; Frigg, goddess of love, Friday, in place of the Roman Venus.
“My great-grandfather was the youngest brother of a royal line,” he would remind her, “so we are descended from Woden himself.” Nearly