Offa and the Mercian Wars by Chris Peers Read Free Book Online

correspondingly lower rates elsewhere (Oppenheimer). These figures represent an upper limit, as they may include many migrants from later centuries and make no allowance for greater population growth among the new arrivals once they settled in England, which might be expected if they represented a social elite. Using an estimate of one million for the total population, half of whom were males, this might represent a migration by up to 25,000 men altogether, of whom a large proportion would have travelled no further west than Norfolk or Lincolnshire. This would have been a very large army by early medieval standards, but even supposing that it is all accounted for by fifth- and sixth-century Angles, they could have arrived over several generations.
    Hines (in Hawkes), arguing from the evidence of Continental warrior burials, states that Germanic armies of the time are unlikely to have consisted of more than a few hundred men. Most of the later arrivals may of course have been farmers rather than warriors, and have settled peacefully on land acquired by their friends or relatives. Living alongside them, on terms of wary coexistence if not actual friendship, would have been the original British population, not as Bede’s wretched survivors, but constituting a large majority. A good analogy might be with the ninth- and tenth-century Danish settlement of the same areas, which replaced some of the local rulers and introduced new names for some of the villages, but left the existing inhabitants largely intact. In that case we should see the Mercians not as invaders, but as descendants of the Coritani, Cornovii, Dobunni and other tribes of Roman Britain, ruled by a foreign dynasty perhaps, and having adopted much of the foreigners’ culture, but still essentially British.
    This does not mean that there were no Germanic invaders at all, and Bede could hardly have expected to be taken seriously if he had invented the migration theory from scratch. It was, after all, supposed to have happened at a time which would have been within the limits of oral tradition when he was writing. However, modern genealogical experience has shown that families tend to remember ancestors who are unusual in some way, and by the eighth century a majority of the inhabitants of Mercia may well have believed, rightly, that they were descended from invaders from across the sea, even though in most cases they would be recalling one distant ancestor among many others who were locally born.
    This relatively peaceful view of the Anglo-Saxon ‘conquest’ is still controversial, however, and several arguments can be mustered against it. We may legitimately wonder why the urban civilisation introduced by the Romans disappeared so completely – far more completely than it did across the Channel in France – if there had not been a mass influx of ‘barbarians’ into Britain. The answer seems to be that, as modern research is making increasingly apparent, Britain had never been very thoroughly Romanised in the first place. It was always a rather remote frontier province of the Empire, only superficially urbanised and with an economy that was heavily reliant on the presence of the army. When the legions left at the beginning of the fifth century, the stimulus which government spending had provided to trade and industry disappeared. At the same time the disturbances on the Continent interrupted communications with the Mediterranean, Roman coins ceased to circulate and the people abandoned the towns and rich villas which had now lost their reason for existence and were too expensive to maintain. Classic Roman civilisation was already losing ground in the fourth century, long before the supposed Germanic invasions, and it is unlikely that many people, apart from a very small Romanised elite, were sorry to see it go.
    To later Christian writers the Roman Empire had become synonymous with the Catholic Church, and it was axiomatic that it must