Texts in Context:
The Seven Crowns
of Engla-lond
By Gabriel Blanchard
If there is one thing we know about England during the age of the Heptarchy, it's that it isn't that, it's something else.
The Cassiterides
Last week, we saw the beginning of the Viking era in the sack of Lindisfarne that took place in 793. Lindisfarne was, of course, a little outside the Carolingian orbit (though we may expect the news affected Alcuin of York more than most of the Frankish court). As a sub-period of the Early Middle Ages, the Viking era lasted roughly two and a half centuries, if we consider the far-flung though short-lived North Sea Empire of Cnut the Great its limit.1 Of course, not everybody was restricting their calendars to “getting raided by Danes and/or Swedes (check local availability).” This was also a period of great importance to the perennial study of why Worcestershire2 is spelled like that: in other words, the English language. We may therefore take a geographically disproportionate interest in the British Isles.
The last few dozen centuries have proven a tad harsh on these islands. They lay under vast glaciers until the beginning of the Holocene (c. 9700 BC). In the Bronze Age, the British Isles received their first recorded bullying nickname: the Κασσιτερίδες [Kassiterides], “the Tin Islands” (tin is one of the two key components of bronze). By the late first millennium BC, Celts of the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures had migrated there. A few hundred years later, the Romans invaded—first under the brilliant albeit Julius Cæsar; about a century later, his great-grandson3 Claudius succeeded in setting up a full-fledged Roman province of Britannia. Out of this province came a Romano-Briton named Constantine, and thereby hangs a tale, though one we’ll skip for time. Two months ago, we touched on the departure of the Romans from Britannia.
Post-Roman Britain
By some lights, this is the point at which we should have begun to hint at the name of Arthur. Whatever his historicity, the context in which he is supposed to have been born and reigned was real enough: the fifth century saw the beginning of at least one wave of Germanic migrants from the mainland, principally Saxony, though some hailed from Jutland or Angeln.4
They brought their language, with them, as one does. By about the seventh century, this is referred to as Anglo-Saxon or Old English. They brought a script to write it in, too: a system of runes known as the futhorc. These runes dropped out of use after a couple of centuries, replaced by Roman script. However, futhorc both influenced how the Roman alphabet would be used among Anglo-Saxons, and even lent it letters for sounds not present in Latin and most of its descendants, like 3 (yogh) and þ (thorn). The Anglo-Saxon tongue was, in other respects, often surprisingly like Latin: inflected (according to an extensive system of conjugations and declensions), a freer word order, grammatical gender, you name it.
From around the end of the sixth century until close to the middle of the ninth, Britain was divided into a quilt of petty kingdoms5 known collectively as the Heptarchy. This name should not be taken too literally: there were many more than seven total realms at the time, always coalescing and quarreling—Deira, East Anglia, Essex, Hwicce, Lindsey, Magonsæte, Pecsæte, Surrey, Wihtwara, and Wreocensæte6 still make an incomplete list. Then again, only about three of these kingdoms had real, permanent importance: Mercia in the center, Northumbria in the northeast, and Wessex in the south. (To the west and northwest respectively lay the Brittonic realms of Wales, Cornwall, and Strathclyde, the latter a predecessor of the Kingdom of Scotland.) And over all of these principalities, not perhaps in lawful power but in prestige, was the Bretwalda, the high king of the Britons. When there was a Bretwalda. And if that really is what the term meant.
ᛁᚾ·ᚳᚪᛁᚾᛖᛋ·ᚳᚣᚾᚾᛖ·ᚦᚩᚾᛖ·ᚳᚹᛠᛚᛗ·ᚷᛖᚹᚱᚫᚳ···
ᚦᚪᚾᚩᚾ·ᚢᚾᛏᚣᛞᚱᚪᛋ·ᛠᛚᛚᛖ·ᚩᚾᚹᚩᚳᚩᚾ
ᛇᛏᛖᚾᚪᛋ·ᚪᚾᛞ·ᚣᛚᚠᛖ·ᚪᚾᛞ·ᚩᚱᚳᚾᛠᛋ
ᛋᚹᚣᛚᚳᛖ·ᚷᛁᚷᚪᚾᛏᚪᛋ·ᚦᚪ·ᚹᛁᚦ·ᚷᚩᛞᛖ·ᚹᚢᚾᚾᚩᚾ
ᛚᚪᛝᛖ·ᚦᚱᚪᚷᛖ···
[In Caines cynne thone cwealm gewraec ...
Thanon untydras ealle onwocon
eotenas and ylfe and orcneas
swylce gigantas tha with Gode wunnon
lange thrage ...]
On the kin of Cain, killings he wrought ...
Thence awoke all untimely births,
ettins7 and elves, and ogres also,
so too giants, such as strove with God
for a long season ...
The Big Three: Mercia, Northumbria, Wessex, and …
Mercia was the largest and generally the most powerful of the Big Three; it was slower to become Christianized than the others. The rulers of Mercia were the only ones on the island who had already been a dynasty on the Continent. They spoke an Anglian dialect; the Gawain poet, who wrote in an archaic type of alliterative verse and came from the Midlands, may have been descended from Mercians and/or speakers of Mercian Old English, and J. R. R. Tolkien used their dialect to represent Rohirric in The Lord of the Rings.
Northumbria appears to have had something of a “melting pot” character. Its Christian practice reflected influences both from the Continent and from the Irish Church—small wonder, since this was the kingdom in which the Synod of Whitby was held, which formally regularized the relationship between the Celtic Church and the Roman. The arts of poetry and manuscript illumination both throve in Northumbria, and, besides Alcuin, it also nurtured the soul and mind of St. Bede the Venerable. The realm was more impacted by the Danelaw than the other two (more on that shortly), and its language, while basically Anglian like that of Mercia, was more Norse-influenced.
Finally, there is everyone’s favorite, the Kingdom of Wessex, or the West Saxons, which was of course in the south of England. It was a comparatively small, poorly-documented realm in the seventh century, but showed a definite tendency to stay resilient against Mercian attempts to achieve top-dog status throughout the eighth. Its native dialect, called West Saxon, is fairly well-preserved, largely thanks to efforts of the late ninth-century King of Wessex, Alfred the Great. He relentlessly promoted improvements in education throughout his reign, and even translated some important works himself, such as Boethius‘ Consolation and St. Gregory‘s Pastoral Care. But one can hardly bring up Alfred the Great without mentioning …
The Bonus Fourth Realm
Even finally-er, we have the Danelaw. This was not mentioned among the Anglo-Saxon realms, because its people were not Anglo-Saxons: they were Danes (though the term “Norsemen” might be more apt here). The wave of Germanic people who wanted to settle in Britain was mentioned as a first wave; there were more; not all of the high prows sailing westward in that time were looking to pillage stuff and go back home. (Indeed, there may very well have been those who were looking to move because they were sick of living as neighbors among the sort of people who pillage and then go back home.) And—naturally enough—the Danes did not speak Old English; they spoke Norse, a language far more closely related to Old English than either was to Latin or Brittonic, but still foreign to Anglo-Saxon ears.
In the year 865, the Mycel Hæþen8 or “Great Heathen Army” landed on Britain’s eastern shore. The details of the ensuing war need not detain us right now—though it may be said that in this war, King Alfred earned, even if he never received, the name of being the first King of All England). In any case, and while the peace agreement did take the Hæþen out of the heathens (i.e., the Danes there agreed to become Christians), it also kept the ex-heathens in England; it would have been fruitless to try to drive them out. About the whole eastern side of England was part of the Danelaw, cutting the once-hegemonic Mercia in half.
The Bittersweet
Which brings us to our last book for this post. It is not known when Beowulf was written, or where, or by whom. It is set primarily in the environs of Sweden, which could point to a poet who lived in the Danelaw—but then, Angeln and Jutland are right next to Sweden too. Scholars date it by internal evidence to be a product of the eighth, ninth, or tenth century; helpful. Beowulf‘s material rather comfortably blends Christian and heathen ideas and images, which matches the seeming cosmopolitan aura of Northumbria, but it is composed principally in West Saxon, the least-Scandinavian-ized of the dialects in question.
Its final ending (not the slaying of Grendel—we’re talking about second final ending) has a “mixed melancholy” that seems characteristically English. For that matter, much the same could be said about the North Sea Empire briefly ruled by one who was, after all, a king of England first. A deed is achieved, but at a high price; neither element in the bittersweet wholly takes the other away.
1Cnut, or Canute, the Great (c. 990-1035) ultimately became King of Denmark, England, and Norway. He acceded to these realms at different times—in 1018, 1016, and 1028, respectively—and held in personal union, not as a single polity. This was not called the North Sea Empire at the time, and only existed for about seven years, until Cnut’s death in 1035.
2For any who are unfamiliar, the English ceremonial country name “Worcestershire” is conventionally pronounced wüs-tŕ-shŕ; the person or persons responsible for this have never been caught.
3That is, Claudius was Julius Cæsar’s great-grandson legally, thanks to the adoption of Octavian (i.e. Augustus) and Octavian’s marriage to Livia (Claudius’ biological grandmother).
4Saxony at the time referred to much if not all of the northwest of modern Germany. Jutland is the name of the Jutish Peninsula, i.e. the one Denmark’s on. Angeln, which probably gave its name to the Angles and thus to England, is a smaller peninsula closely adjacent to Jutland, on the eastern side of it.
5“Petty kingdom” is one of several set phrases (other examples include “petty officer” and “petty cash”) that use petty in an archaic sense, to mean “minor” or “small”; there is no particular reason to think the peoples of Britain during the Heptarchy were, in the modern sense, any pettier than most people.
6The name of Wreocensæte lives on to this day, in the city of Wroxeter.
7Ettin is a Middle English word meaning “giant,” or possibly a more general “monster”; it seems to be distantly related to the word eat (and cognate to the Norse jötunn), and originally to have meant something like “glutton; devourer.” The term appears in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in a catalogue of servants of the White Witch, and has since been resurrected in modern role-playing games as a name for a species of giant with two heads.
8This is pronounced a very little bit like “mew kill ha then.” The actual sounds of the y and the æ are those of the German ü and of the a in “cat.”
Gabriel Blanchard (who makes it a personal policy not to approach ettins, elves, or ogres, whether outside of or within the confines of ancient Wreocensæte. He works as CLT’s editor at large, and lives in Baltimore, MD.
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Published on 13th January, 2025. Page image of a map of the “Heptarchy” around the first half of the ninth century; this map was originally created for J. G. Bartholomew’s A Literary and Historical Atlas of Europe, published in 1914.
The quotation from Beowulf is in futhorc, or Anglo-Saxon runes. Other runic scripts were used outside Britain—some persisted as late as the nineteenth century. All runes, futhorc included, descended from a script known as the Elder Futhark; this was devised roughly around the first century AD, and was probably derived from a Roman or proto-Roman alphabet.
13th January happens to be the memorial of St. Hilary of Poitiers, a fourth-century bishop of that city and a champion of Trinitarianism. A three-term calendar (as opposed to the two-semester calendar more usual in the US) is employed by Oxford University and Trinity College, Dublin; the second term always begins near this memorial, and is therefore known as the “Hilary term.” (This is preceded by the Michaelmas term—Michaelmas falls on 29th September—and followed by the Trinity term, a moveable feast which always falls in the summer.)