Anglo Saxons – The History of England

The Greatest Welsh Ruler Part I

Stephen Wild and I have a simple, but we think noble ambition: to find the Greatest of the Welsh Rulers, and to do so by democratic means. We whave selected 12 of the finest candidates, from Macsen Wledig (4th C) to Owain Glyndŵr (15th C). I don’t think it makes much sense to explain the rules  of how we selected them and why not Henry Tudor, you’d only argue. Greatest Ruler of Wales: Episode One 350AD to 1066 Welcome to our search for the Greatest Ruler of Wales.  In these two Podcasts, Stephen aims to introduce some of the leaders who shaped Medieval Welsh History. Along the way, We’ll give  a very succinct survey of the history of Roman and Medieval Wales. In this episode, we cover the period from 350 AD, to 1066, and rulers Macsen Wledig, Cunedda, Cadwallon ap Cadfan, Rhodri Mawr, Hywel Dda, ‘The Good’,  and Gruffudd ap Llywelyn. Download Podcast - The Greatest Welsh Ruler Part I (Right Click and select Save Link As) The Greatest Ruler program  So, this is the program: We (almost entirely Stephen as it happens) is going to take you through a brief history of Medieval Wales, including the lives of our 12 candidates, in two podcast episodes on 7th and 14th September 15th September: Voting Opens for Round one, the Group Round 21st September: Voting for the Semi Finals 1 22nd September: Semi Final 2 23rd September: The Final! 24th Sepember: The Big Announcement The Draw Stephen’s Pronunciation guide Welsh is (very nearly) phonetic in its spelling, unlike English, but the conventions of spelling are rather different. Here’s a list of names, rendered (very approximately) into an English equivalent. Stress, in Welsh, is on the penultimate syllable. Macsen Wledig – Macsen ooLedig Cunedda – Kinethah (voiced ‘th’ as in ‘that’) Cadwallon – Kadwa*ll*on (the ‘ll’ in Welsh doesn’t occur in English. Put your tongue where it would be to say ‘l’, but blow instead!) Rhodri – like the English Rodry, but sound the ‘h’ at the same time as the ‘r’. Mawr – ma-oor (with a rolled ‘r’ ) Hywell  – Huh-well Dda – thah (but with a voiced consonant – as in ‘Cunedda’, above) Gruffudd (and Gruffydd – same pronunciation) – Griffith (voiced ’th’) Llywelyn – ‘Ll’ as in Cadwallon. Lluh-wel-in Owain – Oh-wine Rhys – Rees, but with a sounded ‘h’ with the ‘r’ Gwenllian – Gwen-llee-ann (see above for ‘ll’) Iorwerth – Yor-werth (with rolled ‘r’s) Glyndŵr – Glin-door (‘oo’ as in spooky) Stephen’s Book recommendations  All of these are general interest history – nothing too academic, I think – and are all in English(!) There’s plenty more to read out there, both in Welsh and in English, as well as recent books I haven’t bought (yet). John Davies’s excellent ‘A History of Wales’ is a wonderful overview. David Ross’s ‘Wales – History of a Nation’ is easy to read and gives a clear timeline. Also recommended David Walker’s ‘Medieval Wales’ Kari Maund’s ‘The Welsh Kings’ Roger Turvey’s ‘The Welsh Princes 1063-1283’ If you want something a bit more argumentative, you might like to try: Gwyn A. Williams’s ‘When Was Wales’ and Martin Johnes ‘Wales: England’s First Colony’. Some helpful maps

Y2 A Brief History of Yorkshire Pt II - Members Only

From Anglo Saxons to West Riding clothing towns, Yorkshire ploughed its own furrow

3.4 Cerdic Founder of England by Paul Harper

Alfred the Great believed that the House of Wessex stretched back to the earliest days of Anglo Saxon England, to the early 6th century, and that the founder was a warrior – Cerdic. But Alfred was a master of propaganda, and was concerned to position Wessex as the most prestigous of all the kingdoms. So did Cerdic actually exist, or just another foundation story? Paul Harper set out to discover the truth. https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/3.4-Cerdic-Founder-of-Wessex-by-Paul-Harper.mp3Download Find out more from Paul’s book; eithger from the publisher, Pen and Sword,  or Blackwell’ –  “Cerdic Mysterious Dark Age King Who Founded England” Transcript Today I have a guest episode for you from Paul Harper, though I am going to speak it. Paul is a history author, who has researched and written a book about the mysterious founder of what would become known as Wessex; it’s called Cerdic: Mysterious Dark Age king who founded England and is available for purchase right now. Now Cerdic is a very shadowy figure way back in the 6th century, the king from whom our current monarch, King Prince Charles, traces his descent – through the odd wiggle or two it must be said. I went myself to look for his burial site in Hampshire once; didn’t find him. But Paul has not only researched Cerdic’s life, and investigated how he built this early kingdom – but is also convinced he has found the site of his burial. So this episode is from and written by Paul Harper, although the voice you hear will be me. In it, Paul talks about how the West Saxon dynasty manipulated the story of Cerdic, to accentuate their status and reputation. He looks at where Cerdic may have come from, and what we can glean from the records about how he carved out this kingdom. And then to his death – and where Cerdic may have been buried. So here goes, and I hope you enjoy it. Cerdic is one of the most enigmatic figures in British history, A warrior king who founded the powerful new realm of Wessex in the 6th century, a kingdom which evolved over many centuries into England – officially under King Athelstan in the tenth century. A long and noble ancestry was very important to later Wessex kings, who were desperate to show their ancestry could be traced all the way back to Cerdic as their illustrious founder. To do so would give them power and most importantly – the right to rule over others.And yet we know so little about Cerdic himself. Everything we know comes from a few brief entries in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle composed hundreds of years after his death. During my research, the focus shifted to a remarkable reference to Cerdic’s final resting place in an ancient royal charter. What followed was something like a treasure hunt as I searched the countryside for the burial site, clues and other lost landmarks. Eventually, the search narrowed down to one long lost barrow. I remember pacing around the site in a daze at the prospect of the discovery.  But let’s start at the beginning of Cerdic’s story. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle tells of how Cerdic and his son Cynric landed on the coast and fought against the Britons, carving out a new kingdom around a hundred years after the Romans left. What is confusing straight away is that Cerdic lands and conquers the kingdom at a time in the early sixth century when according to Gildas, our main contemporary source, ‘foreign wars’ had ended after the victory at Badon over ‘Saxon’ confederates. The other immediate issue is that Cerdic has a Brittonic name, despite being the founder of Wessex, or the land of the West Saxons as it was. The name ‘Cerdic’ is an Old English version of a Welsh or Brittonic name such as Caradoc, Coroticos or Ceretic. Fascinatingly, it may be linked to a famous Briton called Caratacus who led resistance to the Roman invasion. And many of Wessex’s rulers until the eighth century appear to have Brittonic names or Brittonic elements to their name – such as Ceawlin, Cynegils, Cenwalh and Caedwalla.Amid large scale migration and trade from the North Sea and the region around it, lots of people adopted the culture of their new Germanic neighbours in eastern England, copying their fashions, burial customs and language. Of course, it wasn’t all happy families, far from it, but many of the ‘Anglo Saxons’ who did arrive were actually small groups of farming families, looking for a better life because their homelands were being flooded. The lack of dramatic changes in the agricultural landscape and at major settlements such as West Heslerton and Mucking suggests the Anglo Saxon takeover was more complicated than the chroniclers like Gildas would have it, and not just a tale of fire and sword. Wars were often territorial and not based on ethnicity. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle describes Cerdic and his son Cynric as ‘ealdormen’ which is again odd for invaders, it suggests an established official. Because An ealdorman in the ninth century would lead militia into battles, levy taxation on behalf of a king and preside over courts. Meanwhile, Bede, writing around 729 AD, describes how Wessex was interchangeable with the term ‘Gewisse’. The Old English meaning of this word would be ‘reliable, sure’, and may equate to something along the lines of the ‘trusted ones’. Warlords rose to power in the aftermath of Roman Britain by offering protection in dangerous times. I believe his name, the title given him, and the name Gewisse together suggest Cerdic was already in a position of power and headed an authority roughly equivalent to Hampshire in the former Belgae civitas, an old regional district of the Roman empire. This hade essentially become a kind of protection racket and that he was fighting over the New Forest and Solent with rival warlords from modern day Dorset and Wiltshire. His stronghold was likely to have been at Winchester as it had been in this region during Roman period, and would be in the later Anglo Saxon era. Archaeology has found a number of settlements all within three miles of the town around the time of Cerdic. In the late ninth century, Alfred the Great’s monks composed the Anglo Saxon Chronicle something like 350 years after Cerdic died. Through this, Alfred sought to unite the various Anglo Saxon kingdoms with an inspiring story of how the founders of these realms, father and sons, or brothers, arrived in ships and began conquering the natives and were descended from Germanic gods beginning with Woden.  But the chronicle is a real puzzle to decipher. The West Saxon Regnal Genealogical List, the list of kings, for want of a better phrase, is attached to the chronicle; but it often contradicts it. Chroniclers also use folk storytelling methods, so the lesser known places where Cerdic won great victories are difficult to identify being named after the king to lift the story. Hence the story includes place names like ‘Cerdicesford’, ‘Cerdicesora’, ‘Cerdiceleah’ and so on. Other aspects of the Chronicle add to the difficulty of finding the real story; and a major one is about how we date Cerdic’s life and career The story of Cerdic’s reign and conquest appears to have been told twice with a noticeable pattern of 19 years between various entries. So, we get two landings at Cerdicesora and battles involving Cerdicesford which have been repeated with different wording. How to explain this? Well, at the time Easter was calculated by predicting the first full moon after the Spring equinox using a 19 year cycle. Seems sensible, and this may have been a factor in the confusion of these dates; so the chronicle puts the year of St Benedict’s death as 509 exactly 38 years (2 x 19) before the actual date – 547. It looks as though the Chroniclers tried to reconstruct Cerdic’s date by counting back from more reliable information. The king’s list and the later tenth century chronicler Aethelweard reveal that Cerdic landed and then conquered the kingdom six years later. In more recent times academic David Dumville then found that the start of Cerdic’s reign had been backdated by 38 years, using that 19 year cycle based on the calculation of Easter – so 38 is two cycles, or 19 x 2. He then worked out Cerdic’s date by tallying up the reign lengths in the kings list and taking it away from 641 or 642 when Cynegils died. Dumville did this, because Cynegils was the first Wessex king to be baptised which gives a verifiable point in time since from this point the records become more reliable and we can use it as a base to count back from. Based on these findings, then, it looks as though Cerdic landed in 532 and started to reign in 538, and this means that Cerdic ruled during one of the most turbulent decades in British history, a time of plague and harvest failure. Volcanic eruptions around 536 and 540 caused dust veils which blocked out normal sunlight for large parts of the day, sparking famine. The Justinian Plague – the world’s first bubonic plague – followed in 541. Both of these traumatic events are remarkably well documented by chroniclers at the time in history where written records are often so few and far between. So, rather than being an all-conquering invader, as the rulers of Wessex would like to believe, the biggest challenge for Cerdic and his people may have been one of surviving these bleak times, a struggle for resources with a massive increase in raiding which even the Chronicler Gildas laments. Dumville, who sadly passed away recently, believes the Wessex chronicles may have wanted an early start date for the kingdom because Kent and Sussex were founded much earlier than they had been, they wanted a way of constructing a history for Wessex that would put it at the forefront of the Anglo Saxon kingdoms, not one of laggards. Another example of this building of a glorious foundation story may relate to Cerdic’s shadowy son Creoda. Strangely, Creoda is named in some records as his son but not in others – why is the record of his existence so poorly emphasised? Now, There was a Mercian king called Creoda from the exact same period, who does seem to have been a genuine historical figure. This seems likely because some very interesting research found a number of place names in the region that became Mercia, which were attached to Creoda and his descendants Pybba and Penda. There are other interesting connections between Creoda of Mercia and Cerdic’s house of Wessex. Cerdic’s grandson Ceawlin was kicked out of the kingdom of Wessex after an apparent civil war and died alongside a Creoda in 593. There just so happened to be a former place name next to where Ceawlin fought his last conflict at Adam’s Grave near Alton Priors, Wiltshire – it’s called Creoda’s Hill.Fuerthermore, later the great Mercian king Penda, the grandson of Creoda in some records, took over a territory in Wessex including Bath, Cirencester and Gloucester in 627 which had been won by Ceawlin some 50 years earlier. He also drove out the next Wessex king Cenwalh for three years after he refused to marry his sister. So why was Creoda then not given the status in the West Saxon records that his lineage would demand? My findings suggest that Credoa was airbrushed from history on purpose, because of his role in founding Mercia. Because Mercia became Wessex’s great rival. To discover more about who Cerdic was and his story in creating and maintaining his lordship, it might be best to concentrate on the really key battles and events, involving those Cerdic related places – Cerdicesora and Cerdicesford. The Battle of Cerdicesora in the early 530s, and it’s story points to a close connection between Cerdic and the Isle of Wight, just two miles off Hampshire, and a place which was key to Cerdic’s kingdom. I believe Cerdic employed confederates on the Isle of Wight, who guarded the island in return for grants of land. Archaeology has found that the people of the Isle of Wight were Germanic, who had settled there as early as the mid-fifth century. We later learn from Bede they were Jutes, hailing from a region of Denmark and northern Germany, who also settled in Kent. The founders of Anglo Saxon Kent were the same as the ones who wreaked havoc in Gildas’ account of the rebelling confederates who were eventually defeated at Badon. Cerdic was said to be related to Stuf and Wihtgar, who the AS chronicle describes as rulers of the Isle of Wight, and may have been their uncle. Cerdic is said to have handed the Isle of Wight over to them after he died after taking over the island following a battle at Carisbrooke Castle, which is referred to as Wihtgarbyrg; and Wihtgar’s name is derived from the Latin name for the Isle of Wight which was ‘Vechtis’, and would be ‘Wiht’ in Old English. So Whitgar is part of the foundation of the Island, and it may be that we know where Wightgar lies. He is supposed to be buried on the island, and there was a remarkable discovery of a prince or king buried in the modern Carisbrooke Castle there, with rich grave goods – dated to the mid sixth century. And some of the grave goods are comparable in grandeur to those found at Sutton Hoo. So Given the Jutes were based on the island as early as the mid fifth century it is likely his presence there was due to a rebellion which was put down by Cerdic’s forces. In addition, a final piece of evidence linking Cerdic to the Isle of Wight, is a very intriguing reference from Asser, Alfred the Great’s biographer, which implies Cerdic’s wife had Jutish heritage. Intermarriages between Anglo Saxon and Romano British dynasties were common in the 7th century as they formed alliances. So, to get back to that battle in the early 530s, in the events leading up to the fight at Cerdicesora, Cerdic must have gathered all his forces on the Isle Wight – eight ships, up to 400 men – according to the chronicle and rowed to the mainland in Hampshire. The prime location for the battle, based on earlier studies by Osbert Crawford, was identified as Lepe and nearby Stansore Point. Now Stansore is an interesting placename, because it contains the ‘ora’ element, featured in Cerdicesora, relating to an area of land near water. And there was also a Roman road leading into the mainland from Lepe and a former ferry port during Roman times at the same spot. It was also one of the closest places from the Isle of Wight to the mainland. And a last piece of evidence for the location of the battle is an earthwork at the end of Beaulieu River which leads from near Lepe; and has long been called ‘Cerdic’s Bridgehead’. Crawford found earthworks, including ditches and banks, forming a complete ring around the south-eastern corner of Southampton Water up to the Solent. So, after capturing the land, Cerdic’s forces may have been stationed there. The next event is the battle of Cerdicesford around 538, and its location tells us more about Cerdic fought for his kingdom and its extent. Cerdicesford has been convincingly associated with the village of Charford; and Charford is referred to in the Domesday Book as Cerdeford. There’s more; the location has also emerged in another ancient charter from Cerdic’s seventh century descendant Cenwalh. This refers to Fegerhilde Forde, meaning ‘the fair battle ford’. The ‘hilde’ element is a Germanic word meaning ‘battle’. I narrowed this down to a place in North Charford near the River Avon just five hundred metres or so from the modern-day border between Wiltshire and Hampshire which could date to Cerdic’s time. The site is next to an ancient trackway known as the Cloven Way. Medieval battles were often fought at locations near these big trackways, or at border land near the edge of kingdoms and close to river crossings, fords. So this location ticks all those three boxes. Cerdic was fighting now 30 miles away from where he originally landed and fought at Cerdicesora. Cerdic’s opponent at the battle was apparently called Natanleod, and he is another mystery. He boasted a massive army of 5,000 men. This may be an exaggeration but clearly shows this was an incredibly significant battle. The Anglicisation of the south west is very much tied to Wessex’s expansion over the next few hundred years. And this was the dawn of Wessex. Some scholars believe the Natanleod and the Natan Leaga are another product of folk etymology but the ‘leod’ is an Old English term for ‘chief or ruler’ while the ‘Natan’ shares obvious parallels with ancient Brittonic and Pictish names such as Nechtan, shared by a famous saint of the same age. Intriguingly, Natanleod is associated with Downton Moot which is just over a mile away from this main battle site. And outside Downton Moot a street is known as Natanbury after the king who according to legend was buried in the vicinity. Downton Moot, by the way, would later become an important meeting place for local rulers to thrash out issues based on the old Germanic tradition of tribal folk moots. Cerdic’s grip on his new kingdom was also said in the ASC to have challenged, in another battle at a place called Cerdicesleah (around 546). I also believe this was genuine and also occurred close to the battle of Cerdicesora, at a location called Odstock Copse, an old Iron Age fort in woodland between Charford and Old Sarum, again near the Wiltshire-Hampshire border. The location is also close to the start of the land boundary in Cenwalh’s charter and referred to as ‘Fyrdinges Lea’. This means something along the lines of ‘army on a war footing’, which supports the idea that a battle was fought here What this shows us that Cerdic was carving out and holding his kingdom. And since Cerdic’s son Cynric would later capture nearby Old Sarum, 10 miles north of Cerdicesora, it may mean this was frontier land, with three battles occurring during this timeframe all within a few miles of the Wiltshire-Hampshire border. In uncovering Cerdic’s story, we should now really get to the burial site. This for me was the really exciting part of the story. I believe it is a real place on the landscape which we can identify and explain why Cerdic was buried there and in turn really begin to understand who he was. Cerdic would have died around 554 and was buried in a large and spectacular burial mound known as a barrow. They were common before Roman times and again in the early Anglo Saxon period. My interest was piqued by an old charter dated to 900 AD from Edward the Elder, the son of Alfred the Great, which referenced ‘Cerdicesbeorg’, which translates as ‘Cerdic’s Barrow’. Anglo Saxon charters are a fantastic source for the history of this period and this one related to the grant of land from Edward to Winchester Cathedral. It was about 11,000 acres and now makes up the modern St Mary Bourne parish. Some great research from the early 20th century academic George Grundy narrowed the area down to the outskirts of Andover. This may seem quite an inconspicuous rural area now but many moons ago it housed a treasure trove of historically important places including two ancient trackways, no less than six barrows including Cerdic’s, a massive ditch that looked like Offa’s Dyke and a large Roman villa. It must have been some place. These charters largely cover land in the open countryside so the boundaries would be mapped out by various landmarks which could be say an old trackway, a large tree, a big stone or often a barrow. They often have fantastic, almost poetic names. The first landmark after Cerdic was Willow Grove and I found that as willows grow near water the prime candidate was next to the old Roman villa just behind a nearby woodland. I spoke to the estate owner Mike who looks after the site and he said that there must have been a temporary winterbourne river near the villa as how else would they have been supplied, with the nearest other source several miles away. The landmark after the grove which is described in the charter as a trackway could be easily identified as the old Portway Roman road. The preceding pear tree before the barrow must have been on the nearby Apsley Farm where the boundary runs through. It seemed like there was a distance of roughly half a mile between each landmark. Suddenly the pieces started to fall into place. I homed in one former barrow. This barrow has long been ploughed over but thanks to an extensive aerial mapping of the land after the Second World War can still be detected from the sky.  as what’s called a ring ditch. The fantastic Historic Environment Records reveal the locations of former barrows and other historic landmarks on a huge easily accessible database. This barrow was also identified through aerial photography in the 50s, 60s and 70s as a ring ditch. It would have been about 72 ft in diameter and was probably at least 12 ft high on a hill so it would have been a remarkable feature of the landscape. What is really interesting about this particular barrow is that it is very close to the old Harrow Way one of the oldest trackways in Britain and also the dyke, known as the Devil’s Ditch, which could extend all the way to the modern Wiltshire border in Chute parish around eight miles away. The barrow would also have been visible from the Portway Roman Road. These three features made the barrow so interesting. It seems the location was carefully and cleverly chosen. You can imagine the conversation: ‘Where’s Cerdic’s Barrow? ‘Next to the ditch, or on your left or right as you go down the Harrow Way and the Portway – you can’t miss it.’ People must have been awestruck with the barrow on the hill on the Harrow Way. It was also deliberately facing west towards Cerdic’s enemies in Wiltshire. It was a real statement of power and a message to his rivals. ‘I may be dead but my kingdom lives on…This land belongs to the Cerdicing dynasty, enter at your own peril.’ There’s an added possiblity that Cerdic may have hunted in the area given  the presence of potential wooded deer enclosures called ‘haga’ in the charter. Wealthy Romans and Anglo Saxons, including notably Alfred the Great, loved to hunt. Since the book has been published, admittedly some have pointed to how the ‘Beorg’ element of Cerdicesborg could also mean a hill. I can confidently state it wasn’t referring to a hill for several reasons.  Other barrows like this one in the charter are referred to with the same term such as ‘Beorge’, ‘Beorga’. The barrow has been identified in aerial photography at least five times. And I have also found a more recent aerial image which shows a barrow in this spot in the form of a ring ditch as clear as day. It is a really striking image. With the permission of the land owners, hopefully there will be a further investigation someday. This could finally be the conclusive proof that Cerdic was a real king whose impact on Britain was profound, and I am convinced this is where Cerdic was laid to rest. The discovery could take Cerdic out of the land of folklore and finally bring the story to life. Well I hope you enjoyed that, in exploring the original founder of Wessex. And if you want to find out more about Paul’s quest and about Ceric, do hop along to your local bookshop and look for Cerdic: Mysterious Dark Age king who founded England by Paul Harper. Thank you for listening everyone, good luck, and have a great week.

3.3 Seasons

How people in Anglo Saxon England viewed the seasons that meant so much to their health, happiness and survival. From the iron-bound Winter, to the freedom and bounty of summer https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/3.3-Seasons.mp3Download Transcript Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Anglo Saxon England, series 3, which is my place for occasional topics about England before the Normans came along and ruined everything. Well, changed everything. Whatever, you know what I mean. This, then, is an episode I did a while back for the Members of the History of England. They are lovely people, said Members, who collectively put food on my table – and some beer too from time to time – so they have effectively paid for this episode. If you would also like to become a member, and get yet more blathering from me and advert free episodes of ThoE, then just go to https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/become-a-member. Anway, this then is an episode about Anglop saxon seasons. And… I need to start with an explanation. Now look everyone, I did a terrible thing and read a book – not something of which I am normally guilty, I do try and avoid it wherever possible. Making history up is so much more fun, and productive, I find. But look this time I messed up and read/ The book was by Eleanor Parker, and is called Winters in the World. Eleanor Parker is a Prof of Medieval Literature in Oxford, and is an Anglo Saxon specialist. It being literature, it was quite a tough demanding read, but I did also love it, and one of the things I loved was the way that the Anglo Saxons named their months. A really hoot, and how those names reflected their understanding of and relationship with the world around them, and their lives. So I thought wow – the medieval year, the turn of the seasons, what a great podcast that would make, I could tie it up with the liturgical year and all that. Go, Baby, Go, get on it right now! But then during my researches I also came across a wonderful website, supporting this amazing podcast called the History of England. I mean I’m not kidding you, that guy is amazing, whoop and indeed whoop. I then realised that this was in fact my own podcast, and that I have already done two episodes on the medieval and liturgical year – episode 117 and episode 284 on some folk customs around them. Like Hocktide for example, an Easter tradition in memory of the massacre of the Danes under Ethelred in 1002. Interesting that one. And I’ve done the 12 days of Christmas, wassailing and all that. But I had some smashing information from Eleanor’s book additional to all of that, so I thought it would be well worth a shedcast specifically on the Seasons, focussing on Anglo Saxon England, and something of attitudes towards them. But in all honesty I need to point out that an unusually large percentage of this episode comes from Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World. So much so, that you might consider this a book review almost. And if you like it, feel motivated to go and buy it. It is, as I say, not a cake walk, but afterall there is no pleasure without pain, and it really is very wonderful, the poetry and the passion Eleanor has for the subject in particular. We start where all matters Anglo Saxon start in a way I suspect, with the epoch’s greatest chronicler, sat in a monastery in the North of England with a nutmeg by his side; the Venerable Bede. He was writing in the 8th century, 735 ish, and he wrote a book on the reckoning of Time. Now it is not that long ago that the Anglo Saxons had been pagan, and indeed despite  our hard and fast date-based divisions, who knows how long that paganism lasted in secret or private? But Bede was close enough therefore to have some information about the Old English pagan names, before the latinised months we have now came into operation, and he noted them down and tried to explain them. And I thought we’d go through them, because in these old traditions lie some simple meanings about the world around them – before the Roman and more importantly, the Christian year overlaid them. First and most startling thing for me was that the four season structure in England emerged during the Anglo Saxon period; that the starting place like, I think, the Celtic year, was for simply two seasons, summer and winter – not four. Things began to get  bit complicated for me at this point, since I have always thought of seasons in a mother’s milk sort of way, rather than apply my brain. So for me, as most of us in temperate zones, there are four, and they are Spring, – March April May; Summer – June July August; Autumn – September, October, November, and last but sadly not least, Winter, December January February. These, I now learn these were formalised only in 1780 by the Societas Meteorologica Palatina, and they are meteorological seasons, based on temperature. I did no know, you probably did, that there are other types of season. In the two season pagan Anglo Saxon structure, and later their 4 season version, the seasons are based instead on the solstices and equinoxes, a Luni-Solor year you might say;  so Winter is defined as the period which has the equinox as it’s centre; so that’s 7th November to 7th February. Is this killing you by the way? Does my head in, I have to say. Anyway, these dates for Winter, November to January, is great news for me, because it means my birthday is in Spring, not winter; I mean the weather’s still as miserable as sin but hey, now I know it’s Spring! Is sin always miserable I wonder by the way? Asking for a friend, obviously. Anyway. These winter dates may explain the description in this Old English Poem, prosaically called Maxims II, and I am going to try and butcher some Old English https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG54G4EIZUY 0:42 Winter byð cealdost, lencten hrimigost      (he byð lengest ceald), sumor sunwlitegost      (swegel byð hatost), hærfest hreðeadegost,      hæleðum bringeð geres wæstmas,      þa þe him god sendeð. By golly, you’ve no idea how long that took, I do hope there are no native Anglo Saxon speakers amongst you. Here it is in the modern tongue of the English Winter is the coldest, the spring most icy—it’s cold for the longest— the summer the most sun-beautiful—the heaven is hottest— the harvest is most blessed, it brings to men the produce which God sets aside for them There are a couple of things about this poem, which reflects the time of course when the four season structure had appeared. First of all, Spring is the frostiest, cold for longest; a bit surprising surely that’s winter? But maybe because spring includes February now, or maybe it’s a poetic thing – good lord, things ought to be getting warmer but this cold snap keeps going, curse it. The other thing is that in the last line the season is called harvest, Haerfest, rather than the latin autumnus; and remember it includes August so this really is the time when the harvest is being gathered in, and this is the big one. Life or death time for societies that stood perpetually on the edge of famine and disaster. Autumn only starts to be used as a word at the end of the 14th Century, Fall is first recorded in the mid 16th century. Possibly it’s Christianity which comes along to embed the 4 season structure, or at least the Christian church very consciously and very publicly align the liturgical year with the four seasons not two. I have certainly talked about the great feasts in the past as I say, but worth reminding you that some of the largest occur on the four quarter days of the Christian calendar, and broadly align with the solstices and equinoxes of the luna solar year; so Christmas, 25th December is close to the winter solstice on 21st . Next quarter day is Lady Day on 25th March, Midsummer on 24th June, and Michaelmas 29th September. While we are talking about quarter days, it has always seemed to me that nothing could emphasise the dependence of society on the seasons than that the central day of each season should be noted for the collecting of rents and dues. So Lady Day was particularly important. Just to confuse matters further, lady day used to be called 5th April under the Julian calendar before the Gregorian calendar was introduced, which happened in from 1752. It just so happens that in the UK year tax year starts on 25th April, which makes no sense until you remember that this was once Lady Day when many rents became due. The Michaelmas quarter day however was the biggest day of the year for rents and the start of agricultural and domestic service contracts. This makes sense in a largely rural society dependant on the agricultural year; because my Michaelmas, the harvest was largely gathered, extra pay handed out for all the extra work needed at this time of year, and so people were in the money as it were. Ok, to the Anglo Saxon Seasons as promised, and how they named and felt about them.  And we should start with Winter, I guess, the start of which has it’s very own day, Winter’s Day. Winter is might be uncomfortable for us these days, though we might also rather enjoy it, a chance to get cosy by the fire side, and wonder at the weather outside.  But for such vulnerable societies as the Anglo Saxons lived in, a bad winter and a deep Winter’s day, could mean death and dearth; even if not that bad, with little protection against the elements, winter was a time of fear, of confinement and restriction, almost imprisonment; so Eleanor quotes some lines from the Old English Poem the Menologium, which bemoans the ending of Harvest time After comes Winters Day, far and wide Six nights later and seizes sun-bright harvest With it’s army of ice and snow Fettered with frost by the lord’s command And there are similar sentiments in a poem called The Wanderer: I buried my lord in the darkness of the earth and from there Journeyed winter-sorrowful over the binding waves Winter-sorrowful is a rather expressive phrase isn’t it. Eleanor Parker quotes other poems that emphasise not just the iron cold, but the tempestuous assault of winter And storms batter those rocky cliffs Snow falling fetters the earth The tumult of winter … Here wealth is fleeting, here friend is fleeting Here man is fleeting, here kinsman is fleeting All the foundations of this world are turned to waste I promise I’ll stop quoting poetry at you, could get embarrassing, but you get the point? Winter is the enemy, full of danger, the job is to buckle up tight and get to the end of it alive and in one piece. The acquisition of wisdom is linked to surviving the passing of another winter, based on the old idea that wisdom is based on age, a concept I have found to be worryingly south of the truth, since in my experience all I have learned is the depth of my ignorance, and become progressively more anxious. Judas Priest had warned me with their angry track – to the accompaniment of grinding metal guitar – that You don’t have to be old to be wise’, but the Anglo Saxons apparently wouldn’t have believed them. Here’s the Wanderer again And so a man cannot grow wise before he has had His share of winters in the world Or indeed her winters in the world or their winters in the world, just to bring it up to date. Getting through another winter is what marks your growing age and wisdom, not passing a random date you happened to be born and called your birthday. The next most significant moment after the start of Winter at Winters Day, came of course at Midwinter, around the solstice. Midwinter of course gets taken over by Christmas, but before Christianity was most commonly known by the word Middewinter; But there were multiple names around Anglo Saxon England across the centuries.  Before Christianity arrived, some of the AS’s had celebrated modraniht, Mother’s Night; it could be that this was a Romano British survival, a night of veneration of the Mother goddess. Others might have celebrated Geola, the word that becomes Yule, reinforced by the Old Norse word Jol, which famously still appears in Carols when we want to be cutsey and hand out the plum pudding and talk of yuletide good cheer and so on. Bah, and indeed humbug as others call it. Geola was also the name for the months, roughly, of December and January, before the Julian Calendar takes over and separates them into two months. Your AS might have talked about earlier and later Geola respectively. Another name or festival at midwinter that rarely but sometimes occurred was the worship of Earendel, who appears in an Old English poem as ‘brightest of angels’. The idea of a worship of the brightest of angels suggests that the midwinter celebrations, Christmas, is not only a religious ceremony, or a festival with a bit of fun to cheer up the darkest day of the year. It is also a celebration of the returning of the light; from here, the days start to get longer, and days of long lasting daylight get closer, the end of the fark tunnel is in sight. The Earendel thing, I must admit, evokes memories of the obscurer parts of Tolkein and the Silmarillion for me; and also doesn’t Frodo take a tube of Earnedil’s light into Shelob’s Lair? Next up then, in Winter, is the start of the year thing. Here as I suspect you all know, there are a series of choices available. The Roman habit of 1st January I think attractively also lined up with Christ’s circumcision, and took over from 25th March, which had been New Year’s day before the Gregorian Calendar was finally adopted by the Brits in 1752. I was interested to find out that First Footing as a tradition goes way back and has been subject to mockery and eye rolling since the days of the Anglo Saxon Monk Aelfric. First Footing being the idea that what you do or resolve to do on New Year’s Day will affect you all year. Like giving up lardy Cake on New Year’s day as a resolution for behaviour for the rest of the year. Almost always of course followed by obsession next day, and bingeing on it on 3rd. So here are a couple of bits of fun, traditions about what happens around this time of year which will define the rest of the year. One relates the following year according to which of the 12 days of Christmas is a sunny day. So if the sun shines on the 2nd day of Christmas, Gold will be easy to obtain for the English So I’ll be looking out for that one, let me tell you. Or if the sun shines on the 10th day of christmas The sea and rivers will be full of fish Which is not as exotic, but definitely handy, especially if you are preparing a treaty with King John concerning fish weirs on the River Thames. Another tradition was to predict the year ahead according to the day of the week on which New Year’s day falls, that can change everything. They are quite variable; so I had a go at looking up 1649, when a significant event happens in English history. If New Year’s Day 1649 had been a Tuesday then the prediction would have been on the money since It will be dangerous for ships, and kings and noblemen will die All clear for noble women, but nor for kings, as we and king Charles well know. However, it just so happens New Year’s Day 1649 was a Friday. And Fridays are great, though rather randomly, not for shepherds If 1 January is on a Friday, there will be a variable winter, a good spring, and a good summer and much abundance. Sheep’s eyes will be weak in that year. I checked 1st January this year 2023 – it was a Sunday. We are quids-in according to 11th century Anglo Saxon monks, who reckon this means a year of peace and abundance and an exceptional yield on long term treasury bonds. Well, they only mention peace and abundance to be honest. Of course Cardinal Wolsey I think it was who famously remarked that god looks after those who look after themselves, although I think as a sentiment that goes way back to Aesop. So the New Year was marked by more active attempts to make the year go well, which of course mainly depended on a good harvest without which, there was a possibility of, well, famine and a bad case of death. We’ve heard about Plough Monday in episode 117, where the plough was blessed and all that since that was the big job for January, but I missed a ceremony at a similar time called acerbot in Old English, or Field Remedy in new English. This was a Christian ritual which looks spookily just like any other form of witchcraft, with the application, over several days, of various unguents or condiments including things like oil, honey and other things. I mean why ban such things, but you can see what those fun suckers in the reformation were going on about. There was also a deal of wassailing fruit trees to encourage a good fruit season. King Prince Charles I believe used to talk to his plants, wassailing might be one better. At Candlemas at last came the end of winter and the start of Spring – 2nd February, well before my birthday, Christian festivals with lots of candles and light to encourage the Sun to get on with it. The pagan name of the month of February Bede records was solmonath. He records it as being the month of cakes, which does sound good; but less a green light for a lardy cake binge, and more by way of offering of cakes to the gods. But Bede offers no explanation for this, and other etymologies have suggested that it might rather be translated as ‘mud month’, and certainly I can confirm that mud is a thing in an English February. Yet another interpretation refers to the sol bit of solmonath, and calls it the month of returning sun; Eleanor doesn’t mention this, so I present it to you without further comment. Might be one of those truthiness moments us amateurs get trapped by. I mean solmonath…sounds like sol. Anyway move on. By the way, I looked up the names of full moons by month, in the hope that would yield something of interest. There are a few moon names, and some specifically Anglo Saxon, though surprisingly dull – the last full moon before Christmas is called the Moon before Yule, and the first afterwards, with depressingly predictability, was call  the moon after Yule. There appear to be a wide range of Native American traditions, which are much more sexy – January being the wolf moon according to the Greenwich Observatory. While I’m on moons, there’s a tradition of the September Full moon being called the harvest moon; and then there’s the Blue Moon thing. What is a Blue Moon? Well it turns out to be quite complicated and nothing to do with blighty. It appears first in the Maine Farmer’s Alamac in the early 20th century, maine as in the American place rather that the principle Farmer’s Almanac, and there refers to the third full moon of a season exceptionally containing four full moons, and now it’s also sometimes applied to a second full moon occurring within a single calendar month, which apparently happens only once every 2 ½ years. This is quite a specific and complicated sort of thing, but which is probably why I’d only try to explain the phenomenon once in a blue moon. On to March, which Bede explains used to be called Hrethmonath, named for the Goddess Hreth to whom they made offerings; but another, West Saxon name for the month has also been uncovered, Hlyda. This is a word that means loud, or noisy, so probably referring to March windy weather, which can make something of a din. Funnily enough Bede didn’t seem to know the word; he was after all a Northumbrian, golden centre of the Anglo Saxon world in the 8th century, and a lifetime away from the grubby old Gewisse and West Saxons. But actually Hlyda as a name survived much longer than you might think, even past the time when the Latinate March took over. March is referred to as Lyde, a derivation of Hlyda in Middle English texts, and I am told that in Cornwall the first Friday in March, lude, was a holiday for tin miners into the 19th century. The Daffodil was called the Lide Lily apparently, and also based on that the Lent lily since it flowered in March – again, Lide being a derivation of Hlyda. Another example of the survival of Hlyda’s month, comes in a wise old proverb. This has it that Ducks won’t lay until they have drunk Lide water So – duck won’t lay until after March. The expression reminds me, vaguely, just to digress, of the saying Daph the publican at the Cherry Tree used to quote. She would nod her head wisely when we remarked how spring like it seemed during some random bout of good weather in February, and she’d say gravely that ‘Spring wasn’t in until the May Blossom blooms’, or N’er cast a clout till May is out This suggests Spring is until much later than February, because May Blossom refers to the Hawthorn, which may blossom anywhere between April and June depending on the weather, your location and the current progress of climate change which, I am told has given old England an extra 3 weeks of growing season. Not that I am advocating it as a good thing, obviously, given the desertification, famine, displacement, general fear of social collapse and potential end to all life on earth as we turn into the new Venus, which seems a high price to pay for being able to keep the spuds in the ground a little longer. Anyway, how on earth did you get me on to this? Spring of course was joyfully represented in AS poetry and writing – a joyful release from the fetters of winter sort of thing, and I’d like to mention Cuckoos here, though I seem to moving increasingly from anything like history to folk lore. Here’s a line Eleanor quotes from a poem about a hermit, St Guthlac of Crowland, celebrating the return of Spring. Here we go – I’m quoting poetry at you again, sorry, don’t tell your other half Serene was the field of victory and the dwelling renewed; Fair was the song of the birds, the land blossomed Cuckoos heralded the Spring Winter’s army of ice and snow defeated and sent packing, as it were. Now the Cuckoo; I had occasion to write to Eleanor and Martin at the Three Ravens Podcast about cuckoos, and they read out my name on their excellent podcast. I felt inordinately excited, though the expected paparazzi didn’t turn up at my door as my fame spread, fortunately. Anyway, the Cuckoo was seen as the harbinger of Spring, and thereby fertility; so one local legend was that, and I quote from the Tales of Gotham, ‘and a young girl, hearing the cuckoo for the first time in spring, would count the number of its notes, for this would tell her the number of years that were to come before she would be married’. In Cornwall, again, a hot bed of folklore obviously, apparently the Cuckoo was supposed not to migrate, but to hide in caves waiting for spring. Anyway around us, in the much more business like and prosaic South Oxfordshire, there was the myth of the Pent Cuckoo. It’s not specific only to Oxfordshire, but it’s particularly prevalent in the landscape around us, because there are a number of points labelled as ‘Cuckoo Pen’ on the 1900 OS maps along the Chiltern scarp. The myth goes that the triangular planting of the Cuckoo Pen was designed to entice the Cuckoo in, and thus trap it, and bring fertility to parish. So you know, if you are worried about the local birth rate, you might propose it as a solution in your next parish meeting. Let me know how it goes, and anyway planting trees is popular these days given the aforementioned imminent global climate collapse. Back to the names of the month and seasons, and to Lent and eastermonath. Lent came from the old English and Germanic lencten and referred both to the season and to the tradition of fasting; so lencten might indeed be used as a general word for spring. That led to the month of April and the most important Christian festival of the year, Easter. I think most languages, come from a derivation of the word for Passover, paschalis in Latin, hence the words for Easter like Paques in French. But not in England; here’s the Venomous Bede, giving us the pagan name for the most holy of Christian festivals eastermonath, which is now interpreted as the paschal month, once had its name from their goddess, who was called Eostre, and in whom they celebrated festivals, from whose name they now call the paschal season, calling the joys of the new solemnity by the usual term of ancient observance. It is apparently a passage hotly disputed by scholars who labour in dingy garret rooms in place like Oxford, Bologna and Heidelberg getting hot collars. There seems to be no other reference in Old English to his mysterious Goddess, although there’s a Germanic fertility goddess elsewhere called Eostre. Some of the people inside those warm and presumably slightly sweat collars have even accused Bede of being a fibber, which would have made him proper venomous I’d have thought. And a reasonable question has been asked, – why would a Christian so fervent and enthusiastic as the monk Bede invent a pagan goddess as the namesake for the most holy of Christian festivals? A killer point that. Anyway there we are, we are an outlier in English in the name for Paschalis, Easter. On to May, which might be my favourite month, and the poet of the Menologium may well have felt the same May Comes to the city sweeping swiftly, splendid in its adornments of woods and plants, beautiful Thrymilce to the dwellings In there, as the sharp eared of you will have noticed is the old English word for May in, Thrymilce. This is a word which stars with a special the Old English letter, the Thorn. Bede tells us that this May is so names precisely because the cows need to be milked thrice a day in this month, a month of plenty and fertility. May Day however wasn’t a thing in AS England by the looks of thing, though it will most certainly be by the middle ages; and isn’t it a Gaelic thing, Beltane and all that? Now May is definitely spring for me, but let me remind you it was not for your Anglo Saxons; nope, 7th May was the start of summer given again that the Summer solstice of June 21st occurs in the middle of the summer season – so summer was May June and July. In May and June we have a bunch of Christian festivals which I talked about in episode 117; originally Rogantide was all about carrying the blessings of God out from the church into the countryside so that the crops would get a shufti on; again the reformation didn’t like this sort of elegiac thing, so they dropped the relics, but still beat the bounds of the parish, and in either idiom it was an opportunity for a party. These walks had an Old English name too – gangdagas, walking days, and they survive into the 19th century as the ‘gang days’, which were the three days leading up to Ascension, which is 39 days after the moveable feast of Easter. All ver complicated. After the next festival of Pentecost, or Whitsun, we are now approaching midsummer, and so time for the pagan AS name for June, and yet the name Bede gives us is not two names, but one, Litha. Litha means June and July both together, just as like geola means December and January. The word means gentle, and Bede tells us these are therefore named as the gentle or navigable months, and then gets a little specific to be honest, noting that they are so named because they are good for sailing. This is the easy time; the word litha was associated with words like mild, pleasant, sweet, gentle, or when used with people,  merciful, and kindly. The use of the word in these senses survived into middle English before dying out; but an echo survives in the word lithe, and lithe is indeed a lovely word isn’t it, lithe supple, young, free. So, in a gentle and happy time of year came midsummer, 24th June, a very popular festival and a quarter day of course, and close to the solstice of 21st. On a side note, by the way, I understand that the word Solstice derives from the Latin word for staying still, because it was thought that God had the sun pause in it’s path for a while, and stand still. Just so you know if someone asks. Midsummer was a standard marker in Anglo Saxon society; things are referred to as happening before Midsummer, or after midsummer. The day was a special day of great significance, a day to conjure with and be conjured by; it was thought to be one where the spirit of God was close, a day of great potency and power. Potions and healing balms were thought to be more effective if prepared at Midsummer and, in particular, it was a great time for preparing love potions, something to bear in mind. I am told that St Johns Wort, a medicinal herb and a hardy sort of beast in my experience, gets its name because midsummer is also St John the Baptist’s feast day, the plant flowers at this time and is supposed to have healing and protective powers. There were celebrations and festivals at Midsummer, with Bonfires figuring large, houses decorated with flowers and all. Good times. August on the other hand in our Anglo Saxon timings is the start of autumn – or haerfest as the season was known of course. Bede tells us that August was known to the pagans as Weodmonath – the month of weeds, because as Bede explains, ‘they are very plentiful then’, and he’s not kidding, my veg patch can attest to that. There were other regional names though; In Kent August seems to have been called Rutgern, probably referring to the month as the right time for the harvesting of Rye. Either way, this is the most important month to an agricultural society. On the one hand it’s the month of gift and glory, when God, holy king of heaven, causes the earth to give bright fruits for nobles and the needy And hopefully enough for both of course, but if not, the nobles will have ‘em. The first festival was lammas on 1st August, a name I was only aware of because of a Jeeves and Wooster episode when Steven Fry as Jeeves remarks that Lammas eve is when Old boggie walks, a part of a plan to get Bertie out of yet another scrape.  Well I don’t know about Old Boggie, but Lammas was the first of the series of harvest festivals, probably celebrating the first fruits of harvest; the word comes from hlaf, the Old English for bread; but also sharing a root with the words for lord and lady; so, rather beautifully, it has a sense of ‘bread guardian’ sort of thing. Eleanor Parker speculates that maybe loaves for hlafmaesse were made with the first grain from the harvest. But who knows. Unlike midsummer, it was supposed to be a bad time for making various potions and healing, or bloodletting, bloodletting in good way I mean, and this was because Lammas also coincides with the Dog Days. I think you may already know this, certainly Jane did when I told her I had an interesting fact, but Dog Days were when the Dog Star, Sirius, are in the ascendant or whatever the astrological term is. The Dog Days were associated with disease, with fever, thunder, lethargy. Not good things, anyway. September was known by Bede’s pagans as haligmonath, holy month, though that’s all he tells us. Eleanor speculates that a likely explanation is that this is harvest festival time , the celebrations as the last sheaf was cut as opposed to Lammas when the first fruit was picked. This does seem like an attractive conclusion does it not? Aelfric also uses a different name for the month, of Haefestmonath, harvest month. Apparently Snorri Stulurson of Sagas fame also had a list of months in Old Norse, and the only one with a word cognate to the Pagan AS words, is this month, in Norse Haustmanudur, harvest month again. It was the time for Michaelmas, which became the autumnal quarter day, equinox, and the most important one for rents and contracts and all that as previously mentioned. Close on its heels came October; the moon that followed harvest was considered to be the first moon of the winter, and October was therefore named accordingly – the winterfylled, winter full moon. The moon brought with it the first winter wage, translated as the first pledge of winter. Again isn’t that a thoroughly awfully poetic way of reflecting those first genuinely cold blasts which tell you things are changing, brings you the promise of the colder weather to come. Eleanor tells us that there is little sign in Old English poetry of that rather pleasant sense of gentle autumnal browns and comfortable evenings in.  Rather more grimly, the stronger association is between the fall of leaves and the approach of death, So that’s cheery then, but I suppose if you are very vulnerable to a bad winter, that’s the way you’d look at it. And the next month, the last one as we come full circle, is the start of winter, November. This is the time of the last of the Christian festivals, Martinmas. The month, Bede tells us is called blotmonath. This sounds like blood month, and indeed many Anglo Saxon references call it that too; and Snorri calls it Gormanudur, slaughter month. Now Bede however tells us, this is the month of sacrifices, because those horrid pagans dedicated any cattle slaughtered at this time to their gods, referred to by Pope Theodore as devils rather than Gods of course. And then Bede also gets a bit preachy and says how nice it is that Christianity demands only the sacrifice of prayer. But whether sacrificed to gods or devils, there was of course a more practical reason why this was blood month. Not all the animals could be kept through the winter; those for whom there was not enough winter feed must be slaughtered, and their meat preserved as well as possible to get the community through the winter. Which was in itself a challenge; this didn’t come up earlier, but I am sure I found out that May, June, July, the lovely warm months, might also be called the hungry months; because things might be growing but hadn’t grown yet enough to be harvested, and last Autumn’s stuff was looking distinctly mouldy and thin on the ground. Sounds thoroughly plausible, but I think it was a bloke called Eddie, and was related to me in a pub, and Edde was not a historian but an accountant and jazz player. So…you now know my sources and their quality. Well, I have to say that Eddie seems like a good place to leave this story. I’d like to thank Eleanor Parker again, although she doesn’t know me from Adam, and recommend Winters in the world to you. And also I would like to thank you all very much for listening, and if I  happen to think of another topic sometime, then I will be back. Until then, good luck and have a great life!

3.2 The Fens: Home of Monsters and Hermits

Marie Hilder talks about the ‘English Holy Land’ during the time of the Anglo Saxons – the landscape, monasteries and hermits -and the tale of Hereward the Wake. https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/3.2-The-Fens-Monsters-and-Hermits.mp3Download Marie curates a wonderful Facebook page. Have a look at Anglo Saxon History and Language -there are loads of great posts The Fens before they were drained Transcript This is the second episode from Marie Hilder, so once again although it will sound awfully like me, it is in fact a devilish trick, because the words are in fact written by Marie – I am only speaking them. Or well, actually about half of them; in the end I found I had rather a lot wanted to talk about with the Fenland – but it’s mainly Marie in spirit. I’ll let you know when I step back in to add my two penn’orth. Just to remind you that Marie has curated a fantastic Facebook group I’ve absolutely loved, called ‘Anglo-Saxon History and Language’. The group has loads of really excellent and interesting posts, many of them from Marie, and the people of the group also have interesting contributions to make. So, if you like what follows, or even if you don’t, may I urge you all to join the Anglo-Saxon History and Language group if you are on FB; I’ll remind you at the end, and put a link into the episode post. OK, so over then to Marie first of all, talking about the Fenland of Anglo Saxon England, apparently known in some circles as the ‘Holy Land of the English’  – home to monsters and monasteries, including the Monasteries described as the Fen Five. Of which more from Marie. Drive through the Fens of Cambridgeshire and the neighbouring counties, and the flat featureless landscape seems to stretch for miles under open skies. The region is below sea level in some places, and depends on a network of ditches and artificial canals to drain excess water into rivers which have been engineered to take the shortest route to the North Sea … it’s a scene that’s reminiscent of the Netherlands and it comes as no surprise to learn that Dutch engineers played a major role in the drainage of the Fens in the 17th Century. The Fens take their name from the Old English word fenn which described wetlands in general. Before drainage, this area was a mix of coastal salt marshes, peat bogs, shallow inland lakes, and low hills standing above the flood level. Yet the Fens have never been an untamed wilderness.  They might be a strange, unsettling place to outsiders, but they have always teemed with riches in the eyes of the people who live here. A 12th-Century chronicler of Peterborough abbey was thinking like a local when he described the area as “very valuable to men because there are obtained in abundance all things needful for them that dwell nearby” whether it was fish and waterfowl, rushes for thatching or rich water meadows for cattle pasture. The Liber Elienis, a 12th-century English chronicle described: “fish innumerable, eels, large water wolves, pickerel, perch, roach, burbots and lampreys” Eels were so common, they were often used to pay remittances in kind; the name of Ely is supposed by some to derive from Island of Eels. It would have been a region extraordinarily rich in wildlife. The Romans dug canals to manage the water level in the Fens, and the Anglo-Saxons were next with a wave of engineering projects in the 10th Century. These projects were financed by a handful of Benedictine abbeys on the edge of the wetlands or on islands in the marshes. Thanks to generous endowments from royalty and local aristocrats, these monasteries became some of the richest landowners in the kingdom, with huge workforces to do the heavy labour of digging ditches and short canals  – known locally as lodes. Excess water was diverted into nearby rivers, the exposed peat dried into a rich black soil and the monks started to bring this virgin land under the plough.  Scraps of parchment survive from the period and they show in extraordinary detail how monastic estate managers exploited the natural riches of the Fens by moving slaves and herds, fishing nets and bean seed to new farms under development. Two of these abbeys (Thorney and Ramsey) were still relatively new foundations by the time of the Norman Conquest of 1066. Peterborough, Ely and Crowland, which is also known as Croyland, were much older establishments with foundation stories about saintly royals whose parents or grandparents had worshipped the heathen gods Woden and Thunor. The Conversion period  of the 7th century, when the pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdoms slowly adopted Christianity from Rome, was a transformative period and described by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History. The first Fenland monastery was founded in 656. The place was called Medeshamstede and was dedicated to St Peter- which explains how Medeshamstede managed to become the name of the modern city, Peterborough. The monastery was endowed by Penda of Mercia’s son as an outpost of Mercian interests in a region far removed from his ancestral heartland in the upper Trent valley around Tamworth; a supportive monastery on the edge of the Fens was seen as the ideal way to plant the dynasty in the far reaches of the kingdom where the king was rarely seen. What was good for Mercian power worked equally well for East Anglian interests. The eastern kingdom was represented in the Fens by a woman, Etheldreda, or Æthelthyth if you prefer her Old English name.  This lady was the great-niece of King Rædwald of the East Angles, who is the most likely candidate for the man buried at Sutton Hoo. Great-uncle Rædwald was baptised a Christian but continued to worship his ancestral gods. Etheldreda redeemed the family in Bede’s eyes and she did this by founding the second great Fenland abbey at Ely. The Venerable One never met Etheldreda who died when he was a small child, but he spoke to people who knew her and what particularly impressed him was her determination to preserve her virginity through two royal marriages. Bede described the queen’s retreat to the largest island in the Fens, surrounded by marshes and named for the large number of eels caught in its waters. Here she founded a double monastery – for men and women – and was consecrated as its abbess. Admittedly, Etheldreda wasn’t the first Anglo-Saxon woman to found a monastery, but she was the first queen to do so.  If her church was built of lightweight timber in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, it could be thrown up anywhere on the Isle of Ely and didn’t need a hard platform of stone to stand on; unlike the medieval Ely cathedral, which stands where it does because of the geology of the isle. According to tradition, the queen settled a mile from the present cathedral at a place called Cratendune. This first monastery eludes detection but, thanks to Bede, Etheldreda would become the most celebrated Englishwoman of the pre-Norman Conquest era with a cult that lasted from her death through to the Dissolution of the Monasteries almost nine centuries later. Twenty years after Etheldreda’s death in 679, another royal came to the Fens on a spiritual journey. This was Guthlac, a warrior prince who could trace his descent back to Eomer of Angeln. Eomer was a famous and legendary figure  who appears in the poem Beowulf as ‘Helper of heroes”; he also inspired JRR Tolkien’s character of the same name, in the Riders of Rohan of course. Guthlac was a contemporary of Bede, and spent nine years fighting the Welsh. But you can only fight the Welsh for so long, so, burnt out by Welsh fighting at the tender age of 24, he decided to become a monk. Only to find his peers didn’t like him because he refused to touch alcohol – and it’s difficult to disagree with the monks on that one.  In the year 699, he embarked on the solitary life of a hermit and had himself ferried to Crowland, another island in the Fens. To outsiders, the Fens were edgy places where monsters, cold and deadly, lurked beneath the treacherous surface.  One piece of Old English wisdom states: “the monster must dwell in the fens, alone in the land” they were the natural habitat of Grendel and the other ‘boundary-walkers’ of the night in the Old English poem Beowulf. Guthlac’s biographer, writing only a few years later, described his retreat in the spookiest of terms: it was “a most dismal fen of immense size … now consisting of marshes, now of bogs, sometimes of black waters overhung by fog, sometimes studded with wooded islands, and traversed by the windings of tortuous streams”. The newly minted Christians of seventh-century England were not deterred by the threat of monsters. By settling in these liminal places, they felt they were making the same spiritual journey as the early monks who left the city for the Egyptian desert. The fens were a world removed from Egypt, and the Roman cities of Britain shadows of their former selves, but the wetlands shared with the desert that all-important sense of being on the edge of civilisation in early medieval England. It made them perfect for monks and hermits seeking isolation to devote themselves to prayer, as a chroinicler wrote “these marshes afforded to not a few congregations of monks desirable havens of lonely life in which the solitude could not fail the hermits.” Guthlac made his home in the side of a prehistoric barrow and remarkably, new archaeology confirms the existence at Crowland of several prehistoric barrows surrounded by an earthwork and standing on a spit of dry land which projected into the marsh.  In daylight, Guthlac’s barrow attracted a steady stream of visitors who came by boat to consult the resident holy man, but at night he was haunted by the voices of demons who spoke in the British tongue. We might tentatively suggest that the local wildlife might offer a more plausible explanation. Soon after his death in 714, Guthlac’s remains were moved into a splendid new church within a stone’s throw of his hermitage. Here was a saint who could appeal to the Anglo-Saxon nobility: a warrior who gave up the world to become a soldier of Christ and battle (Beowulf-style) against monsters and demons in the marshes. Monastic life in the Fens stalled in the ninth century when the viking Great Heathen Army sacked the three Fenland monasteries in 870.  It took another century before they were re-founded as all-male Benedictine abbeys. There was yet more upheaval with the Norman Conquest in the eleventh century. The Fens were one of the last parts of England to submit to the Conqueror, and the local abbeys played their part in the resistance. What unites them is the figure of Hereward the Wake, a tenant of Peterborough and Crowland abbeys who made his rebel base on the Isle of Ely and, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “defended it with its inhabitants against King William, who then had subjected almost all the land”. Ely proved a tough nut for the Normans to crack. First they tried to reach St Etheldreda’s Isle by throwing causeways across the marshy ground, only for these to collapse under the weight of men and horses; they even supposedly called on the services of a witch to intimidate the rebels into submission. The final outcome was never in doubt and in October 1071, with the Isle under siege and food stocks running low, the monks of Ely decided to submit to the Conqueror.  Hereward did not join them. He broke out of Ely with as many men as could – or would – follow him “and he led them out valiantly” adds the contemporary Chronicle, before he vanishes into the undergrowth of history. Meanwhile, the monks of Ely placated the notoriously avaricious Conqueror with their treasures.  They would remember their submission as a disaster for their abbey which was “weighed down under the Norman yoke” and shorn of its ancient glory.  And yet, thanks to Bede who was still widely read, St Etheldreda was held in great respect and work started on a new Romanesque church in 1080 and her relics moved into a new shrine in 1106. The building was extended over the medieval centuries so that Ely is now the fourth longest among English cathedrals.  Crowland and Peterborough were also rebuilt in the new style, but only after devastating fires in 1091 and 1116 respectively. The 16th and 17th Centuries were times of even greater upheaval for the Fens. First to be affected were the abbeys who had mixed fortunes following Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries.  Ely had been home to a bishop since 1109 and so the great abbey church continued in use, but as a cathedral and without the pilgrims to St Etheldreda’s shrine which was dismantled.  It was a similar story in Peterborough, where the last abbot was consecrated as the first bishop of Peterborough. The third abbey, Crowland fared less well and was reduced to the status of parish church. Next, progress came for the ancient wetlands.  Roman, Anglo-Saxon and medieval planners were content to manage the water level in the Fens but the 17th Century saw the start of systematic efforts to completely drain this ancient landscape, when a group of investors calling themselves ‘The Adventurers’ paid Dutch engineers to do the job. To the Adventurers (one of whom was Oliver Cromwell) this was the Biblical-style creation of new land, and they justified their intervention in the natural order as doing God’s work on earth. The Fens are home to some of the most productive farmland in modern Britain, but at the time drainage was a disaster for local people and prompted a series of local rebellions. Happily, there are still pockets of natural wetland where visitors can still see this ancient landscape before drainage, and sense the isolation that drew Etheldreda, Guthlac and others to do God’s lonely work in the Fens, a millennium before Cromwell and the Adventurers changed them forever. Thank you very much Marie. I thought I’d  add a little  bit, on the principle that no one becomes a podcaster unless they like the sound of their own voice. So for year and years as a nipper I was a keen birdwatcher, though not terribly professional I’m afraid, and I signed up to the RSPB is some way -not sure how, but I seemed to have lots of pamphlets about them, my memory fails me. I did look them up to remind myself; and on Wikpiedia it warned me not to mistake the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds for the similarly acronymed Railways Sports Promotion Board. The mind boggles. Anyway, the rspb had places like Welney Marsh in Norfolk and Minsmere in Suffolk. So one day in my prime with a bit of spare time I set off towards them driving in my car along memory lane but came instead across  a place in fenland called Wicken Fen. And I remembered my friend Tim had spoken of Wicken Fen so I turned in. Wicken Fen is the kind of place Merie refers to, a place to sense how the fens once were; a shard of the way fenlands used to be – 600 acres owned by the National Trust, who try to maintain it in the way that most of Fenland would have been like. There are vast reed beds, pools appearing unexpectedly wherever you go. It is managed still – there are sluice gates everywhere and windmills to pump water, and it puts you in mind of a sort of 17th century iteration of the Fen, rightly or wrongly. It’s lovely, there’s masses of wildlife, but if I can be emotional, it is also a tiny bit tragic. Because it is but a memory of a landscape that used to stretch for mile after mile after endless mile, which could be managed and adapted to, but not controlled. I don’t know if there are any Isaac Asimov fans out there, but I was reminded of his book Caves of Steel, where everyone lives inside, but they all have a local Green Square Mile where you could go and see the sky above you, and feel like an explorer of the old books. Wicken Fen felt a bit like that. The Fenlands were once among the most wild and uncontrollable of English landscapes, constantly flooding. They are now an almost industrial landscape; everywhere there are straight lines, roads, rivers, drains, rectangular fields. I am not saying the Fens don’t still have a kind of distinctive beauty, as Marie said with the feeling of big sky, but it is an unusually man made rural landscape now. It’s very hard to imagine the wilderness that once shielded Hereward the Wake from his enemies, and allowed him to live the guerilla life. A few history notes. Hereward would have lived among people whose entire social structure and way of life was adapted to the Fenlands. Fenlands had remarkably small amounts of land suitable for arable farming, and so as we have heard the people made their living from cattle grazing, wild fowling, catching of eels. And often using stilts to help negotiate the shallows. Peat is critical to the ecology and economy of the whole area, underpinning its enormous fertility, with its famous black earth. In Anglo Saxon times they would as Marie said have been a liminal society, unusually individualistic; one writer described them as a thriftless race whose only strong passion was a love of freedom The settlement names often reflect the topography, of course. There are broadly two types  of Fen; in the north, there are the salt marshes, often forming ‘washes’ – the word was Old English, for a sandbank washed by the sea; and of course the great shallow sea that cuts into the heart of the fens is called The Wash. The salt marshes are covered with the shrub-like Seablite which is one of the only things to cope with constant inundation of saltwater at high tide, although there’s also the much more lovely sheets of pink flowered Thrift, too, and often the reasonably vile tasting samphire which over enthusiastic mothers with an eye for a freebie used to gather and cook for their protesting young ‘uns. Very good for you apparently, in that no pain no gain kind of way. There is then an area called the Siltlands, a band of slightly raised land caused by deposition of silt over centuries – don’t get excited, you won’t need oxygen to get up there – they are raised by something like 3 metres.  South wards of the siltlands, then, Fens are fresh water, caused by regular flooding of the great rivers that flow from the Midlands into its lowlands towards the sea – the Great Ouse, the Welland and the Nene. So islands in the Fens, like the Isle of Ely were terribly important to survival and island words figure highly. The Isle of Axholme  in Lincolnshire is one of those doubling up names; East Anglia was heavily settled by the Danes, and so Axholme borrows from the Old Norse ‘holmr’, island; Axholme was Haxey’s Island. Meanwhile the ea- suffix, ey, to a word means an island, where the oldest settlements were clustered; villages such as Whittlesey, and Manea, and Thorney. Thorney was Haga’s Island, particularly well known to me because the associated village of Thorney Toll was a hideous pinch point of traffic as Leicestershire travelled east to the sea during the August factory fortnight. We were often in those traffic jams, on our way to our stationary caravan by the coast. We’d also hit trouble at the slightly exotically named Guyhirn, from the French word La Guerne, or a guide, referring to the nearby straight drain, Morton’s Leam. This was the same 15th century John Morton, by the way, beloved of Henry VII, and the inspiration of Morton’s fork. These islands, then, and patches of upland were super important; for both settlements and for access to rare arable land. If you listened by my blatherings about the development of parishes in Anglo Saxon Chilterns, you might remember that they were often strip parishes – carefully incorporating the resources of two types of landscape – the pastures and woods of the hills, and the flat fertile arable of the plains. The same happens in places on the fens. The siltlands are often called the Townlands, for that was where the earliest settlement took place, often dating from the Romano British period, a strip of highly nucleated villages. Places like Fosdyke, a placename which again incorporates local Fenlands words – it means Forta’s Ditch, from the Old Norse ‘dic’. The Dyke is a constant feature in the Fenlands, a word which means both a ditch, and a bank, about which I have whined before. Anway, the point is that  these villages were set at the head of long strip parishes heading towards the sea, once again combing resource of arable land, pasture, reed beds. And an important early industry – creating salt from salt water, at places such as Fishtoft; a village with an early statue of St Guthlac as it happens, evidence it is thought of the saint’s cult. Salt was often manufactured using large, square beds called Salterns. The presence of Romano British settlements in the inaccessible Fenlands has led to the idea that it was an area of late survival for the Britons. But in fact that seems unlikely; the idea is also based on a series of placenames with the element ‘wal’ in them, like Walpole, the wall being supposedly from Wealh, foreigner or Welsh. But it seems more likely they are in fact related to Roman Walls of the saxon shore, and there are very few remaining Celtic placenames in east Anglia generally – mainly rivers like the Ouse, and river names are always at the fore front of Celtic survivals. None the less the inaccessibility of the Fenlands did lead to a variety of Anglo Saxon tribes that make it to the Tribal Hideage; the northern Gwyre based on Peterborough, the southern Gwyre based on Ely; supposedly the name Gwyre was derived from the Old English word for a deep bog, so that would figure. Then in Lincolnshire there were the Spalda. From whom the town of Spalding takes its name, and the Bilmingas. Common Land played a crucial part in the local economy. Now the Adventurers of the 17th century partly paid for their investment by enclosing land, which was granted to them, notably by Charles I. This utterly changed the local way of life, removing that common land. So there was massive resistance a marie mentions; actually Oliver Cromwell was initially part of that resistence, giving support to a group of protesters around Ely helping them dispute the land grants by Charles I in law. I wonder if it is fanciful of me to see Cromwell’s transformation from initial support for his locals against state Improvement, to his later advocacy, as symbolic of his personal transformation from local dignitary, to national statesman. Major developments during Charles’ reign were led by the 4th Earl of Bedford, who led a group of Adventurers during the personal rule. So enormous and influential was this project, that the Great Fen, between Cambridge and the Wash, is also called the Bedford Levels. Other Resistance to change from the 16th century included the semi legendary Fenland Tigers, who smashed windmills and sluices to try to hold back change and preserve their way of life. In the long run, they failed of course, but they are remembered in the Red Lion of the Fenland flag. The structured work of Cornelius Vermuyden and the Adventurers introduced a new type of settlement into the Fenlands – the isolated Georgian Farmstead, associated with long strips of reclaimed farmland. I seem to remember at school learning about Dutch Polders, where four areas of reclaimed land were allocated in a big square separated into four sub squares, each a farmstead. Where the squares all met in the middle, there were built 4 farmsteads, so that they had neighbours. Don’t know if that’s true but we are nowhere near as friendly in England, and so those Georgian farms are mainly on their own. But Georgian England was a fine time for Fenland agriculture – as you’ll see if you go to towns like Swaffham. OK, that is all Marie and I have for you this week – I am sorry, I warbled on a bit with personal reminiscing and such, rather spoiling Marie’s much tighter article. Thanks very much to Marie, I do hope you’ll do this again, and do check out her fantastic Facebook group ‘Anglo-Saxon History and Language’. I do have at least one more episode in mind; on Anglo Saxon seasons, inspired by a book by Eleanor Parker, Winter’s in the World. So I’ll pop that up in a few week’s time, and we’ll see where we go from there. Until then, thank you all so much for listening, good luck, and have a great week.