Deep Joy for a beautiful autumn Sunday in October

So, I thought I would share it all with you.

Today, I am preparing a lecture on the Anglo Saxons - this is the deep joy part! They have reared their heads again after the hoard found in a Staffordshire field. Isn't it interesting how history has a future?

It is clearly a battle hoard, made up of armour and coins and basically, it is the spoils of war. The problem is, we know very little about the Anglo Saxons and, what we do know has been written by the monks and priests, who were Christian and so, what they say about the pagan Angles, Saxons, Fresians and Jutes must be taken with a pinch of salt!

The intriguing part about the hoard is...how and when it was collected...what significance did it have for it to be collected in the first place and was it left to be picked up later.

It is believed that the Celts took the heads of their enemies, to give them insider knowledge about their enemies and thus defeat them better. Quite how they extracted this knowledge from dead heads is open to debate! Anyone? As there are no body parts (yet!) found in the hoard, one can probably rule out the gaining knowledge scenario. Unless, of course, it was the Celts who won that battle and it was them who collected the spoils, having already beheaded the enemy...they then took their wealth. Or, did the Anglo Saxons fight each other? The Celts certainly did. The problem historians have with the Anglo Saxons is that most of what we know comes from archaeology, like the Staffordshire find and that of Sutton Hoo. Archaeology is open to interpretation and that makes historians a little antsy about it. Some historians consider archeologists to erase pages of history as they dig and that may certainly be true of early archaeologists but not really of today, where they record everything.

Still, finding burial sites and seeing the things they were buried with, is fascinating but doesn't really give us the significance of the why. Tacitus, a Roman writer based with the legions in what is now Germany, wrote that the Germanic tribes were fierce warriors, that the women were as fierce in fighting as their men and that if they weren't fighting would stand at the sidelines, bare-breasted encouraging their men forward into battle. Yet no such evidence has been found in the Anglo Saxon graves here in Britain. The women have been buried with jewellery, keys and sewing kits, buttons, shells and cloak pins. Ne'ery a sword, buckle or shield boss to be found as they have in male graves. So basically, if the women were warriors, they were not expected to be warriors in the after-life or their grave goods certainly don't indicate this in any case. Yet, these were the same people, weren't they?

Furthermore, we are taught in school that the Anglo Saxons invaded Britain but this has now been disproved. A study of English place names would indicate that they did in fact come as settlers, bringing their wives and children with them. Invaders would immediately have made settlement names their own but England has many place names that have roots in Celtic, Latin and Anglo Saxon as well. This, to me at least, implies a quiet settling, relatively at peace with those indiginous peoples already here. Of course, I could be wrong, it has been known!!!

So...to the writings of Gildas Badonicus, a Celtic monk who spoke of the invasion of the Anglo Saxons as a plague of biblical proportion...a lesson if you will for the tyrant kings, the corrupt church and indolent priests in Britain. Forward to the Venerable Bede, himself an Anglo Saxon, who despite plagiarising Gildas' work unashamedly, described the Anglo Saxons as beloved of God! They were writing in the 6th and 8th centuries respectively. Which just goes to prove that they had hidden agendas even back then!!!

Oh dear, as I write, the lovely autumn day has clouded over and the wind chill has increased exponentially. It is a timely reminder that I should not be writing lectures on my blog for the instruction of all (and, let's be honest to the disinterest of many!!) but rather that I should be applying myself to writing it for my 2nd year Medieval History Uni students, who will, of course (!!) dazzle me with their sparkling insights into the cosmology of the Anglo Saxons but who are, unfortunately, more likely to ask me the worth of the hoard and whether or not it is worthwhile going out to buy metal detectors!!!