Free Foundation (History of England Vol 1) by Peter Ackroyd Page B

available to defend it. So the Angles, and the Saxons, moved westward. Anglo-Saxon civilization was created by a pandemic.
    One of the leaders of the Saxons, Ceawlin, had reached as far as Cirencester, Gloucester and Bath by 577; seven years later his forces had penetrated the midlands. The native kings were thereby deposed. This was the pattern throughout the country. The pressure was growing on the Durotriges of Somerset and Dorset and as a result there was an exodus of native people to Armorica, on the Atlantic coast of north-western France, where their leaders took control of large tracts of land. They may have been welcomed. They were perhaps part of the same tribe. So the region of Brittany emerged. The Bretons in fact retained their old tribal allegiances, and never really thought of themselves as part of the French state. Some of them came back. A Breton contingent was among the forces of William the Conqueror, which chose to settle in south-west England. They had come home at last.
    In the end the natives would be so mixed and mingled with the new settlers that the term Saxon or Angle ceased to have anymeaning. All would become English. Yet it was a slow process. Much of western England was still under the rule of native kings 200 years after the first Saxons arrived; the native kingdom of Elmet, now known as the West Riding of Yorkshire, survived until the early seventh century and the ‘Anglo-Saxon invasion’ only came to an end with the capture of Gwynedd by Edward I in 1282. Celtic speakers were to be found in Cornwall at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and the language did not wholly die until the eighteenth century.
    The settlements of the Germanic tribes took the form of small folk territories, made up of groups of warriors and marked off by river boundaries. So the followers of Haesta created Hastings and the followers of Gilla established Ealing. The people of the Peak district, the people of the Chilterns, and the people of the Wrekin, were all given distinct topographical names. Jarrow means ‘among the Jyrwe’, a small tribe found in the fen district as well as in Northumberland. The immense number of small tribes was gradually aligned for the purposes of defence or warfare. Over-kings emerged as the leaders and protectors of tribal chiefs, and by 600 the recognizable kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England begin to enter recorded history. The kingdom of the East Angles was formed together with those of the East Saxons and the Mercians.
    These were societies of rank, based upon a structure of burdens and obligations imposed by the warlords and their entourage. There were slaves, there were landless workers, there were ceorls or free heads of households, and there were thegns or noblemen, with all possible divisions and distinctions within each rank. The financial penalties for murder, for example, were graded according to the ‘worth’ of the victim. It was a harsh and divisive society, only made possible by the continuous exploitation of the unfree. In that respect, it may not have differed very much from any previous English polity. There never was any Rousseau-esque state of equality in nature. There always was a system of lordship and vassalage.
    And what of the native English? They endured the change of leadership. Most of them worked the soil, as before, and paid taxor tribute to the local lord. The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience. The artisans and merchants were still here. It was in the interest of the Angles and the Saxons to utilize what remained of Romanized English civilization. They did not exterminate the native population because they needed it. They had no aversion to the practices of the open field and could quickly accustom themselves to working the land according to the traditional methods of the English.
    In the first years, however, there may have been a form of separation or apartheid between