Arthur's dykes

[Jim Webster]

Koch does indeed give us examples of equitable co-existence in the Gododdin and in his treatment of the career of Penda.  In both those cases we are not in circumstances of Anglian dominance.

When the Angles or Saxons are securely dominant, we see the lack of equality located by Alex Woolf in his essay Apartheid and Economics.
Woolf shows the long- term effect of Ine's Law and similar statutes was to reduce the status of the native population to an unfree population supporting a Germanic over class. This was accomplished by differing levels of wergild. 

Therefore, it was not possible for a British peasant to learn a bit of German and declare himself a Saxon or an Angle because to do so would deprive the actual Saxons or Angles of material benefit.  Doing so would break both the letter and spirit of the laws and would not be permitted by the kings who promulgated them.  Equally a subject British nobleman could not expect his family to maintain its status nor could he proclaim himself an Angle or whatever to preserve it.

The problem with Ine's law is that it dates from about 694AD
The laws are from a more settled time when boundaries had hardened.

When we look at the period from 400 to 500AD there are several things we ought to note
Firstly at this point how 'Christian' were the Britons anyway? There appears to be a strong school of thought that it hadn't spread much among the rural peasantry (the term pagan comes from pagensis, the country people)
Certainly in Gaul there was a lot of missionary activity in this century as urban based Christianity tried to reach out into the countryside

Secondly we have to ask how 'free' the native peasantry was anyway. The colonoi were certainly not free to just up sticks and get a better life, or a more advantageous tenancy.

Thirdly how much Latin did the peasantry speak anyway?

So you can legitimately postulate a semi-free peasantry who had a traditional folk religion and spoke a local dialect with some latin loan words
If the Saxons appear, they can happily remain a semi-free peasantry with their traditional folk religion and add a few German loan words to the dialect.
Indeed it would be easy enough to add Wotan into the folk religion as just another god, whilst the Saxons, doubtless like the Romans before them, would happily accept the local spirits of place because you never want to upset them.
Even now people throw offerings into wells and pools

[Imperial Dave]

good points Jim. I agree re the pagan/Christian conundrum for Post Roman Britain. We could even look at the lowland/highland split in addition too which effectively flipped on its head with the extreme West becoming highly (celtic) Christianised in this period

[Patrick Waterson]

The problem with Ine's law is that it dates from about 694AD
The laws are from a more settled time when boundaries had hardened.

Valid point, Jim, though I am wondering whether Ine's Law was a codification of existing practice.

When we look at the period from 400 to 500AD there are several things we ought to note
Firstly at this point how 'Christian' were the Britons anyway? There appears to be a strong school of thought that it hadn't spread much among the rural peasantry (the term pagan comes from pagensis, the country people)
Certainly in Gaul there was a lot of missionary activity in this century as urban based Christianity tried to reach out into the countryside

There is also the question of how much the countryside 'mattered' with regard to religious orientation: Britain was Christian enough to worry about the Pelagian doctrine or heresy and was apparently riddled with 'living saints' who were as Christian as they were antisocial, which suggests a wide base of tolerance and support.  Otherwise I would not be at all surprised to learn that many country folk still adhered to the old ways in at least some aspects (country folk often do so).  Not sure this would in any way endear them to the Saxons, though.

Secondly we have to ask how 'free' the native peasantry was anyway. The colonoi were certainly not free to just up sticks and get a better life, or a more advantageous tenancy.

This would seem to come down to: who owned the land, the sheep and the cattle?  Some coloni might argue that servitude to a barbarian was little different to servitude to the Empire's tax gatherers; do we know how much of Imperial administration (and in particular Imperial taxation) had survived by this point?  Gildas seems to suggest that it was all local cities and tribes under local chieftains, but we think he was writing post-'Arthur'.

So you can legitimately postulate a semi-free peasantry who had a traditional folk religion and spoke a local dialect with some latin loan words
If the Saxons appear, they can happily remain a semi-free peasantry with their traditional folk religion and add a few German loan words to the dialect.

I suppose the real question is whether the traditionally land- and pillage- addicted Saxons would give them the chance in the first place.  Given that the peasantry is part of a social organisation rather than an independent transferrable asset and that the Saxons tended to bring their own social organisation to occasionally ally with and more often beat up one of the British social organisations, I suspect the process of adaptation would take place when the survivors were gathered together by their new masters.

Would a semi-(or even predominantly-)pagan peasant populace actually add Wotan to their pantheon?  Conquerors tended to be jealous of their gods, and conquest tended to be taken as a sign that the conqueror's deities were superior, so the victors might not be keen to let the vanquished worship the deity or deities of the conquerors.  As far as I know, the only people who made a habit of acquiring other people's gods were the Romans, who used a ceremony called the evocatio to promise the said deities that the Romans would for the future worship them better then their current adherents, so could the said gods please withdraw their support for the said adherents while the Romans attacked and conquered the latter?  That said, if the Saxons had a deity who could make beans and corn grow and keep sheep and cattle disease-free, I can see possibilities.

Going off on a different and only distantly related tack, Gododdin strikes me as an attempt by someone to recreate the doings of 'Arthur' without understanding the substance, perhaps because he had received his account via bards.  Assembling 300 picked warriors from all over the country is very 'round table'-ish, but hosting and feasting them for a year with no mention of training and tactics suggests a very bards'-eye view of Camelot.  And missing out on the essential step of gathering the soldiery of the country to accompany the 300 into battle also indicates a narrowly Bardic perspective of Arthurian achievement, which these songsters presumably represented as being down to Arthur's comites alone rather than an army (cf. some mediaeval accounts where battles are apparently won by a handful of knights but reading between the lines indicates accompaniment by a strong force of social inferiors unmentioned in the text).  The moral would seem to be: learn generalship from generals, not from bards.

[Jim Webster]

Land is worthless without people to cultivate it.
When a Saxon chieftain and his followers overran another village or two, the chieftain isn't going to turn to the followers who want rewarding and say, "Here, we'll butcher the peasants and you can grovel in the mud as a subsistence farmer." He's not going to improve their lot by doing that.
Yes, at certain times of the year, even as the owner/tenant of the farm they would have to roll up their sleeves and work. We can see this in Norse Sagas. But the newly enriched warrior wants people on site to do the bulk of the work, and the chieftain doesn't want to lose a warrior to a lifetime in peasant agriculture.
Peasantry are a transferable asset, they come with the land. You want them. In fact nobody in the world knows the problems and potential of your new land than the peasantry who are currently tilling it for whoever owned it last

Found this on a BBC website. "Dr Stephan Schiffels of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany sequenced genomes of human remains from Hinxton, Saffron Walden, Linton and Oakington - all of which are near Cambridge.

The burials fall into three different age categories: Iron Age, early Anglo-Saxon and Middle Anglo-Saxon.

Contrary to narratives suggesting large-scale displacement of the Britons by Anglo-Saxon invaders, the researchers found evidence of intermarriage in the earliest phase of settlement."


As for codification of law. Given that these laws weren't written down how old were they and how much had existing practice evolved over eight or nine generations?
But actually it doesn't really matter, because for the unfree, changing master can be no big deal of you never see them.
With regard to Britain was Christian enough to worry about the Pelagian doctrine, that could merely be the surviving cities. As for anti-social living saints, they could have been limited to the west, where there was more room to be an anti-social hermit. But the fact remains, there are very few signs of Christianity to be discovered, and even if the peasantry were Christian, by definition it didn't strike deep roots because they largely drifted back into paganism in time to be reconverted.

[Nick Harbud]

Even now people throw offerings into wells and pools

...or, indeed, the engines on jet aircraft they are about to travel on.   

[Erpingham]

Valid point, Jim, though I am wondering whether Ine's Law was a codification of existing practice.

Even so, when did the existing practice arise?  It is easy enough to suggest there is a "storming and norming" phase in the 5th century where things Germanic sphere are more fluid and allegiances change with regard to utility rather than ethnicity before the rather more ethnic comes to dominate later, as polities firm up. 

On the Gododdin, it needs to be taken as what it is - an epic poem reflecting what its listeners saw as noble virtues.  That's not to say it doesn't have value in reconstructing warfare of the Early Medieval Britain but expecting it to detail weapons practice or even the raising of other , non-heroic, forces might be a stretch. 

[aligern]

Whilst we really do not know the actuality of religious observance  among the Anglo Saxon peasantry it has plausibly been suggested that the invaders had a two tier religion with the nobility following the sky gods and the mass following more bucolic deities . There may well have been a very permeable barrier rather than two systems.  What does seem apparent is that, for the Britons , religion was a denominator, they made little effort to convert the Saxons . This  mirrors the way that Vandals and Visigoths maintained their Arian creed as a way of protecting identity.  Certainly in the Anglo Saxon areas of England there was considerable, indeed murderous resistance to conversion, perhaps because it represented a dilution of the priestly power of the nobility by establishing a separate priesthood that depended upon and reinforced the power of the kings.  Of course traditionalists may have resisted because they thought that the foreign religion would bring bad luck in war ...it had not exactly delivered victory to the Britons.
Roy

[Anton]

Yes, I would say Ine's Law represents the end of a process.  Before its promulgation things had presumably been different and in flux.  It was a clever bit of legislation for it brought the British into the king's peace and allows them to live unmolested if second class lives.  It also set up a continuing system of rewards for the king's key German followers. Very good for group cohesion and eventually any wealth the king's British subjects had was transferred to his German subjects.

Gododdin and the other early Brythonic/Welsh poems have lots to tell us beyond listing heroic virtues.  Mostly in the incidental detail contained in the verses.

Marwanad Cunedda for example has no Christian references at all. Its dated to 383 AD and Cunedda and his court seem to be pagans.  Maybe the men of the civates they fought alongside were pagan too. 

The big Christian pushes for conversion seem to have come with the ultra- orthodox Flavius Magnus Maximus Augustus- Macsen Wledig who ruled the western empire between 383 and 388 AD and St Martin who died in 397 AD.  Dark sees the evangelising Martinians as revolutionary.  Also, if Koch is right in suggesting an early chronology for St Patrick then the conversion had included the British polities beyond the Wall.  We have two arms to the conversion the usual top down from the Emperor and the bottom up from St. Martin.  I'd say Britannia was as Christian as Macsen and St Martin could make it.

[Erpingham]

Gododdin and the other early Brythonic/Welsh poems have lots to tell us beyond listing heroic virtues.  Mostly in the incidental detail contained in the verses.

No argument with that but it remains that they are not military histories - they express things differently to, say, a prose history or a legal text. 

[Imperial Dave]

Gododdin and the other early Brythonic/Welsh poems have lots to tell us beyond listing heroic virtues.  Mostly in the incidental detail contained in the verses.

No argument with that but it remains that they are not military histories - they express things differently to, say, a prose history or a legal text.

true, however we have precious little military histories for the period, in fact very little histories at all

[Jim Webster]

Even now people throw offerings into wells and pools

...or, indeed, the engines on jet aircraft they are about to travel on.   

but they were 'lucky' coins!

[Erpingham]

Even now people throw offerings into wells and pools

...or, indeed, the engines on jet aircraft they are about to travel on.   

but they were 'lucky' coins!

Indeed.  I'm not sure I would have spotted a coin the size of a 2p by the engine - lucky somebody did.

[Patrick Waterson]

Even now people throw offerings into wells and pools

...or, indeed, the engines on jet aircraft they are about to travel on.   

but they were 'lucky' coins!

Indeed.  I'm not sure I would have spotted a coin the size of a 2p by the engine - lucky somebody did.

Otherwise it would have been a definite case of Foreign Object Damage.  I assume - drifting off topic for a moment - that we all have some idea of how turbine engines work and why one does not let any sort of loose objects near them.  Our Chinese traveller evidently had no such idea.  He is a good illustration of the basic fact that what is not taught is not known, and I see some of this in the Gododdin, even allowing for the fact that it is a tale told by a bard, full of sound and fury, as opposed to a 'history'.  Taking the tale at face value is quite enough to explain the defeat, if what was described was indeed what was done.  Bringing together 300 picked warriors from all over and royally feasting them looks to me very like someone going through the motions of trying to build a 'round table' equivalent without really understanding what it takes to win a war.

[Imperial Dave]

I think y Gododdin is a bardic description of a historic battle and not a, albeit distorted, reflection of what actually happened. The Men of The North were a martial lot and would have known how to fight. The point about y Gododdin is it's a praise poem in a society where tales and stories about war leaders needed to be embellished and given lots of artistic licence

[Imperial Dave]

https://www.academia.edu/39676232/The_Sources_and_Contributors_of_the_Northern_Memorandum_and_its_Heirs?auto=download

worth a read.....not dyke related but Arthurian nonetheless