Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Bede's Austere History

Got your laptop on the beach with you? Here's a bit of light reading, to be set next to the recent post by Professor Joy Anglo-Saxons Were Apartheid Racists! and the follow up discissions On Medieval Race and On the nonexistence of race.

Today's point of departure is the simple fact that all this talk about the sustained genetic purity of the Anglo-Saxons (were the aboriginal British wiped out so that a Germanic stock thrived in isolation?) can obscure the cultural hybridity that always erupts when one group welcomes, dominates, vilifies, eradicates, accepts, dreams about another.

A fuller discussion, less rough and with footnotes, can be found in Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain. If I were to rewrite that chapter now, I would have emphasized more the violence that accompanies this moment of cultural contact; I fear that the discussion of hybridity comes across as too disembodied.


The Venerable Bede finished his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum [Ecclesiastical History of the English People] around 731. The heart of his narrative spans the fifth through early eighth centuries, a time when the isles were a maelstrom of cultural clash, admixture, alliance. The Picts and the Britons (disparate and shifting collectives of peoples, some Romanized, some not) formed their greater and smaller collectives, many enduring for years, others coalescing as briefly as the life of a warrior-king. Immigrants from Ireland arrived in what would someday be called Scotland and Wales, establishing the maritime kingdom of Dál Riata. Lively exchange with the continent was a constant. Beginning in the fifth century ethnically various peoples migrated from southern Scandinavia and northern Germany, assimilating or incorporating some indigenous groups, displacing or eradicating others. Over time these plunderers-turned-settlers combined warbands with more sedentary pursuits. Medieval writers referred to this settlement as the adventus Saxonum; modern historians label it the Anglo-Saxon migration, the foundation for what becomes England. Recent archeological and historical work has stressed the survival of native polities, forging out of patchy amalgamations of Anglo-Saxon and Romano-British elements emergent kingdoms like Mercia. Upstart realms fought relentlessly for hegemony, incorporating conquered rivals to form larger kingdoms, expanding into lands still held by Britons and Picts. These peoples, meanwhile, continued to form their own shifting solidarities, especially in the form of competitive principalities.






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