Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-42gr6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T23:13:57.582Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Fenland Frontier in Anglo-Saxon England

Part of: Anglo-Saxon archaeology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

H. C. Darby
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It would seem that the Anglo-Saxon invasion of a great part of eastern Britain in the fifth century radiated fan-wise from the gateway of the Wash and of the Fenland Gulf. If this is true, it is not surprising. The position of the continental base of the Anglo-Saxons made the area a natural entry into the Midland plain; and the invaders, with the Wash behind them, gazed upon no unfamiliar scene. The region into which they came may not have been so different from their former homeland on the flats of northern Germany, the homeland which Bede tells us they had so completely deserted. They penetrated by way of the Fenland rivers, up the Nene, the Welland, the Ouse, and the Witham, and this big spread was supplemented to the north and to the south by the smaller river entrances, the Bure, the Yare, the Waveney, the Humber and so on. The archaeological finds, as plotted by Mr Thurlow Leeds, are located along the courses of navigable streams and their tributaries, and are disposed concentrically around the Fenland. Dr Cyril Fox has moreover indicated affinities, during the earlier Saxon period, between the opposite shores of this marshy gulf. All had changed, however, when the tribes emerged into the light of history. The Fenland basin, characterized at an earlier epoch by a certain cultural unity, had now become a frontier region, separating peoples and exercising a repelling action revealed in the making of the Anglo-Saxon States. Kingdoms, finding their limits here, partitioned the marshy wastes between them, and the barrier of the Fens became a permanent feature in the political geography of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy.

Type
Articles
Information
Antiquity , Volume 8 , Issue 30 , June 1934 , pp. 185 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1934

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, bk I, chap. 15.

2 Archaeology of the Anglo–Saxon Settlement, 1913, p.18.Google Scholar

3 Archaeology of the Cambridge Region, 1923, p.315.Google Scholar

4 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum (ed. by Arnold, ), p.48;Google Scholar Matthew Paris, Chronica Maiora (ed. by Luard, ),1, p.237.Google Scholar See Kemble, The Saxons in England (1876) 1,Google Scholar appendix A ; Ekwall, English Place–names ending in Ing (1923) p.121.for a discussion of Kemble’s theory.Google Scholar

5 Cartularium Saxonicumed. Birch, I, 414.

6 Febvre, Geographical Introduction to History (1925), p.87.Google Scholar

7 Felix, Life of St. Guthlaced. by Goodwin, p. 21.

8 Codex Exonensised. by Thorpe, pp. 115, 120, 156, 158 ; ed. by Gollancz, pp.117, 123, 159, 161.

9 FOX OP .Cit.,p. 275.

10 Le Sol et I’Etat,(1911),p.38.

11 Chronica Maiora,anno. 1256.

12 FOX, OP. Cit., p. 294.

13 Memorials of St. Edmund’s Abbey,ed. by Arnold, I, 1–6.See Camden, Britannia(1607) p. 360 :—‘ This (i.e. the wall) for many miles crosses that plain that goes by the name of Newmarket Heath, a place most liable to invasion beginning at Rech, beyond which the country is fenny and unpassable, and ending just by Cowlidge where the woods stop all marches ’.

14 Felix,Guthluc, (Goodwin), p. 21. Grantchester refers not to the village of that The Latin version has ‘ haut procul a castella quod dicunt See Memname but to Cambridge. gronta ’ with variants of gronta,bricc added over line ; and nomine gronte.orials of St. Guthhc, in Latin, edited by W. de Gray Birch, p. 17

15 Actu Sanctorum ordinis S. Benedicti, ed. by Achery and Mabillon, 111, 5.

16 Felix,Guthluc, ed. by Birch, p. 17. Compare Beowulf’s account of the Frisianshore : ‘ This is no pleasant spot. Thence arisethaloft the vaprous blend ; and dark, to the clouds ’.

17 Codex Exon., pp. 120 and 123 of Thorpe’s edition. But see Gollancz, pp. 123 and 125. See also Actu Sunct., p. 6.

18 Felix,Guthlac(Goodwin), p. 29.

19 Codex Exon. p. 120 (Thorpe) ; and Gollancz, p. 123.

20 Ibid. p. 115 (Thorpe) ; and Gollancz, p. 117.

21 Ibid. pp. 118, 156–7 (Thorpe) ; and Gollancz, pp. 121, 159.

22 Cathdral Church of Ely, app. I, 51.See Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum, p. 56 :‘ ’Tis probable that our fens and morasses might be a long security to us against the Saxons '; Freeman, Norman Conquest (1876), IV, 470 ; and Conybeare, History of Cambridge (1897), p. 427, etc.

23 Memoirs Anthropological Society (1869), pp.458‘9.Google Scholar

24 Study of Man (1895), p.45.Google Scholar

25 ‘The Fens’ in Prose Idylls (1873), p.119.Google Scholar

26 Poems of Cynewulf, ed. by Kennedy, p. 268.

27 Felix, Guthlac (Birch), p. 29 ; The British are ‘ brettonica ’ and ‘ brittannica ’.See also Goodwin’s edition, p. 43. Gray, A. On the Late Survival of a Celtic Population in East Anglia, Procs. Camb. Antiq. SOC. 1911, p.42.Google Scholar

28 Cartularium Saxmicum, 991.

29 Chronicon Abbatiae Ramesienris, ed. by Macray, p. LXXVXI.

30 Chadwick, Origin of the English Nation (1905), p.172.Google Scholar

31 SeeAnglia Sacra, ed. by Wharton, I, 594 and 403.

32 Bede, I, 15 ; 111, 21.Saxon Chronicle, 655 and 657.

33 Liber Eliensis, ed. by Stewart, pp. 5,23,48Bede, 111, 18.Saxon Chronicle, 654;Anglia Sacra,I, 594.

34 Penda was killed in 655.Saxon Chronicle655 ; Bede, 111, 24.

35 Bede, IV, 19.

36 Acta Sancta., op. cit., 111, 5. The Saxon Chronicle for 657 declares that Mercia included Peterborough and ‘ these meres and lakes, Shelfermere, Whittleseymere and all the others which lie thereabouts ’. But some of the passages in this entry are clearly of a late date.

37 IV, 6

38 Liber Eliensis, p. 4.

39 See Note at end.

40 Bede, IV, 19.

41 Liber Eliensis, p. 18.

42 Venables and Wood,Diocese of Ely. Procs. Camb. Antiq. SOC. 1891, p. 164.

43 Liber Eliensis, p. 18.

44 Ibid.,p. 31 et seq.

45 Ibid.,p. 48.Saxon Chronicle, 673.

46 Liber Eliensis, p. 64.See Bede, IV, 19,whose spelling is Grantacaestir.

47 FOX,p.294.

48 Hyde Register, ed. by Birch, 88.

49 Felix,Guthlac (Birch), p. 17.

50 Saxon Chronicle,792.

51 Ibid.,823.

52 Saxon Chronicle,1004.

53 F. M. Stenton, in the volume of Essays presented to R. L. Poole, 1927.

54 Skeat,Lay of Havelok, p.XXXIV.

55 Stenton,op. cit., p. 147 note.

56 Saxon Chronicle, 617,627.Bede, 11,16.

57 Saxon Chronicle, 633.Bede, 111, I.

58 Bede, 111, I I.

59 Bede, 111, 9.Saxon Chronicle,642.

60 Saxon Chronicle,655.

61 Bede, 111, 24 ; IV. 3.

62 Bede, IV, 12.Saxon Chronicle,

63 Bede, IV, 21.Saxon Chronicle,679.

64 Saxon Chronicle,702.

65 Bede, 111, 11.

66 Romanes Lecture on ‘ Frontiers ’, 1907, p. 26.