Blood and Bone: England and Germany in the Dark Ages

I should probably start by apologising for the title.

In the eighth century there was no ‘England’ (unified only in the tenth century), there was no ‘Germany’ (unified in the nineteenth century), and we early medievalists really don’t like the term ‘Dark Ages’.

Right, now that’s sorted, let’s talk about blood and bone.

Two World Wars and one World Cup

Judging from the current ‘ding-dong’ (as Mary Beard referred to it on BBC Radio 4 last Sunday morning) between Michael Gove and Richard Evans about public remembrance of the First World War, it’s clear that the historical relationship between England and Germany is going to be popping up a lot in the news over the next four years.

It’s sad that the modern English perception of Germany is still so dominated by the World Wars. (‘Two World Wars and one World Cup’, as the football chant goes.) The medievalist, to whom any history after about 1789 is basically journalism, naturally takes a longer view. He or she might see the wars of the twentieth century as a regrettable blip in the relationship between two populations who historically have a great deal in common.

Out of Germany 

Image from Wikipedia Commons

More than a thousand years ago, the Venerable Bede, an Anglo-Saxon monk living in Jarrow about A.D. 730, wrote down one of the earliest known accounts of ‘English’ origins. He believed that the English – or the Anglo-Saxons, as we normally call them – only came to Britain across the North Sea about three hundred years earlier.

“Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany [Germania]: Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West Saxons who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight. From the Saxons, that is, the country which is now called Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. From the Angles, that is, the country which is called Anglia, and which is said, from that time, to remain deserted to this day, between the provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, are descended the East Angles, the Midland Angles, Mercians, all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the river Humber, and the other nations of the English.”

Bede is known as ‘the Father of English History’ for this work, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He was writing two centuries before the Anglo-Saxons were finally brought together into a single kingdom called ‘England’. Even so, he viewed the Anglo-Saxons as a single people, unified by three things:

1. Language (English, or ‘Old English’ as we now call it) 
2. Religion (the newly introduced Christianity) 
3. A common origin in ‘Germania’ (what are now the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Denmark)

The Roman coastal fort at Portchester (Hants), one of the mythical landing places of the Anglo-Saxons

It’s strange to think of now, but Bede still saw his own people essentially as immigrants. (This is why Anglo-Saxonists like myself rip our hair out when the BNP and other right-wing groups talk about the English as the ‘indigenous’ inhabitants of Britain – but that’s a topic for another time).

Lingua Germanica

So the Anglo-Saxons and the various peoples of ‘Germania’ were basically cousins. In fact, Bede writes as though the Anglo-Saxons were of pure Germanic descent, but that certainly wasn’t the case; from the very beginning the immigrants had intermarried with the pre-existing population of Britain.

In terms of language, though, he was spot-on. The closest ‘relative’ to modern English is Frisian, a dialect of Dutch. If Eddie Izzard can go to Frisia and, speaking only Old English, manage to buy a brown cow (or brúnu cú) from a local farmer, then his eighth-century counterpart would have had no trouble at all making himself understood across the North Sea.

Christians and pagans

An ancient oak in Reinhardswald, near Kassel

But there was one big difference between the Anglo-Saxons and their distant cousins in Germania: religion. The peoples across the Rhine had never been fully converted to Christianity, and were largely still pagan. They were devoted to gods like Thunaer and Wodan, and given to arcane rituals in forest groves and at natural springs.

This was a big deal for devout Christians like Bede. Judgement Day was coming, and it was crucial to spread the ‘light of salvation’ to every corner of the world. How could the Anglo-Saxons stand by and let their close relatives dwell in darkness, and be doomed to eternal damnation? Something had to be done.

And so from the 690s onwards there was a stream of charismatic, idealistic Anglo-Saxon missionaries across the North Sea, determined to bring the Word of the Gospels to the ‘ignorant’ pagans of Germania.

There were men like the Northumbrian Willibrord, who became Bishop of Utrecht and was buried in his monastery of Echternach, in modern Luxembourg; or like Boniface, originally from Devon, who led a 33-year mission that stretched from Frisia to Bavaria, became an archbishop and the foremost representative of the pope north of the Alps, and is now patron saint of Germany. Or there were remarkable women like Boniface’s relative Leoba, the miracle-working abbess of Tauberbischofsheim, who won the respect of bishops and kings alike, and ended up a saint herself.

There is something distasteful about these figures to modern liberal sensitivities. They smack of later European missionaries to Africa, with their patronising, contemptuous view of indigenous religions, and their unashamed desire to impose Christianity on people who did not always want it.

But there is no denying their courage. Germania was not always a safe place. Two of the first missionaries to enter Saxony were stabbed to death and dumped in the Rhine. In 751, pagan rebels burned more than 30 of Boniface’s churches to the ground. Boniface himself was eventually murdered by brigands in Frisia, butchered along with about 50 of his companions, whose corpses were left scattered in the marshes of Dokkum.

Blood and bone 

Despite all this, the missionaries kept coming. One priest in Wessex, hearing that there might be a new mission into Saxony, wrote an excited letter to the Anglo-Saxon bishop of Mainz:

Modern statue of Boniface at Fritzlar

“If a door of divine mercy should be opened to the region of our people – that is, among the Saxons – be sure to inform us of the matter. There are many who would like to hurry this door with their help, with the assistance of God.”

Our people, he wrote. This Anglo-Saxon priest, even though his ancestors might have left Germania three hundred years earlier, still viewed the continental Saxons as family.

Before his martyrdom Boniface also wrote back home, urging the Anglo-Saxon church to support his mission with their prayers, so that God would “convert the hearts of the pagan Saxons to the faith”. “Have pity on them,” he wrote, “for their repeated cry is: ‘We are of one blood and bone’.”

This, I think, will be a useful phrase to keep in mind over the next few years, as the centeneries of the most terrible battles of the First World War pop in and out of the headlines.

Of course we must never forget the lessons of that war. But at the same time, we should take the long view and see it for what it was: an awful violation of a relationship between two peoples whose common roots, in history as well as in culture and language, go far deeper than the mud of the Somme.