From The Parts Beyond the Sea: The Legend of Hengest & Horsa and the Coming of the Anglo-Saxons

The year is 449 AD, and the British warlord Vortigern is in a state of desperation. Two plagues have hit Britannia in the last 20 years, and raiders from the “northern nations” – the Irish from the west and the Picts from the north – threaten the leaders of the former Roman province. Help is not coming from Rome; its military presence has been non-existent for years, and a plea from the Britons to the Roman General and three-time Consul Flavius Aetius – who is busy battling Attila the Hun in a bid to save the faltering Western Empire – falls on deaf ears. Vortigern and his council, neither able to defend their people on their own nor able to call on the Romans for aid, make a decision that will change the course of history forever: they hire aid from the Saxon nations of modern-day Germany.

That aid comes in three longships, commanded by the brothers Hengest and Horsa, descendants of Woden. They defeat a Pictish invasion from the north and are rewarded with plots of land in the east by Vortigern for their heroic defence of his kingdom. But their intention is not to protect their client nation. It is to enslave it. They send word back home of the weakness of the Britons and the fertility of their lands, and soon they are joined by a massive fleet consisting of men from the nations of the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes to form a formidable army. At first, they come to an agreement that they will defend the Britons from their attackers in exchange for land and pay. Then they strike a deal with the Picts. Soon, they demand greater and greater pay from their defenceless hosts and threaten to break their agreements with the Britons and ravage the lands if their demands are not met. They make good on these threats, plundering the cities and towns of the island from east to west coast, burning down buildings as they please, slaying priests before altars, killing countless innocents and enslaving the rest, except for those who manage to escape overseas or go into hiding in the mountains and woods. The Germanic invaders split the lands they conquer between them. The Jutes come to settle Kent (where Horsa would be buried after dying in battle) and the Isle of Wight, the Saxons give their name to the lands we now call Wessex, Sussex and Essex, and the Angles take the kingdoms above them, being the people from whom the East and Middle Angles, Mercians and Northumbrians can trace their heritage.

So began the tale of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England, as told by the Venerable Bede, the Northumbrian monk behind the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, possibly the most significant text Anglo-Saxon historians have at their disposal. Bede was copying the story from De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain), a sermon by the sixth-century monk Gildas containing a narrative history of the island from the Roman conquest to his own day. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also recounts the same story, specifying Hengest and Horsa’s landing site to be Eopwinesfleot, assumed to be the Kentish hamlet of Ebbsfleet. But in spite of this account being referenced by all three major contemporary works on the history of Anglo-Saxon Britain, it is almost universally agreed to be fictional.

Hengest and Horsa’s lineage tracing back to the pagan god Woden (or, to give him his more popular name, Odin) would be a telltale sign of a less-than-accurate account. So would the fact the names ‘Hengest’ and ‘Horsa’ translate literally to ‘Stallion’ and ‘Horse’, which, combined with their alliterative names being a frequent feature of Indo-European foundation myths, would suggest the two were about as likely to have existed as Romulus and Remus. This is not, however, to say that nothing about the story is plausible. If we take the more fantastical elements (i.e., the characters) out of this account, we are left with what is, on its own, a relatively believable explanation as to how settlers from modern-day Germany came to rule most of the British Isles: the Britons, suffering under raids from the north and west that they were incapable of defending against, brought in a force of warriors from Anglia, Saxony and Jutland as mercenaries. Those mercenaries, realising how exploitable the Britons were, demanded more and more land and pay from them, and eventually took over their kingdoms nonetheless.

The question then becomes: how realistic is this explanation?

The Britons’ decision to hire mercenary armies to fight off their invading neighbours, it may be surprising to learn, makes sense. This was an established Roman practice; in 423, Aetius was sent by his emperor Joannes to recruit a Hunnic army that would fight against his rival to the throne, Valentinian III; then the army switched sides after Joannes was deposed and ended up being paid by the new emperor’s family and given control of Gaul. The Visigothic Kingdom in the southwest of Gaul was offered land in the Pyrenees to put down a revolt against the Romans in the north of Hispania, and their King Theodoric later died fighting side by side with Aetius at the Catalaunian Plains in battle against the Huns. The Britons ultimately still saw themselves as Roman citizens, and given that they were previously forbidden from carrying weapons, had no Roman legions to call on for help, and were under constant attack from Pictish, Irish and Saxon raiders (the Saxons were not unfamiliar with the shores of Britain, being listed as one of the groups who took part in a great raid on the island in 367), the natural response for the British authorities was to recruit one group of barbarians to defend against the others.

But while this detail holds up, the dates provided by this story do not. Bede tells us the English arrived around 449 AD, based on inferences made from Gildas. In his account, which uses accurate late Roman terminology (referring, for example, to the supplies the Britons requested of Aetius as epimenia, a word that had made its way from Greek into the Roman vocabulary), Bede noticed that in the Britons’ letter to Aetius they refer to him as “thrice-consul”. We also know that Bede had access to a list of Roman consuls year by year and could see that Aetius was consul for the third time in 446, and then made consul a fourth time in 453, which gave Bede a rough range of dates for when the letter was sent. The two monks, however, both made the assumption that it was Pictish raiders the Britons referenced in their letters. But what if they wanted Aetius’s help against the Saxons? Accounts from Germanus, a bishop visiting Britain in 429, indicate that the Saxons were already established in Britain at that point, as he gives encouragement to a British army who are said to be fighting them; and archaeological evidence in the form of buildings and artefacts not seen in Rome but commonplace in Germany and Scandinavia broadly backs this up. The apocalyptic attacks Bede describes once the barbarians broke their deal with the Britons also seem to match up strangely well with an entry from the Gallic Chronicle, a set of annals composed in 452, for the year 441 AD: “The Britains [sic], having been up to this time afflicted by various disasters and vicissitudes, were brought under the control of the Saxons” – eight years before Bede says the Anglo-Saxons first arrived, and five before the letter to Aetius could have been written. It is not unthinkable that the Britons managed to hold out for five years; Bede mentions that one of the fictional brothers (Horsa) was killed in battle with the Britons and buried in Kent, indicating that the Britons did fight back against their soon-to-be barbarian overlords. Equally, that annal does not actually tell us that the conquest was absolute – it uses the word latae to indicate that the Britons were brought widely under the control of the Saxons, and how much heavy lifting that word is doing is up for debate. The later emergence of Ambrosius Aurelianus, a Roman of high descent who survived the carnage and led the remaining Britons to victory over the barbarians, culminating in the Battle of Mons Badonicus, would suggest the conquest of Britain was not entire; parts of the island belonged to the barbarians, especially in the east, but the Britons still retained sections of their homeland.

Other elements of the Anglo-Saxons’ arrival in Britain cannot be explained through this story, of course. When it comes to trying to map out how power dynamics worked after the Saxons’ arrival, Gildas’s account would indicate that in the east there were the Saxons, in the west there were the Britons, and the two warred wherever they met. The archaeology presents a more complex picture, with the locations of British and Anglo-Saxon burial grounds and clothing accessories from this time period indicating that, especially in the south, there were plenty of Romano-Britons who simply adopted certain traditions such as burial rituals from the new Germanic settlers. Then there is the question of settlement and population in post-Roman Britain. Gildas would have us believe that in the areas overtaken by the Anglo-Saxons, the Britons were either killed or enslaved. Historians generally reject this narrative, but there is debate in the field as to the extent of Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain, and whether the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons was a mass movement that saw great numbers of laymen from the continent come to the island, or something more akin to the later Norman conquest, where a smaller number of individuals came and established a new ruling class, with the natives simply adopting and emulating the culture of their new masters. The former argument is supported by the triumph of the English language over large parts of Britain, unlikely to have occurred without a significant number of settlers already speaking the Germanic language arriving from overseas, as well as the logistical feasibility of a large-scale migration: Marc Morris in 2021 noted that a letter from a contemporary bishop in Gaul described a practice the Anglo-Saxon raiders had when returning home via boat after taking their plunder, whereby they would drown every tenth captive they took as part of a religious ritual, demonstrating that at a bare minimum, their boats could take ten passengers. He then calculated that if each boat could only fit ten people aboard, and 100 boats made five trips a year over fifty years, then that would bring the number of Germanic settlers to a sizeable quarter of a million. However, the late Roman population of Britain has been estimated to have been two million at the lowest, and as such it is harder to argue that the migrants could have outnumbered the native Britons, even if their numbers were significant. It is also important to note that there are signs that a large number of Britons learnt to speak English, in particular when looking at two particular features unique to the language grammatically: English’s abnormally frequent usage of the word ‘do’ (“did you speak to him”, “I do know about this”, etc.), and its use of the present participle when speaking in the present tense (“I am writing”, etc.). These two features make the English language an outlier from the Germanic language family it originated from, where neither of these features are or were regularly used in conversation. Where they are frequently used, however, is in Welsh, and presumably the British languages from which it originated. This would suggest a large number of Britons learning a broken version of the language, applying the settlers’ vocabulary to their native tongue’s grammatical rules.

When it comes to explaining the beginning of Anglo-Saxon presence in Britain from a political point of view, however, a version of the legend found in the major pre-Norman accounts – with the errors made by Gildas accounted for – holds water: the Roman legions departed in the early 400s AD, and the Britons fell victim to raids from the Picts to the north, Irish to the west and Germanic peoples to the east. In typical late Roman fashion, they recruited the raiders from the continent to defend them from the others around the mid-420s, promising them land and pay in return for defence. This deal soon turned sour, as the Britons’ new mercenary army realised how vulnerable their hosts were and began demanding more and more of them. By 442, it had turned catastrophic for the Britons, with the raiders to whom they had given a foothold on the east of their island now turning their arms against them. Despite putting up a fight, the Britons were eventually overrun in the south and east. They would not disappear from their homeland so easily, but from this point onward their homeland was no longer theirs alone.