The first such overlord was Aelle of Sussex, in the late 5th century; the second was Ceawlin of Wessex, who died in 593. The third overlord, Aethelberht of Kent, held this power in 597 when the monk Augustine led a mission from Rome to Kent; Kent was the first English kingdom to be converted to Christianity. The Christian church provided another unifying influence, overriding political divisions, although it was not until 669 that the church in England acknowledged a single head. The social system
Aethelberht set down in writing a code of laws; although it reflects Christian influence, the system underlying the laws was already old, brought over from the Continent in its main lines. The strongest social bond of this system was that of kinship; every freeman depended on his kindred for protection, and the social classes were distinguished by the amount of their wergild (the sum that the kindred could accept in place of vengeance if a man were killed). The normal freeman was the ceorl, an independent peasant landowner; below him in Kent were persons with lower wergilds, who were either freedmen or, as were similar persons in Wessex, members of a subject population; above the ceorls were the nobles—some perhaps noble by birth but more often men who had risen by service as companions of the king—with a wergild three times that of a ceorl in Kent, six times that of a ceorl elsewhere. The tie that bound a man to his lord was as strong as that of the kindred. Both nobles and ceorls might possess slaves, who had no wergild and were regarded as chattels.
Early traditions, embodied in king lists, imply that all Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Sussex were established by rulers deemed to have descended from the gods. No invading chieftain is described by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as “king”—although the title was soon used—and chieftainship, as before the conquest, remained central to Germanic tribal society. The sacral character of kingship later increased and changed in meaning as the Christian ruler was set apart by coronation and anointment. In the established English kingdoms the king had special rights—compensations for offenses committed in his presence or his home or against anyone under his protection; rights to hospitality, which later became a food rent charged on all land; and rights to various services. He rewarded his followers with grants of land, probably at first for their lifetime only, but the need to provide permanent endowment for the church brought into being a type of land that was free from most royal dues and that did not revert to the king. From the latter part of the 7th century such land was sometimes conferred by charter. It became common to make similar grants by charter to laymen, with power to bequeath; but three services—the building of forts and bridges and service in the army—were almost invariably excepted from the immunity. The king received fines for various crimes; but a man’s guilt was established in an assembly of freemen, where the accused tried to establish his innocence by his oath—supported by oath helpers—and, if this failed, by ordeal. On matters of importance the king normally consulted his witan (wise men).
There were local variations in the law, and over a period of time the law developed to meet changed circumstances. As kingdoms grew larger, for example, an official called an ealderman was needed to administer part of the area, and later a sheriff was needed to look after the royal rights in each shire. The acceptance of Christianity made it necessary to fit the clergy into the scale of compensations and assign a value to their oaths and to fix penalties for offenses such as sacrilege, heathen practices, and breaches of the marriage law. But the basic principles were little changed.
The Anglo-Saxons left England a land of villages, but the continuity of village development is uncertain. In the 7th–8th centuries, in what is called the “Middle Saxon shuffle,” many early villages were abandoned, and others, from which later medieval villages descended, were founded. The oldest villages are not, as previously thought, those with names ending in -ingas but rather those ending in -ham and -ingham. English trading towns, whose names often end in -wich, from the Latin vicus (“village”), developed in the Middle Saxon period, and other urban settlements grew out of and date from the Alfredian and later defenses against Viking attack. The conversion to Christianity
Place-names containing the names of gods or other heathen elements are plentiful enough to prove the vitality of heathenism and to account for the slow progress of conversion in some areas. In Kent, the first kingdom to accept Christianity, King Wihtred’s laws in 695 contained clauses against heathen worship. The conversion renewed relations with Rome and the Continent; but the full benefit of this was delayed because much of England was converted by the Celtic church, which had lost contact with Rome.
Augustine’s mission in 597 converted Kent; but it had only temporary success in Essex, which reverted to heathenism in 616. A mission sent under Bishop Paulinus from Kent to Northumbria in 627 converted King Edwin and many of his subjects in Northumbria and Lindsey. It received a setback in 632 when Edwin was killed and Paulinus withdrew to Kent. About 630 Archbishop Honorius of Canterbury sent a Burgundian, Felix, to convert East Anglia, and the East Anglian church thenceforth remained faithful to Canterbury. Soon after, the West Saxons were converted by Birinus, who came from Rome. Meanwhile, King Oswald began to restore Christianity in Northumbria, bringing Celtic missionaries from Iona. And it was the Celtic church that began in 653 to spread the faith among the Middle Angles, the Mercians, and the peoples of the Severn valley; it also won back Essex.
At first there was little friction between the Roman and Celtic missions. Oswald of Northumbria joined with Cynegils of Wessex in giving Dorchester-on-Thames as seat for Birinus’ bishopric; the Irishmen Maildubh in Wessex and Fursey in East Anglia worked in areas converted by the Roman church; and James the Deacon continued Paulinus’ work in Northumbria. Later, however, differences in usage—especially in the calculation of the date of Easter—caused controversy, which was settled in favour of the Roman party at the Synod of Whitby in 664. The adherents of Celtic usage either conformed or withdrew, and advocates of Roman practice became active in the north, the Midlands, and Essex. Theodore of Tarsus (arrived 669), the first Roman archbishop to be acknowledged all over England, was active in establishing a proper diocesan system, whereas in the Celtic church bishops tended to move freely without fixed sees and settled boundaries; he held the first synod of the English church at Hertford in 672, and this forbade a bishop to interfere in another’s diocese or any priest to move into another diocese without his bishop’s permission. Sussex and the Isle of Wight—the last outposts of heathenism—were converted by Bishop Wilfrid and his followers from 681 to 687 and thenceforth followed Roman usages.
The Anglo-Saxons attributed their conversion to Pope Gregory I, “the Apostle of the English,” who had sent Augustine. This may seem less than fair to the Celtic mission. The Celtic church made a great impression by its asceticism, fervour, and simplicity, and it had a lasting influence on scholarship. Yet the period of Celtic dominance was only 30 years. The decision at Whitby made possible a form of organization better fitted for permanent needs than the looser system of the Celtic church. The golden age of Bede
Within a century of Augustine’s landing, England was in the forefront of scholarship. This high standard arose from a combination of influences: that from Ireland, which had escaped the decay caused elsewhere by the barbarian invasions, and that from the Mediterranean, which reached England mainly through Archbishop Theodore and his companion, the abbot Adrian. Under Theodore and Adrian, Canterbury became a famous school, and men trained there took their learning to other parts of England. One of these men was Aldhelm, who had been a pupil of Maildubh (the Irish founder of Malmesbury); under Aldhelm, Malmesbury became an influential centre of learning. Aldhelm’s own works, in Latin verse and prose, reveal a familiarity with many Latin authors; his writings became popular among admirers of the ornate and artificial style he had learned from his Celtic teachers. Before long a liberal education could be had at such other West Saxon monasteries as Nursling and Wimborne.