Through a Glass Darkly: The Origins of English Kingship

The origins of English kingship lie in the fitfully-lit, if no longer pitch-dark years of the fifth and sixth centuries; the age of the adventus Saxonum and the English settlements, where archaeologists tread warily and historians venture at their peril.2 Sources for these centuries are not completely lacking, but they are fragmentary, partial and ambiguous. Continental writers of the fifth and sixth centuries occasionally refer to events and people in Britain, but indigenous sources are few and mostly composed much later than the events they describe. We must wait until 731 for Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle was not put together until the reign of Alfred (871–99).3 The Historia Brittonum, attributed to the Welsh scholar Nennius, was assembled earlier in the ninth century, and the Annales Cambriae may be contemporary for the seventh and eighth centuries, but not for the fifth and sixth.4The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britonum) was written in the middle of the sixth century by the British monk and priest Gildas, but its usefulness is vitiated by uncertainty as to precisely where Gildas lived, and by the fact that he was not (and did not claim to be) an historian; the work is a polemic on the abuses of contemporary British kings and churchmen, and moral concerns colour its historical content.5 Moreover Gildas had little interest in the English except in their role as the instrument of God’s punishment upon the sinful British. The archaeological record for the fifth and sixth centuries is scarcely more tractable. Numerous modern accounts have been constructed upon these materials, many of them plausible, some mutually exclusive; but in general it is hard to disagree with the conclusion of J. M. Kemble that ‘the genuine details of the German conquests in England [are] irrevocably lost to us’.6