Читать книгу Great Book of Spoon Carving Patterns - Joseph Fullman - Страница 14

The next period of invasion and settlement was significantly more brutal than that which had taken place under the Romans. The Angles and the Saxons were not sharers. They wanted the land, not control of the people, who were either killed or forced from their homes. With the Romans having taken their scholars back to Rome, little written evidence of these ‘Dark Ages’ survives. However it does seem clear that from the fifth century onwards, waves of invaders arrived in the country, driving the Celts westward into Wales and the Southwest, which over the next few centuries became the principal strongholds of the old Celtic culture.

This was supposedly the period in which the great Celt, King Arthur, led the Romano-British resistance against the Anglo-Saxons, holding back the tide of invasion in the Southwest with a series of spectacular victories. While there is some (very limited) evidence for the existence of an important Celtic leader at this time, and there is no doubt that the tribes of the Southwest held out much longer than contemporaries in the rest of the country, most of the Arthurian tales were created at least 600 years after the event.

Almost as soon as they established themselves as the new dominant powers, the Anglo-Saxons came under attack from the next set of continentals to turn their acquisitive gaze towards England, the Vikings. The modus operandi of these Scandinavian adventurers was not conquest but pillage, stealing treasure from coastal towns, looting their way through the countryside and demanding tribute.

The Viking raids forced the Anglo-Saxons to improve their military organization and to expand their armies, which indirectly ended up being bad news for the Celts. In the early ninth century, resistance in the Southwest was finally broken by the newly enhanced Wessex armies of King Egbert who rampaged through the peninsula. By 927 AD the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic kingdoms had been brought together to form a single unified state, England. This was not just a political union, but a religious one too, combining the Celtic Catholicism of the west (born during the days of the Roman Empire and bolstered by subsequent visits from Irish missionaries) with the continental Catholicism of the Anglo-Saxons which took hold following the sixth-century mission of St Augustine.