The Anglo-Saxon Culture: An Overview

Authors Avatar by mystery007 (student)

-A.W.

T

he Anglo-Saxons were Germanic barbarians who invaded Britain and took over large parts of the island in the centuries following the withdrawal of the Roman Empire. They were initially less gentrified than other post-Roman barbarian groups such as the Franks or  Ostrogoths because they had less contact with Mediterranean civilization. The Anglo-Saxons were originally pagan in religion. The main group, from northwestern Germany and Denmark, was divided into Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. German tribal affiliations were loose and the original invaders included people from other Germanic groups as well. Although some of the early Anglo-Saxon invaders had Celtic-influenced names,  such as Cedric, the founder of the house of Wessex, the  Anglo-Saxons had a pronounced awareness of them-selves as different from the peoples already inhabiting  Britain. Their takeover led to the integration of Britain into a Germanic world. Unlike other groups such as the Franks they did not adopt the language of the conquered Celtic and Roman peoples, but continued speaking a Germanic dialect.

The early Anglo-Saxons highly valued courage and skill in battle, as reflected in the most significant surviving Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf. Their pagan religion was marked by a strong sense of fatalism and doom, but also by belief in the power of humans to manipulate super-natural forces through spells and charms. They shared a pantheon with other Germanic peoples, and many Anglo-Saxon royal houses boasted descent from Woden, chief of the Gods. Their religion was not oriented to an afterlife, although they may have believed in one.

The Anglo-Saxons strongly valued familial ties—the kinless man was an object of pity. If an Anglo-Saxon was killed, it was the duty of his or her family to attain vengeance or a monetary payment, weregild, from the killer. Anglo-Saxon kinship practices differed from those of the Christian British, adding to the difficulty of the assimilation of the two groups. For example, British Christians were horrified by the fact that the Anglo-Saxons allowed a man to marry his stepmother on his father’s death. Anglo-Saxons also had relatively easy divorce customs.

The cultural differences between the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons were particularly strong in the field of religion, as British Christians despised Anglo-Saxon pagan-ism. The Anglo-Saxons reciprocated this dislike and did not assimilate as did continental Germanic groups. The extent to which the Anglo-Saxons simply displaced the British as opposed to the British assimilating to Anglo-Saxon culture remains a topic of debate among historians and archeologists of post-Roman Britain.

Join now!

The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity owed more to missionary efforts from Ireland and Rome than it did to the indigenous British Church. Paganism held out longest among the common people and in the extreme south, in Sussex and the Isle of Wight. Some Anglo-Saxons were not converted until the middle of the eighth century. Some peculiar relics of paganism held out for centuries. For example Christian Anglo-Saxon kings continue to trace their descent from Woden long after conversion. The church waged a constant struggle against such surviving pagan Anglo-Saxon customs as men marrying their widowed step-mothers. Reconciling Irish ...

This is a preview of the whole essay