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16
SAXONS, DANES, VIKINGS AND
NORMANS
The end of the Roman occupation of Britain was quite unlike our own recent colonial goodbyes.
There was no lowering of the flag, no salute from a member of the imperial family, no tear brushed
away from the eyes of the last governor and no dignified departure on a warship. That was Hong
Kong in 1997, not Britain in the fifth century AD. The Romans left a country already accustomed to
the intermittent attention of raiding war parties from across the porous land borders to the west and
north. In the great attack of 367, Picts from Scotland had joined Saxons from across the North Sea
in rampaging through the countryside, killing and looting at will. The final withdrawal of the
Roman army, some fifty years later, left England completely undefended and the population
unprotected. Four centuries of occupation, during which citizens and slaves alike were forbidden
even to carry arms and all weapons and military equipment were in the hands of the army, had left
a population unaccustomed to warfare. That is not to say that the population was necessarily
completely defenceless. Everyone must have seen this coming, and there were unknown numbers of
retired veterans living in the towns and countryside. There may even have been remnants of a
command structure at York and around Hadrian’s Wall. The wall was not breached by the Picts,
who must, therefore, have taken to the sea to attack the North Sea coasts in the great rising of 367.
There were already Germanic settlements in eastern England based on former auxiliary units of the
Roman army.
It takes only a little imagination to see these men using even their small advantages to establish
themselves as minor kings in the confusion. But what actually happened is shrouded in mystery for
one very good reason. There are simply no contemporary records. Even allowing for their
exaggerations and creative imagination, the histories of Tacitus and others were some sort of
record. After AD 410 there is nothing. We have to wait over 100 years for the next account – and
that makes Tacitus sound as reliable as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Ruin of Britain, written
by the monk Gildas in about 540, which we encountered in an earlier chapter, is little more than an
indignant rant against the corruption and godlessness of his own time. This is how he describes the
incursions of the early fifth century:
As the Romans went back home, there eagerly emerged from the coracles that had carried
them across the sea valleys the foul hordes of Scots and Picts, like dark throngs of worms
who wriggle out of narrow fissures in the rock.