|
The Heroic AgeIssue 4Winter 2001 |
Abstract: The emergence of various 'ethnically' based polities in early medieval Britain has long been a source of debate and confusion. I explore how ethnic self-identity is constructed and how the identities of the former Roman citizens of Britain changed. It is something that cannot be answered by archaeology alone; nor is a uniquely historical approach appropriate. A fully multidisciplinary examination is necessary.
A version of this paper was delivered at the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference at Leicester in 1997.
Contents
The centuries encompassing the end of the Roman period and the
emergence of the polities that eventually coalesced into the three
major political units of the British mainland can be regarded
as the basis for contemporary debates about national and ethnic
identities in the United Kingdom. As such, they are of prime importance
to our self-perception. The period has been studied by historians
and archaeologists, but with no answers to these questions. More
than in any other three centuries, virtually every supposed fact
becomes a subject for repeated debate and speculation.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this period is that we
can perceive a Britain that is in some sense 'Roman' in the mid
fourth century, and several polities that are developing distinctive
regional styles of material culture that we can retrospectively
label 'Welsh/Cornish', 'Saxon' and 'far northern' by the mid seventh.
It is because the processes of change during the intervening centuries
remain obscure that the period has long been fascinating to archaeologists.
The problem is not one of interpreting large numbers of conflicting
documents, sifting through complex material remains or of a complete
dearth of material. The material is there and the story they seem
to tell ought to be clear enough, but something does not quite
add up: how does England become ethnically English?
The question I shall pose in this paper is: how was it that the
island, with inhabitants numbering somewhere between two and six
million (extremes summarised in Salway:
544), managed so complete an apparent population change that the
Britons, from being a substantial majority in AD 350, evidently
became a minority by AD 650? What happened to the Britons that
they were apparently extirpated from the lowlands and replaced
by an Anglo-Saxon population?
In this paper, I will explore some possible answers to these questions.
To do this, we need to understand something of how ethnic self-identity
is constructed. We must also examine how the identities of the
former Roman citizens changed and how the notion of the Angelcynn
('English kind') and the Cymru ('comrades') came into being.
It is something that cannot be answered by archaeology alone;
nor is a uniquely historical approach appropriate. This is an
area where a fully multidisciplinary examination is necessary.
Transitional periods are widely recognised to be one of the most
important research topics in modern archaeology. For instance,
we have all sorts of questions about the developments that led
one hominid species towards another as one of the biggest questions
in all of archaeology, not just the Lower Palaeolithic. Nevertheless,
even in the post-glacial period, we still tend to find that change
fascinates more than stability and is what archaeologists seek
to explain rather than merely document.
The transition from hunter-gatherer economies to farming that
marks the change from Mesolithic to Neolithic is one that still
holds an immense fascination for archaeologists. Both in the heartlands
of agricultural development - the Mexican basin, the Yangtse valley,
the Zagros foothills and so on - and in the areas to which the
new technologies spread, the process of change is complex and
deservedly the focus of much research. At the other end of the
timescale, we have the recent growth of interest in European colonial
archaeology in the New World and the transitions from purely indigenous
and invasive cultures to those that show some amalgamation (or,
at least, westernisation).
The End of Roman Britain is one of those romantic transitional
events that stands out in British history, like the Battle of
Hastings, the Spanish Armada and so on. We have deeply ingrained
notions about the cultured Romans and the ghastly barbarians who
destroyed their way of life; we English are still required by
the National Curriculum to teach our children about invading Saxons
and the destruction of urban (in other words civilised) life.
>From the political mêlée of the fifth and sixth centuries
grew the numerous kingdoms that finally united as England, Wales
and Scotland around the tenth century.
The growth of Scottish, and to a lesser extent, Welsh nationalism
and independence movements in recent decades has led to a new
urgency for debate about precisely what it means to belong to
one of the nations of the United Kingdom. The current (and often
heated) debate about Celticity has been characterised by some
as an attempt to retain an English political hegemony in the face
of oppressed minority cultures, an assertion that has been hotly
denied (e.g. Megaw &
Megaw 1996: 180; James
1998; Megaw & Megaw
1998: 433; James 1999:
16). The debate has so far hardly affected the English consciousness
apart from anger at the Scottish Nationalist Party's suggestion
that only those of Scots ancestry be allowed to vote in a future
referendum about independence from the UK.
This period when the states of medieval and modern Britain formed
has been studied by historians for centuries (and archaeologists
for about a century), but each new study finds different answers.
If nothing else, this should alert us to the complexity of the
situation. We should, in a way, expect this: periods of transition
are inherently likely to be times of social upheaval, personal
disorientation and polarisation of attitudes. I would argue that
this is something we can see very clearly in the fourth to seventh
centuries. This is a period when the truism that we can only view
the past through the present should be apparent even to the most
dyed-in-the-wool empiricist.
By focusing on the fifth- and sixth-century transformations of
material culture, archaeologists have become fixated on their
supposed ethnic correlates. This is apparently reinforced by the
historical evidence. There has long been a swing between two views
of the Saxon advent: explaining the change in terms either of
mass migration or of small-scale military activity. I will suggest
that neither model explains the observed changes adequately and
that we need to think more carefully about how ethnicity is constituted
and expressed.
In AD 350, Britain was part of the Roman Empire, a diocese on
the far northwestern fringes and part of the Prefecture of Gaul.
True enough, it had had its share of internal and external troubles
- usurpers, rebellions, barbarian raids - but in many ways, it
had escaped the troubles of the third century more lightly than
Gaul or the Germanies. It had an urban élite, responsible
for local and provincial government, men of letters, industrial-scale
pottery production and a burgeoning church. In short, it possessed
all the trappings of an average western province, albeit one seen
as a socially marginal backwater (Wood:
6 note 37).
A century later, though, the situation was quite different. The
Roman government was a distant memory, the consumer economy destroyed
and any sense of belonging to a wider European political community
lost. Only the Church remained as a universal institution, a point
that comes across clearly in Patrick's writings. On the other
hand, it is hard to see exactly what had replaced the Roman ways.
Tribute had presumably replaced tax in those areas-such as the
Wroxeter hinterland-where a continuity of social institutions
can be postulated (hence the disappearance of coinage), cottage
industries had replaced large-scale manufacturing (hence the loss
of wheel-made ceramics, for instance), but what of the men of
letters and the ecclesiastics? Writing in the middle of this muddle,
St Patrick seems blissfully unaware that Britain was then - apparently
- in a state of socio-economic and political decay. True, he had
been captured in youth by Irish raiders, but he presents this
as a fact of life deriving from circumstances of piracy outside
Britain, not a disaster arising from internal political chaos.
Home-wherever that my have been in western Britain-does not appear
to be in any danger.
A century and a half after this, the situation is different yet
again. We can identify a number of polities that are recognisably
Welsh, English and far-northern (i.e. Pictish, Scottish and 'Strathclydian'),
with their own distinctive forms of material culture, settlement
patterns, political systems, languages and so on. We can view
the three centuries from AD 350 to 650 as hiding a single, poorly
located 'End' of Roman Britain, with a transition to the successor
states, or we can view the period (or at least part of it) as
a discrete entity, the infelicitously named 'sub-Roman' period.
The real problem depends ultimately on our views of ethnic change.
Can it only be achieved by a large-scale population replacement,
or can it be achieved through other means, such as acculturation?
I will return to this question shortly. It is one that has largely
been ignored by historians, whose views of ethnicity and ethnic
change have tended to be essentialist, viewing ethnic identity
as something fixed, a 'given', which somehow resides in the blood
or (with a more up-to-date twist) in the genes. David Dumville's
classic paper 'Sub-Roman Britain: history and legend' (Dumville
1977: 174) offers a wish list of historical questions he would
like to answer. It occupies an entire paragraph. Even so, ethnic
identity does not figure in it.
The 'End of Roman Britain' is generally viewed as an event. This
has been the case since the late fifth century, when the Byzantine
historian Zosimus claimed that around AD 411 "the inhabitants
of Britain ... were obliged to throw off Roman rule and live independently."
Ian Wood (passim) has
shown how Byzantine historiography developed a 'pack of cards'
view of the collapse of the west, beginning in Britain and gradually
reaching the centre.
Native tradition presents a slightly different framework, in common
with other parts of the west. It depends ultimately on Gildas,
a younger contemporary of Zosimus. This British tradition saw
the beginning of the end in the various tyrants (tyranni) who
stripped Britain of its male youth, taken to Europe as soldiers
to help in their bids for the throne. Gildas sees this as the
end of Roman rule: exin Britannia omni armato milite militaribus
copiis rectoribus licet immanibus ingenti iuuentute spoliata quae
comitata uestigiis supradicti tyranni domum nusquam ultra rediit
...[1] (de Excidio
13 in Winterbottom:
93).
Nevertheless, what is striking in Gildas is the way in which he
discusses post-Maximus Britain. In his view, Rome abandoned the
province, asserting itself only in reaction to appeals for help,
two of which were successful. Whatever we think of the historicity
of Gildas's account of the late fourth and early fifth centuries,
his view is valuable as an alternative to the Byzantine.
Archaeology does not deal easily with single events. Rather, it
detects processes and the effects of events. The archaeology of
the early fifth century is often hard to recognise because it
is difficult to separate deposits of this date from those of the
late fourth century. It does not actually help us at all in defining
when the Roman government of Britain ended. What it does show,
though, is that the first half of the fifth century saw the gradual
collapse of town life, the decline of organised civil defence,
the collapse of manufacturing and increasing regionalisation.
At the same time, new forms of material culture, of north German
inspiration if not manufacture, begin to dominate the record of
eastern Britain.
The arrival of Germanic settlers was viewed in native tradition
as a series of events. This begins with the account of Gildas,
who describes the invitation of a group of mercenaries by the
'proud tyrant' Vortigern at an unknown date [2]
in the fifth century: tum omnes consiliarii una cum superbo
tyranno uortigerno caecantur adinuenientes tale praesidium immo
excidium patriae ut ferocissimi illi nefandi nominis Saxones deo
hominibusque inuisi quasi in caulas lupi in insulam ad retundendas
aquilonales gentes intromitterentur [3]
(de Excidio 23, adapted from Winterbottom:
97). His story then relates how this group of Saxons found a pretext
to invite yet more barbarians into eastern Britain and how they
then rebelled against the Britons.
The English traditions were similar but more detailed. Although
Bede (Historia Ecclesiastica I.XV in Plummer:
31) gives only the legend of Hengist and Horsa as the first leaders
of the English of Kent, his chronological summary (V.XXIV in Plummer: 353) also mentions
Ida as the first leader of the Northumbrians. The late ninth-century
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle further amplifies this. As well as
Hengist and Horsa in Kent, and Ida in 'Northumbria', it tells
of Ælle, first leader of the South Saxons, Cerdic, first
leader of the West Saxons, Port, Bieda and Mægla, first
leaders of the Meonwara of Hampshire and Stuf and Wihtgar, first
leaders of the Wihtwara of the Isle of Wight.
All is not well here. The stories are often transparent foundation
legends. Hengist and Horsa ('mare and stallion' in Old English)
do not sound like the names of real people, but are the stuff
of myth. Indeed, Hengist figures as an apparently Frisian hero
in the well-known fragmentary poem conventionally called 'The
Fight at Finnsburh'. Port is a transparently concocted eponym
for Portsmouth, his supposed landing place, while the well-known
problem of Cerdic and various members of his progeny is that they
have British names. Cerdic bears the same name as the British
tyrant addressed by St Patrick as well as the last British king
of Elmet in South Yorkshire. It is also the name of the first-century
chief who entered legend as King Caractacus. His son (or grandson,
according to the genealogies) Cynric has a name very similar to
that of an Irishman (Cunorix) whose memorial was found at Wroxeter.
One of his putative descendants, Cædwalla (born around 659),
was evidently named after a ruler of Gwynedd noted for his hostility
to the English, the namesake of Caesar's main opponent in the
first century BC, Cassivellanus (for *Catuuellaunos). These
problems have long been known, but it is rare that any attempt
is made at explanation. Something very curious is going on here.
Recent treatments of the adventus Saxonum (e.g. Hodges:
25; Higham 1992a, 15)
have tended to play down the numbers of putative immigrants in
an attempt to allow a British majority to be subsumed within a
dominant but minority Anglo-Saxon culture. The considerable changes
observed in material culture in fifth- and sixth-century lowland
Britain are seen as the result of an increasing Germanisation
of taste among the native population as much as the migration
of substantial numbers of people from north Germany.
Critics of this model have focused on what they see as the inability
of small numbers of immigrants to effect change on the scale needed
for the shift of ethnic identity from British to English. They
point out that there was almost complete language replacement,
transformation of material culture and disruption of settlement
patterns between AD 400 and 600 in most parts of lowland Britain.
Even where 'continuity' has been suggested, the quality occupation
is of a different order from that in 400; few would contend that
the 'squatter' occupation seen in Roman villas, for instance,
takes us into the seventh century except on a few rare sites.
The material culture of the former Roman citizens during the fifth
and sixth centuries ought to provide valuable clues about social
patterning. The British population remains largely invisible,
although the recognition of sub-Roman pottery types has helped
the identification of continuing occupation in a few places. One
particularly interesting example of this material was found during
rescue excavation of a late to sub-Roman settlement at Pirton,
Hertfordshire. Employing decorative elements found on later sixth-century
Anglo-Saxon pottery, it was found in a purely sub-Roman context.
Moreover, the fabric, a sandy black ware, was not a recognised
Saxon type and the juxtaposition of decorative elements was unusual,
if not unique. Had the maker of the vessel seen pottery of Saxon
type and was consciously imitating its decoration without understanding
the semiotic grammar? Perhaps this is evidence for the beginning
of Germanisation in an otherwise conservative British community.
Martin Millett (228)
has suggested that "Roman Britain disappeared piecemeal".
It is certainly possible to explain the political changes of the
early fifth century in terms of a gradual erosion of romanised
legal structures from beneath or within; the economy, of course,
is another matter entirely, with its complete and catastrophic
collapse, perhaps as early as the 390s. The adoption of forms
of material culture that show Germanic influence and taste by
indigenous underclasses and other subcultures may mean that we
have dated the disappearance of Romanisation too soon as early
dates for Anglo-Saxon pottery have been taken to indicate early
dates for ethnic change. As Ken
Dark (216) has proposed, the Romanised state(s) could survive
for longer, control increasingly eroded as more members adopted
the iconography of the new material culture and the habits of
an emergent élite, including its language.
We need to understand something of the self-identities of the
inhabitants at the two ends of the period to see what changes
may have occurred. I have argued that a native British identity
was something that developed only because of the Roman invasion
in the first century AD.[4]
By the fourth century, it will have been relatively well developed.
When we look at the writings of Bede at the start of the eighth
century, we can see that he was postulating an insular English
identity that is quite distinct from that of the continental Germans.
Whether it existed in the self-identities of the people he labelled
Saxones, Angli or Iuti is something that
has often been too easily assumed from the material culture.
Bede's ethnography of the English is well known:
Aduenerant autem de tribus Germaniae populis fortioribus id est Saxonibus, Anglis, Iutis. De Iutarum origine sunt Cantuarii et Uictuarii (hoc est ea gens quae Uectam tenet insulam) et ea quae usque hodie in prouincia Occidentalium Saxonum Iutarum natio nominatur, posita contra ipsam insulam Uectam. De Saxonibus (id est ea regione quae nunc Antiquorum Saxonum cognominatur) uenere Orientales Saxones, Meridiani Saxones, Occidi Saxones. Porro de Anglis (hoc est de illa patria quae Angulus dicitur et ab eo tempore usque hodie manere desertus inter prouincias Iutarum et Saxonum perhibetur) Orientales Angli, Mediterranei Angli, Merci, tota Nordanhumbrorum progenies (id est illarum gentium quae ad boream Humbri fluminis inhabitante) ceterique Anglorum populi sunt orti [5] (Historia Ecclesiastica I.XV in Plummer: 31).
Now, there are considerable problems here. Since the earliest
efforts to define Anglo-Saxon ethnic groups using material culture,
fruitless attempts at separating 'Saxon' from 'Anglian' from 'Jutish'
have wasted the time of many people. The complex folk movements
that were at one time postulated, for instance bringing the West
Saxons to southwest England from Cambridgeshire along the Icknield
Way, now appear hopelessly simplistic. In many ways they resemble
the conflicting theories put forward to explain the apparent migrations
of Beaker Folk during the European Chalcolithic. Bede's ethnography
derives from imperial models: how appropriate it was in his day
is a difficult question.
Linguistics holds some promise of a resolution. Of the three ethnic
terms used by Bede, only Angli has an Old English equivalent
- Englisc, whence modern 'English'. Saxones is a
term restricted to Latin, British and Gaelic documents - whence
Scots Gaelic Sasunnach (Sassenach). Iutae
appear in Old English documents as the Geatas, but they
are always located in continental Europe. Bede seems to be postulating
an ethnography of Englishness that has no vernacular terms to
describe it. Again, there is evidently something slightly unsatisfactory
here.
Ethnicity is one of those surprising words that turns out to be
only half a century old, yet its use is widespread, at least among
middle-class liberals. It underpins many of our notions of self-identity,
group identity and national identity. It is clearly a concept
of value to the archaeologist, but for some time, the profession
has been very wary of using it. This may have occurred because
it is felt to be too closely linked with extreme right-wing views
and the discredited 'settlement archaeology' of Kossinna and others
that was put to overtly racist use.
The creation of labels of all kinds appears to be a human universal,
probably rooted in the structures of the mind, especially the
so-called 'language instinct'. As Paul
Graves-Brown (83) has reminded archaeologists, the practice
of labelling consists in defining the boundaries between entities.
With human groups, these boundaries are dynamic and depend on
the recognition of cultural traits. Although the archaeological
'culture' is characterised by its static nature, we can reconstruct
something of the discourses embodied in material culture by looking
at synchronic and diachronic relations between those objects.
In discussing the archaeology of Hungarian origins, Csanád
Bálint (188) attempted to demonstrate the impossibility
of defining ethnospecific objects. He discusses the heterogeneity
of the material culture of eastern Europe in the early Middle
Ages without questioning the self-identities of the peoples he
examined. To what extent is it legitimate to assume that early
'Hungarians' viewed themselves as a distinct people, separate
from their neighbours?
The relationship between language and ethnicity, so frequently
assumed, is not a simple one, and it is important that other factors
be taken into consideration. Slightly different lists of characteristics
constituting ethnicity are given by Renfrew
(130) and Hutchinson and
Smith (6) which can nevertheless be combined fruitfully. They
include:
1. a shared name;
2. shared territory or land;
3. a claimed common descent or genetic relationship;
4. community of customs or culture (which may include religion, customs or language);
5. self-identity and sense of solidarity;
6. a shared myth of origin;
7. a link with an ancestral homeland, real or mythical;
8. shared historical memories.
This list ignores the huge variety of meanings embedded in material
culture that can frequently be used to convey group affiliation
but which can only be reconstructed by looking at the relationships
between diverse object types, not specific objects. The creation
of the English states in the post-Roman period is associated with
massive cultural change involving objects that appear to be ethnospecific
(north German pottery and metalwork styles, changes to settlement
types and so on). However, closer consideration of the evidence
has led more recent interpretations to conclude that, while these
objects are stylistically of north German origin, their use need
not have been by people who considered themselves 'Angles' (Hines: 266).
The ways in which material culture styles become attached to ethnic
identification has not been questioned. This is where an archaeological
approach to ethnicity fails unless it retains historical perspective.
The meanings attached to material culture are not fixed but fluid.
They change through time and without a clear understanding of
context, the symbolic elements that contribute to ethnic identity
are lost. In her recent book, The Archaeology of Ethnicity,
Siân Jones concludes that 'it cannot be assumed a priori
that similarity in material culture reflects the presence of a
particular group of people in the past' (Jones:
126).
Siân Jones attempts to explore this relationship between
ethnicity and material culture. She examines the two major theoretical
paradigms underpinning modern concepts of ethnicity: primordialism
and instrumentalism. These are effectively the same as essentialism
and social constructionism, and share the same difficulties of
interpretation. The primordial approach is similar in many ways
to the older anthropological concept of 'race' in that it stresses
a genetic component to ethnicity, sometimes even descending to
referring to it as 'ties of blood'. Instrumentalism, on the other
hand, sees the roots of ethnicity in social practice, a perspective
that will be familiar to most archaeologists.
Siân Jones finds both paradigms wanting. She criticises
the first for '[failing] to address the dynamic and fluid nature
of ethnicity in varied social and historical contexts' (Jones:
72). The second '[tends] to be reductionist and [fails] to explain
the generation of ethnic groups' (Jones:
79). Neither paradigm explains the relationship between culture
(including material culture) and ethnicity. Taking the cue from
Bourdieu, she outlines a 'practice theory of ethnicity' based
around the multidimensional habitus in which the individual's
self-identification with an ethnic group becomes situational.
She therefore suggests that ethnicity is wholly embedded within
power relations through which it is reproduced and transformed
(Jones: 123).
This is social constructionism at its most thoroughgoing, in which
ethnicity is seen as part of the performativity of language: self-identification
is achieved through the actions of hegemonic and restrictive discourse.
This discourse enables an individual's life to be given structure
and meaning through narrative, which may involve some statements
possessing ontological status ("I have brown eyes")
and others having political and moral status ("I am English").
The problem, as social constructionists see it, is that both types
of statement become epistemological in personal experience (Burr: 87).
In approaching ethnicity, we must not forget the fluid and unbounded
nature of group identity and self-identity. It can be argued that
rather than hegemonic discourse, it is the marginal subgroups
that are central to the production of identity at both personal
and group levels. The largely unexplored contribution of subcultures,
for instance, to culture change and to the mediation of ethnicity
between different groups is an important feature not just of contemporary
societies but also of the past.
We can therefore view the use of material culture in fifth- and
sixth-century Britain as a means of establishing and reinforcing
ethnic identity at a time of political crisis and social fragmentation.
Transmission of the new material culture would often be by means
of those on the social peripheries, as well as by the 'Big Men',
the warlords, indigenous or otherwise. A large-scale movement
of the disaffected, similar to the Gaulish bacaudae, could
be one of the channels of communication, although this remains
to be demonstrated. Another channel, and one not to be underestimated
in its impact, would be the north German immigrants, not all of
whom necessarily arrived in the fifth and sixth centuries. They
need only to have been few in number and were, perhaps, mostly
male.
With one exception, the areas in which the earliest Germanising
material culture appears are in eastern England: east Kent, Norfolk
and Lindsey. There were only small numbers of Romano-British towns
and villa-estates in these areas. Both of them may be taken as
indicators of social and economic prosperity and, in the case
of the latter at least, of identification with southern European
élites. We may suggest that these areas, indeed peripheral
to the social life of the late Roman Diocese, had easy contacts
with north Germany and Scandinavia.
The exception is the upper Thames valley, where there are large
numbers of villas and small towns but an early group of German
material culture remains. What makes this group stand out is the
early date of the material culture and its homogeneity: this group
appears to have few contacts with the local Romano-British population,
unlike the thousands of Germans whose material culture sits alongside
that of indigenous groups elsewhere in the Late Roman diocese.
The upper Thames Valley group has long been identified as in some
way anomalous (e.g. Leeds:
53), as the invasion/settlement hypotheses are clearly inadequate
to explain so massive a penetration so deep into central Britain
at this date. Furthermore, it is not identifiable as the core
of a later Anglo-Saxon kingdom, despite valiant attempts to link
it with Wessex (e.g. Stenton:
26). Here is perhaps the best evidence for the Germanic mercenaries
mentioned by Gildas (Higham
1994: 104).
The apparently ethnospecific material culture of the migration
period may well turn out not to be ethnospecific at all, but expressive
of changes in taste and, indeed, the collapse of British manufacturing
industries. We can suggest that the creation of an English ethnicity
arose indirectly from the specific political and economic situation
of the fifth and sixth centuries. In this way, it could easily
have drawn in people who would previously have considered themselves
Britons with the material culture performing an active role in
the construction of new ethnic identities. The confused years
between 400 and 600 were something of a melting-pot for ethnic
identities with the collapse of the pre-existing normative political
framework and the considerable time-lag before the situation resolved
itself again into stable polities.
The difficulties of the period I have chosen to examine stem from
two main sources: firstly, the continuing political and ethnic
division between Scottish, Welsh and English; and secondly, the
compartmentalisation of archaeological specialisms into distinct
period-based studies. Add to this the tendency for Classical,
Celtic and Germanic linguistics to remain separate, the inward-looking
nature of nationalist historians and politicians and the lack
of synthesis in contemporary archaeology, then the problems of
understanding this period become fixed not in the period itself
but in late twentieth-century academia.
In terms of global politics, the borders between England and Wales
or between England and Scotland are little more than a line on
a map. We do not have passport controls to move from one country
to the other; neither is in itself a sovereign state. However,
the perceived difference - the ethnic difference - is enormous.
Exacerbated by centuries of English hegemony, the roots of the
problem are to be sought in the fifth and sixth centuries.
We should not fall into the trap of regarding ethnic identity
as fixed or as monolithic. My own ethnic identity is polymorphous
in a nested way: my primary ethnic identity is English, but within
that, I am a southerner and beyond it, I am British and European
in equal measures. In a North American context, I would be regarded
as a WASP, despite my objections to the label. Depending on circumstances,
I can choose my ethnic identity from this list of options without
any necessary shift of self-identity. In this way, my ethnic identity
becomes recognisable as a performance, not a fixed status conferred
on me by the application of labels or through the use of a material
culture signifier.
The clue to understanding ethnic identity during this period,
as at any other, is therefore to regard it as entirely performative.
While political instability was the norm, individuals will have
found it expedient, perhaps even necessary, to retain a variety
of allegiances, choosing between them as circumstances dictated.
Those who supported Magnus Maximus in the 380s cannot have been
entirely wiped out after his fall; instead, they will have transferred
their support to Theodosius. Similarly, it is entirely possible
that some of the fifth- and sixth-century lowland Britons will
have transferred their political allegiance to new, Saxon-identifying
masters without any sense of treachery. It is, I would suggest,
only a small step from this politically convenient shift of allegiance
to a conscious shift of ethnic identity, particularly if it is
one of the individual's choosing, rather than one imposed from
above. This is where parallels with, for instance, a Chechen population
that refuses to become Russian despite generations of 'Russianisation',
falls down: the Chechen people have actively resisted 'becoming
Russian' because it is imposed from outside. Once again, we can
see the importance of change from within and below, a true subcultural
effect.
Important evidence for the changing emphasis on different aspects
of ethnic performance in the fifth and sixth centuries comes initially
from the shift away from Late Antique artistic canons towards
those we now label 'Celtic', rightly or not. This change in élite
symbolism appears to be a conscious rejection of the older identification
with Mediterranean tastes and the re-emphasising of pre-Roman
roots. The mechanisms by which this was achieved are not known;
it has long been suggested, for instance, that Iron Age styles
continued at a vernacular level on non-durable objects, but this
may be special pleading. We should not overlook conscious archaising
and antiquarianism as sources for a resurgence in these styles.
At the same time, we can see the slow and partial acquisition
of styles with a Germanic origin. The adoption of such styles
by fifth-century people says no more about the ethnic origins
of their users than had the adoption of Mediterranean styles almost
four hundred years earlier by the wealthier inhabitants of the
island.
The coalescing of ethnic identities in this period cannot have
begun before the foundations of the various polities that seem
to have come into being in the sixth century, perhaps slightly
earlier in the west than in the east (although Higham 1992b: 159
would place it in the fifth century). Insofar as ethnic identity
depends on a variety of factors, archaeologists need to take a
broad view of the meanings of material culture. They also need
to look critically at whether a particular pot or brooch form
can be regarded as labelling its owner. It would be naïve
to assume that things are ever that simple.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|