Immigration

Germanic pirates, in one way or another, were in England long before the Romans left. The Saxon Shore forts around the south-east corner of Britain were built about 280 AD, opposite matching forts on the Gallic shore, to deter pirates running the channel. There was almost certainly a fair number of peaceful settlers already on the east and south-east coast, making it somewhat of as 'Saxon shore' anyway. Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and Scandinavians may all have been there, from York down to Kent and along the south coast to Portchester (by Portsmouth).

Post-Roman invasions into Britain

The Germanic tribal names do not indicate where the invaders came from so much as the generic names given by historians such as Bede to the areas they settled.

Map: Unknown

The Coming of the 'Saxons'

Germanic invaders, wherever they came from, tended to be referred to as 'Saxons' but by no means all came from Saxony. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus records the Saxones among the barbarians (along with Picts and Irish) who were harassing the Britons in about AD 365 - even before the Romans left these shores. The Romans reacted by transferring detachments of Roman army auxiliaries from Germanic regions to the South East.

In AD 395, with Rome in danger from the Alaric and Goths, troops were gradually withdrawn from Britain and the advice from Emperor Honorius in AD 410 was that the British should 'look to their own defences'. Britannia (the Roman province in Britain) ceased to be a state and entered an age of fragmentation and local tyrants. In the 420s local British rulers adopted the well-tried Roman policy of calling in Germanic troops to help defend against the Picts. They were deployed defending strategic positions - mostly around the coast.

Later they rebelled, broke out of their agreed settlement areas and had obtained control of considerable areas by the 440s.

From the early 5th century increasing numbers of Germanic pirates invaded the eastern and south eastern coasts and rivers. The invaders, principally Jutes, Saxons, Frisians and Angles no doubt battled each other for territory, the British tribes continued their infighting, and the British and invaders fought each other. The mid-fifth-century Gallic Chronicle mentions a severe raid by the Saxons in 410, and the fall of Britain to the Saxons "after many troubles" in 441. The period must have seen the destruction of most of the vestiges of civilised Roman life in Britain.^3
p26

Villas were particularly vulnerable and rich targets. It appears that British estate owners abandoned the villas very early in the 5th century and moved back into the still defendable, Roman towns and even Iron Age hillforts. From where they no doubt attempted to administer their estates and collect the taxes.

Prolonged, though perhaps sporadic, war with Germanic invaders followed until, c 500, the British tribes at last working together achieved a victory at the battle of Badon. This effectively confined the invaders to the east.

But renewed warfare after 550 led to their conquest of virtually all of Britannia by c 600.^{7 p213}

The archaeological evidence at Silchester indicates that the Britons continued to inhabit the settlement; but it was no longer the administrative centre for this area - more a small scale manufacturing base. The Saxons set up their headquarters nearby at Dorchester on the Thames. There may have been friction between the two rival bases since at some point a ditch was built across the old Roman road linking Silchester to Dorchester. The wells at Silchester were filled in; this may have been a deliberate act by the Saxons to prevent the Britons using Silchester as a base or vice versa. When the Saxons eventually prevailed against the hillforts they chose not to take them over: Saxons were valley-dwelling folk and often established a new settlement by a river close to the hillfort.

The earliest Saxon graves found in the South-East tend to be of important military men, but sometime before the early decades of the sixth century, Saxon warrior farmers probably from Friesland ⁵(now a northern province of the Netherlands) came up the Thames and established settlements in Surrey - mostly on prime agricultural areas of gravel terrace along the Thames, thus probably displacing the native Britons from the best sites. Within a hundred years they had spread up along the northern slope of the Downs to set up a string of settlements along the spring line where the Reading Beds outcrop.

Spring lines are unknown in our area so perhaps consequently early Saxon finds are rare in the whole area lying between the Wey to the East, and the Kennet to the west, the Thames to the north and the Itchen to the south.^{2 p92}

In the later 6th century the Saxons began to spread inland from their settlements along to Thames. Place names ending in 'ham', (meaning settlement, manor or homestead) are generally reckoned to be early Saxon place names. Along the Bourne there is a string of 'hams'; Woodham, Chobham and Windlesham - which may indicate Saxon movement up the the Bourne from the Thames. This is not to say that they came up the Bourne in ships!; merely that their agricultural settlements were along water courses.

Place names ending in 'ley' and 'ing' are also of Saxon origin; e.g. Bisley, Frimley and Woking (old Woking that is).

Ceabba's possible appearance

Image: David Stokes

It has been suggested that one of their chieftains was called Ceabba and thus the settlement he established became known as Ceabba's Ham. The place name evolved through the centuries as Chabbeham (in a charter dated 675 AD), as Cebeham (in the Domesday Book), and variously Chebeham, Chabeham and finally Chobham.

One theory is of ethnic cleansing. Gildas the monk, writing in the mid 6th century, tells us that they were driven west to Wales (and Cornwall and then Brittany), or killed or enslaved. That it was the Saxon habit to overthrow the existing civilisation and religion and replace them with a pagan culture and social system of their own. Gildas's assertions are supported by recent research which shows greater similarities between the paternal DNA of the English and of the Saxon homeland than that of the Welsh, and indicates that the Saxons contributed 50%-100% to the English gene pool ⁵. Certainly, with the exception of 'Chertsey' (Cherot's Eyot) and the 'Thames', there are no locally surviving British local place names or Brittonic words in our local language. Celtic place names tend to survive only in the earliest Saxon settlement areas. Throughout England the native population seems to have become invisible during the Saxon period; no burials or grave goods of Britons been found.

However, others believe that the number of invading Saxons was too few in relation to the existing population and that the Saxons were more likely to have integrated with the natives. However there is no archaeological or historical or linguistic evidence to support this.

There is a middle way between these views. If a relatively small population of Saxons invaded this area, enslaved the men to work on the land and took the women as domestic and sex slaves, then within just a few generations one would see the 50-100% paternal genetic change. A possible reference to surviving enclaves of Britons occurs in the Saxon bounds of Egham where Welsh Gate and Welsh Hythe appear.¹ Walton on Thames is another candidate. 'Welsh' comes from 'wealha' which in Old English merely meant 'foreigner' and ominously 'slave' but was often used when referring to the native population. It is even possible that place names which include 'wealha' refer to 'shanty townships' where the male slave workers were accommodated. Even as late as the time of Domesday, slaves (serfs) are recorded in many of our local communities. It is even possible that British rulers traded there own people as slaves - as they had done in Roman times. We would not expect to find any archaeological record of enslaved Britons; slaves were likely to be buried without coffins or grave goods - the only indicators of burial that we find in our acid soils which dissolve bone. Nor would we expect Brittonic words, used only by slaves, to find their way into the Saxon language. The Europeans in America did not adopt African language-based words from their black slaves. This only tends to happen when invaders experience something which they have no name for. For instance, in Australia there was little social interaction between the incomers and the aborigines - and consequently only place names were adopted: aboriginal words have not entered our general language. It is unlikely that Germanic peoples would see anything in this area which they had not experience in their homeland, that is with the exception of remnants of Roman rule; e.g. walled cities, towns and churches. So is interesting that the Brittonic words for these (in themselves borrowed from the Latin) were adopted by the Saxons - ceaster (castle), wic (town or village) and ecclesia (church). The fact that the Saxon's gave special names to the three places inhabited by native Britons has been interpreted to show that the Britons were not distributed throughout the landscape but confined to a few places. However, one of the problems of the 'slave' model is that Welsh Gate and Welsh Hythe do not sound like slave communities; on the contrary they can be translated as 'the port operated by the Welsh', i.e. an important place.

The local pattern may have been quite complex. NW Surrey was very sparsely populated before the Saxons, the population being largely confined to the banks of the Thames. The earliest Saxon settlements would have been along the Thames at Egham, Thorpe and Chertsey where they might have taken the best land and left pockets of the relatively dense local population, and only later spread to the valleys of the less inhabited heathlands.

The major Saxon kingdoms

Map: David Stokes

In subsequent years, as Saxon lords established their kingdoms, battles were fought between the kings of Mercia, Anglia, Wessex and Kent. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle tells us that in 568 a battle was fought at Wibandun between Æthelbert of Kent and Ceawlin of Wessex. H. E. Malden, the noted historian, has made the case that Wibandun was the Wipandune on Chobham Common (now Ribsdown) recorded in the AD 673 Chertsey Abbey charter.

Surrey became one of those unlucky fought-over border lands - either part of the kingdoms of Mercia, Kent or ultimately Wessex. We know that in 666 AD King Egbert of Kent controlled our area; but by 673 King Wulfehere of Mercia had wrested control. Yet by the mid 680s Caedwalla of Wessex, "renowned in war and arms", controlled Surrey and, although pagan, established a new monastery at Farnham.

It is possible that in these wars the Saxons systematically looted their neighbours; thus continuing the tradition of the Pictish raiders before them and setting the trend for the Vikings who were to come. If so then you really would not have wanted to live in our area during these times.

After 825 Surrey was finally annexed into the kingdom of Wessex and several of the kings of the house of Wessex were crowned in Surrey at Kingston.

As time went by, tribalism was gradually replaced by feudalism and centralised government, especially following the imposition of Norman rule in the 11th century.

2 Aspects of Archaeology & History in Surrey. Pub Surrey Archaeology Society. 2004

5 "Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration". M Weale and others. Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. 2002

7 The Archaeology of Surrey to 1541. Ed J & D Bird. Pub: Surrey Archaeological Society.

Some of the images on this page have been reproduced from the excellent web site for Anglo-Saxon England at www.anglo-saxons.net