Life In Anglo-Saxon England
In each Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the king was chosen from the royal family and his election was probably confirmed by the witenagemot , the king's council. Princes of the royal family were called athelings and formed the highest class in Anglo-Saxon society next to the king. Below them were the nobles, or thanes , from whom the chief local officials, the ealdormen , were selected. The great mass of people were churls , or peasant freemen. Most of these freemen were farmers, living in villages and farming adjacent fields. The Anglo-Saxons possessed slaves, usually war captives or persons serving punishment.
Farming, raising livestock, and fishing were the major occupations. Urban life and trade were developing by 1066, and the Anglo-Saxons engaged in iron and lead mining, metalworking, and salt production.
Freemen wore tunics woven of wool and linen. Members of the upper classes wore loose, flowing garments, sometimes of embroidered silk. Both men and women had long hair. Ale, cider, and mead (fermented from honey and herbs) were favorite beverages. Life for most, particularly for the peasantry, was crude and harsh, with war, famine, and plague constant threats.
When the Anglo-Saxons first invaded Britain, they worshiped Teutonic gods. In 597 Saint Augustine, sent by Pope Gregory I, arrived in Kent to convert the people of the British Isles to Christianity. By the end of the seventh century, missionaries had converted all of England. Christianity played an important role in civilizing the Anglo-Saxons.
The language of the Anglo-Saxons, commonly called Old English, was a form of Low German, allied to Dutch. Actually it was less a language than a group of related dialects. The Jutes spoke Kentish; the Saxons, West Saxon. (These two combined at an early period.) The speech of the Angles separated into two dialects, Northumbrian and Mercian.
Northumbrian and Mercian were important dialects in the pre-Danish period. When Wessex became the most powerful kingdom, West Saxon developed as the prevailing dialect of the country. At that time, much early literature was translated into West Saxon, and most Old English literature that remains is in that dialect. A great flowering of Anglo-Saxon literature occurred in the reign of Alfred the Great, and again in the late 10th century.
Old English tended toward short, strong words, many of only one syllable, and thus had a harsh, Germanic sound. About 40 per cent of modern English words are of Anglo-Saxon origin. From Old English came the names of numbers; the articles, a, an, the ; conjunctions and prepositions, such as and, of, to, for ; short action verbs, such as run, jump, go, come ; and such simple but basic words as man, love, hate, life, death.
