The kingdom of Northumbria extended over a huge swathe of north-eastern England, and up into what is today eastern Scotland. It encompassed the older kingdoms of Bernicia in its northern parts and Deira to the south. The people who had settled these lands out of northern Europe in the sixth and seventh centuries were known as the Angles.

Society was rigidly hierarchical. The rich and powerful lived on landed estates that centred on a large, rectangular hall built of timber, surrounded by smaller buildings consisting of lowlier dwellings, workshops and storage houses. The main hall would be luxuriously decorated with wall hangings to denote high status, and was where the banqueting took place. It was necessary for a lord to be a lavish and regular host if he wished to retain local loyalties.

Below the lord were two classes of freemen – thanes and ceorls. Thanes were higher up the social scale because they owned more land (at least five “hides” – a hide being an area sufficient to support one family). Below these were slaves, an economically vital source of free labour. You were either born into slavery, thrust into it as a war captive, or condemned to it through debt. It was possible, however, to escape this condition by working to pay off what you owed, or by being granted your freedom in a lord’s will.

The lives of women were nowhere near as brutal as we might imagine. They enjoyed a surprising degree of legal independence. A king’s lands, for example, simply passed to his wife upon his death, which compares favourably with much of English history since. Among ordinary people, marriage required the consent of both partners. A woman could own property independently, and any property she brought into a marriage remained legally hers.

Anglo-Saxon women
©TopFoto.co.uk/ Museum of London /HIP

Ordinary folk

Most people lived by farming, which was managed partly co-operatively, with sharing of key resources such as animals. Land was divided up among smallholders in the strip-farming system, with labourers usually being hired for a fixed number of days in the year.

The staple items in the diet were grain crops, namely wheat, oats, rye and barley (the last was also used in brewing beer). These were supplemented by root vegetables (including the stunted purple carrot that was the precursor of the modern orange variety), pulses such as peas and beans, and fruit trees. Honey was the universal sweetening agent, and also formed the basis of the alcoholic brew, mead. Meat came from all the usual farm animals – cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, the first three of which also provided milk. Butter and cheese were usually made from sheeps’ and goats’ milk, while hens, ducks and geese were kept for eggs.

Clothing consisted of simple linen or woollen tunics for men, and long dresses for women, both fixed with brooch-pins. These were worn over stockings and soft shoes. Those who could afford them might also wear lucky amulets (small pieces of jewellery) to ward off evil influences.

People living above the level of slavery enjoyed a fair amount of leisure time, thanks to all that slave labour of course! This might be spent in reciting and listening to narrative poetic works, often accompanied by music, played on the timber-framed plucked string instrument now known as the lyre. Professional story-tellers known as scops wandered from town to town, offering to spin their tales in return for food, drink and lodgings. There were simple pastimes such as dice-throwing and early forms of board games, based on the Nordic taefl (or table), a distant ancestor of chequers.

Travelling was rather a dangerous activity. Once you were off the main Roman roads, you were in danger of being mistaken for an outlaw of some kind and killed. It made sense to announce your approach as noisily as you could, to indicate that you weren’t trying to be stealthy.

The Synod of Whitby

What nearly everybody had in common in this territorial and hierarchical society, at least by the seventh century, was Christianity. The two wings of the early English Christian church, the Celtic and the Roman, were reconciled at the Synod of Whitby in 664, which, among other things, fixed a single means of calculating the date of Easter.

The Northumbrian monasteries were centres both of devotion and of academic and cultural excellence. Nor did the monks simply live a contemplative life within their walls, but roamed the countryside, bringing the word to the people of the villages and towns like travelling salesmen. Belief in mystical occurrences was absolute, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for the year 793 indicates: “This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament.”