50 Fun Facts About Anglo-Saxon

By legend, what did a fugitive Alfred the Great let burn while hiding in a Somerset peasant's hut?

The cakes were wheaten ones she had left baking by the fire, and the unrecognised king was roundly scolded when she came back. Wessex alone was still holding out against the Vikings at the time.

Lady Godiva's legendary ride to win relief from her husband's taxes went through which town?

Coventry. The phrase 'Peeping Tom' comes from later versions of the legend, in which a tailor who spied on her ride was struck blind.

Which word for cheap finery comes from 'St Audrey's lace', sold at the Ely fair held in that saint's name?

Tawdry is 'Saint Audrey' run together. Bede says she blamed the neck tumour that killed her on the necklaces of her youth, which is how her fair came to sell lace for the throat.

Which title comes from Old English hlāfweard, the 'loaf-ward' who kept bread for his followers?

Lord is literally the loaf-guard: hlāfweard wore down to hlāford and then to one syllable, while a household servant was a hlāfǣta, a 'loaf-eater'.

In which county did Terry Herbert's metal detector find the largest Anglo-Saxon gold hoard ever, in 2009?

Staffordshire. Almost every piece is war gear stripped from swords and helmets, with nothing feminine among it, and two local museums paid £3.285 million to keep it.

Which self-taught archaeologist, played by Ralph Fiennes in The Dig, uncovered the Sutton Hoo ship?

Basil Brown had already uncovered the ship when its importance became clear and a team under Cambridge's Charles Phillips took charge. Fiennes, fittingly, was born in nearby Ipswich.

Which monk landed on the Isle of Thanet in 597 and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury?

Augustine's party considered turning back on the way and had to be urged on by letter from Rome before crossing to Kent. Within a few years he was baptising the local king.

Æthelred's byname unræd, long mistranslated as 'the Unready', actually puns on his name to mean what?

Ill-counselled is the joke: Æthel-ræd means 'noble counsel' and un-ræd 'no counsel', so the king named for good advice became the king of bad advice. The gibe is not recorded until long after his death.

What name do historians give the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England as a group?

The Heptarchy, a rule of seven, is a tidy fiction: the number of kingdoms rose and fell, and the word itself is first recorded only in the 1570s, long after the last of them had gone.

Which third people, after the Angles and Saxons, did Bede say settled Kent and the Isle of Wight?

The Jutes did not keep their island: Bede says the West Saxon king Cædwalla seized the Isle of Wight in 686 and set out to wipe out its people and settle his own in their place.

Bede said the Anglo-Saxons named which month Ēosturmōnaþ, after the goddess whose feast named Easter?

April's goddess, Ēostre, is known only from Bede, yet her name stuck: most neighbouring languages call the feast by a form of the Latin Pascha, while English kept Easter.

Which year-numbering system, devised by Dionysius Exiguus, did Bede's history of 731 help spread?

Anno Domini was worked out by a monk in Rome in 525 and little used until Bede took it up; the reach of his history helped make counting from Christ's birth the norm in medieval Europe.

Place names ending in -by, such as Kirkby, Grimsby and Selby, use which language's word for a village?

Old Norse býr, a farm or village, left a trail of -by names across the Danelaw, and the same word survives in 'by-law', at first a town's own law.

Which title replaced 'ealdorman' for England's regional governors during Cnut's reign?

Earl never grew a feminine form, which is why an earl's wife is a countess; the older title lived on too, as the alderman of English town government.

Which silver coin, struck from the later 8th century at 240 to the pound, was Anglo-Saxon England's everyday money?

The penny stayed at 240 to the pound for some twelve centuries, until decimal coinage arrived in 1971. English pennies in Scandinavian hoards are thought to include Danegeld.

The Exeter Book, left to the cathedral by Exeter's first bishop in 1072, holds almost a hundred of what?

Riddles, about ninety-four of them, come with no answers in the manuscript, so scholars have had to argue over some of the solutions. The same book holds The Wanderer and The Seafarer.

Bede has King Edwin's counsellor liken life to which creature's brief flight through a firelit hall?

A sparrow flies in out of the winter storm, crosses the warm hall and is gone into the dark again, and what came before or after, says the counsellor, we cannot know. Wordsworth later turned the image into verse.

The eyebrows, nose and moustache on the Sutton Hoo helmet combine to form which creature?

A dragon with outstretched wings is made from the wearer's own face, and it meets a second dragon's head at the end of the helmet's crest. Conservators had to rebuild the helmet twice from rusted fragments.

Whose coffin, borne by monks who had fled Lindisfarne, finally came to rest at Durham in 995?

By legend Cuthbert's wagon stuck fast on the road and the monks took it as the saint's own wish to stop there; Durham city and its cathedral grew up around his tomb.

Which grandson of Alfred took the last Viking kingdom in 927 and is counted as the first King of England?

Æthelstan had to defend the title ten years later: at Brunanburh he beat a combined army of Scots and Dublin Vikings that had come to break his hold on the north.

King Oswiu ruled at which 664 synod that Northumbria would date Easter by Rome's reckoning, not Iona's?

Whitby turned on one argument: Oswiu sided with Rome because St Peter held the keys of heaven, and he did not want to find its gates shut against him. The losing bishop, Colman, went home.

Which kingdom, converted by the exiled Wilfrid from 681, was the last major Anglo-Saxon one to turn Christian?

Sussex was in famine when Wilfrid arrived, and he is said to have taught the South Saxons to fish before they agreed to be baptised en masse. He stayed five years.

Which landowner, played by Carey Mulligan in The Dig, owned the Sutton Hoo treasure and gave it all away?

Edith Pretty handed the whole trove to the British Museum after a treasure-trove inquest had ruled the grave goods her personal property. She had organised the excavation of the mounds on her estate herself.

Which Welsh monk from St David's, later Bishop of Sherborne, wrote the Life of King Alfred in 893?

Asser agreed to split his time between St David's and Alfred's court. The only manuscript of his Life burned in 1731, so the text survives through copies made before the fire.

Alfred's treaty with Guthrum ran the Danelaw border up the Thames, Lea and Ouse to which Roman road?

Watling Street closed a frontier drawn mostly by water: up the Thames and the Lea, straight across to Bedford, then along the Ouse. The line left London on Alfred's side.

Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford and Leicester were four of the Danelaw's Five Boroughs; which town was the fifth?

Derby was the first of the five to fall back into English hands, stormed in 917 by the army of Alfred's daughter Æthelflæd; Leicester gave in without a fight the next year.

Which king's 973 coronation at Bath set the rite on which every later English coronation has been based?

Edgar's service gave the ceremony its shape, its oath and its anthems, down to the two bishops who led him by the hand into Bath Abbey. His queen Ælfthryth was consecrated beside him, the first West Saxon queen regularly styled regina.

Which 8th-century king's dyke still roughly follows the border between England and Wales?

Offa also had a gold coin struck in imitation of an Abbasid dinar of 774, Arabic script and all, with 'Offa Rex' added in Latin. Only three of his gold coins survive.

Which pagan king of Mercia killed Oswald of Northumbria at Maserfield and died at the Winwaed in 655?

Penda stayed pagan to the end, yet Bede says he let missionaries preach in Mercia and despised only those converts who did not live by their new faith.

Which East Anglian king, one of Bede's overlords of the south, is the likeliest occupant of the Sutton Hoo ship?

Rædwald hedged his bets, keeping two altars in one temple, one to Christ and one to the old gods; the coins in the ship date to the 620s, matching his death around 624.

The Sutton Hoo purse held gold coins that date the burial to 610–635, struck under which Continental dynasty?

Merovingian tremisses, 37 of them and each from a different Frankish mint, lay with three blank discs to make forty. One theory reads them as fares for the forty ghostly oarsmen of the ship.

Sutton Hoo's 27-metre ship burial is often compared with the treasure-laden funeral ship that opens which Old English poem?

Beowulf opens with the Danish king Scyld sent to sea in a ship heaped with treasure, and its helmets, lyre and mead-hall gifts could all be illustrated from the Sutton Hoo finds.

Why did excavators find no body in the Sutton Hoo burial chamber, despite the war gear laid out for one?

Acid soil dissolved it: tests in the 1960s found high phosphate levels in the sand, the chemical trace of a body, which ended decades of talk that the mound was an empty memorial.

The 'Prittlewell prince', a chamber tomb found in 2003 ahead of road works, lay in which Essex town?

Southend-on-Sea's Central Museum put the finds on show in 2019. Two gold-foil crosses had been laid over the dead man's eyes, which the excavators take as a sign that he was a Christian.

An 8th-century whale-bone box, the Franks Casket pairs the Adoration of the Magi with which Germanic smith?

Wayland stands at his forge, tongs in hand, on the casket's front panel, a pagan revenge story carved right next to the Three Kings bringing gifts. The box may have been made to hold a psalter for a royal owner.

Which Old English poem has lines carved in runes on the eighth-century Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire?

The Dream of the Rood lets the cross itself speak of the crucifixion. The stone cross was smashed by iconoclasts in 1642 and pieced back together in 1823; the full poem survives in a manuscript at Vercelli.

A 10th-century note credits Bishop Eadfrith with writing which illuminated manuscript?

Lindisfarne Gospels. The note is by the priest Aldred, who some 250 years on wrote an Old English gloss between the Latin lines, the oldest surviving version of the Gospels in English.

Which monk from Iona founded Lindisfarne at King Oswald's request and was its first bishop from 635?

Aidan preached in Irish at first, so King Oswald, fluent after his years of exile among the Irish, often stood beside him translating for his own people.

Which Roman missionary baptised King Edwin at York in 627 and became the city's first bishop?

Paulinus had to flee south when Edwin was killed six years later, and finished his days as Bishop of Rochester in Kent. For a while he was the only Roman bishop left in England.

Which English monk, born Wynfreth, felled the pagans' Donar Oak and was martyred in Frisia in 754?

Boniface's biographer says a great wind finished the job, toppling the ancient oak the moment he began to chop. Devon made him its patron saint in 2019.

Which 10th-century archbishop, a trained silversmith, is said to have gripped the Devil's face with his tongs?

Dunstan really did work metal, making church plate as a silversmith at Glastonbury, which is why English goldsmiths and silversmiths later took him as their patron saint. The tongs tale was first written down in the late 11th century.

Which cowherd, told in a dream to sing of Creation, is the earliest English poet whose name we know?

Cædmon used to slip away from feasts before the harp reached him, because he knew no songs. The nine-line hymn he made after the dream survives in copies of Bede's history.

Which annals, begun under Alfred and kept up at Peterborough until 1154, are the period's main English source?

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's Peterborough copy runs so late that its final entries are among the earliest Middle English ever written. The lost original was probably compiled in Wessex in the 890s.

Which York scholar, 'the most learned man anywhere to be found', taught at Charlemagne's court in the 780s?

Alcuin was at Charlemagne's court when Vikings sacked a Northumbrian island monastery in 793, and he wrote home that 'never before has such terror appeared in Britain'.

Anglo-Saxon law priced every life by rank: what was the sum a killer owed the victim's kin called?

Wergild means 'man-price': a free farmer was worth 200 shillings and a nobleman 1,200, a split so fixed that a charter of Cnut's simply calls his people 'the twelve-hundreders and the two-hundreders'.

Which land unit, Bede's 'families' when he sized a kingdom, underpinned Anglo-Saxon tax and service?

A hide was never a fixed acreage: it began as land enough for one household, and kings simply set how many a shire owed and let it pay. The word shares a root with 'hiwan', meaning family.

Which free farmer, above a slave but below a thegn, gave his name to places like Charlton and Carlton?

Ceorl gives us 'churl' and 'churlish', a slide from 'free farmer' to 'boor' that says a lot about what later centuries thought of peasants. Charlton and Carlton both mean 'the farmstead of the churls'.

Which king of Kent, the first Anglo-Saxon ruler to turn Christian, issued the oldest Germanic-language law code?

Æthelberht's code survives only in the 12th-century Textus Roffensis. Its first clause protects the church, whose stolen property was to be repaid twelve times over and a bishop's eleven times.

Which brothers, by tradition, led the first Germanic warbands the British ruler Vortigern invited over in 449?

Hengist and Horsa are named for horses: the Old English names mean 'stallion' and 'horse', which makes some scholars suspect a pair of divine horse-twins behind the legend. Bede calls them the first chieftains among the newcomers.

Which queen married both Æthelred and his conqueror Cnut, and was mother to Edward the Confessor?

Emma of Normandy was queen to two rival kings, and through Cnut queen of Denmark and Norway as well. In 1043 her son Edward, newly crowned, rode to Winchester and seized her treasure.