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 staged a Godiva procession from 1678 into the 1960s, and 'Peeping Tom' comes from later versions in which one man, a tailor, spied on her ride and was struck blind. Her husband Leofric was a real 11th-century magnate.

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

Tawdry is 'St Audrey' worn smooth: Audrey was the everyday form of Æthelthryth, the princess who founded Ely's abbey in 673, and her admirers bought modest lace goods at her fair.

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

Lord is literally the bread-keeper, a fossil of the Germanic custom that a chief fed his war band. Over the centuries hlāfweard wore down to hlāford and then to a single syllable.

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

The Staffordshire Hoard's 4,600 pieces hold about 5 kg of gold and 3,500 garnets, and museums in Birmingham and Stoke paid £3.285 million to keep it. It turned up in a field near the village of Hammerwich.

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

Basil Brown was pushed aside once Cambridge's Charles Phillips took over the dig, and only much later was he given full credit. 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. Historians still argue over how far he deserved it.

Henry of Huntingdon's 12th-century label for the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms counted how many of them?

Seven, the 'Heptarchy', is a tidy fiction: the number of kingdoms rose and fell, and there was never a time when exactly that many each had a king of its own. Historians still use the word for convenience.

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

The Jutes are the forgotten third founder-people, and Bede's map of where they settled is why Kentish counts as a dialect of Old English in its own right. Their homeland is usually placed in Jutland.

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

April's goddess rests on Bede's single mention, so scholars long suspected he invented her, until Roman-era altars to the 'matronae Austriahenae' were found in 1958. The Old High German name for the month, Ôstarmânoth, is a cognate.

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

Anno Domini was a monk's calculation from the 520s that Bede picked up, and the popularity of his history carried 'years of the Lord' across Christian Europe. Bede even dated two events 'before the incarnation', an early form of BC.

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

Old Norse left a trail of -by villages across the Danelaw; Kirkby alone, 'church village', recurs again and again across the north and east. The two tongues were still roughly mutually intelligible.

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, a Norman word that otherwise never caught on in England. Ealdorman, the older title, faded out under Cnut.

Which silver coin, struck from about 785 at 240 to the pound, was Anglo-Saxon England's everyday money?

The penny kept the same nominal value, 1/240 of a pound, in continuous circulation for over 900 years, until the Kingdom of Great Britain arrived in 1707. Its silver is also what paid the Danegeld.

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

Riddles sit beside elegies like The Wanderer and The Seafarer in a book its donor described only as 'one large English book on various subjects, composed in verse'. Two poems in it are signed by Cynewulf.

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 bares its teeth at a second dragon diving down the helmet's crest. The helmet came out of the ground as more than 500 rusted fragments.

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

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. He had been bishop of Lindisfarne from 684.

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

Æthelstan's overlordship over the rest of Britain in the 930s was, one historian says, 'perhaps not attained again by an English king until Edward I'. Others still debate whether the title fits.

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

Whitby's verdict also settled the monks' haircut: the Roman crown tonsure replaced the Irish style, and the losing party withdrew to Iona. The case for Rome was argued by the young Wilfrid.

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's Life is why Alfred is the one Anglo-Saxon king we know as a personality, though doubters have periodically called the whole book a forgery. Alfred had summoned him from Wales to his court.

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

Watling Street was the one man-made stretch of a frontier otherwise drawn by water: the Thames, the Lea to its source, a straight line to Bedford, then the Ouse. Everything north and east of it was Guthrum's.

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

Derby was the first of the five to fall back into English hands, captured in 917, and Leicester surrendered without a fight the following 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 copying an Abbasid dinar of 774, 'Offa Rex' stamped amid three lines of Arabic that the die-cutter set upside down. 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 was the last great pagan warrior-king of the Anglo-Saxons, and his victory at Maserfield left him the most powerful ruler in Britain for a decade. He had earlier helped destroy King Edwin at Hatfield Chase.

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, were all the purse held besides three blanks and two small ingots. The ship's oar-rests suggest places for forty rowers.

Surviving only as a stain in the sand and rows of rivets, roughly how long was the Sutton Hoo ship?

27 metres long and 4.4 across amidships, the vessel was measured from its imprint alone, since every plank had rotted and left the rivets in place like a drawing. The chamber roof later collapsed under the mound.

Why was no body found in the Sutton Hoo chamber, among the sword, helmet and feasting gear laid out for one?

Acid soil dissolved it, the 1967 phosphate tests showed, leaving chemical traces that a human body once lay there and settling decades of talk of an empty memorial. A platform or coffin about nine feet long also marked the spot.

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

Southend-on-Sea's Central Museum has shown the finds since 2019, among them two tiny gold-foil crosses that had been laid over the dead man's eyes. The dig began as a routine survey for a road-widening scheme.

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's runic lines on the Ruthwell Cross rank with the Franks Casket inscription as the earliest Old English poetry to survive. The full poem is preserved in a 10th-century manuscript in Vercelli, Italy.

Which bishop, a later colophon says, wrote the Lindisfarne Gospels himself around the year 700?

Eadfrith's book got its English 250 years later, when the priest Aldred squeezed a word-for-word Old English gloss between the Latin lines and signed his name. Ethelwald bound it and the hermit Billfrith added its jewels.

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's nine-line Hymn survives in 21 manuscript copies, mostly added to copies of Bede's Latin history, which told his story. He looked after the animals at Abbess Hild's double monastery.

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's praise comes from Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, and he is counted among the chief architects of the Carolingian Renaissance. He had trained under Archbishop Ecgbert at York.

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, yet it is thought to be the earliest document ever written in English. Its very first clause sets the fines for stealing from a bishop.

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

Emma of Normandy was queen of England twice over, and through Cnut queen of Denmark from 1018 and of Norway from 1028. English royal documents call her Ælfgifu.