Jutes

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Jutes were one of the Germanic tribes who crossed the North Sea and settled in Great Britain after Roman rule collapsed. According to the scholar Bede, writing centuries after the events, they ranked among the three most powerful nations of Germany, alongside the Angles and the Saxons. That claim places them at the very foundation of what would become England. Yet the Jutes are among the least understood of those founding peoples. Historians cannot agree on where exactly they came from. The archaeological evidence points in one direction, the written chronicles in another. Their language blurs into Frisian. Their identity may have merged with the Danes who invaded their probable homeland. The story of the Jutes is really a question: who were these people, and how do we trace a group whose name nearly disappeared into the nations that absorbed them?

• 2. Crossing to Britain

  ›

  In the year 449, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, two brothers named Hengist and Horsa were invited to Sub-Roman Britain by a ruler called Vortigern. He wanted their help fighting the Picts. They landed at Wippidsfleet, a place now known as Ebbsfleet, and defeated the Picts in every engagement. Their success prompted them to send word back to Germany requesting reinforcements. The request was answered. What followed was a wave of migration from what the Chronicle calls "the three powers of Germany": the Old Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes.

  The Saxons went on to populate Essex, Sussex, and Wessex. The Angles moved into East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria, leaving their original homeland of Angeln so completely that the Chronicle says it was deserted. The Jutes took Kent, the Isle of Wight, and Hampshire. The Chronicle also names Wihtgar and Stuf as founders of the Isle of Wight's Wihtwara, and a man named Port along with his two sons, Bieda and Maeglaof, as founders of the Meonwara in southern Hampshire.

  Historians treat these founding legends carefully. Before the 7th century, almost no contemporary written material about the Anglo-Saxon arrival exists. Most of what survives was set down several hundred years after the events it describes. Some archaeological findings have challenged the earlier dates the Chronicle provides. One alternative reading suggests that flooding had made coastal sites in Frisia and northern Germany uninhabitable, pushing people west not as conquerors but as refugees. Under that reading, the British offered land in exchange for peaceful settlement and military cooperation, a transaction rather than an invasion.

• 3. Ships and Routes

  ›

  Sometime in the 2nd or 3rd century, shipbuilders on the Jutland peninsula shifted from sewing planks together with cord to fastening them with iron. That technical change made their vessels stronger and more seaworthy. The route from Jutland to Britain was not a straight crossing. Navigation at the time required ships to be moored overnight, so vessels would have hugged the coastal regions of Lower Saxony and the Netherlands before turning to cross the English Channel. Marine archaeology supports this picture. Artefacts and ship fragments from the migration period have been found in river estuaries along that route, suggesting that migrating ships sheltered in those inlets as they worked their way south and west.

  J. E. A. Jolliffe examined farming and agricultural practices across 5th-century Sussex and found them consistent with the Kentish system. He proposed that Jutes had settled Sussex before the Saxons arrived, and that Jutish territory once stretched from Kent as far as the New Forest. The north Solent coast had been a trading area since Roman times, and old Roman roads between Sidlesham and Chichester, and between Chichester and Winchester, would have given access to Jutish settlements in Hampshire. The Jutish kingdom in Hampshire that Bede describes left traces in local place names, including Bishopstoke, which appears in records as Ytingstoc, and the Meon Valley, recorded as Ytedene.

• 4. Conquest and Suppression

  ›

  In Kent, a ruler named Hlothhere had held power since the early 670s. In 676, the Mercian king Æthelred invaded Kent with a large army, destroying churches and monasteries. Bede records that Æthelred's forces destroyed the city of Rochester. Five years later, in 681, Wulfhere of Mercia advanced into southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, and shortly afterward gave both territories to Æthelwealh of Sussex.

  In Kent itself, a man named Eadric served as co-ruler alongside his uncle Hlothhere, and a law code was issued in both their names. Around 685, Eadric revolted. With the help of a South Saxon army he killed his uncle and took control of Kent.

  The pressure on the Jutish territories intensified in the 680s, when the Kingdom of Wessex was in the ascendant. Cædwalla, king of Wessex, was worried about Mercian and South Saxon influence in southern England. He conquered the South Saxons and took over the Jutish areas in Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight. Bede says Cædwalla attempted to slaughter the Jutes of the Isle of Wight outright and replace them with people from his own province. Bede also maintains that he could not accomplish this fully, and that Jutes remained a majority on the island. Cædwalla killed Aruald, the king of the Isle of Wight. Aruald's two younger brothers, heirs to the throne, escaped to the mainland but were hunted down and found at Stoneham in Hampshire. They were killed on Cædwalla's orders.

  Cædwalla also moved against Kent, installing his brother Mul as ruler. The Kentishmen responded by burning Mul and twelve others to death. After Cædwalla was succeeded by Ine of Wessex, Kent agreed to pay compensation for Mul's killing but kept its political independence.

• 5. Culture and Christianity

  ›

  When the Jutish kingdom of Kent was founded around the middle of the 5th century, Roman ways still shaped daily life. The old Roman settlement of Durovernum Cantiacorum became Canterbury. The people of Kent called themselves the Cantawara, a Germanised form of the Latin name Cantiaci.

  Archaeological evidence shows that the peoples of west Kent were culturally distinct from those in the east of the county. West Kent shared characteristics with its neighbours in the southeast, while east Kent, the Isle of Wight, and southern Hampshire all showed strong Frankish and North Sea cultural influences from roughly the mid-5th century through to the late 6th century. Brooches and bracteates found at these sites look quite different from the north German styles found elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon England. The jewellery may have been made by craftspeople trained in the Roman workshops of northern Gaul or the Rhineland, who then developed their own styles over time. By the late 6th century, grave goods show that west Kent had adopted the distinctive material culture of east Kent.

  Around 580, the Frankish princess Bertha arrived in Kent to marry King Æthelberht. She was already a Christian and brought a bishop named Liudhard with her. Æthelberht rebuilt an old Romano-British structure and dedicated it to St Martin, allowing Bertha to continue practising her faith. In 597, Pope Gregory I sent Augustine to Kent to convert the Anglo-Saxons. There are suggestions that Æthelberht had already been baptised by the time he received the mission. He became the first of the Anglo-Saxon rulers to be baptised.

  The Isle of Wight, by contrast, was the last area of Anglo-Saxon England to be evangelised, not until 686, when Cædwalla's invasion ended the local pagan practice along with the lives of the king Arwald and his brothers. The Jutes also practised a system of inheritance called gavelkind, in which land was divided equally among male heirs. This custom persisted in Kent until the 20th century. Across England and Wales it was abolished by the Administration of Estates Act 1925. The popular explanation for why gavelkind lasted so long in Kent is the Swanscombe Legend: the story that Kent struck a deal with William the Conqueror, agreeing to peace in exchange for keeping their local customs.

• 6. Disputed Origins

  ›

  Bede placed the Jutish homeland on the Jutland Peninsula, and that inference has shaped most later thinking. But the archaeological evidence complicates the picture. Analysis of grave goods shows clear links between east Kent, south Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight, but very little connecting those sites to Jutland itself. The actual material culture points toward northern Francia and Frisia.

  A hypothesis that historians have considered holds that Jutland was indeed the original Jutish homeland until Danish invaders arrived around AD 200. After that, some Jutes may have been absorbed into Danish culture while others migrated to northern Francia and to Frisia. In Scandinavian sources from the Middle Ages, the Jutes appear only sporadically, and when they do, they are described as a subgroup of the Danes.

  The Jutes have also been linked to several other peoples mentioned in early sources. The Roman historian Tacitus refers to a group called the Eudoses, who may have developed into the Jutes. The Old English poem Beowulf, in its Finnesburg episode, mentions a people called the Eotenas involved in conflict with the Danes in Frisia. Theudebert, king of the Franks, wrote to the Emperor Justinian claiming lordship over a nation he called the Saxones Eucii; historians believe the Eucii were Jutes. The Euthiones, a little-documented tribe mentioned in a poem by Venantius Fortunatus in 583, are also thought to be connected. That poem places them under the authority of Chilperic I of the Franks and locates them in northern Francia, in what is now Flanders, directly across the water from Kent.

  In 1884, the scholar Pontus Fahlbeck proposed that the Geats of Beowulf were actually Jutes. Supporting evidence includes the fact that primary sources sometimes refer to the Geats using alternative names such as Iutan, Iotas, and Eotas, and that Asser in his Life of Alfred identifies the Jutes with the Goths. However, within the text of Beowulf itself, the Eoten of the Finn passage are clearly distinguished from the Geatas, which weakens the case. The linguist Elmar Seebold approached the question from a different angle entirely. He argued that the sharp boundary between Frisian and Dutch dialects in the modern linguistic map traces back to migration from Jutland, meaning the Jutes left a linguistic fingerprint that survives to the present day.

• 7. Language and Alphabet

  ›

  The runic alphabet arrived in Britain with the Anglo-Saxon settlers. It had originated in the Germanic homelands through contact with the Roman world, and several runes were directly modelled on their Latin counterparts. Examples of runic writing from that migration period have been found in Kent. As the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms converted to Christianity, Irish missionaries introduced the Latin alphabet, but ran into a problem: Latin had no characters for certain sounds in Anglo-Saxon speech. They solved this by incorporating runic characters into the Latin alphabet, creating what became the Old English Latin alphabet. The runic characters were eventually retired in favour of standard Latin ones, a process completed by the end of the 14th century.

  The language the settlers spoke, Old English, took four main dialectal forms: Mercian, Northumbrian, West Saxon, and Kentish. Based on Bede's account of where the Jutes settled, Kentish was spoken across what are now Kent, Surrey, southern Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. Linguists have noted a similarity between Kentish and Frisian. Whether the two were the same dialect, or whether Kentish was a form of Jutish heavily reshaped by Frisian influence, remains an open question.

  The Jutland peninsula itself occupies a pivotal position in the history of Germanic languages, sitting between the Northern and Western branches of the family. Historians have not been able to determine whether Jutish was always a Scandinavian dialect later influenced by West Germanic speech, or whether it was originally part of the West Germanic continuum. The Finnish surname Juutilainen, which derives from the word juutti, is speculated by some to connect back to Jutland or the Jutes themselves, a distant linguistic echo that linguists have not been able to confirm.