Old Saxony

• 1. Introduction

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  Old Saxony was the homeland of a people who held off one of the most powerful empires in medieval Europe for thirty years. They worshipped a divine tree connecting Heaven and Earth. They killed Christian missionaries and threw their bodies into the Rhine. And when they finally fell, they did not simply disappear. They became the foundation of something far larger.

  Who were the Old Saxons? Where exactly did they live? What drove their fierce resistance to the Franks and to Christianity? And how does a people conquered in the 8th century leave its name stamped across the map of Europe, from the German state of Lower Saxony to the English counties of Sussex, Wessex, and Essex?

  Those questions carry us from the lower River Elbe in the 2nd century all the way through the wars of Charlemagne, and into the shape of the medieval world that followed.

• 2. Origins at the Elbe

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  Ptolemy's Geographia, written in the 2nd century, may contain the earliest written reference to the Saxons. Some copies of that text name a tribe called Saxones living to the north of the lower River Elbe, in a region that would later be called Northern Albingia. The name is thought to derive from the word "Sax," meaning stone knife.

  Not everyone agrees on this reading. Other manuscript copies of Ptolemy spell the same tribe as "Axones," and scholars suspect that this was actually a misspelling of the Aviones, a tribe Tacitus described in his Germania. The question of whether Ptolemy was even writing about the Saxons at all remains genuinely open.

  What does seem clear is that as land grew scarce in their northern homeland, the Saxon population expanded southward. As they moved, they absorbed other peoples: the Cherusci, the Chamavi, the Chatti, and remnants of the Langobardi and the Suebi. That broader, expanded territory is what ancient writers came to call Old Saxony.

  Another people, the Chauci, occupied roughly the same region. Tacitus described the Chauci as peaceful, calm, and levelheaded, and held in high regard among Germanic tribes. At some point the Chauci may have merged with the Saxons, or the two groups may even have been the same people under different names.

• 3. A Society Built on Rank

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  Bede, writing in the early 8th century, described the Old Saxons as ruled not by a single king but by "satraps," a term borrowed from Persian governance. This was a people without a unified political center, held together instead by custom and clan.

  Old Saxon society was sharply stratified into an aristocracy of nobles, a free warrior class, and common freemen. Those distinctions were not merely social preferences. They were enforced with lethal force. Any man who married above his rank faced the death penalty. A man who married below his station faced severe condemnation. Bastardy was not tolerated. Marriage between Saxons and other Germanic peoples was discouraged. Strangers, according to the sources, were hated.

  These rules were embedded so deeply that clear traces of the old Saxon social customs persisted in Saxony well into the Middle Ages, long after conquest and conversion had transformed nearly everything else about Saxon life.

  The same rigidity that kept Saxon society internally ordered also shaped their geography. Adam of Bremen, writing in the 11th century, compared Old Saxony to a triangle, with each angle separated by about eight days' journey. By that accounting, Old Saxony was the largest of all the German tribal duchies. It stretched between the lower Elbe and Saale rivers, nearly to the Rhine, and between the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser it touched the North Sea.

• 4. Raiding and Migration

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  Saxon ships were reaching the eastern coasts of Britain during the 3rd and 4th centuries. Those raids were persistent enough that Roman authorities built a chain of maritime fortifications along the eastern seaboard of Britain, a defensive network known as the Saxon Shore.

  The collapse of Roman defenses on the Rhine in 407 changed the pressure map of northwestern Europe. Population movements pushing from the east forced the Saxons, along with their neighboring peoples the Angles and the Jutes, to look westward across the sea. The traditional date given for this migration and invasion of Britain is 449, an event known as the Adventus Saxonum.

  How many people actually crossed is a matter of genuine uncertainty. Archaeological evidence of large-scale conflict following the arrival is limited, and the physical evidence for mass Germanic migration into Britain is equally thin. It is possible the migration was far smaller than the cultural transformation it produced would suggest, and that the post-Roman population of Britain remained largely in place.

  The cultural and linguistic shifts, regardless of how many people moved, were sharp enough to produce entirely new kingdoms. The South Saxons gave their name to Sussex. The West Saxons became Wessex. The East Saxons became Essex. Alongside the kingdoms established by the Angles and the Jutes, these Saxon settlements became the foundations of what would grow into the modern English nation.

• 5. Pagan Faith and Frankish Pressure

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  After the Western Roman Empire fell in the 5th century, the Old Saxons who remained in Germania maintained a loosely defined relationship with the Merovingian Franks. In practice, they kept their independence and held onto their old religion.

  At the center of Saxon religious life stood the Irminsul, a sacred pillar or divine tree believed to connect Heaven and Earth. A site near modern Obermarsberg is thought to have been its location. The Irminsul was not simply a monument; it was a focal point of Saxon identity.

  Conflict with the Franks was nearly continuous. In 555, when the Frankish king Theudebald died, the Saxons seized the moment and went to war. They were defeated by Chlothar I, Theudebald's successor. Later, Chlothar II won a decisive victory against them. The border between Saxon and Frankish territory was a low divide through the hills of the Harz and Hesse, and the lack of any strong physical barrier meant that raiding and counter-raiding across it were essentially permanent features of life.

  In 690, two missionary priests from Northumbria named Ewald the Black and Ewald the Fair set out to convert the Saxons. At that time, Old Saxony was organized around the ancient dioceses of Munster, Osnabruck, and Paderborn. By 695, the Saxons had grown violently hostile to the Christian presence. Ewald the Fair was quickly killed. Ewald the Black was tortured and torn limb from limb. Their bodies were thrown into the Rhine. This is recorded as having happened on the 3rd of October 695 at a place called Aplerbeck, near Dortmund, where a chapel still stands. Both men are now venerated as saints in Westphalia.

• 6. The Wars with Charlemagne

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  Charlemagne began his campaign against the Saxons in 772 and did not finish it until 804. Thirty years of war, described by contemporaries as bloody and attritious, ground down a people who had resisted Frankish power for centuries.

  The Saxon leader named most prominently in this struggle is Widukind. Under his leadership, the Saxons mounted repeated resistance before their final defeat. Charlemagne, who was king of the Franks and later emperor, forced the survivors to convert to Christianity.

  The bonds of clan and kindred that had defined Saxon society were unusually strong. Despite the divisions among their four main tribal groups, the Angrians along the Weser, the Westphalians along the Ems and Lippe, the Eastphalians on the left bank of the Weser, and the Nordalbingians in what is now Holstein, the Saxons had maintained a cultural coherence that stretched back to the earliest Germanic world Tacitus had described. The Nordalbingians alone were subdivided further into Holsteiners, Sturmarii, Bardi, and the men of Ditmarsch.

  The long war reduced but did not erase that distinct identity. What it did was transform the political structure. The old homeland became the Duchy of Saxony, a Carolingian stem duchy, and the territory that had been the domain of pagan clans was absorbed into the framework of a Christian Frankish empire. The name of Saxony itself outlasted the conquest, carried forward into the German federal state of Lower Saxony and, on the far side of the continent, into the English names that the migrating Saxons had already planted centuries before.