Saxons

• 1. Introduction

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  The Saxons gave their name to England, to Scotland's lowlanders, to the Finnish word for scissors, and to the whole country of Germany as far as Finnish and Estonian speakers are concerned. Yet the people behind that name were never, for much of their history, a single people at all. The term Saxon first appeared in Roman records as a label for seaborne raiders attacking the empire's northwestern edges, a catch-all word not unlike the later term Viking, used to describe anyone who came by boat to take what was not theirs. Who were these Saxons, where did they actually come from, and how did one people's name end up belonging to so many different places and peoples across centuries of European history?

• 2. A Name Before a People

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  The word Saxon may derive from the seax, a kind of knife whose name in Old English was seax and in Old High German sahs. That etymology is traditional, not certain, but it fits a pattern: the name attached first to a method of fighting, then to the fighters themselves, then to whole territories they had never seen. The Laterculus Veronensis, dated to about 314 AD, is the earliest document to list the Saxons by name among barbarian peoples who had come into contact with the Roman Empire. That document placed them among the Chamavi and the Franks as clearly distinct groups. Yet when the contemporary Panegyrici Latini described raids on the North Sea coast near Boulogne-sur-Mer around 285, they named the attackers as Franks, Chamavi, and Frisians, without mentioning Saxons at all. The 4th-century historian Eutropius applied the Saxon label to those same events only later, which scholars believe was anachronistic. The term Saxon, for a long stretch of time, probably designated any group that attacked by boat rather than any specific tribe, much as a later writer might call anyone who raided by sea a Viking regardless of where they sailed from. Writers in the 8th century such as Bede and the author of the Ravenna Cosmography eventually introduced the phrase "Old Saxons" to distinguish the continental people from the settlers who had already transformed into the Anglo-Saxons of Britain.

• 3. Raiders of the Roman Shore

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  In 357 or 358, the future emperor Julian campaigned along the Rhine against the Alemanni, the Franks, and the Saxons, and the late-5th-century historian Zosimus recorded that the Saxons at that time "exceed all the barbarians in those regions, in courage, strength and hardiness." Zosimus also described how a group he called the Quadi, whom he apparently identified as part of the Saxons, used boats to sail around the Franks blocking their land route and reached the Rhine delta at Batavia, present-day Betuwe. Scholars think Quadi is a copying error, probably for the Chamavi, which again suggests that Saxon was still less an ethnic category than a description of a fighting style. The Roman military structure known as the Litus Saxonicum, or Saxon Shore, was a chain of nine forts stretching around the south-eastern corner of England; the Notitia Dignitatum, compiled around 400, confirmed it existed by then. Across the English Channel two parallel coastal military commands protected what is now Brittany and Normandy and the coast of present-day Flanders and Picardy. A Saxon military unit called the Ala primum Saxonum was already serving in the Roman army by 363, stationed in what is now Lebanon and northern Israel, and Julian used them in Arabia against the Persian empire that same year. Roman military accessories found in northern Germany during the 4th and 5th centuries appear to mark the return home of soldiers who had served the empire. The poet Claudian singled out the ferocity of 4th-century Saxon coastal raids, and Ammianus Marcellinus, writing in books 26 and 27, named the Saxons alongside the Picts and the Attacotti as peoples troubling Britain. A Roman officer, Count Theodosius, recovered control of Britain; an inscription in Stobi in North Macedonia described him as the terror of Saxony, making it the earliest known reference to a country of the Saxons outside of the disputed mention in Ptolemy.

• 4. A Scattered and Fragmented People

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  Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries appear in sources spread so widely across western Europe that they resist any single origin story. In the 460s a leader named Adovacrius commanded a Saxon force based on islands near the Loire, took hostages at Anger in France, and was subsequently driven back by the Roman general Childeric I. Many historians believe Adovacrius may be the same person as Odoacer, who later became king of Italy; Gregory of Tours placed both men in the same passage. In 568 or 569, Saxons living in the Austrasian kingdom of Sigebert accompanied the Lombards into Italy under the leadership of Alboin. When they returned to Gaul in 572 and raided as far south as Stablo, now Estoublon, they were defeated by the Gallo-Roman general Mummolus, allowed to fetch their families, and then defeated a second time when they tried to plunder their way back north. A separate Saxon community lived on the Normandy coast near Bayeux in what was called the Bessin region. In 589, these Saxons wore their hair in the Breton fashion at the orders of Frankish queen Fredegund and fought alongside the Bretons. Beginning in 626, Dagobert I used the Saxons of the Bessin for campaigns against the Basques. Official documents from 843 and 846 under Charles the Bald mention a district in the Bessin called Otlinga Saxonia, though the meaning of Otlinga remains unclear. There were also apparent Saxon place-name clusters near Boulogne-sur-Mer in the Pas-de-Calais, with a number of names ending in the suffix -thun. In 632, Saxon messengers met Dagobert I in Mainz and tried to negotiate an end to the tribute of 500 cows per year they had been paying, offering instead to defend the Frankish frontier against the Wend leader Samo at their own expense.

• 5. Charlemagne and the Saxon Wars

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  Charles Martel, son of Pepin of Herstal, invaded Saxony as far as the Weser in 718 and campaigned there again in 720, 724, and 738, with possible additional campaigns in 722 and 728. His son Pepin the Short attacked Saxons northeast of the Rhine in 753, returned in 758, and that time extracted a tribute of 330 horses per year. The full conquest fell to Pepin's son Charlemagne, who fought the Saxon Wars from 772 to 804. In 772 the Franks destroyed Irminsul, a sacred pillar or tree located at Eresburg that may have functioned as a representation of a world tree and been the object of a pole cult. Charlemagne deported 10,000 Nordalbingian Saxons to Neustria and gave their largely emptied lands in Wagria, roughly the modern Plön and Ostholstein districts, to the loyal king of the Abotrites. Charlemagne's biographer Einhard described the end of the conflict: the Saxons accepted renunciation of their national religious customs, acceptance of the Christian faith, and union with the Franks to form one people. In 776 the Saxons promised to convert and swear loyalty to the king, but when Charlemagne was occupied in Hispania in 778 they advanced to Deutz on the Rhine and plundered along the river. Alcuin of York, writing to his friend Meginfrid in 796, objected to the methods used: "If the light yoke and sweet burden of Christ were to be preached to the most obstinate people of the Saxons with as much determination as the payment of tithes has been exacted, or as the force of the legal decree has been applied for fault of the most trifling sort imaginable, perhaps they would not be averse to their baptismal vows." Charlemagne's successor Louis the Pious reportedly treated the Saxons more as Alcuin had wished, and they became faithful subjects, though the lower classes revolted as late as the 840s, when the Stellinga rose up against their Saxon leaders allied with the Frankish emperor Lothair I.

• 6. Society, Castes, and Law

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  Bede, writing around 730, observed that the continental Saxons had no king but were governed by several satraps who cast lots for a war leader during conflicts and held equal power in peacetime. The regnum Saxonum was divided into three provinces, Westphalia, Eastphalia, and Angria, which together comprised about one hundred pagi or Gaue, each with its own satrap holding enough military power to level whole villages that opposed him. The social structure below the leaders was first described in detail by Nithard in the mid-9th century. The caste system was rigid; the three castes excluding slaves were called, in the Saxon language, the edhilingui, the frilingi, and the lazzi. The edhilingui were the descendants of the warriors who led the tribe out of Holstein during the migrations of the 6th century, a conquering warrior elite. The frilingi descended from the dependants and freed men of that class. The lazzi were the descendants of the original inhabitants of conquered territories, obligated to make oaths of submission and pay tribute. The Lex Saxonum set their wergilds precisely: an edhilingui was worth 1,440 solidi, or about 700 head of cattle, which was six times the value of a frilingi and eight times the value of a lazzi, and was the highest wergild on the continent. Intermarriage between castes was forbidden. The Saxons held an annual council at Marklo in Westphalia where, according to the Vita Lebuini antiqua, they confirmed their laws, judged outstanding cases, and decided whether to go to war or remain at peace. All three castes sent twelve representatives from each Gau. In 782, Charlemagne abolished the system of Gaue and replaced it with the Frankish system of counties, and by banning the Marklo councils he pushed the frilingi and lazzi out of political life entirely.

• 7. Faith Forced and Contested

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  Around 695, two English missionaries, Hewald the White and Hewald the Black, were martyred by Saxon villagers while attempting to convert one of the regional satraps. Their deaths were representative of a long pattern: throughout the century that followed, it was the peasants and villagers who most fiercely resisted Christianisation, while the edhilingui and other noblemen often offered the missionaries protection. Saint Lebuin, an Englishman who preached to the Saxons between 745 and 770 mainly in the eastern Netherlands, built a church and made many friends among the nobility; some of them rallied to protect him from an angry mob at the annual council at Marklo near the Weser. The 9th-century Old Saxon Baptismal Vow required those taking it to renounce the worship of three named deities: Thunaer, Wodan, and Saxnot. The last of these, Saxnot, also appears in Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies; scholars believe him to be the mythical ancestor of the Saxons. Charlemagne's Capitulatio de Partibus Saxoniae, dated between 755 and 790, prohibited cremation burial on pain of death, with the latest securely dated cremation burial in Saxony from around 800. Forced baptisms and forced tithing turned much of the lower orders against the new faith, but the Saxon nobility of the 9th century became vigorous supporters of monasticism, forming a bulwark against Slavic paganism to the east and Nordic paganism to the north. To win over the lowest castes, Louis the Pious commissioned the Heliand, a verse epic of the life of Christ set in a Germanic landscape, and a Saxon Genesis, another epic retelling the first book of the Bible. A council at Tours in 813 and a synod at Mainz in 848 both declared that homilies should be preached in the vernacular. After the suppression of the Stellinga revolt, in 851 Louis the German brought relics from Rome to Saxony to foster devotion to the Roman Catholic Church.

• 8. The Name That Outlasted the People

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  Old Saxon is first clearly attested in the 8th century, after Charlemagne's conquest. Closely related to Old English and Old Frisian, it belongs to the North Sea Germanic branch of West Germanic languages, and it shares features with Old High German and Old Low Franconian as well. Knowledge of it survives mainly through the Heliand, the fragmentary Old Saxon Genesis, a handful of short prose texts, and words preserved as glosses in Latin manuscripts. Old Saxon evolved into Middle Low German by around 1200 and into modern Low German by around 1500, which became the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League before facing a long decline as a literary, administrative, and cultural language in favour of Dutch and German. The dukes of Saxony became kings of Germany in 919 with Henry I, called the Fowler, and his son Otto I became the first emperor, but that line lost the throne in 1024. The duchy was split in 1180 when Duke Henry the Lion refused to follow his cousin Emperor Frederick Barbarossa into war in Lombardy. The name Saxony then migrated eastward through political accident: the rulers of Meissen acquired the remnant Duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg in 1423 and gradually applied the name Saxony to their whole kingdom, which lay in territory where the original Saxons had never lived. Celtic-speaking peoples applied their own versions of Saxones to the English: Sasannach in Scottish Gaelic, Sasanach in Irish, Saeson in Welsh, and Sawsnek in Cornish. In Finnish, saksa means Germany and sakslaiset means Germans; sakset, the Finnish word for scissors, preserves the memory of the old seax knife from which the name Saxon first derived.