In Search of the Saxons

Leaf 156 – Looking Back

 

One of my most favourite history documentaries of all time is Michael Wood’s “In Search of the Dark Ages” which was first broadcast between 1979-1981, (see also Leaf 125). In which he recounts the history of England after the fall of Rome, when the old province of Britannia became the homeland of the Anglo-Saxons and laid much of the foundations for our island nation as we know it today.

 

As Michael Wood explains with such energy, enthusiasm and erudition, it is a country which has absorbed incomers for centuries and become a unique melting pot of different cultures. Yet he shows how much of it – the shires and the hundreds, the villages and towns, the roadways and earthworks, the hedges and the forests, the wealds and the downlands, and many of the market squares and churches, are an echo of that older world first-forged by the Saxon Kings. The archaeology underlying the fabric of so many of our towns and high streets, along with the words embedded in our language, and the thoughts which shape so many of our traditions are rooted in that era – the time between the Roman withdrawal and the Norman Conquest, which, when we stop to examine it, shows us so much of who we are still.

 

Michael Wood

I wrote the following poem recently while watching (for the umpteenth time!) the episode entitled, ‘In Search of Athelstan,’ the “first King of all England,” in which Wood uses a modern Ordnance Survey map and a photocopy of an Anglo-Saxon charter from 932 to retrace, physically on foot and by the keenness of his eye, the boundaries of a parcel of land of twelve hides at West Meon in Hampshire, given to Æthelgeard, one of Athelstan’s thegns or thanes (lords) – finding the bumps and hollows in the landscape, as well as the echoes still extant in the place names which the charter described. It was TV programmes such as this one when I was younger which fed my earliest interests in history and archaeology, firing my imagination and inspiring me to pursue a career working on digs and in museums for many years. But it was also Anglo-Saxon poems such as Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon (see Leaf 113) – lyrical and alliterative – which spoke to the poet who is deep rooted in my soul. Hence, despite my love of haiku (and the Metaphysical and Romantic poets as well), I always seem to circle back eventually to sentiments of homecoming, such as these:

 

 

IN SEARCH OF THE SAXONS

 

Rising from history-hushed Rushmere

to a green leafed boundary tumuli,

along the Herepath by the long ditch;

from Fern Lea down to Curved Hollow,

following old ways, well-worn through

a half-forgotten ancestral landscape;

half-glimpsed again, undergrowth shadowed,

along fleet river and ancient hedgerow;

tracing on foot with folded map in hand

the hundreds of Athelstan’s thanes:

a wyrd kinship – still flowing in our veins.

 

 

 

Photograph credits: IMDb and Wikipedia