Boundaries and networks

‘History is bunk,’ averred Henry Ford, whose talents clearly lay elsewhere. There is a kernel of truth to his assertion: history does need to be debunked from time to time.

Most history lies somewhere on a scale between absolute historical facts looking for improved narratives to total myths seeking genuine historical contexts. Examples of the former occur every day, as those whose actions will make up the history of tomorrow spin their stories in self-justification. At the other end of the scale is the legend of King Arthur who, it has been said, has wasted more of historians’ time than any other figure.

The established history of early medieval Britain with its supposed invasions of Angles, Saxons and Jutes is firmly rooted in three centuries of academic analysis and many hundreds of textbooks. But it carries several major encumbrances. First, the all-important primacy of the written record is a bit dodgy in that its provenance trail leads consistently to Gildas, a single, vituperative, sixth-century Welsh monk with an axe to grind. Second is an assumption that in unrecorded histories, ethnicity, language, religion, technology and fashion all march together in a lock step called ‘culture’, when a cursory examination of any other era shows this to be untrue.

Third is the increasing acceptance of the concept of la longue durée, developed in the 20th century by the French Annales School. This asserts that slowly evolving patterns of daily life have a more significant lasting influence on social history than battles, plagues and other major short-term events that historians like to write about. The logic of this is reinforced by the fact that the value of agrarian economies (for farmers and those who exact taxes) relies on deep-rooted local knowledge of soils, drainage and microclimates. Finally, and here is the clincher, there is now previously unavailable phylogenetic DNA data.

From current evidence, it seems that the British people at the start of the 20th century were by and large the descendants of those occupying these islands in the 4th millennium BCE and the only significant invaders have been the English language and other cultural phenomena. Of course, there has always been migration, both inter-regional and international, and both passive and aggressive, but this has been continuously absorbed into the background population.

In the eighth century, here in the southern Marches, the people were then known as the Magonsæte, a sub-kingdom of Mercia. We know this because in 676 the Diocese of Hereford was founded to establish their adherence to the Church of Rome. The ‘boundaries’ of the diocese have changed little – only to give ground to the new Diocese of Gloucester in 1541 and to the Church in Wales when this was established in 1925. But in the eighth century there were no boundaries. These were not fixed until the establishment of geographical parishes in the 10th century.

The limits to the territory of the Magonsæte, and thus the diocese, were defined instead by a network: the hierarchy of personal freedoms and responsibilities, rights and duties, on which their society was based.

The Magonsæte were a bilingual society. By the eighth century, the English language was well established from 300 years of settlement and influence from Greater Mercia, but Welsh was still widely spoken. The part of Herefordshire south-west of the River Wye, which had been part of the earlier kingdom of Ergyng and later became Archenfield, had a significant Welsh-speaking population into the 19th century.

Hadrian’s Wall formed a boundary if only between the defended and the undefended. The late-eighth-century Offa’s Dyke is harder to fathom because none of the theories about its function passes any sort of cost benefit analysis. (When did public infrastructure projects do otherwise?) The dyke peters out in the southern Marches where the Magonsæte, English and Welsh-speaking Mercian allies, lived on both sides of it, undermining the idea of its being a political boundary. But if it were defensive, then being Welsh speaking can hardly have been definitive of the feared ‘Welsh’.

This article originally appeared as: ‘Boundaries and networks’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 179, published in March 2024. It was written by James Caird.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation