Secgas on searwum: early Anglo-Saxon weapons and warfare

Abstract

It begins with Beowulf, the only surviving Old English epic, which tells of the deeds of kings and heroes in geardagum (1), the lords of a society based on the leader and his hearthtroop. This hall-culture is generally thought to have died out in England during the C7, that is, before the poem as we have it took shape. Under Church influence social stratification widened, status became more dependant on the ownership of land than prowess in war, the smaller kingdoms merged, armies became bigger and warfare necessarily changed, moving even further from a society like Beowulf's than it had been. The origin and orginisation of the fyrd, which must have existed in some form before Ine's laws of c. 695, are omitted as too far-reaching and controversial. The fyrd was long thought to have been the raising of every able-bodied (free) man, but it is now argued that it was, at least in later times, a levy based on land. It is even suggested that both existed at once as the great fyrd mentioned above and a smaller élite version. Dodging the much-debated date of the poem (anywhere between the C8 and C11), I treat its heroic society as near enough to that of the early Anglo-Saxon period. It is assumed that the details of gear and behaviour have been remembered as appropriate to legends of a passed age, if not still contemporary with the (English) author. The historically founded material in Beowulf and other Old English poetry must have been handed down orally for centuries and poetic conventions may be very old.