The ‘dark Welsh’ as slaves and slave raiders in Exeter Book riddles 52 and 721

Chapter three argues that a group of Old English riddles located in the borderlands between Anglo-Saxon England and Wales reflect a common regional culture by depicting shared values of a warrior elite across the ostensible Anglo-Welsh divide. These riddles, which link the ‘dark Welsh’ to agricultural labour, have long been understood to depict the Welsh as slaves and thus reflect Anglo-Saxon awareness of both ethnic and social division. Drawing upon understudied Welsh legal material, this chapter argues that these riddles have a multilayered solution in which the Welsh are both slaves and slave traders, complicating readings of negative Anglo/Welsh relations. This polysemic solution reveals that the Welsh, like the Anglo-Saxons, were stratified by class into the enslaved and a warrior elite with less distance from the Anglo-Saxons than has been understood. The location of these riddles on the mearc further characterises the Welsh borderlands in the early period as a distinctive region which was notorious for cattle raiding. These riddles counter the common perception that the Welsh borderlands were defined by Offa’s Dyke, suggesting that this region is better understood as a space which both Anglo-Saxons and Welsh permeated on raids.

Penda of Mercia and the Welsh borderlands in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica

Chapter one examines one of the earliest and most historically significant surviving Anglo-Saxon texts, Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. This chapter argues that Bede’s narrative of Anglo-Saxon religious and ethnic cohesion also depicts a distinct culture in the borderlands in the seventh century, shared between the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia and the Welsh kingdoms of Gwynedd and Powys, formed in opposition to cultural changes brought about by the conversion of surrounding Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Roman Christianity. Bede has long been understood as highly critical of both the heretical Britons and the heathen Mercians, but in his hostility, he preserves important details about the life of king Penda of Mercia which provide a window into the culture of the borderlands as a region which stands apart from Bede’s narrative of ethnic division between Anglo-Saxons and Britons. Several early Welsh poems reflect the same perspective from the west: the borderlands not as a site of strife, but a nexus of Anglo-Welsh culture.

Conclusion: Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon in the Welsh borderlands

Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England concludes with the Latin Life of Harold Godwinson, an understudied text set during the transition from Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England. The Vita Haroldi continues to depict the Welsh borderlands as a distinctive territory where two peoples came together across the temporal divide of the Norman Conquest. This work claims that Harold was not killed at the Battle of Hastings, but survived and lived for many years afterwards disguised as a hermit in the Welsh borderlands. Harold’s curious Vita is a fitting microcosm of this book. The Welsh borderlands serve as the cultural intersection between Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England, the last place where English identity is preserved after the Norman arrival. Yet Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon, can survive only within the borderlands, a cultural nexus of Anglo-Saxon and Welsh. The Vita Haroldi underscores the reputation of the Welsh borderlands as a distinct region where two peoples came together, even from a perspective of longing for a lost English past after the Norman Conquest.

The transformation of the borderlands outlaw in the eleventh century

By the end of the eleventh century, the region of the Welsh borderlands had undergone a significant shift in representation from a distinct territory with a singular style of fighting to a place linked particularly with outlawry. Chapter five explores the transitional moment between these two conceptualisations of the borderlands through an extended study of the Peterborough Chronicle, the recension of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued for the longest period following the Norman Conquest. This text marks the beginning of an important conceptual shift in which a culture of outlawry moved from the mixed Anglo-Welsh inhabitants of the borderlands to the Welsh alone by the end of the eleventh century, underscoring the impact of the Norman presence on the culture of this region.

The Welsh borderlands in the Lives of St Guthlac1

Chapter Two focuses on a corpus of Old English and Latin works about the popular Anglo-Saxon saint Guthlac of Croyland (673-714) whose Mercian youth and later career as a hermit in the fens of East Anglia link him indelibly to two of Britain’s most nebulous geographical spaces. This chapter argues that the various Lives of Guthlac depict the borderlands as a locus of military advancement for Mercian and Welsh elites. As in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, this region is a place where a young Mercian warrior can advance his career by living among the British and leading a multi-ethnic war band, features of military life in the borderlands that are also evident in contemporary Welsh and Cambro-Latin texts. The geographically fluid nature of this region is also evident in this chapter’s second significant argument: that even within this Anglo-Saxon saint’s life, the politics of land control are much less clear-cut than has been assumed. While St. Guthlac’s battles with demons have been understood to reflect Anglo/Welsh ethnic division, this chapter argues that the Old English poem Guthlac A is far more conflicted towards land ownership, reflecting the fluid boundaries of Mercia itself.

Introduction: the Dunsæte Agreement and daily life in the Welsh borderlands

Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England argues that the Welsh borderlands formed a culturally distinctive region during the Anglo-Saxon period. The book begins with a close examination of a late Old English legal text known as the Dunsæte agreement, which governs procedure for the recovery of stolen cattle taken across the river which ran between the Welsh and English banks of the Dunsæte territory. This text reflects Anglo-Welsh equality, community, and cooperation, providing a window into the lived reality of the borderlands: it was a region where two peoples lived together for hundreds of years, not simply a space of endless warfare as it is often understood in scholarship on early medieval Britain. The introduction contextualizes this book within recent work in postcolonial studies, border/frontier studies, and the history of Anglo/Welsh relations, laying out a case for why the Welsh borderlands should be understood as a distinctive region during the Anglo-Saxon period.

The Welsh borderlands in the Anglo‑Saxon Chronicle

Chapter four argues for a significant pattern of political alliance in the Welsh borderlands in the later Anglo-Saxon period, beginning in the tenth century, where half a dozen raids carried out jointly by Mercian earls and northern Welsh rulers have gone unnoticed because they are recorded largely in Welsh sources. This pattern of political cohesion within the Welsh borderlands continues in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle throughout the eleventh century, both before and after the Norman arrival in 1066. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle represents the Welsh borderlands as a region which acted as an independent political force throughout the eleventh century. Chapter four also argues that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle represents the military culture of the Welsh borderlands in a distinctive way which aligns its inhabitants with outlaws.