Saxon Settlement
AD 530
Context: The fifth and sixth centuries saw Germanic peoples from northern Europe settling across Britain, establishing new kingdoms on the ruins of Roman provincial administration.
The arrival of the Saxons on the Isle of Wight in the sixth century was one of the most violent episodes in the island's history. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in AD 530, Cerdic and Cynric, leaders of the West Saxons, conquered the island and killed many men at a place called Wihtgarabyrig. In 534, the Chronicle states, they gave the island to their kinsmen Stuf and Wihtgar. The details are contested by historians, and the Chronicle was compiled centuries after the events it describes, but the broad outline is clear: Germanic settlers seized the island from its Romano-British inhabitants by force.
The people who settled the Isle of Wight were Jutes, not Saxons, according to Bede, the great eighth-century historian. Writing in his Ecclesiastical History, Bede identified the Isle of Wight and the area opposite on the Hampshire mainland as Jutish territory, distinct from the Saxon kingdoms to the north and west. The Jutes were a Germanic people from the Jutland peninsula in modern Denmark. Their settlement on the island created the kingdom of the Wihtwara, the people of Wight, a small but distinct political unit that maintained a degree of independence for roughly a century and a half.
Archaeological evidence supports the picture of significant cultural change. Pagan Saxon cemeteries, with their characteristic grave goods of brooches, weapons, and pottery, have been found at several sites on the island, including Bowcombe Down near Carisbrooke and Chessell Down near Brighstone. The Chessell Down cemetery, excavated in the nineteenth century, yielded a remarkable collection of Jutish metalwork, glassware, and personal ornaments that are now in the British Museum. The quality and continental connections of these objects suggest a prosperous community with ongoing links to northern Europe.
The Wihtwara kingdom came to a brutal end in 686, when Caedwalla, king of Wessex, invaded the island and attempted to exterminate its population. Bede records that Caedwalla killed all the inhabitants and replaced them with settlers from his own people. This account is almost certainly an exaggeration, but it reflects a genuine catastrophe. The Jutish ruling dynasty was destroyed, and the island was absorbed into the expanding kingdom of Wessex. Caedwalla also sought to impose Christianity on the island: the last pagan king of the Wihtwara, Arwald, was killed during the conquest, and his two young brothers were baptised before being executed.
The Christianisation of the island followed swiftly. St Wilfrid, the Northumbrian bishop, had been active in the area, and by the early eighth century the island was firmly within the diocese of Winchester. Churches were established, and the old pagan burial practices ceased. The place names that survive from this period, many incorporating Old English elements, tell the story of a landscape being reorganised and renamed by its new masters.
The Saxon period established the basic pattern of settlement that survives on the island today. The villages, the parish boundaries, the road network, and many of the field systems date in their origins to this era. The island's identity as a distinct territory within the English kingdom, with its own customs and its own sense of separateness, was also formed during these centuries.
Impact
Replaced the Romano-British population with Jutish settlers, created the Wihtwara kingdom, and established the settlement pattern and place names that persist to this day.