1,600 years ago, the North Sea was a kind of water highway. If it wasn't, today's England wouldn't be England. Genetix has messed with Archeo again, uncovering an unknown mass migration.

After the death of Elizabeth II, material went viral in the Polish infosphere, in which Her Majesty's genealogy was traced back to Casimir Jagiellon. Fans of the idea of the Rzeczpospolita will probably like the fact that, on their pages, the Lithuanians have traced this genealogy to Gediminas. Well, why not? Especially since, thanks to genetic research, they can tell much more about the origins of their ruling dynasty than we can.

Windsor, or Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha

The truth, however, is that when you go back far enough into the past, everyone is related to everyone. Which was proven by another, also virulently spread after Meghan Markle's marriage to Prince Harry Windsor, a file with the pedigree of both of them, which proved that the actress from several Hollywood series has among her ancestors King Edward III of England, who died in 1377. Another thing is that it can also be proven in more than 200 ways that both spouses are distant cousins.

In the Isles, which after all were not always British, of course successive dynasties followed one another, and there were as many as seven major ones: Wessex, Normans, Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, Hanoverians and Windsors. They changed mostly because some foreign power made a conquest (e.g. Normans), dynasties died out (e.g. Normans, Tudors) and successive rulers had to be chosen from the side of the ruling line, sometimes a really distant one. There were also times when the monarchy was overthrown revolutionarily in the Isles or there was a break in the succession by parliament. This was the case because of the religion of the rightful heir to the throne from the Stuart dynasty, who had the misfortune to be a Catholic, unlike his sister who was married to a Protestant from the Dutch Orange dynasty.

Queen Elizabeth II was another in a line of beneficiaries of this recent change in the ruling dynasty (as well as the name of the kingdom, which became Great Britain around the same time). She herself was a member of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (a side branch of the Wettin family, from which the Polish electoral kings of Saxony also descended: Augustus II the Strong and Augustus III Saxon). The family was renamed Windsor in 20th century Britain as part of a battle of crowned cousins on opposite sides of the First World War. After all, the current reigning monarch, Charles III, is not Wettin after his father, but Glücksburg, and therefore belongs to the Oldenburg dynasty. But in 1952, Elizabeth II decided that the children would bear her dynastic name. Queen Victoria didn't dare do something like that (it probably wouldn't even have occurred to her) and so Elisabeth II formally does not belong to the Hanoverian dynasty, from which her great-grandmother came.

In 1960, Elizabeth II - after the intervention of Lord Mountbatten, uncle and guardian of her husband Philip's teenage years - changed her mind and her descendants have since borne the surname Mountbatten-Windsor. As an aside: Mountbatten is the surname of the German princely family of Battenberg (anglicised in 1917, in the same wave of anti-German sentiment in the Isles that gave rise to the Windsors), to which Philip's mother belonged.

To the layperson, the subject matter of these connections seems complicated, and there is no shortage of bizarre twists and turns. For, again, by researching pedigrees far enough back, it is possible to trace Queen Elizabeth II and consequently her son Charles III back to the first monarch whom the encyclopaedias call King of England, namely Alfred the Great. The late queen was exactly the 32nd great-granddaughter of King Alfred, who was Anglo-Saxon and ruled Wessex - a sizable chunk of what is now called England - from 871 to 899. It was about his tumultuous reign that the novel "The Last Kingdom" was written, which does a good job of capturing the climate of the ninth century in the area, but is not a scholarly book and information should not be drawn from it.

A story that was written by a saint...

Drawing knowledge from scholarly history books, we can learn what happened in the Isles between the fifth and ninth centuries, i.e. before the reign of Albert, named the Great seven hundred years later. These are incredibly interesting times, the era of, among other things, the heptarchy, or seven kingdoms, founded in what is now England around the sixth century by tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, who arrived 100-150 years earlier from what is now north-west Germany and southern Denmark.

Interestingly, there are reliable and Latin-written sources from the 8th century (in Poland, the oldest known local chronicle in Latin is from the early 12th century), in the form of the "Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum" by the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede the Venerable. Doctor of the Church, Catholic and Orthodox saint, and for Protestants one of the few 'renewers of the faith'. How can one not trust such a figure?

This work was translated into Old English at the behest of the very Albert the Great, that is in the ninth century. Bede's chronicle not only documents the existence of the heptarchy, but details the conflict between the Roman Church, to which the Anglo-Saxons swore allegiance, and the Iroquoian Church, also known as the Celtic-Christian Church. This one was the place for the natives to seek salvation in Christ: the Scots and the Welsh (the Britons had earlier pushed the Anglo-Saxons across the Grand Canal into present-day Brittany).

Bede also deals briefly with the 'secular' history of the land, recording that the fall of Rome around 400 AD opened the way for an invasion from the east. Today we know that in the late fourth and early fifth centuries the Romans brought a number of Anglo-Saxon mercenaries and their families to Britain to help defend the southern and eastern coasts against other Germanic tribes. However, around 410 the last Roman troops left Britain. By contrast, according to Bede, the aforementioned tribes just then "arrived on the island and began to grow so large that they became terrible to the natives".

This enigmatic sentence does not explain what exactly happened. And the later Viking incursions - in the ninth to eleventh centuries called the Danes, and in the twelfth century the Normans (these Vikings settled as fiefs of the local king in the north of France, which they conquered between the eighth and tenth centuries) under William the Conqueror - prompted archaeologists to read the few traces of earlier history found in the ground in a similar vein. They saw them as evidence of a small-scale invasion by groups of Anglo-Saxon warriors - an elite who imposed their imported culture on the population that existed on the Isles in the fifth to sixth centuries. This is how they understood this enigmatic phrase from the chronicle of Bede the Venerable. Although, according to the findings of archaeologists, Roman-style pottery, decoration, tools and architecture declined in western England around 450 AD, and the remains found began to resemble almost exclusively those discovered on the German or Dutch North Sea coast. Objects of this culture were also found in England, but improved, such as helmets and weapons from Sutton Hoo.

... and history written in the genes

Today, archaeogeneticists have shed much light on the issues described by St Bede. Recently, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where the research is headed by Johannes Krause, published their findings in the journal 'Nature', in collaboration with the guru of the field, David Reich of Harvard and English researchers with a keen interest in their past, mainly from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and the University of Huddersfield.

So what is the story of the Isles after the Roman legions departed in 407 AD at the behest of Constantine that the sequenced genomes tell? New DNA samples taken from more than 20 cemeteries from 494 people who died in eastern England between 400 and 900 AD show that more than three-quarters of their ancestors came from northern Europe. In some sites, even 100 per cent. This implies not just an invasion, but the outright mass colonisation of the area of present-day eastern England by whole families and households. And at least a partial, equally violent disappearance of the indigenous population. Had they been beaten and defeated, their bones would also have been found in cemeteries. But the Britons, those most closely related to the Cornish, were literally pushed into the sea and forced to emigrate to the 'end of the world', the present-day department of Finistère in Brittany (north-west France).

The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the Isles, therefore, bore no resemblance to the familiar arrival of William the Conqueror's elite Norman guard and Breton mercenaries when 679 ships were moored off the coast between Hastings and Eastbourne at Pevensey. For William ushered in his order, language and culture in a few years thanks to 7,000 men and a battle won where his Anglo-Saxon rival to the English throne was deprived of his life. He then pushed the much more numerous local Anglo-Saxons into a corner - their fate is described in the legend of Robin Hood.

Instead, the results of recent archaeogenetic research are part of the debate about what travels: culture and technology, or the people carrying them? It seems that the more we move into the past, the more mobile our ancestors are and the less we see cultures carried by a narrow elite to new territories. After all, cultures or languages do not move by themselves. In the early medieval burial grounds of eastern England, we see the effects of gigantic migrations: old and young men, women and children. It seems too simple to be true, and yet it is! And imagine the sea traffic when all those people and their belongings had to be transported - literally whole villages were migrating.

Interestingly, people with a small admixture of continental DNA were also buried in the Anglo-Saxon manner, suggesting that those who remained on the site readily adopted the new culture. The Celtic languages and Latin soon gave way to Germanic Old English, which shares a vocabulary with German and Dutch. They gave way to the extent that even the Francophone William the Conqueror had to take his coronation oath in English, in which he did not speak a word until his death. These few thousand people transported across La Manche became the core of the aristocracy and bureaucracy of the new ruler and the new dynasty. Old French, therefore, dominated the court and the administration of the state and even the institutional church until the end of the Plantagenet reign, while English succumbed to French influence especially in terms of vocabulary.

However, Meghan Markle's aforementioned royal ancestor, Edward III Plantagenet, was forced in 1362 to order that English was to be spoken in the courts, as otherwise the vast majority of the population would not understand what was going on. As for the English aristocracy, it still mostly descended from the barons of William the Conqueror, but Edward III's son and successor Richard II was already fluent in English, although it was not his first language. The Anglo-Saxon element, therefore, precisely because of its plurality, was not wiped out by the Normandy invaders, although it was - let's call it - trampled on for a time. To then burst forth and, over time, force privileges, their language and culture, and even the change of family names to, after all, foreign in origin to successive dynasties, right up to the last - of two surnames.

Similarly, the continuous Viking-Danish invasions of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy and the growing kingdom of England were even able to overthrow monarchs and seize the English throne (as in 1013 and again in 1016, this time for much longer), but failed to impose either their paganism, language or material culture on the Isles. Geneticists have found an explanation: these later Vikings left fewer traces. Modern Britons are only 6 per cent descended from them. In contrast, according to a study published six years ago, modern Britons are as much as one third of Anglo-Saxon descent.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE I don't know how the Windsors are positioned on this genetic map. After all, the ancestors of Queen Elizabeth II, according to the genealogies studied, include Albert the Great, Casimir the Jagiellonian and - as if it could be otherwise - William the Conqueror. Whether genetics would have been able to unravel the genealogical meanderings unambiguously and assign the Queen to a specific group - it is difficult to say. What is most fascinating is that it is getting better and better at finding 'signatures' in our DNA that place us in specific historical ethnoses. This means that, although looking into the very distant past, we are all related to each other, but not all equally close.

It is easier for us to imagine everyone having two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, as many as 16 great-great-grandparents and so on, than this great migration across the North Sea of the Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes in the fifth century. Imagine this water highway. We have ceased to be nomads. But for our ancestors, these already settled agricultural peoples, it was a normal way of life. When a prolonged crop failure came and a new living space opened up somewhere, they got up and walked. Then they even sailed, sometimes very far. Because a thousand kilometres by sea is a long way even today.

Archaeogenetics has just challenged the idea of Britain as an island nation isolated from the continent, only occasionally experiencing invasions. Genetix has messed with Archeo again.

– Magdalena Kawalec-Segond
-Translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists

The author thanks Adam A. Pszczółkowski for his very helpful critical comments on this text.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05247-2