They left their estates and fled away from the land with a great host

An intriguing story. From Exiles built little England by the Black Sea after Norman Conquest by Mark Bridge. It is not a certainty as implied by the headline, but certainly a possibility with some known facts supportive of the idea.

It is a tale of English adventurers who fled a king’s tyranny, crossed oceans and built a version of their homeland on distant shores, naming towns after those they left behind.

These were not the Pilgrim Fathers, however, but little-known fugitives from the Norman Conquest who created their own New England on the Black Sea more than 500 years earlier.

Late-medieval accounts of English exiles rewarded for derring-do on behalf of the eastern Roman, or Byzantine, emperor read like a film script but a historian has claimed that there is evidence for significant aspects of the story. Caitlin Green, a medieval historian and archaeologist, has published the first account of this eastern “Nova Anglia” in BBC History Magazine.

A colourful telling of the purported exodus comes from the 14th-century Icelandic saga of Edward the Confessor, which relays how, after the defeat at Hastings in 1066, English chiefs appealed to the Danes to help them to oust William the Bastard. “When the English chiefs were sure that the Danes would not help them . . . then they left their estates and fled away from the land with a great host.”

It says the force travelled in 350 ships and was led by one Siward, earl of Gloucester. After a series of adventures, including raiding Ceuta, north Africa, where they slaughtered a host of heathens and were paid off in treasure, the saga says the exiles heard of great strife out of Micklegarth (then Constantinople, now Istanbul), which was under siege by land and sea. They made haste and took the enemy ships, causing such a rout that the foe on land also “sprang up and fled”.

The saga says that the emperor “took wonderfully well” to his guests. It says that he offered the English places in his bodyguard unit, the Varangians, but some asked for land instead. Unwilling to risk depriving local notables of their estates, the emperor said there was former Roman territory lying six days and nights’ sail across the sea “in the east and northeast from Micklegarth” that was theirs if they could take it from the heathens.

After many battles, the saga relates, they duly won the land and called it England. “To the towns that were in the land and to those which they built they gave the names of the towns in England. They called them both London and York, and by the names of other great towns.”

Bridge acknowledges that the tale is likely embellished but then goes on to elaborate on the facts and circumstances which support the idea. In the process, he shares other information which I either did not know or had forgotten. For example:

In her book The Alexiad, written in about 1148, the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena mentions the presence in the imperial service of Varangians from “the island of Thule”, which is often taken to be Britain. She described how these “axe-bearing barbarians” ... “regarded their loyalty to the emperors and their protection of the imperial persons as a pledge and ancestral tradition, handed down from father to son”.

Historians agree that the Varangian guard went from being dominated by Scandinavians for the 10th and much of the 11th centuries to being a primarily English unit. Englishmen travelling to Constantinople after the Norman Conquest could have heard of the wealth and opportunities of “Micklegarth” due to the large Danish influence at home.