Our History topic this term is Anglo Saxons and Vikings. So far, we have studied where they came from and what life was like for Anglo Saxon Britons, using evidence from historical sources such as pottery and from West Stow Anglo Saxon Village, a reconstructed settlement that shows how people might have lived more than a thousand years ago. This week, we were answering the question, ‘Who ruled Anglo Saxon Britain, and how was the country divided?’ We began by recapping what we already knew about hierarchies from our learning on Ancient Egypt and discussed how we can still see similar structures today in government, school and even in our everyday lives.
Before diving into our main task, we defined some key historical terms that would help us make sense of the Anglo Saxon world, including thegns, ceorls and earls. Armed with this new vocabulary, we worked in pairs and groups to match definitions with the correct names and then organise them into a hierarchy pyramid, from the most powerful to the least.
This was trickier than it looked. Thegns and ceorls seemed quite similar at first, but we discovered that thegns were landowners who fought for the king and were seen as the backbone of Anglo Saxon society, while ceorls were free farmers who owned small areas of land but were not particularly wealthy. Once we had agreed on the correct order, we summarised our learning in our books, creating our own clear explanations of how Anglo Saxon society was structured.
This activity helped us understand not just who held power, but also how each group had a role to play in keeping society running smoothly.
If you lived in Anglo Saxon Britain, which level of the hierarchy do you think you would belong to, and why?
