How much would the average English person know about the Anglo Saxon Pagan Gods throughout the Middle Ages after Christianization?

by [deleted]
Steelcan909

Nothing. Or near enough to nothing so as to be all but meaningless.

Paganism in the Anglo-Saxon world (and the broader North Sea world) was not a religion as we often conceive of one today. Features of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam such as written scriptures, formalized education systems to train members of the religious elite, and organized international structures did not exist for the religious traditions. This presents a problem for the survival of knowledge of the pagan gods after conversion. In the absence of written works or learned elite, the survival of folk knowledge of their old deities relies on the "average" people having a desire to retain that knowledge for some reason such as a marker of political allegiance, economic factors, or something else just as compelling.

That is to say that the pagan traditions of the English were not tied to the means by which institutions, doctrines, and beliefs are able to last, and in the absence of strong reasons to keep those traditions, such as knowledge of the pagan gods, alive, the practices, beliefs, and ideas of the pagan people withered away. Once the last pagans converted (or as the Venerable Bede claims, were murdered) the line of knowledge was broken and there was no way to resurrect the beliefs that had once been popular, they were simply lost to time as their practitioners died off or were converted.

That is not to say that the practices and beliefs of the people were totally changed by conversion. For example in the immediate decades and centuries after conversion practices such as small offerings of grain to local spirits, wearing amulets to protect against disease, and the continued religious significance of some sites were maintained. Our evidence for this comes from the penitentials of the early Middle Ages which catalogued various sins and their recommended penance, so we know that some practices were tolerated, such as local grain offerings, while others, such as the consumption of horse meat or the swearing of oaths to pagan names, were sharply repressed. However knowledge of the rituals and rites of the pagan practices did not survive and probably did not last more than the generation after the final pagan one.

This is because of how the various practices of the pagan traditions were structured and carried out. The pagan religious traditions of England, as in other places like Scandinavia, were tied immensely to social elites. The religious practices of the people as whole were different from those of the social elite, but it was among the social elite that the rituals and practices that firmly differentiated the religion from other practices were found. Let me explain that a bit more. In the Medieval Christianity that displaced the old pagan traditions the practices of the common people could be more easily rebranded into Christian contexts. Prayers and offerings to gods of fertility, the weather, and so on could be changed into Christian ones easily, and were not suppressed. However the practices of the social elite, such as human/animal sacrifice, could not be brought into the Christian worldview and were thus repressed. Over time the line between pagan and Christian for the average person blurred and eventually the pagan roots of traditions were lost. (To this point, almost any practice you see today, anywhere in Europe [that isn't Greece or Italy], that people claim goes back to pagan times doesn't, its far far more likely that they go to the early modern period or the Middle Ages)

We can see this change over time in our limited literary evidence as well, the venerable Bede wrote a little about the pagan practices of his forebears. Bede wrote in the generation after conversion, and has some tantalizing glimpses as to the practices of the pagan English, for example that the month of November was the "sacrifice month" or that the king of East Anglia maintained a temple to the pagan deities, and Christ, that was still standing in his day, or that the kingdom of Northumbria has a priest of the pagan gods (who was the first convert to Christianity). However this is really about all that he has to say on the matter. The knowledge of pagan gods was not preserved among the educated elite, and over time the practices of the pagans became adopted by Christians with no indication that this was a sign of continued pagan allegiance.

So by the next generations after the conversion to Christianity very few people, and only educated literate figures (mostly Church related) would have had access to the preserved knowledge from figures like Bede, such as it was. While among the people as a whole the knowledge of the pagan gods and their practices was displaced and rebranded into Christian practices and their pagan roots forgotten.