Anglo-Saxon England or early medieval England covers the period from the end of the Roman Empire's rule in Roman Britain in the 5th century until the Norman Conquest in 1066. Compared to modern England, the territory of the Anglo-Saxons stretched north to present day Lothian in southeastern Scotland, whereas it did not initially include western areas of England such as Cornwall, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, and Cumbria.
The 5th and 6th centuries involved the collapse of economic networks and political structures and also saw a radical change to a new Anglo-Saxon language and culture. This change was driven by movements of peoples as well as changes which were happening in both northern Gaul and the North Sea coast of what is now Germany and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxon language, also known as Old English, was a close relative of languages spoken in the latter regions, and genetic studies have confirmed that there was significant migration to Britain from there which started before the end of the Roman period.
By the late 6th century, England was dominated by small kingdoms ruled by dynasties who were pagan and which identified themselves as having differing continental ancestries. A smaller number of kingdoms maintained a British and Christian identity, but by this time they were restricted to the west of Britain. The most important Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 5th and 6th centuries are conventionally called a Heptarchy, meaning a group of seven kingdoms, although the number of kingdoms varied over time. The most powerful included Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Wessex. During the 7th century the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were converted to Christianity by missionaries from Ireland and the continent.
In the 8th century, Vikings began raiding England, and by the second half of the 9th century Scandinavians began to settle in eastern England. Opposing the Vikings from the south, the royal family of Wessex gradually became dominant, and in 927 King Æthelstan was the first king to rule a single united Kingdom of England. After his death however, the Danish settlers and other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms reasserted themselves. Wessex agreed to pay gafol to the Danes, and in 1017 England became part of the North Sea Empire of King Cnut, a personal union between England, Denmark and Norway. After Cnut's death in 1035, England was ruled first by his son Harthacnut, and then by his English half-brother Edward the Confessor. Edward had been forced to live in exile, and when he died in 1066, one of the claimants to the throne was William, the Duke of Normandy.
William's 1066 invasion of England ended the Anglo-Saxon period. The Normans persecuted the Anglo-Saxons and overthrew their ruling class, substituting their own leaders to oversee and rule England. However, Anglo-Saxon identity survived beyond the Norman Conquest, came to be known as Englishry under Norman rule, and through social and cultural integration with Romano-British Celts, Danes and Normans became the modern English people.
Terminology
In modern times, the term "Anglo-Saxons" is used by scholars to refer collectively to the Old English speaking groups in Britain. As a compound term, it covers the various English-speaking groups and also avoids possible misunderstandings which could come from using the terms "Saxons" or "Angles" (English)—both terms could be used either as collectives referring to all the Old English speakers or to specific tribal groups. Although the term "Anglo-Saxon" was not commonly used until modern times, it is not a modern invention because it was also used in some specific contexts between the 8th and 10th centuries.
Before the 8th century, the most common collective term for the Old-English speakers was "Saxons", which was a word originally associated since the 4th century not with a specific country or nation, but with raiders in North Sea coastal areas of Britain and Gaul. An especially early reference to the Angli is the 6th-century Byzantine historian Procopius who heard through Frankish diplomats that an island called Brittia, lying not far from the mouth of the Rhine, was settled by three nations: the Angili, Frissones, and Brittones, each ruled by its own king. (He did not use the word Saxon at all.)
By the 8th century the Saxons in Germany were seen as a distinct country, and writers such as Bede, Alcuin, and Saint Boniface began to refer to the overall group in Britain as the "English" people (Latin Angli, gens Anglorum or Old English Angelcynn). In Bede's work the term "Saxon" is also used to refer sometimes to the Old English language and to refer to the early pagan Anglo-Saxons before the arrival of Christian missionaries among the Anglo-Saxons of Kent in 597. To distinguish them, Bede called the pagan Saxons of the mainland the "Old Saxons" (antiqui saxones).
Similarly, a non-Anglo-Saxon contemporary of Bede, Paul the Deacon, referred variously to either the English (Angli) or the Anglo-Saxons (Latin plural genitives Saxonum Anglorum, or Anglorum Saxonum), which helped him distinguish them from the European Saxons whom he also discussed. In England, this compound term came to be used in some specific situations, both in Latin and Old English. Alfred the Great, a West Saxon, was, for example Anglosaxonum Rex in the late 880s, probably indicating that he was literally a king over both English (for example, Mercian) and Saxon kingdoms. However, the term "English" continued to be used as a common collective term and indeed became dominant. The increased use of these new collective terms, "English" or "Anglo-Saxon", represents the strengthening of the idea of a single unifying cultural unity among the Anglo-Saxons, who had previously invested in identities which differentiated various regional groups.
Historian James Campbell suggests that it was not until the late Anglo-Saxon period that England could be described as a nation-state. It is certain that the concept of "Englishness" only developed very slowly.
Precursors of the Anglo Saxon era before 400 AD
In modern history writing the Anglo-Saxon period is said to begin following the end of Roman rule in Britain during the 5th century AD. The Anglo Saxon period is marked by economic and population collapse, and the arrival of a new Anglo-Saxon culture and language. By around AD 430, a dramatic cultural transformation had taken place in Britain, reflected in changes to burial practices, architecture, clothing, and other aspects of daily life. However, in reality the details of this transition remain uncertain, and there are indications that changes in the economic, cultural, and even linguistic situation, were changing already before 400 AD, while Britain was still within the Roman Empire. Archaeological evidence also indicates similar economic decline and cultural change was happening across the English Channel in northern Gaul, which was also still within the empire.
While there is a tradition of seeing the Anglo-Saxon language and culture as something imported suddenly after the collapse of Roman rule, Germanic soldiers from areas near the Rhine delta had been brought to Britain since the beginning of Roman rule in Britain in 43 and may have already been a significant presence in Roman society. The written record agrees with the genetic evidence that such movements of people had increased before the end of Roman rule. The term "Saxon" began to be used by Roman authors in the 4th century, initially to refer to Germanic raiders from areas north of the Frankish tribes who lived closest to the Rhine delta. 4th century Roman sources reported that these Saxons had been troubling the coasts of the North Sea and English Channel since the late 3rd century. Among the earliest such mentions of Saxons, they were named as allies of the rebel emperors Carausius, who was based in Britain, and Magnentius. At some point in the 3rd or 4th centuries the Romans established a military commander who was assigned to oversee a chain of coastal forts on both sides of the channel and the one on the British side was called the Saxon Shore (Litus Saxonicum).
According to 4th-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus, in 367 the Romano-British defences were overrun by Scoti from Ireland, Picts from northern Scotland, together with Saxons in the so-called Great Conspiracy. In 368 imperial forces under the command of Count Theodosius defeated Saxons who were apparently based in Britain, and coordinating with the Scoti and Picts. In 382 Magnus Maximus defeated another invasion by Picts and Scoti, but in the following year he led an army to Gaul for a bid to become emperor. There were further troop withdrawals in the 390s, and the last major import of coins to pay the troops took place around 400, after which the army was not paid.
Rapid cultural change (400–550 AD)
The last Roman ruler of Britain, the self-proclaimed Emperor Constantine III, moved Roman forces based in Britain to the continent. The Romano-British citizens reportedly expelled their Roman officials during this period and never again re-joined the Roman Empire. Apparently taking advantage of the lack of organised military, the Chronica Gallica of 452 reports that Britain was ravaged by Saxon invaders in 409 or 410. Writing in the mid-sixth century, Procopius states that after the overthrow of Constantine III in 411, "the Romans never succeeded in recovering Britain, but it remained from that time under tyrants".
The Romano-Britons nevertheless called upon the empire to help them fend off attacks from the Saxons, the Picts and the Scoti. A hagiography of Saint Germanus of Auxerre claims that he helped command a defence against an invasion of Picts and Saxons in 429. Between 400 and 425, the archaeological record in Britain indicates a rapid meltdown of Roman material culture and trade, and its replacement by a material culture associated with the Anglo-Saxons. The Chronica Gallica of 452 records for the year 441: "The British provinces, which to this time had suffered various defeats and misfortunes, are reduced to Saxon rule." British monk Gildas, writing some generations later, reports that a message was sent to a powerful Roman leader (romanae potestatis virum) addressed as "Agitius thrice consul", begging for assistance, with no success. This is normally understood to be Aëtius, whose third consulship was in 446, implying a date between 445 and 453 when he died. The episode is sometimes referred to as the Groans of the Britons.
This having failed, Gildas reported that an unnamed Romano-British "proud tyrant" then invited "Saxons" to Britain to help defend Britain from the Picts and Scoti, working under a Roman-style military treaty as foederati, which entitled them to lands in Britain. According to Gildas, these Saxons came into conflict with the Romano-British rulers when they were not given sufficient monthly supplies. In response, they overran the whole country and then returned to their "home" (domus). After this, the British united successfully under Ambrosius Aurelianus and struck back. Historian Nick Higham calls this the "War of the Saxon Federates". There were then more wars until finally the siege at "Mount Badon", the location of which is no longer known. Gildas states that Badon was fought in the year of his birth, forty-three years earlier, and does not mention any later conflict with the Saxons.
Centuries later, Anglo-Saxon writers, in contrast, viewed the events described by Gildas as the beginning of a massive movement of people from northern Europe—an account which influences historians to this day. In Bede's account, the call to the "Angle or Saxon nation" (Latin: Anglorum sive Saxonum gens) was initially answered by three boats led by two brothers, Hengist and Horsa ("Stallion and Horse"), and Hengist's son Oisc. Some modern scholars have suggested that both "Hengist" and Oisc may represent memories of the same person as Ansehis, who was named in the Ravenna Cosmography as the chief of the "Old Saxons" who led his people to Britain, almost emptying his country.
Regarding this specific Saxon conflict reported by Gildas, modern historians remain uncertain about its timing and the relative importance it had in terms of its effect on the overall culture or population, which had begun changing rapidly already in the late 4th century. More generally, scholars continue to debate the timing and size of migrations from the continental North Sea coast. A traditional account of sudden Anglo-Saxon immigration and forced displacement or decimation of local populations has been influential since at least the eighth-century retelling of Gildas' account by Bede. In Bede's account, these events marked the beginning of a massive and violent invasion of Anglo-Saxons into Britain after the end of Roman rule in 411. The arrival of the soldiers described by Gildas became the adventus saxonum representing the main immigration event, which was followed by a period where small, pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the east fought small Christian British kingdoms in the west, and bit by bit the Anglo-Saxons defeated the British and took over a large part of Britain by force, creating England. In this traditional account, ethnic Anglo-Saxons and ethnic Britons were distinct and separate peoples, conscious of the war between their nations. By Bede's time it was assumed that after the adventus, British people living in Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had to move or else convert to a foreign culture, but modern scholars now doubt this.
A 2022 genetic study used modern and ancient DNA samples from England and neighbouring countries to study the question of physical Anglo-Saxon migration. It concluded that there was large-scale immigration of both men and women into eastern England from a "north continental" population matching early medieval people from the area stretching from northern Netherlands through northern Germany to Denmark. This began in the Roman era and experienced rapid growth in the 5th century. The burial evidence shows that the locals and immigrants were being buried together using the same customs, and that they were having mixed children. The authors estimate the effective contributions to modern English ancestry are between 25% and 47% "north continental", 11% and 57% from British Iron Age ancestors, and 14% and 43% was attributed to a more stretched-out migration into southern England, from nearby populations such as modern Belgium and France. There were significant regional variations in north continental ancestry—lower in the west, and highest in Sussex, the East Midlands and East Anglia.
Although the use of Old English during this early period cannot be conclusively demonstrated, its closest linguistic relatives—Old Frisian and Old Saxon—were spoken in these continental coastal regions, lending further support to the idea that migration played a significant role in shaping early Anglo-Saxon England.