Anglo-Saxons
The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to Germanic settlers who became one of the most important cultural groups in Britain by the 5th century. The Anglo-Saxon period in Britain is considered to have started by about 450 and ended in 1066, with the Norman Conquest. Although the details of their early settlement and political development are not clear, by the 8th century an Anglo-Saxon cultural identity which was generally called Englisc had developed out of the interaction of these settlers with the existing Romano-British culture. By 1066, most of the people of what is now England spoke Old English, and were considered English. Viking and Norman invasions changed the politics and culture of England significantly, but the overarching Anglo-Saxon identity evolved and remained dominant even after these major changes. Late Anglo-Saxon political structures and language are the direct predecessors of the high medieval Kingdom of England and the Middle English language. Although the modern English language owes less than 26% of its words to Old English, this includes the vast majority of everyday words.
In the early 8th century, the earliest detailed account of Anglo-Saxon origins was given by Bede, suggesting that they were long divided into smaller regional kingdoms, each with differing accounts of their continental origins. As a collective term, the compound term Anglo-Saxon, commonly used by modern historians for the period before 1066, first appears in Bede's time, but it was probably not widely used until modern times. Bede was one of the first writers to prefer "Angles" as the collective term, and this eventually became dominant. Bede, like other authors, also continued to use the collective term "Saxons", especially when referring to the earliest periods of settlement. Roman and British writers of the 3rd to 6th century described those earliest Saxons as North Sea raiders, and mercenaries. He believed the earliest settlers were really from a range of different tribes in northern Europe, notably including the people of what he called "Old Saxony" in what is now northern Germany, the Jutes of what is now western Denmark, and the English themselves, whose homeland he placed between the former two.
Anglo-Saxon material culture can be seen in architecture, dress styles, illuminated texts, metalwork and other art. Behind the symbolic nature of these cultural emblems, there are strong elements of tribal and lordship ties. The elite declared themselves kings who developed burhs, and identified their roles and peoples in Biblical terms. Above all, as archaeologist Helena Hamerow has observed, "local and extended kin groups remained...the essential unit of production throughout the Anglo-Saxon period."
Ethnonym
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 has the advantage of covering the various English-speaking groups on the one hand, and to avoid possible misunderstandings from using the terms "Saxons" or "Angles", both of which 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 used as a common term until modern times, it is not a modern invention because it was also used in some specific contexts already between the 8th and 10th centuries. Its first recorded use was by Continental scholars in the mid-eighth century.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, which he apparently heard through Frankish diplomats. He never mentions the Saxons, but he states that a large island called Brittia, which was not far from the Rhine delta. He had heard it was settled by three nations, the Angili, Frissones, and Brittones, who were each ruled by their own king. Each nation was so prolific that Brittia sent large numbers of individuals every year to the Franks, who planted them in unpopulated regions of their territory.
By the 8th century the Frisians and Saxons living on the continent were seen as two distinct countries, and writers such as Bede and some of his contemporaries including Alcuin, and Saint Boniface, began to refer to the overall group in Britain as the "English" people. In Bede's work the term "Saxon" is also used to refer sometimes to the Old English language, and also to refer to the early pagan Anglo-Saxons before the arrival of Christian missionaries among the Anglo-Saxons of Kent in 597. The term "Saxon", on the other hand, was at this time increasingly used by mainland writers to designate the northeastern neighbours of the Frankish kingdom of Austrasia. Bede therefore called these the "Old Saxons", and he believed that there was no longer any country of Angles in Germany, as it had become empty due to emigration.
Similarly, a non-Anglo-Saxon contemporary of Bede, Paul the Deacon, referred variously to either the English, or Anglo-Saxons, which helped him distinguish them from the European Saxons who he also discussed. In England itself this compound term also came to be used in some specific situations, both in Latin and Old English. Alfred the Great, himself a West Saxon, was for example Anglosaxonum Rex in the late 880s, probably indicating that he was literally a king over both English 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 themselves, who had previously invested in identities which differentiated various regional groups.
In contrast, Irish and Welsh speakers long continued to refer to Anglo-Saxons as Saxons. The word Saeson is the modern Welsh word for "English people"; the equivalent word in Scottish Gaelic is Sasannach and in the Irish language, Sasanach. Catherine Hills suggests that it is no accident "that the English call themselves by the name sanctified by the Church, as that of a people chosen by God, whereas their enemies use the name originally applied to piratical raiders".
History
Anglo-Saxon origins (4th–6th centuries)
Although it involved immigrant communities from northern Europe, the culture of the Anglo-Saxons was not transplanted from there, but rather developed in Britain. In 400, the Roman province of Britannia had long been part of the Roman Empire. Although the empire had been dismembered several times during the previous centuries, often because of usurpations beginning in Britain, there was an overall continuity and interconnectedness with both Roman and Germanic regions on the continent. Already before 400 Roman sources used the term Saxons to refer to coastal raiders who had been causing problems especially on the coasts of the North Sea. In what is now south-eastern England the Romans established a military commander who was assigned to oversee a chain of coastal forts which they called the Saxon shore. These third century raiders are not called Saxons in contemporary sources, but a few generations later Eutropius, claimed that Saxon and Frankish raiders were attacking the North Sea coast near Boulogne-sur-Mer in about 285, when Carausius was posted there to defend against them. A more contemporary source, the "8th" Latin Panegyric, made in 297, refers to the now rebellious barbarian forces of Carausius and Allectus based around London in the 290s as being mainly "Frankish", and also mentions local British people in this period who "imitated the barbarian in their mode of dress and flowing red hair". The homeland of these early raiders was also not clearly defined in such sources but they were apparently from regions near the Lower Rhine, where the Romans had also lost control to barbarians including Franks, but also Chamavi and Frisii.Even when the empire was in control of Britain, the administration in Britain began to recruit Germanic soldiers from the Rhine river regions and beyond in what is now Germany and the Netherlands more heavily, and these are likely to have become more important in Britain after the withdrawal of field armies during internal Roman power struggles. In the 360s and 370s there was a major invasion of Saxons into Britain, coordinated with tribes from Ireland and Scotland, and they were able to take control of large parts of Britain. Roman officer Count Theodosius led a successful campaign to recover control, both in Britain, including a naval battle in the Orkneys, and possibly also in the Rhine delta. A few years later in 383 Magnus Maximus began his push for imperial power in Britain, and according to later writers such as Gildas he took the best Roman forces with him, leaving Britain exposed once again to the Irish and Scottish tribes. According to the Chronica Gallica of 452 Britain was ravaged by Saxon invaders in 409 or 410. This was only a few years after Constantine III was declared Roman emperor in Britain, and during the period that he was still leading British Roman forces in rebellion on the continent. The rebellion was soon quashed, the Romano-British citizens reportedly expelled Constantine's imperial officials during this period, but they never again received new Roman officials or military forces. Writing in the mid-sixth century, Procopius states that after the death 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 not only the Saxons, but also the Picts and Scoti. A hagiography of Saint Germanus of Auxerre claims that he helped command a defence against an invasion of Picts and Saxons in 429. By about 430 the archaeological record in Britain begins to indicate a relatively rapid melt-down of Roman material culture, and its replacement by Anglo-Saxon material culture. At some time between 445 and 454 Gildas, one of the only writers in this period, reported that the Britons also wrote to the Roman military leader Aëtius in Gaul, begging for assistance, with no success. In desperation, an unnamed "proud tyrant" at some point invited Saxons as foederati soldiers to Britain to help defend it from the Picts and Scots. Gildas did not report the year, and later writers developed different estimates of when this occurred. Possibly referring to this same event, 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". Bede, writing centuries later, reasoned that this happened in 450–455, and he named the "proud tyrant" as Vortigern. However, the date could have been significantly earlier, and Bede's understanding of these events has been questioned. The Historia Brittonum, written in the 9th century, gives two different years, but the writer apparently believed it happened in 428. Another 9th century source, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is largely based on Bede but says this Saxon arrival happened in 449. The archaeological evidence suggests an earlier timescale. In particular, the work of Catherine Hills and Sam Lucy on the evidence of Spong Hill has moved the chronology for the settlement earlier than 450, with a significant number of items now in phases before Bede's date. Historian Guy Halsall has even speculated that Gildas was badly misread by Bede and all subsequent historians, and that the invitation of the foederati was part of a military reorganization in the time of Magnus Maximus in the late 4th century.
Bede, whose report of this period is partly based on Gildas, believed that the call was answered by kings from three powerful tribes from Germania, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The Saxons came from Old Saxony on the North Sea coast of Germany, and settled in Wessex, Sussex and Essex. Jutland, the peninsula containing part of Denmark, was the homeland of the Jutes who settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight. The Angles were from 'Anglia', a country which Bede understood to have now been emptied, and which lay between the homelands of the Saxons and Jutes. Anglia is usually interpreted as the old Schleswig-Holstein Province, and containing the modern Angeln. Although this represents a turning point the continental ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons were probably quite diverse, and they arrived over a longer period. In another passage, Bede named pagan peoples still living in Germany in the eighth century "from whom the Angles or Saxons, who now inhabit Britain, are known to have derived their origin; for which reason they are still corruptly called Garmans by the neighbouring nation of the Britons": the Frisians, the Rugini, the Danes, the "Huns", the "old Saxons", and the "Boructuari" who are presumed to be inhabitants of the old lands of the Bructeri, near the Lippe river.
Gildas reported that a war broke out between the Saxons and the local population, who joined forces under a person named Ambrosius Aurelianus. Historian Nick Higham calls it the "War of the Saxon Federates". Unlike Bede and later writers who followed him, for whom this war turned into a very long war between two nations which was eventually won by the descendants of the Saxons, Gildas reported that by the time he was born this war ended successfully for the Britons after the siege at 'Mons Badonicus'. Gildas himself did not mention the defeated Saxons as an ongoing problem, but instead he noted that the Britons had become divided into many small "tyrannies". His interest was in criticizing the Romano-British ruling class, whereas archaeological evidence shows that Anglo-Saxon culture had long become dominant over much of Britain. Historians who accept Bede's understanding interpret Gildas as ignoring a large part of Britain, and writing about Romano-British kingdoms which had been limited to the north and west. Other historians have argued that in the 5th century many Romano-British people must have adopted the new culture which we now call Anglo-Saxon, even when they did not have Germanic ancestry or rulers.
Unfortunately, there are very few written sources apart from Gildas until the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity which began in the late 6th century. One eastern contemporary of Gildas, Procopius, reported a story which was apparently relayed to him by Frankish diplomats, that an island called Brittia which faced the Rhine was divided, between three peoples, the Britons, Anglii, and Frisians. Bede and later sources portrayed the royal family of Kent as a direct descendants of the original group of "Saxons" mentioned by Gildas, although they apparently believed they were actually Jutish. Unfortunately the king lists and genealogies produced by Bede and later writers are not considered reliable for these early centuries.
A 2022 genetic study used modern and ancient DNA samples from England and neighbouring countries to study the question of physical Anglo-Saxon migration and 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 already in the Roman era, and then increased rapidly in the 5th century. The burial evidence showed that the locals and immigrants were being buried together using the same new 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.
Linguistic evidence from the names of kings in Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies suggests that Britons played a part in the foundation of several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. In the kingdom of Wessex, early kings Cerdic, Cædwalla and probably Ceawlin bear British names. In Mercia, Penda, Pybba and Creoda, members of the royal family in the 6th and early 7th century, appear to have names derived from Old Welsh. A royal genealogy from the minor kingdom of Lindsey gives the name Cædbæd, probably derived from British *Catuboduos, for one of its early sixth century kings.