Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

This article is part of the series:
Anglo-Saxon society and culture
People
Settlement Women History
Language
Language Literature Runes
Material culture
Architecture Art Burial Coins Dress Glass Weaponry
Power and organization
Charters Government Law Monarchs and kingdoms Warfare Military
Religion
Christianity Paganism
v t e

The settlement of Great Britain by diverse Germanic peoples, led to the development of a new Anglo-Saxon cultural identity and a shared Germanic language, Old English, which was most closely related to Old Frisian on the other side of the North Sea. Settlements began by the fifth century, around the time of the end of Roman rule in Britain, and continued for centuries. The first Germanic-speakers to settle permanently are likely to have been soldiers recruited by the Roman administration, possibly already in the fourth century or earlier.

Based upon the account of a Gildas, some generations later, the first group to become independent was a "Saxon" force specifically invited by the Romano-British leadership to help defend against raids from the Picts and Scots, at some point after the withdrawal of the regular Roman military. The term Saxon was at this time consistently associated with groups who had been raiding into Roman territories. After a long war, the Romano-British recovered control of most of Britain and were maintaining it at the time of Gildas, writing in the 6th century, although they were no longer unified, but ruled by petty "tyrants". Small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms eventually appear in later records in most of what is now modern England, as well the south-east of modern Scotland, although at least some of them probably originated as Roman-British kingdoms. The exact nature of this change is a topic of on-going research.

Many questions remain about the scale, timing and nature of the settlements, and also about what happened to the previous residents of what is now England. The available evidence includes the archaeological and genetic information, and the scant medieval written record. The few literary sources such as Gildas tell of hostility between incomers and natives. They describe violence, destruction, massacre, and the flight of both Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon populations. The Old English language seems to have become dominant rather quickly in many areas because British Celtic languages had very little impact on Old English vocabulary. This suggests that a large number of Germanic-speakers appeared relatively suddenly. On the basis of such evidence it has even been argued that large parts of what is now England were cleared of prior inhabitants. However, a view that gained support in the late 20th century suggests that the migration involved relatively few individuals, possibly centred on a warrior elite, who may have already been influential within the Roman military, and who popularized a non-Roman identity after the downfall of Roman institutions. This hypothesis suggests a largescale acculturation of natives to the incoming language and material culture. In support of this, archaeologists have found that, despite evidence of violent disruption, settlement patterns and land use show many continuities with the Romano-British past, despite profound changes in material culture.^[1]

A major genetic study in 2022 which used DNA samples from different periods and regions estimated that the Anglo-Saxons contributed about 40% of the ancestry of modern English ancestry. The authors argue that this is "strong evidence of large-scale early medieval migration across the North Sea zone", involving both men and women, which began in the Roman era, increased rapidly after the end of that era, and continued until the 8th century. There was also strong evidence of rapid acculturation, with early medieval individuals of both local or migrant ancestry being buried in the same new ways.^[2]