Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

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The settlement of Great Britain by diverse Germanic peoples, who eventually developed a common cultural identity as Anglo-Saxons, changed the language and culture of most of what became England from Romano-British to Germanic. This process principally occurred from the mid-fifth to early seventh centuries, following the end of Roman rule in Britain around the year 410. The settlement was followed by the establishment of the Heptarchy, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the south and east of Britain, later followed by the rest of modern England, and the south-east of modern Scotland.^[1] The exact nature of this change is a topic of on-going research. 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 scant contemporary and near-contemporary written record, archaeological and genetic information.^[a] The few literary sources tell of hostility between incomers and natives. They describe violence, destruction, massacre, and the flight of the Romano-British population. Moreover, little clear evidence exists for any significant influence of British Celtic or British Latin on the Old English language. These factors suggested a mass influx of Germanic-speaking peoples. In this view, held by most historians and archaeologists until the mid-to-late 20th century, much of what is now England was cleared of its prior inhabitants. If this traditional viewpoint were to be correct, the genes of the later English people would have been overwhelmingly inherited from Germanic migrants.

However, a view that gained support in the late 20th century suggests that the migration involved fewer individuals, possibly centred on a warrior elite. This hypothesis suggests that the incomers achieved a position of political and social dominance, which, aided by intermarriage, initiated a process of acculturation of the natives to the incoming language and material culture. Archaeologists have found that settlement patterns and land use show no clear break with the Romano-British past, though changes in material culture were profound. This view predicts that the ancestry of the people of Anglo-Saxon and modern England would be largely derived from the Romano-British.^[3]

Even so, if these incomers established themselves as a social elite practising a level of endogamy, this could have allowed them enhanced reproductive success (the 'apartheid theory', named after the 20th-century apartheid system of South Africa). In this case, the prevalent genes of later Anglo-Saxon England could have been largely derived from moderate numbers of Germanic migrants.^[4][5] This theory, originating in an early population genetics study, has proven controversial, and has been critically received by many scholars. Genetic studies in the late 2010s and early 2020s have repeatedly demonstrated that immigration from the Germanic-speaking Continent was on a greater scale than argued by supporters of the theory of a small migration, and also that marriages between native Britons and immigrants were more common than posited by proponents of the apartheid theory.

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