Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

Written evidence is scarce. A Gallic chronicle records a Saxon raid on Britain in 409 or 410 and notes under 441 that the British provinces had passed under the rule of the Saxons. Gildas, writing in the late 5th or the first half of the 6th century, tells how, after an appeal to Aetius had failed, an unnamed “proud tyrant” invited Saxons as federate soldiers against the Picts and Scots; the federates rebelled over their supplies and ravaged the country until the Britons under Ambrosius Aurelianus fought back, and the war ended with a British victory at Mount Badon. Bede, writing around 731, named the tyrant Vortigern and the first leaders Hengist and Horsa and placed their coming in 450–455; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives 449. Archaeology — for instance the great cremation cemetery at Spong Hill in Norfolk — suggests that settlement began before 450.

The scale of the migration has long been debated: some scholars pictured the Britons killed or driven out, others a small warrior elite whose language and customs the natives adopted. Old English took very little from the British Celtic and the spoken Latin of Roman Britain, and British place names are rare in the east of England; on the other hand, field systems and land use show much continuity with the Roman past. A genetic study published in 2022 found that early medieval people in eastern England derived up to 76% of their ancestry from a population of the Netherlands, northern Germany and Denmark, that migrants and locals intermarried and were buried side by side, and that the continental share was lower in the west.

By Bede’s time the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms — Kent, Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, Northumbria and others — dominated most of what is now England, while British kingdoms held out in the west. Several early kings of Wessex and Mercia bore British names, a sign that Britons had a part in founding the new kingdoms. Christianity reached the pagan Anglo-Saxons with the mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 597.