During the fifth century AD Britain ceased to be part of the Roman Empire and became a group of small warring territories, from which eventually developed the medieval kingdoms of England, Scotland and Wales. This process involved population movements around the Irish and North Sea coastal regions, of which the largest was that of the Anglo-Saxons from northern Germany and southern Scandinavia into eastern England. Two early accounts of the Anglo-Saxon migration were written by authors who were both Christian clerics, Gildas and Bede. Gildas was British and wrote in about 500AD, probably in south-western Britain. He describes in his account the departure of the Roman army, followed by the arrival of bloodthirsty invaders, who killed the native British population or drove them into exile.Two hundred years later Bede, an Anglo-Saxon monk in the monastery of Jarrow, wrote The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which he completed in 731AD. He drew on Gildas's work, but in his own account describes the Anglo-Saxon invaders, his own ancestors, as those carrying out the just vengeance of God and therefore being a people chosen by God.Bede gave a precise date, 449AD, for the first arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and he said they came from three tribes: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who themselves came from different parts of Germany and Denmark – the Angles were from Angeln, which is a small district in northern Germany; the Saxons were from what is now Lower Saxony, also in northern Germany; and the Jutes were from Jutland, now part of Denmark. According to Bede the Angles settled in East Anglia, the Saxons in southern England, and the Jutes in Kent and the Isle of Wight. The name ‘Anglo-Saxon’ comes from the fusion of the names of two of these peoples. The terms ‘English’ and ‘England’ come from a further shortening, all terms coming from the name of a small district in northern Germany, AngelnBede’s story has been so influential that many scholars have taken it as their starting point rather than as a piece of historical evidence to be tested. The tribes Bede names in his account have been understood as the names of distinct peoples, who arrived in separate groups, all from specific places. But Bede was explaining regional differences that existed in his own day, in terms that made sense to him, centuries after the migration had actually taken place. The archaeological evidence suggests, instead, that Britain’s people were much more mixed. The incomers did not all come from the same place at the same time in separate groups and many of the regional differences have other explanations.Also, any version of this migration story that presents it as the rapid and complete replacement of Britons by Anglo-Saxons shortens a process that took centuries, and a different course in different parts of Britain. Crossing the North Sea by boat was not like the early European journeys across the Atlantic to discover America; they were not difficult, unusual and dangerous voyages to unknown lands. People had been travelling by boat around the coasts of northern Europe for thousands of years, and trade across the Channel was established long before the Romans arrived. During the Roman period people had moved around the empire, many of them coming to or travelling from Britain, and movement didn’t end completely once Rome was not ruling Britain any longer, even if the big official shipments of goods and money did stop. The Britons knew about the peoples of Germany and Scandinavia as traders, slaves or pirates, and the Anglo-Saxons knew about the land they decided to come to, and once they arrived they were able to make repeat journeys to return home or to bring more of their family over. There has been much debate about how many Anglo-Saxons arrived and how many of the native Britons survived their invasion. The key issue in this debate is the extent to which change in culture and language was caused by a large scale invasion or whether or not the social, economic and political changes we know took place, combined with native adoption of a Germanic lifestyle and language after the disintegration of the Roman Empire, were the result of a much smaller incoming group. Language, archaeology and genetics have been used with varying success to expand, confirm or contradict the story of an all-conquering Anglo-Saxon migration provided by Bede and other early medieval historical sources. Figures of between two and six million have been suggested for the population of Roman Britain on the basis that the scale of land use and density of settlement shows it was as great or greater than the population listed in the Domesday Book in 1087
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