Tag: thecrossofsaintgeorge

The first people to be called “English” were the Anglo-Saxons, a group of closely related Germanic tribes that began migrating to eastern and southern Great Britain, from southern Denmark and northern Germany, in the 5th century AD, after the Romans had withdrawn from Britain.  The Anglo-Saxons gave their name to England (“Engla land”, meaning “Land of the Angles”) and to the English.

The Anglo-Saxons arrived in a land that was already populated by people commonly referred to as the “Romano-British”—the descendants of the native Brittonic-speaking population that lived in the area of Britain under Roman rule during the 1st–5th centuries AD.  The multi-ethnic nature of the Roman Empire meant that small numbers of other peoples may have also been present in England before the Anglo-Saxons arrived.  There is archaeological evidence, for example, of an early North African presence in a Roman garrison at Aballava, now Burgh-by-Sands, in Cumbria: a 4th-century inscription says that the Roman military unit “Numerus Maurorum Aurelianorum” (“unit of Aurelian Moors”) from Mauretania (Morocco) was stationed there.  Although the Roman Empire incorporated peoples from far and wide, genetic studies suggest the Romans did not significantly mix into the British population.

The exact nature of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and their relationship with the Romano-British is a matter of debate.  The traditional view is that a mass invasion by various Anglo-Saxon tribes largely displaced the indigenous British population in southern and eastern Great Britain (modern-day England with the exception of Cornwall).  This is supported by the writings of Gildas, who gives the only contemporary historical account of the period and describes the slaughter and starvation of native Britons by invading tribes (aduentus Saxonum).  Furthermore, the English language contains no more than a handful of words borrowed from Brittonic sources.

This view was later re-evaluated by some archaeologists and historians, with a more small-scale migration being posited, possibly based around an elite of male warriors that took over the rule of the country and gradually acculturated the people living there.  Within this theory, two processes leading to Anglo-Saxonisation have been proposed.  One is similar to culture changes observed in Russia, North Africa and parts of the Islamic world, where a politically and socially powerful minority culture becomes, over a rather short period, adopted by a settled majority.  This process is usually termed “elite dominance”.  The second process is explained through incentives, such as the Wergild outlined in the law code of Ine of Wessex which produced an incentive to become Anglo-Saxon or at least English speaking.  Historian Malcolm Todd writes, “It is much more likely that a large proportion of the British population remained in place and was progressively dominated by a Germanic aristocracy, in some cases marrying into it and leaving Celtic names in the, admittedly very dubious, early lists of Anglo-Saxon dynasties.  But how we identify the surviving Britons in areas of predominantly Anglo-Saxon settlement, either archaeologically or linguistically, is still one of the deepest problems of early English history.”

An emerging view is that the degree of population replacement by the Anglo-Saxons, and thus the degree of survival of the Romano-Britons, varied across England and that as such the overall settlement of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons cannot be described by any one process in particular.  Large-scale migration and population shift seem to be most applicable in the cases of eastern regions such as East Anglia and Lincolnshire, while in parts of Northumbria, much of the native population likely remained in place as the incomers took over as elites.  In a study of place names in northeastern England and southern Scotland, Bethany Fox found that the migrants settled in large numbers in river valleys, such as those of the Tyne and the Tweed, with the Britons moving to the less fertile hill country and becoming acculturated over a longer period.  Fox describes the process by which English came to dominate this region as “a synthesis of mass-migration and elite-takeover models.”