History of Anglo-Saxon England

Anglo-Saxon England or early medieval England covers the period from the end of Roman imperial rule in Britain in the 5th century until the Norman Conquest in 1066. Compared to modern England, the territory of the Anglo-Saxons stretched north to present day Lothian in southeastern Scotland, whereas it did not initially include western areas of England such as Cornwall, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, and Cumbria.

The 5th and 6th centuries involved the collapse of economic networks and political structures and also saw a radical change to a new Anglo-Saxon language and culture. This change was driven by movements of peoples as well as changes which were happening in both northern Gaul and the North Sea coast of what is now Germany and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxon language, also known as Old English, was a close relative of languages spoken in the latter regions, and genetic studies have confirmed that there was significant migration to Britain from there before the end of the Roman period. Surviving written accounts suggest that Britain was divided into small "tyrannies" which initially took their bearings to some extent from Roman norms.

By the late 6th century England was dominated by small kingdoms ruled by dynasties who were pagan and which identified themselves as having differing continental ancestries. A smaller number of kingdoms maintained a British and Christian identity, but by this time they were restricted to the west of Britain. The most important Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 5th and 6th centuries are conventionally called a Heptarchy, meaning a group of seven kingdoms, although the number of kingdoms varied over time. The most powerful included Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Wessex. During the 7th century the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were converted to Christianity by missionaries from Ireland and the continent.

In the 8th century, Vikings began raiding England, and by the second half of the 9th century Scandinavians began to settle in eastern England. Opposing the Vikings from the south, the royal family of Wessex gradually became dominant, and in 927 King Æthelstan I was the first king to rule a single united Kingdom of England. After his death however, the Danish settlers and other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms reasserted themselves. Wessex agreed to pay the so-called Danegeld to the Danes, and in 1017 England became part of the North Sea Empire of King Cnut, a personal union between England, Denmark and Norway. After Cnut's death in 1035, England was ruled first by his son Harthacnut and succeeded by his English half-brother Edward the Confessor. Edward had been forced to live in exile, and when he died in 1066, one of the claimants to the throne was William, the Duke of Normandy.

William's 1066 invasion of England ended the Anglo-Saxon period. The Normans persecuted the Anglo-Saxons and overthrew their ruling class to substitute their own leaders to oversee and rule England. However, Anglo-Saxon identity survived beyond the Norman Conquest, came to be known as Englishry under Norman rule, and through social and cultural integration with Romano-British Celts, Danes and Normans became the modern English people.

In modern times, the term "Anglo-Saxons" is used by scholars to refer collectively to the Old English speaking groups in Britain. As a compound term, it covers the various English-speaking groups and also avoids possible misunderstandings which could come from using the terms "Saxons" or "Angles" (English)—both terms could be used either as collectives referring to all the Old English speakers or to specific tribal groups. Although the term "Anglo-Saxon" was not commonly used until modern times, it is not a modern invention because it was also used in some specific contexts between the 8th and 10th centuries.

Before the 8th century, the most common collective term for the Old-English speakers was "Saxons", which was a word originally associated since the 4th century not with a specific country or nation, but with raiders in North Sea coastal areas of Britain and Gaul. An especially early reference to the Angli is the 6th-century Byzantine historian Procopius who heard through Frankish diplomats that an island called Brittia, lying not far from the mouth of the Rhine, was settled by three nations: the Angili, Frissones, and Brittones, each ruled by its own king. (He did not use the word Saxon at all.)

By the 8th century the Saxons in Germany were seen as a distinct country, and writers such as Bede, Alcuin, and Saint Boniface began to refer to the overall group in Britain as the "English" people (Latin Angli, gens Anglorum or Old English Angelcynn). In Bede's work the term "Saxon" is also used to refer sometimes to the Old English language and to refer to the early pagan Anglo-Saxons before the arrival of Christian missionaries among the Anglo-Saxons of Kent in 597. To distinguish them, Bede called the pagan Saxons of the mainland the "Old Saxons" (antiqui saxones).