Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

[1] From the 1970s onwards there was a reaction to this narrative, drawing particularly on archaeology, contending that the initial migration had been of a very small group of elite warriors who offered a more attractive form of social organisation to the late Roman models available in Britain at the time.

The Vita Germani, a hagiography of Saint Germanus of Auxerre written in 480, claims that during a visit to Britain this Gaulish bishop helped command a British defence against an invasion of Picts and Saxons in 429.

But the work opens with a short historical sketch of the sins of the Britons and their "ruin and conquest" by "Saxons", initially invited to the island as mercenaries, and although it makes up only an eighth of the text, it is this passage that has attracted most attention from historians, from the early Middle Ages into the twenty-first century.

So here in Britain the just Judge ordained that the fire of their brutal conquerors should ravage all the neighbouring cities and countryside from the east to the western sea, and burn on, with no one to hinder it, until it covered almost the whole face of the doomed island.

[23]During the high-to-late medieval period, interpretations of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain were shaped by a combination of monastic traditions, genealogical interests and political concerns — not least different power groups' desire to legitimate or adapt to the Norman Conquest of England of 1066.

[24] Geoffrey of Monmouth's reading was tremendously popular over the next four centuries, both in the original Latin and in translation into Old French, English, Welsh, and other languages, revolutionising British and international views of the Anglo-Saxon settlement[27]: 1–2  (despite the criticism of Gerald of Wales and William of Newburgh, the latter of whom stated "no one but a person ignorant of ancient history [can doubt] how impertinently and impudently he falsifies in every respect").

Racial categories were far vaguer than they would be in later centuries, but these writers did start a commonly repeated seventeenth-century theme of the Anglo-Saxons being the "most distinguished branch of the sturdy, free-growing Germanic tree".

[36] Gibbon characterized the Saxon incursions as part of the chaotic dissolution of Roman authority in the western provinces, portraying the Britons as a weakened people who fell victim to both external barbarian invasions and internal decay.

He drew upon earlier sources such as Gildas and Bede, emphasizing the narrative of Britain’s decline due to corruption and the loss of Roman discipline as well as reflecting Enlightenment-era perspectives on civilization and barbarism.

[37][27]: 2–3  At the same time, as nineteenth-century history-writing developed, there was polarised debate between classicists who lionised Rome, and saw the end of Roman Britain as a disaster, and medievalists who saw Anglo-Saxon migrants as noble savages paving the way for the modern English state.

[27]: 2 Kemble was exceptionally well informed about Old English language and literature, Anglo-Saxon historical records, and archaeology, along with comparative material from elsewhere in Europe, undertaking extensive fieldwork in Germany.

"By grafting a patriotic zeal for the received accounts on to the congenial stock of Kemble's Germanism, Guest created an historical orthodoxy that lasted for fifty years", influencing histories that were widely read in Britain and its Empire.

[46] Accordingly, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), who had learned to read Old English,[47][48] proposed that Hengest and Horsa, the legendary leaders of the first Anglo-Saxon settlers of Britain, be put on the Great Seal of the United States,[49] calling them "the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we assumed".

[55]: 219–22 [56]: 102–3 The early twentieth century also saw archaeology professionalising in Britain, shifting from being the preserve of gentleman antiquarians to a university subject, not least through the efforts of Edward Thurlow Leeds (1877–1955), a key contributor to work on Anglo-Saxon migrations.

[27]: 5–7  Nonetheless, as archaeologists realised that, far from being the forested wilderness of Victorian imagination, Roman Britain was intensively cultivated and densely populated, archaeologists or sympathetic historians such as T. D. Kendrick (1895–1979), H. P. R. Finberg (1900–1974), J. N. L. Myres (1902–1989), and Eric John (1922–2000) increasingly offered interpretations of their data independent of and even at odds with Bede's stories of Anglo-Saxon migration, identifying possible evidence for cultural and institutional continuity between Roman and Anglo-Saxon Britain.

Important twentieth-century challenges to Germanist perspectives in the migration debate came, for example, from Celtic studies at the Universities of Cambridge (particularly Hector Munro Chadwick, 1870–1947), Edinburgh (particularly Kenneth Jackson, 1909–1991), and Wales and Glasgow (particularly Leslie Alcock, 1925–2006).

[65] Thus, in the latter half of the 20th century, archaeologists increasingly argued that Anglo-Saxon migration had constituted only a small "warrior elite", which gradually popularized a non-Roman identity among the Romano-Britons after the downfall of Roman institutions.

[27] In support of this, archaeologists have found that, despite evidence of violent disruption, settlement patterns and land use show many continuities with the Romano-British past, despite profound changes in material culture.

[69][70][71][72] In recent years, partly driven by new genetic studies, there has been a synthesis of migration and acculturation, with a return to a more migrationist perspective but with an emphasis on the regional variation of the ratio of Anglo-Saxon and Romano-Britons.

Heinrich Härke explains the nature of this agreement: It is now widely accepted that the Anglo-Saxons were not just transplanted Germanic invaders and settlers from the Continent, but the outcome of insular interactions and changes.

[81] A paper by Thomas et al. developed an "apartheid-like social structure" theory to explain how a small proportion of settlers could have made a larger contribution to the modern gene pool.

[82] It has been proposed, too, that the genetic similarities between people on either side of the North Sea may reflect a cumulative process of population movement, possibly beginning well before the historically attested formation of the Anglo-Saxons or the invasions of the Vikings.

[89] Oppenheimer, basing his research on the Weale and Capelli studies, maintains that none of the invasions following the Romans have had a significant impact on the gene pool of the British Isles, and that the inhabitants from prehistoric times belong to an Iberian genetic grouping.

[89] Oppenheimer suggests that the division between the West and the East of England is not due to the Anglo-Saxon invasion but originates with two main routes of genetic flow – one up the Atlantic coast, the other from neighbouring areas of Continental Europe – which occurred just after the Last Glacial Maximum.

At the same time, the findings of the same study support theories of rapid acculturation, with early medieval individuals of both local, migrant and mixed ancestry being buried near each other in the same new ways.

The migration of the Anglo-Saxons formed the basis of a long-lasting thesis that aspects of common law, personal liberty and representative government were unique to England and other Germanic-speaking countries and that these had originated from the Germanic nature of the migrants.

Accordingly, Algernon Sidney (1623–1683) used the Anglo Saxon arrival as a link between the supposed liberty of the German tribes described by Tacitus in Germania and the Anglo-Saxon model of elected kings.

[97] One of the main arguments was the "Teutonic germ theory" which argued that many British and so American institutions came about due to the racial characteristics inherited from the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain.

[100] In 2006, Stephen Oppenheimer (along with some non-scholarly commentators around the same time) argued that some of the native tribes, identified as Britons by the Romans, may have been Germanic-language speakers, and that this may account for the lack of evidence for Celtic influence on English in a context where settlement by Germanic-speakers in the fifth century was relatively small.

The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain is seen by most of this movement as part of the exodus of the tribes who after leaving Israel, went to the Black Sea and then to the Carpathians, and finally up the Danube from southern and eventually Northern Germany.