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The Saxons, sometimes called the Old Saxons or Continental Saxons, were the Germanic people of early medieval "Old" Saxony (Latin: Antiqua Saxonia) which became a Carolingian "stem duchy" in 804, in what is now northern Germany. [1] Many of their neighbours were, like them, Germanic-speaking, including the Franks and Thuringians to the south.
The name of this tribe, the Saxons (Latin: Saxones), was first mentioned by the Greek author Ptolemy. The name Saxons is derived from the Seax, a knife used by the tribe as a weapon. [citation needed] In the 3rd and 4th centuries, Germany was inhabited by great tribal confederations of the Alamanni, Bavarians, Thuringians, Franks, Frisii, and ...
Saxons had been raiding the eastern seaboard of Britain from here during the 3rd and 4th centuries (prompting the construction of maritime defences in eastern Britain called the Saxon Shore) and it is thought that following the collapse of the Roman defences on the Rhine in 407 pressure from population movements in the east forced the Saxons and their neighbouring tribes the Angles and the ...
The southern and east coasts were, of course, the areas settled first and in greatest numbers by the settlers and so presumably were the earliest to pass from Romano-British to Anglo-Saxon control. Once established they had the advantage of easy communication with continental territories in Europe via the North Sea or the Channel.
Saxony has a long history as a duchy, an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire (the Electorate of Saxony), and finally as a kingdom (the Kingdom of Saxony).In 1918, after Germany's defeat in World War I, its monarchy was overthrown and a republican form of government was established under the current name.
The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to Germanic settlers who became one of the most important cultural groups in Britain by the 5th century.
Lived since the High Middle Ages onwards in Transylvania as well as in other parts of contemporary Romania. Additionally, the Transylvanian Saxons are the eldest ethnic German group in non-native majority German-inhabited Central-Eastern Europe, alongside the Zipsers in Slovakia and Romania (who began to settle in present-day Slovakia starting in the 13th century).
[2] [a] The term 'Anglo-Saxon' came into use in the 8th century (probably by Paul the Deacon) to distinguish English Saxons from continental Saxons (Ealdseaxan, 'old' Saxons). The historian James Campbell suggested that it was not until the late Anglo-Saxon period that England could be described as a nation-state. [ 3 ]