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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 has the advantage of covering the various English-speaking groups on the one hand, and to avoid possible misunderstandings from using the terms "Saxons" or "Angles" (English), both of which terms could be used either as collectives referring ...
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.
An 1130 depiction of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes crossing the sea to Britain equipped with war gear from the Miscellany on the Life of St. Edmund. Another 6th century Roman source contemporary with Gildas is Procopius who however lived and wrote in the Eastern Roman Empire, and expressed doubts about the stories he had heard about events in the west.
It became part of the short-lived North Sea Empire of Cnut, a personal union between England, Denmark and Norway, in the 11th century. The Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain from mainland northwestern Europe after the Roman Empire's withdrawal from Britain at the beginning of the 5th century.
Anglo-Saxons inherited the concept of sacred kingship. [13] The Old English word for king was cyning (' son of the kin '). [14] The term implied the king was part of a "specially selected kindred, divinely called to rule over a people". Kingship was passed down through royal dynasties that all claimed descent from a deity, usually Woden.
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 Kingdom of the West Saxons, also known as the Kingdom of Wessex, was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in the south of Great Britain, from around 519 until Alfred the Great declared himself as King of the Anglo-Saxons in 886. [2] The Anglo-Saxons believed that Wessex was founded by Cerdic and Cynric of the Gewisse, though this is considered by some to ...
c. 520: Saxons took control of Sussex, Kent, East Anglia and part of Yorkshire, West Saxons founded a Kingdom in Hampshire under Cerdic. 535 & 536: The extreme weather events of 535–536 likely caused a great famine and thus population loss. In or before 547: Bernicia established by Angles taking over part of a British area called Bryneich.