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Anglo-Saxons
c. 400 - 802AD
The Anglo-Saxons gave us our language, our counties, our place names, our common law, our desire for living in villages, our idea of an English kingdom from Offa's Dyke to the Tamar, our first vernacular literature and our political constitution. In short, they gave us our social, legal and civil roots.
Following the withdrawal of the Roman Army from Britain in 408AD, the Celtic King Vortigern, invited mercenaries from Europe such as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes to counter the raids from pirates such as the Vikings, Picts and Scots.
The Angles (Lat. Angli ), are mentioned in Tacitus' Germania, and seem to have come from what is now Schleswig Holstein in the later decades of the 5th cent.
The Saxons are first mentioned in the 2nd Century by Ptolemy, were a Danish/Germanic tribe who had been continental neighbours of the Angles, also settled in England in the late 5th century after earlier marauding forays there.
The Jutes were a tribe about whom very little is known except that they probably came from the area around the mouths of the Rhine, settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight.
The 5th and 6th centuries saw increased Germanic settlement, and the English language became predominant. The term "Anglo-Saxons" was first used in Continental Latin sources to distinguish the Saxons in England from those on the Continent, but it soon came to mean simply the "English."
By the 7th century, the Anglo-Saxons had formed seven separate kingdoms (known as the heptarchy) and dominated what became England. It was during this period that Christianity arrived in England. The church became an important force in society; the only truly national entity tying together the different Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
By 870 the Danes had overthrown the kingdoms of East Anglia, Northumbria, and Mercia, and were preparing to do the same to Wessex, but the king of Wessex, Alfred (the Great) eventually repelled them, which spelled the end of the Anglo-Saxon dominancy of England.
Most of our knowledge about the Angles and Saxons originates from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in 890 AD possibly on the orders of King Alfred the Great.
Anglo-Saxon art
Anglo-Saxon art included sculpted crosses and ivories, manuscript painting, and gold and enamel jewellery, demonstrating a love of intricate, interwoven designs. The relics of the Sutton Hoo ship burial (7th century) and the Lindisfarne Gospels (about 690 British Museum, London) have typical Celtic ornamental patterns, but in the manuscripts of southern England, a different style emerged in the 9th century, with delicate, lively pen-and-ink figures and heavily decorative foliage borders.
Anglo-Saxon art was influenced by the Celtic arts of the native Britons, by Roman influences brought by the Christian church, and by Norse arts following the Viking invasions of the 8th century.
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