The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the making of England

When Roman rule in Britain collapsed in the early fifth century, settlers from what is now northern Germany and Denmark, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes of tradition, crossed the North Sea and founded small kingdoms across lowland Britain. Over the next five centuries those kingdoms were drawn together, largely by the kings of Wessex fighting the Vikings, into a single kingdom of England.^•

Newcomers and Britons

How many newcomers there were, and what happened to the Britons already living there, is one of the oldest arguments in British history. Older accounts imagined the Britons being slaughtered or driven west; later scholars argued for a small warrior elite that the natives copied. Recent archaeology and DNA research point to substantial migration, while also showing that many Britons stayed and were absorbed. What is clear is the result: by around 600 the east and south of the island spoke Old English, while British, the ancestor of Welsh, survived in the west and north.^•

Kingdoms and conversion

Kingdoms such as Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent and Wessex fought one another for supremacy. Missionaries sent from Rome under Augustine arrived in Kent in 597, and Irish monks worked in the north, so that within a century the kings had become Christian. The Northumbrian monk Bede, finishing his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731, already wrote of a single English people, the gens Anglorum, before there was any single English kingdom. Mercia’s King Offa built the great earthwork still called Offa’s Dyke along the border with the Welsh kingdoms.^•

The Vikings and Wessex

Viking raids began with the attack on Lindisfarne in 793, and from 865 a “Great Army” conquered Northumbria, East Anglia and much of Mercia. Wessex alone survived. Its king, Alfred, defeated the Danes at Edington in 878, built fortified towns called burhs, and promoted learning and law in English. His successors pushed north into the Danish-ruled lands, and his grandson Æthelstan took York in 927, becoming the first king to rule all the English. In 937 he defeated an alliance of Scots, Strathclyde Britons and Dublin Vikings at Brunanburh.^•

An old, organised kingdom

Late Anglo-Saxon England was, by the standards of its day, remarkably well run: divided into shires and hundreds, with a single silver coinage, royal writs and a tradition of law-making in the vernacular. It survived a second wave of Danish attack, and even a Danish king, Cnut, who ruled from 1016 to 1035. Historians such as Robert Tombs see in this the foundation of a lasting English habit: a strong, centralised kingdom that people expected to be governed by law and custom.^•

The legacy is everywhere. Most English place names, and the core of the English language, come from this period. The Danelaw left its mark in northern and eastern place names ending in -by and -thorpe. And the notion that England is an ancient, continuous nation, rather than a new state, starts here.^•

Why it matters today