Anglo-Saxons

"By the Lord before whom this sanctuary is holy, I will to N. be true and faithful, and love all which he loves and shun all which he shuns, according to the laws of God and the order of the world. Nor will I ever with will or action, through word or deed, do anything which is unpleasing to him, on condition that he will hold to me as I shall deserve it, and that he will perform everything as it was in our agreement when I submitted myself to him and chose his will."

"Contrast the position in 1066. England was by then a nation-state. It is highly improbable that any European rulers enjoyed closely organised authority over so wide an area as did its kings. The dominions of the German King Henry IV were far more extensive, but the extent of his authority varied from area to area; his government was by no means uniformly integrated; and he did not rule a state in the sense that Edward the Confessor did. There is no question of there having been anything comparable to the English state in France, Spain or Italy. In four centuries a position had been completely reversed. The area of the former Western Roman Empire where authority had disintegrated furthest had become the largest area of integrated power."

"Bede himself insists that three different Germanic peoples came to Britain – the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes – and that they set up a whole series of distinct kingdoms, the Jutes in Kent, the Saxons in various southern districts, the Angles in East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. Nevertheless by the time he is writing – some three hundred years after the early migrations and a hundred years after their Christian conversion – he takes it for granted that this whole medley of peoples and kingdoms has become a single nation, "gens Anglorum", the people of the English, and he regularly uses the name "English" to include not only Northumbrians and other Angles, but Saxons and Jutes. He does not, however, for one moment, think that it includes the other peoples of Britain – Britons, Scots and Picts. Britain is one but it includes four peoples with four languages. The English, he had no doubt at all – meaning Saxons, Angles and Jutes – are now a single nation with a single language and a single church."

"The process of Britain’s departure from the Roman Empire was hastened not only by turbulence across the sea in Gaul and Italy, but by the arrival in Britain of significant numbers of warriors and their families from another part of Europe, well outside the empire. The eastern seaboard of Britain had long been a tempting entry point for raiding parties of Picts, Scots, and Germanic tribes known collectively (if imprecisely) as Anglo-Saxons. There had been a serious invasion crisis in 367-8, known as the Great Conspiracy, in which a troop mutiny on Hadrian’s Wall preceded a massive series of coastal raids by non-Roman aligned northern British tribes, apparently in league with Saxons and others from outside the province. Now the same route lay open again. From the early fifth century Britain was steadily settled by war-bands and migrant groups from the North Sea fringe. There was no single, co-ordinated military invasion such as the Romans had landed in the time of Claudius, or the Normans would stage in 1066; the invasions were piecemeal and staggered over many years. Some of the names later applied to the peoples who arrived included the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. But ethnic terminology would have mattered much less to fifth-century Britons than observed reality: Roman functionaries and soldiers had disappeared across the sea in one direction, while Germanic settlers bringing new languages, cultures and beliefs arrived from another."

"Bleed, Saxon blood, and bare old tales of winning wars, westward thrust, killing Celts, keeping lands, eager-storming, ever-taking, battle-sweating, strong-sure Thanes! Folk-hearts proud, forging hard, sweeping through, sowing deep."

"[T]he glory of the late Anglo-Saxon period was its English writing. At a time when no vernacular prose of any distinction had appeared on the Continent, the Anglo-Saxons had developed a language of great copiousness and flexibility, capable of rendering Latin works on theology, philosophy and science. They had translated the gospels, most of the first seven books of the Old Testament, the Benedictine Rule and that of Chrodogang of Metz, some of Alcuin's treatises, and of the canonical writings of Amalarius of Metz and Theodulf of Orelans, and some of Bede's scientific work."