"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."