The historiography on the Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain has tried to explain how there was a widespread change from Romano-British to Anglo-Saxon cultures in the area roughly corresponding to present-day England between the Fall of the Western Roman Empire and the eighth century, a time when there were scant historical records.
From as early as the eighth century until around the 1970s, the traditional view of the settlement was a mass invasion in which "Anglo-Saxon" incomers exterminated or enslaved many of the native "Romano-British" inhabitants of Britain, driving the remainder from eastern Britain into western Britain and Brittany. This view has influenced many of the scholarly and popular perceptions of the process of anglicisation in Britain. It remains the starting point and default position from which other hypotheses are compared in modern reviews of the evidence.
From the 1970s onwards there was a reaction to this narrative, drawing particularly on archaeology, contending that the initial migration had been of a very small group of elite warriors who offered a more attractive form of social organisation to the late Roman models available in Britain at the time.
Since around 2010, genetic studies have begun to contribute a new dataset, suggesting a greater migration from the Continent to Britain, and of Britons to the West, particularly in the case of Southern England and Eastern England, although not a total population replacement. There is as yet, however, little consensus about what this rapidly increasing body of data reveals.
Accounts of the transition from Roman to Anglo-Saxon culture in Britain have been influenced by the political contexts of the scholars who produced them, including many centuries of English colonialism within the British Isles, the Norman Conquest, the Reformation and British settlement in America. Twentieth-century academic disciplinary boundaries have led to divergent histories becoming accepted in different disciplines (for example between history, archaeology, and genetics) or in different sub-disciplines (for example between Roman and early medieval archaeology, or between archaeologists focusing on "Anglo-Saxon" and "Celtic" archaeology).
Early medieval views
Contemporary written sources record scarcely any account of the most influential phases of Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain, generally thought to have been around the fifth century. Surviving written accounts of events of that period are all at least decades after the facts, yet remained the basis for historians' understanding of Anglo-Saxon settlement from the eighth century into the 1970s, and remained influential on less scholarly history-writing into the 2020s.
Continental sources
Near-contemporary Continental sources attest to raids (though not necessarily settlement) of Britain by Saxons around the fifth century. The Vita Germani, a hagiography of Saint Germanus of Auxerre written in 480, claims that during a visit to Britain this Gaulish bishop helped command a British defence against an invasion of Picts and Saxons in 429.
According to the Chronica Gallica of 452, a chronicle written in Gaul, Britain was ravaged by Saxon invaders in 409 or 410. This was only a few years after Constantine III was declared Roman emperor in Britain, and during the period that he was still leading British Roman forces in rebellion on the Continent. Although the rebellion was eventually quashed, the Romano-British citizens reportedly expelled their Roman officials during this period, and never again re-joined the Roman empire. Writing in the mid-sixth century, Procopius states that after the overthrow of Constantine III in 411, "the Romans never succeeded in recovering Britain, but it remained from that time under tyrants" without, however, being clear as to the ethnicity of the "tyrants".
Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae
The earliest text to give an explicit account of settlement of Britain by what it calls "Saxons" (Latin Saxones) is the sermon De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae. Its date of composition is uncertain, plausibly falling between the late fifth and the mid-sixth century. Inspired by Old Testament prophetical writing, seven eighths of the De excidio chastises political figures contemporary with Gildas for their irreligious behaviour. But the work opens with a short historical sketch of the sins of the Britons and their "ruin and conquest" by "Saxons", initially invited to the island as mercenaries, and although it makes up only an eighth of the text, it is this passage that has attracted most attention from historians, from the Early Middle Ages into the twenty-first century. In Gildas's account, settlement in Britain by Saxons was divine punishment for the sinful nature of many British rulers.
Anglo-Saxon sources
Gildas's account of "Saxon" settlement was adapted and supplemented by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a text that was politically committed to the idea that there was such a thing as English ethnicity, to give an account of settlement by the English (Latin Angli); that the whole of Britain should be a politically unitary part of the Roman Church; and that these agendas constituted the divine plan of the Christian God.Tugene, Georges. 2001. L'idée de nation chez Bède le Vénérable, Collection des Études Augustiniennes, Série Moyen Âge et Temps Modernes 37. Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes Like Gildas, Bede presented the settlement as divinely motivated, echoing divine punishment for Jews' poor behaviour in the Old Testament:In this case Jeremiah 32:29, 38:18-23, 39:8; 2 Kings 25:9)
to put it briefly, the fire kindled by the hands of the heathen executed the just vengeance of God on the nation for its crimes. It was not unlike that fire once kindled by the Chaldeans which consumed the walls and all the buildings of Jerusalem. So here in Britain the just Judge ordained that the fire of their brutal conquerors should ravage all the neighbouring cities and countryside from the east to the western sea, and burn on, with no one to hinder it, until it covered almost the whole face of the doomed island.
Unlike Gildas, however, Bede implied that the English were not only sent by God to punish the Britons, but to bring Britain under their own rule, and through their own conversion to Christianity into the Roman Church.
Bede also took the view that this was an invasion of three tribes — the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes — at a specific date, 449 AD, yet this information is not presented in his History in an internally consistent way.
Regardless of how close it may have come to historical reality, Bede's account of the migration was hugely influential on later historical writing in Britain. It was a source for the Historia Brittonum, composed in ninth-century Wales. As well as being translated and adapted into Old English, it influenced, for example, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle account of the fifth and sixth centuries.Janet Bately, 'Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', in Saints, Scholars and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honour of Charles W. Jones, ed. by Margot H. King and Wesley M. Stevens, 2 vols (Collegeville: 1979), I 233–54.
Later medieval views
During the high-to-late medieval period, interpretations of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain were shaped by a combination of monastic traditions, genealogical interests and political concerns — not least different power groups' desire to legitimate or adapt to the Norman Conquest of England of 1066. Chroniclers such as Henry of Huntingdon and Geoffrey of Monmouth relied on earlier sources, particularly Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, adapting these accounts to reflect the concerns of their own times.
A dominant narrative among late medieval writers was the idea of the Anglo-Saxon migration as a violent invasion that led to the near-total displacement of the native Britons. This interpretation, rooted in Bede and so in Gildas, was frequently repeated and expanded upon in later medieval chronicles. Henry of Huntingdon, in his Historia Anglorum, presented the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons as an overwhelming catastrophe for the Britons, describing their defeat as divine punishment for their sins — he treated the Angle and Saxon "invasions" as two of five invasions (together with the Picts, Scots and Normans) that were sent as a punishment from God.
Geoffrey of Monmouth's largely invented Historia Regum Britanniae and Vita Merlini adapted the accounts of Gildas, Bede, and the Historia Brittonum by giving Britons an illustrious ancestry and period of glory, positioning the Anglo-Saxons as distinctly barbaric invaders. Despite its relatively positive account of the Britons, however, the Historia continued to legitimise the Norman Conquest, implying both that the Norman kings and landowners were the legitimate successors to a successful and just Saxon conquest of Britain and also that Bretons among the Norman forces represented a return of noble British emigrés, chased from the island by the Saxons. Geoffrey of Monmouth's reading was tremendously popular over the next four centuries, both in the original Latin and in translation into Old French, English, Welsh, and other languages, revolutionising British and international views of the Anglo-Saxon settlement (despite the criticism of Gerald of Wales and William of Newburgh, the latter of whom stated "no one but a person ignorant of ancient history [can doubt] how impertinently and impudently he falsifies in every respect"). Geoffrey's association of the Anglo-Saxon settlement with his largely invented character King Arthur has remained influential on non-scholarly understandings of the settlement into the twenty-first century.
Hints also survive of local and oral traditions about migratory histories circulating around the twelfth century, most strikingly in accounts of Havelok the Dane, which, while unhistorical, indicate that the dominance of Bede's account in surviving written history may not be representative of the origin-stories that circulated outside literate, scholarly circles. Early-modern views
The Reformation gave Protestant English scholars a new ideological motivation for contemplating the Anglo-Saxon period: they hoped to find there evidence of a purer, distinctively English Church. The dissolution of the monasteries put into different hand many Anglo-Saxon manuscripts that had been within monastic libraries, and, although a large number of manuscripts were destroyed, historical and chronological works tended to be preserved, facilitating a religiously charged interest in the Anglo-Saxon period.
The early seventeenth-century historians Richard Verstegan (c. 1550–1640) and William Camden (1551–1623) also began to emphasise the supposed Germanic roots of the English, tracing English institutions to a Germanic love of liberty, which they argued the Anglo-Saxon settlers had imported into Britain. Racial categories were far vaguer than they would be in later centuries, but these writers did start a commonly repeated seventeenth-century theme of the Anglo-Saxons being the "most distinguished branch of the sturdy, free-growing Germanic tree". Hengest and Vortigern were sufficiently well known figures that John Aubrey's Monumenta Britannica (published 1665–93) could attribute earthworks to them without feeling the need for further explanation.