How Did the English Arrive in Britain?
Bede wrote that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded Britain en masse in the fifth century. Does the evidence agree?
‘Bede tells a straightforward tale of migration and conquest’
Samuel Cardwell is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Nottingham
What would we know of the adventus Saxonum (‘arrival of the Saxons’) if we only had textual sources to go on? The narrative provided by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History (completed in 731) is a straightforward tale of migration and conquest. Around AD 449 the ‘Saxons, Angles and Jutes’ were ‘invited’ by the British king Vortigern to fill the void left by the departure of the Roman legions a generation earlier. These people came initially in three ships, led by the brothers Hengist and Horsa, but before long more and more migrants came from what is now northern Germany and southern Denmark, crowding out the native Britons and laying waste to the lands of anyone who opposed them. Although the Britons fought back with some success, by the late sixth century the kingdoms of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ were well established.
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