Editing History of England (section)

===Anglo-Saxon migrations===
{{main|Sub-Roman Britain}}
{{further|Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain}}
[[File:2004 sutton hoo 01.JPG|thumb|Anglo-Saxon helmet from the [[Sutton Hoo]] ship burial, 625 AD (replica)]]

In the wake of the breakdown of Roman rule in Britain from the middle of the fourth century, present day England was progressively settled by [[Germanic peoples|Germanic]] groups. Collectively known as the [[Anglo-Saxons]], these included [[Angles (tribe)|Angles]], [[Saxons]], [[Jutes]] and [[Frisians]]. The [[Battle of Deorham]] was critical in establishing Anglo-Saxon rule in 577.<ref>{{cite web |author=Hamerow, Helena |url=http://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/wessex.html |title=The Origins of Wessex |publisher=University of Oxford |access-date=18 November 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120702185330/https://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/wessex.html |archive-date=2 July 2012 |url-status=dead}}</ref> Saxon mercenaries existed in Britain since before the late Roman period, but the main influx of population probably happened after the fifth century. The precise nature of these invasions is not fully known; there are doubts about the legitimacy of historical accounts due to a lack of archaeological finds. [[Gildas]]' ''De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae'', composed in the 6th century, states that when the Roman army departed the Isle of Britannia in the 4th century AD, the indigenous Britons were invaded by [[Picts]], their neighbours to the north (now Scotland) and the [[Scoti|Scots]] (now Ireland). Britons invited the [[Saxons]] to the island to repel them but after they vanquished the Scots and Picts, the Saxons turned against the Britons.
[[File:Britain peoples circa 600.svg|thumb|Kingdoms and tribes in [[Britain in the Middle Ages|Britain]], c. AD&nbsp;600]]

[[File:Beowulf Cotton MS Vitellius A XV f. 132r.jpg|thumb|left|The epic poem ''[[Beowulf]]'', set in 6th century Scandinavia, composed c. 700–1000 AD.|239x239px]]

Seven kingdoms are traditionally identified as being established by these migrants. Three were clustered in the South east: [[Sussex]], [[Kingdom of Kent|Kent]] and [[Kingdom of Essex|Essex]]. The Midlands were dominated by the kingdoms of [[Mercia]] and [[Kingdom of East Anglia|East Anglia]]. To the north was [[Kingdom of Northumbria|Northumbria]] which unified two earlier kingdoms, [[Bernicia]] and [[Deira]]. Other smaller kingdoms seem to have existed as well, such as [[Kingdom of Lindsey|Lindsey]] in what is now Lincolnshire, and the [[Hwicce]] in the southwest. Eventually, the kingdoms were dominated by [[Kingdom of Northumbria|Northumbria]] and [[Mercia]] in the 7th century, [[Mercia]] in the 8th century and then [[Wessex]] in the 9th century. [[Kingdom of Northumbria|Northumbria]] eventually extended its control north into [[Scotland]] and west into [[Wales]]. It also subdued [[Mercia]] whose first powerful King, [[Penda of Mercia|Penda]], was killed by [[Oswiu of Northumbria|Oswy]] in 655. Northumbria's power began to wane after 685 with the defeat and death of its king [[Ecgfrith of Northumbria|Aegfrith]] at the hands of the [[Picts]]. Mercian power reached its peak under the rule of [[Offa of Mercia|Offa]], who from 785 had influence over most of Anglo-Saxon England. Since Offa's death in 796, the supremacy of [[Wessex]] was established under [[Egbert of Wessex|Egbert]] who extended control west into [[Cornwall]] before defeating the Mercians at the [[Battle of Ellendun]] in 825. Four years later, he received submission and tribute from the Northumbrian king, [[Eanred of Northumbria|Eanred]].<ref>Stenton, Frank. "Anglo-Saxon England". OUP, 1971</ref>

Since so few contemporary sources exist, the events of the fifth and sixth centuries are difficult to ascertain. As such, the nature of the Anglo-Saxon settlements is debated by historians, archaeologists and linguists. The traditional view, that the Anglo-Saxons drove the Romano-British inhabitants out of what is now England, was subject to reappraisal in the later twentieth century. One suggestion is that the invaders were smaller in number, drawn from an elite class of male warriors that gradually acculturated the natives.<ref>Francis Pryor, ''Britain AD'', 2004.</ref><ref>Ward-Perkins, Bryan. "Why did the Anglo-Saxons not become more British?." The English Historical Review 115.462 (2000): page 523.</ref><ref>Higham, Nicholas J. and Ryan, Martin J. ''The Anglo-Saxon World'' (Yale University Press, 2013).</ref>

An emerging view is that the scale of the Anglo-Saxon settlement varied across England, and that as such it cannot be described by any one process in particular. Mass migration and population shift seem to be most applicable in the core areas of settlement such as East Anglia and Lincolnshire,<ref>Stefan Burmeister, ''Archaeology and Migration'' (2000): " ... immigration in the nucleus of the Anglo-Saxon settlement does not seem aptly described in terms of the "elite-dominance model.To all appearances, the settlement was carried out by small, agriculture-oriented kinship groups. This process corresponds more closely to a classic settler model. The absence of early evidence of a socially demarcated elite underscores the supposition that such an elite did not play a substantial role. Rich burials such as are well known from Denmark have no counterparts in England until the 6th century. At best, the elite-dominance model might apply in the peripheral areas of the settlement territory, where an immigration predominantly {{sic|comprised |hide=y|of}} men and the existence of hybrid cultural forms might support it."</ref><ref>{{cite web|last=Dark|first=Ken R.|title=Large-scale population movements into and from Britain south of Hadrian's Wall in the fourth to sixth centuries AD|year=2003|url=https://www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/GCMS/RMS-2003-03_K._R._Dark,_Large-scale_population_movements_into_and_from_Britan_south_of_Hadrian's_Wall_in_the_fourth_to_sixth_centuries_AD.pdf}}: "In fact, part of eastern Britain may have already been losing a significant portion of its rural population, as evidence from East Anglia – amassed and analyzed by local archaeologists –  may suggest. In this area at least, and possibly more widely in eastern Britain, large tracts of land appear to have been deserted in the late fourth century, possibly including whole "small towns" and villages. This does not seem to have been a localised change in settlement location, size or character but genuine desertion ... The areas where we have most indications of an intrusive Germanic culture are precisely those where we have most evidence of late fourth-century abandonment."</ref><ref>Toby F. Martin, ''The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England'', Boydell and Brewer Press (2015), pp. 174–178: "There is by now, however, an admission that no single model is suitable for Anglo-Saxon England in its entirety. Regional variation may well provide the key to resolution, with something more akin to mass migration in the southeast, gradually spreading into elite dominance in the north and west. I accord with this compromise between the debates insofar as large-scale migration seems highly likely for at least East Anglia and parts of Lincolnshire. At the same time, however, it is dubious that these people migrated as a coherent Anglian group."</ref><ref>Catherine Hills, "The Anglo-Saxon Migration: An Archaeological Case Study of Disruption," in ''Migrations and Disruptions'', ed. Brenda J. Baker and Takeyuki Tsuda, pp. 45–48: "In a fairly precisely defined region in eastern England, centered on Norfolk and Lincolnshire, a significant number of people from the other side of the north sea do seem to have arrived in the fifth century and established territories where Germanic material culture and, especially, burial practices were dominant. This forms the basis for the "Anglian" zone of later Anglo-Saxon England. The population may indeed have included a substantial number of people with Germanic ancestry as well as an as yet unspecifiable proportion of the native British population ... There was not one "Anglo-Saxon migration" that had the same impact in all of England ..."</ref><ref>{{cite web|last=Coates|first=Richard|title=Celtic whispers: revisiting the problems of the relation between Brittonic and Old English|url=https://ul.qucosa.de/api/qucosa%3A31804/attachment/ATT-0/}}: "... I believe that the linguistic evidence favors the traditional view, at least for the south-east and for the southern North Sea coastal lands, i.e. East Anglia."</ref> while in more peripheral areas to the northwest, much of the native population likely remained in place as the incomers took over as elites.<ref name="Härke, Heinrich 2011">Härke, Heinrich. "Anglo-Saxon Immigration and Ethnogenesis." ''Medieval Archaeology'' 55.1 (2011): 1–28: "A third model, that of "elite transfer," has been suggested for Bernicia where a small group of immigrants may have replaced the British elite and took over the kingdom as a going concern."</ref><ref>{{cite web|last=Kortlandt|first=Frederik|title=Relative Chronology|year=2018|url=https://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art320e.pdf}}: "The second migration, which attracted incomers from other Germanic tribes, offers a different picture for Northumbria, and more specifically Bernicia, where there was a noticeable Celtic contribution to art, culture and possibly socio-military organisation. It appears that the immigrants took over the institutions of the local population here."</ref> In a study of place names in northeastern England and southern Scotland, Bethany Fox concluded that Anglian migrants settled in large numbers in river valleys, such as those of the Tyne and the Tweed, with the Britons in the less fertile hill country becoming acculturated over a longer period. Fox interprets the process by which English came to dominate this region as "a synthesis of mass-migration and elite-takeover models."<ref>{{cite web|last=Fox |first=Bethany |title=The P-Celtic Place Names of North-East England and South-East Scotland |website=The Heroic Age |date=2007 |url=http://www.heroicage.org/issues/10/fox.html}}</ref>