c.450. Traditional date for the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons to Britain

This date, and the whole idea of a sudden onslaught of "Anglo-Saxons" on post-Roman Britain in the mid-5th century, is a vast oversimplification. Saxon pirates may have been raiding the shores of Britain already by 365; in 367 there was a Roman military officer in charge of a series of fortresses along the south-eastern coast, and by the end of the century the coast itself was called the Saxon Shore. There may also have been Saxons among the defenders of late 4th-century Britain: the German names of two of the Roman commanders (Fullofaudes and Fraomar) make it clear that members of some Germanic tribes were on the Romano-British side.

Information from the 5th century is scarce. Constantius's Life of St Germanus notes that the saint helped the British to win a victory against a combined force of Picts and Saxons, in a visit which Prosper of Aquitaine's Chronicle dates to 429. The Gallic Chronicle, written probably shortly after 452, notes a severe Saxon raid on Britain in about 410, and the fall of Britain to the Saxons, after many troubles, in 441. It would be fascinating to learn what tidings reached the near-contemporary chronicler in the south of France to make him believe that Britain had fallen: the tales of refugees, perhaps, fleeing for their lives, or the sudden cessation of contact or trade with Britain which might result if the Saxons took the coastal settlements and blockaded the Channel. Without more details, though, this source is too far away from events to be more than an index of how widely-known and serious were the Saxon troubles in Britain.

For more discursive accounts of the Anglo-Saxon arrival we must turn to later British and English sources. The earliest source is Gildas, who wrote in the 6th century the De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, "Of the Ruin and Conquest of Britain"; this is primarily a lament for the sins of contemporary British rulers, but it includes some historical background. Gildas says that some time after an unsuccessful appeal for help to the Roman consul "Agitius", the Britons, fearing a return of their old enemies, the Irish and the Picts, agreed to give land to the Saxons on condition that they beat back the raiders. The Saxons came first in three ships, landing on the east side of the island, and later a second and larger group arrived. For a long time they received their wages and did their work, but eventually they demanded greater rewards, and plundered "the whole island" when they were refused. Gildas pictures the Saxon conquest as divine vengeance for earlier sins of the Britons, and is manifestly uninterested in names or dates or historical precision. It is true that the Irish and the Picts, as well as the Saxons, did raid late Roman (and presumably sub-Roman) Britain; it is also plausible that some Saxons may have been employed as defenders of Roman Britain, as we know some other Germanic peoples were. But elsewhere Gildas is clearly rearranging material to suit his polemical ends (we know the Saxons were already raiding Britain in the late 4th and early 5th centuries, but Gildas omits all mention of this to introduce them as agents of divine vengeance in the mid-5th century), or straying into legend (the arrival of the Saxon invaders in three ships parallels origin stories told of the Picts, the Irish, the Goths and the Continental Saxons). His account, though influential as narrative, cannot be trusted as history.

In the 8th century, the English writer Bede added dates to Gildas's account. In his Chronica Maiora of 725 he tried to put Gildas's events into a sequence of Roman imperial reigns, and since Gildas notes that "Agitius" was thrice consul and there was a Roman military leader, Aetius, who received a third consulship in 446, Bede dates the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to the following reign, of Marcian and Valentinian (450-57). Bede was using A.D. dating in his Historia Ecclesiastica of 731, but instead of giving a specific year, he repeats his statement that the coming of the Saxons happened in the seven-year reign of Marcian and Valentinian, which he states (erroneously) began in 449. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at the end of the 9th century repeats Bede's statement under its annal for 449, and it is a simplification of that which has given us the supposed date "449" for the coming of the Anglo-Saxons. But it seems that Bede was only trying to make sense of Gildas, and since the result contradicts a nearly-contemporary source (by which the Saxons had conquered Britain by 441, nearly ten years before they were first "invited"), the date c.450 for the "Coming of the Anglo-Saxons" has no real historical authority. Nonetheless, from the 8th century to the 20th, c.450 was the approximate received date for the invasion. Bede himself is not consistent: elsewhere in his History, he dates events with the phrase "about [x] years after the English came to Britain", and in three cases he seems to be calculating from a date of 446/47 rather than 449-56. The later Historia Brittonum, on uncertain authority, notes that an Irish abbot who visited Ripon in 753 discovered that there they dated the arrival to 453.

A recent and skeptical review of the archaeological evidence (Hines, "Philology, Archaeology and the adventus Saxonum vel Anglorum") notes that while the overall sequence of the transition from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England is clear, it cannot be dated with the precision historians would desire. It seems that there were only a handful of sites containing "Anglo-Saxon" artefacts datable to before the middle of the 5th century. There was then a considerable expansion in the area covered by Anglo-Saxon sites and in the density of such sites over the second half of the 5th century and the first half of the 6th. In other words, Anglo-Saxon influence became much more visible on the ground in the second half of the 5th century, and if the "Coming of the Anglo-Saxons" is defined as the point where they achieve significant influence rather than their first arrival, c.450 may be as good a date as any. It is still an oversimplification, however, and "the second half of the 5th century" more accurately reflects our current knowledge.

"Saxons", "Anglo-Saxons", and "English" have been used interchangeably for the Germanic invaders of England. In a famous passage towards the beginning of his History (I.xv), Bede states that the people of the Angles or Saxons came from three strong Germanic tribes, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. There were doubtless many other peoples involved: Bede himself gives a longer list towards the end of his History (V.ix), naming the Frisians, the Rugini, the Danes, the Huns, the Old Saxons and the Boructari (probabaly Franks); a 6th-century Byzantine historian, Procopius, thought that Britain was inhabited by Britons, Angles, and Frisians. But the fact that contemporaries tended to refer to them indiscriminately as "the Angles" or "the Saxons" suggests that these two groups were predominant. The compound "Anglo-Saxon" appears in some Continental sources as a vague synonym of "Angles" or "Saxons", or as a term to differentiate the Saxons in Britain from those on the Continent (Pohl pp.21-2), but it is introduced in England as a term meaning "all of the English" at King Alfred's court at the end of the 9th century.

R. Burgess, "The Dark Ages Return to Fifth-Century Britain: The 'Restored' Gallic Chronicle Exploded", Britannia 21 (1990), pp.185-95

J. Campbell (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons (London: 1982)

J. Cotterill, "Saxon Raiding and the Role of the Late Roman Coastal Forts of Britain", Britannia 24 (1993), pp.227-39

S. Frere, Britannia: A History of Roman Britain, 3rd edn (London: 1987)

N. Higham, The English Conquest: Gildas and Britain in the Fifth Century (Manchester: 1994)

J. Hines, "Philology, Archaeology and the adventus Saxonum vel Anglorum", Britain 400-600: Language and History, edd. A. Bammesberger and A. Wollmann (Heidelberg, 1990), pp.17-36

W. Pohl, "Ethnic Names and Identities in the British Isles: A Comparative Perspective", in J. Hines (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge: 1997), pp.7-32

P. Sims-Williams, "Gildas and the Anglo-Saxons", Cambridge Medieval Celtic Society 6 (1983), pp.1-30

P. Sims-Williams, "The settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle", Anglo-Saxon England 12 (1983), pp.1-41

F. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn (Oxford: 1971), pp.1-18