View source for Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

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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 culture|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.{{sfn|Grimmer|2007}}

From the 1970s onwards there was [[Anglo-Saxon diffusionism|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 [[English Reformation|Reformation]] and [[British colonization of the Americas|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{{sfn|Harland|2021}}) or in different sub-disciplines (for example between Roman and early medieval archaeology,{{sfn|Fleming|2021|pp=3–4}} or between archaeologists focusing on "Anglo-Saxon" and "Celtic" archaeology{{sfn|Halsall|2013|pages=26-48}}).

== Early medieval views ==
[[File:E-codices_bke-0047_001v_medium.jpg|thumb|upright|The [[Venerable Bede]] writing the ''Ecclesiastical History of the English People'', from a codex at [[Engelberg Abbey]], Switzerland.]]

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.{{sfn|Harland|2021|pages=18–20}} 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.{{sfn|Harland|2021|pages=16–17}}

===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.{{sfn|Butler|1866}}

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.{{sfn|Halsall|2013|page=13}} 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".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Dewing |first1=H B |url=https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/SLAVSTUD182/Procopius%20Wars%20Books%20VII.36-VIII.pdf |title=Procopius: History of the Wars Books VII and VIII with an English Translation |date=1962 |publisher=Harvard University Press |pages=252–255 |access-date=1 March 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200303224542/https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/SLAVSTUD182/Procopius%20Wars%20Books%20VII.36-VIII.pdf |archive-date=3 March 2020 }}</ref>

===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|''De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae'']]. Its date of composition is uncertain, plausibly falling between the late fifth and the mid-sixth century.{{sfn|Harland|2021|page=18}} 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.{{sfn|Halsall|2013|pages=53–57}} In Gildas's account, settlement in Britain by Saxons was [[divine punishment]] for the sinful nature of many British rulers.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2019/06/gildas.html|title=The Ruin of Britain|publisher=British Library|website=Medieval manuscripts blog|date=11 June 2019}}</ref>{{sfn|Harland|2021|page=18}}

===Anglo-Saxon sources===

Gildas's account of "Saxon" settlement was adapted and supplemented by [[Bede]] in his [[Ecclesiastical History of the English People|''Ecclesiastical History of the English People'']],{{sfn|Lapidge|1984|p=204}} 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.<ref>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</ref> Like Gildas, Bede presented the settlement as divinely motivated, echoing divine punishment for Jews' poor behaviour in the [[Old Testament]]:<ref>In this case [[Jeremiah 32]]:29, [[Jeremiah 38|38]]:18-23, [[Jeremiah 39|39]]:8; [[2 Kings 25]]:9)</ref>

<blockquote>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 [[Chaldea|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.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Bede |title=The ecclesiastical history of the English people, The Greater Chronicle, Bede's letter to Egbert |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2008 |isbn=978-0-19-953723-5 |edition=Reissued |series=Oxford world's classics |location=Oxford |pages=28 [book I, chapter 15] |translator-last=Colgrave |translator-first=Bertram |translator-last2=McClure |translator-first2=Judith |translator-last3=Collins |translator-first3=Roger}}</ref></blockquote>

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]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Cavill |first=Paul |title=Vikings: fear and faith |date=2002 |publisher=Zondervan |isbn=978-0-00-710402-4 |location=Grand Rapids, Mich}}</ref>{{rp|52–54}}

Bede also took the view that this was an invasion of three tribes — the [[Angles (tribe)|Angles]], the [[Saxons]] and the [[Jutes]] — at a specific date, 449 AD,<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/oms/anglo-saxon-migrations|title=The Anglo-Saxon invasion and the beginnings of the 'English'|website=Our Migration Story}}</ref> yet this information is not presented in his ''History'' in an internally consistent way.{{sfn|Harland|2021|page=19}}

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|''Historia Brittonum'']], composed in ninth-century Wales.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Woolf |first=Alex |date=2018 |title=Imagining English Origins |journal=Quaestio Insularis: Selected Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic |volume=18 |pages=1–20}}</ref>{{Rp|page=1}} As well as being translated and adapted into Old English,<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Niles |first=John D. |title=The idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901: remembering, forgetting, deciphering, and renewing the past |date=2015 |publisher=John Wiley & Sons Ltd |isbn=978-1-118-94332-8 |series=Blackwell manifestos |location=Chichester (GB) Hoboken}}</ref>{{Rp|pages=2–3}} it influenced, for example, the [[Anglo Saxon Chronicle|''Anglo Saxon Chronicle'']]'s account of the fifth and sixth centuries,<ref>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.</ref><ref name=":0" />{{Rp|pages=2–3}} [[Wulfstan (died 1023)|Wulfstan of York]]'s conception of Scandinavian migration to Britain in the late tenth century, and ''[[Battle of Brunanburh (poem)|The Battle of Brunanburh]]''<nowiki/>'s representation of [[Æthelstan]]'s attempts around the 930s to conquer all of Britain:<ref>{{Cite book |last=Howe |first=Nicholas |title=Migration and mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England |date=1989 |publisher=Yale University Press |isbn=978-0-300-04512-3 |location=New Haven}}</ref><blockquote>Never yet in this island before this by what books tell us and our ancient sages, was a greater slaughter of a host made by the edge of the sword, since the Angles and Saxons came hither from the east, invading Britain over the broad seas, and the proud assailants, warriors eager for glory, overcame the Britons and won a country.<ref>ASC, s.a. 937, text C
, quoted in [https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-833 Æthelstan [Athelstan] - The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</ref></blockquote>

== Later medieval views ==
[[File:Corpus Christi College ms 280 f.7v.jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|The opening page from Book 1 of the ''Historia Anglorum''.]]

During the [[High Middle Ages|high]]-to-[[Late Middle Ages|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.<ref name=":1">{{Cite journal |last=Faletra |first=Michael A. |date=2000 |title=Narrating the Matter of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Norman Colonization of Wales |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096117 |journal=The Chaucer Review |volume=35 |issue=1 |pages=60–85 |jstor=25096117 |issn=0009-2002}}</ref> Chroniclers such as [[Henry of Huntingdon]] and [[Geoffrey of Monmouth]] relied on earlier sources, particularly Bede's [[Ecclesiastical History of the English People|''Ecclesiastical History of the English People'']] and the [[Anglo-Saxon Chronicle|''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'']],<ref>{{ODNB|title=Henry [Henry of Huntingdon]}}</ref> 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|''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 [[Angles (people)|Angle]] and [[Saxon]] "invasions" as two of five invasions (together with the [[Picts]], [[Scoti|Scots]] and [[Normans]]) that were sent as a [[punishment from God]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/haywardp/hist424/seminars/Huntingdon.htm|title=Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum|website=[[University of Lancaster]]}}</ref>

[[Geoffrey of Monmouth]]'s largely invented [[Historia Regum Britanniae|''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.<ref name=":1" /> 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<ref name=":4" />{{rp|1–2}} (despite the criticism of [[Giraldus Cambrensis|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").<ref>{{citation |last=William of Newburgh |title=Historia rerum Anglicarum |year=1198 |url=https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/williamofnewburgh-one.asp#preface | at = Book I, Preface |access-date=24 May 2023}}</ref> 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.{{sfn|Halsall|2013|pages=}}

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.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Parker |first=Eleanor |date=2016-06-01 |title=Havelok and the Danes in England: History, Legend, and Romance |url=https://academic.oup.com/res/article-abstract/67/280/428/2451631?redirectedFrom=fulltext |journal=The Review of English Studies |volume=67 |issue=280 |pages=428–447 |doi=10.1093/res/hgw034 |issn=0034-6551|url-access=subscription }}</ref>
== Early-modern views ==
[[File:Hengest and Horsa Verstegan.jpg|thumb|"The Arrival of the First Ancestors of Englishmen out of Germany into Britain", from ''A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence'' by Richard Verstegan (1605)]]
The [[English Reformation|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.{{sfn|Horsman|1976|pp=387-388}} The [[dissolution of the monasteries]] put into different hand many Anglo-Saxon manuscripts that had been within [[monastic libraries]],{{sfn|Grimmer|2007|pp=170-171}}{{sfn|Frantzen|1986|p=144}} 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.{{sfn|Vann|1958|pp=259-260}}

The early seventeenth-century historians [[Richard Verstegan]] (c. 1550–1640) and [[William Camden]] (1551–1623) also began to emphasise the supposed [[Germanic peoples|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".{{sfn|Horsman|1976|p=389}} 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.<ref name=":4">{{Cite book |last=Higham |first=Nicholas John |title=Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons |date=1992 |publisher=Seaby |isbn=978-1-85264-022-4 |series=The archaeology of change |location=London}}</ref>{{rp|1}}

[[Edward Gibbon]] (1737–1794), in [[The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire|''The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'']] (1776–1788), addressed the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons invasion within [[Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire|the broader context of Rome's decline]].<ref>{{cite book|chapter=XXXVIII: Reign Of Clovis.—Part V|url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25717/25717-h/25717-h.htm#chap38.6|author-link=Edward Gibbon|first=Edward |last=Gibbon|title=The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire|year=1776}}</ref> Gibbon characterized the Saxon incursions as part of the chaotic dissolution of Roman authority in the western provinces, portraying the Britons as a weakened people who fell victim to both external barbarian invasions and internal decay. He drew upon earlier sources such as Gildas and Bede, emphasizing the narrative of Britain's decline due to corruption and the loss of Roman discipline as well as reflecting [[Enlightenment era|Enlightenment-era]] perspectives on civilization and barbarism.

== Nineteenth-century views ==
[[File:Anglo.Saxon.migration.5th.cen.jpg|thumb|upright=1.05|Possible routes of Anglo-Saxon migration in the 5th/6th centuries]]
There was, according to Donald A. White, "very little interest in the Saxon past among scholars and the general reading public at the beginning of the nineteenth century" in Britain.<ref name=":3">{{Cite journal |last=White |first=Donald A. |date=1971 |title=Changing Views of the Adventus Saxonum in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century English Scholarship |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708979 |journal=Journal of the History of Ideas |volume=32 |issue=4 |pages=585–594 |doi=10.2307/2708979 |jstor=2708979 |issn=0022-5037|url-access=subscription }}</ref>{{rp|585}} This changed with major studies of the period by [[Sharon Turner]] (1768–1847) and [[John Mitchell Kemble]] (1807–1857). They and other English scholars of their time were encouraged to emphasise England's Anglo-Saxon heritage by English colonialism within the British Isles, which English thinkers sought to legitimate by arguing that the English were racially distinct from the Welsh, Irish, and Scots and inherently more fit to govern; the same idea was also used to promote British colonialism elsewhere. The [[Napoleonic Wars]] with France discouraged English identification with the Normans, while the 1714 accession to the thrones of the [[Kingdom of Great Britain|Kingdoms of Great Britain]] and [[Kingdom of Ireland|Ireland]] by the German [[House of Hanover]] encouraged English thinkers to seek historical connections between England and Germany. Additionally, liberal thinkers such as Kemble believed that England could avoid revolution by nurturing a liberal democracy derived from its Anglo-Saxon past.<ref name=":3" /><ref name=":4" />{{rp|2–3}} At the same time, as nineteenth-century history-writing developed, there was polarised debate between classicists who lionised Rome, and saw the end of Roman Britain as a disaster, and medievalists who saw Anglo-Saxon migrants as [[Noble savage|noble savages]] paving the way for the modern English state.<ref name=":4" />{{rp|2}}

Kemble was exceptionally well informed about Old English language and literature, Anglo-Saxon historical records, and archaeology, along with comparative material from elsewhere in Europe, undertaking extensive fieldwork in Germany. His research was foundational in helping British archaeologists identify burials from the Anglo-Saxon period and in demonstrating that furnished burials found in fifth- and sixth-century eastern England shared distinctive similarities with contemporary burials in Germany, providing important support for the idea of a migration from one region to the other. Anticipating approaches that would become popular in the late twentieth century, Kemble was sceptical of the accounts of Gildas and Bede, and argued for a gradual transition from a "Keltic" and Roman to an Anglo-Saxon population in Britain, supposing that "the mass of people, accustomed to Roman rule or the oppression of native princes, probably suffered little by a change of masters, and did little to avoid it".<ref name=":3" /><ref>Howard Williams, '[https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/heathen-graves.pdf Heathen Graves and Victorian Anglo-Saxonism: Assessing the Archaeology of John Mitchell Kemble]', in ''Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History'' 13 (2006), pp. 1–18.</ref><ref name=":4" />{{rp|2}} For Kemble's English contemporaries, however, "it seemed almost treasonable to impugn the veracity of Bede, the greatest Anglo-Saxon historian, or of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the earliest vernacular history in Europe".<ref name=":3" />{{rp|587}} In 1849, [[Edwin Guest]] gave a vivid account of the Anglo-Saxon settlements that viewed these written sources as straightforwardly true, arguing that the Anglo-Saxons and the Britons were competing cultures, and that through a series of military campaigns, extermination, slavery, and forced resettlement the Anglo-Saxons defeated the Britons and eradicated them and their culture and language from most of England. "By grafting a patriotic zeal for the received accounts on to the congenial stock of Kemble's Germanism, Guest created an historical orthodoxy that lasted for fifty years", influencing histories that were widely read in Britain and its Empire. These included [[Edward Augustus Freeman]] (1823–1892), [[William Stubbs]] (1825–1901) and [[J. R. Green]] (1837–1883).<ref name=":3" />{{Rp|page=588}}<ref name=":4" />{{rp|3–4}}

Freeman's 1869 ''Old English History for Children'' contrasted Germanic migration to England with the [[Frankish invasion of Gaul]]: whereas the [[Franks]] adopted the religion and language of the population, eastern Britain experienced what Freeman saw as a violent takeover and a far greater number of invaders, meaning that the Anglo-Saxons retained an exclusively "[[Teutons|Teutonic]]" character which owed nothing to the expelled, exterminated or enslaved post-Roman native Britons.<ref>Freeman, E.A. (1869) ''Old English History for Children'', MacMillan, London, pp. 7, 27–28</ref>{{sfn|Ward-Perkins|2000|p=518}} [[William Stubbs]] (1825–1901), in his ''Constitutional History of England'',<ref>3 vols., 1874–78</ref> laid out a more conventionally [[Whig history|Whig]] view which for a while became the standard authority on its subject.<ref>[[s:A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature/Stubbs, William]]</ref> The book claimed to trace the development of the English constitution from first [[Anglo-Saxon]] settlers until [[Battle of Bosworth|1485]].<ref>{{EB1911|wstitle=Stubbs, William|volume=25 |last1= Hunt |first1= William |author1-link= William Hunt (priest)|pages=1048–1049|short=1}}</ref><ref>''A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past'' by J. W. Burrow, Cambridge University Press, 1981. {{ISBN|0-521-24079-4}}</ref>

During the eighteenth century, English and American intellectuals and politicians had developed a view, later labelled "[[Anglo-Saxonism in the 19th century|Anglo-Saxonism]]" by scholars such as [[Allen Frantzen|Alan Frantzen]], which contended that the English, and Americans descended from them, were a superior culture due to their Anglo-Saxon racial roots.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Frantzen |first=Allen J. |title=Desire for origins: new language, Old English, and teaching the tradition |date=1990 |publisher=Rutgers university press |isbn=978-0-8135-1590-8 |location=New Brunswick (N.J.) London}}</ref><ref name="Britain and the Americas">{{cite book |last1=Kaufman |first1=Will |title=Britain and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History, Volume 2 |last2=Macpherson |first2=Heidi Slettedahl |date=2005 |publisher=[[ABC-CLIO]] |isbn=978-1-85109-431-8 |pages=90–91}}</ref> This movement extended Bede's opinion that the migration of Anglo-Saxons to Britain was divinely ordained as a means to bring the whole island of Britain under proper Christian rule to argue that later English settlement in the British Isles, Caribbean, and North America was likewise ordained by God. In America, the influential concept of [[Manifest Destiny]] was linked to a belief that American liberty was tied to Anglo-Saxon heritage.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Greenberg |first1=Kenneth S. |title=Review: The Ideology of Racial Anglo-Saxonism Reviewed Work: Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism by Reginald Horsman |journal=Reviews in American History |date=September 1982 |volume=10 |issue=3 |pages=353–357|doi=10.2307/2702497 |jstor=2702497 }}</ref> Accordingly, [[Thomas Jefferson]] (1743–1826), who had learned to read [[Old English]],<ref name="ReferenceA">[[Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain#Miller|Univ. Virginia archives: Miller Center]]</ref><ref>[[Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain#Andresen|Andresen, 2006]], Chap. 1.</ref> proposed that [[Hengest and Horsa]], the legendary leaders of the first Anglo-Saxon settlers of Britain, be put on the [[Great Seal of the United States]],<ref>{{cite web |title=II. Jefferson's Proposal, 20 August 1776 |url=https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0206-0002 |quote=Mr. Jefferson proposed the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; and on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed}}</ref> calling them "the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we assumed".{{sfn|Peterson|1970|p=98}} The American preacher [[Josiah Strong]] (1847–1916), who originated the idea of the [[Social Gospel]], also believed that the Anglo-Saxon peoples (although he specifically included all English speaking people) had, through their Germanic roots, a predisposition to both civil liberty and to a "pure spiritual Christianity" that laid the way in England to Luther's [[Reformation]].<ref>"The Anglo-Saxon is the representative of two great ideas, which are closely related. One of them is that of civil liberty. Nearly all of the civil liberty of the world is enjoyed by Anglo-Saxons: the English, the British colonists, and the people of the United States.&nbsp;... The other great idea of which the Anglo-Saxon is the exponent is that of a pure spiritual Christianity."  He went on, "It follows, then, that the Anglo-Saxon, as the great representative of these two ideas, the depositary of these two greatest blessings, sustains peculiar relations to the world's future, is divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother's keeper." {{cite book|author-link=Josiah Strong|first=Josiah|last=Strong|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PNhr7fU_egwC&pg=PA208|title=Our Country|year=1890|pages=208–210}}</ref>

== Twentieth-century developments: archaeology and place-names ==
[[File:Angles, Saxons, Jutes in Britain year 600.jpg|thumb|Map of Britain in the year 600 by [[William R. Shepherd]] (1871-1934), Professor of History at Columbia University in New York and cartographer, published in ''Historical Atlas'' (Henry Holt & Co., NY 1911).]]
In the early twentieth century, the systematic study of English place-names commenced (and was further promoted by the formation of the [[English Place-Name Society]] in 1922–23). This afforded a new source-base for the history of language in much of Britain.<ref name=":2">{{Cite journal |last=White |first=Donald A. |date=1971 |title=Changing Views of the ''Adventus Saxonum'' in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century English Scholarship |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708979 |journal=Journal of the History of Ideas |volume=32 |issue=4 |pages=585–594 |doi=10.2307/2708979 |jstor=2708979 |issn=0022-5037|url-access=subscription }}</ref>{{rp|588}} Place-name study, and other research on [[Celtic language decline in England]], demonstrated that [[British Celtic]] languages had very little impact on Old English vocabulary and place-names, a fact which was taken to affirm Gildas and Bede's narratives of a violent and swift population-replacement of Britons by Anglo-Saxons.<ref name=":4" />{{Rp|page=4–5}}<ref name="autogenerated4">R. Coates. 2007. "Invisible Britons: The view from linguistics." In ''Britons in Anglo-Saxon England'' [Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies 7], N. Higham (ed.), 172–191. Woodbridge: Boydell.</ref><ref name="autogenerated2007">O. J. Padel. 2007. "Place-names and the Saxon conquest of Devon and Cornwall." In ''Britons in Anglo-Saxon England'' [Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies 7], N. Higham (ed.), 215–230. Woodbridge: Boydell.</ref> Efforts to find [[Celtic toponymy#Insular Celtic|Celtic etymologies for English place-names]] grew from around the 1990s, but did not greatly shift the overall picture, and linguists' efforts to explain the linguistic evidence without assuming large-scale migration were driven by pressure from archaeologists and historians rather than by changing linguistic data.<ref>{{cite book | chapter-url=http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M65M6264M | doi=10.17613/M65M6264M | date=2012 | last1=Hall | first1=Alaric | chapter=The Instability of Place-names in Anglo-Saxon England and Early Medieval Wales, and the Loss of Roman Toponymy }}</ref>{{Rp|pages=219–22}}<ref>{{cite book | chapter-url=http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M65M6264M | doi=10.17613/M65M6264M | date=2012 | last1=Hall | first1=Alaric | chapter=The Instability of Place-names in Anglo-Saxon England and Early Medieval Wales, and the Loss of Roman Toponymy }}</ref>{{Rp|pages=102–3}}

The early twentieth century also saw archaeology professionalising in Britain, shifting from being the preserve of gentleman antiquarians to a university subject, not least through the efforts of [[Edward Thurlow Leeds]] (1877–1955), a key contributor to work on Anglo-Saxon migrations. Archaeologists were able to identify geographical variation in burial furnishings in different parts of eastern England around the fifth century, and quite different forms of material culture (in burials, settlements, and portable objects) in western and northern Britain in the same period. Assuming that these patterns correlated neatly with ethnic groups mentioned in written sources, until the 1970s, archaeologists generally saw these patterns as confirming Bede's account of the settlement of eastern Britain by different Germanic groups (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), along with the idea that British culture persisted longer in western Britain.<ref name=":4" />{{Rp|page=5–7}} Nonetheless, as archaeologists realised that, far from being the forested wilderness of Victorian imagination, Roman Britain was intensively cultivated and densely populated, archaeologists or sympathetic historians such as [[T. D. Kendrick]] (1895–1979), [[H. P. R. Finberg]] (1900–1974), [[J. N. L. Myres]] (1902–1989), and [[Eric John]] (1922–2000) increasingly offered interpretations of their data independent of and even at odds with Bede's stories of Anglo-Saxon migration, identifying possible evidence for cultural and institutional continuity between Roman and Anglo-Saxon Britain.<ref name=":2" />{{rp|590}}<ref name=":4" />{{Rp|page=7–12}}{{sfn|Halsall|2013|pp=26–47}}

The century also saw the rise of academic [[Celtic studies|Celtic Studies]], which was ideologically less inclined to put Germanic peoples at the centre of events. It was also more aware of Celtic-language source material such as the poems ''[[Y Gododdin]]'' and ''[[Book of Taliesin|Canu Taliesin]]'' which, while even less straightforward as sources than texts by Gildas and Bede, suggested a dynamic post-Roman Brittonic-speaking warrior culture. Important twentieth-century challenges to Germanist perspectives in the migration debate came, for example, from Celtic studies at the Universities of [[University of Cambridge|Cambridge]] (particularly [[Hector Munro Chadwick]], 1870–1947), [[University of Edinburgh|Edinburgh]] (particularly [[Kenneth H. Jackson|Kenneth Jackson]], 1909–1991), and [[University of Wales|Wales]] and [[University of Glasgow|Glasgow]] (particularly [[Leslie Alcock]], 1925–2006).<ref name=":4" />{{Rp|page=4, 10–11}}{{sfn|Halsall|2013|pages=51–86}}

The straightforward narrative offered by the traditional view has led it to remain popular in non-academic history-writing into the 2020s,{{sfn|Harland|2021|page=17}} partly because of its integration into popular myths of King Arthur (which in turn helped Alcock win funding for his archaeological digs).{{sfn|Halsall|2013|pp=7–10}}

== Developments 1970s–2010s, and the diffusion theory ==

Around the 1970s, scholars' preferred source materials for the migration began to undergo a revolution. In the context of post-Second-World-War Europeanism and the dissolution of the British Empire, historians, influenced by [[Post-structuralism|poststructuralism]], began to conclude that early medieval written accounts of the settlement were unlikely to be based on a good knowledge of the events they described, and that those sources were shaped by religious and political agendas and by genre conventions in ways that reveal more about the time in which those texts were written than about the time that the texts wrote about.<ref name=":2" />{{Rp|pages=593–94}}{{sfn|Halsall|2013|pages=51–86}}{{sfn|Harland|2021|page=17}} Influential early studies on these lines included articles by [[James Campbell (historian)|James Campbell]] (1935–2016),<ref>{{Cite book |last=Campbell |first=James |title=Essays in Anglo-Saxon History |date=1986 |publisher=Hambledon press |isbn=978-0-907628-32-3 |location=London Ronceverte (W.Va.)}}</ref>{{Rp|pages=121–30}} [[David Dumville]] (1949–2024),<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Dumville |first=David N. |date=1977 |title=Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend |url=https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-229X.1977.tb02335.x |journal=History |language=en |volume=62 |issue=205 |pages=173–192 |doi=10.1111/j.1468-229X.1977.tb02335.x |issn=1468-229X|url-access=subscription }}</ref> and [[Patrick Sims-Williams]] (1949–).<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Sims-Williams |first=Patrick |date=1983 |title=The Settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle |journal=Anglo-Saxon England |volume=12 |pages=1–41 |doi=10.1017/S0263675100003331 |jstor=44510771}}</ref> As of 2021, their source-criticisms and those of their successors remained central to the study of Anglo-Saxon migrations; in the words of James Harland, "these scholars have created a new body of source criticism that now renders it impossible for the informed and careful reader to simply take the content of those sources at face value".{{sfn|Harland|2021|page=17}}

Meanwhile, archaeology was producing a rapidly expanding source-base, and becoming theoretically much more sophisticated than before.<ref name=":4" />{{Rp|page=12–15}} Whereas medieval textual sources for the migration revolved around aristocratic men, military conquest, and ethnic conflict, archaeology began to provide evidence from which radically different kinds of narratives could be constructed — narratives focusing, for example, on the large population of people who did not bear arms. These perspectives fundamentally, albeit slowly, changed the parameters for studying migration around the fifth century.{{sfn|Fleming|2021|pp=1-5}} By the 2020s, some scholarship was arguing that narratives of ethnic change of that kind that Bede and his successors wanted to tell could simply not be supported by the surviving evidence,{{sfn|Harland|2021}} and that alternative histories of the fifth century framed in terms of material culture or the economy were more meaningful than histories framed in terms of ethnic or political change.{{sfn|Fleming|2021}}

Thus, in the latter half of the 20th century, archaeologists increasingly argued that Anglo-Saxon migration had constituted only a small "warrior elite", which gradually popularized a non-Roman identity among the Romano-Britons after the downfall of Roman institutions. This hypothesis suggested a large-scale [[acculturation]] of natives to the incoming language and [[material culture]].<ref name=":4" />{{Pages needed|date=March 2025}}

In support of this, archaeologists have found that, despite evidence of violent disruption, settlement patterns and land use show many continuities with the Romano-British past, despite profound changes in material culture.<ref>{{Harvcolnb|Higham|Ryan|2013|pp=104–105}}</ref> The elite takeover, similar to the [[Norman Conquest of England|Norman Conquest]], rather than a large-scale migration, meant the bulk of the population were Britons who adopted the culture of the conquerors. [[Bryan Ward-Perkins]] argued that while "culturally, the later Anglo-Saxons and English did emerge as remarkably un-British, ... their genetic, biological make-up is none the less likely to have been substantially, indeed predominantly, British".{{sfn|Ward-Perkins|2000|p=523}}

Within this theory, various processes leading to Anglo-Saxonisation have been proposed. One is similar to culture changes observed in Russia, North Africa and parts of the Islamic world, where a politically and socially powerful minority culture becomes, over a rather short period, adopted by a settled majority. This  process is usually termed "elite dominance".{{sfn|Ward-Perkins|2000|p=513-533}} One plausible mechanism, proposed in the 1990s by [[Heinrich Härke]], is the [[wergild]] as outlined in the law code of [[Ine of Wessex]] (r. 689–726), where the wergild of an Englishman was set at a value twice that of a Briton (Old English ''wealh'') of similar wealth. While demonstrating that Ine's kingdom included Britons, some of whom were very prosperous (owning at least five [[Hide of land|hides of land]], which gave [[thegn]]-like status), the difference in status between the Anglo-Saxons and Britons could both have produced an incentive for a Briton to seek to acquire Anglo-Saxon identity (presumably by adopting English) and conferred a reproductive advantage on Englishmen.<ref name="attenborough52">Attenborough. [https://archive.org/stream/lawsofearliesten00grea#page/34/mode/2up The laws of Ine and Alfred. pp.&nbsp;35–61]</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Härke |first=Heinrich |date=2011 |title=Anglo-Saxon Immigration and Ethnogenesis |url=http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1179/174581711X13103897378311 |journal=Medieval Archaeology |language=en |volume=55 |issue=1 |pages=1–28 |doi=10.1179/174581711X13103897378311 |issn=0076-6097|url-access=subscription }}</ref><ref>Lavelle, R. (2010) ''Alfred's Wars: Sources and Interpretations of Anglo-Saxon Warfare in the Viking Age'', Boydell & Brewer p. 85</ref><ref name="Thomas, Mark G. 2006">Thomas, Mark G., Michael PH Stumpf, and Heinrich Härke. "Evidence for an apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England." ''Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences'' 273.1601 (2006): 2651–2657.</ref>

By around 2010, a new consensus had emerged among scholars that the Anglo-Saxon settlement did not involve cataclysmic demographic change, but rather the migration of a relatively small number of incomers, who seized political control in what became eastern England, and to whose culture the local population assimilated,<ref>{{cite journal |last=Burmeister |first=Stefan |date=2000 |title=Archaeology and Migration |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200032760 |journal=Current Anthropology |volume=41 |issue=4, August–October 2000 |pages=539–567 |doi=10.1086/317383 |access-date=13 March 2025}}</ref>  with a [[Continuity model of British ancestry|more extreme version]] claiming that the British gene pool was substantially unaltered from the Britain's original settlement in the [[neolithic|late Stone Age]]. Correspondingly, by 2012, textbooks on the history of the English language accepted that what Matthew Townend called 'the standard explanation'<ref>Quoting Matthew Townend, 'Contacts and Conflicts: Latin, Norse, and French', in ''The Oxford History of English'', ed. by Lynda Mugglestone, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 75–105 (p. 80).</ref> for the spread of English within Britain was political dominance by a fairly small number of Old English-speakers, whose language was adopted by large numbers of Britons while leaving little detectable trace of this language-shift.<ref>D. Gary Miller, ''External Influences on English: From Its Beginnings to the Renaissance'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 35–40).</ref><ref>Kastovsky, Dieter, 'Semantics and Vocabulary', in ''The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 1: The Beginnings to 1066'', ed. by Richard M. Hogg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 290–408 (pp. 317–18).</ref> 

The popularity of this view faded when modern [[autosomal genetic clustering]] shows the British and Irish clustering genetically far more closely with other North European populations, rather than Iberians.<ref>{{cite journal|display-authors=etal|last=Novembre|first=John|year=2008|title=Genes mirror geography within Europe|journal=Nature|volume=456|issue=7218 |pages=98–101|doi=10.1038/nature07331 |pmid=18758442 |pmc=2735096 |bibcode=2008Natur.456...98N }}</ref><ref>Lao, O.; Lu, T.T.; Nothnagel, M.; Junge, O.; Freitag-Wolf, S.; Caliebe, A.; Balascakova, M.; Bertranpetit, J.; Bindoff, L.A.; Comas, D.; Holmlund, G.; Kouvatsi, A.; Macek, M.; Mollet, I.; Parson, W.; Palo, J.; Ploski, R.; Sajantila, A.; Tagliabracci, A.; Gether, U.; Werge, T.; Rivadeneira, F.; Hofman, A.; Uitterlinden, A.G.; Gieger, C.; Wichmann, H.; Rüther, A.; Schreiber, S.; Becker, C.; Nürnberg, P.; Nelson, M.R.; Krawczak, M.; Kayser, M. (2008). "Correlation between genetic and geographic structure in Europe". Current Biology. 18 (16): 1241–1248.</ref> Further, more recent whole genome research has broadly supported the idea that genetic differences between the English and the Welsh have origins in the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons rather than prehistoric migration events.<ref name= Olalde>{{harvnb|Olalde|Brace|Allentoft|Armit|2018}}</ref>

== Twenty-first century: genetics ==
{{see also|Genetic evidence of Anglo-Saxon migration in Britain}}
[[File:Weal.png|upright=1.45|thumb|right|Map of Y-chromosome distribution from data derived from "Y chromosome evidence for Anglo-Saxon mass migration" by Weale ''et al.'' (2002)]]
In the twenty-first century, [[Genetic history of the British Isles|genetic research]] has emerged as a major new form of [[Genetic evidence of Anglo-Saxon migration in Britain|evidence]] about Anglo-Saxon migration. At first these were techniques that traced back [[Human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup|male only]] and [[Human mitochondrial genetics|female only]] lineages and groups them with other people in different areas and countries. Later on there was a greater use of graveyard remains and greater sophistication of genetic studies. This has helped to drive a [[Thesis, antithesis, synthesis|synthesis]] of migration and acculturation, with a return to a more migrationist perspective but with an emphasis on the regional variation of the ratio of Anglo-Saxon and Romano-Britons. 

Heinrich Härke explains the nature of this agreement:

<blockquote>It is now widely accepted that the Anglo-Saxons were not just transplanted Germanic invaders and settlers from the Continent, but the outcome of insular interactions and changes. But we are still lacking explicit models that suggest how this ethnogenetic process might have worked in concrete terms.<ref name="Härke, Heinrich 2011">Härke, Heinrich. [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Heinrich-Haerke/publication/272308208_Anglo-Saxon_Immigration_and_Ethnogenesis/links/5de5235092851c83645cda30/Anglo-Saxon-Immigration-and-Ethnogenesis.pdf "Anglo-Saxon Immigration and Ethnogenesis"]. ''Medieval Archaeology'' 55.1 (2011): 1–28. [https://web.archive.org/web/20210926033244/https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Heinrich-Haerke/publication/272308208_Anglo-Saxon_Immigration_and_Ethnogenesis/links/5de5235092851c83645cda30/Anglo-Saxon-Immigration-and-Ethnogenesis.pdf Archived] 26 September 2021 at the [[Wayback Machine]].</ref></blockquote>

Early studies of British ancestry using [[Y-chromosome DNA]], which traces paternal lineages, revealed significant male-line genetic input from continental Europe, especially from areas like [[northwestern Germany]] and [[Denmark]]. A 2002 study by Michael Weale found that in some regions of [[England]], 50–100% of paternal ancestry could be traced to areas such as [[Friesland]] and [[Norway]].<ref>{{cite journal |first=Weale |last=Michael E |display-authors=etal |url= https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/19/7/1008/1068561 |title=Y chromosome evidence for Anglo-Saxon mass migration|journal=Molecular Biology and Evolution |volume=19 |issue=7 |date=July 2002 |pages=1008–1021|doi=10.1093/oxfordjournals.molbev.a004160 |bibcode=2002MBioE..19.1008W }}</ref> In 2003, Cristian Capelli's research, based on a larger sample, found continental paternal input ranging from 25% to over 50% in areas such as [[Kent]], [[East Anglia]], the [[East Midlands]], and [[Yorkshire]], although it was unable to distinguish between [[Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain|Anglo-Saxon]] and [[Viking]] contributions.<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982203003737 |last=Capelli |first=Cristian |year=2003 |display-authors=etal |title=A Y chromosome census of the British Isles |journal=Current Biology |volume=13 |issue=11 |pages=979–984 |doi=10.1016/S0960-9822(03)00373-7|pmid=12781138 |bibcode=2003CBio...13..979C }}</ref> 

A 2015 large scale [[population genetics]] study looked at regional patterns of genetic differentiation across the UK. It confirmed notable Anglo-Saxon ancestry in central and southern England (10–40%) and also identified distinct regional genetic clusters in other parts of the [[United Kingdom]], challenging the idea of a single, homogeneous [[Celtic Britons|Celtic]] ancestry.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Leslie  |first1=Stephen  |last2=Winney  |first2=Bruce  |last3=Hellenthal  |first3=Garrett  |last4=Davison  |first4=Dan  |last5=Boumertit  |first5=Abdelhamid  |last6=Day  |first6=Tammy  |last7=Hutnik  |first7=Katarzyna  |last8=Royrvik  |first8=Ellen C  |last9=Cunliffe  |first9=Barry  |last10=Lawson  |first10=Daniel J  |last11=Falush  |first11=Daniel  |last12=Freeman  |first12=Colin  |last13=Pirinen  |first13=Matti  |last14=Myers  |first14=Simon  |last15=Robinson  |first15=Mark  |date=2015-03-19  |title=The fine scale genetic structure of the British population  |journal=Nature  |volume=519  |issue=7543  |pages=309–314  |doi=10.1038/nature14230  |issn=0028-0836  |pmc=4632200  |pmid=25788095|bibcode=2015Natur.519..309.  }}</ref>

Recent [[whole genome sequencing]] of [[ancient DNA]] collected from skeletons found in Iron Age, Roman and Anglo-Saxon era burials, have shown that there was a migration into Great Britain that the ancestry of the modern English population in the south and east have a larger share of genetic material from Anglo-Saxon migrants than in other parts of the island. Research on burials from [[Cambridgeshire]] in 2016 showed evidence of early intermarriage, with recent Germanic immigrants and Romano-British natives buried in the same cemeteries with [[grave goods]] of the same [[material culture]] and showing that Anglo-Saxon DNA is currently higher in eastern England and lower in traditionally [[Celts (modern)|Celtic]] areas such as [[Wales]] and [[Scotland]].<ref name=one-third>{{Cite news|title =  English DNA 'one-third' Anglo-Saxon – BBC News|url =  https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35344663|access-date = 2016-02-17|language =  en-GB|date =  2016-01-19|last1 =  Rincon|first1 =  Paul}}</ref> Another 2016 study found that burials in [[Roman-era York]] were significantly genetically closer to the modern population of Wales than that of [[Yorkshire]].<ref name=one-third/> A 2018 Irish focused study found that modern southern, central and eastern English populations were of "a predominantly Anglo-Saxon-like ancestry", while those from northern and southwestern England had a greater degree of indigenous origin.<ref>{{cite journal |first1=Ross P |last1=Byrne |first2= Rui |last2=Martiniano |first3=Lara M |last3=Cassidy |first4= Matthew |last4=Carrigan |first5=Garrett |last5=Hellenthal |first6=Orla |last6=Hardiman |first7=Daniel G |last7=Bradley|first8=Russell |last8=McLaughlin |title=Insular Celtic population structure and genomic footprints of migration |date=2018-01-25 |journal=[[PLOS Genetics]] | doi=10.1371/journal.pgen.1007152 |volume=14 |issue=1|pages=e1007152 |pmid=29370172 |pmc=5784891 |doi-access=free }}</ref>

The 2022 Gretzinger study used DNA samples from different periods and regions demonstrated that there was significant immigration of women as well as men from the area in or near what is now northwestern Germany, from the Roman period until the 8th century with significant intermarriage with Romano-Britons as well as significant adoption of new burial styles.<ref>{{citation|last1=Gretzinger |first1=J |last2= Sayer| first2= D|last3= Justeau| first3= P| title=The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool |journal= Nature| year=2022|volume=610 |issue=7930 |pages=112–119 | doi=10.1038/s41586-022-05247-2|pmid=36131019 |pmc=9534755 |bibcode=2022Natur.610..112G |doi-access=free}}</ref>

==Debates==
=== Estimating migrants' numbers ===
Different descriptions of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain demand different assumptions about the relative numbers of pre-settlement inhabitants of Britain and Germanic-speaking migrants, leading to an extensive sub-debate about precise population numbers. However, there is no straightforward evidence for these numbers, and scholars have not reached a precise consensus either on the population of fourth-century Britain or the number of migrants who entered Britain around the fifth century.<ref name="Hedges, Robert 2011. pp 81-83">{{cite book |last=Hedges |first=Robert |title=The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2011 |isbn=978-0-19-921214-9 |editor1-last=Hamerow |editor1-first=Helena |location=Oxford, UK |pages=81–83 |chapter=Anglo-Saxon migration and the molecular evidence |editor2-last=Hinton |editor2-first=David A. |editor3-last=Crawford |editor3-first=Sally |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xucNJfS42PwC&q=anglo-saxon+migration&pg=PA79}}</ref> 

The population of fourth-century Britain is usually estimated at between 2 and 4 million.<ref>Millet, Martin. "The Romanization of Britain." An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation (1990).</ref> From this figure, Heinrich Härke and [[Michael Wood (historian)|Michael Wood]] have argued that, taking into account declines associated with political collapses, the population of what was to become Anglo-Saxon England had fallen to 1 million by the fifth century.<ref name="Härke, Heinrich 2011" /><ref>{{cite news |last=Wood  |first=Michael  |date=25 May 2012  |title=Viewpoint: The time Britain slid into chaos  |work=[[BBC News]]  |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18159752  |url-status=live  |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120525182330/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18159752  |archive-date=25 May 2012}}</ref>

Estimates for migrants range between 20,000{{Sfn|Hills|2003|p=11-20}} and 200,000.<ref>Bryan Ward-Perkins, "Why did the Anglo-Saxons not become more British?" in ''The English Historical Review'', Oxford University Press (2000).</ref> A computer simulation showed that a migration of 250,000 people from Denmark to [[Kingdom of East Anglia|East Anglia]] could have been accomplished in 38 years with a reasonably small number of boats.<ref name="Härke, Heinrich 2011" /> Härke has posited a scenario in which the Anglo-Saxons, in expanding westward, outbred the Britons, eventually reaching a point where their descendants made up a larger share of the population of what was to become England.<ref name="Härke, Heinrich 2011" /> Härke concluded that "most of the biological and cultural evidence points to a minority immigration on the scale of 10 to 20% of the native population. The immigration itself was not a single 'invasion', but rather a series of intrusions and immigrations over a considerable period, differing from region to region, and changing over time even within regions. The total immigrant population may have numbered somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 over about a century, but the geographical variations in numbers, and in social and ethnic composition, should have led to a variety of settlement processes."<ref name="Härke, Heinrich 2011" /> Within 200 years of their first arrival, the settlement density has been established as an Anglo-Saxon village every {{convert|2|-|5|km|abbr=off}}, in the areas where evidence has been gathered.<ref>Hamerow, Helena. "The earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms." The New Cambridge Medieval History 1 (2005): 263–90.</ref> Given that these settlements are typically of around 50 people, this implies an Anglo-Saxon population in southern and eastern England of 250,000. The number of migrants therefore depends on the population increase variable. If the population rose by 1 per cent per year (slightly less than the present world population growth rate), this would suggest a migrant figure of 30,000. However, if the population rose by 2 per cent per year (similar to India in the last 20 years), the migrant figure would be closer to 5,000.<ref name="Hedges, Robert 2011. pp 81-83" /> The excavations at [[Spong Hill]] revealed over 2,000 cremations and inhumations in what is a very large early cemetery. However, when the period of use is taken into account (over 200 years) and its size, it is presumed to be a major cemetery for the entire area and not just one village; such findings point to a smaller rather than larger number of original immigrants, possibly around 20,000.<ref>The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Spong Hill, North Elmham. Norfolk Archaeological Unit, 1995.</ref>

It has also been proposed that the Britons were disproportionately affected by plagues arriving through Roman trade links, which, combined with a large emigration to [[Armorica]],<ref name="auto1">{{cite web |last=Dark |first=Ken R. |year=2003 |title=Large-scale population movements into and from Britain south of Hadrian's Wall in the fourth to sixth centuries AD |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 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/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 |archive-date=2022-10-09}}</ref><ref>Jean Merkale, ''King of the Celts: Arthurian Legends and Celtic Tradition'' (1994), pp. 97–98</ref> could have substantially decreased their numbers.<ref name=":2" /><ref>Nicholas Ostler, ''Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin'' (2009: Bloomsbury Publishing), p. 141</ref><ref>Jim Storr, ''King Arthur's Wars: The Anglo-Saxon Conquest of England'' (2016), p. 114</ref>

===Regional Variations===
The spread of Anglo-Saxon culture happened at different times, and in different ways, in different parts of Britain. According to Toby Martin, "Regional variation may well provide the key to resolution, with something more akin to mass migration in the south-east, gradually spreading into elite dominance in the north and west."<ref>Toby F. Martin, ''The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England'' (2015: Boydell and Brewer), pp. 173-174</ref> This view has support in the place-name evidence. In the southeastern counties of England, Brittonic place-names are nearly nonexistent, but moving north and west, they increase slightly in frequency.<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/}}</ref>

[[Kingdom of East Anglia|East Anglia]] has been identified by a number of scholars, including Härke, Martin, Catherine Hills, and Kenneth Dark, as a region in which a large-scale continental migration occurred,<ref name="Härke, Heinrich 2011" /><ref name="Toby F. Martin pp. 174-175">Toby F. Martin, ''The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England'' (2015: Boydell and Brewer), pp. 174-175</ref><ref name="Hills2015">Catherine Hills, "The Anglo-Saxon Migration: An Archaeological Case Study of Disruption," in ''Migration and Disruptions: Toward a Unifying Theory of Ancient and Contemporary Migrations'', ed. Brenda J. Baker and Takeyuki Tsuda (2015: University Press of Florida), pp. 47-48</ref> possibly following a period of depopulation in the fourth century.<ref>Ken R. Dark, "Large-scale population movements into and from Britain south of Hadrian's Wall in the fourth to sixth centuries AD" (2003)</ref> [[Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire|Lincolnshire]] has also been cited by Hills and Martin as a key centre of early settlement from the continent.<ref name="Toby F. Martin pp. 174-175" /><ref name="Hills2015" /> Alexander Mirrington argues that in [[Kingdom of Essex|Essex]], the cultural change seen in the archaeological record is so complete that "a migration of a large number of people is the most logical and least extreme solution."<ref>Alexander D. Mirrington, ''Transformations of Identity and Society in Anglo-Saxon Essex: A Case Study of an Early Medieval North Atlantic Community'' (2019: Amsterdam University Press), p. 98</ref> In [[Kingdom of Kent|Kent]], according to [[Susan Harrington|Sue Harrington]] and Stuart Brookes, "the weight of archaeological evidence and that from literary sources favours migrations" as the main reason for cultural change.<ref>Stuart Brookes and Susan Harrington, ''The Kingdom and People of Kent, AD 400-1066'', p. 24</ref>

Immigration into the area that was to become Wessex occurred from both the south coast and the Upper Thames valley. The earlier, southern settlements may have been more prosaic than descriptions in the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'' imply. Jillian Hawkins suggests that powerful Romano-British trading ports around the [[Solent]] were able to direct significant numbers of Germanic settlers inland into areas such as the [[Meonwara|Meon valley]], where they formed their own communities.<ref>Jillian Hawkins, "Words and Swords: People and Power along the Solent in the 5th Century" (2020)</ref> In areas that were settled from the Thames, different processes may have been at play, with the Germanic immigrants holding a greater degree of power. Bruce Eagles argues that the later population of areas such as Wiltshire would have included large numbers of Britons who had adopted the culture of the socially dominant Saxons, while also noting that "it seems reasonable to consider that there must have been sufficient numbers of widely dispersed immigrants to bring about this situation in a relatively short space of time."<ref>Bruce Eagles, ''From Roman Civitas to Anglo-Saxon Shire: Topographical Studies on the Formation of Wessex'' (2018: Oxbow Books), pp. 74, 139</ref>

In the northern kingdom of [[Bernicia]], however, Härke states that "a small group of immigrants may have replaced the native British elite and took over the kingdom as a going concern."<ref name="Härke, Heinrich 2011" /> Linguist [[Frederik Kortlandt]] agrees, commenting that in this region "there was a noticeable Celtic contribution to art, culture and possibly socio-military organization. It appears that the immigrants took over the institutions of the local population here."<ref>{{cite web|last=Kortlandt|first=Frederik|title=Relative Chronology|year=2018|url=https://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art320e.pdf}}</ref> In a study of place-names in northeastern England and southeastern Scotland, Bethany Fox concluded that the immigration that did occur in this region was centred on the river valleys, such as those of the Tyne and the Tweed, with the Britons' culture persisting longer in the less fertile hill country, becoming acculturated over a longer period.<ref>{{cite web|last=Fox|first=Bethany|title=The P-Celtic Place Names of North-East England and South-East Scotland|url=http://www.heroicage.org/issues/10/fox.html}}</ref>

Even as late as the eighth century, the kingdoms of [[Wessex]], [[Kingdom of Mercia|Mercia]] and [[Kingdom of Northumbria|Northumbria]] housed significant numbers of people recognisable as Britons.<ref name=Manco>Jean Manco, ''The Origins of the Anglo-Saxons'' (2018: Thames & Hudson), pp. 131–139</ref>

===The Apartheid Hypothesis===
A paper by Thomas [[et al.]] developed an "apartheid-like social structure" theory to explain how a small proportion of settlers could have made a larger contribution to the modern gene pool.<ref name="Thomas, Mark G. 2006">Thomas, Mark G., Michael PH Stumpf, and Heinrich Härke. "Evidence for an apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England." ''Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences'' 273.1601 (2006): 2651–2657.</ref> This view has been criticized by JE Pattison, who suggested that the Y-chromosome evidence could still support the idea of a small settlement of people without the apartheid-like structures.<ref>Pattison, John E. "Is it necessary to assume an apartheid-like social structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England?." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 275.1650 (2008): 2423–2429.</ref> It has been proposed, too, that the genetic similarities between people on either side of the North Sea may reflect a cumulative process of population movement, possibly beginning well before the historically attested formation of the Anglo-Saxons or the invasions of the Vikings.<ref>Hills, C. (2003), ''Origins of the English'', Duckworth, London. {{ISBN|978-0-7156-3191-1}}, p. 67</ref> The 'apartheid theory' has received a considerable body of critical comment, especially the genetic studies from which it derives its rationale. Problems with the design of Weale's study and the level of historical naïveté evidenced by some population genetics studies have been particularly highlighted.<ref>Higham, C. 2008, "Whither Archaeogenetics? A view from the trenches". In ''Simulations, Genetics and Human Prehistory—a focus on islands''. S. Matsumura, P. Forster, and C. Renfrew, eds. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 183–187. Published by: Wayne State University Press</ref><ref>Green, C. (2012), ''Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400–650''. History of Lincolnshire Committee, Lincoln (critique of Weale on pp. 124–125)</ref><ref>Pattison J.E.  (2011) ''Integration Versus Apartheid in Post-Roman Britain: A Response to Thomas et al. (2008)'', Human Biology 83(6):715–733</ref><ref>Woolf, A. (2007). ''Apartheid and economics in Anglo-Saxon England''. In: ''Britons in Anglo-Saxon England''. N. J. Higham, ed. Woodridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 115–129.</ref><ref>Hills, C. (2009).  'Anglo-Saxon DNA?', in Sayer & Williams, eds, ''Mortuary Practices and Social Identities in the Middle Ages.'', University of Exeter Press, p. 129</ref>

=== Criticisms of using genetic techniques ===
Some scholars have questioned whether cultural identity can solely come from a person's ancestry.{{sfn|Halsall|2013|pp=242-5}} Other historians have cast doubt on the interpretations put on the genetic evidence, particularly its revival of models of large scale Germanic migration, pointing out that it is a very young area and so prone to sudden revisions and that the lack of exposure to historical methods means that they have missed developments in other areas.{{sfn|Fleming|2021|page=159}} Concern has also been raised about the studies not accounting for how ethnic groups can come from quite distinct ancestors{{sfn|Harland|2021|pages=71-72}} and also how these studies may be used by the [[Far-right politics|far right]].{{sfn|Harland|2021|pages=73,75}}{{sfn|Halsall|2014|p=518}}

== Themes ==

=== Specific dates ===
From Bede—who took an exception interest in chronology, inventing ''anno Domini'' dating—into the twentieth century, historians have often been preoccupied with assigning developments in the Settlement to specific years. Since the 1970s, influenced by processual archaeology, historians have moved away from trying to assign complex social changes to individual years.

==== 410 and "the end of Roman Britain"====
Into the 2020s, 410 was frequently given as the year in which "the Romans" or their "legions" left Britain, never to return, or for "the end of Roman Britain".{{Sfn|Higham|Ryan|2013|p=41}}<ref name=":5">{{Cite book |last=Gorton |first=Paul Martin |url=https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/29685/ |title=Reassessing Bede: Power and identity in fourth- to eighth-century Britain, focusing on Northumbria |publisher=unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds |year=2021}}</ref>{{Rp|pages=16–17, 22–23}} This dating is suggested by a number of sources, including: the fact that bulk imports of Roman coins ended around that time (though by the twenty-first century roughly the year 400 was more accepted); Constantine III leading troops from Britain to Gaul around 407 prior to the [[Sack of Rome (410)|sack of Rome]] in 410; the ''[[Chronica Gallica of 452]]''<nowiki/>'s account of a Saxon raid on Britain in 409 or 410; and the understanding of some scholars that Bede placed the end of Roman rule in Britain in 410.{{Sfn|Higham|Ryan|2013|p=|pp=41–42}}<ref name=":5" />{{Rp|pages=23–38}} However, twenty-first-century scholarship generally rejects the idea that Roman culture, civic administration, or military organisation ended abruptly in 410, rather seeing different kinds of decline in different regions and domains from the fourth century into the sixth.{{Sfn|Higham|Ryan|2013|p=|pp=33–56}} Paul Gorton has argued that Bede promoted the idea of 410 specifically in an effort to present the English as natural successors to Roman rule in Britain, in a parallel to [[Alaric I|Alaric the Goth]]'s sack of Rome in that year.<ref name=":5" />{{Rp|pages=38–48}}

==== 449 and the "adventus Saxonum"====
According to [[Guy Halsall]], by the early twentieth century, British schoolchildren were routinely taught that "the English came to England in 449, a date as evidently precise and important as 1066".{{sfn|Halsall|2013|pages=194, 203|p=61}} A phrase used by the twelfth-century chronicler [[Henry of Huntingdon]], "adventus Saxonum" ("arrival of the Saxons"), was adopted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians as a technical term for this event, even though it does not appear in earlier sources.<ref>{{Citation |title=adventus Saxonum, n. |date=2023-03-02 |work=Oxford English Dictionary |url=https://oed.com/dictionary/adventus-saxonum_n |access-date=2025-03-08 |edition=3 |publisher=Oxford University Press |language=en |doi=10.1093/oed/1073504171|url-access=subscription }}</ref>

Assuming that Germanic migration to Britain could be understood as a single event, Bede dated it to
<blockquote>the time of the Emperors Valentinian and Marcian (450–5; ''HE'' 1.15). From Gildas, he knew that the appeal to Aëtius took place after his third consulate, and produced no response. From Prosper and Marcellinus he could date that consulate to the year he calculated as AD 446. He also knew from Gildas of periods of resistance to the barbarians, prosperity, and then famine and plague ''after'' the appeal. Thus he made an educated guess that the invitation to the Saxons was made five to ten years later.{{sfn|Halsall|2013|page=59}}</blockquote>
The ''[[Anglo-Saxon Chronicle]]'' later interpreted this date as 449, and this came to be accepted by generations of later historians.{{citation needed|date=March 2025}}

Since Bede's date demonstrably rests on inference from Gildas, whose account modern historians view as profoundly unreliable, and on the dubious assumption that the initial migration of Saxons could be dated to a single year, it is no longer accepted. In fact, both textual and archaeological evidence indicates that a new "Anglo-Saxon" culture with parallels in northern Germany already became prominent in Britain by the 430s, well before the 450s as reported by Bede.<ref name="Hills. C, & Lucy, S.">{{cite book |author1=Hills, C. |url=http://www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk/publications/publication-images/table%20of%20contents/spong-hill-toc |title=Spong Hill IX: Chronology and Synthesis |author2=Lucy, S. |publisher=McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research |year=2013 |isbn=978-1-902937-62-5 |location=Cambridge}}</ref> Historians such as Halsall have also pointed out that a Germanic population may have already been present under Roman rule for many years before 430 without this being obvious in the archaeological record, because of the prestige which Roman material culture still had.{{sfn|Halsall|2013|pages=186,246}} Accordingly, from the 1970s, scholars abandoned efforts to assign Anglo-Saxon settlement to a single year, and relied on archaeological rather than textual evidence to date the process.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Hines |first=John |title=Britain 400-600: language and history |publisher=Winter |year=1990 |isbn=3-533-04270-7 |editor-last=Bammesberger |editor-first=Alfred |pages=17–36 |chapter=Philology, archaeology, and the ''adventus Saxonum vel Anglorum'' |editor-last2=Wollmann |editor-first2=Alfred}}</ref>

The ''[[Historia Brittonum]]'', written in the 9th century, attempted similar calculations to Bede with different outcomes. It gives two different years, but was apparently based on the idea that the first migration happened in 428, possibly based on the real date of the visit of Germanus in 429.{{sfn|Halsall|2013|pages=194, 203}}

===Saxon Liberty===

The migration of the Anglo-Saxons formed the basis of a long-lasting thesis that aspects of [[common law]], personal liberty and representative government were unique to England and other Germanic-speaking countries and that these had originated from the Germanic nature of the migrants.

Anglo-Saxon settlers were often seen — particularly by the [[Radical Whig]] faction of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England — as the foundation of English legal and political liberty, with Anglo-Saxon settlers bringing in a system of governance based on [[customary law]], [[folkmoots]] and the [[rule of law]] which was later [[Norman Yoke|disrupted]] by the [[Norman Conquest]]. Accordingly, [[Algernon Sidney]] (1623–1683) used the Anglo Saxon arrival as a link between the [[Germanic myth|supposed liberty of the German tribes]] described by [[Tacitus]] in [[Germania]] and the Anglo-Saxon model of [[Witan|elected kings]].<ref>{{cite book|chapter-url=https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/sidney-discourses-concerning-government|title=[[Discourses Concerning Government]]|author-link=Algernon Sidney|first=Algernon|last=Sidney |editor= Thomas G. West|chapter=Chapter III, Section 10}}</ref>

One of the main arguments was the "Teutonic germ theory" which argued that many British and so American institutions came about due to the racial characteristics inherited from the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain.<ref name="Dockray-Miller">{{cite book |last1=Dockray-Miller |first1=Mary |author-link=Mary Dockray-Miller |title=Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women's College |date=2017 |publisher=[[Springer Nature]] |isbn=978-3-319-69705-5 |edition=1st |chapter=Introduction}}</ref> It later evolved into the [[Nordicism]] of the 20th century which was more inclusive towards [[Celtic identity|Celtic]] and [[Norman Conquest|Norman]] influences in Britain.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Kassis |first1=Dimitrios |title=Representations of the North in Victorian Travel Literature |date=2015 |publisher=Cambridge Scholars Publishing |isbn=978-1-4438-7084-9 |page=28 |quote=In the Nordicist discourse, what can be noticed is the attempt to racially unite the English with the Celts, a rather pioneering element considering the earliest theories which were ideologically constructed on a strictly anti-Celtic basis.}}</ref>

In 1932, the American historian [[Charles A Beard]] (1874–1948) argued against the nineteenth-century idea that representative government and Anglo-Saxon liberties were derived from "the forests of Germany" or from Anglo-Saxon local assemblies, and named a number of historians who he thought were guilty of this.{{sfn|Beard|1932}}

== Fringe theories ==

=== Pre-Settlement Germanic-speakers ===

In 2006, [[Stephen Oppenheimer]] (along with some non-scholarly commentators around the same time) argued that some of the native tribes like the [[Belgae]], identified as Britons by the Romans, may have been Germanic-language speakers, and that this may account for the lack of evidence for Celtic influence on English in a context where settlement by Germanic-speakers in the fifth century was relatively small.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/57466/myths-of-british-ancestry|title=Myths of British ancestry|date=20 October 2006|website=[[Prospect (magazine)|Prospect]]}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Oppenheimer |first=Stephen |title=The origins of the British |date=2007 |publisher=Robinson |isbn=978-1-84529-482-3 |location=London}}</ref><ref name="jones99">Forster et al. [http://www.geneticancestor.com/Forster2004Festschrift.pdf MtDNA Markers for Celtic and Germanic Language Areas in the British Isles] ''in'' Jones. ''Traces of ancestry: studies in honour of Colin Renfrew''. pp. 99–111 Retrieved. 26 November 2011</ref> Most scholars disagree with Oppenheimer's theory due to insufficient evidence of Germanic languages in Britain in Roman-period artefacts and records.<ref>[[Alaric Hall]], '[http://www.alarichall.org.uk/bede_and_place-names.pdf A gente Anglorum appellatur: The Evidence of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum for the Replacement of Roman Names by English Ones During the Early Anglo-Saxon Period]', in ''Words in Dictionaries and History: Essays in Honour of R. W. McConchie'', ed. Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Säily, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice, 14 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011), pp. 219–31 (pp. 220–21).</ref><ref>{{Harvcolnb|Higham|Ryan|2013|pp=29}}</ref>

=== British Israelism and Christian Identity ===

The [[British Israelite movement]] is a belief that the British people, in most cases particularly the Anglo Saxon component are some or all of the ten [[lost tribes of Israel]].  The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain is seen by most of this movement as part of the exodus of the tribes who after leaving Israel, went to the Black Sea and then to the Carpathians, and finally up the Danube from southern and eventually Northern Germany.<ref>Cottrell-Boyce, Aidan. 2021. "British Israelism." In James Crossley and Alastair Lockhart (eds.) Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements. 21 October 2021. Retrieved from https://www.cdamm.org/articles/british-israelism</ref> The [[Anglo-Saxon Federation of America]] was a group active in the mid twentieth century which originated the far right ideology of [[Christian Identity]] which believes that Northern Europeans (and not simply Anglo-Saxons) are the lost tribes of Israel.  Christian Identity has far more explicitly influenced<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/imperial-klans-america/|website=Southern Poverty Law Centre|title=Extremist Files: Imperial Klans of America}}</ref> and been influenced in turn by the far right than the original British Israelism or the continuing British Israelite movement outside of Christian Identity.

=== Role in far-right ideas  ===

The debate about the nature of the Anglo Saxon migration into Britain has influenced branches of the far right outside the orbit of British Israelism.  The influential [[Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America]] in 1920s Virginia directly invoked the supposed racial purity derived from the Anglo-Saxon migration to justify their lobbying for eugenics and anti-miscegnation laws such as Virginia's [[Racial Integrity Act of 1924|Racial Integrity Act]].{{sfn|Rambaran-Olm|Wade|2021}} The idea of the Saxons as a racially pure group has been a continuing motif of the far right.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/jason-jt-ready-revives-new-saxon-popular-white-supremacist-social-networking-site/|website=Southern Poverty Law Centre|title=Jason "J.T." Ready Revives New Saxon, Popular White-Supremacist Social Networking Site}}</ref>

==References==

===Footnotes===
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* {{cite magazine|url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/many-myths-term-anglo-saxon-180978169/|magazine=[[Smithsonian Magazine]]|title=The Many Myths of the Term 'Anglo-Saxon'|first1=Mary|last1=Rambaran-Olm|first2=Erik |last2= Wade|date=14 July 2021}}
* {{cite book|first=Matthias |last=Springer| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3op4DwAAQBAJ |title=Die Sachsen |year =2004 |publisher=Kohlhammer Verlag |isbn=978-3-17-023227-3 |language=de}}
* {{cite journal|title=The Free Anglo-Saxons: A Historical Myth|first=Richard T.|last= Vann|journal=Journal of the History of Ideas|volume=19 |issue=2|date=April 1958 |pages=259–272}}
* {{Cite journal |last=Ward-Perkins|first=Bryan|author-link=Bryan Ward-Perkins|year=2000|title=Why did the Anglo-Saxons not become more British?|publisher=Oxford University Press |url=https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article-pdf/115/462/513/9762424/513.pdf|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210927041727/https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article-pdf/115/462/513/9762424/513.pdf|archive-date=27 September 2021|journal=The English Historical Review|volume=115 |issue=462 |pages=513–533 |doi=10.1093/ehr/115.462.513 }}
* {{cite book |last=Yorke |first=Barbara|author-link= Barbara Yorke |title=The Conversion of Britain: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain c. 600–800 |publisher=Pearson/Longman |location=London |year=2006 |isbn=978-0-582-77292-2}}

[[Category:Anglo-Saxon historiography]]
[[Category:Archaeological controversies]]
[[Category:5th century in England]]
[[Category:Migration studies]]