Anglo Saxons

Are the Angles, and Jutes Vikings. In this map they seem to come from Denmark. Saxons from around the area of modern Netherlands.

though I don't think that Frisians played any role in that migration.

Some of them (saxons?) came from the area where Frisians now live, and with in the Germanic family, English and Frisian are the closest relatives.

What did England look like in the 11th century? I recently bought an Anglo Saxon sword guard from the 11th century. It was found in Suffolk 2003. Could it be Viking? Here is a picture:

The Angeli in particular and to a lesser extent the Saxons had virtualy the same language as the Frisians.

 

 The anglo-saxons were only a minority on the british isles, they were later displaced by the normans, bretons and Franks who became the ruling minority. Britian remains mostly celtic racially.

Originally posted by HistoryGuy Does anyone know about my sword guard?

Do you have any provenance for it?

The style isn't Anglo-Saxon or Viking, without provenance my guess would be late 17th C.

And he likes to repeat the word race like if it would have some meaning. Specially, when talking about a Celtic race... Celts come from southern/western Germany: their original type should be more Germanic (Alpine?) and less Atlantic. As Celtic culture and language spread through a very wide region from Portugal to Turkey, Celts obviously got mixed with the locals that they invaded once and again. So talking of a Celtic race is an oxymoron. 

Quetzalcoatl, London Univeristy College made a sutdy a few years ago comparing British, Danish, Norwegian and German y-chromosomes. It was found out, that all of the 1700 tested British men had Anglo-Saxon/Viking ancestry. Also, about 60% of the male population of the Scottish Isles had Norwegian blood, while people more south had Anglo-Saxon and Danish blood. So basically, the Germanic people who came to modern England weren't just a ruling minority, but a mass-migration more like?

It is said that Saxons, Anglian and Jutes came to Britain. If you look at maps like abouve you'll get the impression they sailed right across the northern sea an settled everyone in their own region. This is completely wrong. The most group sailed along the coast and settled in the Netherlands, the coast of Belgium and France. From there they sailed to Britain. These groups appear as saxons. But this is just a term for a unknown group of germanc tribes. So you have Saxones Eutii but Eutii, you have Saxon kouadoi and Saxon Ambrones but also Ambrones... So if you have Essex, Wessex and Sussex you can be sure that the germanic people there did not only came from Lower Saxony and the people in the Anglia territories didn't come only from the german region of Anglia. There were people we call Old Saxons, Anglians, Frisians, Franks, Ambrones, Jutes and more. Probably there were even people from Skandinavia wo joined Britain, if you look at Sutton Hoo e.g.

Edited by beorna - 04-Dec-2007 at 13:37

Amateur historians are very fond of saying "this was so!", when in fact the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain is a highly disputed matter and not in any way set in stone. There are two main theories (with slight variations between scholars): one; the Anglo-Saxons imposed themselves as a small ruling elite over the Romano-British, and two; the Anglo-Saxons genocided and drove away the natives on a large scale, and more or less resettled the land, while the Romano-British were confined to the western and northern fringes.

One of my old profs from Oxford, whose specialty was linguistics, was a firm believer in the latter theory, as ruling elites that are not seen as culturally superior nearly always adopt the language of the conquered, and it is hard to imagine the Romano-British would have considered the Anglo-Saxons culturally superior. This is of course a strictly linguistic approach to the problem, but even as a historian I have difficulties arguing against it.

James Campbell supports the theory in his book "The Anglo-Saxons".

The Anglo-Saxons on Amazon

Other good books on the topic are F.M. Stenton's old but massive "Anglo-Saxon England" and Peter Blair's more accessible "An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England". Both of them are standard works at university courses.