Why did The Anglo Saxons Migrate to Britain?

Why did The Anglo Saxons Migrate to Britain?

It’s believed that this was the time when groups of Germanic peoples, referred to more exclusively from the 8th century on as Angles and Saxons, decided to enter the vacant landscape. There was still an indigenous population across England, namely the Britons with the neighboring Picts and Scots from Scotland and Ireland, but the withdrawal of the Romans left a prominent hole waiting to be filled. The story of exactly how this played out, however, is a bit fuzzy…

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#History #Documentary

[Knowledgia]

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[Xristoforos]

Denmark tiny, has little room. Britain not as tiny, has some more room.

[adrianlouw]

I heard the theory where after the Roman power vacuum the native British kings took to hiring Saxon mercenaries and soon the practice became so prevalent that Angles and Saxons were facing each other in the battlefield and realised they could simply unite and take the lands for themselves.

[cornelkittell]

I believe that the Frisians also came, but in smaller numbers and did not totally abandon their continental homeland. Very hard to tell apart genetically. And Frisian is still the closest language to English.

[ChrisJohannsen]

My family ancestry is from Angles but we never went to England. But ironically still ended up in Anglo colonies. (Australia, USA and Canada)

[ndie]

love my cousins in am from westfalia in northwest have been many times in England....they are our closest relatives....🇩🇪🇯🇪❤

[vzvklkv]

What’s really cool when you think about it is that the Vikings basically were just trying to do what the Anglo-Saxons had done before them. Only difference is the Anglo-Saxons actually did it.

[HamishGardiner-ruxg]

One very important point that you are missing is that the romans used Germanic mercenaries in their army particularly in the UK. Hadrian’s wall was garrisoned almost exclusively by Germanic auxiliaries for hundreds of years and there were well established ‘Saxon’ communities on the east coast of the UK for generations during Roman rule, because the angles, Saxons and Jutes like the Scandinavians were excellent sailors and members of the group now regarded as ‘proto-Viking’s’ with similar ship building skills. The romans used them as a naval force to stave off raids by the Irish. It’s a simple extension of logic to reason that when the Romans departed from the UK the remaining military forces being principally Germanic, noticed a power vacuum and called for their cousins across the channel to join them.

[fandf]

One big reason for inviting the Anglo-Saxons in was a great plague that hit the island in the seventh century. A lot of land became empty which also coincided with increasingly devastating attacks from Ireland. Hence a need for fighting men who could also farm the land. That’s why we see warriors arriving with their families.

[gobbotits]

I always figured that The Angles and Saxons were just one of the many Germanic tribes that pillaged Roman provinces during a great famine in the 6th century.
It was common all across Europe at the time, and many of these Germans would settle in the regions where they plundered.
I don't see how this would be any different for England.

[bgl]

I'm Japanese. I love Anglo Saxons.

[plisqdn]

England doesnt exist as a concept until the Anglo Saxons made it. So there were no English for the Anglo Saxons to Anglicise. You even summarise this early on by pointing out that the English anglicised a lot of the world. Therefore, the Anglo Saxons would have anglicised the Britons and other such native peoples?

[perlefisker]

It's often depicted that the Vikings leaving their homelands were the adventurous, brave, entrepreneurs of Scandinavia.
They might as well have been outcasts and misfits, whether traders, farmers or pirates, pushed out of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

[TorvusVae]

I'm a little frustrated by the narration's use of the word "England" to describe post-Roman Britain. England and the English people as a concept didn't exist until the end of the 9th and beginning of the 10th century. Otherwise a great summary of what we know of early Anglo-Saxon (Anglo being a reference to the tribe of the Angles, not the English) presence in Britain, just weird to call the land England before the the English even exist.

[randombutuseful]

The English weren’t anglicised, because the angles were the 1st to be “English” There were no English people on Britain until the Angles and Saxons arrived and became English

[andreleers]

The English language is based on an old Germanic dialect. As the Dutch language does by the way. Ancient Angeln and Sachsen are situated in the northern part of Germany. If you visit Kappeln an der Schlei in Angeln, you might think you are in the UK. Sussex: Südsachsen. Essex: Eastsachsen. They migrated to fight as soldiers and because of living a poor life in deserted areas.

[jacobwwarner]

Welsh History Podcast said something along the lines that the Roman's used to hire settled "barbarians" as federati and that the local romanized Britain's may have been inviting the anglo-saxons to do much the same after the withdrawal of the Roman legions.

[padredemishijos]

Why did the Visigoths not establish a Germanic language in Spain or the Franks do the same in France whereas the Anglosaxona did? The Visigoths had been a Roman soldiers and already spoke Latin and were Romanized. The Anglos did not speak any Latin, and were barbarians.

[meh]

Nobody ever stops to think why all the North Sea tribes were migrating to Britain except for the people that were actually nearest. Many Frisians did in fact also move across the pond. It is _their_ language that is at the origin of English. It is still spoken in a large part of the Netherlands and smaller regions in Denmark and Germany.

[leehallam]

I think it is foolish to dismiss Gildas and Bede, and much of the motivation for doing that has come from archaeologists who because they couldn't find evidence for battles, have dismissed the idea of conquest or mass migration in favour of the voluntary adoption of Anglo Saxan language and culture by celts from a small group of high status migrants. That never really stacked up with the evidence of language, religion and culture, and DNA has now shown that there was a mass migration. I don't think there was a mass conquest, but I do think there were armed invasions, a degree of local rulers using them as mercenaries who wouldn't go away followed by more peaceful migration into areas under germanic control. Bit by bit the country was taken over and within each area celts either were enslaved, intermarried or conformed to new rulers, though many moved ahead of the slow invasion, which is why Brittany exists. The video didn't try to hard to explain why they left their homelands, is their evidence of flooding at that time? What we do know for example is the Jutes were under pressure from Scandinavians as the Jutes are not the same people as the later Danes.