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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Very interesting and well-discussed examination of my ancestors, amazing how Sussex became sandwiched between two Jute areas and remained intact.

I lived in a part of northern England where villages only a few miles apart were named after the various settler 'tribes. So 'Bretton' is traceable to original indigenous pre-Roman peoples, 'Skelmanthorp' being Scandinavians and 'Denby Dale'. to Danes etc. There are many other examples. It's very unlikely - in my opinion - that such a patchwork of people living so close to one another were aggressive.

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.

Many of the Celtic Britons left Britain with the coming of the Angles and Saxons and migrated to Brittany, now part of France, and Galicia in Spain making 2 new Celtic nations on the continent. Also the Slavs moving from Russia into modern day Poland were pushing the Germanic peoples further westward which may have played a part in the anglo saxon migrations according to some historians.

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.

I feel "Kings and Generals" did a better summary of this period. And highlighted that it was both a combination of military conquest and semi-peaceful assimilation. This video also overlooks Bythonic/Welsh sources

Amazing video as always!

I really like your videos. They are very high quality and the topics are always very interesting.

Love your videos. Your channel got the best maps, I wonder how you guys make them

I have read writings where early Americans such as Dr. Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson were proud of their Anglo-Saxon/English heritage, and considered Germans to be "inferior". But little did they knew that their own heritage came from Germany.

As an Englishman, I am proud of my Anglo-Saxon heritage

The English language is based on an old German 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.

A very informative video thanks for sharing these suggestions and history with us ❤🙋❤️

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.

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.

"They were not blood thirsty invaders they were enacting Gods vengeance on the people of Britain" Like that's not that same thing.

good job as always, i also love how we pronounce burial now. "burryul"

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.

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.

I wish you continued success.When will the second part of the Turkish liberation struggle be broadcast?

I'm surprised Danelagen isn't mentioned. That was a massive part of the old Britain, and the reason for many of the Old Norse rooted words in modern English.

The idea that Germanic languages overtaking the local Latin and Brythonic languages due to a choice by the natives is absurd, I would say it had more to do with the fact that the ratio between invaders and locals was not as skewed towards the natives as it was in England. In Spain and France the locals numbered in the millions while the Germanic invaders numbered in the tens of thousands while in Roman Britain there were only about half a million locals compared to 200,000 Germanic peoples.

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?

Thanks for sharing 😊

Geological studies have theorized that climate in North Germany was often changing from warm trend to cool trend playing havoc on crops causing floods including surge flooding especially along the coast and turning the fields to mud, then ice, and back to mud often. Some cold trends called mini-ice ages finally contributed to the collapse (in some areas) of agriculture including loss of livestock production.

Worth mentioning that the Angles, specifically the Bernician kingdom, stretched into modern day Scotland too (Scottish Borders and Lothian).

Towards The four kingdoms era the Anglo Saxons were indeed the majority in Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria

The opening seems to be confusing "England" with Britain, and "the English" with "the Britons"

Interesting. Thank you.

I've done extensive (and exhausting!) geneological research on 8 main branches of my family tree (starting point, 2nd ggparents). One of those branches went as far back as the 1st decade of the first millenium (I was stunned by the validity of the paper trail). Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Romans, Hungarians, Serbians, Italian, Spanish, French, German, etc, so many wound up in Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales. BTW, Vikings landed in southern Scotland around the 5th century, too.

I suspect a Viking age before the Viking age, considering that the Anglo-Saxons are literally long distance cousins to us Scandinavians

Extremely it was wonderful historical video

I like the Angle you take on this subject. 😊

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.

People don't tend to abandon their culture and heritage purely for the sake of doing it. There is always a reason. I think we underestimate just how impactful the roman withdrawal was from Briton. It wasn't just a military withdrawal that had already occurred when magnus maximus and constantinus withdrew the roman field comitatinses/limates from Britain for their bids for the imperial purple in the west. Not to mention recruitment from the male latin/britano population following the defeat at adrianople and others! Stilco pulled what remained of organized roman military out as well. So what we have left Is a population already on the decline who picked up and left with all the roman administration. Those who stayed would have been a minority still roman or romanized Britons. They had no choice but to adopt germanic culture and language over time as social and religious pressure probably made them change. The opposite happened in almost every other part of the empire. The kingdoms in Briton never claimed to be under imperial rule after the withdrawal where all the germanic kingdoms in Europe did claim to be nominally subject to the emperor in Constantinople or Rome. I think if we had a window into that time. It would have been extremely scary for the populace. By the time of significant migration there were Noone alive to keep the tradition of roman/brittonic culture alive who saw it during its last years under imperial administration. The change was effective but nessecary.

I need to know more and more about the Scotts and the Picts

And the winters are milder and the soil is superior to the peet bogs of Denmark. Go west young Dane!

This is generally a good video with a lot of important points mentioned and reasonable conclusions. This is one of my favourite topics however and I have to nit-pick, with a mind to possibly informing your viewers even better, so here are my critiques. :) 1. Gildas wasn't Spanish, so there's no need to pronounce the G as a voiceless fricative /x/ - it's /g/ as you might expect. 2. Ogham and Futhorc are the names of alphabets, not languages - they shouldn't really be used as markers of what was being spoken on maps like this. It's also particularly wrong to show "FUTHORC" expanding through Europe, since not all those Germanic migrants necessarily used runes, and if they did they would not have use Futhorc as that is a specifically Anglo-Saxon variant (the C indicates that, it would be transcribed with a K in other Germanic languages). 3. The degree to which the Britons' adoption of Anglo-Saxon culture was 'voluntary' is questionable, and not really the point. The point is it will have been practically necessary for many people at many times. I am not suggesting it was forced, although it will have been occasionally. It is more a case of people throwing in their lot together in order to pool resources and labour and have greater strength against potentially aggressive neighbours. That this process led to the gradual Anglo-Saxonisation of a lot of Britain rather than the assimilation of Anglo-Saxons to the native Romano-British culture shows that the incoming Germanic culture was the more robust one. 4. Following on from that, the adoption of the Anglo-Saxon language was not a 'choice'. People in such situations make choices day by day and conversation by conversation, but the large-scale patterns again show convenience and necessity not choice. The situation on the continent was that proportionally small armies of Germanic peoples conquered large areas and subject populations, and then kept aloof from them (most notably the Visigoths in Spain for instance); this is a great recipe for their distinctive culture dwindling and dying out while the incumbent mass culture persists and merely adopts some personal names and words for warfare. In England equally small numbers, if not smaller, of Anglo-Saxons migrated to tiny coastal toeholds where they were in much greater proportion to the natives, who they eventually ruled over, then that Anglo-Saxonised polity conquered other small native polities inland, which they Anglo-Saxonised, until 'Anglo-Saxons' (those with a culture whatever their mix of ancestry) had a foothold, then those polities conquered Brittonic areas further inland and so on. The gradualness and more balanced populations are crucial to enabling a cumulative effect of the survival and dominance of the incoming culture rather than the incumbent native one. In a way the continental Germanic tribes like the Franks, Goths, Burgundians, Vandals and Lombards were victims of their greater and easier success, as none of their languages survive today, while the Anglo-Saxons were beneficiaries of their much smaller successes and greater challenges. 5. Another part of this picture is that a long, slow migration process is not needed to explain the result any more than a short large-scale invasion. The presence of ever more 'Anglo-Saxons' in ever further inland areas of Britain over time doesn't require more ancestral Angles and Saxons from the continent to be migrating in, it just requires people brought up in communities and polities with mixed ancestry (Anglo-Saxon/Brittonic) to be identifying with their Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage including language, and to be then perceived as that by Britons outside the Anglo-Saxonised areas. This explains why the proportion of Germanic DNA is greatest in coastal areas, and trails off considerably in inland ones. Areas like Mercia came to dominate the later Anglo-Saxon world, but the majority of the ancestry and DNA of its rulers would have been Brittonic. 6. There are some other points not covered in the video, such as: those coastal continental Germanic peoples already knew Britain before the Roman armies left, as they were often employed as foederati troops in its coastal defence. And the late Romans report attacks on the British coast by Frankish, Frisian, Saxon and other raiders. The southern British shore was called the 'Saxon Shore' (litus Saxonicum), either for the first reason, or the second, or both. 7. Another point is that the English language is closer to the Frisian languages than it is to the German dialects of (Lower) Saxony or Angeln. This can partly be explained by subsequent migration to those areas from further south in Germany, bringing different dialects, but only partly, and it does seem reasonable that there is actually some role for Frisian-speakers in the 'Anglo-Saxon' migration to Britain. There are several possible scenarios, including the idea that the Angleness or Saxonness of peoples in England was based on ancestral tribal allegiance due to conquests on the continent rather than linguistic reality. In other words the people who came over were linguistically Frisian but lived in (coastal) areas that had been overruled/dominated by chiefs further inland who identified as Saxon or Angle, and those 'official' people names are what stuck. Alternatively the language of the coastal areas from Flanders to Jutland may have been very similar, due to people constantly moving about around the coasts having a very mobile, sea-based culture, while retaining different tribal identities which were preserved after migrating to Britain, but then the later migrations to the coasts from inland Germany erased this commonality. Yet a third possibility is that Saxon and Angle rulers *led* the migrations, or at least later came to dominate them, but that it was Frisians who provided the bulk of the manpower, leading to their dialects being the surviving English ones.

I'm Japanese. I love Anglo Saxons.

It is indisputable that many of our first men in the UK were Anglish and Eohtish foederati who were employed by the British. This explains the mix of family and military-based archaeological evidence. The purpose of foederati is to defend land and settle some of it as payment. This concept was introduced to the British by the Roman Empire. Thanet was granted to the English in 429AD as payment for services rendered (there is no evidence to the contrary) and at some point Kent was awarded. There may have been similar arrangements further North if the British were consistent in applying this Roman model.

My thoughts go further back. In pre-history, England was joined to France, the low-lying land has been named Doggerland. Yes, at some time, there was a huge tsunami following an undersea upheaval, and Doggerland destroyed, and forever underwater. However, the tribes people knew of each other 'across the Channel' . They could take their craft across the waters when the weather allowed. It's possible that their culture and languages were similar enough to allow for trade, inter-marriage, and cultural exchange over time. Knowing the Warrior Kings of that time, there would also have been regional wars. But overall, the peoples of early England/Britain were not so different from their similar tribes and cultures on the Continent.

Unfortunately little is known about the period of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, because there are very few historical documents that tell us the facts in detail. After the withdrawal of the Roman Legions from Britain, in 410 AD, the island fell into a situation of chaos: Roman Britain shattered into small kingdoms fighting among themselves and without the Roman army to defend the borders, the Pictish tribes from Scotland they spread to the north and the coasts were repeatedly raided by Irish pirates. From what little the British chroniclers have handed down, it seems that the first contingents of Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain from Germany as mercenaries in the pay of one of these small British kings, around 443 AD. These mercenaries, however, saw the weakness of the Britons and chose to rebel, calling for reinforcements from their homeland and starting the conquest of the island. In reality it should be noted that the term "Anglo-Saxons" is a simplification: they were various Germanic peoples (the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, etc...) who were internally divided into tribes. Therefore we must not imagine a single Anglo-Saxon army led by a single leader, but an alliance of many Germanic tribes who simultaneously, each on its own behalf, conquered its own territory. The Anglo-Saxons therefore did not found a single kingdom, but at least seven. In fact we speak of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy: Wessex, Essex, Mercia, Northumbria, Sussex, Kent and East Anglia. To tell the truth, not much is known about this period, so it seems that in reality, in addition to the 7 kingdoms already mentioned, there were also smaller kingdoms that were subjugated by the larger ones. England as a unified kingdom was born in 927, as an enlargement of the kingdom of Wessex, which had been the only kingdom capable of resisting the invasion of the Vikings in the 9th century and liberating the other territories. (google translate)

I suspect it might be similar to the vikings. When Rome left, England was open to plunder. As they kept returning t England, they realised how feetile the lands were, and started settling.

It's funny how nowadays the peninsula in Germany that used to be home to the Anglo Saxons is now mostly a part of Denmark but the closest large German city to the Angle Saxons back in the day was probably Hamburg

One thing to consider: Looking at the map with 20th/21st century eyes, we see the land-masses as the important units. However, until the arrival of the railways in the late 19th century, water transport was far more important. The better unit is the North Sea. Coastal peoples would have had far more contact with folk across the water than with those living inland. A good speed for an ox-cart is about 3mph and travel would be limited to a few hours a day. By contrast, a Viking-style boat can do 10mph and keep going day and night. A boat can carry 10x the load of a cart and is not bogged down on rutted wet roads. If we shift our perspective from seeing roads as the main 'highways' to seeing the coast as the main route, then many of the 'problems' of explaining the AS migration are simplified..

From wiki: "The Danes first appear in written history in the 6th century with references in Jordanes' Getica (551 AD), by Procopius, and by Gregory of Tours. They spoke Old Norse (dǫnsk tunga), which the Danes shared with the people in Norway and Sweden and later in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. In his description of Scandza, Jordanes says that the Dani were of the same stock as the Suetidi ("Swedes") and expelled the Heruli and took their lands." "In the Nordic Iron Age, the Danes were based in present-day Zealand and Scania (and neighbouring parts of present-day Sweden). Until around the 6th century, Jutland was the homeland of two other Germanic tribes: the Jutes in what is now North Jutland, and the Angles in South Jutland (especially the Anglia peninsula). The Widsith mentions two semi-mythical kings in relation to the Danes of the Iron Age. Sigar who ruled the "Sea-Danes" and Offa who ruled both Danes and Angles. Centuries later, Saxo lists for the first time the Danes entire lineage of semi-mythical kings, starting from King Dan. As Saxo's texts are the first written accounts of Denmark's history, and hence the Danes, his sources are largely surviving legends, folk lore and word of mouth. The royal seat and capital of the Danes was located on Zealand near Lejre and constituted what has later been dubbed the Lejre Kingdom, ruled by the Skjöldung dynasty. Some time around the middle of the First Millennium, both Jutland and Anglia became part of Danish kingdom or kingdoms. So was southern Schleswig (now the northernmost part of Germany) - the site of Danevirke, a large set of fortifications reportedly built by Danes to mark the southern border of their realm. It was extended several times in later centuries." Seems to me there was a strong pressure from the Danes at the same time the Jutes and Anglosaxons migrated to Britain. And the gradually took control of Jutland. Later they also followed and invaded Britain. Danelaw etc.

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.

The reason we dont know is because William the Bastard ensured that Anglo Saxon writings were not copied and maintained and therefore over time the literary legacy was lost and history with it.

“A prominent hole waiting to be filled”. He loved saying that

It should be noted that these migrations and invasions had a "knock on" effect with the peoples around the newcomers being forced to move on. It happened all through post Roman western Europe, not just Britain. I believe the Germanic newcomers were seeking new farmlands perhaps due to overcrowding and invasions in their homelands. They seem to have focused their efforts on the southern parts of the British Isles where the farmland is the most fertile. There is evidence that Wales survived because the Saxons had little interest in its hilly landscape and rocky soils. There is evidence that the Anglo-Saxons pushed the indigenous Celts out of southern Britain. The Bretons of Brittany ("Little Britain') are descendants of Celts who fled from Cornwell and Devon to western France to escape the Anglo-Saxons. Devon is good farmland.

Real answer: The Anglo saxons fled to Britain from the Hunnic horde invasion, Europe was ravaged which led to the fall of western Roman empire

Very interesting historical description. Boats with sails are shown, but the migrants came in boats without sails, as the sail had not yet been invented by the Jutes, Angles or Saxons. The boats were rowed in the traditional way, with the rowers sitting with their backs to the direction of the boat's movement. Sails were first introduced 600 to 700 AD.

🤔 . . . I have TWO questions: what was happening in & around what is today Denmark at the time (the homelands of the Anglo-Saxons)? And could this move be due to the Ancient Roman power vacuum, i.e. hearing the news that their Germanic neighbors to the south have successfully toppled the empire & now they want a piece of the shrinking Pie that was once the Ancient Roman Empire?

It's weird but true. Danish and Germans from Hamburg have a strong DNA connection to British Isles.

I remember as a kid watching the "Barbarian" series on the history channel. They said that the Romanic Briton nobility took to hiring Saxon mercenaries. The Saxons decide to come back/stay. The rest is history.

Our family heritage is Treuel from Wedel in what was then Denmark and Street from Salisbury England, but we are Australian🇦🇺 Definately Anglo-Saxon

Climate Change (Cooling) in 500-700 AD also motivated Scandinavian / Germanic migrations to Scotland (Norwegians) England (Jutes, Anglo Sax), France (Francs), Spain (Visigoths), Italy (Lombards) and Balkans (Ostrogoths). The simultaneous mass migration of Scandinavians happened many times. E.g., The Cimbri Ambrose (Jutes / Anglos), Teutons (Saxon) migrated / raided N Italy in 400 BC and in 110 BC, and was likely the result of a common existential threat such as cooling climate.

Farm land with less destructive weather more so then in the low countries.

Danish Anglo Saxon’s arriving only to get invaded by the same people danish vikings 300 years later is crazy same people

This history somehow repeated itself with the Glucksburgs inheriting the House of Windsor in the UK by the ascension of King Charles III.

Has anyone ever located the so called battle sites where Saxons (according to Bede) supposedly fought the Britons? I have always wondered about this. On a different tact an archeological study of a township in the Saxon shore area showed no sign of a discontinuation in habitation, the town grew all through the "Invasion" period and there are no signs of destruction. Of course more places need to studied but it does make you wonder. In the same area a graveyard study of burials from the same period found an interesting mix of British men who had Swedish wives. In North East England they found Angles and Britons buried in the same graveyard.

The North Sea and its major estuaries being the super-highway of the day, where a suitable vessel could sail across from Demark or Norway to England faster than someone could ride across the country by horse.

Given that the Romans employed Saxons as mercenaries long before they left Britannia, it is not that wild a stretch of the imagination that many of them were stationed there and rather than leave with the legions they stayed on as the power in Rome's absence, then calling to their relatives back on the continent to come over. The British had already adopted a foreign culture and language as part of the Roman Empire, so it's perfectly within the realm of possibility that they repeated the trick with the new "Anglo-Saxon" warrior class forming the majority of the elite. It usually only takes a couple of generations for a economically lower group to adopt the language and customs of the upper echelons within a society, and so wanting to align themselves with the powerful "Anglo-Saxon" nobility, the once Romano-British adopted the language, fashions, and customs of their new overlords.

Another factor that was not mentioned here or properly referred to as being one of the root causes of these early & mid first millennium migrations were the numerous population movements from the east at these times, then originating from the Russian & Siberian Steppes & beyond there too. This fact had also accounted for mass-migration of various nomadic peoples constantly seeking new pasturelands for their diverse livestocks to feed & water upon over these times, such as the Huns, the Magyars, other Finnish-Uralic & Turkomen peoples, tribes & clans then migrating westwards had thus started a chain reaction of internal European migration that lasted three or four centuries. These events had all occurred even before but mainly around the time of the collapse of Roman rule that the ensuing power-vacuums in former rich & then vulnerable territories of the Roman Empire had consequently brought about & afterwards had prevailed all over Western Europe as its result!

Excellent, thanks. Personally, I fink it's to do with using the benefit system - and the NHS (though that didn't work out too well).

The danes were known as a group in the migration periode. With assumed origin in southern Sweden they migrated west and fought with the judes, angles and the saxons too. Because of this pressure from the danes I have heard that 90% of the angles migrated to England. Also the Franks fought the saxons.

Why would the locals adapt the language and customs of a bunch of poor farmers arrived on their shore? The only explanation is conquest, not migration.

I wonder if TRADE had anything to do with why the language of the Angles and Saxons took over? Background: I remember reading about a tradesman in the 800's AD in the Norwegian sagas who traded with the people of the area now called England. He said that the "English" and the Norse could understand each other's language, at this time, so that made trade easy. Perhaps the need to understand each other when trading with fishermen from the Norse, farmers from Northern Europe and Sami people from even further north, made languages melt together. Of course, WAR and TRADE went hand in hand in those days, so .., but you would need to both understand and trade with conquerors as well ..

What this linguistic evidence tells me is that Anglo-Saxons held the reins of power. The striking dissimilarity between Old English (Anglo-Saxon), and Middle English, bespeaks an adoption of Anglo-Saxon culture by the Celtic natives of the island. Why? Economic pressures favor adopting the culture of the rulers. Middle English (and Modern English) retain many syntactical features of the Celtic (British) language(s) spoken by those learners of English. Those speakers' "English" was their best attempt at learning Anglo-Saxon. The result was (and remains) a kind of relexified Celtic. It's easier to learn new words than it is to learn new syntax. This would, however, also argue for relatively smaller numbers of Anglo-Saxon settlers.

"The Anglo Saxons Migrate to Britain" : OMG.... Stop the boats !!

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

Fascinating.

I believe that people migrated to Britannia from all across the entirety of the European coastline including the Normans and Frisians and others, the only difference being the number of migrations and size, the Angles and Saxons made up the bulk with smaller waves from the Frisians etc and we're talking a lengthy amount of time here, could have been dozens if not hundreds of waves over the years, decades and centuries after the Romans left.

Do we even know what the demographics of Britain were at the time of the Anglo/Saxon migration? Was there a large degree of cross breeding between Romans and original Celts, or were the two populations largely separate? Was the majority of England descendants of Roman migrants at that point?

The effects of the Hun invasion of Europe on migration to England is overlooked.

Similar what happened when the Romans left the Alps area, where that area were repopulated by Germanic peoples like the Alemannic, Bavarii, Ostrogoths ,replaced the original Celtic people.

The story is very similar to the situation England is experiencing now.

This makes no sense. The "withdrawal of the Romans" (ie Constantine's decision to enter the civil war for Rome) does not leave a literal "hole" in the population of the British isles. There was no "vacant landscape". Nor was the country left impoverished and weak (if it was, why would immigrants think it a better place to live?). Another huge anomaly is the longuistic evidence: if England was suddenly occupied by anglosaxons you would expect to find the anglosaxon language(s) everywhere. In fact it now appears that Old English was restricted to east coast fringes for centuries (notably Edinburgh because it was the largest trading port on the east coast). In reality, the indigenous population of the east coast switches to North Sea customs and language because the region needs new trading partners after the roads to Rome are blocked by centuries of civil war. That's all that happened. The rest is modern misinformation.

Good video. I always thought the Scotts were in the North and Irish on their own island? wow.

The Danes are such an interesting group of people. The way they speak their language is utterly baffling, but they themselves are very interesting.

Probably plenty of room at the time. East Anglia today has lots of space and the Fens, though swampy at the time still had a fair amount of dry land for farming.

Why would a majority celtic speaking Britons adopt a foreign germanic language? What incentive would there be, especially if the anglo-saxon migration took place slowly over 100-200 years.

i love how the jutes are kinda just there

THE OUTFITS ARE A SCREAM-- HOW DID YOU FIND THEM???

Good video! One thing you do not mention is that Denmark was fantastically fruitful with great soil after the last ice age. The populations there exploded and huge numbers migrated south and west. The Kimbrians from central Jutland went all the way down to the walls of Rome, and another raiding party went down through Spain (from Denmark) and settled eventually in Libya. I am old and I remember an old aunt on an island in western Jutland, living isolated on a small farm, still speaking old Anglian. The population explosion of the Danish tribes was quite unique in European history. The Danish tribes conquered and controlled the Baltic states too, settled on the islands north of Scotland, and eventually hundreds of years later, colonized Iceland, southernmost Greenland, and eventually went to New Foundland. You are absolutely right in that these raiding parties most often consisted of men, women, children, and cattle, in order to colonize where they arrived. In a time when few methods were available for agriculture, this immensely fruitful soil, left by the melting ice, made a population boom possible like nowhere else. In a time when few methods were available for agriculture, this immensely fruitful soil, left by the melting ice, made a population boom possible in Denmark like nowhere else. By the way: Denmark (Tan Mark), means the land of the long bows.

What if the mercenaries who were asked to come aid them realized they could set themselves up as a ruling class and the locals adopted their culture as a way for political advantage and advancement after the Anglo Saxon families came over giving them parity in population.

People like to think past migrations and colonisations were always violent. But more often people saw some free land and were like "I like this spot, no ones claimed it, so might as well build a house here"

As far as i know the romans had some influence east of their borders. Lots of people wanted to be part of the roman good life. They negotiated for some north germanic tribes a deal that they would settle in britain and protect the land and people there from the picts and were promised to get some regular payment too. After some time they were not happy with the payment and started a long war that they lost. After that there was a long peace and lots of mingling.

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.

This is a very questionable take. Roman Britain was fully occupied. Tens of thousands of "immigrants" would not have just been able to walk or sail in and set up farms on previously unused lands. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes showed up. There may or may not have been murder, mayhem and conquest, but they certainly had enough military might and organization to "encourage" many of the local Celts to either move away, or to take "jobs" as servants or slaves to the "migrants." Me and my friends might "peacefully" move into your house, and not attack anyone, but only if you decide that being subjugated is better than being killed. BTW; "I'll take the master bedroom, but, I'll let your eldest daughter share it with me. Now, go make me some dinner."

the mingling continues - I was born near Liverpool and I'm tow haired and blue eyed. My husband is 1/4 Danish - his grandfather was from Copenhagen who married an English wife. My daughter is now working in the British Embassy in Denmark and has a Danish boyfriend! In Canada, my brother's children have Indigenous and African partners, and several children between them. It's awesome to have such a genetic mix in one family and we are the better for it, both culturally and genetically.

I suppose one question to ask would be: how do other, straightforward cases of conquest, including forcefully imposed linguistic and cultural practices, compare to the case of Britain? Do we see marked differences in the Spanish/Catholic conquests of the Aztecs or the Inca? What about the Arab/Islamic conquests of Egypt and Syria?

lovely video but every time he says burry instead of bury i winced it may be a local pronunciation from where he grew up philadelphia maybe