410, was attacked from three sides: by the Picts from the north, by the Irish from the west, and by various Germanic peoples from the east and south. The attacks of the Picts seem to have ceased in the fifth century; they do not seem to have made any settlements south of Hadrian's Wall. The Irish founded settlements in western Wales, and the kingdom which they founded in south-west Scotland, Dalriada, remained an important political force for several centuries. And the Germanic peoples, the Angles and Saxons from north-west Germany, the Jutes from Denmark, the Frisians from the Low Countries, gained political control over south-eastern Britain, and gradually moved their sphere of political, cultural and linguistic influence further westwards, until, by the tenth century, they had gained the whole of modern England.

The Saxons, a term which for Roman writers meant all the north Germans who were involved in the settlement of Britain, played a similar role to that played by the Vikings four centuries later. They raided the coasts of Gaul and Britain, and founded settlements, perhaps initially no more than pirate bases, by the mouths of the Garonne and the Loire, and near Bayeux, as well as in Britain. The tradition in Britain was that the first Saxons--Hengist and Horsa--had been invited in as mercenaries by a British leader, and had then rebelled and set up their own kingdom in eastern Britain. This is a simplified version of what happened in the case of several German peoples on the Continent, and it is not impossible that it happened in Britain. But the very fact of the sea barrier made the effects of the migration to Britain different from other migrations. Any organized crossing was out of the question. Migration must have been in small groups, spread out over several generations. In most areas there was no smooth transition of political power and institutions from Romans to Germans as so often happened on the Continent. Excavations at the Bernician palace of Yeavering in Northumberland suggest that the incoming Angles took over a pre-existing British political centre and used it as their own. The Anglian kings in Bernicia (Northumberland and Durham) and Deira (Yorkshire)--both words of Celtic origin--must have ruled kingdoms whose

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