Invasion, settlement or political conquest: Changing representations of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain

The nature of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain c 450-600, and the survival of the incumbent Romano-British population, has long been an emotive topic. Traditional views represented the coming or the Anglo-Saxons as an invasion of entire tribes with large and aggressive warbands, and used vivid imagery or the Anglo-Saxons 'storming the earthwork camps... slaughtering and driving away the Romanised Britons', and of the Romano-Britons being 'as nearly extirpated as a nation can be'. The last 50 years, however, have seen a growing trend towards representations of the Anglo-Saxon arrival as an elite settlement, in which the Romano-Britons assimilated with the Anglo-Saxons, adopting their cultural characteristics in order to fit in to a new social order. This paper aims to consider the process by which views of the Anglo-Saxon arrival have undergone this transformation, and to place this process in the broader context of England's changing position in the world, and its changing relationship with its Celtic neighbours.