The story of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain begins around the time when the Romans decided to abandon Britain after 400 years of rule.

For many years before they left Britain, the Romans had had to defend the southern and eastern shores from hit-and-run raids by small groups of people from the mainland of Europe. The raiders included the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes.

The largest groups were the Angles and Saxons, and so we often know them as the Anglo-Saxons. They came from the lands we now call Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands – lands that lie to the east of England, across the North Sea.

The Anglo-Saxons were pagan peoples and believed in war and battle as a way of gaining wealth and slaves. The Romans used armed ships and a line of forts to try to keep the Anglo-Saxons away from England.

At the beginning of the fifth century, the Romans left Britain. They had not trained the British to defend themselves, so the people living in what is today England became an easy target for peoples, like the Angles and Saxons, who wanted new lands.

It was during the second half of the fifth century that more and more Anglo-Saxons arrived to take land for themselves. It is for this reason that the time of the Anglo-Saxons is usually thought of as beginning about ad 450.

At this time, most of Britain was still covered in forest. There were perhaps no more than a few hundred thousand people in the whole land (today there are about 50 million). So it was still an easy place for newcomers to find a place to start a village and then turn the surrounding forest into farmland (picture 1). It was, of course, much less work to take over land already cleared by the British.

The newcomers usually settled in places that could easily be reached by boat, such as the east coast of England or along the banks of the big rivers like the Thames and the Humber.

Most settlements were small, home to just a chieftain and a small number of followers. But even so, they had to be places that were easy to defend. An island in a river was a favourite choice. Another popular place was inside a sharp curve, or meander, in a river. A third place was in the angle where two rivers met.

As the Anglo-Saxons invaded, some of the British fled westward, to hilly or remote lands such as present day Wales and Cornwall. Many, however, lived alongside the newcomers. We know this because of evidence from archaeology. The British were Christians. They did not bury treasures with their dead. The early Anglo-Saxons were pagans, and they buried many treasures with their dead.

Many early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have been found that contain the graves of people buried without treasures. This tells us that Christian British sometimes lived alongside pagan Anglo-Saxons. The British may often have been beaten in battle by the Anglo-Saxons and then lived as slaves, as was the custom of the time.

Eventually the Anglo-Saxons settled down, and over hundreds of years they became the people of England. Then the Viking raiders came. What they did was not unlike the raids of the Saxons hundreds of years before.