After Rome withdrew around AD 410, Germanic peoples from across the North Sea — Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from what is now northern Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands — settled in Britain. Over six centuries their kingdoms became England, and their language became English.
The name of the country
England means “land of the Angles”. English is their language. The days of the week are theirs too: Tuesday from the god Tiw, Wednesday from Woden, Thursday from Thunor, Friday from Frige. So are Easter, from the goddess Eostre, and a very large share of the most ordinary words in the language.
The kingdoms
Britain fragmented into competing kingdoms — the Heptarchy, conventionally seven: Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, East Anglia, Essex, Sussex and Kent. Dominance shifted between them for centuries.
The Viking invasions destroyed most of them. Wessex alone survived, and it was from Wessex that a single English kingdom was assembled — by Alfred the Great, who defeated the Danes, and by his successors who took back the Danelaw. Æthelstan is generally counted as the first king of all England, from 927.
Alfred the Great
The only English monarch called “the Great”, and the only one most people can name from before 1066. Beyond the military achievement he rebuilt fortified towns, reformed the law, established a navy, and — unusually for a king of his era — promoted literacy and translated works into English himself.
The story of him burning the cakes while sheltering in a peasant’s hut is a later invention, and everyone knows it anyway.
Sutton Hoo
The find that changed everything. In 1939, excavations at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk uncovered an entire ship burial beneath a mound — a 27-metre vessel containing gold and garnet jewellery, silver from Byzantium, weapons, and the famous iron and bronze helmet.
Before it, the period was dismissed as the Dark Ages, poor and crude. Sutton Hoo revealed craftsmanship of extraordinary sophistication and trade links stretching to the Mediterranean, and the “Dark Ages” label has been retreating ever since. The treasure is in the British Museum; the site is National Trust.
The language
Old English is a Germanic language, and it is genuinely foreign to a modern reader — Beowulf is unreadable without translation. But the core of everyday English is Anglo-Saxon: man, wife, child, house, eat, drink, sleep, work, love, hate, life, death.
The pattern that survives is a class one. After the Norman Conquest, French became the language of the powerful, so English kept the Anglo-Saxon words for the animals in the field — cow, pig, sheep — and took French ones for the meat on the table — beef, pork, mutton. That division is still there, and it tells you exactly who was farming and who was eating.
1066
Anglo-Saxon England ended at Hastings. Harold Godwinson, having just destroyed a Norwegian invasion in Yorkshire, marched south and was killed by William of Normandy. The English aristocracy was almost entirely replaced within twenty years.