Anglo-Saxon migrationism is the school of thought that holds that the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain was driven by a large scale migration of Germanic speakers from present day north Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands into Roman Britain with the consequent extermination, expulsion and enslavement of the Romano-Britons. The opposing school of Anglo-Saxon diffusionism contends that the process of linguistic, cultural and religious change between the fourth and eighth century was by a process of adoption of elite culture from a small dominant minority.
The traditional view of the process was that of a mass invasion in which the Anglo-Saxon incomers drove the native Romano-British inhabitants to the western fringes of the island. The theory, first set out by Edward Augustus Freeman, suggests that the Anglo-Saxons and the Britons were competing cultures, and that through invasion, extermination, slavery, and forced resettlement the Anglo-Saxons defeated the Britons and consequently their culture and language prevailed. [1]
This view has influenced much of the scholarly and popular perceptions of the process of anglicisation in Britain. It remains the starting point and 'default position', to which other hypotheses are compared in modern reviews of the evidence. [2] Widespread extermination and displacement of the native peoples of Britain is still considered a viable possibility by a number of scholars. [3]
The idea of large scale displacement is rooted in the few primary sources from the time which tell of a period of violence. This is notable because it is from both the Romano-British and the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint.
There are very few chronicles surviving from Romano-British writers from the fifth and sixth centuries. However the most cited was from Gildas a Welsh monk whose sermon De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae has survived and paints a bleak picture of a history of violent expulsions from areas in the east where pagan Germanic peoples settled and westward migration of the Romano-British, largely due to the sinful nature of many British rulers. [4] Additionally Arthurian legends although neither contemporary nor historical writing, were later distillations of earlier largely Welsh folklore recounting active warfare between Christian Romano-Britons and pagan Saxon invaders.
From the Anglo-Saxon side, the consciously Saxon historian Bede also writes about the settlement in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He also takes the view that this was an invasion of three tribes - the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes - at a specific date 449 AD. [5] He also claims that the Welsh had a strong hostility to the Anglo-Saxons which meant that unlike the Irish missionaries or the Roman mission of Augustine they did not try to evangelise the Saxons. [6]
Near contemporary continental sources, although clearly further removed from events also backed up the Romano-British and Saxon accounts of Germanic immigration and displacement of native Britons. According to the Chronica Gallica of 452 , a chronicle written in Gaul, Britain was ravaged by Saxon invaders in 409 or 410. This was only a few years after Constantine III was declared Roman emperor in Britain, and during the period that he was still leading British Roman forces in rebellion on the continent. Although the rebellion was eventually quashed, the Romano-British citizens reportedly expelled their Roman officials during this period, and never again re-joined the Roman empire. [7] Writing in the mid-sixth century, Procopius states that after the overthrow of Constantine III in 411, "the Romans never succeeded in recovering Britain, but it remained from that time under tyrants". [8]
There are a number of non written methodologies that were traditionally used to back this school. Using linguistic analysis, British Celtic languages had very little impact on Old English vocabulary, and this suggests that a large number of Germanic-speakers became important relatively suddenly. [9] Such a view is broadly supported by the toponymic evidence. [10] On the basis of such evidence it has even been argued that large parts of what is now England were cleared of prior inhabitants.