The Anglo-Saxons Wrested England From the Romano-British
After the Roman conquest of Britain in the 1st century AD, they formed a province comprised of England, Wales, and parts of eastern Scotland, which experienced centuries of peace, stability, and prosperity. Roman troops from across the Empire were garrisoned in the towns, and many married local Britons. By the 4th century AD, Roman soldiers and their families in Britain numbered about 125,000, out of an estimated population of 3.6 million.
There were also thousands of Roman officials, businessmen, artisans, and other professionals, who descended upon the province, often bringing their families with them. Together with the Roman military, they formed a sizeable Roman core that transformed Britain and Romanized the native Britons. Hitherto Celtic in language and customs, the indigenous population melded with their conquerors to form a Romano-British culture.
While the bulk of Roman Britain’s population was rural, there was a sizeable urban population numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and the province’s capital, Londinium, had a population of about 60,000. Londinium was a cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse city, inhabited by Britons, as well as people from North Africa, the Middle East, the Rhineland, and the rest of the Roman and Mediterranean world.
Christianity arrived in the 3rd century. Saint Alban, one of its early adherents and martyrs, was beheaded in the Roman town of Verulamium, which was eventually renamed Saint Alban. The new faith caught on and spread like wildfire, and within a century, the province of Britain, like much of the rest of the Roman world, had become Christian.
Roman citizenship was granted to a steadily growing number of native Britons, and in 212, Roman citizenship was granted to all free men throughout the Roman Empire, and all free Britons became Romans. By the 4th century, Britain had been transformed into one of the most loyal provinces of the Roman Empire. Then the bottom fell out, when the Romans abruptly left the island, and told the natives to take care of and look out for themselves.