Saxon Mercenaries Seized England From the Native Britons
The Saxons had been raiding the Roman province of Britain throughout much of the 4th century. Then, in one of history’s worst “it takes a thief to catch a thief” brainstorms, the locals struck a deal to settle the Saxons on British soil, in exchange for Saxon promises to defend the rest of the province from other barbarians. It did not take the Saxons long to turn on the locals.
Much of what we know about the Saxons’ displacement of the Romano-Britons comes from De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (“On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain”), penned circa 510 – 530 by a British cleric, Saint Gildas. Another valuable source on the subject is the Venerable Bedes’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written about 731.
According to Gildas, the Saxons began by complaining that the Romano-Britons had skimped on the monthly supplies they had been promised. A conference meeting was arranged between Briton nobles led by a Vortigern, and the Saxons led by two chieftains named Hengist and Horsa, to resolve the dispute. However, the Saxons’ idea of resolving the dispute was to suddenly pull out daggers during the meeting, and murder the Britons. Only Vortigern was spared.
The Saxon declared that the locals had rendered the treaty void by failing to live up to its terms, and launched a massive onslaught that engulfed Roman Britain “from sea to sea”. Eventually, Hengist and Horsa forced Vortigern, whom they had reduced to a puppet, to enter into a treaty that ceded large swaths of southeastern England to the Saxons.
The Saxons were not content with those gains, however, and continued attacking the Britons. They launched a war of conquest that sought to seize the entire province, displace the local inhabitants, and replace them with Germanic settlers. The Saxons were joined by the Angles, from today’s Schleswig-Holstein, between Germany and Denmark, and Jutes, from today’s Jutland in Denmark, and Lower Saxony in Germany.
The onslaught lasted for 20 or 30 years, until the hard-pressed Britons won a crucial victory at the Battle of Mons Badonicus, sometime around 500. For some time at least, that stopped the invaders, who by then had overrun about half of what had been the Roman province. It was this period of warfare that gave rise to the stories of King Arthur, the heroic leader of legend who led the Britons against the Saxons.
While King Arthur is a figure of myth, archaeology does support a Saxon setback around 500. The pattern of Saxon settlement steadily expanding westward and replacing the Britons, suddenly reversed, and Briton settlements began expanding eastwards, displacing the Saxons and reclaiming previously lost lands. Thus, accounts of a major Briton victory sometime around 500 are probably true.
That stabilized the border between the Britons and Saxons, and their allied Angles and Jutes. For decades afterwards, the Britons held on to a region west of a crescent running roughly from Dorset on the English Channel to the Derwent River in Yorkshire, with salients jutting north and west of London, and south of St. Albans. For at least some undefined period, the Anglo-Saxons were also made to pay to tribute to the Britons.
The Britons’ reprieve proved only temporary, however. The Anglo-Saxons recovered, and resumed their expansion at the expense of the Britons, eventually conquering and settling nearly all of what is now England. The indigenous Britons lost their most productive lands, and their last independent remnants were pushed into the peripheral regions of Cornwall and Wales.