Anglo-Saxon England

Anglo Saxon England was the early medieval England from 449 to 1066, the six centuries that made the English. When Rome abandoned Britain, Angles, Saxons and Jutes crossed the North Sea, planted their villages on vacant Roman fields, and divided the lowlands into kingdoms: Kent, Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria and the rest, the seven of the Heptarchy. Augustine's mission converted Kent in 597, and within a lifetime Bede was writing church history in a Northumbrian monastery while missionaries carried the faith back to Germany. Offa of Mercia raised his great dyke against Wales and called himself king of the English. Then the sails came: Lindisfarne sacked in 793, the Great Heathen Army in 865 carving the Danelaw out of the north and east. Only Wessex held, and Alfred, hiding in the Somerset marshes, gathered an army, won at Edington in 878, retook London and set schools to copy the books the Danes had burned. His grandson Athelstan, victor at Brunanburh, ruled as the first king of all England in 927. Danish kings followed, then Edward the Confessor, and when Harold took the crown in January 1066, William of Normandy crossed the sea and killed him at Hastings that October, closing the Saxon age and opening the Norman one.