Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain

The historiography on the Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain has tried to explain how there was a widespread change from Romano-British to Anglo-Saxon cultures in the area roughly corresponding to present-day England between the Fall of the Western Roman Empire and the eighth century, a time when there were scant historical records.

From as early as the eighth century until around the 1970s, the traditional view of the settlement was a mass invasion in which "Anglo-Saxon" incomers exterminated or enslaved many of the native "Romano-British" inhabitants of Britain, driving the remainder from eastern Britain into western Britain and Brittany. This view has influenced many of the scholarly and popular perceptions of the process of anglicisation in Britain. It remains the starting point and default position from which other hypotheses are compared in modern reviews of the evidence.

From the 1970s onwards there was a reaction to this narrative, drawing particularly on archaeology, contending that the initial migration had been of a very small group of elite warriors who offered a more attractive form of social organisation to the late Roman models available in Britain at the time.

Since around 2010, genetic studies have begun to contribute a new dataset, suggesting a greater migration from the Continent to Britain, and of Britons to the West, particularly in the case of Southern England and Eastern England, although not a total population replacement. There is as yet, however, little consensus about what this rapidly increasing body of data reveals.

Accounts of the transition from Roman to Anglo-Saxon culture in Britain have been influenced by the political contexts of the scholars who produced them, including many centuries of English colonialism within the British Isles, the Norman Conquest, the Reformation and British settlement in America. Twentieth-century academic disciplinary boundaries have led to divergent histories becoming accepted in different disciplines (for example between history, archaeology, and genetics) or in different sub-disciplines (for example between Roman and early medieval archaeology, or between archaeologists focusing on "Anglo-Saxon" and "Celtic" archaeology).