This was extremely important because although Henry had been born in England, he needed a bride with ties to the ancient Wessex line to increase his popularity with the English and to reconcile the Normans and Anglo-Saxons.

The Franks and the Anglo-Saxons were unique among the Germanic peoples in that they entered the empire as pagans and converted to Nicene ( Catholic ) Christianity directly, guided by their kings, Clovis and Æthelberht of Kent.

In their raids, the Anglo-Saxons traditionally preferred to attack head-on by assembling their forces in a shield wall, advancing against their target and overcoming the oncoming wall marshaled against them in defence.

Alfred's burh system posed such a formidable challenge against Viking attack that when the Vikings returned in 892 and successfully stormed a half-made, poorly garrisoned fortress up the Lympne estuary in Kent, the Anglo-Saxons were able to limit their penetration to the outer frontiers of Wessex and Mercia.

The events described in the poem take place in the late 5th century, after the Anglo-Saxons had begun their migration to England, and before the beginning of the 7th century, a time when the Anglo-Saxon people were either newly arrived or still in close contact with their Germanic kinsmen in Scandinavia and Northern Germany.

He was sent from Italy to England by Pope Gregory the Great, on a mission to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons from their native paganism, probably arriving with the second group of missionaries despatched in 601.

He was a member of the Gregorian mission sent from Italy to England to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons from their native Anglo-Saxon paganism, although the date of his arrival is disputed.

Laurence was part of the Gregorian mission originally dispatched from Rome in 595 to convert the Anglo-Saxons from their native paganism to Christianity ; he landed at Thanet, Kent, with Augustine in 597, or, as some sources state, first arrived in 601 and was not a part of the first group of missionaries.

Mellitus ( died 24 April 624 ) was the first Bishop of London in the Saxon period, the third Archbishop of Canterbury, and a member of the Gregorian mission sent to England to convert the Anglo-Saxons from their native paganism to Christianity.

Old English ( Ænglisc, Anglisc, Englisc ) or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southern and eastern Scotland, more specifically in the England Old Period, between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century.

The Anglo-Saxons themselves would consider him elf-shot ( attacked by elves ), their term for any number of deadly diseases.

Archaeological evidence collected from the cemeteries of the pagan Anglo-Saxons suggests that some of their settlements were abandoned and the frontier between the invaders and the native inhabitants pushed back some time around 500.

The Anglo-Saxons held the present counties of Kent, Sussex, Norfolk, Suffolk, and around the Humber ; it is clear that the native British controlled everything west of a line drawn from the mouth of the Wiltshire Avon at Christchurch north to the river Trent, then along the Trent to where it joined the Humber, then north along the river Derwent and east to the North Sea, and also controlled a salient to the north and west of London, and south of Verulamium, that stretched west to join their main territory.

The names and many details of their culture are in fact based on Germanic-derived cultures, particularly that of the Anglo-Saxons and their Old English language, towards which Tolkien felt a strong affinity.

So many English senior Thegns and lesser noblemen died at Stamford Bridge and Hastings that it was difficult for the Anglo-Saxons to resist their new Norman lords ; there were literally no leaders with standing to rally around.

In this endeavour, Pope Gregory I sent a group of clerics headed by the monk Augustine to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity and to establish new churches and dioceses in their territory.

These Anglo-Saxons needed and used the hunting and trapping predecessors as a means of subsistence until their agricultural pursuits improved their living conditions.

Before the arrival of the Normans the Anglo-Saxons had built burhs, fortified structures with their origins in 9th-century Wessex.

Britain had been Christianized under the Romans, but the incoming Anglo-Saxons practiced their indigenous religion ( Anglo-Saxon paganism ) and the church in Great Britain was limited to the surviving British kingdoms in Scotland and Wales, and the kingdom of Dumnonia in the southwest of England.

A member of the Gregorian mission sent in 601 by Pope Gregory I to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons from their native Anglo-Saxon paganism, Paulinus arrived in England by 604 with the second missionary group.

While both the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes attacked settlements to seize wealth and other resources, they employed very different strategies.

Generally preferring not to settle in the old Roman cities, the Anglo-Saxons built small settlements near their centres of agriculture.

Excavations and place-name evidence indicates that the early Anglo-Saxons ( pre-800 AD ) seem to have occupied the south and south-west of Norfolk most densely, with settlements concentrated along river systems.

That is, there was no trace of Anglo-Saxons in Britain as early as the late third century, to which time the archaeological evidence for the erection of the Saxon Shore forts was beginning to point.

* Anglo-Saxons, Germanic tribes that settled down in Britain and founded England

A brief account of Christianity in Roman Britain, including the martyrdom of St Alban, is followed by the story of Augustine's mission to England in 597, which brought Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons.

Quite possibly it was a survival of a Roman concept of " Britain ": it is significant that, while the hyperbolic inscriptions on coins and titles in charters often included the title rex Britanniae, when England was unified the title used was rex Angulsaxonum, (' king of the Anglo-Saxons '.

By the year 500, the Anglo-Saxons were in Britain, and the Burgundians were in the Rhône valley.

Native Celtic peoples had been marginalized during the period of Roman Britain, and when the Romans abandoned the British Isles during the 400s, waves of Germanic peoples, known to later historians as the Anglo-Saxons, migrated to southern Britain and established a series of petty kingdoms in what would eventually develop into the Kingdom of England by AD 927.

Historians are divided about what followed: some argue that the takeover of southern Great Britain by the Anglo-Saxons was peaceful.

* At some point after 440, the Anglo-Saxons settle in Britain.

He rules probably in the south of Britain and continues the war against the Anglo-Saxons.

* Bede treated this passage in his paraphrase as saying that the battle was — he inserted " about "— 44 years after the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain, which Bede ( not Gildas ) said was in 449.

* There are other tales from the mid-6th century about groups of Anglo-Saxons leaving Britain to settle across the English Channel.

Following the collapse of Roman rule at the beginning of the 5th Century, Britain was colonised by invaders from northern Europe called the Anglo-Saxons.

Scholars such as Christopher Snyder believe that during the 5th and 6th centuries — approximately from 410 AD when Roman legions withdrew, to 597 AD when St. Augustine of Canterbury arrived — southern Britain preserved a sub-Roman society that was able to survive the attacks from the Anglo-Saxons and even use a vernacular Latin for an active culture.

* Pryor, Francis ( 2004 ) Britain AD: a Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons.

By the 7th-century, England was almost entirely divided into kingdoms ruled by the Anglo-Saxons who had come to Britain two hundred years before.

Historia Brittonum, an ancient history of Britain traditionally attributed to Nennius, a ninth-century Welsh monk, records that Arthur, the war leader of the Britons fought his first battle against the Anglo-Saxons at the mouth of the River Glein.

Roman Britain had become fully Christianized, but the Anglo-Saxons retained their native faith.

Tol Eressëa was conceived as a mythological equivalent of the island of Great Britain or Albion before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons.

Although the battle is said to be the most important between the early northern and southern divisions of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, few details are available.

" Indeed, many historians believe King Arthur to be an entirely mythical character with no basis in historical fact, whilst some others disagree, maintaining that the legendary figure may be based upon an Early Medieval British leader who might have been involved in fighting the migrating Anglo-Saxons who were settling in Britain at that time.

In return, the Anglo-Saxons received lands in the southeast of Britain.