Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: What countries did the Anglo-Saxons inhabit?
The Anglo-Saxons were a cultural group who inhabited Great Britain from the 5th century, and the direct ancestors of the majority of the modern British people. They comprise people from Germanic tribes who migrated to the island from continental Europe, their descendants, and indigenous British groups who adopted many aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture and language; the cultural foundations laid by the Anglo-Saxons are the foundation of the modern English legal system and of many aspects of English society; the modern English language owes over half its words – including the most common words of everyday speech – to the language of the Anglo-Saxons. Historically, the Anglo-Saxon period denotes the period in Britain between about 450 and 1066, after their initial settlement and up until the Norman conquest.
The early Anglo-Saxon period includes the creation of an English nation, with many of the aspects that survive today, including regional government of shires and hundreds. During this period, Christianity was established and there was a flowering of literature and language. Charters and law were also established. The term "Anglo-Saxon" is popularly used for the language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons in England and eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. In scholarly use, it is more commonly called Old English.
British and African Romance—the forms of Vulgar Latin used in southeastern Britain and the Roman province of Africa, where it had been spoken by much of the urban population—disappeared in the Middle Ages (as did Pannonian Romance in what is now Hungary, and Moselle Romance in Germany). But the Germanic tribes that had penetrated Roman Italy, Gaul, and Hispania eventually adopted Latin/Romance and the remnants of the culture of ancient Rome alongside existing inhabitants of those regions, and so Latin remained the dominant language there. In part due to regional dialects of the Latin language and local environments, several languages evolved from it.
The Christianization of Scandinavia as well as other Nordic countries and the Baltic countries, took place between the 8th and the 12th centuries. The realms of Scandinavia proper, Denmark, Norway and Sweden (Sweden is an 11th or 12th century merger of the former countries Götaland and Svealand), established their own Archdioceses, responsible directly to the Pope, in 1104, 1154 and 1164, respectively. The conversion to Christianity of the Scandinavian people required more time, since it took additional efforts to establish a network of churches. The Sami remained unconverted until the 18th century. Newer archaeological research suggests there were Christians in Götaland already during the 9th century, it is further believed Christianity came from the southwest and moved towards the north.
Edward the Elder was succeeded by his son Æthelstan, who Simon Keynes calls the "towering figure in the landscape of the tenth century". His victory over a coalition of his enemies – Constantine, King of the Scots, Owain ap Dyfnwal, King of the Cumbrians, and Olaf Guthfrithson, King of Dublin – at the battle of Brunanburh, celebrated by a famous poem in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle", opened the way for him to be hailed as the first king of England. Æthelstan's legislation shows how the king drove his officials to do their respective duties. He was uncompromising in his insistence on respect for the law. However this legislation also reveals the persistent difficulties which confronted the king and his councillors in bringing a troublesome people under some form of control. His claim to be "king of the English" was by no means widely recognised. The situation was complex: the Hiberno-Norse rulers of Dublin still coveted their interests in the Danish kingdom of York; terms had to be made with the Scots, who had the capacity not merely to interfere in Northumbrian affairs, but also to block a line of communication between Dublin and York; and the inhabitants of northern Northumbria were considered a law unto themselves. It was only after twenty years of crucial developments following Æthelstan's death in 939 that a unified kingdom of England began to assume its familiar shape. However, the major political problem for Edmund and Eadred, who succeeded Æthelstan, remained the difficulty of subjugating the north. In 959 Edgar is said to have "succeeded to the kingdom both in Wessex and in Mercia and in Northumbria, and he was then 16 years old" (ASC, version 'B', 'C'), and is called "the Peacemaker". By the early 970s, after a decade of Edgar's 'peace', it may have seemed that the kingdom of England was indeed made whole. In his formal address to the gathering at Winchester the king urged his bishops, abbots and abbesses "to be of one mind as regards monastic usage . . . lest differing ways of observing the customs of one Rule and one country should bring their holy conversation into disrepute".
Swedish pre-history ends around 800 CE, when the Viking Age begins and written sources are available. The Viking Age lasted until the mid-11th century, when the Christianization of Scandinavia was largely completed when Sweden became the last Norse country to adopt Christianity. Scandinavia was formally Christianized by 1100 AD. The period 1050 to 1350 – when the Black Death struck Europe – is considered the Older Middle Ages. The Kalmar Union between the Scandinavian countries was established in 1397 and lasted until King Gustav Vasa ended it upon seizing power. The period 1350 to 1523 – when king Gustav Vasa, who led the unification of Sweden, was crowned – is considered the Younger Middle Ages.
Æthelstan continued the expansion of his father and aunt and was the first king to achieve direct rulership of what we would now consider England. The titles attributed to him in charters and on coins suggest a still more widespread dominance. His expansion aroused ill-feeling among the other kingdoms of Britain, and he defeated a combined Scottish-Viking army at the Battle of Brunanburh. However, the unification of England was not a certainty. Under Æthelstan's successors Edmund and Eadred the English kings repeatedly lost and regained control of Northumbria. Nevertheless, Edgar, who ruled the same expanse as Athelstan, consolidated the kingdom, which remained united thereafter.
Old Icelandic was very close to Old Norwegian, and together they formed the Old West Norse dialect, which was also spoken in settlements in Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man and northwest England, and in Norse settlements in Normandy. The Old East Norse dialect was spoken in Denmark, Sweden, settlements in Kievan Rus', eastern England, and Danish settlements in Normandy. The Old Gutnish dialect was spoken in Gotland and in various settlements in the East. In the 11th century, Old Norse was the most widely spoken European language, ranging from Vinland in the West to the Volga River in the East. In Kievan Rus', it survived the longest in Veliky Novgorod, probably lasting into the 13th century there. The age of the Swedish-speaking population of Finland is strongly contested, but at latest by the time of the Second Swedish Crusade in the 13th century, Swedish settlement had spread the language into the region.
Between c. 1150 and c. 1400, most of the Scottish Lowlands became English culturally and linguistically through immigration from England, France and Flanders and from the resulting assimilation of native Gaelic-speaking Scots although Lowland Gaelic was still spoken in Galloway until the 18th century. The Scots language is the resulting Germanic language still spoken in parts of Scotland and is very similar to the speech of the Northumbrians of northern England. Between the 15th and 17th centuries Scots spread into more of mainland Scotland at the expense of Scottish Gaelic although Gaelic maintained a strong hold over the Scottish Highlands, and Scots also began to make some headway into the Northern Isles. The latter, Orkney and Shetland, though now part of Scotland, were nominally part of the Kingdom of Norway until the 15th century. A version of the Norse language was spoken there from the Viking invasions until replaced by Scots in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Vikings were also active in Francia. Some of these Vikings would sail through the Strait of Gibraltar and pillage the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. In the early 10th century, a group of Vikings under the leadership of Rollo settled in Rouen, France, and established the Duchy of Normandy. The descendants of these Vikings, known as the "Normans", would in the 11th century conquer England, Southern Italy, and North Africa, and play a leading role in launching the Crusades. Sub-groups of the Normans include Anglo-Normans, Scoto-Normans, Cambro-Normans, Hiberno-Normans and Italo-Normans.
From the 8th to the 10th century, the wider Scandinavian region was the source of Vikings. The looting of the monastery at Lindisfarne in Northeast England in 793 by Norse people has long been regarded as the event which marked the beginning of the Viking Age. This age was characterised by expansion and emigration by Viking seafarers. They colonised, raided, and traded in all parts of Europe. Norwegian Viking explorers first discovered Iceland by accident in the 9th century when heading for the Faroe Islands, and eventually came across Vinland, known today as Newfoundland, in Canada. The Vikings from Norway were most active in the northern and western British Isles and eastern North America isles.
Æthelstan is regarded as the first King of England by some modern historians. Although it was Eadred who would achieve the final unification of England by the permanent conquest of Viking York, Æthelstan's campaigns made this success possible. His nephew Edgar called himself King of the English and revived the claim to rule over all the peoples of Britain. Simon Keynes argued that "the consistent usages of Edgar's reign represent nothing less than a determined reaffirmation of the polity created by Æthelstan in the 930s". Historian Charles Insley, however, sees Æthelstan's hegemony as fragile: "The level of overlordship wielded by Æthelstan during the 930s over the rest of Britain was perhaps not attained again by an English king until Edward I." George Molyneaux argues that:
Some classify the northern dialects of Low German together with English and Frisian as the "North Sea Germanic" or "Ingvaeonic" languages. However, most exclude Low German from that group often called Anglo-Frisian languages because some distinctive features of that group of languages are only partially observed in Low German, for instance the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (some dialects have "us", for "us" whereas others have , ), and because other distinctive features do not occur in Low German at all, for instance the palatalization of /k/ (compare palatalized forms such as English "cheese", Frisian to non-palatalized forms such as Low German or , Dutch , German ).
While some Swedish areas had Christian minorities in the 9th century, Sweden was, because of its geographical location in northernmost Europe, not Christianized until around AD 1000, around the same time as the other Nordic countries, when the Swedish King Olof was baptized. This left only a modest gap between the Christianization of Scandinavia and the Great Schism, however there are some Scandinavian/Swedish saints who are venerated eagerly by many Orthodox Christians, such as St. Olaf. However, Norse paganism and other pre-Christian religious systems survived in the territory of what is now Sweden later than that; for instance the important religious center known as the Temple at Uppsala at Gamla Uppsala was evidently still in use in the late 11th century, while there was little effort to introduce the Sami of Lapland to Christianity until considerably after that.
Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the late 7th century. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is "Cædmon's Hymn", composed between 658 and 680. There is a limited corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries, but the oldest coherent runic texts (notably the Franks Casket) date to the 8th century. The Old English Latin alphabet was introduced around the 9th century.
With the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (outside the Danelaw) by Alfred the Great in the later 9th century, the language of government and literature became standardised around the West Saxon dialect (Early West Saxon). Alfred advocated education in English alongside Latin, and had many works translated into the English language; some of them, such as Pope Gregory I's treatise "Pastoral Care", appear to have been translated by Alfred himself. In Old English, typical of the development of literature, poetry arose before prose, but King Alfred the Great (871 to 901) chiefly inspired the growth of prose.
Old English literature or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses literature written in Old English, in Anglo-Saxon England from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066. "Cædmon's Hymn", composed in the 7th century, according to Bede, is often considered the oldest extant poem in English, whereas the later poem, The Grave is one of the final poems written in Old English, and presents a transitional text between Old and Middle English. The "Peterborough Chronicle" can also be considered a late-period text, continuing into the 12th century.
One of the oldest known pieces of British literature is a poem called "Y Gododdin", written in Old Welsh, having previously been passed down via the oral traditions of the Brythonic speaking Britons. This poem celebrates the bravery of the soldiers from what was later referred to by the Britons as "Yr Hen Ogledd" – The Old North; a reference to the fact that this land was lost in battle to an invading force at Catraeth (modern day Catterick).
Viking activity in the Iberian peninsula seems to have begun around the mid-ninth century as an extension of Viking raids on and establishment of bases in Frankia in the earlier ninth century. While connections between the Norse and Eastern Islamic lands were well-established, particularly involving the Rus') along the Volga and around the Caspian Sea, relations with the Western edge of Islam were more sporadic and haphazard. Although Vikings may have over-wintered in Iberia, no evidence has been found for trading or settlement. Indeed, the Iberian peninsula may not have offered particularly wealthy targets, in the ninth to tenth centuries. Sporadic raiding continued until the end of the Viking Age.
The majority of the vocabulary is of Indo-Aryan origin but there are a number of loanwords from other languages. Welsh loanwords include "melanō" ("yellow", from "melyn"), "grīga" ("heather", from "grug") and "kraŋka" ("crab", from "cranc"). There are also English loanwords such as "vlija" ("village"), "spīdra" ("spider") and "bråmla" ("bramble"). Historically the variants of Welsh and English Romani of the Romanichal, constituted the same variant of Romani, share characteristics and are historically closely related to dialects spoken in France, Germany (Sinti), Scandinavia, Spain, Poland, North Russia and the Baltic states. Such dialects are descended from the first wave of Romani immigrants into western, northern and southern Europe in the late Middle Ages.
Apart from Anglo-Saxon architecture, which survives entirely in churches, with only a handful of largely unaltered examples, monumental stone sculpture survives in large stone crosses, an equivalent to the high crosses of the Celtic areas of Britain. Most sculpture was probably once painted, clarifying the designs, which are mostly in relatively low relief and not finished with great precision, and now almost all badly worn and weathered. Dating is usually difficult. Sculpture in wood was very likely more common, but almost the only significant large survival is St Cuthbert's coffin in Durham Cathedral, probably made in 698, with numerous linear images carved or incised in a technique that is a sort of large-scale engraving. The material of the earliest recorded crosses is unknown, but may well have been wood. From various references (to its destruction by Christians) there would seem to have been a tradition of Anglo-Saxon pagan monumental sculpture, probably in wood, of which no examples remain (as opposed to later Anglo-Scandinavian pagan imagery), and with which the crosses initially competed.
In 395 Theodosius I, who had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, would be the last emperor to preside over a united Roman Empire. The empire was split into two halves: the Western Roman Empire centred in Ravenna, and the Eastern Roman Empire (later to be referred to as the Byzantine Empire) centred in Constantinople. The Roman Empire was repeatedly attacked by Hunnic, Germanic, Slavic and other “barbarian” tribes (see: Migration Period), and in 476 finally the Western part fell to the Heruli chieftain Odoacer.
The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 300–400 million native English speakers and over 100 million native German speakers. They belong to the West Germanic family. The West Germanic group also includes other major languages, such as Dutch with 23 million, Low Saxon with approximately 5 million speakers in Germany and 1.7 million in the Netherlands, and Afrikaans with over 6 million native speakers. The North Germanic languages include Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. There is also the East Germanic branch, which includes languages such as Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, but it has been extinct for at least two centuries. The SIL "Ethnologue" lists 48 different living Germanic languages, with the Western branch accounting for 42, and the Northern for 6 languages. The total number of Germanic languages is unknown, as some of them, especially East Germanic languages, disappeared shortly after the Migration Period.
Germans have resided in the United Kingdom throughout its history. The Anglo-Saxons were partly from what is now Northern Germany, and created the notion of England as a Germanic country. Likewise, the English language was descended from their dialects. The Anglo-Saxons arrived in what later became England from the 440s. Examples include the Hanseatic merchants of the Middle Ages and also the sixteenth-century Protestant refugees who emigrated to Great Britain to flee the instability caused by the religious wars following the Reformation. By the end of the seventeenth century, a significant German community had developed, consisting mostly of businessmen, mainly from Hamburg; sugar bakers and other economic migrants.
What happened to the indigenous Brittonic people is also subject to question. Heinrich Härke and Richard Coates point out that they are invisible archaeologically and linguistically. But based on a fairly high Anglo-Saxon figure (200,000) and a low Brythonic one (800,000), Brythonic people are likely to have outnumbered Anglo-Saxons by at least four to one. The interpretation of such figures is that while "culturally, the later Anglo-Saxons and English did emerge as remarkably un-British, . . . their genetic, biological make-up is none the less likely to have been substantially, indeed predominantly, British". The development of Anglo-Saxon culture is described by two processes. One is similar to culture changes observed in Russia, North Africa and parts of the Islamic world, where a powerful minority culture becomes, over a rather short period, adopted by a settled majority.
Most of southern, eastern and central England has shown a somewhat close genetic similarity with modern populations in the Low Countries, Germany and Denmark, which has been interpreted as representing a major contribution by peoples originally from Germany or Denmark such as the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Franks, later Danes and the previous Belgae Celts who had inhabited the same areas of Britain, or prior immigrants from before the aforementioned peoples arrived while the populations of areas such as Wales and southwestern England are closer to populations of modern-day western France 
"'We might be seeing the result of Anglo-Saxon invasions pushing other peoples down into Cornwall or Wales,' Bruce Winney suggests. 'Or we might be seeing how Britain was recolonised after the ice ages. The West of our islands may have been peopled by movement up the coastal areas from Atlantic-facing Europe, whilst the southeast was influenced by pre-Anglo-Saxon movements from the area that now spans Denmark to Belgium. These patterns may then have been reinforced by the Anglo-Saxon invasions much later.'"
Various scholars have used a synthesis of evidence to present models to suggest an answer to the questions that surround the Anglo-Saxon settlement. These questions include: How many migrants were there? When did the "Saxons" gain political ascendency? What happened to the 'Romano-Brittonic' peoples in the south-east of Britain? The Anglo-Saxons were a mix of invaders, migrants and acculturated indigenous people. The ratios and relationships between these formative elements at the time of the Anglo-Saxon settlement are the subject of enquiry. The traditional interpretation of the settlement of Britain has been subject to profound reappraisal, with scholars embracing the evidence for both migration and acculturation. Heinrich Härke explains the nature of this agreement: "It is now widely accepted that the Anglo-Saxons were not just transplanted Germanic invaders and settlers from the Continent, but the outcome of insular interactions and changes. But we are still lacking explicit models that suggest how this ethnogenetic process might have worked in concrete terms".