Read The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are for Free Online

says he followed olderwriters, which is natural enough since he
     believed in such authorities. 40 His book was not scientific, and
     not historical in a modern sense. He didn’t question his sources so much as
     paste them together on the page, a brilliantly considered scrapbook. His book is
     naturally a Saxon account of Saxon triumphs, a Christian treatise. A Saxon monk was
     never likely to write anything else.
    This is where the trouble starts. Bede
     says that long before the Saxon missionaries landed, a king in Britain called
     Vortigern had invited Saxon mercenaries to come across the North Sea and help beat
     back the enemies of the Britons. He and his allies had asked for Roman help before,
     but the Romans were otherwise occupied, and the Picts and the Irish were still
     marauding. Three longships came in 449 CE , Bede says, carrying men
     who were expected to defend the country as friends but really meant to conquer it
     like enemies; Gildas, his sixth-century source, writes more colourfully that
     ‘a pack of cubs burst forth from the lair of the barbarian lioness, coming in
     three keels’. 41 They found the country rich,
     they thought the Britons cowardly and they summoned from home a much larger navy
     with many more fighting men. Jutes, Saxons and Angles arrived, with Hengist and
     Horsa as commanders, and they were followed by mobs of settlers, so many that the
     native Britons became nervous. They were right: the Saxons were about to turn their
     weapons on their allies. They ravaged almost all the island – the
     ‘dying’ island, Bede calls it. Houses fell, Christian priests were
     slaughtered at the altar, there was nobody prepared to bury the dead bishops and
     when the Britons took to the hills they were murdered in heaps. Some were starved
     into surrender, some quit the country altogether, some were exiled to the forests
     and mountains to scrape together what living they could. The Britons went away and
     England was Saxon. 42
    This is loaded stuff, and a little
     confusing. For a start, Bede was not just on the Saxon side; he seems to be on the
     pagan side against Christians. He had to believe that Christianity had somehow gone
     wrong in Britain, that the Britons deserved everything they got for being sinful,
     drunk and arrogant, including the plague he says was so sudden and violent there was
     nobody alive to bury the dead. The Saxons were God’s next means of punishment
     ‘that evil might fall on thereprobates’. He was particularly angry that the
     Britons, clergy and lay alike, threw off ‘the light yoke of Christ’; he
     says later that the Britons were rotten with heresy, corrupted by the comforting
     notion that man is not stained with original sin at all but is free to choose good
     or evil for himself. Bede gives a brief account of a British victory at Mount Badon
     which seems to contradict his notion that all the surviving Britons had died or run
     away, and then he gets to his real story: the coming of Saxon missionaries and their
     very rapid success. These are Saxons preaching to Saxons: what could go wrong? After
     all, the British – still around, it seems – collapsed into civil strife when they
     found they had no foreign wars to fight. 43
    Bede’s version is very powerful.
     It gives England a clean start and Christian faith. It turns history into a Saxon
     story. It has been used to explain how English was formed, why the English are
     somehow a racial group. But what if there never was an invasion? What if the real
     story was one of connections, of Saxons invited in over the years to help out in
     battles, of ‘Belgic’ peoples on the east side of England who spoke a
     Germanic language, as Tacitus said, even before the Romans arrived in 43 CE ? The Romans certainly had Germanic mercenaries, then small
     mobile field armies with Germanic soldiers who were billeted on civilians with
     plenty of opportunity to fraternize and put about their genes. Saxon