The origin of Anglo-Saxons

England in the late fifth century was occupied by three great barbarian kingdoms, Anglia, Saxony and Kent of Jute kingdom, each of which was founded by the chief English founding father.

The collapse of Roman rule in Britain was not so much a sudden catastrophe, as a long and drawn-out decline. The ‘Celtic’ Britons, who had been ‘civilized’ during centuries of Roman domination, retreated gradually to the highland areas of Wales, Cornwall and the south-west of Scotland.

Control of the fertile eastern lowlands was lost to warriors of Germanic origin who migrated from the Continent. 

These Germanic conquerors have become known to history as the ‘Anglo-Saxon’. The Anglo-Saxons were the people who transported themselves from the Cimbric peninsula, and its vicinity, in the fifth and sixth centuries, into England.

They were branches of the great Saxon confederation, which, from the Elbe, extended itself at last to the Rhine. They have come from ‘very powerful Germanic tribes’, the Saxons, Angles and Jutes.

The Angles, who came from Schleswig and the adjacent islands, occupied the Cimbric Peninsula of Denmark between the Jutes to their north, who gave Jutland its name, and the Saxons to their south, who came from Holstein. 

The Angles, Jutes and Saxons, all migrate to Britain in the fifth-century and by the tenth-century had merged to become the English People.

Saxons and Angles were united in fortune, and that shortly after their settlement, they were called Anglo-Saxons and their language Anglo-Saxon, to distinguish it from the same language on the continents, which was called Old Saxon.

The Anglo-Saxons were to dominate the lowland zone of Britain (basically England) until their final defeat at Hastings in 1066.
The origin of  Anglo-Saxons