One such native churchman was Bede, a monk living and working at Jarrow and Wearmouth in north east England from the end of the 7th Century. His Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples, completed in 733, contains the often-quoted passage that describes the area of Kent as settled by Jutes, the area to the west of Kent by Saxons and the area to the north by Angles. This implies groups of people, coming from distinct parts of what we now think of as Germany and Denmark, and maintaining their group identity when they arrived in Britain. This identity was then reflected in the kingdoms they founded: the kingdoms of the West Saxons, the South Saxons, the East Anglians, and so on. This is all very neat, but even Bede accepts this isn’t the whole picture. In another part of the same Ecclesiastical History, he says that there were:

‘very many peoples in Germany from whom the Angles and Saxons, who now live in Britain, derive their origin…and these people are the Frisians, Rugians, Danes, Huns, Old Saxons and Bructeri.’

So even Bede acknowledged that there was no simple correspondence between places of origin in Germany, Scandinavia and the Low Countries, and the kingdoms formed in Britain.  It seems rather that the West Saxon, the East Anglian and all the other political identities that we know from the 7^th and later centuries were formed in Britain after the migrants had arrived, and may have owed little to the identities these people had in their land of origin. 

More than a hundred  years before Bede was writing, King Æthelberht of Kent, (the father of Queen Æthelburh who founded the church at Lyminge), was styled Rex Anglorum (‘King of the Angles’) by Pope Gregory writing from Rome.  While we don’t know what title he used himself, by contrast his successors in their own written documents called themselves Rex Cantiae (‘King of Kent’) or Rex Cantuariorum  (‘King of the Kentish people’) .  This tells us at least three different things: 

The earliest use of the name Saxones to describe contemporary people is in a work written by the Roman Emperor Julian in 356.  This suggests the name only came into use in the Roman world during the 4th Century.  There are indications of an actual group of people called Saxones living on the North Sea coast west of the River Elbe some 300 miles beyond the Roman frontier. There was at least one regiment of Saxons in the Roman army.  But until the middle of the 6th Century, the term was most usually used as a generic term, rather than as an ethnic identity. Saxones was used as a universal short-hand for pirates or raiders from beyond the Roman frontier, and this is perhaps most dramatically reflected in the name for the line of forts built by the Romans along the British coast from Brancaster in North West Norfolk to Portchester near Portsmouth.  The forts were built at different times from around the end of the 3rd Century, but we know they became part of a single military command from a document known as the Notitia Dignitatum that dates probably to the late 4th Century.  It lists the military commands of the Roman Empire and identifies these particular forts in Britain as belonging to the command of the Count of the Saxon Shore. 

There is debate whether the name Saxon Shore derives from it being the coastline attacked by Saxon raiders, or the coast settled by Saxons who had been engaged as troops to defend the frontier zone, a practice common throughout the later Roman Empire.  However, whether it comes from those attacking or those settling on this length of coast, the name Saxon Shore is perhaps most easily understood as deriving from the Romans’ own generic use of the term Saxon. Saxon was a synonym for barbarian or non-Roman sea raider, in much the same way that Viking or Northman was used in later centuries to describe Scandinavian raiders in general.  Use of Saxon as a by-word for raider continued through the 5th and 6th Centuries, and is found both in Continental Europe and further west in Britain where literacy and Roman culture survived. There is no obvious reason why the Saxon Shore should have been so-named either because it was attacked or because it was settled by people who were ethnically Saxon. At the time the Saxon Shore received its name, to the people of Roman Britain, Saxons were simply pirates and raiders from beyond the frontier.

To the Franks of 6th, 7th and 8th Century France, Saxonia meant what we now call England.  It was only because the area west of the Elbe was formally annexed by the Emperor Charlemagne around the end of the 8th Century and constituted as a political unit with the name Saxonia that the name Anglisaxones had to be invented. It was first used at Charlemagne’s court to distinguish the Saxons of England from the Saxons of Continental Saxony west of the River Elbe.  Today, we may think of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as meaning ‘a mixture of Angles and Saxons’, but in the 8^th and 9^th Centuries when the name was invented and first came into use, Anglisaxones may have had more the sense of ‘English Saxons’.  Alcuin, possibly the foremost scholar of his day, who lived and worked at the court of Charlemagne, was himself an Englishman.  He used the term Saxonia Anglorum (‘Saxony of the English’), which implies that Saxonia was a term applied to the whole country, while the people themselves were commonly known as the English.  This was not a new usage either.  In the early 8^th Century, Bede notes that the Abbot of his own monastery at Jarrow described his country as Saxonia, even though Bede’s own tripartite division of England places Jarrow in the land of the Angles.