In recent years there has been some controversy regarding the origins of Saxon England. From the evidence of the written record, the dominance of the English language, and the distribution of Saxon place-names across the landscape, the assumption throughout most of history was that it came about through a series of invasions. However, in some contemporary scholarship, the use of the word ‘invasion’ or even ‘migration’ has fallen out of favor. Not only is it posited that there was no Saxon invasion at all–justified in part by the fact that we have found no massive battlefields–but that there was not even a migration. The Saxon conquest was, rather, a cultural takeover where the native British people remained living in all the same places throughout Britain, but gave up their language, culture, religion, traditions, and place names in order to adopt Read more…