Before that a number of British or Celtic tribes vied with the Roman forces of occupation, which had arrived in Britain under the command of Julius Caesar in 43 AD.
These warriors were tall, strong fighters with blue eyes and long blond hair. There re three main groups of invaders: Angles, Jutes, and Saxons. At first the Anglo-Saxons were hired as mercenary troops to defend the British from their northern enemies of the Picts, who lived in what is now Scotland.
But by AD 600 the Anglo-Saxons had settled in the east and south of England and conquered the British who had hired them.
By 750, the Anglo-Saxons occupied most of present-day England. The famed seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England – Kent, Sussex, Essex , Wessex, East Anglia and Northumbria - struggled for predominance throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, and from time to time a ruler of one of these kingdoms managed to establish hegemony over the other six.
Most of the people living in Anglo-Saxon England were farmers. They lived in individual farms or hamlets (small village) of between two and 10 farm units.
Each farm had a principal house made of thatch and wood in which the family loved and slept.
The English nation-sate began to form when the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms united against Danish Viking invasions, beginning around 800 AD. Over the following 150 years England was for the most part a politically unified entity, and remained permanently so after 927, when Athelstan of Wessex established the nation of England after the Battle of Brunanburh.
Norman conquests of England led by William the Conqueror in 1066 ended Anglo-Saxon and Danish rule of England, as the new Norman elite replaced virtually all of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and church leaders.
Anglo-Saxon
