What we know now as England was part of the Roman Empire for a few hundred years until the Romans withdrew around the year 300 CE. When they left, the natives were speaking a Celtic language, and some knew Latin. By the year 700, the people had their own language, Old English, and were spread over the countryside tending farms. We know that the English language owes a lot to Germanic influence, and that many Germans and Danes had moved to England. But was that a matter of conquest or just old-fashioned immigration?
Only the stories of royalty were chronicled, and even those accounts are spotty and often inaccurate compared to Roman records. But we don't know much about the everyday people of early England. Archaeologists keep digging them up, but until fairly recently, could not identify who they were or where they came from. That changed when advanced DNA analysis enabled us to trace which parts of Europe these long-dead people descended from. Add to that new isotope analysis techniques that tells the story of where an individual lived at different stages of their lives. These tests have been opening doors to the lives and ancestry of early medieval Britons who made England into, well, England. Read their stories in an article from the September issue of Smithsonian magazine.
(Image credit: Duncan Sayer)
