ABSTRACT
In 865, following over half a century of Viking raiding activity, what contemporaries came to call the ‘great heathen army’ landed in East Anglia. Across the next decade these Scandinavian warriors shattered the political map of England. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which disintegrated in the face of Viking attack, together with the surviving West Saxon kingdom (with its by now dependent territories in Essex, Sussex and Kent), had roots deep in earlier history. The fifth and early sixth centuries AD witnessed the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west and the emergence in a sub-Roman, though still largely Catholic, world of Germanic barbarian ‘successor-states’ in Italy, Gaul and Spain. In a famous passage Bede writes about the peoples (gentes) who invaded Britain at the end of the Roman period – the Angles, Saxons and Jutes from Denmark and north Germany.
