The Transformation of Post-Roman Britain A.D. 410-660

What would one day become 'England' emerged gradually during the so-called 'dark age', the two centuries that followed the separation of Britain from the Roman empire around A.D. 410. The present historical outline uses the surviving written and archaeological evidence (as well as the vast secondary literature) to reconstruct how immigrant Saxon groups, organised into seven kingdoms, had by the mid-7th century taken over all the lowlands and the northern uplands as far as the Firth of Forth from numerous smaller British polities.

The major reinterpretation offered here is of the traditional story of early Saxon conquests presented in king Alfred's West Saxon chronicle, to suggest instead that the decisive ones only began in the 590s and were not completed until after the upheavals of the Norse invasions almost three centuries later.