The Anglo-Saxons , in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English , were a cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to Germanic settlers who became one of the most important cultural groups in Britain by the 5th century. The Anglo-Saxon period in Britain is considered to have started by about and ended in , with the Norman Conquest.
By , most of the people of what is now England spoke Old English, and were considered English. Viking and Norman invasions changed the politics and culture of England significantly, but the overarching Anglo-Saxon identity evolved and remained dominant even after these major changes.
In the early 8th century, the earliest detailed account of Anglo-Saxon origins was given by Bede d. As a collective term, the compound term Anglo-Saxon , commonly used by modern historians for the period before , first appears in Bede's time, but it was probably not widely used until modern times.
Bede, like other authors, also continued to use the collective term " Saxons ", especially when referring to the earliest periods of settlement.
Roman and British writers of the 3rd to 6th century described those earliest Saxons as North Sea raiders, and mercenaries. Later sources, such as Bede, believed these early raiders came from the region they called " Old Saxony ", in what is now northern Germany , which in their own time had become well known as a region resisting the spread of Christianity and Frankish rule.
