Who Were The Angels And Anglo-saxton

The Angles were a German people who moved into England about 1

,500 years ago, in the 5th century A.D., and have lived there ever since. It is from them that England ("Angle-land") and the English language got their names. Two other German tribes, the Saxons and the Jutes, went to England at the same time. All these Germanic peoples were among the ancestors of the Englishmen of today. The Angles were warriors and sailors. They must have been very good-looking people, because there is a story that when Pope Gregory saw some of them in Rome he exclaimed, "Not Angles, but angels!" Until the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded England, it had been a colony of the Roman Empire. The Romans kept powerful armies there and no one could invade England.

But then Rome became hard-pressed fighting off German tribes that were trying to invade Italy, and called back the armies from England, leaving it too weak to defend itself. Within a few hundred years, most of the people in England were speaking a Germanic language that came to be called Anglo-Saxon, after the Angles and the Saxons. It is now usually called Old English. Many of the simple words we use today come from this Anglo- Saxon language, though our English language also has many other words that came from French, Latin, and other languages.

You may often hear the British people, and some of their descendants in America, spoken of as "Anglo-Saxon" peoples. This is not a correct scientific description of them. The English and other British peoples come from several sources: the Celts, who lived in England even before the Romans came, and who are still found in Wales, Ireland, and parts of Scotland; the Romans; the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; the Danes and other Scandinavian tribes; the French from Normandy; and many others who have gone to England to live in the course of the centuries.

Americans are even more a mixture of different nationalities than this. But all who speak the English language are united in the fact that it came originally from the Anglo- Saxon. The Anglo-Saxon language was little written until the time of King Alfred, about whom there is a separate story. The greatest of the early Anglo-Saxon writings was a long poem about a hero named Beowulf; see the article on beowulf in the next volume of this encyclopedia.

by: David Bunch

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