Anglo-Saxon-Northumbria

 

 

 

According to “The Anglo Saxon Chronicles” the first of the Angles, Ida came to the northeast in 40 ships, in the year 547AD. Landed somewhere on the coast above the Humber and by force of arms carved out a kingdom for himself and called it Bernicia.

When Ida died in 559, one of his followers Aelle, broke away, seized land to the south of the river Tees and set up his own kingdom Deira.  There were now two Angle kingdoms in the north and one day they would combine and become the powerful Kingdom of Northumbria.

But the Angles were not the first of the Saxons in northern Briton. According to “The Anglo Saxon Chronicles” they arrived a hundred years before Ida, when the Jutish mercenary leader Hengest, at the request of the Britons, sent his son and his men north to protect against the ravages of the Picts and Scots.

Even then they were not the first. Saxons, Angles and Jutes had been raiding the coast of Briton since Roman times. In fact the raiding became so bad that the Romans built forts all along the east coast to counter the threat. In the main these fierce piratical raiders came to pillage, plunder and take slaves to be sold on and then would sail off with their booty, leaving death and destruction behind.

But there were others of them, who finding a weakly defended area, would stay and a small foreign community would take root. Imagine these communities dotted about the country and add to them the communities made up of ex legionnaires from the Germanic auxiliary legions employed by the Romans and you find that quite a few Saxons were already here a long time before Ida arrived.

But still histories of kingdoms have to start somewhere and the Anglo Saxons according to the Chronicles, came to the northeast of what was to become Angle-land, (England) in 547AD.

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