Anglo-Saxons

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The Anglo-Saxons were people from northern Holland, Denmark and Germany who immigrated to Great Britain. The historians aren’t sure of the reason why they immigrated, but maybe it was because their own land often was flooded and they had a hard time to grow crops, so they had to find a new place to settle down and farm - and that place happened to be Great Britain. Some people although say that the Saxons warriors were invited to England and that’s why they came. Anyway the Anglo-Saxons invaded Great Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries and the Romans, who governed the land, were driven away. The Romans who didn’t flee were taken as slaves.
The Anglo-Saxons didn’t have prisons. If you committed a small crime you probably would lose a hand or a nose, but if you killed some one you had to pay money to the dead persons family, and how much you had to pay depended on if the killed person were a free man or a slave. As you can imagine the price were much, much expensive if the man were free instead of a slave.
The Anglo-Saxons were at the beginning pagans and believed in many gods. The Pope sent a monk to England to turn the Anglo-Saxons into Christians and there were many Anglo-Saxons who converted to Christianity, and for that reason abandoned their old religion. They then started to build hundreds of churches and monasteries.
When the Vikings came in the 8th and 9th centuries they started to destroy the churches and they massacred people, stole animals and other things. In 878 they had conquered all of England, except Wessex which still was Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons manage to hold the Vikings back until 1066 when they got defeated in the Battle of Hastings, which also became the end of the Anglo-Saxons epoch. But the English language is a development of the language that the Anglo-Saxons spoke. Today if you hear some one talk about the Anglo-Saxons they probably mean people from one of the countries that have English as their main langua...