I have bad news for you: the Anglo-Saxons didn’t exist.
I realise you may have studied them or taught classes about them, but the fact remains: they didn’t exist.
There’s a lively debate going on among historians at the moment about what happened in Britain after the Roman legionaries left. How and when the English emerged are not, it seems, simple questions to answer. However, we don’t need to be drawn into this debate to see that, in the words of a recent article from Current Archaeology, it’s time to axe the Anglo-Saxons. We simply need to recognise that no one ever referred to himself or herself as an “Anglo-Saxon”.
