and from that came the word England. The Anglo-Saxons were pagans who worshipped gods such as Woden, Thor and Freya, whose names were to give the English language the words Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The Anglo-Saxons had no interest in the Roman way of life, their society was differently organized. At the top came the nobles who fought, next the ceorls (freemen) who farmed and, at the bottom, slaves. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t live in towns, but in wooden huts. Their whole existence was war. Fighting bound them together in ties of loyalty to their leader. Loyalty was seen as the greatest of human virtues and the most detestable of all crimes was the betrayal of a king.

The Angles and Saxons took possession of all the land as far as the mountains in the north and west, and divided it into a handful of small kingdoms. In the south-east there was the kingdom of Kent and the south Saxon kingdom (Sussex), in the east – the kingdom of East Saxons (Essex), in the Midlands – Mercia, in the north – Northumbria, in the south-west – Wessex. Eventually the Christian Celts were wholly defeated; those who escaped death were pushed back into the mountains of Wales and Scotland, and also to Ireland, where their languages – Welsh, Gaelic and Erse – can still be heard.

In 597 Pope Gregory sent a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. It is believed that the mission was inspired by the pope meeting a group of fair-haired youths in Rome. He asked them who they were and what their country of origin was. They answered that they were Engles, Angli in Latin. The pope is said to have remarked that he saw them not as Angli, but Angeli, that is angels. The papal mission was led by St. Augustine, and the missionaries made their base at Canterbury. The king of Kent, Ethelbert, fearing magic, insisted that his meeting with the missionaries take place beneath an open sky. Out of this came the grant of a place in Canterbury in which they could live and had permission to preach. Soon there were many converts, old churches began to be restored and new ones built. After a year Ethelbert himself became Christian. Augustine was consecrated Bishop and later Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet, that mission was only the beginning of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, a task that took most of the 7th century to achieve.

Monasteries such as Canterbury became centres of teaching and learning, where both Greek and Latin were taught, as well as so called Seven Liberal Arts that included the trivium – grammar or the art of writing, rhetoric or the art of speaking and the dialectic, the art of reasoned argument – and the quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. The most famous of all these scholars was the monk Bede (better known as the Venerable Bede), who wrote the History of the English Church.

Thus, by the 8th century a new society, deeply Christian, had come into being, only to face a new wave of invasions as fierce Northern people, the Vikings, began to attack from beyond the seas.

The story of Viking invasions is dramatically told in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which traces how these raids accelerated during the second half of the 8th century. The Vikings were a people from Scandinavia, mainly Norway, Sweden and Denmark, whose life originally consisted in working the land and fishing, but who went on to attack and later settle in Britain, Northern France, Russia, Iceland and Greenland. One of the basic reasons for their endless raids was that their homelands no longer produced enough to support them. Another was the nature of their society that glorified fighting. The Vikings were pagan and believed that the gods rewarded fighters above all and that bloodshed and death in battle were the true paths to wealth and happiness.