Although they are first mentioned by Ptolemy, in the mid second century AD, the Saxons played no part in European History until the later part of the third century. From their homeland in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany they then began to harass the coasts of western Europe and Britain, along with the Franks and other neighbouring peoples. Their attacks on Britain and Gaul intensified in the forth century and by the end of that century or early in the next they were seeking to settle within the Roman provinces. When the Roman frontiers could no longer function, bands of Saxons began to move into eastern Britain, attracted as others had been by the easily accessible, rich land. The Saxons who migrated to eastern Britain helped to create several small Germanic kingdoms which were only much later brought into a unified kingdom of England. Together with the other Germanic settlers of the time, the Angles and Jutes, they came to be known as the Anglo- Saxons, to distinguish them from the Saxons on the European mainland. The early Saxon settlers came in small groups and established themselves, or were established, in East Anglia, Essex, Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire, often at or close to Roman towns, as at Caister-By-Norwich and Dorchester-on-Thames. The tradition reported by Bede that the Saxons were brought to Britain by the leader Vortigern to serve as soldiers and only later turned against their employers, may be regarded as resting on fact, though the full story was almost certainly more complicated than the one that has been handed on to us. By the middle of the fifth century, Saxon immigration markedly increased. In eastern Britain there were Saxon settlements from Yorkshire to Kent, inland to the upper Thames valley with more and more of southern Britain falling under their control They did not, however, have matters all their own way. About 490, a Saxon force was defeated by the Britons at Mount Baden and for a time the Saxon advance was checked. but after 520 more expansionist Saxon regimes began to emerge in Sussex, Essex and Wessex, laying the foundations of later minor kingdoms. Contacts with the continental Saxon lands were not lost and new settlers probably came to Britain during the sixth century. There was also intermarriage with surviving ruling families, as the king-lists of Wessex and Lindsey reveal. Christianity spread slowly through the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms after Augustine was sent to Kent by Pope Gregory in 597. The following century was the age of conversion. After AD 600 minor kingdoms began to emerge among the Saxons settled in Britain. Kent was the earliest and most advanced. Wessex developed steadily through the seventh century to become the dominant power in the south and the nucleu

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Approximate Word count = 1852
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)