Britain was settled not by three separate ‘tribes’ who carefully maintained their identities during the migration process, but by a steady flow of peoples from all around the coasts of northern Europe and southern Scandinavia. Saxons, Angles and Jutes were certainly among their number, but so too were Frisians, Swedes and Franks, all mixing together, forming communities, and combining their artistic cultures to create new ones. Bede himself, in a later but less celebrated passage, acknowledged this point, saying ‘there were very many peoples in Germany from whom the Angles and Saxons, who now
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