The soldiers arrived in "three ships of war, with their sails wafted by the wind and with omens and prophecies ... that they should occupy the country to which they were sailing three hundred years, and half of that time ... should plunder and despoil the same." So wrote Gildas, a sixth-century British monk, describing the Germanic conquest of Britain shortly after the end of Roman rule.
Since the Renaissance, scholars have been engaged in a curious and feverish debate over where the people who populate England came from. Did they arrive as conquerors, as Gildas would have it? Or by a more gradual and peaceful migration?
Under Roman administration, Britain was largely urban. People lived in tile-roofed stone buildings in towns connected by roads; they boasted a standing army and a coinage system. The things they made, jewelry or pots, drew on both continental and indigenous traditions but were uniquely their own.
By the 700s, things had changed entirely: Inhabitants lived mostly in country hamlets in wood-and-thatch homes resembling Grubenhauen, typical of northern Germany. With the empire gone, many workers had no market for their products, so they had to survive through subsistence farming.
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