VIKINGS AND ANGLES AND SAXONS LIVING SIDE BY SIDE (COMMENT).

VIKINGS AND ANGLES AND SAXONS LIVING SIDE BY SIDE (COMMENT). As it happens, Mary Jane recently gave me a copy of Michael Wood’s THE DOMESDAY QUEST, and I was reading it at the time Michael Byrne posted his comment. Wood provides support for Byrne’s arguments. Byrne describes settlement patterns where “certain Germanic groups settled long ago (Danes in some areas, Swedes in others and Angles and Saxons in others – with mixing in these areas) – maybe even before the Romans. With virtually no solid proof from these areas, how can we make sweeping racial, cultural or linguistic statements?” Michael Wood says, “[E]verything points to a mixed society right from the start of the settlement period” and “All the evidence suggests that [the Scandinavians] moved in alongside the native Anglian peoples rather than drove them out or made them subject.”