Saxons

The Saxons appear in the sources from the second century as a people of the North Sea coast around the Elbe estuary, and their name derives from the seax, a single-edged knife. From the third century they were raiding the coasts of Gaul and Britain in shallow-draught oared ships, in company with Franks, on a scale that made Rome build a chain of forts from the Wash to the Solent under an officer titled the Count of the Saxon Shore. When Roman administration in Britain ended after 410, Saxons came as settlers and as hired soldiers, and by the sixth century they and the Angles and Jutes had founded the kingdoms - Wessex, Sussex, Essex - that became England, a process the British writer Gildas describes as invited and then betrayed. The Saxons who stayed on the continent, the Old Saxons, were a different story: a confederation with no king, governed by an annual assembly at Marklo where nobles, freemen and freedmen each sent representatives, and resolutely pagan. Charlemagne fought them for thirty-two years from 772, the longest war of his reign; he cut down the Irminsul, their sacred pillar, executed four and a half thousand prisoners at Verden in 782, deported populations, and made conversion compulsory on pain of death. Widukind's submission in 785 broke the resistance, and Saxony was absorbed into the Frankish empire by around 804. Within a century and a half the Saxon duchy produced the dynasty that took the German crown. The Saxon Shore forts still stand at Portchester and Burgh Castle. Widukind was baptised with Charlemagne as his godfather. The Marklo assembly is one of the earliest representative bodies recorded in Europe. Lower Saxony and Saxony both carry the name, and neither is where the Saxons started.

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