Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England, episode 1.3, building a new world.

This week then we discussed the basic story of the migrations and some of the evidence.

I need to give you the obligatory health warnings. It was just one reading. There are many

I have no doubt that would disagree and slaughter me, slaughter me with evidence. And who

knows what the story will be in a few years' time.

This week let's talk more about who these Anglo-Saxons were and what they were like.

About how the settlements unfold, the tribes and kingdoms that emerge from the soup, and

how societies begin to be structured during the 6th and 7th centuries. And then next

time we can get more political and start to look at the early Anglo-Saxon states and their

wranglings.

So what would they like these Germanic invaders?

First of all they were, of course, pagans. Sadly we know far less about Anglo-Saxon beliefs

than we do about Norse. We don't have anything like the superb survival of the sagas, but

it's highly likely that there's a very close relationship between the Norse and Germanic

pantheon of gods. And of course both of them were resolutely polytheistic.

We know about some of the gods in the Anglo-Saxon pantheon. The most important was Woden. Most

important, because in their genealogies this is the god from whom most of the kings claimed

sent. It is Woden, of course, that we get the day of the week Wednesday from. In Norse mythology

his equivalent Odin was often referred to as Grimeer, the masked one. And this carries

over into the Anglo-Saxon world, so that although we don't have any direct textual references,

we have survivals such as Grim's Dyke and Grime's Graves.

And there was Thunor, the thunder god, equivalent with Thor, from whom we get Thursday, how many

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