Buried review: Did the Anglo-Saxons really invade Britain?

Who were the Anglo-Saxons? Biological anthropologist Alice Roberts’s informed, sophisticated new take digs deep to re-examine their true origins

By Michael Marshall

FEW groups of people exert more power on English imagination than the Anglo-Saxons. They first appear in the historical record in the 1st millennium AD, in the wake of the Roman Empire’s retreat from Britain, and historians have seen them as playing a central role in the emergence of medieval English society. But were they a group who invaded Britain …