Arthur Drives the Saxons from his Realm | King Arthur

by

Rupert S. Holland

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Tonight, we’ll read another story from our King Arthur series. This one, “Arthur Drives the Saxons from His Realm” comes from a book edited by Rupert S. Holland and published in 1919.

The Saxons were a group of Germanic peoples whose name was given in the early Middle Ages to a large former country in what is now Germany. In the late Roman Empire, the name was used to refer to Germanic coastal raiders, and as a name similar to the later "Viking".

In contrast, the British "Saxons", today referred to in English as Anglo-Saxons, became a single nation bringing together migrant Germanic peoples and assimilated Celtic Britons populations. The term "Anglo-Saxon", combining the names of the Angles and the Saxons, came into use by the eighth century to distinguish the Germanic inhabitants of Britain from continental Saxons.