Adventus Saxonum

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin adventus Saxōnum (“arrival of the Saxons”).

Proper noun

the Adventus Saxonum

1. (historical) The arrival en masse of Germanic settlers or invaders in Britain in the 5th–6th centuries CE.
   • 1936, R. G. Collingwood, J. N. L. Myres, Roman Britain and the English Settlements, →ISBN, page 356:

     If the ‘Adventus Saxonum’ is placed within ten years of the middle of the fifth century, it can hardly be far wrong; […]

   • 1996, Michael E. Jones, The End of Roman Britain, →ISBN, page 36:

     Anglo-Saxon demography and the adventus Saxonum begin with the fifth century.

   • 2004, Carole Hough, “The (Non?)-Survival of Romano-British Toponymy”, in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, volume 105, number 1, →JSTOR, page 25:

     The non-survival of Celtic place-names from the period before the Adventus Saxonum presents a perennial problem for students of Anglo-Saxon England.

   • 2022 October 5, Joanna Story, “Revisiting the Adventus Saxonum, again: exploring the implications of new evidence”, in The Past‎^[1]:

     The history of the Adventus Saxonum is a fascinating one. The stories that were told in the Middle Ages about ‘the Arrival of the Saxons’ on the island of Britain, and the influence of those stories on later audiences, reveal a lot about notions of collective identity.

Further reading

• Keynes, Simon (2013) “Adventus Saxonum”, in Michael Lapidge et al., editors, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, →ISBN
• Michelet, Fabienne L. (2017) “Adventus Saxonum”, in Robert Allen Rouse et al., editors, The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, →DOI