How DIVERSE was Roman Britain? New DNA evidence

A preprint for a new large study by Silva et al titled "Genomic history and selection in Roman and early medieval Britain” uses new data with 1039 ancient samples and new methods to confirm what previous studies have found about our island history.

Anglo-German relations and the Origin of Germans

 

Anglo-German relations were good in the 19th century up until the Boer war, and have been tense ever since. In this talk, historian, Tom Rowsell , explains the deep roots the two nations share in common; the Anglo-Saxons, the Celts, the Bell Beaker folk, The Single Grave Culture and the network of Bronze Age cultures in Northern Europe who traded with each other and shared mutual descent from the Corded Ware culture. The talk was delivered to students in Hamburg in February 2026.

Roots of the Saxons // History Documentary

The English have roots in Northern Germany. But what was life like for the Saxons in the old country? Why did they want to go to Britain? And what was the relationship of the Old Saxons to the Roman Empire? Find out in this travel documentary in which I visit Lower Saxony and interview a local archaeologist on these important matters.

Sources: 

• Hesse, Stefan. (2009). Grenzen in Archäologie und Geschichte. 
• Hauck. K., Die Goldbrakteaten der Völkerwanderungszeit (1985) 
• Skre, Dagfinn. (2024). The Northern Routes to Kingship: A History of Scandinavia AD 180–550 
• Taayke, E. (2024) “Meanwhile, in the North...Handmade Pottery beyond the Roman Frontier,” ROMAN POTTERY IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 
• Holst and Nielsen (2020) ‘Excavating Nydam: Archaeology, Palaeoecology and Preservation. The National Museum [of Denmark]’s Research Project, Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries and University Press of Southern Denmark 
• McLaughlin, R. (2025) ‘Germania: the Ancient Germans in Greek and Roman Sources: Geography, Society, Warfare, Religion, and Customs’ 

Probably other books too which I forgot to put in as i was researching for months. 

Art:

• CGI Odin by Skellyboi 
• Kivik CGI by Robert Molyneaux 
• Hengist and Horsa and Sutton Hoo funeral by Graman 
• Wading through Hell by Jack Jones 
• Historical reconstruction art and photography by Samson Goetze, Joan Oliveras, Jonas Radtke 
• Nordic Bronze age map by Maptism 
• Migration map animation by 1st Aquarian 

Music:

• Kulturgeist 
• Freond 
• 11 Eastern 
• Faunus Amadeus Loki 
• Khan Kurra 
• 97 Sound Signal
• Bark sound productions 
• Halindir

What Is An Englishman?

The English ethnic group traces its origins to 5th-century Germanic migrants who integrated with native Britons. Modern genetic studies confirm English people, first documented by Bede in 731 AD, are today 25-47% Anglo-Saxon.

 

England is named after the English ethnic group, not the other way around. An Englishman may move abroad and remain an Englishman, and a foreigner who moves to England does not thereby become English. English culture is defined by whatever ethnically English people do. English ethnicity is determined by heritage. If you descend from the medieval English people and were enculturated among their descendants in England, then you are ethnically and culturally English.

England was first united under one crown in 927 AD, which is 1,098 years ago. So England as a nation-state is over 1,000 years old, but England – that is, the land of the English – is much older.

The English were first defined as a native ethnic group in Britain by Bede in c. 731 AD. However, their ancestors, the Angles on the continent, are first described by the Roman historian Tacitus, who called them the 'Anglii' in 98 AD (and we cannot imagine that they did not exist before the Romans learned about them).

Not only do we have these written sources, making us one of the most historically well-attested, extant ethnic groups on Earth today, but we also have scientific evidence confirming the recordings of our origins first presented by the Venerable Bede and in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

A combination of new genetic evidence, old archaeological evidence and a novel approach to the analysis of skull morphology (craniometry) have revealed what really happened in this obscure period of history, traditionally called the Dark Ages, to which we trace our ethnogenesis.

In the fifth century AD, large numbers of Germanic peoples from the continent migrated, in a seemingly coordinated way, to Britain. The initial impact on the Eastern part of the country has been estimated to indicate a population displacement of up to 75% according to a study of skulls (Plomp KA, et al, 2021) or a displacement of up to 80% according to genetic evidence (Gretzinger J, et al, 2022). There followed a period of integration as the English moved further West, causing formerly Brythonnic speaking natives either to adopt the Germanic language and culture of the English, or to flee to the Western fringes of the island where they became the Cornish and Welsh peoples. This integration with the natives resulted in a modern English population that was estimated to be 40% of Germanic origin and 60% Brythonic in a 2016 study (Schiffels S, et al, 2016). A larger and more conclusive study of ancient English DNA from 2022 estimates that modern English people range from 25-47% Anglo-Saxon (CNE), 11-57% Iron-age Briton (WBI), and 14-43% French. The ethnic English must therefore be modelled with three Iron-Age source populations, not just two, due to continuous immigration from France during the Middle Ages (Gretzinger J, et al, 2022). The variations in ancestral proportions reflect regional diversity within the English ethnic group, with Brythonic ancestry remaining higher in the West and Germanic ancestry being higher in Eastern and Central regions.

However, it must be understood that while the English are about 40% like the fifth century Germanic migrants (averaged across all regions, ignoring modern population density), they have a far greater genetic affinity to the English of the Middle and Late Anglo-Saxon periods, who had already assimilated the native Britons. The modern English genetic group existed in the Middle Anglo-Saxon era and by the time the term “Anglo-Saxon” was in use, the people who it referred to were almost entirely the same as modern ethnically English people.

The archaeological record includes one man of entirely native “Celtic” British ancestry (grave 37, Updown Eastry, Gretzinger et al 2022) interred along with weapons in a high-status pagan Germanic barrow – showing that the natives not only became English but were able to achieve high status within the Germanic English culture.

Another ancient pagan grave, including a cow sacrifice, was found at Oakington near Cambridge (grave 80, Gretzinger et al 2022) among a total of 124 inhumations. It contained a woman whose genetic ancestry has been determined to be around 60% native British and 40% Germanic invader – and this mix is much the same as that of the average Englishman today, even though the term 'English' did not yet exist when she was buried (Gretzinger et al 2022).

The terms 'English' and 'Anglo-Saxon' were synonyms. While 'English' was first recorded as an ethnonym by Bede around 731 AD, the term 'Anglo-Saxon' came a bit later when King Alfred the Great, formerly just King of the West Saxons, captured the Mercian-Anglian territory of London in 886 AD, and was thenceforth known as 'Rex AngulSaxonum'. Both terms continued to be used for the next two centuries. A 10th-century charter of King Eadwig describes him as “King of the Anglosu” – an abbreviation of 'Anglo-Saxonum' – and King Cnut sometimes used the title "King of the Anglo-Saxons" as recently as the 11th century.

After the Normans invaded in the 11th century, they referred to the natives as 'Engleis' and in so doing recognised their distinct ethnic identity. The Normans brought an end to the so-called Anglo-Saxon era, but not to Englishness. Neighbours on the continent referred to the English then, and still do, with names derived from Angle such as “Anglais” while Celtic speaking British neighbours refer to the English as “Sassenach” - a word derived from Saxon.

Nor were Anglo-Saxon origins of the English forgotten at home. Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, published around 1129, relied on Anglo-Saxon texts to tell a history of England. Henry there coined the expression Anglia plena jocis, “England full of jokes”, a phrase which may be the origin of the “Merry old England" trope - a nostalgia for an England which has been lost, widely regarded as a central component of English culture, at least since the Industrial Revolution.

In 1215, a history of Britain was written called Layamon's Brut - which, while including a number of Norman words, deliberately employs archaic Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.

Around 1400, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales invoked pre-Norman English figures such as the Germanic water god Wade. An anonymously authored poem from the late 14th century titled ‘Athelston’ is set in Anglo-Saxon England and seems to be about Alfred’s grandson, King Aethelstan of the Anglo-Saxons.

The word 'Anglo-Saxon' reappears along with a renewed interest in the early English past in the mid-16th century – motivated by an awakening Protestant national consciousness seeking to define itself in opposition to the Catholic South which did not share their Germanic ancestry. Consequently, Englishness and its Anglo-Saxon origins, became associated with an imagined liberty of pre-Norman governance.

In the 17th century, Gerrard Winstanley, one of the leaders of the radical dissidents known as The Diggers, wrote:

“O what mighty Delusion, do you, who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke, and Babylonish power, and have promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny, and holds the People as much in bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War.”

(Winstanley, Gerrard, The True Levellers Standard Advanced: Or, the State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men (London: [n.pub.], 1649)

For the last 500 years, this English identity has repeatedly relied on an Anglo-Saxon origin to define itself. But since the two world wars, the word “Germanic” has had negative connotations associated with a national enemy and so some, such as Francis Pryor, have attempted to manufacture an imagined “Celtic” origin for the English instead (In his BBC series Britain AD (2004) and Britain BC (2003), and his books, Pryor proposes a continuity model: major cultural transformations in Britain (like the transition to Anglo-Saxon England) occurred through gradual internal development and cultural exchange).

Certainly, the genetic evidence demonstrates that the English are not entirely descended from Germanic migrants. But the Iron-Age Britons themselves were not entirely descended from Celtic migrants either. The genetic history of the British Isles over the last 4400 years is characterised by long periods of stability interspersed with mixing events with closely related peoples.

This infographic illustrates the last 12,000 years of Britain’s genetic heritage.

 

The blue in the above diagram represents the Western Hunter-Gatherers like Cheddar man, from whom we still descend in part, but who were largely displaced by the first farmers 6000 years ago, represented by the green. It was this second group who built the megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge. Then, around 4400 years ago, the Bell Beaker folk arrived from the Netherlands and hastened the Bronze Age. This was the largest population displacement in the history of Britain, with some 90% of the Neolithic people being displaced in just a few generations (Olade I, et al 2018). The Beaker folk introduced Western Steppe Herder ancestry from Ukraine/South Russia, represented on the graphic by orange, and which is associated with the Indo-European language family to which both Brythonic (Celtic) and English (Germanic) belong. This was the last genetic component of the three prehistoric peoples who constitute the populations ancestral to the English. However, the Beaker folk were also already mixed with the same farmers and hunters that were previously present in Britain, which is why the orange on the graphic does not show the full 90% displacement.

Migrations of Celts in the Late Bronze Age (Patterson N, et al 2022), Anglo-Saxons in the Dark Ages and French people in the Middle Ages (Gretzinger J, et al, 2022) did not introduce any new prehistoric ancestry to the island. They merely altered the proportions of the three pre-existing ancestral components, as the graphic demonstrates. The nearly four centuries of Roman occupation, surprisingly, left no genetic legacy in the native gene pool (Martiniano R, et al 2016). Therefore the alleged diversity of Roman Britain has no relevance to the identity of English people today. It is also important to note that the Anglo-Saxons were already closely related to the Iron Age-Britons before they mixed together, both being indigenous North-West European peoples descended from the Bell Beaker folk, Neolithic farmers and hunter-gatherers.

While the roots of the English nation, ethnicity and language are tied to the Germanic invaders of the fifth century, the English ethnic group have much deeper ancestral ties to Great Britain. Via the Britons who mixed with the Saxons, the English people descend from the Bronze Age Beaker folk, the first Neolithic farmers and even the hunter gatherers who collected shellfish on these shores over 10,000 years ago when Britain was not yet an island. The English share in the deep Celtic ancestry of their Welsh and Scottish neighbours, but are also distinguished by a unique connection to Germanic Europe.

This article was originally written for The Restorationist in June 2025

 

British Thought Leaders Interview with Tom Rowsell

 

 

I was recently interviewed by Lee Hall on the British Thought Leaders programme for NTD tv.

DEBUNKING: Anglo-Saxon diversity: Updown Girl

 
 

Anglo-Saxon England was racially diverse according to a new genetics paper 'West African ancestry in seventh-century England: two individuals from Kent and Dorset published in Antiquity journal. But is Duncan Sayer misrepresenting the evidence? How significant are two skeletons with 1/4 black ancestry and have they failed to notice middle eastern ancestry in Updown Girl?

It is also worth nothing, as I did not mention it in the video, that the archaeologist Duncan Sayer, named author on the new paper, was the one who has been pushing for said paper since 2022 when Updown girl's sample was published in the supplements for the Gretzinger et al 2022 paper on Anglo-Saxons. 

The 2022 paper undermined a nonsense piece Sayer had written in 2018 for The Conversation in which he denied that English people share a common Anglo-Saxon origin and pretended that the fact the Germanic migrants mixed with Britons was a revelation and an own. This has always been known though, and no one ever denied it. He used the piece as a means to score political points openly attacking both UKIP and a charity for Heathens called The Odinist Fellowship. 

He also said: "The people of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries certainly did not think of themselves as Anglo-Saxons and would not have understood the description." The terms 'English' and 'Anglo-Saxon' were synonyms. While 'English' was first recorded as an ethnonym by Bede around 731 AD, the term 'Anglo-Saxon' came a bit later in 886 AD - but there is no reason to think that Anglisc is a term invented by Bede or that the common identity of Germanic people in Britain didn't exist before him. The fact that Jutes, Angles and Saxons all migrated in a coordinated way shows there was a tribal coalition prior even to their arrival. 

 What does he have against the English ethnic group, I wonder? It does explain the inclusion of woke artist Jade Montserrat in the paper. 

Sources

• B. Foody MG, Dulias K, Justeau P, et al. Ancient genomes reveal cosmopolitan ancestry and maternal kinship patterns at post-Roman Worth Matravers, Dorset. Antiquity. Published online 2025: 
• Sayer D, Gretzinger J, Hines J, et al. West African ancestry in seventh-century England: two individuals from Kent and Dorset. Antiquity. 2025 
• Gretzinger, J., Sayer, D., Justeau, P. et al. The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool. Nature 610, 112–119 (2022). 
• Bryc K, Durand EY, Macpherson JM, Reich D, Mountain JL. The genetic ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States. Am J Hum Genet. 2015 . 

What is English Identity? How old is England?

 

 

Some people are saying the English have no identity or culture of their own. Others are trying to ban the term "Anglo-Saxon" from academic discourse.

This video is my response to them.

The True History of Britain that the Government Hates

 I was a guest on the Dialogue show of Reality Check radio in New Zealand. We talked about the attack on the Anglo-Saxons in academia and the recent riots in the UK caused by the two tier legal system and the murder of native children by an African man.

The playback of the radio show is available here

The show prompted one so called "extremist researcher" from Massey University (@CTPuzzlePieces), who ironically is herself a far left extremist, to call in a hate filled thread on X for references to the Anglo-Saxon ethnic group to be erased via hate speech legislation.

🧵'Anglo-Saxons': This is echoing a theme that re-emerged in the veneered racial -cultural language of the extreme right years ago. It is warps white ancestry & religion for propaganda & agitation. #TrojanHorse #revisionst tactics. 1/ 8 https://t.co/bQHyGjne1B

— Donna (@CTPuzzlePieces) September 17, 2024

Ban Anglo-Saxon: the full story 2019-2023

 

The full interview with me on the Lotus Eaters is now up on YouTube. I reveal not only how Mary Rambaran Olm and Erik Wade sought to ban the term "Anglo-Saxon" but also how they conspired to depict me as a white supremacist in several academic journals as revenge for my disruption of their nefarious schemes back in 2019

Where Did Celts Come From?

While Germanic language is widely agreed to have emerged around 3000 years ago in Northern Denmark, amongst a people who were genetically like modern Danes, and then to have spread from 750BC as neighbouring peoples adopted the language for some reason, it is harder to pin point who the first Celtic speakers were or explain how their languages got to Britain.

As I have said in videos, the modern British genetic profile emerged 4500 years ago with the arrival of the beaker folk from Holland, but these people did NOT speak a Celtic language, as linguists agree Proto-Celtic isn't that old (maybe 3000 or 3500 years old). This means that either: 

a) The peoples of the British Isles adopted a Celtic language due to trade with continental Celts
b) A small Celtic elite took over Britain and Ireland and somehow changed the culture and language but not the genetics
c) A continental population of Celts took over Britain and Ireland and did change the genetics, but this change is only very slight because they were already closely related to the people of the British Isles.

Archeologically, the Hallstatt culture of the 8th to 6th centuries BC, is seen as the first proper Celtic material culture. The two black stars on the PCA chart above, made by Eurogenes, represent two skeletons from the Hallstatt culture, and it can clearly be seen that one plots among the Dutch and one among the Northern French, but neither among modern "Celtic" areas. However, the purple Iron Age Celts on the chart are between the older Bronze age British samples and the Halstatt samples indicating there WAS an invasion of continental Celts to Britain who were related to these Halstatt samples and that they changed the DNA of Britain and Ireland.

Modern English people plot between these purple Iron Age Celts and the red Anglo-Saxon samples, but there is always the possibility that other 5th century Anglo-Saxon invaders from Frisia, Holland etc would have plotted like modern Dutch people just as the much older Halstatt sample does - thus making the job of distinguishing "Celtic and Germanic DNA" very complicated! Especially when you also see that the Anglo-Saxon samples are closer to the Bronze Age Britons than the Halstatt Celts are.

EDIT: Eurogenes actually said there may have been as much as 10% admixture from a Celtic source in the iron age.

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Pagan Barrows and Catholic Frescoes in Sweden

Heathens and Horses

The recent horse meat scandal involving tescos burgers has got people wondering why the English don't eat horses anyway. I covered this subject in my recent dissertation. The answer is to do with paganism. The Catholic church realised that eating horse meat was connected to pagan rites in the North of Europe, rites associated with gods like Odin, Thor and Freyr, so they banned it.

Riding To The Afterlife: The Role Of Horses In Early Medieval North-Western. Europe.