The English and the Celts - no genocide?

[Robert Vermaat]

Robert wrote, "Why do you say that Anglo-Saxons who migrated inland would have encountered Huns and Franks? These lived hundreds or thousands of miles away."

Several sources I have record armed conflict between the Franks and the Saxons during the sixth through ninth centuries. In fact, one admittedly dated source (Geoffry Ashe's The Quest for Arthur's Britain, Academy Chicago reprint edition, 1994, p.55) quotes "Procopius, writing in Constantinople toward the middle of the sixth century, describes Britain as inhabited by Britons, Angles and Frisians, the last evidently Saxons named for their previous home. All three races multiply fast, he says, and the surplus goes over to the continent [from Britain? reverse migration?], where the Frankish rulers permit settlement."

Well, yes on both.

Saxons only came into conflict with the Franks when the Franks consolidated their 'regnum' northwards, and the Saxons southwards.
That clearly signals that
a) there were no Franks to hinder any Saxon that wanted to move his family to a higher spot close to his home, instead of migrating to Britain, and
b) there were enough Saxons to create a 'regnum', one that botrhered the Franks enough until Charlemagne exterminated them and baptised the survivors (or the other way around).
Which clearly shows that not all of them took ship for Britain when their feet got wet, as some academics seem to indicate.

We can safely say that Procopius is not the most enlightened source on 6th-c. Britain (he seems to think that there were two Britains), but he seems to have received his information from a Frankish delegation.