A bent irminsul from a relief at Externsteine.

The Saxons or Saxon people were a confederation of Old Germanic tribes. Their modern-day descendants in northern Germany are considered ethnic Germans; those in the eastern Netherlands are considered to be ethnic Dutch; and those in southern England ethnic English. Their earliest known area of settlement is Northern Albingia, an area approximately that of modern Holstein.

Saxons participated in the Germanic settlement of Britain during and after the 5th century. It is unknown how many migrated from the continent to Britain though estimates for the total number of Germanic settlers vary between 10,000-200,000.^[1] Over the past two centuries or so, many continental Saxons settled other parts of the world, especially in North America, Australia, South Africa, and in areas of the former Soviet Union, where some communities still maintain parts of their cultural and linguistic heritage, often under the umbrella categories “German” and “Dutch”.

Because of international Hanseatic trading routes and contingent migration during the Middle Ages, Saxons mixed with and had strong influences upon the languages and cultures of the Scandinavian (whence the Saxons originate, in any case) and Baltic peoples, and also upon the Polabian and Pomeranian West Slavic peoples.

First mentioned by the Ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy, the pre-Christian settlement of the Saxon people originally covered an area a little more to the northwest, with parts of the southern Jutland peninsula, Old Saxony and small sections of the eastern Netherlands. During the 5th century AD, the Saxons were part of the people invading the Romano-British province of Britannia. One of these tribes was the Germanic Angles, whose name, taken together with that of the Saxons, led to the formation of the modern term, Anglo-Saxons.