ANGLO-SAXON QUEEN, from the pagan period (6th century), bearing a ceremonial drinking horn, based on a passage from the epic poem “Beowulf” in which queen Wealhtheow serves mead to the Danish king Hrothgar, the Geatish hero Beowulf and his warriors before they fight the monster Grendel.

THE ANGLO-SAXONS: In the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire was collapsing. The year 410, the Germanic Visigoths sacked the city of Rome. In 455, the Vandals, another Germanic people that had formed a kingdom in North Africa, sacked Rome too. The year 451, the Roman general Flavius Aetius and Attila, king of the Huns, clashed at the battle of the Catalaunian Plains, in northern Gaul. But 451 is also the year that the Romans supposedly lost the province of Britannia to invading Germanic tribes from the Jutland Peninsula: The Jutes, the Angles and the Saxons, who had previously been hired as mercenaries by the Romans in Britain to fight Pictish raiders. Before the arrival of these Germanic peoples, society in Roman Britain was a mix of indigenous Celtic and Roman elements. The Romanised part of Britain roughly corresponded with the territories of modern-day England. The territories of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, remained inhabited by independent Celtic tribes, which the Germanic newcomers whose language evolved into English also failed to conquer. Around the late 6th century or early 7th century, a consolidated Anglo-Saxon society transitioned from Germanic polytheism to Christianity, and in the year 793, the first documented Viking raid took place in the Anglo-Saxon monastery of Lindisfarne, marking the beginning of the Viking Age. Anglo-Saxon England ended the year 1066, when the Norman king William the Conqueror (from a dynasty of Viking descent) won the battle of Hastings, becoming the first king of Norman England.