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A history of invasions of Britain
What do we mean when we call something an invasion and what counts?
Ages ago I wrote a Medium post about all the rebellions and revolts that had taken place in British history, and for some reason it was popular. So I thought, why not write one about all the times Britain was invaded too?
The concepts of ‘invasion’ and ‘migration’ are regularly conflated these days by nationalists attempting to scare people that refugees arriving on a beach are in some way comparable to a military force. All the definitions of the word invasion require there to be ‘an incursion of an army’, or ‘an army entering another country by force in order to take control of it”. This list, therefore, will be limited to recorded military invasions of the UK, of which there are many.
Some invasions, of course, include migrations too. The Anglo-Saxons, for example, certainly brought military forces, but those military forces brought migrations in their wake too. The period following the end of the Roman Empire is often known as the Migration Period, but some of these waves of migration necessarily also included military forces.
The migration of Neolithic (approx 10,000 BC — 4,500 BC) people to Western Europe is sometimes referred to as an invasion, though it is hard to tell what level of military participation was involved. It’s worth…
