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We are all descended from migrants. The earliest ancestors of people living in Britain today arrived about 25,000 years ago from other parts of Europe. Since then people continued to migrate here for thousands of years for three main reasons:

• to trade
• to settle
• to conquer

Trading routes by sea from Northern Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa have existed for centuries, bringing goods and people.

The Roman conquest from AD43 brought people from across the Roman Empire including Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Soldiers from what is now Croatia, for example, built a fort in Cumbria, and a Bulgarian cavalry officer was buried in Colchester. Some settled and made a life here.

After the Roman armies left Britain, Roman influence remained for centuries. Peoples’ lives mixed ancient British and Roman influences. Between the 5th and 11th centuries, many Germanic people - Angles, Saxons and Jutes - arrived to conquer and settle. The kingdoms they created had a wide mix of languages and cultures. They continued to have trading links with the rest of Europe and North Africa and possibly further afield to Asia. Viking invaders settled in large numbers in the north and east in the 9th and 10th centuries and at different times England was ruled by Saxon and Viking monarchs.

England in 1000 was already a multicultural and multilingual society, and had been for centuries. We know this from various kinds of evidence:

• archaeology (human remains and objects buried with people)
• genetic biology (the study of DNA in human remains)
• chemical analysis of skeletons (to show diet and drinking water)
• histories written by people living at the time