The Franks were a Christian Germanic people who, during the 5th and 6th centuries AD, controlled an area that encompassed modern northern and central France and parts of Belgium, Holland and western Germany. Much of the evidence for contact between the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons in England comes from Kent, the closest part of England to northern France.

The strength of Frankish influence on early 6th-century metalwork and pottery led some earlier historians to suggest that the Franks settled in large numbers in south-east England. It is more likely that trade with the Franks stimulated a taste for continental fashions among the Kentish nobility. In the late 6th century, Ethelberht of Kent (died 616) married a Christian Frankish princess. According to the 8th-century historian Bede, Frankish missionaries later played a part in the Christian conversion of England.

Other kinds of contact between the Frankish kingdom and East Anglia are suggested by the recent find near Norwich of a seal-ring which may have belonged to an English woman called Balthild. Sent to the Frankish court (according to tradition, as a slave), she married King Clovis II in 648. When her husband died, Bathild became Regent for their three sons, who eventually reigned in turn over the kingdom.