According to tradition, Kent was one of the first regions to be settled by Anglo-Saxons. The monk Gildas, writing in the AD 540s, tells how the Britons recruited foreign mercenaries in the 5th century to help them fight other raiders from mainland Europe. The historian Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People(731), tells how the leaders of the mercenaries, Hengist and Horsa, landed in eastern Kent in the 450s, quickly establishing Germanic settlement there. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle(a 9th-century collection of historical records) confirms this story and also tells of the arrival in the south of other Anglo-Saxon leaders such as Ælle, who founded the kingdom of the South Saxons in Sussex in 477.

Bede also writes that ‘The people of Kent and the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight are of Jutish origin’ (Jutland is part of modern day Denmark/Germany). Brooches in a style which archaeologists identify as coming from that area have been found in graves among some of the many Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in Kent. Another sign of early settlement is the survival of Anglo-Saxon words in place names. The element –ingas, meaning a group of people, is found in many place-names, such as the modern town of Hastings, which means the place of ‘the followers of Haesta’.