The Angles, Saxons and Jutes migrated to Britain and established seven great kingdoms and several smaller ones. Eventually these kingdoms were consolidated under the first English dynasty – the House of Wessex—who established the shire system to govern an emerging nation primarily based on free-peasant landholding. By maintaining many of their Germanic customs, the newly Christianized Anglo-Saxons developed their own systems that valued family and kinship ties, while maintaining a sense of political and social hierarchy.
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