---
title: "Anglo-Saxon DNA test: how much of your ancestry traces to the migration, and how to measure it"
description: "The 2022 genomes put continental North Sea ancestry at about three quarters of early medieval eastern England and a quarter to half of the English today. What that looks like in a modern genome, why it blurs with Danish Viking input, and how a qpAdm model and Ancient Matches measure it."
canonical: https://www.ancestrify.io/blog/anglo-saxon-dna-test
date: 2026-09-16T09:00:00+00:00
updated: 2026-09-16
author: "Ancestrify"
---

# Anglo-Saxon DNA test: how much of your ancestry traces to the migration, and how to measure it

The question behind an Anglo-Saxon DNA test is the oldest argument in English history put to a genome: how much of your ancestry came across the North Sea after Rome left, and how much was already there? Since 2022 the question has a measured answer at the population level, and a testable one at the individual level. This guide gives the numbers, shows what they look like in a modern genome from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland or the diaspora, explains why the Danish Viking stream blurs into them, and sets out how a formal model and a segment scan can measure your own share.

## What the 2022 study found

Gretzinger and colleagues sequenced 460 medieval individuals, 278 of them from England, and compared them with earlier Britons and with early medieval people from the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. Three findings matter for testing. First, the scale: the sampled early medieval English population averaged 76 percent ancestry related to continental northern Europe using present-day proxies, or 86 percent when ancient Lower Saxony and Iron Age England were the sources. Eastern England was, for a while, a largely continental place. Second, the variation: the continental share was highest in the east and centre, lower in the south and west, and varied inside single cemeteries, where fully local, fully continental and admixed people were buried side by side. Third, the intermarriage: the migration showed no significant sex bias, and at Dover Buckland a family of unadmixed continental ancestry took in a local British woman and had admixed grandchildren within two generations. Our full reading is in [Anglo-Saxon DNA: how migration reshaped early medieval England](/blog/anglo-saxon-dna-migration-england).

The same paper also modelled the English of today, and here the number falls. Present-day English regions needed three sources: 25 to 47 percent early medieval continental northern European-like, 11 to 57 percent Iron Age England-like and 14 to 43 percent Iron Age France-like ancestry. The continental share was highest in the east. The early medieval peak was diluted afterwards by the surviving British population, by later cross-Channel movement and by internal migration.

## The estimates that came before

Two earlier studies bracket the same answer. Schiffels and colleagues in 2016 sequenced ten Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon-era genomes from three Cambridgeshire sites and used rare variants to estimate that present-day eastern England derives about 38 percent of its ancestry from the migration, with the migrants closest to modern Dutch and Danish people. One cemetery, Oakington, already showed the pattern the larger study would confirm: a woman with rich grave goods carried mostly local ancestry.

A year earlier Leslie and colleagues had approached the question from modern DNA alone, typing 2,039 British people with four grandparents from one area. Their fine-structure map put Saxon-related ancestry in central and southern England at 10 to 40 percent and found no clear signature of the later Danish occupation. The three studies used different methods, different sources and different populations, and all three land in the same band: a real, minority, east-tilted continental contribution to the English of today, on top of a majority base that was already in Britain before Rome.

## What it looks like in a modern genome

- **England.** A continental North Sea component in the range the 2022 paper gives, larger in Norfolk, Lincolnshire and the East Riding, smaller in Devon and Cornwall, over an Iron Age British majority. In a fine-grained comparison an eastern English row leans toward Dutch, Danish and German averages, a western one toward Welsh and Irish; the [English guide](/blog/english-dna-ancient-origins) reads that gradient.
- **Scotland.** Southeastern Scotland, the old Northumbrian lowlands, carries a measurable share; the Highlands and the west carry little beyond what shared British ancestry supplies.
- **Wales.** The least continental region in Britain. A Welsh file typically fits the Iron Age British source alone, and a small continental weight with a wide error bar is the honest expectation.
- **Ireland.** The Anglo-Saxon migration did not reach Ireland; the study's one Irish site showed none of it. Continental ancestry in an Irish file arrives through later English settlement and is small.
- **Americans and Australians of British descent.** The same components in the same ratios, blurred by whichever other ancestries are in the mix. A New England or New South Wales genome with four English-descended grandparents will look, in this model, like an English one.

In every case the number is a property of the model, not a fixed fact. Change the sources and the weights move.

## Why the Danish stream is hard to separate

The Angles, Saxons and Jutes came from a coastal zone running from the northern Netherlands through Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein into Denmark. Three centuries later the Danish settlers of the Danelaw came from the same corridor. Margaryan and colleagues, who sequenced the Viking Age, noted that Danish-like ancestry in England is hard to distinguish from what the earlier migrants brought, and the Cambridge summary of their study put the Viking-related share of the UK at up to about six percent. Gretzinger's team had the same difficulty and modelled the English with a single early medieval continental source that absorbs both streams. At the resolution of an autosomal ancestry model, then, an Anglo-Saxon weight is a North Sea weight with a fifth to seventh century date stamp and an unmeasured Danish tail. The [Dutch guide](/blog/dutch-dna-ancient-origins) explains why the Frisian and Saxon coast sits at the centre of all of this. Nothing in a raw file distinguishes a Saxon from a Dane, because at the genome-wide level there was very little to distinguish.

## Testing it with qpAdm

A formal admixture model is the method all three studies used, and it is the method that makes the question testable for one file. The [qpAdm analysis](/qpadm) offers your genome an early medieval continental source, built from the Saxon and Frisian reference individuals of northern Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, against a British Iron Age source, built from published Iron Age Britons, and asks whether the mixture fits. The report prints the p-value for the model, every weight with its standard error and z-score, and the complete set of outgroups it was tested against. Where a file needs it, a third source is offered: Iron Age Gaul for the French-related stream the 2022 paper found in southern England, or a Viking Age Scandinavian source, with the warning above attached, since it competes with the continental one for the same ancestry.

The honest readings look like this. An eastern English file returns a continental weight around a third, three or more standard errors from zero: measurable. A Welsh file returns a continental weight of a few percent with a z-score below two, and the nested model with the Iron Age British source alone is the one to report. A file with one Danish grandparent returns a continental weight the model cannot assign to century, and the report says so.

## Ancient Matches to the individuals themselves

The population weight has a second, more concrete companion. The people Gretzinger and Schiffels sequenced are published individuals from named cemeteries, and Ancestrify's ancient panel holds them: men and women from Oakington, Hatherdene Close, Lakenheath, West Heslerton, Dover Buckland and their continental counterparts from Lower Saxony and Frisia. [Ancient Matches](/ancient-matches) scans your raw file against every one of them and reports the stretches of genome you share with each, painted on your chromosomes, with the evidence stated on the row. A match is identity by state: your genome and theirs read the same across a stretch, which is evidence of shared population history and never a claim of descent. For the Anglo-Saxon question it does something the population model cannot: it shows whether your closest early medieval matches are the fully continental individuals, the fully local ones or the admixed families in between, one person at a time.

## Frequently asked questions

### How much Anglo-Saxon DNA do English people have?

Between about a quarter and a half of the ancestry of present-day English regions is modelled from early medieval continental northern European sources, highest in the east, with the remainder split between Iron Age British and Iron Age French-related sources. Early medieval eastern England itself averaged around three quarters continental before later dilution.

### Can a DNA test tell me if I am Anglo-Saxon?

It can measure a continental North Sea weight against a British Iron Age source with a standard error, and show shared segments with published early medieval individuals. It cannot make anyone Anglo-Saxon, which was a culture and a language, and it cannot separate the fifth-century migrants from the Danes who followed them.

### Is there an Anglo-Saxon haplogroup?

No single one. Y lineages I1 and R1a were absent from sampled Iron Age and Roman Britain and appeared in more than a third of early medieval English men, so an English I1 or R1b-U106 line is consistent with the migration, but both are also common in Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany and say nothing on their own about when the line arrived.

### Do Scots, Welsh and Irish people have Anglo-Saxon ancestry?

Southeastern Scotland does, in a measurable share; Wales carries little, and a Welsh file usually fits an Iron Age British source alone; Ireland was not reached by the migration and carries continental ancestry only through later English settlement, in small amounts.

Terms used here are defined in the [glossary](/glossary).

## Sources and further reading

1. Gretzinger, J. et al. (2022). [*The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool*](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05247-2). *Nature*, 610, 112 to 119.
2. Schiffels, S. et al. (2016). [*Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history*](https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10408). *Nature Communications*, 7, 10408.
3. Leslie, S. et al. (2015). [*The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population*](https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14230). *Nature*, 519, 309 to 314.
4. Margaryan, A. et al. (2020). [*Population genomics of the Viking world*](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2688-8). *Nature*, 585, 390 to 396.