Old Saxony is the original homeland of the Saxons in the northwest corner of modern Germany and roughly corresponds today with the contemporary länder of Lower Saxony and Westphalia.

Adam of Bremen, writing in the eleventh century, compared the shape of Old Saxony to a triangle, and estimated from angle to angle the distance was eight days journey. In area Old Saxony was the greatest of the German tribal duchies. It included the entire territory between the lower Elbe and Saale rivers almost to the Rhine. Between the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser it bordered the North Sea. The only parts of the territory which lay across the Elbe were the counties of Holstein and Ditmarsch. The tribal lands were roughly divided into four kindred groups: the Angrians, along the right bank of the Weser; the Westphalians, along the Ems and the Lippe; the Eastphalians, on the left bank of the Weser; and the Nordalbingians, in modern Schleswig-Holstein. But not even with these four tribal groups was the term of tribal division reached. For the Saxon “nation” was really a loose collection of clans of kindred stock. For example, the Nordalbingians alone were divided into lesser groups- Holsteiners, Sturmarii, Bardi, and the men of Ditmarsch.

Old Saxony is the place from which most of the raids and later colonisations of Britannia were mounted. The region was called "Old Saxony" by the later descendants of Anglo-Saxon migrants to Britannia, their new colonies in Wessex and elsewhere were the "New Saxony". In Germany the Saxon lands was known simply as "Saxony" (German:Sachsen) and only later came to be called Lower Saxony to differentiate those original Saxon tribal territories from what became the Kingdom of Saxony or Upper Saxony in territories far to the south-east of the original Saxon homeland.

The Anglo-Saxon writer, Bede, claimed in his work Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (731) that Old Saxony was the area between the Elbe, Weser and the Eider in the north and north west of modern Germany and was a territory beyond the borders of the Roman Empire.

Origin and history of Old Saxony

Tacitus in his 1st Century work De Origine et situ Germanorum ascribes several tribes of Germanic peoples inhabiting the northern seaboard and interior lands later called Old Saxony, viz;

(English translation) "There follow in order the Reudignians, and Aviones, and Angles, and Varinians, and Eudoses, and Suardones and Nuithones; all defended by rivers or forests. Nor in one of these nations does aught remarkable occur, only that they universally join in the worship of Herthum (Nerthus); that is to say, the Mother Earth."--Tacitus, Germania, 40, translated 1877 by Church and Brodribb.^[1]

Tacitus believed that these people were the original and ancient inhabitants of this land. The Chauci, according to Tacitus, also lived also in the general area later known as Old Saxony and were highly respected among Germanic tribes. He describes them as peaceful, calm, and levelheaded. At some point they may have merged with, or were perhaps synonymous to, the Saxons.

Ptolemy's Geographia, written in the 2nd century, is sometimes considered to contain the first mentioning of the Saxons. Some copies of this text mention a tribe called Saxones in the area to the north of the lower River Elbe, thought to derive from the word Sax or stone knife.^[2] However, other copies call the same tribe Axones, and it is considered likely that it is a misspelling of the tribe that Tacitus in his Germania called Aviones.

Saxon "pirates" had been raiding the eastern seaboard of Britannia from here during the 3rd and 4th Centuries (prompting the construction of maritime defences in eastern Britannia called the Saxon Shore) and it is thought that following the collapse of the Roman defences at the Rhine in 407 pressure from population movements in the east forced the Saxons and their neighbouring tribes the Angles and the Jutes to migrate westwards by sea and invade the fertile lowland areas of Britannia. The traditional date for this invasion is 449 and is known as the Adventus Saxonum. This began a vicious 400-year war of occupation and led to the creation of various Saxon kingdoms in Britannia including that of the South Saxons (Sussex), the West Saxons (Wessex) and the East Saxons (Essex) alongside others established by the Angles and the Jutes and are the foundations of the modern English nation.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th Century the Old Saxons who remained in Germania were loosely associated with the Merovingian Kingdom but practically remained independent and maintained their old pagan religion (for more on this see: Germanic paganism). The Saxon pagan religion appears to have focussed on the worship of the Irminsul or "great pillar"; a divine tree that connected Heaven and Earth and is thought to have existed at a site close to modern Stadtbergen. Saxons as inhabitants of present-day Northern Germany are mentioned in 555, when Theudebald, the Frankish king, died and the Saxons used this opportunity for an uprising. The uprising was suppressed by Chlothar I, Theudebald's successor. Some of their Frankish successors fought against the Saxons, others were allied with them; Chlothar II won a decisive victory against Saxons.

In 690, two priests called Ewald the Black and Ewald the Fair set out from Northumbria to convert their distant kin in Old Saxony to Christianity. It is recorded that at this time Old Saxony was divided into the ancient dioceses of Münster, Osnabrück, and Paderborn. However, by 695 the pagan Saxons had become extremely hostile to the Christian priests and missionaries in their midst and began to suspect that their aim was to convert their over-lord and destroy their temples and religion, which was probably true. Ewald the Fair was quickly murdered, but Ewald the Black they subjected to torture and was torn limb from limb. After which the two bodies were cast into the Rhine. This is understood to have happened on 3 October 695 at a place called Aplerbeck, near Dortmund, where a chapel still stands. The two Ewalds are now celebrated in Westphalia as saints.

Their reluctance to accept the new Christian religion would eventually bring them into direct conflict with Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor. After a bloody and highly destructive thirty year campaign known as the Saxon Wars (772–804) they were eventually subdued and forced to convert to the new religion. This give rise to the early Medieval stem duchy called the Duchy of Saxony.