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The Angles, Saxons and Jutes who now arrived in England were basically farmers. They were not, like their predecessors the Romans, merchants and traders. They lived in small villages. The houses were rectangular and usually built of wood. A rectangle is like a square but not all the sides are the same length; only the ones opposite each other are the same length. I bet your computer screen is a rectangle. The problem in knowing more about these people is twofold. One, they didn't, at this early stage, have much writing and, secondly, as they used wood for their buildings, those clever archaeologists haven't got much to examine as wood rots away. They can tell some things from finding holes in the ground where wooden posts have been, but, unlike the Romans who left stone walls and mosaic floors, not much else. The houses had a timber frame with thatched roofs and were often built on stilts over a pit so that the wooden floors didn’t sit on soil and rot. We do know that the lords lived on estates, with a main rectangular hall surrounded by outlying buildings for various living, working and storage purposes. Inside the hall, a lord might hang expensive tapestries and even paintings on the walls. Some Saxons took stones from old Roman houses to make more permanent buildings.
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