Old Saxony is the original homeland of the Saxons in the northwest corner of modern Germany and roughly corresponds today to the modern German states of Lower Saxony, Westphalia and western Saxony-Anhalt.Adam of Bremen, writing in the 11th 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 Saxonyis the greatest of the German tribal duchies.
It includes the entire territory between the lower Elbe and Saale rivers almost to the Rhine.
Between the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser it borders the North Sea.
The only parts of the territory which lie across the Elbe are the counties of Holstein and Ditmarsch.
The tribal lands are 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 is the term of tribal division reached.
For the Saxon “nation” is really a loose collection of clans of kindred stock.
For example, the Nordalbingians alone are 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 colonizations of Britain were mounted.
The region is called "Old Saxony" by the later descendants of Anglo-Saxon migrants to Britain, their new colonies in Wessex and elsewhere are the "New Saxony" or Seaxna.
In Germany the Saxon lands are known simply as "Saxony" (Modern German:Sachsen) and only later come to be called Lower Saxony, to differentiate those original Saxon tribal territories from what becomes the Kingdom of Saxony or Upper Saxony in territories far to the southeast of the original Saxon homeland.
The Anglo-Saxon writer Bede claims in his work Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (731) that Old Saxony is the area between the Elbe, the Weser and the Eider in the north and north west of modern Germany and was a territory beyond the borders of the Roman Empire.It has been claimed that the Old Saxons were composed of an aristocracy of nobles, a free warrior class of distinction and renown, leading freemen united and controlled by ancient custom of kindred and clan.
