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Since Greco-Roman antiquity, otherness has often been represented as “barbarity.” All foreign peoples, threatening, inferior, but sometimes also portrayed as models, embody a form of barbarity. Assuredly, Britons, Anglo-Saxons, and Viking invaders may have represented a form of barbarity compared to the “civilizations” they threatened. The purpose of this article is to understand how the notion evolves when these peoples appropriate these concepts and in turn see themselves as civilizations threatened by a new barbarity. The study includes all of the Anglo-Saxon period and most of the narrative (annals, chronicles, hagiographies) and diplomatic (Anglo-Saxon charters) sources produced in England between the migration period and the Norman conquest.