I'm really quite confused about this whole area of history, and even after reading my understanding is still quite muddled. I was hoping my questions could be cleared up. Please stop in any of my questions as soon as I get the premise wrong and correct that instead of answering the question.
Around the year 700 The Saxons, as I understand it, inhabited northern Germany before traveling to current day England. My current understanding of the Angles is similar, origination from near the same area (further north/east then the Saxons?) who then also colonized England. The Jutes, a group that I'll come back to later, were more north still up in current day Denmark.
First, is our distinction between the Saxons and Angles purely to reflect the politics of the time (simply being different nations)? or are our reasons for separating them in history based more in cultural or ethnic reasons? Were they different 'peoples' merely because they identified as different nations, or did they have importantly different origins before their time near each other in northern Germany? Whatever the reason for this distinction, why do we seem to then remove this distinction by calling them the collective term of 'Anglo-Saxon' some time down the line?
Second, were there any native people when the Angles and the Saxons colonized England? Did they 'usurp' any other cultures or peoples, or did they find empty land on their arrival? If there were people before them what can you tell me about them? Are they names I'd recognize?
Third, this is a question regarding a later period often called (for good reason) the 'viking age'. Did the vikings who raided England from around this time come from Denmark? In such a case, where they related or descended from the Jute's who inhabited the area of Denmark before the Saxons and Angles left to England? If so, that leads me to a few more questions:
Fourth, How were the Jute's related to the Saxons and Angles? Why, if for any particular reason, did they not colonize England? (assuming they didn't).
And fifth, did either the English people who were being raided, or the Vikings doing the raiding realize that they were from related groups? Did the people of either culture understand this (relatively) recent relationship? What did they 'think' of each other, either because of or despite this common history? Did they simply have no idea/not care?
Sorry for such a rambley question, people ask for clarification wherever it might help you answer my question.
These are pretty confusing distinctions, especially since it's easy to make assumptions based on our own experiences of politics, ethnicity, and nationhood in the modern world. Scholars have made many such assumptions, which makes it difficult to overcome them, but researchers at the forefront of the field are currently really advancing our abilities to do so. I'd point you especially to Robin Fleming's Britain After Rome and Guy Halsall's Worlds of Arthur as two brilliant introductions to how historians assess the Anglo-Saxon period today. There's also a great community of early medievalists on AskHistorians. I'd recommend searching for just Angles, Jutes, or Saxons, and paging through until you find something that strikes your interest and has a few comments on it.
Briefly stated, we often imagine early English history in three periods: (1) Roman Britain, (2) an invasion-period Britain of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and (3) a Britain organized into the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, with particular attention to Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria. Your question really concerns that second period, which scholars refer to rather unsurprisingly as the Early Anglo-Saxon Period. The problem is, there wasn't much written during this period—a single homily, in fact, survives and nothing more—but later Anglo-Saxons during the period of the kingdoms wrote a lot about it, in particular the well-known monk and scholar Bede.
The homily by Gildas gives us hints that look like they might point to an Anglo-Saxon conquest, but it really took Bede to come up with all the details. The problem is, he was writing in the 700s, about 300 years after the events he described. He looked around at the kingdoms around him, and he saw how they were different from the neighboring Welsh, Irish, and Scottish, so he took the hints out of Gildas (whatever he might actually have been referring to; see Halsall for more) and turned them into a full-blown story of conquest.
Bede also noticed that although Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were starting to consolidate across Britain, their political boundaries didn't quite match up with the cultural groups that he saw. These were most likely based on riverways, which were the highways of the premodern world, connecting the neighbors that lived along them into communities that looked more alike (intermarriage), talked more alike, ate foods that tasted more alike, and had all sorts of other similarities that differentiated them from the next river valley over. In England, geography gives rise to three 'natural' maritime communities: the northern rivers that flow east into the North Sea, the Stour that drains central England into the Irish Sea, and the Thames that empties southern England into the Channel. (See Tom Williamson's Sutton Hoo and Its Landscape for an insightful discussion.)
Although these three basins don't exactly correspond to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, I think they were in part an inspiration for Bede's story. The Jutes could be placed in Kent, a kingdom with close links across the Channel into Francia. The Angles supposedly landed north along the Thames, with East Anglia having a particular focus on the River Deben. The Saxons, Bede's purported ancestors, landed in his own home in the north, and he gave them a leading role in the conquest of Britain, taking them across Britain and down the Stour to establish the fledgling kingdom of Wessex.
So that's where the story comes from, as best as we can tell, but that means that a lot of your questions can't actually be answered. I'm very skeptical that at any point in medieval history were there Jutes and Angles running around and introducing themselves to each other as such. There probably was no massive invasion, despite the liberties that Bede took with Gildas's tale. The shift from Roman to Anglo-Saxon material culture more likely evolved out of the old Roman posts that were manned in part by 'German' mercenaries, where power was connected with wearing 'Germanic' war gear and cultivating ties of marriage back onto the Continent. This material culture was never unified, however, especially once the long-distance connections to Rome began to dissolve, and so as these Britons were beginning to look more 'Anglo-Saxon', ideas about just an Anglo-Saxon was were also beginning to diversify.
It's really a testimony to Bede's genius that he could look back on this period without the advantages of archaeology or a written record and he could still come up with a story to explain the non-Roman diversity that he saw. His explanation, however, seems to have been false. And as you can imagine, not everyone (vikings included) bought into his invented story of a common past—which was never enough even to discourage the Anglo-Saxons from fighting amongst themselves. When Norse-speakers (probably originally from Norway, but confusingly called Danes in the sources) first began to arrive, there was no sense of shared history to hold them back.