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Modern English identity

Defining English identity is far from easy, English identity can be identified in terms of nationhood and membership of an ethnic group, though the distinction between an ethnic group and a nation is arbitrary. Both nations and ethnic groups are united by factors that include "language, culture, history, or occupation of the same territory", as well as the perception of a shared ancestry.

English group identity is older than that of the British identity, and the 1990s witnessed a revival in English self-consciousness. This is linked to expressions of national self-awareness of the other British nations of Wales and Scotland — which take their most solid form in the new devolved political arrangements within the United Kingdom — and the waning of a shared British national identity as the British Empire fades into history. Ethnic groups tend to identify themselves in opposition to other ethnic groups, for example studies of people with English ancestry have shown that they tend not to regard themselves as an 'ethnic group', even when they live in other countries. Patricia Greenhill studied people in Canada with English heritage, and found that they did not think of themselves as "ethnic", but rather as "normal" or "mainstream", an attitude Greenhill attributes to the cultural dominance of the English in Canada. Writer Paul Johnson has suggested that like most dominant groups, the English have only demonstrated interest in their ethnic self-definition when they were feeling oppressed.. Therefore the rise of nationalism in both Wales and Scotland may in part explain the counter rise in English self awareness.

Expressions of identity usually involve beliefs in common descent, for example it is commonly held that the English are descended from a fifth century mass migration of Germanic speaking peoples. the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. On the other hand in modern day England most political English nationalists do not consider Englishness to be a form of kinship. For example, the English Democrats Party states that "We do not claim Englishness to be purely ethnic or purely cultural, but it is a complex mix of the two. We firmly believe Englishness is a state of mind", while the Campaign for an English Parliament says, "The people of England includes everyone who considers this ancient land to be their home and future regardless of ethnicity, race, religion or culture". In an article for The Guardian, novelist Andrea Levy (born in London to Jamaican parents) calls England a separate country "without any doubt" and asserts that she is "English. Born and bred, as the saying goes. (As far as I can remember, it is born and bred and not born-and-bred-with-a-very-long-line-of-white-ancestors-directly-descended-from-Anglo-Saxons.)" Arguing that "England has never been an exclusive club, but rather a hybrid nation", she writes that "Englishness must never be allowed to attach itself to ethnicity. The majority of English people are white, but some are not ... Let England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland be nations that are plural and inclusive.".

There are counter-arguments to this however. For example Miss Levy appears to be of jewish extraction. The ethnic solidarity of Jews, their willingness to work to undermine homogeneity in host nations, is well documented, and this may explain her anxiety to prevent the English from 'attaching' themselves to the concept of ethnicity her own people make such a fetish of. Also it is untrue to suggest an absence of exclusivity to ethnic belonging. Many regard the English as no more a 'hybrid' nation than their neighbours. The diffrence they perceive lies in the attitude of a liberal media network in actively discouraging English identity, in which regard self-serving assumptions like this one are thought of as nothing new. Other arguments fall short as well. For many neing 'born and bred' seems to mean little. Had Miss Levy been born in Tokyo, one might ask, would it make her Japanese? The English are white. If you aren't white you aren't English. This position is perfectly defensible on historical grounds and because the state is not the nation. It is not the business of outsiders to lecture peoples on how they define themselves in their own homeland. Finally one might say that even if Miss Levy consider herself white and English others may not. The English are a white European people. They are not semites.

There of course remains an important distinction for those who see differences between people with long-standing English ancestry and people whose ancestors arrived much more recently, an attitude expressed succinctly by a character in Sarah Kane's play Blasted who boasts "I'm not an import", contrasting himself with the children of immigrants: "they have their kids, call them English, they're not English, born in England don't make you English". However, this conception of English identity is complicated by the fact that most non-white people in England identify as British rather than English. In their 2004 Annual Population Survey, the Office of National Statistics compared the ethnic identities of British people with their perceived national identity. They found that while 58% of white people described their nationality as "English", the vast majority of non-white people called themselves "British". For example, "78 per cent of Bangladeshis said they were British, while only 5 per cent said they were English, Scottish or Welsh", and the largest percentage of non-whites to identify as English were the people who described their ethnicity as "Mixed" (37%).

A popular interest in English identity is evident in the recent reporting of scientific and sociological investigations of the English, in which their complex results are heavily simplified. In 2002, BBC Wales used the headline "English and Welsh are races apart" to report a genetic survey of test subjects from market towns in England and Wales, while in September 2006, The Sunday Times reported that a survey of first names and surnames in the UK had identified Ripley as "the 'most English' place in England with 88.58% of residents having an English ethnic background". The Daily Mail printed an article with the headline "We're all Germans! (and we have been for 1,600 years)". In all these cases, the conclusions of these studies have been exaggerated or misinterpreted, with the language of race being employed by the journalists. In addition, several recent books, including those of Stephen Oppenheimer and Brian Sykes, have argued that the recent genetic studies in fact show very little difference between the English and their 'Celtic' neighbours, suggesting that all are primarily descended from the original paleolithic settlers of the British Isles.

It is unclear how many people in the UK consider themselves English. In the 2001 UK census, respondents were invited to state their ethnicity, but while there were tick boxes for 'Irish' and for 'Scottish', there were none for 'English' or 'Welsh people', who were subsumed into the general heading 'White British'. Following complaints about this, the 2011 census will "allow respondents to record their English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish, Irish or other identity."

A further complication is England's dominant position within the United Kingdom, which has resulted in the terms 'English' and 'British' often being used interchangeably.

English origins

The origins of all group affiliations are obscure and often steeped in creation myths, but English identity is particularly difficult owing to England's dominant position in Great Britain, it's relatively large size, and it's the more heterogeneous nature of English regional culture than of the other groups on the island of Great Britain. The archaeologist Catherine Hills, in her book Origins of the English writes that it is possible to identify at least three periods for the "origins" of the English: The human settlement of the geographic region that would later become England after the Last Glacial Maximum; the sub-Roman period, between 400-600 AD, when tradition has it that there was a massive migration of Anglo-Saxons from regions of what are now in Germany and Denmark, that displaced the indigenous Brythonic peoples; and lastly the period of Viking attacks on Great Britain and Ireland that started from about 800 AD with the eventual unification of England as a single Kingdom by Athelstan in 937. Simon James postulates another much later date for the mass identification of the population as English, writing that until the sixteenth century or even later, most people had little awareness of group identity beyond their own local region, with the exception of religious identity, and that engagement in an English identity was restricted to the political elite before that time.

Pre-Roman settlement of England

Further information: Genetic history of the British Isles and Settlement of Great Britain and Ireland

The earliest settlers in What was to become England would not have called themselves English, an identity that has it's foundations in late antiquity. There has been much debate as to the nature of the relationship between the prehistoric populations of Great Britain and the modern population.

Traditional views

It was long accepted that changes in material culture discovered by archaeologists marked migrations, with populations moving en mass and bringing new technologies and culture with them. This view of archaeology proposes that there were movements of peoples during several transitions, the neolithic, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and in England during late antiquity (sub-Roman Britain), all of which resulted in, to a large extent, the displacement of the settled population. This view of pre-history produces a modern English people who have no or little descent from the earliest inhabitants of what became England, at it's most extreme, English people are the exclusive product of a massive Anglo-Saxon invasion during the fifth or sixth centuries that displaced or eliminated the Iron Age Brythonic speaking "Celtic" population, which had itself displaced the previous Bronze Age population centuries before. This view was dominant for much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, with Anglo-Saxon political and legal systems held up as the epitome of a free society. The idea that the English are descended from an endogamous Germanic people and do not share any ancestry with the other peoples of Great Britain and Ireland seems to have gained ground starting from the reformation, when the dissolution of the monasteries lead to the dispersal of many ancient manuscripts written in Old English, and was partly used to justify the break with the Roman Catholic Church. The reformation aligned England with other European protestant countries, and strengthened links with protestant Germany and the Netherlands, while weakening ties to the catholic countries of France and Spain, encouraging research into the Germanic origins of the English. Likewise the relationship between Anglo-Saxon kings and the Witan was used as a political justification of the supremacy of parliament over the monarchy during the English Civil War, for example Paul Hill states that during the civil war "Anglo-Saxon England became a heavily politicised subject thrust into the heart of the debate about the future of a nation against the background of a perceived overbearing and absolutist monarchy in the form of James I (1603-25) and Charles I (1625-49)." But it wasn't until the arrival of an authentically German royal family for Great Britain during the early eighteenth century and the acquisition of a global empire that the idea of a race of Nordic people, with specific characteristics, became widespread. Therefore the German origin of the Hanoverians may have had an influence on the emphasis of the Germanic origins of the English and the perception of an egalitarian and ancient free Anglo-Saxon society deriving from Germanic roots, as Paul Hill puts it: "As far as the Hanoverians were concerned at least, their association with the ancient Saxons was not allowed to go uncelebrated. Samuel Gale had urged the new monarchy to base itself in Winchester just like its ancient counterparts." It ultimately lead to a racialised view of Great Britain, with many anthropologists claiming the English as the "racial elite" of Great Britain, with "Celtic" peoples described as less culturally developed and more backwards. For example the anthropologist John Beddoe claimed that geniuses tended to be "orthognathous" (having a receding jaw), while the Irish and Welsh were "prognathous"(having a protruding jaw), he developed his "Index of Negrescence" which purported to show that Welsh and Irish people were more "Africanoid" than English peoples. Julian Huxley also introduced a racial classification that showed the English as "Xanthochroi" while the Welsh, Irish and Scots were a mixture of Xanthochroi and Melanochroi. It was common at this time to hold that the Germanic nature of Englishness made them both culturally and racially superior to the other nations of Great Britain.

Modern academic views

Neolithic and Bronze Age migrations

Migrations during the Neolithic and Bronze Age according to Stephen Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer believes that his genetic analysis shows a greater neolithic and Bronze age contribution to eastern England than to other regions of Great Britain and Ireland, these are primarily contributions from Scandinavia and represent movements along the major rivers of Europe towards the North Sea region. His explanation is that these movements represent an intrusion of haplogroup I1 into eastern England millenia before the Anglo-Saxon period, in contrast to Weale et al. (2002) and Capelli et al. (2003) who have used the high frequency of haplogroup I1 in England as evidence for an Anglo-Saxon mass migration. He concludes that any migration during late antiquity may therefore be much smaller than suggested by other genetic analyses, he believes that Anglo-Saxon migration during late antiquity may represent 4-12% of haplogroup I1 in England.

The migrationist view of British prehistory has come under critical attack since the 1960s, with archaeologists such as Francis Pryor claiming a far greater continuity than discontinuity in the archaeological record, for example he has stated that he "can't see any evidence for bona fide mass migrations after the Neolithic." The current orthodoxy amongst archaeologists in the British Isles is that the modern population is likely to be predominantly descended from the earliest settlers to migrate there after the end of the last Ice Age some 14,000 years ago along with some descent from neolithic settlers who introduced farming about 6 000 years ago.

The geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer has analysed various pieces of evidence and believes that the genetic evidence supports the current archaeological orthodoxy. His analysis identifies two early colonisation events before or just after the Younger Dryas (which marked the final phase of the last Ice Age in Europe). One of these colonisation events was significantly larger than the other, and came along the western coast of Europe from the Ice Age refuge that is postulated to have existed around the Pyrenees. The second smaller migration followed the major European riverways and moved northwards from the Balkan and Ukrainian refugia, arriving in what is now eastern England during the mesolithic. He postulates that the distribution of the major Y chromosome haplogroups in Great Britain is explained by this event, with haplogroup I1 represented strongly in eastern England, and R1b represented in large proportions all over the island. He believes that R1b is largely derived from the ancestors of the Pyreenean refuge, while I1 is the product of the migration from the Balkan refuge. On the other hand Oppenheimer does show that there were subsequent migrations to the island, especially during the neolithic with the advent of farming, several Y chromosome types associated with the Near East appear to be associated with this migratory event. The geneticist Bryan Sykes also provides evidence that the majority of the ancestors of the modern indigenous peoples from the British Isles are from these earliest colonisations.

The advent of Indo-European languages is also important, while this has in the past been attributed to Iron Age migrations to Great Britain introducing Celtic languages across the whole archipelago, some linguists now believe that this language group may well have spread over Europe during the neolithic, and that the presence of Celtic and Germanic languages on Great Britain may also be attributable to this period.

Cultural diffusion cannot occur in isolation, the diffusion of technology and culture must be accompanied by movements of people, the modern orthodoxy postulates that much smaller migration events produced these cultural changes, with the indigenous populations learning the new technologies and culture from much smaller incoming groups. Many such scenarios postulate "elite takeovers" of the indigenous populations, with a displacement of the local political elite, rather than the whole population.

The Anglo-Saxon migration

Further information: [[:Anglo-Saxons, Roman Britain, Sub-Roman Britain, Ancient Britons, Romano-Britons]]

Further information: Genetic history of the British Isles

The nature Britain during late antiquity is a source of much debate and controversy. The debate is largely focused around migrations of peoples, Angles, Saxons and Jutes, to the south and east of Great Britain during the period immediately after the Roman withdrawal from their province of Brittania in the fifth century. This period is called the Völkerwanderung in German and is seen as the origin of many of the populations of northern Europe, particularly those speaking Germanic languages.

Traditional view

Traditionally it has been believed that there was a massive migration of German speaking tribes from across the North Sea to the now militarily weakened island of Great Britain. Gildas's story has it that a Brythonic king, Vortigern, invited Saxon mercenaries (identified as being led by Hengist and Horsa by Bede) to Britain to help with it's military defence. Eventually this military force rebelled and took lands for their own use, inviting large numbers from their own tribes to settle their newly acquired lands and displacing the Celtic population. Thus the mass migration of Anglo-Saxons was achieved. According to Malcolm Todd it was Bede who first identified these peoples as a culturally unified group with several regional kings. Archaeologists working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated many finds from this period with the invasion. Many similarities are found between Anglo-Saxon material culture and that of the peoples on the opposing shores of the North Sea, these have routinely been ascribed to population movements. For example grubenhauses are found in eastern regions of England during this time, and are common over the North Sea region of this time. This account of mass population movement and population displacement is still very much seen as part of English identity and is taught in schools and popularly believed.

This period has few surviving written records, although Gildas was a near contemporary. There is a change in the archaeology in certain parts of England that implies at least a cultural change, with the inhabitants of at least the eastern regions of England displaying cultural similarities to those of the other peoples of the North Sea coast.

Recent reappraisal

Most modern British archaeologists have become more sceptical of the mass migration explanations for the change in culture. The main argument is that The first people to be called 'English' were the Anglo-Saxons, a group of closely related Germanic tribes that migrated to England from southern Denmark and northern Germany in the 5th century AD after the Romans retreated from Britain. The Anglo-Saxons gave their name to England (Angle-land) and to the English people.

However, the Anglo-Saxons arrived in a land that was already populated by people commonly referred to as the 'Romano-British', the descendants of the native Brythonic-speaking population that lived in the area of Britain under Roman rule during the 1st-5th centuries AD. Furthermore, the multi-ethnic nature of the Roman Empire meant that small numbers of other peoples may have also been present in England before the Anglo-Saxons arrived: for example, archaeological discoveries suggest that North Africans may have had a limited presence.

The exact nature of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and their relationship with the Romano-British is a matter of debate. Traditionally, it was believed that a mass invasion by various Anglo-Saxon tribes largely displaced the indigenous British population in southern and eastern Great Britain (modern day England with the exception of Cornwall). This was supported by the writings of Gildas, the only contemporary historical account of the period, describing slaughter and starvation of native Britons by invading peoples (adventus Saxonum). Added to this was the fact that the English language contains no more than a handful of words borrowed from Brythonic sources (although the names of some towns, cities, rivers etc do have Brythonic or pre-Brythonic origins, becoming more frequent towards the west of Britain).

"It is much more likely that a large proportion of the British population remained in place and was progressively dominated by a Germanic aristocracy, in some cases marrying into it and leaving Celtic names in the, admittedly very dubious, early lists of Anglo-Saxon dynasties. But how we identify the surviving Britons in areas of predominantly Anglo-Saxon settlement, either archaeologically or linguistically, is still one of the deepest problems of early English history."

Geneticists have explored the relationship between Anglo-Saxons and Britons by studying the Y-chromosomes of men in present day English towns. In 2002, a study by Weale et al found genetic differences between test subjects from market towns in central England and Wales, and that the English subjects were, on average closer genetically to the Frisians of the Netherlands than they were to their Welsh neighbours. This study hypothesised that an Anglo-Saxon invasion had replaced 50-100% of "indigenous" men. A 2006 study led by Mark Thomas used computer simulations to find a possible reason for the divergence between these finds and the archaeological record, which does not show evidence of mass immigration. They postulate that a small Anglo-Saxon elite could have operated an apartheid-like system, preventing intermarriage between male Britons and female Anglo-Saxons (therefore increasing the proportion of "Anglo-Saxon" Y chromosomes in certain regions), depriving indigenous Britons of essential resources (leading to higher population growth rates for the elite), and asserting political dominance. Eventually the dominant group would have grown too large to be an effective elite, and the "indigenous" group would have been assimilated.

Reconstruction of an Anglo-Saxon burial chamber at Sutton Hoo, East Anglia

Y chromosome distribution from Capelli et al., showing that Y chromosomes display isolation by distance; there is no sharp discontinuity between English and Welsh samples.

Other geneticists tell a different story. A more comprehensive follow-up study to Weale et al in 2003 by Christian Capelli et al, which analyzed Y chromosome samples across a wider range of the British Isles, complicated the picture and indicated that different parts of England may have received different levels of intrusion: they theorise that while central and eastern England experienced a high level of intrusion from continental Europe (the study could not significantly distinguish Germans of Schleswig-Holstein from Danes or Frisians although Frisians were slightly closer to the British samples), southern and western England did not, and the population there appears to be largely descended from the indigenous Britons (the scientists acknowledge that this conclusion is "startling"). The 2003 study also noted that the transition between England and Wales is more gradual than the earlier study suggested.

In The Origins of the British, Stephen Oppenheimer concludes, based on a meta-analysis of the data collected during both the 2002 and 2003 studies, and data from other sources, that the majority of English ancestry is from the original hunter-gatherer populations that settled Britain between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the last Ice Age. He also suggests that the relatively high levels of northern European Y chromosomes (mainly I1a and R1a, "Anglo-Saxon" and "Viking" markers) detected in eastern and central Great Britain (both Scotland and England) may have a far older signature than they would have if they had been introduced during an "Anglo-Saxon" invasion - they appear to have been in Great Britain much longer. According to Oppenheimer, there may have been ongoing migrations between North Sea regions (eastern Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Northwestern Germany) as far back as the palaeolithic, and it is not conclusive that all Y chromosome types usually associated with Anglo-Saxon invasions actually derive from colonisation during this period, since many may have come to Great Britain during the initial colonisation of the land after the Last Glacial Maximum. Thus he theorises that there is no necessity to postulate either a mass "Anglo-Saxon" migration or an "apartheid-like" system to explain the differences between the far east and far west of Great Britain, the differences in Y chromosome frequencies vary gradually and are not clearly defined, and that they have always been there. Oppenheimer also postulates that the arrival of Germanic languages in England may be considerably earlier than previously thought, and that both mainland and English Belgae (from Gaul) may have been Germanic-speaking peoples and represented closely related ethnic groups (or a single cross channel ethnic group). Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes has argued from DNA evidence that English genetic heritage is derived mainly from the Iberian Peninsula; according to him, the Anglo-Saxons played a rather insignificant role in English genetic composition.

The conventional view of English origins is that the English are primarily descended from the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic tribes that migrated to Great Britain following the end of the Roman occupation of Britain, with assimilation of later migrants such as the Vikings and Normans. This version of history is considered by some historians and geneticists as simplistic. However, the notion of the Anglo-Saxon English has traditionally been important in defining English identity and distinguishing the English from their Celtic neighbours, such as the Scots, Welsh and Irish.

Unification of England

Further information: [[:Danelaw, Treaty of Wedmore, Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum]]

Southern Great Britain in AD 600 after the Anglo-Saxon settlement, showing England's division into multiple petty kingdoms.

From about AD 800 waves of Danish Viking assaults on the coastlines of the British Isles were gradually followed by a succession of Danish settlers in England.

The English population was not politically unified until the 10th century. Before then, it consisted of a number of petty kingdoms which gradually coalesced into a Heptarchy of seven powerful states, the most powerful of which were Mercia and Wessex. The English nation state began to form when the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms united against Danish Viking invasions, which began around 800 AD. Over the following century and a half England was for the most part a politically unified entity, and remained permanently so after 959.

The nation of England was formed in 937 by Athelstan of Wessex after the Battle of Brunanburh, as Wessex grew from a relatively small kingdom in the South West to become the founder of the Kingdom of the English, incorporating all Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Danelaw.

At first, the Vikings were very much considered a separate people from the English. This separation was enshrined when Alfred the Great signed the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum to establish the Danelaw, a division of England between English and Danish rule, with the Danes occupying northern and eastern England. However, Alfred's successors subsequently won military victories against the Danes, incorporating much of the Danelaw into the nascent kingdom of England. Danish invasions continued into the 11th century, and there were both English and Danish kings in the period following the unification of England (for example, Ethelred the Unready was English but Canute the Great was Danish).

Gradually, the Danes in England came to be seen as 'English'. They had a noticeable impact on the English language: many English words, such as dream, take, they and them are of Old Norse origin, and place names that end in -thwaite and -by are Scandinavian in origin.

History of English identity

Further information: [[:History of England]]

Overview

Further information: Genetic history of the British Isles and Settlement of Great Britain and Ireland

The term English is not used to describe the earliest inhabitants of England - Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. The word "English" refers to a heritage that began with the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century, who settled lands already inhabited by Romano-British tribes. That heritage then comes to include later arrivals, including Scandinavians, Normans, as well as those Romano-Britons who still lived in England.

Norman England and Angevin succession

King Harold II of England (right) at the Norman court, from the Bayeux Tapestry

Further information: [[:Normans]]

The Norman Conquest of 1066 brought Anglo-Saxon and Danish rule of England to an end, as the new Norman elite almost universally replaced the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and church leaders. After the conquest, the term "English people" normally included all natives of England, whether they were of Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian or Celtic ancestry, to distinguish them from the Norman invaders, who were regarded as "Norman" even if born in England, for a generation or two after the Conquest. The Norman dynasty ruled England for 87 years until the death of King Stephen in 1154, when the succession passed to Henry II, House of Plantagenet (based in France), and England became part of the Angevin Empire until 1399.

Various contemporary sources suggest that within fifty years of the invasion most of the Normans outside the royal court had switched to English, with Anglo-Norman remaining the prestige language of government and law largely out of social inertia. For example, Orderic Vitalis, a historian born in 1075 and the son of a Norman knight, said that he learned French only as a second language. Anglo-Norman continued to be used by the Plantagenet kings until Edward I came to the throne. Over time the English language became more important even in the court, and the Normans were gradually assimilated into the English people, until, by the 14th Century, both rulers and subjects regarded themselves as English and spoke the English language.

Despite the assimilation of the Normans, the distinction between 'English' and 'French' survived in official documents long after it had fallen out of common use, in particular in the legal phrase Presentment of Englishry (a rule by which a hundred had to prove an unidentified murdered body found on their soil to be that of an Englishman, rather than a Norman, if they wanted to avoid a fine). This law was abolished in 1340.