The forging of an English identity took place over many centuries, but was most significantly shaped by intermarriage and mutual cultural exchanges between three groups:

1. Britons who formed the base of foundation of the English people, and whose DNA dominates in the English today, arriving in Great Britain after the Younger Dryas when the English Channel and North Sea were not yet covered in water, and whose culture was influenced by Celtic and Roman immigrants in the late Bronze Age through the first five centuries of the Common Era;
2. Germanic cultures of eastern England probably present before the Roman conquest, and their cousins, the Anglo-Saxon immigrants who arrived in the 5th through 7th centuries; and
3. Representatives of Scandinavian cultures brought by Danes, Norwegians, and other Vikings in the 9th through 11th centuries.

The English identity already existed when the Normans conquered England in the 11th century. The Normans added French-Latin culture into the English mix. English identity and culture that transcended identification with regions and sub-kingdoms such as Northumbria, Mercia, or Wessex; or ethnicity such as Danish or Saxon, strengthened between 900 and 973.

Milestones:

• People walk from Spain to Great Britain before the seas rose and covered the lowlands with the English Channel and North Sea. As Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and Norman settlers and conquerors come to Great Briton, they do not ever significantly displace or replace this original stock, and DNA studies show that most English today get most of their DNA from these original immigrants who arrived around 9,000 BC.
• In the Bronze age, Celtic culture and language spreads from the Iberian Peninsula and Southern France into the British Isles. The pre-Celtic cultures that built Stonehenge and similar neolithic monuments transform into Celtic cultures as they enter the Iron Age.
• During Neolithic times and the Bronze Age, there are evidently political units that sometimes engage in warfare, judging from fortified sites and weapon artifacts. Britain is not unified.
• Before the Roman conquest, there are probably people speaking a proto-Anglo-Saxon Germanic language in eastern England, while everywhere else the people of the British Isles are probably speaking Celtic languages, that later became Welsh, Cornish, Gaelic, etc. An exception may be the Picts, who possibly spoke a language related to the pre-Indo-European languages of northern Europe, possibly a Semitic language.
• Roman conquest (from 43 AD to 87 AD) unifies England and Wales as Britannia for about three hundred years.
  
• Between 370 and 410 the Roman Empire’s army and administration departs England, with the parting warning that locals should look to their own defenses.
• Between 410-449 various chieftains set up defensive kingdoms as non-Romans pillage and loot the nearly defenseless former Roman realm of Britannia. Vortigern rises as a leader of the Britons in Britannia, and his son is Vortemir. A successor or rival to Vortigern is Ambrosius Aurelianus, who seems to have success against the Saxons in the 460s.
• Between 449-473 the brothers Hengist and Horsa, of the Germanic tribe of Jutes, come from Germany (probably Frisia) and settle in the eastern part of Kent (Isle of Thanet), and they are given credit in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles for starting the Saxon immigration/invasion of Britain. They may be legendary, rather than historical.
• One of the chieftains of the Britons, a Riothamus Arthurius, ascends to leadership around 454, and campaigns in Britain and Gaul until he departs in 470. Possibly he is Vortigern’s son-in-law, or he is related to Ambrosius Aurelianus. He seems to have authority in both Saxon and Briton communities, and be of higher rank than Ambrosius Aurelianus. Possibly he is the father or grandfather of Cerdic, who is the first Anglo-Saxon King of Wessex, ruling from 519-534. The historian Jordanes in his Gothic History (551) says this “Riotimus” sent 12,000 men into Gaul to help the emperor Anthemius fight the Visigoths. This Riothamus Arthurius is probably the historical figure around which the legends of King Arthur accumulated.
• During the 5th and 6th century, there is significant conflict and shifting alliances among Britons and Germanic peoples (the Angles, Saxons and Jutes). This may be essentially a return to patterns of political (dis)organization that existed in pre-Roman Britain.
• During the sixth through eighth centuries, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms are formed in England (Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, and Sussex). Cornwall is the Kingdom of Dumnonia (a land of Britons rather than Saxons); and Wales has the four kingdoms of Gwynedd, Powys, Dyfed, and Gwent. Other small kingdoms such as Lindsey, Wihtwara, Bernicia, and so forth exist for a few generations, but generally become subordinate to larger kingdoms such as Wessex or Mercia. Mostly Britons become Saxons, but some relocate to Cornwall, Wales, and Breton (across the English Channel in northwestern France). It is important to remember that ethnic identity is rooted in shared experiences (culture), rather than blood, so saying that “Britons became Saxons” involves changes in language and culture more than demographic displacement through ethnic cleansing or genocide (at least in England, according to DNA evidence drawn from archeological sites and current populations).
• King Offa (rules from Mercia in the years 757-796) unites the “English” (Anglo-Saxons) south of Northumbria in the late eighth century, but this unification quickly collapses after his death.
• In the 9th and 10th and early 11th centuries new waves of immigrants and invaders arrive in England from Norway and Denmark, and Scandinavians take over East Anglia and much of Northumbria. The ninth century and the early part of the tenth century is marked by fighting between the Scandinavians and the Saxons, with Welsh kingdoms sometimes involved. Intermarriage and cross-cultural hybridization also occurs.

Alfred the Great is a King of Wessex (ruled 871-899) who aspired to see the various kingdoms united into one England. Alfred’s son Edward the Elder (ruled 899-924) and his grandson Aethelstan the Glorious (ruled 924-940) worked to unite the various English kingdoms and subdue the Scandinavians. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle claims that Edward the Elder received promises of loyalty from all the various kingdoms in 920, so that could be taken as a date for the unification of England, but this was not a strong union, and in fact the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles are probably misrepresenting the agreement that took place.

A more likely date for the forging of England could be 937, when King Aethelstan won the battle of Brunanburh. Saxon historians of the later 10th century sometimes proposed that this was the moment when England really achieved national unity. Also, King Aethelstan claimed to be King of England rather than merely King of Wessex. However, Northumbria soon became independent again after Aethelstan’s death, and shifted in and out of union with the rest of England until 954, when the English (Saxon) King Eadred of Wessex (Aethelstan’s half-brother) took away Northumbrian independence and made it part of England.

When Eadred’s son Edgar came to the throne as a boy in 959, he was the first king to come to power in a united England that stretched from Northumbria in the north to Kent in the south, and during his benevolent and efficient rule of about 15 years until 975, the identity of being English started to significantly replace in importance the identities of tribe or sub-kingdom. Scandinavian settlers in England sometimes retained their language and elements of their culture, and Edgar permitted local laws and governance to reflect local Scandinavian or Saxon dominance, but intermarriage between Scandinavians and Saxons was common, and there were far more Anglo-Saxons than Danes in the land.

 

 

Links about The Origins of England:

1. The British Library offers a good article written by Alison Hudson describing how England came into shape in the 10th century
2. English Heritage offers a fine summary of the early Medieval period and how England emerged from trends of those centuries
3. Sarah Foot has a book chapter in Old English Literature: Critical Essays. (published in 2002 and edited by Liuzza) entitled “The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity Before the Norman Conquest” in which she gives credit to Bede for emphasizing a shared identity among the Saxons based on their Christianity, and Alfred the Great for emphasizing an English identity based in law, culture, and Biblical ideas of Identity.
4. Our understanding of early English history comes from reading Frank M. Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England, Geoffrey Ashe’s The Discovery of King Arthur, Peter Hunter Blair’s Northumbria in the days of Bede, and Stephen Oppenheimer’s The Origins of the British. Translations of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle such as that of Benjamin Thorpe or the annotated and illustrated version by Bob Carruthers have also been helpful.