English people

The English people (from the adjective in Old English: Englisc) are a nation and ethnic group native to England who speak English. The English identity as a people is of early origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. The largest single population of English people reside in England, a constituent country of the United Kingdom. As an ethnic group, they are normally presumed to be an admixture of different groups that have settled in England throughout history, such as the Brythons (including Romano-Britons), Anglo-Saxons, Danish Vikings, Bretons ^[7] and Normans. As a nation, they include a large minority of more recent migrants and their descendants, from a variety of different countries/regions.

Definitions

Writing about the "English people" may be complicated because England has historically been settled by waves of invaders and immigrants at different periods in history, and has also spread its influence, and its populace, worldwide. Hence, the term can refer to the English ethnic group that shares a belief in their common descent from a mass migration of Germanic peoples (usually referred to as Anglo-Saxons) during the sub-Roman period. Historian Catherine Hills describes what she calls the "national origin myth" of the English:

The term is also used more broadly to refer to the 'English nation', which can have various meanings but generally comprises anyone who considers themselves English and are considered English by most other people.^[9]

English nationality

Although there is no longer any official definition of English nationality, the term "the English people" can be used to discuss the English as a "nation", using the OED's definition of "nation" as a group united by factors that include "language, culture, history, or occupation of the same territory", rather than ancestral ties alone.^[10]

The concept of an 'English nation' is older than that of the 'British nation' and the 1990s witnessed a revival in English self-consciousness.^[11] This is linked to the 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.^[12]^[13]^[9]

While there can be an ethnic component to expressions of English national identity, 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",^[14] 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".^[15] 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."^[16]

However, this use of the word "English" 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%).^[17]

English ethnicity

It may be difficult to clearly define English ethnicity, owing to the close interactions between the English and their neighbours in the British Isles, and the waves of immigration that have added to England's gene pool at different periods. The conventional view of English ethnicity 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 admixture from later migrants such as the Vikings and Normans. This version of history is increasingly considered simplistic or even incorrect by historians and geneticists (see below). 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. Furthermore, the idea of English ethnicity is important to those who see important ethnic 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".^[18]

A popular interest in English ethnicity is evident in the recent reporting of scientific and sociological investigations of the English, in which their complex results are heavily simplified. In 2002, the BBC used the headline "English and Welsh are races apart" to report a genetic survey of test subjects from market towns in England and Wales,^[19] 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".^[20] The Daily Mail printed an article with the headline "We're all Germans! (and we have been for 1,600 years)".^[21] In all these cases, the conclusions of these studies have been exaggerated or misinterpreted, and the language of race and ethnicity used only by the journalists.^[22] 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 prehistoric settlers of the British Isles, and that the Anglo-Saxon distinctiveness of the English is largely mythic (see below).

It is unclear how many people in the UK consider themselves ethnically 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', who were subsumed into the general heading 'White British'.^[23] Following complaints about this, the 2011 census will "allow respondents to record their English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish, Irish or other identity."^[24]

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.^[25] Relatedly, 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.^[26] 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.^[27]

History of English identity

Overview

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "English" is not used to refer to the earliest inhabitants of England - Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, Celtic Britons, and Roman colonists.^[28] This is because up to and during the Roman occupation of Britain, the region now called England was not a distinct country; all the native inhabitants of Britain spoke Brythonic languages and were regarded as Britons (or Brythons) divided into many tribes. 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.^[28]

Romano-Britons and Anglo-Saxons

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 Celtic 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.^[29]^[30]

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).^[31] 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).^[32] However, this view has been re-evaluated in recent times with archaeologists and historians finding minimal evidence for mass displacement: archaeologist Francis Pryor has stated that he "can't see any evidence for bona fide mass migrations after the Neolithic."^[33] Historian Malcolm Todd writes

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.^[35]

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.^[36]

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.^[37] 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).^[38] 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.^[39]

Danish Vikings

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. 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.^[40] 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,^[41] and place names that end in -thwaite and -by are Scandinavian in origin.^[42]

The unification of 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.^{citation needed}

Normans and Angevins

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.^[46] 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.^[47] 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.^[48]

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.^[49]

The English and Britain

Throughout the history of the UK, the English have been dominant in terms of population and political weight. As a consequence, notions of 'Englishness' and 'Britishness' are often very similar. At the same time, after the 1707 Union, the English, along with the other peoples of the British Isles, have been encouraged to think of themselves as British rather than identifying themselves by the smaller constituent nations.^[52]

Later migrants

Although England has not been successfully conquered since the Norman conquest or extensively settled since prior to that, it has been the destination of varied numbers of migrants at different periods from the seventeenth century. While some members of these groups maintain a separate ethnic identity, others have assimilated and intermarried with the English. Since Oliver Cromwell's resettlement of the Jews in 1656, there have been waves of Jewish immigration from persecution in Russia in the nineteenth century and from Germany in the twentieth.^[53] After the French king Louis XIV declared Protestantism illegal in 1685 with the Edict of Fontainebleau, an estimated 50,000 Protestant Huguenots fled to England.^[54] Due to sustained and sometimes mass emigration from Ireland, current estimates indicate that around 6 million people in the UK have at least one grandparent born in the Republic of Ireland.^[55]

There has been a black presence in England since at least the 16th century due to the slave trade and an Indian presence since the mid 19th century because of the British Raj.^[56] Black and Asian proportions have grown in England as immigration from the British Empire and the subsequent Commonwealth of Nations was encouraged due to labour shortages during post-war rebuilding.^[57] While one result of this immigration has been incidents of racial tension and/or hatred, such as the Brixton and Bradford riots, there has also been considerable intermarriage; the 2001 census recorded that 1.31% of England's population call themselves "Mixed",^[58] and The Sunday Times reported in 2007 that mixed race people are likely to be the largest ethnic minority in the UK by 2020.^[59]

Resurgent English nationalism

The late 1990s saw a resurgence of English national identity, spurred by devolution in the 1990s of some powers to the Scottish Parliament, National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly. As England lacks its own devolved parliament, its laws are created only in the UK parliament, giving rise to the "West Lothian question", a hypothetical situation in which a law affecting only England could be voted for or against by a Scottish MP.^[60] Consequently, groups such as the Campaign for an English Parliament are calling for the creation of a devolved English Parliament, claiming that there is now a discriminative democratic deficit against the English. A rise in English self-consciousness has resulted, with increased use of the English flag.^[61]

The English nationalist movement has had mixed results. Opinion polls show support for a devolved English parliament from about two thirds of the residents of England as well as support from both Welsh and Scottish nationalists.^[62]^[63]^[64] Conversely, the English Democrats gained just 14,506 votes in the 2005 UK general election.

Geographic distribution

From the earliest times English people have left England to settle in other parts of the British Isles, but it is not possible to identify their numbers, as British censuses have historically not invited respondents to identify themselves as English.^[65] However, the census does record place of birth, revealing that 8.08% of Scotland's population,^[66] 3.66% of the population of Northern Ireland^[67] and 20% of the Welsh population were born in England.^[68] Similarly, the census of the Republic of Ireland does not collect information on ethnicity, but it does record that there are over 200,000 people living in Ireland who were born in England and Wales.[3]

English emigrant and ethnic descent communities are found across the world, and in some places, settled in significant numbers. In the 2000 United States Census, 24,509,692 Americans described their ancestry as wholly or partly English. In addition, the 1,035,133 who recorded British ancestry and the 20,188,305 who simply called themselves 'American' doubtless contain many people with English ancestry.^[69]

In the 2006 Canadian Census, 'English' was the most common ethnic origin recorded by respondents; 5,202,890 people described themselves as wholly or partly English, 16% of the population.^[70]

In Australia, the 2006 Australian Census recorded 6,298,945 people who described their ancestry as 'English'. 1,425,559 of these people recorded that both their parents were born overseas.

Since the 1980s there have been increasingly large numbers of English people, estimated at over 3 million, permanently or semi-permanently living in Spain and France, drawn there by the climate and cheaper house prices.^[71]^[72]^[73]^[74]

Culture

The culture of England is sometimes difficult to separate clearly from the culture of the United Kingdom,^{citation needed} so influential has English culture been on the cultures of the British Isles and, on the other hand, given the extent to which other cultures have influenced life in England.

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