Sauron… I mean, Tony Blair once said that Britain is a young country.
“Maybe,” I’d say, “but England? That’s a different story. And the English? Well… the English are far older than you’ve been told.”
English identity has often been called into question. The Tudors claimed it, the Normans ignored it, and the modern political class hardly mentions it at all. Yet the name “English” goes back long before England existed
as a kingdom. This is the story of how that identity formed — not in castles or parliaments, but in villages, halls, and fields, long before the English crossed the North Sea. This episode is about following that thread back to its roots. Time and time again, we hear people say that England has no culture and some even dare to say the English do not exist at all. Or that anyone can be English. So…
1: Who are the English?
First, let’s start with terms. England is the land of the Angles. English means “pertaining to the Angles.” So the English language is the language of the Angles. The English people are Angles. English culture is the culture of the Angles. English food is… delicious. The question ought to be, how long have the English existed? Let’s wind the clock back a little and find out about England and the English.
2: There is No England
When the Irish won their freedom in the 1920s, the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” became the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” Technically, you could say Britain is under a hundred years old — young, by country standards. But Britain is four countries: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Three have some self-determination. England does not. It’s a country in name and sport only — and it’s been that way since the Acts of Union in 1707.
England and Scotland formally united to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. On paper, England as an independent state ended here… but the English people didn’t disappear. The elites folded English identity into Britishness. The act is a union between Scottish imperial ambitions and English finances. From this point on, English identity is downplayed and folded, where possible, into a new sense of Britishness. The ordinary English served the imperial desires of the elite.
This union was possible because of the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when James VI of Scotland also became James I of England. Both kingdoms kept their own parliaments, coins, and foreign policy — but England hasn’t had its own head of state since. Let’s keep going back to when England did exist.
3: England, but was it English?
Despite ruling for 118 years, the Tudor dynasty only included three generations and it started off Welsh. Henry Tudor’s first language was, in fact, Welsh, and English was his third or fourth language behind French and Latin. He was a smart guy and a crafty bugger. He wanted his heir to be his eldest son, Arthur (named after the mythological Welsh king famous for killing Saxons), but he passed away, and the throne went to his exuberant second son, Henry. And the rest is history. We can say that Henry, despite his Welsh father, was our last English king. And his second daughter, Elizabeth, an English queen. English morale and identity began to revive. Revive from what? I break medieval England into three phases:
1066-1204 – England as a Norman Colony.
One of the great lies of English history is that the English lost control of Normandy and other French territories under Bad King John. We did not. We never controlled them. John was a French monarch, but not King of France. Primarily, he and his brother, Richard coeur de Lion, and his father, Henry II of Anjou, were French nobles who happened to be Kings of England. The Normans conquered and colonised England in 1066. Their lands and freedoms taken from them. The English elite were killed or exiled, and the people were forced into servitude by the sword. Rebellions were put down with brutal, almost genocidal wrath. Norman lords kept gallows on their lands to hang ordinary English people should they step out of line. Being King of England gave them prestige, but they never lost sight of their true goal – the throne of France. The English were but a tool for their ambitions. However, in a unique twist in history, the colonisers lost their homeland.
1204 to 1399 – Colonists Stuck Abroad
King John lost his French lands. The nobility loathed him for it. They had been separated from their kin and the places where their hearts lay. Now they had no choice but to make peace with being stuck on this cold, windy, and often rainy island. Still, the continued to speak only French and their hatred of the English lay undimmed. Meanwhile they made every effort to regain their French lands and to lay claim to the French throne. Even by Henry VIII’s time they still thirsted for it. Now England had to become their homeland too and so they sought to shape it, but not being English, they did not feel themselves bound by the lands of the natives, and so sought to control the whole island and that of Ireland too. This was their continuation of the Angevin Empire and a bridge to the real British empire which would come later.
1399 to 1485
Still, the English rebelled from time to time. Most notably the Peasants Revolt which was put down with its usual viciousness. English people clung to the false notion that their king would stand up for them against the nobility. They never did. At least, after Henry IV’s coup, they now spoke English. Kind of. By then the elite had now created their own symbols for England and forced them on the people. Examples include replacing St. Edmund with St. George, and replacing the Golden Dragon of Wessex with the Cross of England. Still, they campaigned for the throne of France and in Henry V, almost got it.
So as we can see here. The English did exist as a coherent identity but they were oppressed and dominated by a foreign elite. England became an independent kingdom in 1204 but it was by accident rather than by design. So what about before 1066?
4: England of the English
You might not know it, but England existed as a country before 1066. Æthelstan, in 927, is often seen as the first true king of all England after conquering Viking York. Crucially, he styled himself rex Anglorum — King of the English. Before him, titles were “King of the Saxons” or “King of the English and Saxons.” Alfred the Great, Æthelstan’s grandfather, united Saxon Wessex and English Mercia — two related but distinct peoples. Or are they? The English, in name and culture, existed before the political kingdom. Even during this so-called period of independence the English had three periods of rule by the kings of Denmark with Sweyn Forkbeard, Cnut the Great, and Harthacnut.
Let’s circle back a little. This is a point which is not made often enough. We say Anglo-Saxon without understanding that the Anglo- portion means ‘English.’ Like I said at the beginning, English means pertaining to the Angles, so Anglo means the same thing. So Anglo-Saxon is really another way of saying English-Saxon.
Athelstan knew this and so did his grandfather, Alfred the Great. They were Saxons; specifically West Saxons. The English were a separate but related people. They understood each other but their dialects were different in many ways from word choices and spelling to syntax. Alfred the Great not only united Saxon Wessex and English Mercia, but set a template for what it meant to be an English king. A template few have managed to live up to. So yes, the English and the Saxons were different people. Wessex, sussex, Middlesex, Surrey and Essex were Saxon kingdoms. Kent was Jutish. East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria were English. When the Danish vikings invaded England, they only settled in the English areas, why? Keep listening.
So this answers a major question people have, did the English exist before Athelstan united England into one kingdom? Yes, we did. When the Venerable Bede wanted to write a Christian history of his people in the 700s, he did not write an Ecclesiastical History of the Northumbrians nor of the Saxons, or Anglo-Saxons, but of the English. Why? Well, what if I told you there was an England before England?
5: Before England: The English as a People
You might know the story. One we get from Bede – a man who was a monk from the age of about seven. So not one to really see much of the real world. The tale is an easy one. The Angles, the Saxons and Jutes invaded Britain in the 5th century. You might have seen the simple maps too. With the Jutes in Jutland, the Angles in northern Germany, and the Saxons in Saxony. What if I told you a fair bit of that might be… wrong. Or at least, not entirely true. I have studied this period all my life, and I am currently in the midst of my fifth decade of it.
In the third century CE, the Roman Empire set up a series of coastal forts called the Litus Saxonicum – the Saxon Shore. A count was put in charge of this coastal defense. It just so happens that the Saxon kingdoms cover the western, southern, and eastern portions of this fortification network. Were they built to defend against Saxons or were they staffed by them? We do not know. What we do know is that the Roman Empire moved a large number of Germanic peoples into the empire, and this included into settlements all over Roman Britain. I posit that when the Romans were left to fend for themselves, many of these Germanic communities decided to govern themselves.
Then along came the Jutes, Hengist and Horsa in around 451. They were guests but they rebelled and took Kent for themselves The Saxons formed a confederation on the continent in what we now call Lower Saxony. They have a long history there and we do not know how many crossed the channel to Britain, but I believe they did not move as whole kingdoms, but as warbands. So how did Britain become England and not Saxonland?
In the 6th century, long after Hengist and long after the Saxon rebellion, King Icel led the English to Britain in around the time just before the Justinian plague. There he took East Anglia and pushed into the midlands forming Middle Anglia and then Mercia. Other Angles founded Northumbria. The English are the only people who moved as a whole group. But, from where?
Well, a small nook of the old English kingdom still retains its name today. It is a little corner of Northern Germany now, right on the border with Denmark, but it used to be a lot bigger. This is Angeln. The Danes call it Angel. This is the homeland of the English. It is also possibly where those who did not migrate made their last stand as Saxons invaded from the southwest and the Slavic Wends from the southeast.
This is also where Widsith speaks of one of the most famous Kings of the English – Offa of Angel. In one mighty duel, he won his kingdom and saved the honour of his people against the Saxons. It is a far mightier
story than Widsith tells, and one I will dedicate a whole video to, but in short, Offa secured the border of his kingdom from the Saxon Myrgings at the Eider river. This fight took place in the middle of the 5th century in Schleswig-Holstein on the Jutland peninsula. Offa’s father was Waemund and he had ruled the English of Angeln for quite some time. We do not know much about their dynasty, but we know the English are not appearing out of nowhere here either.
If we delve back in time to the 2nd century it is the English, in a way, who gave rise to the Danes. Both were ruled back then by a most horrendous king named Heremod. Beowulf tells us that he was banished to the Jutes, who in those days were a coastal people on the western side of Jutland and down the coast in Germany and the Netherlands, mixing with the Frisians.
It was because of Heremod that Scyld Scefing arose in Scania and gave the Danes their freedom, separating them from both the Swedes and the English. From that time on, the Danes would eat into English lands in Denmark. Like in the Viking era, we were cousins then – a close people. That is why the Danes are so deeply entwined with our story of Beowulf. Scyld is possibly the ethnogenesis of the Danes, but not of the English. A century earlier we are mentioned in most curious terms by the Roman historian, Tacitus.
Block 6: Tacitus and the Ingaevones
Tacitus knew the region of Gaul well, and spent some time trying to understand the feisty Germani. These freedom loving tribes had given Rome such a torrid time in the previous century. In his ethnographic survey, Germania, Tacitus says that above all others, the Germani worship a god named Tuisto, and that Tuisto had a son named Mannus, who was the father to all of mankind, but specifically to three sons who gave rise to the Ingaevones by the sea, the Irminones inland, and the rest, were the Istvaeones. Each of these groups contained a number of tribes.
The tribes of the Ingaevones were the Frisii, Chauci, Batavi, Cimbri, Reudigni, Aviones, Varini, Eudoses, Suarines, Huitones, and the Anglii. That’s their names in Latin, how about in English? Okay, some of these translations are speculative on my part, but here we go – The Frisians, Heocas, Bætware, Ymbers, Rondings, Eowan (later Saxons), Weorn, Eoten (Jutes), Swaefe, Teutons, and the English.
There we are. The English were among the Ingaevones back in 98 CE, but of course they were older than that. They did not spring up the year before. But wait, who were the Ingaevones? They were the children of Ing. He was a god. The vikings knew him as Freyr, but Freyr means “Lord.” He was Lord Yngvi – Yngvi Freyr, that is the Lord, Ing.
Hold on a minute though, doesn’t the Ing of the Ingaevones look and sound a lot like the Eng of the English? Which in Latin was Ang, but in modern Italian is Ing again – Inglese. The people of Ing. Experts tell us that the name Angeln, and therefore the name of the English, comes from the word angle. That is to say an angle of land. The nook between Flensburg and Schleswig.
But…
What if we were named after the god, Ing – the people of Ing? That not only makes the English a lot older, but it means that the English peoples were a loose coalition of tribes with a common language, Ingaevonic, and a common culture, one which included the worship of the same Earth goddess, Nerthus. That means the English, in the form of the Chauci (Heocas) were involved in the destruction of three Roman legions at Teutoburg. It means the Cimbri and Teutons who invaded Gaul and the Roman Republic in 113 BCE were English peoples.
It also means that the Saxons and the Jutes had been English peoples long before they migrated to Britain. This makes the English part of a seafaring, coastal confederation with a shared language (Ingaevonic) and shared gods — centuries before they set foot in Britain. So is that it? Are we roughly 2,000 years old as a people? Or do we go beyond history?
Block 7: Before History
The quill alone does not control the existence of a people. It allows us to remember. But, as an archaeology graduate as well as a history one, I know that the material culture of a group transcends the written word. And now, thanks to developments in DNA analysis, so too do their genetics.
This is too much to go into in any great detail in such a broad podcast episode, but we have material evidence, genetic evidence, and linguistic evidence to say that the English peoples, these Ingaevones go back a lot further – to 500 BCE and beyond. English has always been an odd language, and I do not mean after we had so many French words imposed upon us, or when Flemish typesetters screwed around with our spelling under the direction of Caxton. We are something of a middle ground language in the Germanic family. Broadly speaking there are Nordic languages to the north, high and low German to the south, and the family group which experts erroneously called Istvaeonic to the west.
Then there is Ingaevonic. It sits somewhere between German and Norse and I would say that Dutch is actually West Ingaevonic. Let me show you some of the differences, briefly, with a few words. Let’s start with Willow. In Old English is it Welig. In Old Saxon it is Wilgia. In Dutch it is Wilg. And Old Frisian it is Wylch. Ingaevonic. For the Danes it is Pil, the Germans it is Weide, Swedish it is vide, Norwegian it is selje and in Latin it is Salix.
Let’s try another tree – Maple. Old English – Mapuldur, Old Saxon – Mapulder, Old Frisian – Mapul, Dutch – Esdoorn… ok we lost Dutch on that one. In Danish it is Ahorn, the same in German whereas in Swedish and Norwegian it is lonn. In Latin it is acer. How about wheel? Same order – Hweol, wel, hwel, wiel – the Dutch are back on board. And then rad, hjul, hjul, hjul, and in Latin, rota.
The Ingaevones would have lived in the area by the sea stretching from the low countries to the German Baltic coast, including Jutland and possibly some or all of the Danish islands. We do not know how far inland they went, but they bordered the Irminones, who were the main drivers of Teutoburg, and also the mighty Suebians. This region had its own material culture and set of traditions going back centuries. In the 6th century BCE we know they started to erect totem poles known as wooden cult figures. They were usually human shaped and clothed. They ended up preserved in bogs for us to find millennia later. There are even poems of forgotten figures such as the Havamal:
My clothes
I gave in the fields
To two wooden men;
Warriors they played at,
When they had cloaked heads,
And not naked halls.
We have even found a huge post hole outside of an English temple at Yeavering, showing that these pole gods were erected for a thousand years from 500 BCE to the conversion of the English to Christianity – after they had migrated. Across the same time period we have evidence of offerings being made to the bogs. This includes people, sad to say, men and women, but also artifacts. These too cover the period of roughly 500 BCE to 500 CE. Both the pole gods and the bog deposits end with the migration of the English to Britain. This area was also home to Jastorf culture, a burial and pottery culture. And also the epicenter of the expansion of Nordic Bronze Age settlements. We have genetic evidence showing a distinct group of people in the region for a long time.
My guess would be that the English peoples were a loose confederation of tribes who worshipped their founder as a man or god named Ing. They emerged with the Proto-Indo Europeans around the time the Germano-Baltic-Slav group began to break apart after the other branches had moved on. They formed their own branch of the Germanic family and mixed with already established hunter-gatherer groups in the coastal Germany-Danish island regions such as Ertebølle culture and developed their own unique culture.
The Ingaevonic tribes broke apart, re-formed, took on new names, as tribes do. The core tribe retained their identity as the Engles, but were made into Anglii in Latin, and later Angles. Other tribes within this group slowly spread apart and came under the influence of other groups. But enough remained in common for them to have similar languages and traditions lasting until the 6th century CE and beyond. They just forgot who they had been. What this does change, however, is the idea that England is an amalgam of distinct tribes – Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. It was not. It was the re-merging of three related groups after a long time of being distinct neighbours.
Closing
Let’s bring it back to the beginning. I hope I have demonstrated to you that the English people are among the oldest people in the world with a consistent identity going back at least two-thousand years. But why is
Englishness questioned so often? And why is it constantly being re-drawn by those at the top?
In a way, I just answered that question during my great sweep of English history. Since 1066, the ruling classes have seen themselves as French, British, or European — rarely as English. Historians have written volumes on the land and the state, but seldom on the ordinary people themselves. Unlike in other countries which too have had waves of invasions where new people were either absorbed or fully took over, the colonisation of England in 1066 was partial. The English mostly stayed at the bottom as a peasant class and the French, though they eventually spoke an approximation of our language, never really integrated nor did they take over the land, language, and culture entirely. If they had, we would be speaking some form of Norman French now. Instead, we speak English with a lot of Norman French words thrown in, but not fully assimilated.
By not buying into Englishness and by continuously seeking to control large empires, the descendents of these elites have, with a few, rare occasions such as the Tudors, never bought into English identity. They merely seek to shape it in whatever image they wish to project at that particular time while destroying any grassroot attempt to foster a native culture, even if ordinary people cherish the very symbols the elite imposed on them previously. They just find new symbols and new definitions. And if they wish to dismiss the people entirely or replace them, then so be it. They believe it to be within their right to do so.
England is not a young country. It is not a free country. The English are not a free people, but we are a long lived one. Older than the Scots. Older than the Welsh. Older than the French, the Danes, Spanish, Russians… Older than many nations in Europe. We are a very old people who have forgotten who we are. One of the goals of this channel is to help us remember.
So the next time someone tells you England is a thousand years old, you can tell them — the English are older than you think.
