English people

• 1. Introduction

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  The English people are an ethnic group and nation whose origins stretch back to the 5th century AD, when Germanic tribes began crossing from southern Denmark and northern Germany to settle the eastern and southern coasts of Britain. Their very name comes from the Angles, one of those founding tribes. The word "Angelcynn" meant "Angle kin" in Old English, and it is from that root that both "England" and "English" descend.

  But who, exactly, are the English? The question turns out to be far more complicated than it might seem. Centuries of invasion, settlement, and assimilation have layered peoples upon peoples on the same island. Danes, Normans, Huguenots, and immigrants from across the British Empire have all become part of the English story. And the line between being English and being British has blurred so thoroughly that a historian named Krishan Kumar described a common slip of the tongue in which people say "English, I mean British" without realising the distinction matters.

  Modern genetics has added another dimension. Three distinct ancient lineages run through the English population: Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who arrived in Europe roughly 45,000 years ago, Neolithic farmers who migrated from Anatolia about 9,000 years ago, and Yamnaya Steppe pastoralists who expanded from the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 5,000 years ago. The layers go far deeper than the Norman Conquest or even the Anglo-Saxons. What follows is the story of how those layers accumulated, what they produced, and why the question of English identity remains contested today.

• 2. Before the Anglo-Saxons

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  Around 2400 BC, Britain's Neolithic farming population was largely replaced by a group from North Continental Europe characterised by the Bell Beaker culture. Genetic studies have traced this population to the Yamnaya people of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. They appear to have been an offshoot of the Corded Ware single-grave people as that tradition developed in Western Europe, and they did not share genetic affinities with Bell Beaker populations in Iberia.

  This early replacement matters because it means that the close genetic ties between modern British and Irish people and other Northwest Europeans were established long before the Viking or Anglo-Saxon periods. Whatever ancestry the Anglo-Saxons and Danish settlers introduced in the first millennium AD, the underlying genetic clustering of British and Irish populations with Continental Northwest Europeans was already in place.

  Whether the Bell Beaker populations who arrived around 2400 BC went on to develop Celtic languages in Britain, or whether later Celtic migrations brought those languages to the island, remains an open question in current scholarship. The answer would reshape how historians understand the origins of the Brittonic-speaking Romano-British population that the Anglo-Saxons encountered when they arrived centuries later.

• 3. The Anglo-Saxon Transformation

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  Gildas, the only contemporary historical source for the early period of Anglo-Saxon arrival, described slaughter and starvation of native Britons as the invading tribes swept in. The traditional reading of this account suggested a mass displacement of the Romano-British population in southern and eastern Britain. One piece of linguistic evidence points the same way: the English language contains no more than a handful of words borrowed from Brittonic sources, which is striking given that Brittonic speakers had lived there for centuries.

  Not all scholars accepted that picture. An alternative model proposed a small-scale migration built around an elite of male warriors who took over political control and gradually drew the existing population into Anglo-Saxon cultural forms. The law code of Ine of Wessex offered one mechanism: a legal system called Wergild created material incentives to become Anglo-Saxon or at least English-speaking. Historian Malcolm Todd argued that a large proportion of the native British population likely stayed in place and was progressively dominated by a Germanic aristocracy.

  A 2016 study using ancient DNA from Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon era graves in Cambridgeshire calculated that ten modern eastern English samples carried an average of 38% Anglo-Saxon ancestry. Ten Welsh and Scottish samples each averaged 30%. Another study from burials in northern England found a sharp genetic break between Iron Age and Roman-period bodies on one side and Anglo-Saxon-period bodies on the other, with East Anglia showing the strongest shift.

  A landmark 2022 study titled "The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool" found the English to be of plurality Anglo-Saxon-like ancestry, but with heavy native Celtic Briton admixture and evidence of medieval French influence. Researcher Bethany Fox, studying place names in northeastern England and southern Scotland, found that migrants settled densely in river valleys like the Tyne and the Tweed, while the Britons moved to less fertile hill country and acculturated over a longer period. Fox described the overall process as "a synthesis of mass-migration and elite-takeover models."

• 4. Danes, Normans, and a New England

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  From around 800 AD, Danish Viking raids on British coastlines gave way to Danish settlement. Alfred the Great formalised the division by signing the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, which established the Danelaw and split England between English and Danish rule, with the Danes holding the north and east. Alfred's successors then reversed this by winning military victories that absorbed much of the Danelaw into the growing kingdom of England.

  The nation of England was formally constituted on the 12th of July 927, when Æthelstan of Wessex concluded the Treaty of Eamont Bridge and brought all Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Danelaw under a single rule. England remained permanently unified after 954. Yet Danish kings continued to follow English ones: Æthelred II ruled from 978 to 1013 and again from 1014 to 1016, but Cnut, who was Danish, held the throne from 1016 to 1035.

  The Danes left a clear mark on English speech. Words such as anger, ball, egg, got, knife, take, and they all come from Old Norse. Place names ending in -thwaite and -by are Scandinavian in origin. Gradually the Danish settlers came to be seen as English themselves.

  The Norman Conquest of 1066 ended Anglo-Saxon and Danish rule. The new French-speaking Norman elite replaced the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and church leadership almost universally. For a generation or two after the Conquest, "English" referred to all natives of the island regardless of Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, or Celtic origin, to distinguish them from the Normans. The Norman dynasty ruled for 87 years until the death of King Stephen in 1154, when the crown passed to Henry II of the House of Plantagenet. Anglo-Norman and Latin remained the official languages of the Plantagenet kings until Edward I came to the throne. By the 14th century, both rulers and subjects thought of themselves as English and spoke the English language. A legal relic of the conquest, the Presentment of Englishry, survived until it was abolished in 1340.

• 5. The Diaspora and Its Reach

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  In the 2020 United States census, 46.5 million Americans self-identified as having some English origins, representing 19.8% of the White American population. Within that figure, 25.5 million identified as English alone. Demographers regard even this large number as an undercount, because many people of English descent have tended to identify simply as American, especially since the introduction of a new "American" ancestry category in the 2000 census.

  In the 1980 census, more than 49 million Americans claimed English ancestry, at the time around 26.3% of the total population. The principal settlers of the 17th-century American colonies were primarily English and established the foundations of what became the country's culture.

  Australia presents a comparable pattern. In the 2016 census, 7.8 million Australians, or 36.1% of the population, identified as English or a combination including English. Some 907,572 residents, or 3.9% of the population, were actually born in England, making the English-born the largest overseas-born group in the country. In Canada's 2016 census, 6.3 million people, or 18.3% of the population, identified as wholly or partly English.

  In Argentina, English settlers arrived in Buenos Aires in 1806, when it was still a Spanish colony, mostly as businessmen. They founded banks, developed export trade in crops and animal products, introduced football, and brought the families' younger sons across the Atlantic to seek fortunes in cattle and wheat. In Chile, the English eventually numbered more than 32,000 in Valparaíso during the saltpeter boom at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, drawn there after the port opened to free trade in 1811.

• 6. English Identity Under Pressure

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  The 1990s brought a visible rise in English self-awareness that puzzled and interested scholars. Devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales in the late 1990s generated what became known as the "West Lothian question": MPs from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland could vote on matters affecting only England at Westminster, but English MPs had no equivalent say over devolved matters in those nations. Groups such as the Campaign for an English Parliament argued this created a democratic deficit.

  Writer Matthew Parris, writing in The Spectator in December 2010, offered a different frame. He argued that English identity had not grown so much as been unmasked from behind a veneer of Britishness. Krishan Kumar, studying English identity directly, observed that the slip of saying "English, I mean British" is made by English people themselves and by foreigners, but almost never by Welsh or Scottish people.

  In 2010, the English Democrats won 64,826 votes in the UK general election, accounting for 0.3% of all votes cast in England. Support for establishing a separate English parliament fluctuated widely depending on how pollsters asked the question. A 2007 BBC Newsnight poll found 61% in favour. The British Social Attitudes Survey, by contrast, put support at between 16 and 19% in the first five years of devolution, rising to 29% by 2010.

  A 2017 YouGov survey found that 38% of English voters considered themselves both English and British, while 19% felt English but not British. In the 2021 United Kingdom census, 58.4% of respondents identified as British, while 14.9% identified as English. A nationally representative survey published in June 2021 found that 77% of white respondents in England agreed that being English was open to people of different ethnic backgrounds, while 68% of ethnic minority respondents said the same.

• 7. Language and Literature

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  English belongs to the West Germanic language family. Its earliest recorded form, Old English, was the speech of the Anglo-Saxon settlers and the language in which Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, The Seafarer, and The Wanderer were composed. Latin and French dominated official and literary life for much of the medieval period; Middle English, which was shaped by Norman-French, Old French, and Latin, was the everyday tongue from the 12th to the 15th century.

  Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London and the Great Vowel Shift. Dialects had once varied widely across England, recorded in projects such as the English Dialect Dictionary in the late 19th century and the Survey of English Dialects in the mid-20th century, but sustained dialect levelling driven by education, the media, and economic pressures has reduced that variety considerably.

  The Elizabethan era is often described as the golden age of English literature, with William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe, and Ben Jonson all producing work during that period. Geoffrey Chaucer stands as the most famous writer of the Middle English period. In 2003, the BBC carried out a survey called The Big Read to find the nation's best-loved novel, and the top five places were taken by works from English novelists J. R. R. Tolkien, Jane Austen, Philip Pullman, Douglas Adams, and J. K. Rowling.

  Through the spread of the British Empire from the 17th to the mid-20th century, and later through newspapers, radio, satellite television, and the Internet, English became the dominant international language of business, science, aviation, and diplomacy. Cornish, a Celtic language, was historically spoken in Cornwall and has undergone a revival; Cumbric, another Brittonic Celtic language once spoken in Cumbria, died out in the 11th century, though traces of it remain in the Cumbrian dialect.