Q&A
When did people start considering themselves English?
eople started thinking of themselves as English long before there was any country called ‘England’. In the eighth century, when the Anglo-Saxons still belonged to separate kingdoms, there was already a developing sense that they might all be one (‘people of the English’ or ‘Angles’), even if they were originally Saxons or Jutes. The historian Bede was an influential proponent of this idea.
