What is English?

Can anyone be English? I suppose it depends how far back in history you want to go. There is the favourite nationalist saying that if a dog has puppies in a stable they are still puppies, not horses. Meaning where you are born doesn’t make you what you are, it is who you are born from that makes you what you are.

So that phrase doesn’t answer the question very well as dogs and horses are completely different species of animals. Perhaps it is better put like if a spaniel has puppies in a stable the puppies are still spaniels.

Nationalist outlook is if a Nigerian mother and father move to England and have children in England, the children will always be Nigerian, not English. If one parent is English then the children will be half English or mixed race.

What then when those children grow up and have their own children in England? If they are fully Nigerian then I suppose their children will be the same too if they had children with a Nigerian partner. If as we said they are only half English and they had children with another Nigerian girl would that make their children quarter English? If they were half English and had children with a fully English girl would those children then be ¾ English. I could go on down further generations with different permutations but this is getting confusing already.

The question is what is English?

Before the 5th century the English never existed as there was no England until the invasion of the Barbarians or Angles. Prior to that it was Britain (Britannia)and for the first 3 centuries AD was under occupation of the Roman Empire. The Roman empire wasn’t just made up of Romans from Rome, it would have consisted of people from all over the empire including the middle east and north Africa . Certainly it was Roman policy not to employ its soldiers in their home countries so any Britons who joined the Roman army would have gone abroad while Roman soldiers in Britain are known to have come from places like Dalmatia (Croatia).

Prior to the Roman invasion in the 1st century Britain was inhabited by tribal Britons each tribe with their own King or ruler, they certainly didn’t see themselves as one nation.
The Roman invasion didn’t wipe out the entire colony of Britons although I’m sure it was bloody in places, more so that Britons became Romanised. It was that or die. Over the 300 years of Roman occupation there would have been interaction between the original Britons and the Roman Britons. There would have been marriages and children.

By the 4th century Britain became too costly to defend from the repeated Barbarian attacks and the Roman Empire simply gave up on Britain, upped sticks and left leaving the country open to the Angles (German), Saxons (German) and Jutes (Danish). We know them as the Anglo Saxons and probably the first known reference to English and England (Angle Land), leaving the Britons behind to defend themselves. Amongst these Britons most certainly would have been some Roman Britons who had settled and chose to take their chance with the Saxons.

The Saxons never wiped out every remaining Briton, it was simply an occupation and the Britons just had to live with it. Over time they would have fully integrated into what was then Saxon Britain, Britons and Saxons having children together. Things stayed that way for some 600 years until the Norman invasion.

The Normans were not actually French although they came from what we know as France. They originated from earlier Viking invasions of France and became known as the North men (Norsemen).

The Duke of Normandy was made King of England (William 1st) and he divided the land up and gave it to his Barons making them Lords of the manor to look after the land. William actually spent very little time in England, he hated then place. Much of the English aristocracy today can trace its family line to these Norman barons and is where our class structure today stems from. Although these classes were kept separate there would certainly have been inter relations between the Norman men and Saxon women producing children.

That was 945 years ago and here we are today modern England and the English. A people made up out of early tribal Britons, The global Roman Empire, Germans, Danish, Norwegian and French.

Today global travel and immigration has also contributed to international breeding. It is not uncommon for an English man to have a far eastern wife, African wife or a wife from the Indian sub-continent. So their children will always be labelled half English half Chinese etc. (mixed race) but what of their grand children or great grandchildren? Are we going to start dividing their nationality into fractions again depending on the racial makeup of their ancestors? I have to confess to being about 1/16th Irish but still proud to be British.

The views expressed here are solely those of the author and not of any political party he may belong to.