The Fundamental Interest of the English People

Interesting thread. I see some people  have great difficulty with nationality , identity and ethnicity. The English are of course an ethnic group , a people , a nation and are readily identifiable worldwide. If the English don't meet the criteria of being an ethnic group....nation and people then those terms are completely meaningless.



Don't understand this quote dan. The first groups of humans began arriving in what is now England at the end of the last ice age. No one knows who these people were , or what language and culture they had , but they weren't Celts. Who erroneously refers to them as Celtic?

 Neolithic period ended in these islands roughly 2000 bc , and the Celtic age ( there is of course some debate about this) began 1000 bc , so at best , the arrival of the Celts marked the end of the neolithic period. Neither the neolithic people , nor the Celtic people , were English.

 Celtic is a linguistic term , which first arose thousands of years ago when the mediterraneans  , particularly the romans and greeks , first encountered these people north of the alps and in Iberia. These people shared common languages and culture , from Iberia and these islands in the west , to turkey in the east.

 So today , the comparison would be that the Scottish for example are a Celtic people in terms of our heritage native language and culture , and the English a germanic people. The erroneous bit about the Celts of these islands is a red herring based on the fact that we Scots Irish and welsh never called ourselves Celts. It was the 16th century welsh historian Edward lhuyd who first noticed the similarity between our native languages and cultures and those of the Celts of antiquity.

That doesn't mean we aren't Celts in linguistic terms because we didn't use the term historically. Neither did the Danes call themselves vikings , or the germanic English anglo and Saxon.........all modern terms based on cherry picked pieces of history.



The ancestors of the English began to arrive from angeln and Saxony in the mid 5th century at the earliest dan .


How so? The genetic profile of a country is always in a state of change surely? Of course you also don't need a mass change in people to fundamentally alter the character of a nation. For example , take the effect the Norman French had on England and the entirety of these islands. In 1066 and the aftermath , the Norman French made up less than 1 % of the population of England , which itself had roughly 40% of the population of these islands. within 300 years , the English language and culture had been so fundamentally changed as to be literally unrecognisable to the native English.




Eh? How so? You seem to want to selectively cherry pick some pure English stock to look up to in the dark ages , while ignoring all the rest up to the modern age.



Alfred was never king of the English. At one point , his kingdom was a swamp in Somerset , at best , he was king of Wessex. His claim to fame was he was the first saxon to have the vision of a united England , which his grandson Athelstan was to later achieve in 937 with the great battle of brunanburgh , the battle that was supposed to have established England.

 the anglo saxon chronicle is good for some information , but much of it is of course bullshit. For example the writers were always quick to praise English warlords and kings on their great victories , but remained silent on pain of death when they were defeated in battle.


 Athelstan as well as being famous as Englands first king , was also famous for being vehemently anti British. It was famously written that Athelstan drove the filthy British race out of the town of Exeter (and possibly rest of Devon) and cleansed the town of its defilement by the British. Later he passed laws that no anglo saxon was to marry a briton , and no briton could own land in England.

 yet today many of your countrymen have romantic ideas of the British , and forget all these ancient tales of their countries making such are the modern fables of britishness that have been bred into them In the modern era.





You are right historically , but I'm not sure in this increasingly mono lingual world that language is really now a large identifier of national or ethnic identity as it once was. 99% of the worlds English speakers aren't English and don't live in England or even these islands.

 still , a common language is a sore point for the brits as the British don't have a common shared native language .



you can quote who you like , but the English language and literature is famous for borrowing. 


fair point to a degree. just as there is a church of scotland , there is a church of england , but no church of that mythical country Britain.


Not sure that is true. It took five hundred years for the anglo saxons to carve out the country we now know as England (for comparison the germanic franks overran much of gaul in 50 years) for a good two hundred years the Danes were a dominant group within England , and then the native English lost that domination after the Norman conquest.

 for three hundred years the French ruled England , with Geoffrey Chaucer ( of French extraction himself) or people like the 14th century English chronicler ranulph higden famously writing in the polychronicon that Englishmen were essentially slaves in their own lands who had to drop the English language and speak French to get good jobs , positions , and be better thought of in English society .


 English in historical terms were a minority population in these islands rather than the dominant force in terms of sheer numbers prior to the early 19th century.

 good thread though  , I bet your English nationalistic story telling won't be popular with the resident British though.