Legal Definitions and origins of the words
England - English - Englishness
The origins of the words ‘England’ and ‘The English’
The words ‘English’ and ‘England’ come from the Anglo-Saxon. The Anglo-Saxons were not a single people, and may not have been even a formal confederation originally. Primarily made up of Jutes from Jutland where they are still called Jutes in that area, the Engle or Angles from Angeln in Denmark, also called the ‘Anglii’ (Latin for Engle,) by the Roman historian Tacitus, and the Seax, named after their formidable fighting knife of the same name, who came from Saxony Elbe-Weser region in Germany. Smaller number of Frisians came from the small islands in the North Sea.There were also Jutes from the lower Rhineland, and Swabians, Franks and Alamanni. However the Anglian and Saxon tribes were the most prominent. These tribes called the Anglii-Saxones by Paul The Deacon to cover a single ‘insular Germanic’ identity, or Saxons (after the dominant tribe,) for short in more modern times. They were a formidable set of three North Sea Germanic tribes. From this combination of tribes we get an evolution through the words Engle, Angles, Anglii, - or Englisc, Anglisc which were apart of the Nerthus-Worshipping peoples mentioned in Tacitus’s Germania. Anglii (the Latin version of the word Engle) is the earliest recorded form of the folk-name which gave rise to ‘Eng’ in England. However, the people called themselves Anglisc (Angle-ish, Anglian) and the national identity was assumed under the heading Anglisc or Englisc, ‘English’. The people gave their name to their territory, thus the Englisc gave their name to Englalond (England). Englisc was used from the time of Alfred the Great onwards to describe both in the sense of ‘Englishman’ and as meaning the ‘English’ language.
The English – a legal definition
The Ethnic English
The English are by law a Nation. A lawyer has described the English in this way:
"The English gave their name to England and have lived there ever since. People who have since come to England and merged into the English population and are indistinguishable from the English and claim no identity other than English and are accepted by the English as being one of their own, are English."
Englishness
"Your strength of Englishness is defined by your desire to be part of the English community, to be sensitive to the ethnic English people who form it, and to its history and culture as anyone would expect them selves to be sensitive to any culture."
English Culture
Leaving aside Shakespeare, William Blake and others who are Global culturalists, England itself does have a strong Folk culture. Use the web to search for the people below.
- English Sword Dancers
- Carlisle Sword Dancers
- English Folk Music or Folk Songs
- Cecil James Sharp, born in 1859 in London an organist
- William Kimber born 1872 from Headington Quarry near Oxford.
- Charles Marson from Hambridge in Somerset
- English Folk and Country dancing – social and ceremonial – ceremonial being seasonal.
Links
> English Folk Dance and Song Society website: http://www.efdss.org/
> The Morris Ring website: http://www.themorrisring.org/
> The Lancashire Folk website: http://www.lancashirefolk.co.uk/
> The Liverpool Folk society website: http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/gerry.jones/contra.html
> The South West of England website: http://www.folksw.org.uk/links.htm
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