ABSTRACT
It was with characteristic self-effacement that Nicholas Brooks recently joined the currently-fashionable debates about ethnic identity and the ways in which early medieval communities saw themselves (or were perceived) as ‘nations’, ‘peoples’ or ‘races’.1 His particular interest has been in the assertion of a notion of English identity, notably in the ways in which this was constructed (by Bede and others) to allow a multi-ethnic British and English population to accept a shared notion of Englishness. Brooks’s reticence prevents him from trumpeting the originality of his contributions, but his essays stand apart from others on the same subject. Their especial importance is that they consider this question in terms not just of England but of Britain; the demonstration that Alcuin, for example, used the term ‘English’ to apply to the whole island of Britain (‘he certainly writes as if the English church was the church of Britain and the English bishops were the bishops of Britain’2) sheds a quite different light on these issues. This essay reflects further on the importance of thinking as much about the British as the English in the later context of the mid-tenth century.
