ABSTRACT
England and the English, state and folk,2 are not old as historians reckon time. Tacitus set down the English name, it is true, as early as A.D. 98, but the Anglii of the Germania3 were only a Germanic tribe of the Jutland peninsula, politically independent but culturally part of a nationality, not yet a nationality in their own right. They won cultural independence and national status by migration. In the fifth and sixth centuries of our era the Angles, like many another Germanic tribe of that day, gave up their old seats and sought land and loot within the bounds of the Roman Empire. If Bede is right, the whole tribe left home in this migration, and parts of at least two neighboring tribes, the Saxons and the Jutes, took ship in the same move.4 All three tribes settled anew in the Roman province of Britannia, the eastern half of which they overran, from the Channel to the Firth of Forth. The western half held out longer against them, though without help from Rome, who had withdrawn her legions from Britannia one after another until, early in the fifth century, the land was left stripped of troops. Not until the ninth century did Cornwall yield to English arms, and further north the Welsh kept their freedom, more or less, until 1282, over 200 years after the English lost theirs at Hastings. But by the end of the sixth century most of the geographical area now known as England had fallen into the hands of
Migration to Britain
the Germanic tribesmen, and these, whatever their tribe, had begun to think of themselves as members of a larger unit, a new nationality which went by the English name. The old tribal name Angl(i)i in its extended or generic sense, denoting the Germanic inhabitants of Britain irrespective of tribe, first appears in the writings of Pope Gregory the Great (d.604).5 The rise of this national name marks the beginnings of English national (as distinct from tribal) feeling.
