The Christian conversion and the invention of the English

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds Christians that they’re surrounded by a terrific “cloud of witnesses.” (NRSVA) That “cloud” has continued to grow in size since then. In this column we shall be fascinated with a number of the people and events, over the past 2000 years, which have helped make up this “cloud.” People and events which have helped construct the community of the Christian church because it exists today. 

Every nation has its ‘deep story,’ the best way that it consciously and unconsciously draws on its history (and its imagined history) to define its modern identity. None more so than the English. Today, the thought of what it means to be ‘English’ lies behind much of the heated and contested conversation in England about its character and its place inside the UK. What is usually neglected is the origin of ‘Englishness’ and the best way that the Christian Church largely invented the label as a part of the conversion of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. 

The English in the favored imagination

We often take without any consideration the existence of a spot called ‘England’ and a community of those living there to be ‘English’.  

Most people imagine this was since the English (ie the Anglo-Saxons) were a recognisable ethnic group who left northwestern Europe to seize land at the tip of Roman Britain within the fifth century; drove out the British (Celtic) inhabitants throughout the ‘Dark Age’ wars of the sixth century; and created a community that we will call ‘England’ by the center of the seventh century. Hence references in popular culture to modern people being ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (ie ‘English’), even ‘pure Anglo-Saxon.’ 

However, things were more complex and the implications of this are very significant. They are still relevant today in debates over national identity.

The Viking Wars and political rebranding

2025 is the anniversary of the crowning of some of the essential kings of England that almost all people have never heard of. In September 925, Athelstan was crowned king of Wessex at Kingston upon Thames. 

As a results of the Viking Wars, large parts of England within the east and north had been seized by incoming Norse-speaking rulers and settlers throughout the second half of the ninth century. The Christian Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia, Northumbria, and the eastern regions of Mercia had been conquered by Viking pagan armies. However, under Athelstan’s grandfather, Alfred the Great (died 899), father, Edward the Elder (died 924) and aunt Ethelfled Lady of the Mercians (died 918) the one surviving Anglo-Saxon kingdom – Wessex (the West Saxons) – had fought back. 

At first, this meant that the lands south of the Thames and within the West Midlands remained in Anglo-Saxon hands, ruled by the king of Wessex and allies within the West Midlands (in what was left of the old kingdom of Mercia). 

New labels were invented to explain these rulers and the lands under their control. Alfred was occasionally called “Anglorum-Saxonum Rex” (King of the Anglo-Saxons) but his usual royal title was “Rex Anglorum” (King of the Angles/English). It was a clever piece of political terminology that positioned him as representing all ‘Christian Anglo-Saxons,’ as a people distinct from the ‘pagan Danes’ (the latter a catch-all label of convenience for Viking bands and settlers) and the ‘Christian Welsh.’ It implied that every one the Anglo-Saxon peoples (despite their long history of division into separate rival kingdoms) were one recognisable ethnic community: the ‘Angli’ (English). This rebranding continued under his son, Edward the Elder.

In the early tenth century, the fight against the Vikings was taken to the East Midlands and areas of Norse control there have been conquered. Then, under Athelstan, the world was prolonged even further. His reign would see a West Saxon king annex Viking Northumbria, invade Scotland and eventually defeat an enormous alliance of Viking forces, Scots and Welsh in 937, on the Battle of Brunanburh. 

During his reign a recent royal title of REX TO (tius) BRIT (anniae) – King of all Britain – appeared on his coinage, together with the primary representation of any English monarch wearing a crown. In 927, at Eamont, south of Penrith, rulers of the Welsh, Scots, and independent Anglo-Saxons around Bamburgh (in Northumbria) accepted Athelstan, king of England, as their overlord. In one in every of his documents he called himself “Athelstan, king of the English, through the favour of the Almighty raised to the throne of the dominion of the entire of Britain.”

Athelstan’s kingdom was one which included Anglo-Saxons, Danish and Irish-Norse Vikings and whose authority overshadowed the neighbouring kingdoms of the Scots and the Welsh. It was an achievement forged in wars that were conducted on a scale larger than any fought in previous phases within the Viking Wars. Modern historians have hailed him because the creator of a united ‘England’ (albeit with borders quite different to today’s).

It had taken over 450 years for the thought of an ‘English’ political nation to emerge. Yet, when it did, the thought of a culturally ‘English people’ was already 300 years old. And this was a direct results of the best way that the mixed pagan Germanic kingdoms were seen, initially from the angle of the pope in Rome, after which by those that pioneered the Christian conversion on the bottom within the seventh century. Alfred the Great and his successors were working with an idea that was centuries old by the point they and their propagandists sought to make use of it as a counterpoise to a recent wave of pagan (Viking) invaders.

The Christian conversion and the invention of the ‘English’

The peoples who created recent kingdoms within the wreckage of, what had once been, Roman Britain (within the fifth and sixth centuries) claimed to come back from Germanic tribes named Saxons, Angles and Jutes. However, they weren’t very consistent in how they used these labels and their enemies tended to call all of them ‘Saxons’: ‘Saesnaeg’ (to the Welsh) and ‘Sasanach’ (to the Scots). Had that stuck, English people would now be ‘Saxons,’ and living in ‘Saxony.’ But one other label emerged.

The Christian mission from Rome to the Germanic kingdoms in what had once been eastern Roman Britain (arriving in Kent in 597) opted for a convenient label to explain their target market, and it stuck. When the Northumbrian monk Bede wrote his highly influential account of the origins of his people and their conversion to Christianity, he titled it: the ‘Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum’ (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) and described how Pope Gregory the Great sent a mission (under Augustine) “to evangelise the Word of God to the English nation.” 

In his account he also recorded a legend that Gregory met slaves in Rome and asked “What was the name of that nation?” To which the reply was that they were called Angles. Gregory had then said, “Right, for they’ve an angelic face, and it is true that such needs to be co-heirs with the Angels in heaven.’”  

‘Angli’ (English), not ‘Saxones’ (Saxons) was chosen as the general label that included all of the Germanics on the island of Britain. It was probably chosen to tell apart the Germanic people in Britain – the ‘Anglisaxones’ (English Saxons) – from continental ‘Old Saxons’ still living in Old Saxony in Germany.

This also insisted that – despite all of the complexity and variety on the bottom – those within the ‘gentis Anglorum’ (the English nation) were a recognisable ethnic unit. The intriguing thing is that they weren’t one ethnic group. The evidence of archaeology, landscape studies, political geography and now modern genetic studies reveals that the emerging English community was ethnically complex. Even in its most Germanic communities, 25% were probably ‘British,’ who now dressed, spoke, and acted ‘English.’ And this became much more pronounced the further west one went. Even at the very best levels this was the case, with founders of Anglo-Saxon dynasties having British names. 

When Alfred the Great sought to rally support behind his resistance to the Vikings he drew on a useful term that was already over 250 years old, and gave it enhanced political meaning which transcended old kingdom loyalties, in a world where Wessex alone had withstood Viking conquest. And the term ‘English’ had deep resonance since it was also one intimately linked to Christian faith. 

But Alfred’s kingdom included those culturally recognisable as Welsh, and the newly minted English kingdom of his grandson, Athelstan, included Norse as well, lots of whom were pagan. Once more the term ‘English’ and ‘England’ was culturally inclusive because it had at all times been – nonetheless it’d appear at first glance. It represented all those that lived inside its borders, whatever their ethnic origins. 

In conclusion, it was the Christian Church which invented the thought of the ‘English’ – as a useful (catch-all) label – and the political nation played catch-up in its adoption of the term. As a results of the Roman Christian mission, before God the ‘English’ were thought to face as one recognisable community – but they were never one ethnic or racial group (regardless of the label or Bede implied) and the term ‘English’ was at all times a posh one. 

That is price reflecting on in our modern age of culture wars and identity politics. Who the ‘English’ were and are has at all times prompted a debate. The conversation over this continues within the twenty first century, because it did within the seventh and the tenth. Just activate the news to find that!

Martyn Whittock is a historian, commentator, columnist and a Licensed Lay Minister within the Church of England. The writer, or co-author, of fifty-seven books, his work includes: Daughters of Eve (2021), Jesus the Unauthorized Biography (2021), The End Times, Again? (2021), The Story of the Cross (2021), Apocalyptic Politics (2022) and American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America (2023). His latest book (published in April) is: Vikings within the East. From Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin – the Origins of a Contested Legacy in Russia and Ukraine.