The English nation is of distinctly Teutonic or German origin. The Angles, Jutes & Saxons, who according to Bede, furnished the majority of immigrants in the fifth century … entered upon a land whose defenders had forsaken it … whose vast forests & unreclaimed marshlands afforded the newcomers a comparatively easy conquest, & the means of reproducing at liberty on new ground the institutions under which they had lived at home
This new race was the main stock of our forefathers, sharing the primeval German pride of purity of extraction; still regarding the family tie as the basis of social organisation, migrating in groups of allied & kindred character, & commemorating the tribal identity in the names they gave to their new settlements; honouring the women of their nation & strictly careful of the distinction between themselves & the tolerated remnant of their predecessors
Bishop Stubbs. Select Charters 1st edition 1870, 9th edition 1966
How things change
We might cringe these days, but that passage from a much respected constitutional historian is not what ir seems through our rearview spectacles
Even at school in the mid C20th I was taught that the free Anglo Saxon inhabitants of England were enslaved as serfs by the Norman French. The proof is there in our language, which retains the Old English words for animals - cow, sheep, pig - while they are still alive & need hard work to tend in the fields. Once they become expensive meat, affordable only by the aristocratic owners of the land, the french words take over - boeuf, mouton, porc
