"Bede himself insists that three different Germanic peoples came to Britain – the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes – and that they set up a whole series of distinct kingdoms, the Jutes in Kent, the Saxons in various southern districts, the Angles in East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. Nevertheless by the time he is writing – some three hundred years after the early migrations and a hundred years after their Christian conversion – he takes it for granted that this whole medley of peoples and kingdoms has become a single nation, "gens Anglorum", the people of the English, and he regularly uses the name "English" to include not only Northumbrians and other Angles, but Saxons and Jutes. He does not, however, for one moment, think that it includes the other peoples of Britain – Britons, Scots and Picts. Britain is one but it includes four peoples with four languages. The English, he had no doubt at all – meaning Saxons, Angles and Jutes – are now a single nation with a single language and a single church."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (1997), pp. 37-38
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxons
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Anglo-Saxons
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