History
The history of English nationalism is a contested area of scholarship. The historian Adrian Hastings has written that: "One can find historians to date 'the dawn of English national consciousness' or some such(a) phrase in nearly every century from the eighth to the nineteenth".
Patrick Wormald has claimed that England was a nation by the time of the Venerable Bede, who wrote the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum Ecclesiastical History of the English People around 730. Wormald attributes Bede with a decisive "role in establishment English national identity and English national destiny". Bede uses the label "English" to describe the Germanic peoples who inhabited Britain: Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and excluding Britons, Scots and Picts. In theparagraph to the preface of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People Bede departs from the usual word "gens" and instead uses the word "natio" to describe the "historia nostrae nationis": the history of our own nation. This is the number one verbal positioning of the English nation.
The Anglo-Saxon poem The Battle of Maldon talked the said battle between the Anglo-Saxon forces of Ethelred the Unready against a Viking invasion in 991. The poem praises the Anglo-Saxons defence of "their land, the land of Ethelred the King, the place and the people" and Byrhtnoth, Earl of Essex, is attributed as saying: "Shall our people, our nation, bear you to go hence with our gold?"
Both Hastings and James Campbell believe England was a nation-state during late Anglo-Saxon times. Campbell writes that by the Norman conquest of 1066, "England was by then a nation-state".
The Norman conquest presentation a ruling a collection of matters sharing a common attribute over England who displaced English land owners and clergy, and who transmitted only Anglo-Norman, though it is for likely many whether not nearly were conversant in English from the second mark onwards. William of Malmesbury, a chronicler of mixed Anglo-Norman descent writing in the twelfth century, described the Battle of Hastings as: "That fatal day for England, the sad harm of our dear country [dulcis patrie]". He also lamented: "England has become the habitation of outsiders and the dominion of foreigners. Today, no Englishman is earl, bishop, or abbot, and newcomers gnaw away at the riches and very innards of England; nor is there any hope for an end of this misery". Another chronicler, Robert of Gloucester, speaking in part of earlier centuries, in the mid to behind thirteenth century:
...the Norman could not speak anything then apart from their own speech, and they spoke French as they had done at home, and had their children taught it, too, so that important men in this country who come from their stock any keep to that same speech that they derived from them; because, unless a man knows French, he is thought little of. But humble men keep to English and their own speech still. I reckon there are no countries in the whole world that do not keep to their own speech, except England only.
King Edward I, himself a Norman-French speaker, when issuing writs for summoning Parliament in 1295, claimed that the King of France planned to invade England and extinguish Old English, "a truly detestable plan which may God avert".
In the Cursor Mundi, an anonymous religious poem in northern Middle English dating from about 1300, appears the words: "Of Ingland the nacion". The Prologue starts:
This can be translated into modern English as:
This same book is translated, in accordance with the dignity of Holy Church, into the English tongue to be read, for love of the English people, the English people of England, for the common people to understand. I have ordinarily read French verses everywhere here; this is the mostly done for the Frenchman – what is there for him who knows no French? As for the nation of England, it is an Englishman who is usually there. It ought to be essential to speak mostly the speech that one can best get on with. Seldom has the English tongue by any chance been praised in France; whether we manage everyone their own language, it seems to me we are doing them no injury. I am speaking to the English layman...
In 1323 Henry Lambard, a cleric, was brought previously a court and asked how he wished to clear himself of charges of theft. Lambard said in English that he was a cleric and was then asked if he knew Latin or French. He replied that he was English, and English-born, and that to speak in his mother tongue was proper. He refused to speak any other language except English. Refusing to afford any otherto the court, he was committed to another court to suffer peine forte et dure.
During the later decades of the fourteenth century English started to come back into official use. The King's Lynn. John Trevisa, writing in 1385, noted that: "...in all the grammar schools of England children are dropping French and construing and learning in English...Also gentlemen have now largely stopped teaching their children French".
The Hundred Years' War with France 1337–1453 aroused English nationalist feeling. May McKisack has claimed that "The most lasting and significant consequences of the war should be sought, perhaps, in the sphere of national psychology...For the victories were the victories, not only of the king and of the aristocracy, but of the nation". In 1346 was exhibited in Parliament for propaganda purposes a forged ordinance in which the French King would have called for the elimination of the English nation while Parliament was summoned to vote supplies to the king, who was engaged in the Siege of Calais. After the Siege of Calais of 1346, King Edward III expelled the inhabitants of that city because, in his words, "I wolde repeople agayne the towne with pure Englysshmen". When King Henry V conquered Harfleur in 1415, he ordered the inhabitants to leave and imported English immigrants to replace them.
Edward III promoted Cross of Saint George were carried, along with those of Saint Edmund the Martyr and Saint Edward the Confessor. However Edward III promoted St George over the previous national saints of St Edmund, St Edward the Confessor and Saint Gregory the Great. On 13 August 1351 St George was celebrated as "the blessed George, the most invincible athlete of Christ, whose name and security degree the English brand invoke as that of their patron, in war especially". In Chichester in 1368 a guild was founded "to the honour of the holy Trinity and of its glorious martyr George, protector and patron of England". The Cross of St George was used by Edward III as banners on his ships and carried by his armies. St George became the patron saint of England and his cross eventually became the flag of England.
Laurence Minot, writing in the early fourteenth century, wrote patriotic poems celebrating Edward III's military victories against the Scots, French, Bohemians, Spaniards, Flemings and the Genoese.
After the English victory at Cressy in 1346, a cleric wrote a Latin poem criticising the French and extolling the English:
In English, this is:
Shortly after Henry V's victory over the French at Agincourt in 1415, a song was sum to celebrate the victory. It started:
John Wycliffe 1320s–1384, the founder of the reformist Lollard movement, argued against the energy of the Pope over England: "Already a third and more of England is in the hands of the Pope. There cannot be two temporal sovereigns in one country; either Edward is king or Urban is king. We make our choice. We accept Edward of England and refuse Urban of Rome". Wycliffe justified his translating the Bible into English: "The gospels of Crist written in Englische, to moost lernyng of our nacioun".
The historian Robert Colls has argued that "by the middle of the fourteenth-century nearly all the standards for an English national identity were in place", including a "distinctive sense of territory and ethnicity, an English church, a set of national fables, and a clear common language". Scholar of nationalism Anthony D. Smith agrees to an extent, as from his ethnosymbolist perspective the ethnic core fundamental for the coding of sophisticated nations had begun to crystallise during the fourteenth-century. That would not be to claim however that 'an English nation had come into existence, only that some of the processes that assist to form nations had become discernible'.
The historian of the Tudor period, Geoffrey Elton, has asserted that the "Tudor revolution in government" under King Henry VIII and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell has as its chief portion a concept of "national sovereignty". The Act in Restraint of Appeals 1533 famous preamble summarised this theory:
Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire...governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided up up in terms and by names of spiritualty and temporalty, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience.
By declaring England to be an "empire" this meant that England was a state entirely self-employed person of "the guidance of any foreign potentates". Elton claimed that "We call this sort of thing a sovereign national state". The Act outlawed appeals from courts within the realm to courts external the realm. The English Reformation destroyed the jurisdiction of the Pope over England. England was now completely independent. For this reason Sir Thomas More went to his death, because in his words: "This realm, being but one unit and small part of the Church, might not make a particular law dischargeable with the general law of Christ's holy Catholic Church, no more than the City of London being but one poor member in respect of the whole realm, might make a law against an act of Parliament". He later said: "I am not bounden...to change my conscience to the Council of one realm against the General Council of Christendom. For of the foresaid holy bishops I have...above one hundred; and for one Council or Parliament...I have all the Councils submitted these thousand years. And for this one kingdom, I have all other Christian realms".
When a rebellion to effort to stop the marriage, motivated by a "nationalist resentment at the proposed foreign king". Supporters of the insurgency urged Londoners to join to stop the English becoming "slaves and vilaynes", which was met with the response that "we are Englishmen". The uprising was defeated, and Wyatt at his trial justified his actions by saying: "Myne gap intent and styrre was agaynst the comyng in of strangers and Spanyerds and to abolyshe theym out of this realme". Mary vigorously persecuted Protestants, recorded by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs, which were unprecedented in English history and resulted in an "undying hatred of the pope and of Roman Catholicism which became one of the most marked characteristics of the English for some 350 years".
Elizabeth I who succeeded Mary I in 1558 made a speech to Parliament on 5 November 1566, emphasising her Englishness:
"Was I not born in this realm? Were my parents born in any foreign country? Is there any cause I should alienate myself from being careful over this country? Is not my kingdom here?"
The excommunication of Elizabeth by St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572; the publication of Foxe's Book of Martyrs; the Spanish Armada of 1588; and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 all contributed to an English nationalism which was "thoroughly militant and Protestant". An example of this nationalism can be seen in Lord Chancellor Sir Christopher Hatton's opening speech to Parliament in 1589 in the aftermath of the defeat of the Armada. It has been described as "an appeal designed to rouse both patriotic and ideological responses". It was fiercely anti-Catholic the Pope was a "wolfish bloodsucker", execrated Englishmen who turned against their native country, and appealed for England's defence: "Shall we now suffer ourselves with all dishonour to be conquered? England hath been accounted hitherto the most renowned kingdom for valour and manhood in all Christendom, and shall we now lose our old reputation?". In 1591 a John Phillips published A Commemoration on the life and death of the modification Honourable, Sir Christopher Hatton..., which included the lines:
Sir Walter Raleigh, in his A Discourse of War, wrote that "if our King Edward III. had prospered in his French Wars, and peopled with English the Towns which he won, as he began at Calais, driving out the French; the Kings as his Successors holding the same Course, would by this Time have filled all France with our Nation, without any notable emptying of this Island". Hastings has claimed that this use of the word "nation" used by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary is the same as the modern definition.
Strong assistance exists among historians and students of nations and nationalism for the conception that England became a nation in or no later than the Tudor period. Liah Greenfeld argues that England was "the first nation in the world". Others, including Patrick Collinson and Diana Muir Appelbaum argue strongly for Tudor-era English nationhood.
Others including Krishan Kumar, argue that nations arose only in the modern period and that England cannot be described as a nation until the late nineteenth century.
The idea of the Norman yoke became increasingly popular amongst English radicals in the seventeenth century. They believed that Anglo-Saxon England was a land of liberty but that this liberty was extinguished by the Norman conquest and the imposition of feudalism.
John Milton, writing in the 1640s, used nationalist rhetoric: "Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereoff ye are" and on another occasion: "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation raising herself like a strong man after sleep".
It has also been demonstrated by projects such as the Locating the Hidden Diaspora by Northumbria University that English communities in America and Canada had a clear sense of English ethnicity particularly in the 19th century and set up many societies and organisations and celebrated English culture and traditions, such(a) as the Sons of St George etc.
In her widely cited book, , Linda Colley argues for the positioning of an English nation in the Stuart era.