Welcome to the British History Podcast. My name is Jamie and this is episode 144. King

Chul Red, a lunatic running the asylum. This show is free and independent due to

member support and as thanks for helping keep the community going I offer members only

content such as extra episodes and rough transcripts. If you're interested in supporting

the show and helping us out you can do so over at the British History Podcast.com. And

thank you very much to Robert, Bo and Steve for contributing already.

Alright starting with this episode I'm going to refer to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as

English. That's because we're at the point where Bede was writing and he seems to have

seen the angles and Saxons as virtually indistinguishable and he had remarkably little

to say about the juts. So I thought that I would put that down as a marker. From now on we're

going to use the term English. And actually in the members' feed we just finished an episode

on Englishness and what that is. Since it is relevant both for this show and also it seems

to be coming up a great deal in modern discourse these days. And here's a brief clip of what

we're talking about over there. The thing is that the deeper you dig into ethnicity the

more difficult it is to pin down because it isn't like we have a firm starting point.

Human beings wander and change and modern concepts of ethnicity require a sort of static

truth that history simply cannot give us. As you already know what Bede described as the

English people is far more complex than that. There wasn't a single monolithic culture

during any period in which he was writing. So even from the start the concept of Englishness

has some issues. And the paragraph where he relates that they were descended from three

Germanic groups, the Angles, Saxons and Juts, is also a gross oversimplification. We now know

that it would be an incredibly huge error to assume that the Anglo-Saxons had distinct

...