The Toller Lecture. Read at the John Rylands Library, March 2015. Bede‘s Idea of the English

The Venerable Bede has often been held as creator of a single collective identity for the Germanic inhabitants of Britain: the English (gens Anglorum). This article examines how Bede crafted his notion of Englishness, reviewing his use of terms for nation, race and peoples to exclude those of whom he did not approve. It included the Northumbrians and the people of Kent whom Bede regarded as the progenitors of the English Church. It excluded the Mercians who were rivals and sometime enemies of Bede‘s own people, the Northumbrians. By the time Bede finished his account (731) the term gens Anglorum had begun to lose its usefulness in binding together the Northumbrians and Kentishmen as custodians of a unitary Church. After Bede terminology remained unstable, writers such as Boniface or Alcuin being as likely to call the people of England Saxons as Angles/English. Bedes role as the father of Englishness is thus here nuanced and seen to be historically contingent.