The Naming of England

Names are as essential to the identity of countries as they are to individuals, and country names are an indispensable part of the collective identity of the people. Could one conceive of the English people without England? That name is part of its very being. In a literal sense England is simply the name of the land, the country, but in the minds and language of the English it has long taken on additional meanings. An example is Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’, written prior to his military service and death in the First World War. (If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England.)  For Brooke, England was not only his home but also a source of his life, his intellect, his appreciation of beauty. It is difficult to imagine a more emotional evocation of one’s attachment to one’s own country.

Feelings of this kind are expressed in the writings of earlier poets such as William Blake and Shakespeare (‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’ Henry VIII), and presumably go back to the time when the English first started to call their country England. But when did that happen? 

It is often difficult to find out when names were first ascribed to countries. In some cases people have assigned a name to their land after a successful war or resistance movement led to the creation of a new state. The birth of the United States of America, for example, accompanied a successful war of independence against the British. Yet most older countries did not come into existence through a single creative event, but evolved slowly over long periods of time, and names became attached to them casually or informally in ways that contemporary records did not record. Even the origins of the ‘America’ element of the name United States of America are obscure: the earliest documentary evidence for its use, as a geographical or territorial name, not a country one, is a map in a book published in Germany in 1507. 

The name England first appeared, in its Latin form Anglia, in the work of the late tenth-century chronicler Aethelweard of Wessex. After looking into the continental origins of the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, he notes that the land, earlier called Britannia, had taken its present name Anglia from one of the victorious invaders, the Angli: ‘Britannia is now called Anglia, taking the name of the victors’. William of Poitiers, a Norman historian writing in the 1070s, and an early twelfth-century monk, Eadmer of Christ Church Canterbury, said much the same. But none of these authors said anything about the precise time when the name was brought into use, who was responsible for introducing it, nor for what reasons. Nor have any later historians. As strange as it may seem, the story of how England – or Engla land, its earliest known form – was named has never previously been told. 

Records in the Old English vernacular are the vital source of information on the origins of the name Engla land, those in Latin being less precise and sometimes misleading. In particular, the name appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Version C, written by an anonymous author) and in royal letters, charters and laws. Of course, written records may not accurately represent current practices in spoken language and it is possible that people used Engla land in daily conversation before any author brought it into his writings.

The introduction of the name Engla land took place in the early eleventh century after five centuries during which the land was known as  Britene and to a lesser degree as Albion, names carried over from earlier times. But Britene was the geographical or territorial name for the entire island, not a country or political name. 

From the later ninth to the early eleventh centuries Scandinavian invasions led to the collapse of most of the Anglo-Saxon tribal kingdoms and to the rise of Wessex as the leader of the native resistance. With this came the gradual emergence of a single people with a common culture, language, and political loyalty, and a new designation or name – the Angelcynn, the English kindred, race or people.  By the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh centuries Angelcynn had become the dominant term in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

From 1014 Angelcynn was abandoned by the author of the Chronicle. This was a moment of grave political crisis. In 1013, in the latest of a series of successful Scandinavian invasions, the Danish ruler Swein, after defeating the English monarch Aethelred who fled into exile in Normandy, occupied much of the country, and was named king of the English. Swein’s unexpected death in February 1014 led to the selection of his son Cnut as his successor and the author of the Chronicle tells how: 

Then all the councillors who were on Engla londe, ecclesiastical and lay, determined to send for King Aethelred and they said that no lord was dearer to them than their natural lord if he would govern them more justly than he did before.

This is the earliest use of Engla land in the Chronicle. For the next five years the author wavered between Angelcynn and Engla land, as if in doubt as to which name was most appropriate. But in 1020 he settled on the latter and never used Angelcynn again, nor did any of the later authors of the Chronicle (with one exception, the Peterborough  Chronicle annal for 1096). By now Engla land had become the standard  name for the country in the Chronicle.

At the same time it also became the formal country name in the vernacular letters, laws, and charters of Cnut (r.1016-35). These begin with the law code of 1018 (Oxford), and continue with the Winchestercode (presumed to date from 1020), and the secular code from 1023. In the earliest known example of an English king being given the title, the Winchester code’s prologue proclaims: 

This is the ordinance which King Cnut, ealles Englalandes cining, and his councillors decreed.

Engla land is also the country name used by Cnut in two letters to the English people from 1020 and 1027, and in charters he issued for Christ Church Canterbury in 1023 and the Old Minster in Winchester in 1035, though there is some question about the authenticity of these latter two.

Engla land appears in Cnut’s documents at most seven times, and there are far more examples of country names in Latin appearing in the titles given to the King in his coin inscriptions and charters (‘Cnut, basileus totius Albionis’, ‘basileus Anglo-Saxonum’ or ‘totius Britanniae monarchus’, for example). But it would be a mistake to conclude that Engla land had no preferred status with the King or was only one of several names used more or less at random. Cnut’s letters, laws, and charters in the vernacular use only the name Engla land; Britene or Albion, or Angelcynn do not appear. These vernacular letters and laws were addressed to the English people as a whole, in their own language. For instance his 1020 letter reads: 

King Cnut greets in friendship his archbishops … and all his people … ecclesiastic and lay, on Englalande.

And the prologue to his laws (II Cnut, 1023) begins: 

This is now the secular ordinance which I, with the advice of my councillors, wish to be observed ofer eall Englaland.

His Latin charters, on the other hand, were issued in a learned language unintelligible to common people, for ecclesiastical elites, prelates or abbots. In them the scribes adhered to traditions which called for the King to receive the same titles taken by his predecessors. The King and his circle were consciously rejecting these earlier names and replacing them with the new one, Engla land.

Further evidence of Cnut’s introduction of Engla land at this time comes from a group of Scandinavian (Skaldic) poets who formed part of the King’s entourage and wrote in Old Norse celebrating his reign and accomplishments. Three of their poems contain references to the country they call England, the Old Norse form of the name. In the anonymous poem Lidmannaflokr, dated to 1016-17, the poet writes ‘… the warrior does not carry a shield into Englandi …’. The Knutsdrapa of Hallvardr Harekblesi, c. 1029, asserts that ‘The prince … alone rules England and Denmark’, and Sigvatr’s Western Travel Verses, describes Cnut ‘the king of Englandz …’. Most probably these poets simply incorporated into their verse the name as they heard it spoken by the King and his advisers.

But what led Cnut and his administration to select this name and why? No contemporary author gives an answer but the introduction of the new name Engla land may have been part of the regime’s effort to strengthen Cnut’s rule in the country.

The first years of Cnut’s reign were violent and uncertain. The former King Aethelred returned from exile in 1014 to lead English resistance to Cnut. When Aethelred died in 1016 his son, Edmund Ironside, took over and held Cnut and his army at bay for another year-and-a-half, but Ironside’s own death in November 1017 so weakened the English cause that they elected Cnut as their king. Thus the young Dane began his rule with three years of warfare and destruction, and the deaths of two previous monarchs.  His first acts as King suggest that Cnut, grasping how precarious his situation was, moved quickly to persuade the English of his right to the throne.

It is likely that he arranged for a coronation ceremony, though the Anglo-Saxon chronicle makes no mention of it. The frontispiece of a contemporary illuminated manuscript, the Liber Vitae of New Minster and Hyde Abbey in Winchester, which shows Cnut and Queen Emma giving an altar cross to the abbey may be a representation of this coronation. The earliest coin issued under Cnut’s rule also pictures the King bearing a crown.

Once firmly established on the throne, Cnut set out to convince the English people of his desire to overcome the divisions which had torn the country apart and to unite the Danes and the English into a single people, by respecting English traditions and by ruling as a law-abiding monarch. He began his 1020 letter to all of his people in Engla lande with the promise: ‘that I will be a gracious lord and faithful observer of God’s rights and just secular law’, and the preface of his 1018 law code reads:  

This is the ordinance which the councillors determined and devised …  and this took place as soon as  King Cnut with the advice of his councillors completely established peace and friendship between the Danes and the English and put an end to all their former strife.

It does not seem impossible that Cnut’s royal intentions and his adoption of the new name were directly related and that the name Engla land somehow embodied the aspirations of the new regime. If this was the case it explains why Angelcynn, an ethnic name for the English people which had taken on a territorial meaning – did not adequately convey or represent the gist of Cnut’s new policy. What distinguishes the two names is the presence of land in the new one. Angelcynn emphasized the people – the English – whereas Engla land laid equal stress on the land, or territory, or country – English Country. English kings right up to Aethelred’s time had titled themselves as kings of the Angelcynn, the English people, but Cnut and all later kings changed that to king of Engla land. I  believe this change occurred because land had begun to take on the meaning of country as we understand it today. It no longer simply designated an indeterminate territory or a geographical region but was beginning to encapsulate a political entity with a government, a population, and its own lands with clearly defined boundaries. In calling himself the King of Engla land Cnut was making it known that he considered himself to be the ruler of a country not simply the king of a people.

But Engla land was not a new creation of Cnut and his circle. The voluminous sermons and saints lives of Abbot Aelfric of Eynsham (c. 955-c. 1010) show that this influential ecclesiastic regularly used the term Engla land in the 990s, distinguishing it from Angelcynn. Yet Aelfric’s choice of Engla land as the name of the country seems to have been a personal matter, not a reflection of widespread custom at the time, as with two or three possible exceptions, no other contemporary author ever used Engla land.

We don’t know how Aelfric came up with Engla land and what prompted him to adopt the name. Although earlier English peoples had commonly created names for their tribal areas by combining their ethnic name with land – for example, Eastengle land, the land of the East Anglians; Miercna land, the land of the Mercians; Northaphymbra land, Northumbria – Engla land had appeared only once in Old  English documents prior to Aelfric’s day, when the late ninth-century translator of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History into Old English wrote:  

… in the monastery of Abercorn which lies in Englalonde [regione Anglorum] but is, however, near the sea which separates Engla lond [Anglorum terras], the territory of the English and the Picts.

Aelfric would have known this passage, and would have perceived that in Bede Angle came to stand for Englishman in the broader sense of member of the gens Anglorum, Angelcynn.  Thus he could have decided to appropriate the name for use in his own homilies as the name of the land of all the English people. Or he could have created Engla land on his own.

Since Engla land was probably not used in everyday speech prior to 1014, it seems reasonable to conclude that Cnut’s royal advisers took the name from Aelfric’s sermons and saints’ lives, which were widely circulated. The link could well have been the distinguished English prelate, Archbishop Wulfstan of York, one of Cnut’s most influential advisers. Wulfstan borrowed extensively from the writings of Aelfric of Eynsham with whom he had personal contact, and he himself was one of the first eleventh-century authors to use the name Engla land in one of his own sermons. That sermon is thought to have been delivered to an aristocratic audience, including the King, which assembled to deal with legislative matters in Oxford in 1018. Wulfstan was the principal author of the Oxford law codes of 1018 and the Winchester Code of 1020, thus he may well have been the person who introduced the new name to Cnut and persuaded him to incorporate it into the official language of the crown and the land.

While there is no doubt about the novelty of the name in written records when Aelfric of Eynsham first brought it into his writings, nor that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicler C and Cnut’s entourage made it the standard name for the country after 1014, we can only speculate about the royal reasons for adopting the name.

The final questions to examine also involve both factual data and historical surmise. The first concerns the ways in which the King and his advisers put into effect their decision to call the country by the new name. It could have been a decision reached in council with instructions issued to make the change in future written documents, but it seems unlikely that it was brought about by a formal ceremony.

Another question concerns the diffusion of the name to the population at large. Did the crown take any measures to put it into effect? How long was it before Engla land became the universally recognized name of the country? How did people react? Did they consider it significant?

Contemporary records provide some fascinating clues about what might have happened. The simultaneous introduction of the new name  by both the royal chancery and by  the scribe of Chronicle C into his work suggests either that the latter learned of the change in the royal chancery and decided unilaterally to follow it in his annals, or that someone in the royal administration informed him of it and asked him to incorporate Engla land into his  entries. If the second, then Cnut’s men must have taken action to see the change implemented outside governmental circles. A further matter of note is the consistency and permanence of the new name in the respective vocabularies of the chancery and Chronicle following its initial adoption. Though Old English charters and diplomas of eleventh-century English kings after Cnut are rare, isolated examples show that Engla land continued to be the country name under Edward the Confessor (1061-66), William I (1066-87), and Henry I (1100-35). What Cnut had started remained unchanged after his death. 

A search for the earliest appearances of Engla land in Old English texts (other than in Aelfric) from  sectors of English society outside the royal administration and the Chronicle workshop, turns up a handful of cases, all but one associated with the Church. These are an anonymous poem, Seasons for Fasting, (of uncertain dating, perhaps the late tenth century), ‘… geond Engla land’; a passage in a relics inventory from St Peter’s Minster, Exeter (c. 1030), ‘ealles Englalandes …’; a passage in a listing of saints’ burial places in England from the Liber Vitae of New Minster and Hyde Abbey, Winchester (1015-30) ‘on Engla lande …’; a passage in a saint’s life  from the  Lambeth  Psalter, Winchester (early eleventh century), ‘on Engla lande …’); an undated letter of an unnamed archbishop of Canterbury attributed to Archbishop Dunstan (980-88), ‘of angla lande …’; a charter of the bishop of Hereford believed to  date  from 1023, ‘all the councillors … on Englalande’; and finally, Archbishop  Wulfstan of York’s citation in his sermon Larspell, ‘ende Englalandes ealle…’, thought to date from Oxford, 1018.

The uncertainty about the precise dates of samples in this list hampers our understanding of how the various authors might have come to know and use the new name. Had they encountered it in the writings of Aelfric of Eynsham, or could their use have resulted from formal intervention from the Crown? All but the presumed letter of Archbishop Dunstan are from the early eleventh century, which favours this latter possibility. How this might have happened is clear with regard to the uses of Engla land in the Liber Vitae and the Lambeth Psalter manuscripts, both from Winchester. The illustration of Cnut and Queen Emma from the frontispiece of the Liber Vitae manuscript shows that the King had a close relationship with New Minster and Hyde Abbey and visited it in person. The scribes of those manuscripts could have decided to turn to Engla land after hearing it used in Cnut’s entourage. As a result of the King’s travels over the course of time the new name may have circulated around the country.

Of particular interest in this regard is the c. 1023 charter of the Bishop of Hereford which tells of a land purchase made with the cognizance of ‘… all the councillors who were alive at the time on Engla lande’. Nothing in this charter suggests that it came out of Cnut’s entourage or that the King had anything to do with it. This could mean that by 1023 Engla land had become accepted usage in clerical circles, at least in the Hereford region, and that this explains how the scribe became aware of it. By whatever channels the name spread, either through royal contacts, or diffusion among the clergy down to the parish level, or through merchants, Engla land had become the country name among the English people by the end of the century.

This did not happen gradually as a result of many different people acting individually with little consciousness of what was happening. Instead, I believe, it was the deliberate decision of  Cnut and his advisers as part of their program at the beginning of the reign to unite a Danish and English population divided by war. The royal circle did not create it but did make it the standard country name and promoted its adoption throughout the land. 

Did the English people in general, attribute any importance to its introduction?  It must have meant something to the royal circle, but none of them put their thoughts on the matter down in writing. Nor did the author of Version C of the Chronicle.

Yet, several near-contemporary historians – Aethelweard of Wessex, end of the tenth century; William of  Poitiers, 1070s; Eadmer of Canterbury, early twelfth century – took the trouble to tell their readers of the name change – and two explain that the name England came from the name of the people who conquered Britain. But none offers further comment. However, if the change from Britene to Engla land had been meaningless to them they would not have bothered to mention it. Perhaps the country name had begun to occupy a prominent place in their thoughts and everyday speech, just as it does for the English today.

To modern observers the change looks momentous, if only in the sense that it brought into use what became one of the most famous and long-lived country names of the past millennium, ironically received under the rule of a foreign conqueror. To contemporaries like Aethelweard and Eadmer of Canterbury the adoption of the new country name Engla land was significant in that it brought a territorial dimension into their English identity. 

George Beech is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History a Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan.