My friend Jim Sibbet recently asked me this question. I guess that it was a topic that had cropped up in the weekly discussion forum that he regularly attended.
I have previously covered much of the material in various other potted histories that I have written. So, it was no great labour to produce this article, particularly as I am now making use of ChatGPT to help me.
Ask someone who the English are and the obvious answer is: the people of England. Historically, however, the question is much more interesting. There was no original English people waiting on the shores of Britain for history to begin. England, the English people and even the English language were created gradually from successive movements of people into Britain and centuries of intermarriage, conquest, cultural change and assimilation.
Hunter-gatherers came when Britain was still intermittently connected to continental Europe. They were followed by farmers whose ancestors had travelled across Europe from the eastern Mediterranean. Later came people associated with the Beaker culture, further migrants during the Bronze Age, the peoples conventionally called Celts, Romans and inhabitants of the Roman Empire, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. Still later came Flemings, Jews, Huguenots, Irish people, Europeans and people from Britain’s former empire and the wider world.
None simply replaced everything that had gone before. Some migrations produced enormous demographic changes; others involved relatively small numbers of people who nevertheless exercised considerable cultural or political influence. Over thousands of years the newcomers and the existing inhabitants repeatedly became one population.
The English are therefore not the descendants of a single ancient tribe. They are the product of a continuing historical process.
The first inhabitants
Human beings had visited Britain long before there was anything resembling a permanent population. During the Palaeolithic period the climate repeatedly changed, ice sheets advanced and retreated, and groups of early humans moved in and out.
Modern humans, Homo sapiens, were certainly present by about 40,000 years ago, but the severe conditions of the last Ice Age periodically drove people away. Permanent occupation effectively begins after the climate warmed towards the end of the Ice Age.
The people living in Britain during the Mesolithic period, beginning around 10,000 BCE, were hunter-gatherers. They lived by hunting animals, fishing and collecting wild plants, moving through landscapes very different from those of modern Britain.
Britain was not initially an island. The North Sea was much shallower, and an extensive area of land now known as Doggerland connected eastern Britain with continental Europe. People, animals and plants could move across it. Rising sea levels gradually submerged Doggerland, and by about 6000 BCE Britain had become effectively separated from continental Europe.
One famous Mesolithic inhabitant is Cheddar Man, whose skeleton, dating from about 7100 BCE, was discovered in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. Ancient DNA has shown that Britain’s Mesolithic inhabitants were related to western European hunter-gatherers.
They were Britain’s population for thousands of years, but they contributed surprisingly little to the ancestry of the people who followed them.
The Neolithic farmers
At about 4000 BCE a profound change occurred. Farming appeared in Britain.
For many years it was debated whether Britain’s hunter-gatherers had simply learnt agriculture from neighbouring peoples or whether farmers themselves migrated into Britain. Ancient DNA has largely resolved the question.
The farmers were predominantly newcomers from continental Europe. Their distant ancestors had originated among the early farming populations around the Aegean and Anatolia, whose descendants had gradually spread agriculture westwards across Europe.
Genetic studies indicate substantial population replacement. Britain’s Neolithic farmers had only a relatively small contribution from the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who had preceded them. (Nature)
These newcomers brought domesticated cattle, sheep and crops such as wheat and barley. They cleared woodland, established more permanent settlements and constructed monuments.
The great stone structures of Neolithic Britain — including the earliest stages of Stonehenge, as well as long barrows and chambered tombs — belonged to their world.
For more than a thousand years their descendants formed most of the population of Britain.
Then another remarkable demographic transformation occurred.
The Beaker people
From about 2500 BCE, objects belonging to what archaeologists call the Bell Beaker culture began appearing in Britain. The name comes from the distinctive bell-shaped pottery vessels found in graves and settlements.
Once again, archaeologists debated whether this represented merely the spread of fashionable objects and ideas or the arrival of new people.
DNA has provided an unexpectedly dramatic answer.
Large numbers of people migrated into Britain from continental Europe. Within a few centuries, most of the ancestry of Britain’s Neolithic population had been replaced by ancestry associated with these newcomers.
The Beaker migrants ultimately possessed considerable ancestry from pastoral peoples who had expanded westwards from the Eurasian steppe into Europe during the third millennium BCE.
Their arrival helped create the population of Bronze Age Britain.
This does not mean that every Neolithic inhabitant disappeared. Populations do not change with such neatness. Some descendants survived and mixed with the newcomers. But genetically the change was enormous.
It is one of the most important migrations in British history, even though until comparatively recently few general histories of England mentioned it.
Bronze Age migrations
The Beaker migration was not the end of prehistoric movement between Britain and continental Europe.
Britain participated in extensive networks linking communities across the Channel and throughout western Europe. Metals, objects, skills and people travelled considerable distances.
Ancient DNA has revealed another important development during the Middle and Late Bronze Age, particularly between roughly 1500 and 800 BCE. People related to populations in what is now France migrated into southern Britain.
By the Iron Age, migrants arriving during this period and their descendants may have contributed approximately half the ancestry of people in England and Wales.
Researchers have suggested that these migrations provide one possible route by which early Celtic languages reached Britain. (Nature)
This discovery also illustrates why the traditional picture of British population history — Neolithic people, followed by Beaker people, followed by Celts — is too simple.
Population movement was frequently continuous rather than consisting of neat invasions separated by centuries of stability.
Were the next inhabitants Celts?
Older histories commonly described a Celtic invasion of Britain beginning somewhere around 700–500 BCE.
The picture is now much less clear.
There certainly were cultural connections between Iron Age Britain and peoples on the European continent whom Greek and Roman writers described as Celts. Related Celtic languages were spoken across extensive parts of Europe, including Britain.
But there is little evidence for one identifiable people called “the Celts” arriving and replacing Britain’s Bronze Age inhabitants.
Rather, Iron Age Britain consisted of numerous societies whose cultures developed from those of the preceding Bronze Age while maintaining considerable contact with continental Europe.
By the time Julius Caesar visited Britain in 55 and 54 BCE, different tribal groupings occupied different regions. Later Roman writers gave names including the Catuvellauni, Trinovantes, Iceni, Brigantes and Atrebates.
Their languages probably belonged mainly to the Brittonic branch of Celtic, from which Welsh, Cornish and Breton ultimately developed.
It remains convenient to call these people Celtic Britons, provided we remember that the term describes a broad linguistic and cultural family rather than a single race or nation.
These Britons constituted the population encountered by Rome.
Roman Britain
The Roman conquest began under the emperor Claudius in 43 CE.
Roman rule lasted for nearly four centuries, but the Romans present another difficulty when asking who the English are.
There was no mass migration of a people called “Romans” comparable with the later Anglo-Saxon migration. Most inhabitants of Roman Britain remained descendants of the existing British population.
Nevertheless, Roman Britain became part of an empire extending from northern Africa to the Middle East and from Spain to the Rhine and Danube.
People moved around that empire.
Soldiers serving in Britain came from places including Gaul, Germany, Spain, the Balkans, Syria and North Africa. Merchants, administrators, craftsmen and their families also travelled to Britain. Some stayed and had children.
London, York and other Roman towns could therefore contain surprisingly cosmopolitan populations.
Latin became the language of government and administration, while Brittonic languages continued to be spoken by much of the population.
Roman rule changed Britain profoundly, but it did not create the English. Indeed, neither England nor the English yet existed.
Their emergence followed the collapse of Roman government.
The Anglo-Saxons
Roman administration in Britain effectively ended in the early fifth century. During the following generations, migrants from across the North Sea began settling particularly in eastern and southern Britain.
They are conventionally known as the Anglo-Saxons.
Writers such as Bede later identified three principal groups: Angles, Saxons and Jutes, originating in areas corresponding broadly to parts of modern northern Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. Reality was undoubtedly more complicated, with migrants probably coming from numerous communities along the North Sea coast.
For generations historians debated their numbers.
At one extreme was the old idea that invading Anglo-Saxons killed or drove most of the Britons into Wales and Cornwall. At the other was the suggestion that relatively small warrior elites took power while most of the population remained biologically British but adopted Anglo-Saxon language and culture.
Ancient DNA suggests that neither simple explanation is satisfactory.
There really was large-scale migration.
A major genetic study of early medieval remains found extremely high levels of continental northern European ancestry among many people buried in eastern England. At some sites individuals possessed almost entirely continental ancestry, while others were of mixed continental and indigenous British ancestry. The evidence points towards sustained migration and intermarriage rather than merely the arrival of a tiny military aristocracy. (Nature)
The effect varied greatly by region. Continental ancestry was considerably stronger in eastern England than in the west.
Over time migrants and existing Britons mixed.
Something else extremely important happened: identities changed.
By around the seventh and eighth centuries, kingdoms such as Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex had emerged. Their inhabitants increasingly shared related languages and cultural traditions.
From the Angles ultimately came the words England — the land of the Angles — and English.
For the first time it becomes meaningful to speak of something recognisably English.
The birth of the English language
For this reason the English language belongs in the story, although it deserves only a short diversion here.
The Anglo-Saxon migrants spoke a collection of closely related West Germanic languages. In Britain these developed into what we now call Old English.
Old English was very different from modern English, but much of our most basic vocabulary derives from it: words such as man, woman, child, house, bread, water, earth, day, night, and king.
The indigenous Brittonic languages did not disappear everywhere. Welsh survived to become the dominant language of Wales, Cornish survived in Cornwall for many centuries, and Brittonic speech probably persisted for considerable periods within areas becoming politically Anglo-Saxon.
Nevertheless, across most of what became England, English eventually prevailed.
Language therefore contributed enormously to the development of English identity. A person did not need entirely Anglo-Saxon ancestors to become English. People could become English by living within English kingdoms, speaking English and participating in English society.
That distinction between ancestry and identity is fundamental to the whole story.
The Vikings
The next major arrivals came from Scandinavia.
The famous raid on Lindisfarne in 793 is traditionally used to mark the beginning of the Viking Age in Britain, although contacts across the North Sea had never entirely ceased.
Initially the Vikings came mainly as raiders. Increasingly, however, they came as settlers.
During the ninth century large Scandinavian armies conquered extensive areas of England. Danish-controlled territory eventually covered much of northern and eastern England and became known retrospectively as the Danelaw.
Large numbers of Scandinavians settled.
Their influence remains visible in place names. Names ending in -by, such as Derby and Grimsby, often have Scandinavian origins, while -thorpe is another common Norse element.
The Viking settlers spoke Old Norse, a Germanic language sufficiently similar to Old English for at least some communication between speakers to have been possible.
The two languages influenced each other profoundly. Everyday English words such as sky, window, egg, husband, law, take, give, they, them and their have Scandinavian origins or were reinforced by Norse usage.
Once again, however, newcomers gradually became part of the population.
Indeed, the distinction between “English” and “Danish” became increasingly difficult to maintain. Intermarriage, conversion to Christianity and political integration progressively created mixed communities.
In 1016 England was even conquered by the Danish king Cnut, who ruled an empire encompassing England and parts of Scandinavia.
Yet England remained England.
That fact demonstrates how firmly an English political identity had already developed.
The Normans
Then came the most famous conquest of all.
In 1066 William, Duke of Normandy, defeated King Harold at Hastings and became William I of England.
The Norman conquest produced an extraordinary political and social transformation, but genetically it was probably far less dramatic than the Beaker or Anglo-Saxon migrations.
The Normans came as conquerors rather than as a replacement population.
William redistributed enormous quantities of land to his followers. Norman aristocrats replaced much of the English nobility, Norman clergy acquired senior positions in the Church, and castles appeared throughout England.
Yet the overwhelming majority of ordinary inhabitants remained the people who had lived in England before 1066.
The Normans themselves were an interesting historical mixture. Normandy had been established when Viking settlers — the “Northmen” from whom the name Normandy comes — settled in northern France. They rapidly adopted French language, Christianity and culture.
The conquerors of Anglo-Saxon England were therefore themselves partly descended from Scandinavian migrants who had become French-speaking Normans.
After 1066, Norman French became the language of the royal court and aristocracy, Latin remained important in Church and government, and English continued as the language of most inhabitants.
Eventually the Normans too became English.
Their French vocabulary poured into English. Words associated with government, law, warfare, religion, cooking and social status entered the language in enormous numbers.
By the later Middle Ages, Old English had evolved into Middle English.
The conquerors had not replaced the English. They had joined them.
After the Normans
It would be tempting to end the story in 1066 because the familiar sequence — Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans — then appears complete.
But immigration did not stop. During the Middle Ages Flemish merchants, craftsmen and weavers settled in England. Jewish communities became established after the Norman conquest, although Jews were tragically expelled from England by Edward I in 1290 and were not formally readmitted until the seventeenth century.
Later came other Europeans. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Protestant refugees fled religious persecution on the continent. Among the most important were the Huguenots, French Protestants who settled particularly in London and other towns. They contributed to industries including silk weaving, clockmaking, finance and crafts.
Dutch, German and other European migrants also arrived.
England had never become an isolated population.
The Irish
One of the largest sources of immigration into England during the modern period was much closer to home.
Irish people had moved between Ireland and England for centuries, but migration became particularly important during the nineteenth century, especially during and after the Great Famine of the 1840s.
Large Irish communities developed in Liverpool, Manchester, London and many other industrial towns.
Their descendants became thoroughly integrated into English society while frequently retaining elements of Irish family identity.
Welsh and Scottish migration into England was also substantial, though movement within Britain is easily overlooked when discussing immigration.
By the twentieth century millions of English families contained ancestry from elsewhere within the British Isles.
Immigration from the wider world
The twentieth century widened the sources of migration still further.
People from Britain’s empire and former empire settled in England in increasing numbers.
There had been African and Asian inhabitants of England for centuries, particularly in ports and London, but numbers increased considerably after the Second World War.
People arrived from the Caribbean, particularly from the late 1940s onwards. The arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 became the symbolic beginning of what is now called the Windrush generation, although Caribbean migration both preceded and followed it.
Large numbers of people subsequently came from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and later from many other countries.
Migration from Europe also continued. After the expansion of the European Union in 2004, substantial numbers of people from Poland and other central and eastern European countries settled in England.
More recent migration has come from virtually every part of the world.
Their children and grandchildren raise exactly the same question encountered repeatedly throughout English history: at what point does someone cease to be a newcomer and become English?
History’s answer has repeatedly been: remarkably quickly.
So how much of the English are Anglo-Saxon?
There is no single percentage.
Modern genetic research finds considerable regional variation within England. People in Cornwall, Cumbria, Yorkshire, East Anglia and Kent, for example, do not have identical population histories.
A major study of modern British genetics found clear geographical clusters and estimated that the Anglo-Saxon contribution to ancestry in south-eastern England was substantial but below half. More recent ancient-DNA research has shown that the immediate impact of early medieval migration was considerably larger in some eastern communities, followed by centuries of further mixing. (Nature)
Modern English ancestry consequently contains components derived from prehistoric hunter-gatherers, Neolithic farmers, steppe-related Bronze Age migrants, later continental Bronze Age populations, Iron Age Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians and many subsequent populations.
But trying to assign precise percentages to modern individuals rapidly becomes misleading.
There is another reason.
The number of our ancestors doubles with every generation as we go backwards — two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so forth — although in practice family trees repeatedly overlap. Go back sufficiently far and enormous numbers of people living in the same population become shared ancestors.
An English person today does not normally descend from one historic population rather than another. He or she potentially descends from numerous populations that eventually merged.
Are the English Anglo-Saxons?
In one sense, yes.
The English political and linguistic identity arose principally in the Anglo-Saxon period. England takes its name from the Angles, and the English language belongs to the Germanic family because of Anglo-Saxon migration.
Yet it would be wrong to conclude that the English are simply Anglo-Saxons.
The Anglo-Saxons themselves mixed with the descendants of people who had inhabited Britain long before them. They subsequently mixed with Scandinavians, Normans and later immigrants.
Nor was English identity fixed once it had appeared.
A Norman nobleman whose grandfather spoke French could become English. So could the descendant of a Flemish weaver, a French Huguenot, an Irish labourer, a Caribbean railway worker, an Indian doctor or a Polish builder.
This has happened throughout the country’s history.
Genes, culture and identity
The question “Who are the English?” therefore contains several different questions.
Who are their biological ancestors?
They descend from many populations which arrived in Britain at different periods over thousands of years.
Where did their language come from?
Principally from the Germanic speech of Anglo-Saxon settlers, subsequently transformed by Scandinavian and French influences and by centuries of internal development.
When did England emerge?
Gradually during the Anglo-Saxon period, culminating politically in the creation of a unified Kingdom of England during the tenth century.
What makes somebody English today?
That cannot be answered by genetics.
Nationality and identity are social and cultural matters as well as matters of ancestry. A person whose ancestors arrived in England thousands of years ago has no greater genetic certificate of Englishness than somebody whose grandparents arrived much more recently.
Indeed, if ancestry alone determined nationality, the term “English” could never have arisen in the first place. The original Anglo-Saxon migrants were themselves immigrants.
A nation of immigrants?
The phrase “a nation of immigrants” can also be misleading if taken too literally.
England has experienced repeated immigration, but its population has not been completely replaced every few centuries. Some migrations — particularly those associated with the Neolithic transition, the Beaker period and the Anglo-Saxon settlement — produced enormous demographic changes. Others, such as the Norman conquest, transformed society while involving much smaller numbers of newcomers.
There has therefore been both continuity and change.
A useful way of imagining English population history is not as a succession of separate peoples:
Hunter-gatherers → Farmers → Beaker people → Celts → Romans → Anglo-Saxons → Vikings → Normans.
It is better imagined as a river.
Tributaries repeatedly enter it. Some are enormous and temporarily alter the character of the whole river. Others are small. But once their waters have mixed, separating them again becomes impossible.
And the river continues to flow.
Who, then, are the English?
The distant foundations were laid by prehistoric peoples whose names we do not know.
Mesolithic hunter-gatherers occupied Britain after the Ice Age. Neolithic farmers arrived from continental Europe around 4000 BCE. Beaker migrants transformed the population after about 2500 BCE. Further continental migration occurred during the Bronze Age. From these populations emerged the inhabitants of Iron Age Britain whom we conventionally call Britons or Celts.
Roman conquest added new people and new influences without replacing that population.
Then came the migration which gave the English their name. Anglo-Saxon settlers crossed the North Sea in large numbers after Roman rule ended, mixing with the existing inhabitants and establishing kingdoms in which Old English became dominant.
Scandinavians followed during the Viking Age and became absorbed into English society.
The Normans conquered England in 1066, transformed its ruling class and profoundly affected its language, yet within a few generations they too were becoming English.
Flemings, Huguenots, Jews, Irish people and countless other migrants followed them. During the modern period they were joined by people from Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia and elsewhere.
Each generation inherited the country left by those before it and altered it in turn.
So there is no moment in history at which we can point to a biologically pure English people. There never was one.
There is instead something considerably more interesting: a population continuously reshaped by migration and assimilation while nevertheless developing an unusually durable sense of place, language and national identity.
Perhaps the shortest answer to the question “Who are the English?” is therefore this:
They are the descendants of the people who came before them — and of the people who kept arriving.
Yes. I would add two compact elements rather than interrupting the flow of the article too much.
Odds and Sods
Chronology of the peoples who contributed to the population of England
| Approximate date | People or movement | Main significance |
|---|---|---|
| Before c. 10,000 BCE | Early modern humans | Intermittent occupation of Britain during the Ice Age |
| c. 10,000–4000 BCE | Mesolithic hunter-gatherers | First long-term post-Ice-Age population |
| From c. 4000 BCE | Neolithic farmers | Farming introduced largely by migrants from continental Europe |
| From c. 2500 BCE | Beaker-associated migrants | Major population change; strong ancestry ultimately derived from Eurasian steppe populations |
| c. 1500–800 BCE | Further Bronze Age migrants | Significant migration from continental Europe, especially into southern Britain |
| Iron Age | Britons, conventionally called Celts | Numerous tribal societies speaking mainly Brittonic Celtic languages |
| 43–c. 410 CE | Roman Britain | Britain incorporated into the Roman Empire; migrants arrived from many parts of the empire |
| From 5th century | Angles, Saxons, Jutes and related peoples | Large-scale migration; emergence of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Old English |
| 8th–11th centuries | Vikings, mainly Danes and Norwegians | Settlement particularly in northern and eastern England; major influence on language and place names |
| From 1066 | Normans | Political and social conquest; major French influence on English language and institutions |
| Medieval–early modern | Flemings, Jews, Dutch, Huguenots and others | Continuing European migration and settlement |
| Especially 19th century | Irish migrants | Large-scale settlement, particularly in industrial towns and cities |
| 20th century onwards | Caribbean, South Asian, African, European and other migrants | Further reshaping of modern English society |
I would place this after the introductory section, or possibly immediately before the section on the first inhabitants. It gives the reader a map of what is to come without requiring them to remember a succession of dates.
A word about the Celts
The term “Celts” needs a little care. Older histories often pictured Celtic tribes invading Britain during the Iron Age and replacing an earlier Bronze Age population. Modern archaeology and genetic research suggest a much more complicated story.
There certainly were substantial movements of people between continental Europe and Britain during the Bronze and Iron Ages, and the inhabitants of Britain spoke languages belonging largely to the Celtic family. They also shared cultural features with peoples elsewhere in western Europe whom Greek and Roman writers sometimes described as Celts.
However, there is no good evidence that a single people calling themselves the Celts arrived in Britain in one great invasion. Iron Age Britain consisted of many different communities and tribes, including the Iceni, Brigantes, Catuvellauni and Trinovantes.
It is therefore reasonable to use “Celtic Britons” as convenient shorthand, provided it is understood that they were not one unified race or nation. They were the descendants of populations already living in Britain, together with people who had arrived through repeated migrations and contacts with continental Europe over many centuries.
Acknowledgements
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Version History
Version 1.0 – September 2026