Who Do the English Think They Are?: From the Anglo-Saxons to Brexit

by Derek J. Taylor

The world should be thankful that the country took its name from the Angles and not the Saxons. If it had been the other way around – and given the ‘a’ to ‘e’ shifts in Essex and Sussex – the land of Shakespeare and Queen Victoria might have been called Sexland. And what would that have done for English (Sexish?) national identity?

If you were a romantic aesthete back in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, fond of melancholic, remote, fallen beauty, then here, among the remains of Lindisfarne Priory with its distant view of the island’s crag-top castle, is just the sort of place where you’d tell your friends you wanted to meet your lonely, tragic end.

the English middle classes that followed him have always been a bulwark against riot and revolution.

We can say that it’s fit and proper (Anglo-Saxon and French) to have a bit of peace and quiet (French and Latin) while we draft our last will and testament (Anglo-Saxon and Latin), otherwise the whole thing will go to wrack and ruin (Anglo-Saxon and French).

Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.