Currently, I’m playing the exciting and beautiful Brytenwalda mod, for Mount and Blade: Warband. It centers around Anglo-saxon Britain, in the 630s. Among other things, you got the Angles on one side of the map (Mercia, East Anglia, Bernicia/Northumberland), and the Saxons on the other side (Wessex, Sussex, Essex).
My mother, who studied this stuff in college and was allegedly once fluent in Old English, told me that since the Angles and the Saxons weren’t very different people to begin with (it’s not 200 km from Saxony to Angeln), it wasn’t a great trick for them to pretty much merge together when they were living under the same rulers - first the Angle kings of Mercia, then the Saxon kings of Wessex. Thus, it seems (to me) to be a bit of a misnomer - rather than ‘Anglo-saxons’ being, as it sounds, ‘Saxons in the style of Angles,’ it’s rather just ‘Angles and Saxons, who are basically the same.’
What’s the Straight Dope on the origin of the WASPs?
Anglo-Saxon doesn’t sound like Saxons in the style of Angles. Any more than Greco-Roman means "Greeks in the style of Romans, or Anglo-American means English in the style of Americans.
That hyphenated conjunction is simply a way of referring to two groups that you have some reason for referring to as a single entity. At one extreme it it may refer to opponents in war, as in “Sino-Soviet conflict”. It can refer to highly volatile and ill-defined relationships, as in “Sino-American”. It can refer to friendly partnerships, as in “Anglo-American”.
It can, of course, refer to one group in the style of another, as in “Romano-British”, but that isn’t the sole, or even primary, implication.
So Anglo-Saxon is perfectly correct and informative. They weren’t highly distinctive groups the way that say, Chinese and Aztecs are distinctive groups. But they were* at least* as distinctive as, say, Americans and Canadians are today. So unless you are also arguing that all references to US-Canada are also a misnomer, the distinction hardly seems trivial.
But my question is, when and how did they become a group sufficiently un-differentiated that they could be referred to by such a construct? At what point did it stop being ‘we’re Angles, not Saxons’ and vice-versa, but start being ‘we’re Anglo-Saxons?’
Possibly almost from day one. It very hard today to distinguish the Angles from the Saxons in any real sense. Archaeological evidence seems to have born out the general outlines of their origins as recorded by chroniclers. But we have no real idea of how firm any tribal or political distinctions were between them or even internally to the groups. And really they came from more or less overlapping regions and were probably linguistically and culturally almost identical. As their kingdoms were named by geography and were not unified by tribal designation ( i.e. the Saxons of Wessex and Sussex were not necessarily allies just because they happened to have both been Saxon-founded states ), it is really hard to say how different any of them were at any point. It could be that any tribal political distinction based on their origins in Germania was effectively gone in a generation or two, after the likes of semi-mythical figures like Ælle, Cerdic and Icel or their immediate successors were dead.
But I believe the shorter and more accurate answer is that nobody knows for sure.
There probably won’t be any factual answer to that question. Consider that Scotland and England have had the same monarch for centuries and the lines between Scottish and English are still quite firm, despite both being part of the same “country”.
Much the same happened with the division between “Angla Land” and “New Saxony”. Even after the ascendance of Atehlstane, the level of autonomy of the local nobles ensured that the division didn’t fade away for centuries, probably not until after the Norman invasions.
From a purely linguistic perspective, Wikipedia says that Alfred the Great referred to himself as “Rex Anglorum Saxonum”. But that is probably as misleading as QEII referring to herself as the Queen of England and Scotland. The statement is true of her regency, but it certainly doesn’t mean that nobody says “We’re English not Scottish” or vice versa and everyone has started saying “We are United Kingdomers”.
The Anglo-Saxons came from various places in northern Germany, southern Scandanavia, and the Low Countries. Some divided them into Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, but others conjecture that some were Frisians or Franks. It’s not easy to figure out who were all the groups involved:
Here’s a map of the divisions of the British people as of 600 A.D.:
I have been reading Bernard Cornwell’s series about Alfred the Great, and while an historical novel is undoubtedly a lousy cite, he does argue that Alfred was the first to really think about “The English” as a people, and it was the effect of the invasion of the Danes that caused it to come about. The difference between the Angles and the Saxons was unimportant compared to the difference between the English and the Danes.
What I wanna know is how the Jutes got shafter out of their recognition. I recall the maps in y history books showing Angles, Saxons, and Jutes coming to England as invaders and making the new influx of people to be come the Anglo-Saxons. Even the Wikipedia article, citing Bede’s History, memntions those three groups. But the Jutes seem to have gotten lost in the shuffle, like the junior partner in a banking merger.
If I were a Jute I’d register my complaints. Probably with an axe.
Probably because no distinctly Jutish Kingdoms made it to unification. Even the most Jutish parts of England, like Kent, were under Anglo-Saxon rule for centuries before then(first Mercia, then Wessex)
Note that “King of the English” and “King of England” are different terms.
So Alfred, perhaps a bit prematurely, referred to himself as “King of the Angles and Saxons”, essentially “King of the English”. (England as we currently know it did not yet exist.)
Complicating things the question of “Who was the first king of England?” is what do you mean by “England”. The country as a political unit? As a geographic unit? What about later border changes/absorptions? E.g., it’s not clear when Cornwall was officially made part of England. And then there’s the islands like Man and such whose status were/are non-standard.
My fun fact:
Alfred is the only English King to be called “Great.”
Cnut is the only King of England to be called “Great”.