The idea that there was once a wholly English nation, with no presence of members of other ethnicities and speaking no languages other than English, is a fantasy with no foundation in reality.
This is true even of the probable homeland of the English language itself, namely East Anglia, and it has been true ever since the foundation of the Kingdom of the Eastern Angles, probably during the 400s AD after the first arrival of Angles from Angeln.
Angeln is a peninsula on the Baltic coast of Jutland, in the Bay of Kiel. It forms part of Southern Schleswig, the northernmost region of Germany. It is bounded on the north by the Flensburg Firth, which separates it from the Danish island of Als, and on the south by the Schlei inlet. The largest towns are Flensburg and Schleswig.
In spite of its name, the Old English kingdom of East Anglia, which comprised areas which are now Norfolk, Suffolk and eastern Cambridgeshire, had something of an ethnic mix from the very beginning, including within its frontiers peoples other than Angles.
Much of the evidence for this comes from toponyms. Several place-names in modern East Anglian testify to the fact that the area has never in the last two millennia been ethnically homogeneous.
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From the very first arrival of the Germanic-speaking Angles on these shores, they lived alongside the indigenous British Celtic population of Old Welsh-speaking Iceni and their descendants. The first element Bret– in the name of the two East Anglian villages called Brettenham (one in Norfolk and one in Suffolk) indicates that these villages were inhabited by British, ie Celtic-speaking, people.
The Wal– in place-names such as Walcott (in Norfolk) and the two Waltons (one each in Norfolk and Suffolk) also indicate the survival of Britons. This Wal– comes from a Germanic element meaning “foreigner”, and it survives in the modern English-language name of Wales, in the second syllable of Cornwall, as well as in the word walnut; in Old English the word was wealh, related to Old High German walah “foreigner, Welshman”, a term which originally referred to Celts or Romans, who were linguistically and culturally outsiders to these Germanic settlers.
Although the Angles made up the majority of the population of East Anglia, other Germanic peoples also lived there. The name of the Suffolk village of Saxham shows that it was a Saxon settlement, which was unusual for East Anglia.
There were also Frisians who settled in the area: the Suffolk village names Friston and Freston both signify “village of the Frisians”. The American sociologist George Holman argued that “Frisians invaded East Anglia in the fifth century”, and that East Anglia “is culturally more closely related to Friesland than it is even to its nearest English relative, Kent”.
Other Germanic peoples were also present in the region. Swabia today is the part of Germany around Stuttgart, Augsburg and Ulm, but some of these non-coastal Swabians must have been part of the migration across the North Sea because the name of the Norfolk town of Swaffham means “the home of the Swabians”.
It is also possible that there were people of Flemish origin in the region, given the name of the East Anglian village of Flempton in Suffolk, near Bury St Edmunds, which may well indicate the presence of Flemings.
Walnut
The literal meaning of the Old English word walhnutu was “foreign nut”. It was introduced to Germanic peoples, including the Angles, from Gaul and Italy to the south. The name distinguished it from the indigenous hazel nut. The modern Dutch word is walnoot, the German Walnuss and the Norwegian valnøtt.
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