In what we now call England, the general population would have mostly spoken Old English, but there were many different dialects and languages spoken in various areas of the British Isles. The language he wrote in was Latin, which was the dominant written language in England for most of the Middle Ages, but Latin was not commonly spoken among the people who inhabited the British Isles.
But in a time before “nations” existed, can Bede really have been the father of the English nation? The issue is more complex than it seems.īede wrote the History of the English Church and People in the early 8th century, completing it around the year 731 AD, at the monastery of St Paul in Jarrow, a town in the north-eastern part of England known then as Northumbria. So, from where did the idea originate? In the search for the origins of the English nation, some scholars have looked to the ancient historian Bede, and his famous work the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, or The History of the English Church and People. In fact in the Middle Ages most people would not have considered themselves as belonging to any particular nation at all. It may surprise you to know that this modern idea of nationality did not always exist. In today’s increasingly globalized world, our nations remain a powerful formative influence on us and almost every individual identifies themselves by their nationality in some way. How do you define a nation? Most people would probably think of a nation as being a defined geographical area governed by a political body of some sort which acts on behalf of its citizens, who are usually bound together by some level of shared culture, ethnicity and religious beliefs or moral ideals.
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