An Overview of Race and Ethnicity in Pre‐Norman England
Authors: Harris Stephen J. 
Published: June 2008

This article surveys ideas about race in pre‐Norman England (c.450–1066). I review contemporary race categories that tend to structure our view of the medieval evidence; modern and medieval vocabulary; and some ideas about race and ethnicity current in the early Middle Ages. Within that broader context, I then discuss Gildas, Bede, and King Alfred.

Race and ethnicity are vexed categories. Anyone inquiring into medieval English ideas of race must try to disentangle the historical evidence from our own ideas of race. Some medieval English people thought about race in entirely different ways than we do; some did not. The point here is that race belongs first and foremost to the domain of thought, and only accidentally to the domain of objects. There is nothing one can point to, dissolve in a beaker, or grind into a powder that reveals an English race. We must also try to distinguish race from family, which does have biological markers, as well as from tribes and clans. The historical study of race and ethnicity is largely a record of thoughts about race and their real‐world effects. Since our own thoughts about race can prejudice our study of the past, in what follows I review some of the dominant thoughts about race in the last two centuries before turning to Anglo‐Saxon England.

Race and ethnicity are not fixed categories. They change over time. Sometimes they are defined along cultural or religious lines, sometimes along political or linguistic lines. As time passes, one or another idea of race comes to dominate narratives of national or regional self‐identity, and then evanesces.1 For example, the dominant nineteenth‐century American racial consensus designated the Irish as a race distinct from Anglo‐Saxons. By the mid‐twentieth century, the Irish had been ‘whited’, or integrated into a larger ‘white’ race, itself a relatively recent innovation.2 Today, the United States government presumes that each individual belongs to one of five races, or to one of two ethnicities, although it acknowledges multiple affiliations.3 None of them is Irish. The five races are ‘American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and White’. The two ethnicities, so to speak, are ‘ “Hispanic or Latino” and “Not Hispanic or Latino” ’.4 We can discern here various strata of racial categories, including geographical definitions of race and familal ones. We can also see that American categories of race differ from British ones and, for that matter, from Spanish ones. Spain is divided into a number of ethnoterritories, and so the Spanish national government recognizes multiple ethnicities under the more general rubric of Hispanic (as did Isidore of Seville in the seventh century). Thus, the American ethnic category ‘Hispanic’ does not correspond to the ethnic categories recognized in Hispania herself. The Mexican government has different definitions again.5 So, it's not clear that ‘Hispanic’ is a category that would be defined similarly by an American, an Englishman, a Mexican, and a Spaniard. So, if the categories of race and ethnicity differ from one country to another, then we need to pay attention to where we are speaking from when we look back at the Middle Ages.

We also need to pay attention to who is speaking. Who defines a race, or an ethnicity? Can it be reasonably self‐defined, is it socially defined, or are races and ethnicities stable, biological categories? Are racial categories nominal conveniences or do racial categories reflect physical essences? We may flatter ourselves to think that the former is the more sophisticated, modern position. In fact, the latter is more recent. François Bernier was perhaps the first (in 1684) to use ‘race’ to describe essential biological characteristics as definitive of races. Racial categories also came to be described culturally. Hippolyte Taine, the hugely influential nineteenth‐century literary critic, spoke of race much like we speak today of culture– nationally defined as French, English, Irish, Italian, and so forth. In the confusing tumult of nineteenth‐century anthropology, races were differentiated from, equated with, and confused with peoples (Völker), cultures, families, nations, clans, and tribes. An infamous case of abstract racial categories demanding biological definition arose in the Nürnberg Laws of September, 1935. The National Socialists of Germany had declared Jews racially distinct from Germans, but there were no tests to determine who was and who was not a Jew. Similarly, in the American South after the Civil War, local legislatures produced codes that tried to distinguish black citizens from white citizens biologically; these were known as Jim Crow laws. Many such approaches assume that race simplifies (or ‘purifies’) the further back in time one goes. So, if my grandmother was white, then I am white. But, what makes my grandmother white? And her grandmother? Our dominant narrative of biological diversity is inherited from Charles Darwin, and tends to presume a single origin point – like horses or birds evolving from a single‐cell organism (monogenesis). One might be tempted by analogy to impose this model on humans, and to assume thereby that racial categories simplify as we go further back in time. But, they don't. One may want to acknowledge that medieval people were no less sophisticated in this regard than we are.

In the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries, academics tend to define race as a conceptual category that correlates with culture, and perhaps with geography, but not explicitly with biology. Debates have been further confused by political ideology. Premises grounding one's political attitudes can limit or direct the questions one asks of race.6 However complicated the situation seems today, it was no clearer during the Middle Ages.