Noah Millman wondered the following thing to me:

“Ignoring Wales for a moment, and ignoring non-territorial ethnic minorities like Jews, Pakistanis, etc., and ignoring really tiny places like the Falklands and Gibraltar, if Scotland went independent and Ireland were unified, England would become an ethnostate like, say, Denmark. When was the last time this was true? That is to say: when was the last time England was an independent country ruling only the English? I think the answer is: from 924 to 1014. 924 is when the various Saxon kingdoms of England were unified, right? And 1014 is when much of England was conquered by the Danes, after which England was pretty much continuously conjoined to non-English territories, either in Scandinavia (beginning with King Cnut) or France (beginning with William the Conqueror), or Ireland, or Scotland, or India, or whatever.”

[Derb] I don’t have time to dig around on this, but it doesn’t look right. A 10th-century Englishman’s image of his country would have regarded the northeastern Danelaw as “foreign” to some degree (though admittedly it was (a) being Anglo-Saxonized throught the period, and (b) the base stock was probably still largely A-S). The Cornish-speaking “Western men” were another complicating factor, as were the pre-Danelaw Norse settlement in the northwest and Isle of Man. “There’ll always be an England,” no doubt… but I am not sure there ever has been an England, not as an independent ethno-state.

For sure, the English haven’t had an English monarch since Harold Godwinson (1066). The dynasties were Frenchified-Scandinavian, then French, then Welsh, then Scottish (with an interlude of republican govt. under–yes!–an Englishman), and then these bloody Germans came in.

It’s an odd thing that, though all true-born Englishmen have a strong idea about what it means to be English, and foreigners have an even stronger (though much less flattering) idea, England as a nation is really an imaginary object.