Celebrities with English Roots

Angles, Saxons and Jutes

The priest Bede, who lived from 673 to 735, traced the English back to settlers from the continent. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation he writes that the newcomers were “of the three most powerful nations of Germany”, the Saxons, Angles and Jutes. He dates their arrival to the year 449. According to Bede, the people of Kent and the Isle of Wight descend from the Jutes, and the East Angles, Mercians and Northumbrians from the Angles.^[4]

A study of ancient DNA published in 2022 examined 460 people from medieval northwestern Europe, 278 of them from England. In early medieval England it found a substantial increase in ancestry from continental northern Europe, closely related to the people of Germany and Denmark, both then and now. Individuals from eastern England derived up to 76% of their ancestry from the continental side of the North Sea. The authors infer “large-scale substantial migration across the North Sea into Britain during the Early Middle Ages”. In their view it was part of a continuous movement of people from the late Roman period into the 11th century.^[5]

For people in England today, the study estimates this continental share at 25% to 47%, with peaks in Sussex, the East Midlands and East Anglia. A second component, closest to people of Iron Age France, accounts for 14% to 43% and is also highest in East Anglia. Both are lower in the southwest, the northwest and along the Welsh border. The second component already appears at several early medieval burial sites in the southeast. According to the authors, this ancestry kept arriving through the Middle Ages and possibly beyond.^[5] The British page follows the earlier migrations into Britain, from the first farmers to the Bronze Age.

Vikings and the Danelaw

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle first records ships of Danish men in England in 787. In 865 a large Viking force, the Great Heathen Army, arrived and camped for successive winters in the East Midlands, at places such as Repton and Torksey. In 878 Alfred the Great won a victory over the Danes, who then converted to Christianity. Nottingham, where the Chronicle places a Viking camp in 868, later became one of the Five Boroughs of the East Midlands. The area followed Scandinavian customs to such an extent that it became known as the Danelaw.^[6]

Old Norse also left its mark on the map. The most common Scandinavian element in the place names of the region is -by, meaning farm or homestead, often joined to a personal name, as in Scrooby, Skropi’s farm. In Nottingham, the many street names ending in -gate go back to Old Norse gata, a street or road.^[6]

The Norman Conquest and Domesday Book

On October 14, 1066, the English and Norman armies met near Hastings. King Harold died in the battle, and William, Duke of Normandy, was crowned King of England on Christmas Day.^[7]

At Christmas 1085 William ordered a survey of land and property across England, which was carried out the following year. Royal commissioners put fixed questions to local men at sworn inquests in the local courts. For each property they asked how it had been held on the last day of Edward the Confessor’s reign, when King William granted it and in 1086.^[8] The Norman inspectors spoke French and Latin, and the people in England spoke English. Juries of leading local men, among them the village priest and the reeve, understood the different languages and had to decide whether their neighbors were telling the truth.^[7]

The result, Domesday Book, holds details of 270,000 inhabitants, free and unfree, in 13,000 settlements. The writer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noted in English that “there was no single hide nor virgate of land” left out of the record.^[9] The people it names are almost all landholders, and The National Archives advises anyone tracing a Norman ancestor to turn to other reference works.^[8]

How English surnames came about

Most English surnames go back to a name that became hereditary between the 13th and the 16th century. In south Lancashire, some surnames were still being formed from a father’s name in the early 17th century. Many only settled into their present spelling in the 20th century.^[10]

The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, published in 2016, explains 45,600 of the most frequent surnames, nearly 40,000 of them native to Britain and Ireland. Richard Coates, one of its editors, names the main types. Smith and Baker come from occupations, as do the less obvious Beadle, Rutter and Baxter. Hill refers to a place, and so does Green, after a village green. Jackson and Jenkinson preserve a father’s name. Brown, Short and Thin once described the first bearer, though Short may have been an ironic nickname for a tall person.^[11]

One spelling can stand for unrelated names. The English surname Lee comes from a Middle English word for a clearing in a wood. According to the dictionary’s editors, nearly half of the 84,000 people named Lee in Britain have Chinese ancestry and carry a Chinese surname spelled the same way.^[10]

Parish registers, certificates and census returns

On September 5, 1538, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s deputy in church affairs, ordered every parish to keep a register of baptisms, marriages and burials.^[12] Only a very few parishes still have registers from that first year. Before 1813, London’s baptism registers typically give the date, the child’s name, the parents’ names and possibly the father’s occupation. The mother’s maiden name is never entered.^[13]

Civil registration in England and Wales began in July 1837. The General Register Office holds every birth, marriage and death registered since then, and its index references can be looked up for free on the FreeBMD website.^[14]

England and Wales have taken a census every ten years since 1801, except in 1941, and Scotland has held its own. The 1841 returns are the earliest to name every person. From 1851 they give the county and parish of birth for people born in England or Wales. Census records stay closed for 100 years, and 1921 is the latest open census. The 1931 census was destroyed by fire in 1942.^[15] The 1939 Register fills part of the gap. Taken on September 29, 1939, and used to produce identity cards, it records about 40 million civilians with their exact dates of birth.^[16]

English ancestry in American statistics

In 2020, people who marked White as their race could write in a more specific origin, a new option on the census form. In all, 46.6 million people identified as English, alone or in any combination with other groups, more than any other White group. German followed with 45 million and Irish with 38.6 million. Maricopa County in Arizona, which includes Phoenix, had the largest English population of any county, 620,199 people.^[3]

The American Community Survey has an ancestry question of its own, and only the first two groups a person names are counted. Some people answer American. The Census Bureau explains that this could be because their ancestors “have been in United States for so long or they have such mixed backgrounds that they do not identify with any particular group”.^[17] In 2024, 18.1 million people gave American as their ancestry. As a share of the population, English ancestry is most common in Utah and Maine.^[2]