Who are the English? Essentially, we are the same people we were before the Norman Conquest in A.D. 1066. In other words we are Anglo-Saxons. The Venerable Bede wrote that the English nation was born from the three most noble nations of the Germans, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. By A.D. 825, the Jutes had ceased to exist as a separate people, having been absorbed by the Saxons. We know that Frisians were also present among the early settlers, but they were absorbed by the Angles even before the Jutes of Kent and Hampshire had merged with the Saxons.
England can be thought of as Anglo-Saxony, with Angles (Angelcynn/Engle) in the North and Midlands, and Saxons (Seaxe) in the South. It is unfortunate that the period before A.D. 1066 is referred to as the Anglo-Saxon period, because that suggests that in some way the English are no longer Anglo-Saxons. The growing practice of referring to the period, between the withdrawal of the Romans and the arrival of the Normans, as ‘Early Medieval’, or ‘The Early Middle Ages’ is preferable.
There is a certain validity in the use of the description of Anglo-Saxon for the period before A.D. 1066. The Norman Conquest marked a linguistic and cultural watershed when we English began to lose touch with our Anglo-Saxon identity, as our true English language (our nation’s soul) became corrupted with Norman French to begin with, then Central French, then with “ink-horn” Latin and Greek, and then, thanks to British Empire, with elements from every language under the sun. If we English are to rediscover ourselves as a nation, we must eschew Common English and build a New English with strong roots deep in the good ground of that speech which the Angelcynn brought to this island fifteen hundred years ago.