National origins remain as important as they have ever been to our sense of identity. Accounts of the early history of the peoples of Europe, including the English, are key tools in our construction of that identity. The origins of the English might seem at first glance a well-worn topic - there are libraries of books on the subject, and politicians, teachers and journalists daily make confident statements suggesting there are clear, simple answers to all questions relating to it.Yet if you look at those answers, they vary considerably, and this is true of all accounts of early British history written since the fifth century AD, when the Anglo-Saxons are thought to have arrived in what thereafter became England.These accounts address the subject from different perspectives, and so come to different conclusions.

National identity has been studied through a range of different types of evidence - historical, archaeological, linguistic and most recently genetic. This has caused problems of interdisciplinary communication. In this book Catherine Hills carefully and succinctly unravels these different perceptions and types of evidence to assess how far it is really possible to understand when and how the people living in south and east Britain became 'English'.