General Discussion
Showing Original Post only (View all)Do the English think of themselves as God's blessing to mankind? I ask this question because [View all]
recently an American tennis fan congratulated an Englishman when finally a Briton, Andy Murray,
had won the Wimbledon championship for the first time in 75 years! Do you know what the
the Englishman said? His reply was, "Yes ..... but he is not English!" Andy Murray is Scotch. I
suppose the Englishman looked upon him as a "colonial." He and too many Englishmen still have
the mentality of people from the 18th and 19the centuries, still thinking in terms of
"pure Englishmen" and "colonials."
Can you imagine the subtle, not-so-subtle, and blatantly open snubs and put-downs still going on
in the social and business worlds of the UK today? And among "pure Englishmen" themselves,
their society is still being separated by barriers according to class from the blue-blooded nobility to
the city slum dwellers. And today, the situation is complicated by the large numbers of non-white
immigrants from the far-flung countries of their former world-wide empire.
Can you blame the Scots for wanting to secede from the UK?
Let's take a closer look at what a "pure Englishman" is. The first known settlers in England
probably were the Celts. Around 400 BC, the ancient Romans conquered and colonized
"Britannia," as they called that land, and they stayed there for 4 centuries. And Roman armies
were known to have Nubian soldiers. Nubians were black Africans. So, there was already a
mixture of some Italian and a little of black African genes in their ancestry even before the
Christian Era.
The Viking pirates had been raiding the coasts of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales also for
centuries.
In the 5th and 6th Centuries A.D. there was a heavy influx of the Angles and Saxons into
England. These were Germanic tribes, and many of them were fleeing from the Huns (an
Asian tribe) who had conquered much of Germany at that time. The Anglo-Saxons warred
with the Celts, who retreated further west into Wales and Ireland, and north into Scotland.
In 1066 William the Conqueror from Normandy, France, conquered the land and became the
King of England. His descendants (among whom was Richard the Lion-Hearted of the
Crusades fame). The Plantagenets remained for 200 years, and French was the spoken language
at the English Court. And the Normans despised their defeated subjects, the Anglo-Saxons.
The English language we have today is a mixture of Celtic, Latin, Scandinavian, German and
French. There may be others that I have missed.
The "pure Englishman?" Hah! They're deluding themselves. There is no pure anything. There
never was.
I wish the Scotch people good luck, whatever results from their present problems with
the "pure English."