National character may be regarded as the result of national history, or national history as the development of national character; either way we can… - William Stubbs

The English nation is of distinctly Teutonic or German origin. The Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, who, according to Bede, furnished the mass of immigrants in the fifth century, were amongst those tribes of Lower Germany which had been the least affected by Roman influences... This new race was the main stock of our forefathers: sharing the primeval German pride of purity of extraction, still regarding the family tie as the basis of social organization; migrating in groups of allied and kindred character, and commemorating the tribal identity in the names they gave to their new settlements, honouring the women of their nation, and strictly careful of the distinction between themselves and the tolerated remnant of their predecessor.

The general tendency of the process may be described as a movement from the personal to the territorial organisation; from a state of things in which personal freedom and political right were the leading ideas, to one in which personal freedom and political right had become so much bound up with the relations created by the possession of land, as to be actually subservient to it: the Angel-cynn of Alfred becomes the Engla-lande of Canute.

It is of the greatest importance that this study should become a recognized part of a regular English education. No knowledge of English history can be really sound without it: it is not creditable to us as an educated people that while our students are well acquainted with the state machinery of Athens and Rome, they should be ignorant of the corresponding institutions of our own forefathers: institutions that possess a living interest for every nation that realizes its identity, and have exercised on the wellbeing of the civilized world an influence not inferior certainly to that of the Classical nations.