Ethnic cleansing that ensured England stayed pure Anglo-Saxon

THE earliest Englishmen were the same as their modern counterparts, contemptuous of foreigners and snobbish about their neighbours, according to researchers. New computer models of the process of colonisation demonstrate that, by refusing to let their daughters marry the locals, and never inviting them to share even the smallest crumb from the Anglo-Saxon table, our genetic ancestors slowly but surely ethnically cleansed the country.

For the past 50 years and more, historians, archaeologists and more recently geneticists have argued about how many Anglo-Saxons it took to achieve the full dominance of early medieval society in England. Pottery records, which are accurate indicators in other parts of the world, suggest that the invaders who began arriving from the Angle, Saxon and Jute homelands in northern Europe around AD400 never amounted to more than a tenth of England's total population, which was between two and three million. They may have been as few as one in 20.

But the genetic map of England today means that at least 55 per cent of all men in the country must have been of pure Anglo-Saxon stock by the reign of Alfred the Great (871-899). In the early 20th century, historians assumed that the traditional story of the great Anglo-Saxon invasion was true, with the poor Romano-Britons driven into Wales, Cornwall and other places that the invaders were too soft to want to live in.

Then in the 1980s and 1990s, the pottery experts made it the accepted historical wisdom that there was only a small influx of Anglo-Saxons, enough to dominate militarily, but not actually to become the majority population.

However, in 2002 and 2003, genetic sampling of men in England showed that most had Y chromosomes that were similar to those from the regions in Friesland, Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland where the Germanic tribes came from. This suggested that between 50 and 75 per cent of white males here were Germans.

The new research, led by Mark Thomas of University College, London, claims it can reconcile the two conflicting schools of thought by reference to the snobbishness of Anglo-Saxon attitudes. They base their theory on the idea that the Germanic peoples maintained economic and social dominance after the armed conquest, which meant that they had more to eat and healthier living conditions.

Therefore, they bred more successfully than their Romano-British neighbours, with more of their children surviving to adulthood.

"Crucially, they also had rules which clearly distinguished between Anglo-Saxons and the British, whom they called Welsh, and gave them a much lower status,'' Mr Thomas said.

There was nothing inherently superior about Anglo-Saxon heredity over the Celts, he said. "This is just a question of genes hitchhiking on culture.''

By the time of King Alfred, there were no longer social or legal taboos on intermarriage but the Anglo-Saxon genes were already dominant, and Viking and Norman incursions were not large enough to change that pattern.