The foreigner is not new to Anglo-Saxon studies. The uncertain status of the foreigner, and of its complement, the indigene, has been implicit in the study of Anglo-Saxon society since at least the seventeenth century, when it was examined by scholars such as Richard Verstegen, John Selden, and Sir Henry Spelman. 1 The issue has recently received attention under the neologism "ethnicity" and looms large in current historical and archaeological work, at the same time complicating our understanding of Anglo-Saxon social categories. Over a century after John Mitchell Kemble discu ssed Bede's tribal division in 1876, any inquiry into Anglo-Saxon ethnogenesis must still confront the ethnic implications of Bede's passage in Book I Chapter 15 of his Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (HE), which relates the division of Germanic tribes in Britain into Angles, Saxons and Jutes.2 This passage is a historiographical landmark that demands the fullest attention of anyone passing into the uncertainties of Anglo-Saxon society. Although Bede's tribal division continues today to be a source of academic contention, Bede offers a set of general qualifications for determining who belonged to which tribe and who did not, in other words, who was indigenous and who was foreign.

Kemble argued that Bede's tribal divisions were not factually accurate,3 a view reiterated by Sir Frank Stenton in 1943 and J. N. L. Myres in 1949.4 In 1983, however, Patrick Sims-Williams reported that the forty years of Bede studies since Stenton had essentially confirmed, amplified, or qualified the narrative of events offered in the HE.5 Recent studies of Bede by Peter Hunter Blair, David Dumville, Eric John, and D. P. Kirby affirm in the main the historical accuracy of Bede's evidence.6 On the one hand, scholars such as J. M. Wallace-Hadrill in his 1988 posthumous commentary on the HE, conclude that Bede's "distinction stands up fairly well to modern archaeological evidence."7 On the other hand, scholars following Kemble and Stenton have concluded that Bede's distinction does not. While Bede's distinction continues to slumber under his-

Two distinct lines of approach to the HE thus greet us in the mid-1990s. The first employs the HE as evidence in reconstructed historical narratives of pre-Augustinian Britain. The second seeks to discover the larger aim of the HE with respect to the historiographical tradition with which Bede was fluent. In any consideration of the foreigner in early Anglo-Saxon England, then, we confront two relatively distinct lines of inquiry. The first asks after the actual, factual composition of, for example, the gens Anglorum. The second asks us to consider the term gens Anglorum as part of Bede's rhetorical strategy to extend to his audience a sense of identity implicit in Gregory the Great's nomenclature. It is within and against the confines of this second line of inquiry that I ask of Bede who belonged to which tribe and who did not.

I title this paper "Bede, Social Practice, and the Problem with Foreigners." The "problem," as I see it, lies in accounting for the mutual exclusivity of the two lines of inquiry I have just described. Specifically, it lies in the relationship between the facts of early Anglo-Saxon history and Bede's apparent use or misuse of those facts. The phrase "social practice" raises the related question of the applicability or utility of Bede's narrative evidence to larger sociological conclusions. In this vein, for example, Stenton claimed that Bede's division reflected "the common opinion of his time."10 But here a flag of caution must be raised. Stenton's evidence for his claim is names, especially "titles of kings and bishops."11 The phrase "common opinion" lends a false air of democratic veracity to a body of evidence that is recognizably ill suited to establish such veracity. With respect to Bede, the standard by which we determine the sociological systems extant in early Anglo-Saxon England cannot, in my opinion, rest solely upon narrative evidence so clearly fashioned for the proselytization of theological truth. The active didacticism of the HE, a truism since Hanning and Mayr-Harting, seems to me to impugn a popular, secular application of Bede's evidence consistent at least with contemporary historiographical criteria.12 In other words, Bede's evidence is best approached not in terms of how it reflects either the actual facts or common opinion, but in how it actively contributes to mythographic or ideological formations.

Furthermore, recent historical work in early medieval ethnogenesis, especially that by Herwig Wolfram, indicates that the actual polyethnic constitution of many Germanic tribes belies the homogeneity implied by their tribal names.13 Blood lines, ancestry, geography, and physical features are all qualifications that somehow fail to describe the constituative elements of tribal identity. In asking about the actual composition of Bede's gens Anglorum, we ought to consider

Bede's own identity, that is his self-declared position within a British ethnic complex, is evinced in the very terms he chooses to tell his story. In the Preface to his HE, Bede dedicates his work to a Northumbrian king, Ceolwulf, to whom he promises to tell stories of illustrious men of "nostrae gentis" of our race.19 With this phrase alone, Bede declares his affiliation with the Northumbrian king. And this is an important point: we know that Bede is Northumbrian not because he lived in Northumbria, but because he declares himself to be of the Northumbrian gens, of the same gens as King Ceolwulf. Hw‘tberht, for example, who succeeded Ceolfrith at Jarrow in 716, also lived in Northumbria and was also a monk at Jarrow. But in Bede's dedication of his De temporum ratione to him, Hw‘tberht (nicknamed Eusebius) is recognized as a Saxon.20 Nevertheless, if both Bede and Ceolwulf are of the gens Nordanhymbrorum, why then is Bede's story of nostrae gentis entitled Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum?

The simplest answer, and the one which I contest, is that gens Anglorum refers to all three incoming Germanic tribes and their descendants: in other words, to the English people, not the Welsh, Scots, or Irish. The phrase "English people," which reflects this simple answer, appears in the title of Sherley-Price's popular Penguin translation of the HE, as it does in the scholarly edition and translation by Colgrave and Mynors.21 In the notes to their edition, Colgrave and Mynors tell us that Bede "happily" refers to the whole complex of incoming tribes.22 Michael Richter, in a 1984 article entitled "Bede's Angli: Angles or English?" and Susan Reynolds in a 1985 article both conclude that the gens Anglorum are not the Angles, but certainly the English people.23 Their certainty seems to have resulted from a conflation of our two lines of inquiry (outlined above), following the 1983 publication of Patrick Wormald's "Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origin of the gens Anglorum."24 In other words, in the

In the same article, Wormald points out that Anglian and Saxon cultures remained relatively distinct until at least the tenth century. Their purported terrestrial unity, he wrote, is usually presumed with reference to the unifying bretwalda, which, he declares, rests on contentious interpretations of the merest bits of evidence.26 Reynolds admits in her 1985 article that the ethnically inclusive term "Anglo-Saxon" and its Latin equivalent "seems to appear in surviving native sources only from the late ninth century on."27 One point to be made here, and one evident in Wormald, is that early continental evidence lacks the ethnic distinctions available only in later native evidence. This appears to be because the vast majority of early continental usage follows the Gregorian nomenclature. But Gregorian nomenclature applies properly only to the post-Augustinian polity. As Peter Hunter Blair, Wormald and Reynolds conclude, it applies only to the English unified "in their loyalty to Rome and Canterbury."28 But it is senseless, not to mention wrong, to conceive of an ecclesiastical unity in a pagan people a unity born of a religion that would not be accepted by the invaders for another 150 years or, in Bede's narrative, for another thirteen chapters. The imposition of a late ninth-century unity on a variety of fifth-century continental advenae is not only anachronistic, but also ignores the dynamism of what John Hines argues is "the quite drastic but reasonably clear development of Anglian identity."29 Thus, if "English" refers to a combination of Germanic tribes, then we can accept the translation of the Latin gens Anglorum as "English" if and only if it applies to a late- or post-ninth-century collective.

In fact, Bede's phrasing tells us as much. Bede uses the term Anglorum to refer specifically and exclusively in this first book to an Anglian identity (viz. orientalis Angli and mediterranei Angli). Consider the phrase "Tunc Anglorum sive Saxonum gens," used in describing the pagan advenae. If gens Anglorum refers happily to the complex of incoming Germanic tribes, then saxonum is both redundant and misleading. Furthermore, if we translate gens Anglorum as

That Bede is presenting a purported Anglian identity and not referring to the continental Angles is an important distinction.31 In the HE, Bede uses the nominative Angl (which in the vast majority of instances refers to the continental Angles) only 18 times. Anglorum, on the other hand, which is the genitive of material (or substance), occurs 179 times, mainly to qualify gens.32 These figures support the contention that Bede is writing his HE not about the Angles per se but about a gens. The distinction is subtle but telling. A reader finds very few sentences in which Angli forms the subject. In considerably more sentences, gens forms the subject only to be qualified by Anglorum. That is to say, the vast majority of Bede's sentences are not about the Angles, but about a tribe who shares constituative ethnic or socially binding characteristics connoted in the name "Angle."

These constituative characteristics, summed up in Smith's features, are evinced in Bede's famous passage. The first feature, the common name itself, is clear: gens Anglorum. The second, a common myth of descent, is found at the end of the passage. In this short geneology, Bede tells his reader that Woden is the common ancestor of the ruling race of the Angles.33 The third feature, association with a specific territory, is also clearly in evidence. Bede tells us that the Saxons come from Old Saxony, the Jutes from the kingdom of the Jutes, and the Angles from Angulus. The confluence of these three distinguishing ethnic features identify a place for British Angles, and consequently Northumbrians, within the social and ethnic complex of early Anglo-Saxon Britain. Bede says that from the Angles are descended "tota Nordanhymbrorum progenies" ("all of Northumbria's descendants"). With respect to a specific territory, Bede says that Angulus "ab eo tempore usque hodie manere desertus" ("from that time and to this day remains deserted"). Whereas the tribes of the Jutes and the Saxons (and the Picts and the British Irish, for that matter) are divided between those Jutes and Saxons who make their homes in Britain and those who make their homes elsewhere, Bede notes that the Angles are whole, united, and integral. (This is further borne out in the Latin, but not in Colgrave's translation.)

Furthermore, Bede's identification is not anathema to Gregorian nomenclature. One might almost propose that Bede was extending Gregory's heavenly