some snippage

If Rupert Brooke had substituted 'Britain' for 'England' and 'British' for
'English', then his poem would have had different cultural connotations.

I have been enjoying this exchange, but would like to say that the
difference would be a political emphasis. For example, I am in all political
and legal definition English, yet culturally a Celt.

Incidentally, the American author of Red Badge of Courage, is also an
interesting analyst of these [war-time]subjects, though 'culture' is
implicit rather than expicit, and the title is still a set book in American
High Schools.

"There is clear evidence that the concept of Englishness--the
'Englishness'
of the Anglo-Saxons, as opposed to the 'Britishness' of the
Celts--circulated
widely in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Yes. I think this is correct, however the emphasis is not of a political
'Britain or England', but a cultural one.

Bede composed 'Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis
Anglorum' (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People), where the
'Gens
Anglorum' were deemed to be a specific and identifiable race sprung out of
Saxon and Old English roots. In Bede's history, 'the English were God's
new
'chosen' nation elected to replace the sin-stained Briton in the promised
land
of Britain.' (This belief in God's providential choice, most ably
expounded
by Milton in the seventeenth century, survived until the later part of the
nineteenth century.)

Yes again. A further definition of these two things can be found in the
Church, and the schism at Farne between what might be called British
Johanine early Christianity, and the later Pauline English variant, which
became dominant thereafter.

Thereafter much "British" language and culture took a hike, pursued by
Normanidisation, to Wales, Ireland and Breton France, to return a bit
transmogrified 200 years later as Romance material, until that interesting
woman translated Mabinogion.

The notion of Englishness itself was a religious one
from the moment Pope Gregory sent Augustine to England with the mission of
establishing a Church of the English, in the light of his celebrated if
apocryphal remark 'non Angli sed angeli' ('Not Angles but angels'). A
late
seventh-century biography then declared that Gregory would lead 'gentum
Anglorum' into the sight of God at the time of the Last Judgement. One of
the reasons for the success of the Reformation, and the formation of the
Church of England, lies in this national zeal."
--Peter Ackroyd (Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, p.
xxviii)

O. I anticipated your point too quickly! And someone else has read Ackroyd!
I should that Ackroyd's literary record may be a deeper well than his
historical one. Did you read "English Music" as a comparison?

'I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.'
--William Blake

Amen.

Relectantly returning to chess, Adams might feel as I do above, that he is
not culturally English as a dominant, and he may elect to be more Celt or
'British" in the older sense you mention. [I don't know, and speculate].
This is not to say that this rejects what is currently 'English" and such
persons as Wm. Blake, as example, have been better English extrapolators of
what is British than any nominal other persons, perhaps since the Bard.

It is an interesting layering of one thing on another, and both cultures
seem to inform and intertwine with each other more as variants on a theme,
rather than anything antithetical .

Phil Innes

--Nick