Toponymy
The name "England" is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles".[16] The Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages. They came from the Angeln region of what is now the German state of Schleswig-Holstein.[17] The earliest recorded use of the term, as "Engla londe", is in the late-ninth-century translation into Old English of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The term was then used to mean "the land inhabited by the English", and it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was then part of the English kingdom of Northumbria. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that the Domesday Book of 1086 covered the whole of England, meaning the English kingdom, but a few years later the Chronicle stated that King Malcolm III went "out of Scotlande into Lothian in Englaland", thus using it in the more ancient sense.[18]
The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, in which the Latin word Anglii is used.[19] The etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars; it has been suggested that it derives from the shape of the Angeln peninsula, an angular shape.[20] How and why a term derived from the name of this tribe, rather than others such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country is not known, but it seems this is related to the custom of calling the Germanic people in Britain Angli Saxones or English Saxons to distinguish them from continental Saxons (Eald-Seaxe) of Old Saxony in Germany.[21] In Scottish Gaelic, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England (Sasunn);[22] similarly, the Welsh name for the English language is Saesneg. A romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England, Lloegr, and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend. Albion is also applied to England in a more poetic capacity,[23] though its original meaning is the island of Britain as a whole.