What is a WASP?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The population history of England in the early middle ages is... er... contentious. It is not certain how large the migration of Germanic peoples actually was. The idea that there was a wholesale replacement of the previous population is discredited, but the idea that England and the English were created by a small settler elite is not massively popular. The situation is further complicated by later Norse invasions and settlement; again the exact extent of the latter is uncertain. And we shouldn't pretend that pre-Roman population history is simple either... or, actually, that there was no significant immigration between the Conquest and the beginning of emigration to the future United States.

As a historical term 'Anglo Saxon' means a speaker of Old English; it is often shortened to just 'Saxon'. Even Anglo Saxon is a simplification as traditionally the Anglo-Saxons were held to have been comprised of the Angles, the Saxons, the Frisians and the Jutes (we can be fairly sure that things were not this neat). Exactly where these people originally came from is not entirely certain, despite the seemingly certain names. Things were not recorded until centuries later, so it isn't really all that fair to blame the Venomous Bede for simplifying things.

In the context of 'WASP', though, Anglo Saxon just means English (irrespective of early mediaeval family history) and should be understood simply as the linguistic creation of a society obsessed with the idea of 'race' as a quantifiable scientific category.