The exhibition also includes a charming 11th-Century English map of the world, which gives us an insight into Anglo-Saxon identity. Britain and Ireland are squeezed into the bottom left-hand corner. (The two main population centres in England, London and Winchester, are noted.) The Mediterranean Sea is at the centre of the world’s land mass, with Rome prominent near the bottom on the left (‘Ro’ and then ‘ma’, with towers in between); across the water, Jerusalem is also prominent. Africa looms large on the upper right (follow the orange line up from the Nile delta), and India is the roughly triangular mass at the top centre.

This worldview was inherited from the Romans, who regarded Britain as being on the far edge of the world, but remained tied to the ‘centre’ by the Christian religion. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, which ended with the Norman Conquest in 1066, there was religious (and with it, intellectual) traffic across Europe.

Venerable Bede, an English monk and historian, noted in the early 8th Century that Britain was inhabited by four peoples who used five languages: the Picts (who remain shadowy); the Scots (whose language became Gaelic); the Britons (whose language became Welsh, Cornish, and Breton); and the Anglo-Saxons (who used a form of English). The fifth language was the Latin of the church, which eventually provided an alphabet to replace runes. On top of all of this, the Viking invasion of Britain began in the early 8th Century, adding Danish culture to the mix.

It is important to remember that the formation of English was influenced by a huge range of ethnic and geographical forces. The emerging ‘England’ of this period was a melting pot.

For example, we owe our English names for the days of the week, Tuesday to Friday, to the pagan religion that the Anglo-Saxons brought with them to Britain (Saturday, Sunday and Monday derive from the Greco-Roman tradition). Equally, the name of the Christian festival Easter is linked by Bede to ‘Eostre’, who seems to have been a pagan goddess. Woden, the most important pagan god, to whom we owe the word Wednesday, was also claimed as the ancestor of Anglo-Saxon royal lines. (The similarity to the name of the Norse god Odin is no accident.)