The independence that I describe at the end of the last chapter can be succinctly demonstrated by looking at the many ways in which Bede's translator chooses to render Bede's term gens Anglorum. Approaching the OEHE from a comparative lexical perspective, this chapter examines differences between the OEHE and other vernacular texts, especially the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, regarding gentes names, the names of tribes or peoples that appear in the text. Focusing on the ways in which the OEHE translates gens Anglorum in relation to other gentes names, this chapter questions whether the OEHE plays a role in the tenth-century construction of an English national identity by the West Saxon court. Although the OEHE was circulating in England during the period in which King Alfred and his son Edward formed and ruled the ‘kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’, as well as into (and beyond) the days of Æthelstan's ‘kingdom of the English’, it does not privilege the Alfredian term Angelcynn. Taking a comparative approach to the study of gentes names shows that Bede's translator makes choices clearly different from what many scholars have defined as Alfred's ideological program of asserting an ideal of national unity via the term Angelcynn.

Many of the arguments for the formation of a proto-nation state or centralized kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons and the English in the tenth century derive, via Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, from Gregory the Great's notion that the kingdom of the Angles corresponded with what had been Roman Britannia.