The British islescape wields an undeniable power in shaping the collective identities of all peoples which have inhabited this part of the world. For the Anglo-Saxons, the ‘insular mentality’ was rooted in a myth of arrival at the island and the subsequent conquest of this confined territory. In the continuous perception of the littoral landscape they could further construct and perpetuate this specific mindset. Their word for island (OE ealond/igland), a compound combining water (ea) and land (land/lond), must have resounded in their minds with a semantic delay to which present-day users of the word are almost deaf. Unlike many peoples on the European continent Anglo-Saxons could, for large parts of their territory, perceive a clear geographical frontier in the coast and thus foster a particular notion of the independence of the land mass they inhabited. Through the unchanging natural border they could view the island as an eternally stable territory, but – for the same reason – they were also prone to develop fears of invasion of the familiar home ground. This sense of limited space and its implementation in the Anglo-Saxon collective memory could not be more emphatically expressed than by the attempts to define exact territorial measures in the famous opening sentences of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica or the Peterborough Chronicle. Their perimeters largely defined by the sea, but also by the strong belief that they would inhabit a marginal realm of the world, Anglo-Saxons could begin to transform given or inherited social, historical, and spiritual realities or create fresh mental maps, the constructions of which were triggered and guided by an involvement with the geographical realities that surrounded them.

One important mental response to the geographical insulation on a naturally limited body of land may have been an intensified focus on the self: on the one hand on the physicality of the confined island ‘body’, on the other on the human body inhabiting it as an entity that could be perceived as equally finite. It is in the special awareness of visible demarcations that island life can cause a stronger identification between man and land, a stronger sense of belonging and attachment than felt towards territories arbitrarily demarcated by porous borders. Land that is visibly insulated can be perceived and related to more easily in its entirety as a geographical unit or centre within a maritime ‘desert’.