<P> The name "England" is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles". The Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages . The Angles came from the Anglia (Angeln) peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area (present - day German state of Schleswig--Holstein) of the Baltic Sea . 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 in a different sense to the modern one, meaning "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 . According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its modern spelling was first used in 1538 . </P> <P> The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st - century work by Tacitus, Germania, in which the Latin word Anglii is used . 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 . How and why a term derived from the name of a tribe that was less significant than others, such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country and its people 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 between Weser and Eider rivers in Northern Germany . In Scottish Gaelic, another language which developed on the island of Great Britain, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England (Sasunn); similarly, the Welsh name for the English language is "Saesneg". </P> <P> An alternative name for England is Albion . The name Albion originally referred to the entire island of Great Britain . The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus, specifically the 4th - century BC De Mundo: "Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean that flows round the earth . In it are two very large islands called Britannia; these are Albion and Ierne". But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, i.e. it was written later in the Graeco - Roman period or afterwards . The word Albion (Ἀλβίων) or insula Albionum has two possible origins . It either derives from a cognate of the Latin albus meaning white, a reference to the white cliffs of Dover (the only part of Britain visible from the European mainland) or from the phrase the "island of the Albiones" in the now lost Massaliote Periplus, that is attested through Avienus' Ora Maritima to which the former presumably served as a source . Albion is now applied to England in a more poetic capacity . Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England, Lloegr, and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend . </P> <P> The earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximately 780,000 years ago . The oldest proto - human bones discovered in England date from 500,000 years ago . Modern humans are known to have inhabited the area during the Upper Paleolithic period, though permanent settlements were only established within the last 6,000 years . After the last ice age only large mammals such as mammoths, bison and woolly rhinoceros remained . Roughly 11,000 years ago, when the ice sheets began to recede, humans repopulated the area; genetic research suggests they came from the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula . The sea level was lower than now and Britain was connected by land bridge to Ireland and Eurasia . As the seas rose, it was separated from Ireland 10,000 years ago and from Eurasia two millennia later . </P>

What was england called before it was called england
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