Abstract
The English government, simply by its very existence, helped to maintain and propagate the constructs of England and Englishness, and played a role in the adoption of a new ethnic identity by the political elites. A number of scholars have argued that government was a factor in the unification of English and Normans after the conquest. But how and why did the royal government strengthen the ideas of England and Englishness? This chapter explores the royal government's influence on constructs of place and identity after the Norman conquest and discusses some of the mechanics of how it worked. First, the chapter looks at the scholarly debate over whether one can speak of an Anglo-Norman Regnum in which England and Normandy essentially formed a single political entity.