...Except ethnicity isn't defined just by skin colour, but also by region. A white Slavic person is a different ethnicity to a white Irish person - this is demonstrated, for instance, by the fact that white Irish people as an ethnicity have a higher risk of haemochromatosis.

To quote the UK government: >We use ‘ethnic minorities’ to refer to all ethnic groups except the white British group. Ethnic minorities include white minorities, such as Gypsy, Roma and Irish Traveller groups.

You can also look at their list of ethnicities they used in the last census for an idea of how most European people conceptualise ethnicity.

Do you genuinely believe that, for example, a company with British, French, and German people is less diverse than a company with British people, if the British people have different skin colours?

Personally, I don't. If a company in the UK only hired British people and gave that excuse when criticised for not employing non-Brits, they'd be laughed out of an employment tribunal.

When you're all the same nationality, you're inherently limited to how diverse you can be. And on that note, out of curiosity, what are the statistics for non-American nationals in the USA?

The citation for that statistic, if you click on the footnote, is from 2002 - bit outdated to say the least.

>Christoph Pan, Beate Sibylle Pfeil (2002), Minderheitenrechte in Europa. Handbuch der europäischen Volksgruppen, Braumüller, ISBN 3700314221 (Google Books, snippet view).

>Also 2006 reprint by Springer (Amazon, no preview) ISBN 3211353070. Pan, Christoph; Pfeil, Beate Sibylle (2002). Minderheitenrechte in Europa. ISBN 9783700314226. Archived from the original on 5 December 2015. Retrieved 14 August 2015

Let's look at the UK as an example. England and Wales had a census in 2021, which returned these statistics on ethnicity and nationality:

>As part of the "White" ethnic group, 74.4% (44.4 million) of the total population in England and Wales identified their ethnic group as "English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British", this is a continued decrease from 80.5% (45.1 million) in 2011, and from 87.5% (45.5 million) who identified this way in 2001.

So 25.6% of the UK are non-white and/or non-British nationals. This includes 9.3% who are Asian (including Asian British and Asian Welsh), who are the second biggest ethnicity in the UK.

For comparison, in Ireland as of 2016, white Irish people made up 82.2% of the population. In Spain as of 2011, foreign nationals made up 12.15% of the population, which is still a very outdated figure.

Germany, like France, doesn't collect data on ethnicity, but it does collect data on birthplaces as someone born abroad is considered a foreign national, as are the children of at least one immigrant parent. As of 2019, German nationals born in Germany were 74% of the population.

I could go on, but seriously - in the future, check how old the footnote is before you cite something.

...what stats are you even looking at?

France doesn't even allow people to collect statistics on the demography of different ethnicities, so unless it has a massive disclaimer stating that, it's biased as hell.

You've also got to consider we don't use the inherited "racial" divide from eugenics (white, black, Asian). So in the UK, white people from non-British backgrounds contribute just as much to diversity as a black British person, because they've both got different experiences to a white British person.

I've actually been looking at the Winchester pipe rolls (basically accounts of the bishop's tenants) lately, which started in the first decade of the 1200s, and you still see quite a significant amount of Old English names. It's maybe 10% of women's names at most, and not many women appear in the first place, but it's still enough that I wouldn't rule the post-Conquest period out.

Yeah, given this was kept in an abbey for several centuries, I think there's a good chance it was a child initiate.

The manuscript was kept in an abbey until the 1500s - abbeys were often used as schools for aristocratic children and would also educate peasant children given to them as initiates (who sometimes would decide against becoming a monk or nun as an adult). It's entirely possible this was the case here.

There's literally a whole field of study about marginalia in medieval manuscripts - yes they were expensive, but that's never stopped graffiti.