Chapter 8 - Historical Origins of a Mythical History: The Formation of the Myth Supporting Anglo-Saxonism Reconsidered

Summary

ANGLO-SAXONISM or ‘the sentiment of being “Anglo-Saxon” […] or English ethnologically; a belief in the superiority or claims of the “Anglo-Saxon” race’, is fundamentally based on the belief that the Anglo- Saxons constitute the major part of the ancestry of English people, the indigenous ‘Celts’ having mostly been eliminated from England in the process of Anglo-Saxon conquest, as, for instance, Andy Orchard summarizes in the following passage:

Soon after the first wave of invasions in the mid-fifth century the British population was literally marginalized: swept off to the Celtic fringes of what is now Wales, Scotland and Cornwall by aggressive Anglo-Saxon incomers who took over the land and imposed their own perspective […] in a process that smacks uncomfortably of what is now termed ‘ethnic cleansing’.

As we shall see below, the idea summarized here has been repeated over the centuries, but it is also true that some, regarding this view postulating a kind of ‘ethnic cleansing’ as exaggerating or oversimplifying the reality, have expressed different opinions assuming a higher rate of racial blending.In recent years, moreover, it has been challenged by some archaeogenetic researchers who, based on their DNA analyses, suggest that the indigenous population remained demographically predominant even after the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England. It is far beyond the scope of this article to uncover the actual facts or to make any assessment of the archaeogenetic research, but if this common belief substantially differs from reality, it is interesting to examine when and how it came into existence. Thus, in this article, I shall re-examine early medieval works on English/British history in the hope of elucidating when and how the historical myth came into existence. In the first section, I shall examine what Gildas and Bede wrote about the Anglo-Saxon invasions and how early modern historians misleadingly utilized them as records of the large-scale population turnover. In the second section, I shall trace the origin of the misleading treatment of Gildas's and Bede's accounts by the early modern historians back to Æthelweard's Chronicle, while in the third section, I shall examine Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae as a very influential work endorsing and spreading (a modified version of) the myth fundamentally based on Anglo-Saxon Anglo-Saxonism as reflected in Æthelweard's Chronicle.