1 - Anglo-Saxonisms of the Early Eighteenth Century

Summary

Not only our Histories, but our Language, our Laws, our Customs, our Names of Persons and Names of Places, do all abundantly testify, that the greatest part of your Majesty’s Subjects here, are of SAXON Original.

Edmund Gibson

In a letter to the Swedish antiquary Eric Benzelius written late in the summer of 1704, Humfrey Wanley announced the imminent publication of George Hickes’s Thesaurus, a work now widely regarded as the single most significant eighteenth-century contribution to Anglo-Saxon scholarship. The first of its two volumes, by Hickes, was ‘full of uncommon Learning, relating to the Laws, Customs, &c. of our Saxon Ancestors’; the second, Wanley noted, contained ‘my Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon MSS’. The two volumes represented the culmination of decades of work on the grammar of Old English and other septentrional languages. Hickes’s Old English grammar became the standard for more than a century, and Wanley’s catalogue contained a comprehensive survey of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in England that would remain unrivalled for more than 250 years. Critical response to the Thesaurus offered unqualified praise, and over the course of the following twenty years four editions of an abridgement of the first volume were published, each containing testimonies to the enduring value of Hickes’s work. As late as 1837, J. M. Kemble praised Hickes’s contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies, despite the fact that by Kemble’s day the advent of scientific philology had ‘render[ed] his grammars rather dangerous than useful’.

The achievements of Hickes and Wanley, like those of most of the other authors discussed in the first half of this chapter, are relatively well known to scholars of medievalism and the history of medieval studies thanks to Eleanor Adams, David Douglas and David Fairer, although Douglas’s observation that Old English studies saw a marked decline after the 1720s has led on occasion to a mistaken assumption that eighteenth-century scholars had little or no interest in Anglo-Saxon literature, history and culture. It is nevertheless necessary to review both the publications available to and produced by early eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists before considering the scholarly and popular forms of Anglo-Saxonism that relied on them. Not only do these works reveal the highly collaborative nature of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxon studies, they also exhibit a clear presentism – defined by Louise D’Arcens as ‘arguably the essence of medievalism itself’ – that would shape a variety of forms of Anglo-Saxonism as the century progressed.