5 - Anglo-Saxonist Politics and Posterity

Summary

HAROLD: If future ages,

Thro’ narrow ignorance, zeal, or party rage,

Convert the glorious deed to shame, while truth

Scorns the black record, shall we tremble now,

And shrink from virtue’s standard? Our good swords

Were never meant, like monkish pens, to cut

Deep channels for a lie.

Ann Yearsley

In the preceding chapters I have argued for the inextricability of scholarly and popular Anglo-Saxonism, pointing to the ways in which eighteenth-century antiquaries, historians, writers and artists exchanged information and ideas about England’s Anglo-Saxon past in numerous intentional and unintentional ways, and across what have since become more and less distinct disciplinary and generic boundaries. This chapter examines the ways in which political Anglo-Saxonism acted as a unifying ideology for eighteenth-century political writers regardless of partisan affiliation, and the ways in which dramatists and other creative writers reflected and disseminated Anglo-Saxonist political ideology through plays about events from Anglo-Saxon history. A number of recent studies have explored Anglo-Saxonist themes in eighteenth-century English political discourse, though for the most part political Anglo-Saxonism remains associated with partisan polemic and propaganda, or with theories of the ancient constitution or the Norman Yoke. While none of these associations is incorrect, each decontextualises political Anglo-Saxonism by implicitly or explicitly failing to acknowledge the extent to which Anglo-Saxonist political sentiment was shaped by and contributed to other forms of artistic production and other fields of scholarly enquiry. By examining Anglo-Saxonist political writing alongside the overwhelmingly political character of Anglo-Saxonist creative literature, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that the multivalent nature of Anglo-Saxonist thought allowed it to function as an ambient cultural-political force, and as a unifying and potentially inclusive language of patriotism firmly linked to English identity.

Although medievalism scholars such as Allen Frantzen, Hugh MacDougall and Kathleen Wilson have suggested that Anglo-Saxonism could bridge eighteenth-century party divides, they have done so within the narrower confines of literary and linguistic history, nationalism studies and racial/ imperial studies, respectively. David Conway has pointed out some of the ways in which modern political historians have too readily presented eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism as an uninformed or wilfully naive ideology. There is, however, no evidence that eighteenth-century writers who referred to ‘their “excellent” or “happy constitution”’ consciously used a ‘formulation which side-stepped the question of its historical legitimacy’.