The Anglo-Saxons: Myth and History

Abstract

‘Anglo-Saxon’ is a term with a long and nuanced history. This study assesses where the word itself comes from, why it has been felt appropriate to separate the pre-Conquest epoch from later English history and why the Anglo-Saxons have taken on so many different meanings in subsequent times. Beginning with the deployment of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in the eighth to tenth centuries, the focus then turns to how the period before 1066 was constructed as a formative time for English national and institutional identity. This process began in the later Middle Ages, but the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ itself only began to be used again in the sixteenth century. It later took on powerful political and cultural resonance, which eventually gave rise to a racial understanding of ‘Anglo-Saxon’. The difficult legacy of these many layers of later usage, including developments since the Victorian peak of Anglo-Saxonism, is also assessed.

‘Anglo-Saxon’ is a term with a long and complicated history that begins in the eighth century.¹ However, its basic meaning in modern times is as a designation for the earliest phase of English history that runs from the fifth century to the Norman Conquest that began in 1066; it also refers to the inhabitants and cultures of England in that period, and by extension to other ideas, practices and people that claim association with or descent from them, sometimes distantly and with heavy layers of reinterpretation.

This broadly historical valence of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ started to develop only in the sixteenth century, but arose from an already long tradition of regarding the Conquest as a suppression of ancient English liberty, which led to 1066 being cast as an historical watershed and the time before as the source of much that was thought to constitute the deepest strata of English national and political identity. The Anglo-Saxons changed as the English themselves did in subsequent times, suiting each new age’s requirements and tastes. In the sixteenth century they were forerunners to the inchoate Church of England. Claims to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ freedom and institutional heritage became an important part of political culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This casting of the Anglo-Saxons as the wellspring of English identity reached its apogee in the nineteenth century, when such claims became much wider in appeal, as well as very forthright in articulation. A more explicitly racialised, and racist, understanding of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ arose; one that cast not only ancient peoples but modern ones as Anglo-Saxons, and that was used to celebrate and justify the global extension of British and American influence.² Where once the Anglo-Saxons had been cherished because of their great institutions, the institutions were now cherished because they were thought to have been made by racially superior Anglo-Saxons. There is no getting around the fact that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ used in this way has been enthusiastically and prominently used in exclusionary rhetoric across the globe. Such language is no longer part of the acceptable mainstream regarding ethnicity or race anywhere, but it is the handling of this legacy that creates the most contention in the twenty-first century.

Dissatisfaction with the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has been expressed since the mid-nineteenth century, on diverse grounds. The vernacular of early medieval England had already started to be called ‘Old English’ rather than ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in the 1860s and 1870s, emphasising its place in the longue durée of English language and literature,³ and this designation grew to predominate in the twentieth century.⁴ Historians in the nineteenth century such as E. A. Freeman (1823–92) and Thomas Kerslake (1812–91) also argued in favour of moving away from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in historical contexts because it was not a term widely used in the period itself.⁵ For Freeman, the label’s main value was as a designation for the modern population because ‘the “Anglo-Saxon period”, so far as there ever was one, is going on still’.⁶ This racialised modern heritage of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has been recognised in scholarship since the 1980s,⁷ but was brought to wider attention in a series of disputes that arose in 2017 within the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists; in 2019, these controversies led the society to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England.⁸

No single alternative term exists that will satisfy all constituencies, which in turn raises the question of whether and why there should be a single designation for this period.⁹ There is no consensus on what to do with the Anglo-Saxons and their afterlife, and this survey makes no attempt to settle that debate. What it offers is in part an account of the development of the word itself, but also an historiographical exploration of what lies behind it. Very often this study deals with caricatures that bear only a distant and selective relationship to material from before 1066, for the idea of the Anglo-Saxons – what might be called the myth of them – was harnessed again and again to serve contemporary needs. Limits must inevitably be set for this expansive subject. The focus will be on developments in Britain and later also the USA; ‘Anglo-Saxon’ mythology in Australia, Canada and non-Anglophone countries is also deeply interesting, but space precludes a full treatment of all areas.¹⁰ The remit includes scholarly assessment of the Anglo-Saxon past, meaning study of the actual history, language and literature of early medieval England, but also looks to other deployments of that past. Indeed, there was not a firm distinction between popular and scholarly writing before the twentieth century.¹¹ The last section of this article does, however, turn to how approaches to the Anglo-Saxons in historical scholarship have changed since that time. Philological research – the study of Old English, understood broadly – has likewise been closely bound up with interest in all aspects of the Anglo-Saxon past since the sixteenth century, but because this side of the subject has been extensively covered elsewhere it will be touched on here only in relation to historical themes.¹²

It should also be stressed that even at the height of their popularity the Anglo-Saxons were by no means the only or uncontested foundation of English national or ethnic identity. They competed at various times with the Britons or Celts (especially in the form of King Arthur), the Romans, the Normans and others.¹³ Eventually, as will be seen, the Anglo-Saxon past did win out as the preferred English (and to some extent British) origin story, although there was no single, agreed way of understanding it.

The ‘English Saxons’ before 1066

‘Anglo-Saxon’ did not originate in England. It first emerged as an exonym: a name used by outsiders. Specifically, it arose in Latin in continental European sources of the late eighth and ninth centuries as a way of differentiating the ‘English Saxons’ from their counterparts in ‘old’ Saxony.¹⁴ Around 760 St Willibald (d. c. 787), an Englishman long resident in mainland Europe, set Angles and Saxons side by side when giving the ‘old name of the Angles and Saxons’ for London (antiquo Anglorum Saxonumque vocabulo),¹⁵ and two decades or so later Paul the Deacon (d. 799),¹⁶ in his History of the Lombards (Historia Langobardorum), referred to the loose, linen garments seen in a painting at Monza as like those associated with the Anglisaxones, and called Cædwalla, ruler of the West Saxons (686–8), king of the Anglorum Saxonum. ¹⁷ Two other very early references come in the Vita Bertuini (probably written in the late eighth century), which refers to its subject as having been born in ‘the Anglo-Saxon land’ (provintia Anglisaxonis),¹⁸ and in a document conveying the decisions of a papal legation of 786 that described a synod as being held in Anglorum Saxonia. ¹⁹ Several more occurrences of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ come from the ninth century: among others, a biography of the Northumbrian expatriate scholar Alcuin (d. 804), written probably at Tours in the 820s, describes one English visitor to him as an Aengelsaxo,²⁰ and a papal privilege from ninth-century Saint-Denis refers to lands held apud Anglos Saxones. ²¹

None of the longer texts among these used ‘Anglo-Saxon’ exclusively, or even predominantly: they also leaned heavily on Angli and Saxones, which were the standard terms in England during the eighth and ninth centuries to refer to the English as a whole.²² Both were well-established ethnonyms long before the era of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ settlement.²³ According to the famous origin story recounted by the Venerable Bede (d. 735), both the Angles and Saxons were among three continental European peoples who settled in Britain from mainland northern Europe in the fifth century: the Angles supposedly made the lands north of the Thames their own, with the exception of the kingdom of the East Saxons, while other realms founded by Saxons could be found south of the Thames, along with some established by Jutes.²⁴ Bede’s narrative had enormous influence in subsequent times, even though he was almost certainly simplifying a more complex picture and back-projecting the political and ethnic landscape of his own day.²⁵ His own Ecclesiastical History of the English People neatly labelled all the English peoples Saxones prior to their conversion (following the usage of very early sources), and all Angli thereafter, united by the famous pun of Pope Gregory I (590–604) who likened some enslaved Angli he saw on sale in Rome to angeli (angels).²⁶ In the tenth and eleventh centuries this undoubtedly gave impetus to Anglian (or, as it would become, English) nomenclature,²⁷ but a wider view shows considerable diversity in earlier centuries, including in Bede’s own time. Charters from Worcester (supposedly in an ‘Anglian’ area) referred to speaking Saxonice,²⁸ the West Saxon St Boniface (d. 754) preferred Angli,²⁹ and the Northumbrian Stephen of Ripon referred to St Wilfrid (d. 709/10) at various points as both de Anglorum gente and an episcopus Saxoniae. ³⁰

The development of English identity and self-reference is too large a subject to address fully here, but it is important to establish that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was always a variation on the more popular Anglian/English and Saxon terminology. For a brief period, it did enjoy wider popularity in England, when circumstances conspired to promote the political convergence of Angles and Saxons. This extended from the middle of the reign of Alfred the Great (871–99) to the early years of the reign of his grandson Æthelstan (924–39), with a limited revival in the 940s and 950s. At the outset of this period, Northumbria, East Anglia and a large part of Mercia, three of the four principal English kingdoms, had fallen under Scandinavian dominance, and Mercia was severely truncated. Alfred, king of the West Saxons, was recognised as overlord of what remained of the Mercian kingdom from some point around 880, and in time also by the rulers of the Welsh kingdoms. In effect, Alfred now ruled over all those in the southern part of Britain who were arrayed against the Scandinavian (or, as it was sometimes put, pagan) threat. This situation gave rise to the formulation of Alfred’s position as found in the opening of a biography of him written by Asser (d. c. 909) in 893: ‘ruler of all the Christians of the island of Britain, king of the Anglo-Saxons’.³¹ It may be no coincidence that Asser himself was an outsider, coming from Wales; he could also have absorbed the usage of the several scholars from the Frankish kingdoms at Alfred’s court. Anglo-Saxon terminology nonetheless proved useful as a way to set Alfred’s polity apart. Asser called earlier West Saxon kings ‘king of the (West) Saxons’, reserving ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nomenclature for Alfred alone. Charters show that this language extended beyond Asser’s work, and it seems to have gained wider currency after a ceremonial submission to Alfred at London in 886 by all the English peoples who were not under Scandinavian dominance.³²

For two generations in late-ninth- and early-tenth-century England, a ‘kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’ therefore came into being.³³ It co-opted a helpful, originally external designation, given new force by the merging of West Saxon and Mercian (Anglian) polities to create an altogether new composite entity.³⁴ The same configuration was maintained under Alfred’s son and successor, Edward the Elder (899–924), who collaborated closely and successfully with his brother-in-law and sister, Æthelred (d. 911) and Æthelflæd (d. 918), as rulers of the Mercians within the larger ‘Anglo-Saxon’ polity.³⁵ During this period ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was integral to the identity of the kingdom, and featured prominently not only in charters issued by the kings but also in several versions of a royal coronation ordo, intended for recitation during the formal installation of new monarchs before their most important subjects.³⁶ Early in the reign of Edward’s son and successor Æthelstan (924–39) the emphasis shifted, again in response to changing circumstances. The takeover of York in 927 – which brought together at least part of all the kingdoms considered English before the Scandinavian invasions of the late ninth century – gave grounds for the king’s partisans to reformulate his domain as a unified kingdom of the English or, as one Latin poem of the period put it, ‘this Saxon-land (now) made whole’ (ista perfecta Saxonia).³⁷ This reference to Saxons notwithstanding, for the rest of Æthelstan’s reign the emphasis fell on kingship of the English (Angli), combined now with overlordship of all Britain. Things were different by this stage: Æthelstan asserted a higher order of political supremacy, while within his own kingdom he ruled lands in the east and north of England as well as in Mercia and Wessex, and the combined whole was perhaps not felt to fit so comfortably with the Anglo-Saxon frame of reference. Tellingly, Anglo-Saxon terminology was resurrected briefly in the mid-tenth century by the scribes responsible for the so-called ‘alliterative charters’. These documents took a view from the west midlands that was especially conscious of the patchwork nature of the kingdom and probably also of the reduced circumstances of Æthelstan’s successors, who lost many of the gains made in the midlands and the north earlier in the tenth century. One charter, issued in 946 by King Eadred (946–55), described him as ruler ‘of the Anglo-Saxons and Northumbrians, of the pagans and the Britons’.³⁸

As the kingdom of the English was reconstituted in the later tenth century, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was superseded. That should not take away from its genuine significance during a formative phase of English political development. It had been adopted from external usage to suit a particular configuration of circumstances that existed between the end of the ninth century and the mid-tenth. Yet except when copying or adapting texts from this era, it was barely used for centuries thereafter. Rulers and subjects in the century before the Norman Conquest were resolutely English.

Looking Back on the Anglo-Saxons in the Later Middle Ages

Even though the Anglo-Saxons as such vanished almost completely from the scene even before 1066, at least in England,³⁹ the centuries that followed the Norman Conquest were pivotal in the creation of the myth of pre-Conquest England that would flourish in later times.

Such was emphatically not the message propagated in the decades immediately after the Conquest. Continuity was an integral element of what came to be the accepted Norman line on the events of 1066: that William, Edward’s kinsman, had been nominated as the latter’s legitimate heir, and reclaimed from a presumptuous usurper the kingdom that was his by right.⁴⁰ William’s invasion only crystallised into a watershed moment in English history in several important works of history that were produced in the early twelfth century. Written by Eadmer of Canterbury, Gaimar, Henry of Huntingdon, Symeon of Durham, William of Malmesbury and others, these works offered the most dynamic syntheses of English history since that of Bede himself.⁴¹ Several of them reflect deep interest in the pre-Conquest past, which was not at this stage set apart with a distinct term: in that sense there was as yet no ‘Anglo-Saxon England’. Nonetheless, what animated William of Malmesbury to write his monumental History of the English Kings (Gesta regum Anglorum) was a desire to ‘mend the broken chain of our [meaning English] history’.⁴² By this he referred to the paucity of historical writing from England between Bede and his own time: the main witnesses he knew of were several versions of vernacular annals now known collectively as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and one tenth-century Latin adaptation of the same chronicle. Yet he was concerned about more than the simple lack of information. William immediately followed his comment on the broken chain by saying that he wished to ‘give a Roman polish to the rough annals of our native speech’.⁴³ The information that could be found about the English past – much of it written in the English vernacular, or in Latin of idiosyncratic and outmoded style – now sat uncomfortably in a kingdom that was remaking its aristocratic and ecclesiastical culture. The king and his barons were French speakers with interests on both sides of the Channel, and most abbots and bishops were drawn from the same stock, trained to regard Latin as the proper foundation of literacy, and largely unfamiliar with English. Major churches across the land were being knocked down and rebuilt to suit new architectural tastes. The face of England was changing rapidly.⁴⁴ And yet many foundations of the kingdom – its saints, its institutions, the landholdings of lords and churches – rested on the pre-Conquest past. What William of Malmesbury and his contemporaries achieved was a rationalisation of that history, in a form more conducive to Anglo-Norman expectations. They presented the Conquest itself as a major event, as recompense for the sins and shortcomings of the English in the preceding decades, but not as the end of English history.⁴⁵

At much the same time, and for much the same reasons, scholars of law began to play a part in consolidating and preserving the legacy of the pre-Conquest past. Interest in early laws grew around 1100, when several compilations of Anglo-Saxon law were assembled, most notably the Latin translation Quadripartitus and the Old English Textus Roffensis. The bulk of surviving Anglo-Saxon legislation comes from these compilations.⁴⁶ They put the legal heritage of England on record, on the premise that English legal traditions laid down before 1066 were still believed to inform the way the law operated in subsequent times.⁴⁷ William the Conqueror was thus supposed to have endorsed the laws of King Edward the Confessor. As is well known, Edward never issued any such laws, and the text that circulates as the Leges Edwardi Confessoris was a product of the twelfth century that had only a distant connection with the saintly king.⁴⁸

Fascination with the legal heritage of the Anglo-Saxons reflected a strengthening conviction that England after 1066 was less free and less just, which implied that the time before had been better. Already in the early twelfth century, Henry of Huntingdon and the writer of the Gesta Herewardi railed against Norman injustice,⁴⁹ and Orderic Vitalis and Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote, respectively, of the ‘Norman arrogance’ (Normannicus fastus) or ‘yoke of unending slavery’ (iugum perpetue seruitutis) imposed on the English – phrasing that would prove deeply influential in later times.⁵⁰ These writers were still close enough to the Conquest that they could (at least in the case of English speakers) comprehend Old English, and had reasonable familiarity with Anglo-Saxon sources and customs. That knowledge dwindled as time passed, but enthusiasm for the institutional virtues of the Anglo-Saxons persevered. For Robert Mannyng (d. c. 1338) and other vernacular historians of the early fourteenth century, affection for the Anglo-Saxons arose out of animosity for their conquerors: ‘alle þis þraldom þat now on Inglond is, þorgh Normanʒ it cam, bondage [and] destres’.⁵¹ Oppression by Normans could also be set against triumph over brutish Danes. The latter were frequently the antagonists of the English in romances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries set in the pre-Conquest period, and even featured as ceremonial adversaries to be beaten by the English in pageants from at least 1416 onwards.⁵²

Other writers focused on genuine historical characters of the pre-Conquest period. Alfred the Great was already seen in the early twelfth century as pre-Conquest England’s pre-eminent ruler, and by the thirteenth century his status as ‘the great’ was well established in both English and Icelandic sources.⁵³ As ‘England’s darling’ (Englelondes deorling), to use the description from Laʒamon’s Brut (1185 × 1216),⁵⁴ Alfred also won a particular reputation for sagacity and lawmaking, though the utterances associated with Alfred in the Proverbs of Alfred (probably written in the thirteenth century) were an assemblage of moralised wisdom rather than law.⁵⁵ Similarly, King Æthelstan was, in the fourteenth-century romance Athelston, transplanted from the tenth century into a more-or-less contemporary fourteenth-century setting where he exemplified a virtuous, nostalgic brand of kingship.⁵⁶

Specific liberties also depended on supposed Anglo-Saxon roots. At a local level, Thomas Walsingham (d. c. 1422) recounted how angry crowds assailed the abbot of St Albans during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, demanding to be shown a specific charter with gold and azure letters that enshrined the liberties of the town, allegedly granted by Offa of Mercia but later suppressed by the abbots.⁵⁷ Some of England’s key representative institutions were credited to the pre-Conquest period. One legacy put optimistically, yet falsely, at the feet of both Alfred and Edward the Confessor around 1300 was the foundation of parliament, and in legal tracts from around this time a slew of other practices such as wardship, dependent tenure and seigneurial justice were given Anglo-Saxon origins.⁵⁸

As will be apparent, there was a good dose of wishful thinking at work, and the impact of real pre-Conquest material was limited – but neither of those impediments prevented the idea of Anglo-Saxon institutional inheritance from taking firm root. Domesday Book presented an exception to this rule. The volumes constituting this survey remained accessible across the Middle Ages, and were used to define (for example) the privileges of ‘ancient demesne’: estates that had belonged to the king in 1066, and that were entitled to numerous exemptions and privileges. In 1377, a consortium of about forty villages across the south of England asserted – and won – the right to withhold labour services on the basis that they had been ancient demesne in the time of King Edward, based on an inspection of Domesday Book.⁵⁹

The later medieval assertion of pre-Conquest roots established a tradition that would persist into the early modern period, gathering momentum as time went on and reinforced rather than shaken by increasing acquaintance with pre-Conquest sources.⁶⁰ This on-going attachment to Anglo-Saxon England was forged as much from legal and literary texts as historical narratives, and specialists in law and government would go on to play a large part in cultivating the idea of Anglo-Saxon England in subsequent centuries.

The Rebirth of Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth Century

The Anglo-Saxons regained a prominent place in political and historical consciousness in the sixteenth century.⁶¹ It was at this point that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ itself emerged once again, now with effectively the meaning it still has: England and the English before 1066. But in order to seize on this archaic term, direct access to early medieval texts was needed, and this was one hallmark of the age: increased awareness of and interaction with original sources. For the pre-Conquest period, that meant dealing not just with Latin, but also with Old English, which presented a particular challenge to learn, yet which also assumed special authority precisely because of its obscurity and age.⁶²

This revival of interest in early history – ‘antiquity’, as it was often called, and its dedicatees ‘antiquaries’ – quickly gathered momentum in the mid- and late sixteenth century.⁶³ England’s experience at this time was part of a much wider renewal of interest in the past,⁶⁴ but it also owed much to specific circumstances, most notably the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, which rendered the written remains of earlier times more open (though also more vulnerable) than they had been in centuries,⁶⁵ as well as other facets of the Reformation and establishment of the Church of England. Advocates of the new religious order sought to portray their Protestant ideals as a restoration of pristine Christianity, untainted by what they saw as Catholic errors. The unquestionable papal element in the Anglo-Saxon conversion story thus stood as a liability: many Protestant scholars reached for antecedents in the earliest phase of Christianity in Roman and pre-Roman Britain, and portrayed the Anglo-Saxons as the first bringers of corruption. Richard Davies, bishop of St David’s (d. 1581), claimed that the Welsh resistance to dealing with St Augustine at the end of the sixth century was precisely because ‘the Christianity which Augustine brought to the English/Saxons had fallen somewhat from the purity of the Gospels and the limits of the old Church, and it was mixed with much superfluity, rules for people, and meaningless ceremonies, disagreeing with the nature of Christ’s kingdom’.⁶⁶ Catholic writers such as Thomas Stapleton (1535–98), who produced a new translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in 1565, and Richard Verstegan (d. 1640) capitalised on exactly the same point but from the opposite perspective, emphasising early religious links between England and Rome as a virtue;⁶⁷ as Cardinal William Allen (1532–94) put it in a letter of 1578 or 1580, Bede’s History served ‘to show our countrymen … that our nation did not receive in the beginning any other than the catholic faith which we profess’.⁶⁸

It was therefore an important departure when Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury (1504–75), and his associates in the 1560s and 1570s started to argue that the pre-Conquest English preserved elements of pure, apostolic Christianity that persisted down to the eleventh century and that could be harnessed as historical support for the Church of England.⁶⁹ Parker maintained a strong interest in the early British church, which featured prominently in the opening part of his De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae (1572), but the dissolution of the monastic libraries had shone a bright new light onto specific practices in Anglo-Saxon Christianity, attested in books of great antiquity. Parker used his position and its prestige to gain access to the choicest manuscripts circulating at the time. He and his collaborators put great emphasis on the books’ age, attested by their archaic language and script, both of which were scrupulously reproduced in print.⁷⁰ These volumes were mined to support Parker’s preferred views on the use of the vernacular in ecclesiastical contexts, priestly marriage, transubstantiation and other matters.⁷¹

The religious element in the revival of Anglo-Saxon studies was especially strong in the 1560s and 1570s. An important change in direction later in the Elizabethan era saw the rise of secular contributions to historical discourse and scholarship, not least on the part of members of the gentry enriched by the liquidation of monastic assets. As a result, the constituency who had the resources and skills to engage with the past grew substantially and changed in makeup.⁷² Gentleman antiquaries had interests that extended far beyond religion, to language, landscape, buildings and objects, as well as the legal and institutional aspects of the Anglo-Saxon past that were already embedded in English legal tradition. Such topics were all grist to the mill of the ‘College of Antiquaries’ that operated in London between about 1586 and 1607, and which consisted of lawyers, heralds, archivists and wealthy collectors of manuscripts and antiquities, among them John Stow (1525–1605), William Lambarde (1536–1601), William Camden (1551–1623), Henry Spelman (1562–1641) and Robert Cotton (1571–1631). These members gathered every Friday at the College of Arms, with some idea of their weekly discussions being preserved in lists of topics and summaries of main points (‘discourses’).⁷³ It should be stressed that although the early antiquaries had a deep, genuine curiosity regarding the past, this was not a detached or abstracted interest: generally it served to support and deepen current practices, with the potential to undermine or challenge them as well. Indeed, the College of Antiquaries is thought to have ceased to operate precisely because it enquired too closely into sensitive matters of religion and state, leading James VI and I (1603–25) to curtail its activities.⁷⁴

The sixteenth-century resurgence of interest in the Anglo-Saxon past was in many ways a much amplified and elaborated continuation of the role that the period had served already, as a storehouse of founding precedents that were still usually quite distant from practices and concerns of the early Middle Ages, but increasingly informed by contact with genuine early material. Importantly, the Anglo-Saxon period was still often thought of as a collective whole. Members of the College of Antiquaries spoke broadly of the ‘Saxon kings’ and ‘Saxon laws’, and a few decades earlier the first edition of Anglo-Saxon laws, Archaionomia (1568), made much of the fact that it presented for the first time the laws of Æthelberht (d. 616/17) to Alfred and Æthelred II (978–1016).⁷⁵ ‘Saxon’ was widely considered the more formal and correct term of reference into the seventeenth century,⁷⁶ and it was equally common in the late sixteenth century to refer to the pre-Conquest English simply as ‘English’ (Angli in Latin). ‘Anglo-Saxon’ also reappeared as a shorthand for the period of English history before 1066, initially in Latin texts where its similarity to Angli and Anglia was evident. Why and by whom the hybrid term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was plucked out of obscurity is not clear. John Leland (d. 1552), the first of the main line of antiquaries at this time, used it very occasionally in the 1540s as a synonym for Angli and Saxones,⁷⁷ and it was used, apparently as a one-off, in Archaionomia to refer to the ‘ferocious peoples of Germany’ (feroces Germaniae populos) invited into Britain by Vortigern in the fifth century, as part of a brief historical overview written to accompany a map of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.⁷⁸

A possible source for Leland and the writer of Archaionomia, William Lambarde, may have been Asser’s Life of Alfred, the one surviving manuscript of which was owned by Leland and later by Matthew Parker, Lambarde’s patron.⁷⁹ As noted above, this work prominently entitled Alfred ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’ (Anglorum Saxonum regi) in its opening address, and several times thereafter. An edition of Asser’s Life was eventually published (in 1574) as part of the wave of works on early history and texts undertaken through Parker’s initiative, and contributed to rising awareness of Alfred as a figurehead for Anglo-Saxon achievements.⁸⁰ More prominent, and still more influential, use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ came in the historical introduction to William Camden’s monumental Britannia, first published in Latin in 1586.⁸¹ Camden headed his discussion of the English between the end of Rome and the Norman Conquest Anglosaxones, and freely mixed this designation with Angli and Saxones in his prose. What appears to be the first vernacular usage of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ came in 1589,⁸² very soon after the appearance of Britannia, and Camden himself carried over all these terms into the first English edition of his great work (1607), with Anglosaxones becoming ‘English Saxons’. For the period after 1066, having crossed the Rubicon of the Norman Conquest, Camden exclusively used Angli, or ‘English’. Anglo-Saxon England had been created (or re-created) by a series of antiquaries in the late sixteenth century.⁸³

The Free Anglo-Saxons in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Assigning a name to the earliest phase in English history did not in itself transform how the period was thought of and used, but it did reflect the intellectual head of steam that was gathering around Anglo-Saxon England. Claims to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ origins, and political rhetoric founded in various ways on them, reached their zenith in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and became the dominant frame of reference for early English history.

Two initial caveats must be registered. First, appeals to the Anglo-Saxons did not at this stage have a consistent ethnic dimension. They meant different things when viewed through various lenses, many of which had no significant ethnic component.⁸⁴ The dominant associations of the Anglo-Saxons were cultural and institutional,⁸⁵ and these themes tended to drive ethnic thinking, not the other way around. John Hare in 1647 issued a pamphlet under the evocative title St. Edward’s Ghost or Anti-Normanisme, which dwelt on the ‘Teutonick’ character of the English as a way to distance them from the Normans, whom he portrayed as invaders and corrupters of English customs, and quite different racially.⁸⁶ The supposed ethnic character of the Anglo-Saxons served to draw connections as well as build barriers: Hare not only disavowed the Normans but embraced the Saxons’ ‘Gothic’ roots. On these grounds the English could be seen as related not only to the Germans but also the Danes and the Normans; a claim first made by Richard Verstegan using linguistic parallels, which was subsequently used both for and against Anglo-Saxonism. Verstegan’s argument of necessity posited that the Britons had been wiped out and replaced entirely by the incoming Anglo-Saxons, which was presented by him as a point of pride: ‘cometh it to passe, that wee not only fynde Englishmen (and those no idiots neither) that cannot directly tel from whence Englishmen are descended, and chanceing to speak of the Saxons, do rather seem to understand them for a kynd of foreyn people, then as their own true and meer anceters … for Englishmen cannot but from Saxon originall derive their descent and offspring, and can lack no honor to be descended from so honorable a race’.⁸⁷ In Scotland in the late eighteenth century, pursuit of the idea that the Picts and Lowland Saxons had been part of a larger Teutonic kindred (with the English), set apart from the ‘Celtic’ highlanders, served to repress and redirect Scottish nationalism.⁸⁸ Scottish Enlightenment thought also contributed significantly to the elision of cultural and physical characteristics among humans, which would in time give rise to more solidly racial thinking,⁸⁹ but when appeals to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ blood were made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they did not have the same resonance as in later times. Some presciently rejected ethnically-based divisions and lampooned the idea of racial purity, most bitingly exemplified in Daniel Defoe’s (c. 1660–1731) satire The True-Born Englishman. Published in 1701, it took aim at Englishmen who criticised King William III (1689–1702) for his Dutch origins and lack of ‘pure’ English heritage:

Thus from a Mixture of all Kinds began,

That Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman:

In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot,

Betwixt a Painted Britain and a Scot.

Whose gend’ring Off-spring quickly learn’d to Bow,

And yoke their Heifers to the Roman Plough:

From whence a Mongrel half-Bred Race there came,

With neither Name, nor Nation, Speech or Fame.

In whose hot Veins new Mixtures quickly ran,

Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.⁹⁰

Mingled origins brought strength, but at the same time the potential for division.⁹¹ Tellingly, Defoe went on to argue that what would bind all together was England’s strong legal and constitutional glue. He stopped short of saying that this had first been set down in the Anglo-Saxon period; others had no such qualms, although there was considerable variation in how much continuity was emphasised.

The second preliminary point is that the image of liberty-loving, quasi-democratic Anglo-Saxons was in very large part a myth. It is true that Anglo-Saxon law presupposed the cooperation of freemen and, at least in theory, cast the king as a protector for the rights of those freemen.⁹² Aspects of this tradition had a powerful influence, especially after David Wilkins (1685–1745) produced the first full Latin translation of Anglo-Saxon law in 1721.⁹³ Another legacy drawn from Wilkins, and from William Somner’s (1598–1669) earlier Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum – the first Old English dictionary – was that of the witan or witenagemot. ⁹⁴ By the end of the seventeenth century the witan was seen as a formal body of royal councillors and a precursor to parliament, and would continue to be regarded in that light until the twentieth century.⁹⁵ It is plausible to identify the grand assemblies that produced certain tenth-century charters as forerunners to later royal gatherings,⁹⁶ and hence to parliament, though that distant link was made to seem much more concrete and representative in the eyes of patriotic antiquaries of the seventeenth century and after. Three lawyers, Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), Sir Henry Spelman (1562–1641) and John Selden (1584–1654), made particularly learned and persuasive claims to the pre-Conquest roots of parliament, shires, juries and more.⁹⁷ In general, England in the early Middle Ages is no longer seen as significantly more free or just, or more democratic in its rule, than any other contemporary European polity.⁹⁸ But early modern claims to Anglo-Saxon institutional heritage, including those of Coke, Spelman and Selden, did not stem solely from close study of actual Anglo-Saxon sources. Their immediate inspiration for key claims came from later medieval constitutional texts such as the Mirror of Justices and Modus tenendi parliamentum that asserted ‘Anglo-Saxon’ roots for parliament and for powers to limit royal action.⁹⁹ Although packaged in a new way to speak to new concerns, these texts had been known and read for a long time: radical claims regarding the ancient constitution in the seventeenth century rode on a train of thought that had been moving since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹⁰⁰

There is no indication that insincerity or doubt dogged those who made claims to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ origins, despite what are now recognised as unstable foundations.¹⁰¹ As the formative first chapter of English history, the Anglo-Saxons by proxy became part of the political language of the day. The past underpinned the present in a very direct way in early modern political thought, such that arguments for England’s future were often built from views of its history, including relatively distant epochs like the pre-Conquest centuries. In the words of J. G. A. Pocock, ‘to write history [at this time] was to write polemics. England was a legal, not a geographical expression; to write her history was to interpret her law, or the relation of that law to the Crown, and so to take sides in the battle of parties’.¹⁰² As Pocock went on to stress, some saw the Anglo-Saxons as just one link in an even longer chain of continuous institutional development: Sir Edward Coke situated the Anglo-Saxons in a story of precursors to the common law that went back to Brutus and Troy.¹⁰³ Another supposed source for the earliest layers of English freedom was the Roman writer Tacitus (d. c. 120), whose account of the history and customs of ancient Germany (known as De origine et situ Germanorum, or more commonly in later times simply as Germania) had become highly influential in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, first in Germany and then in England. Being conscious of the Anglo-Saxons’ origins in early Germany, English scholars took Tacitus’ account of first-century liberty among the Germani as applicable to the first English settlers as well.¹⁰⁴ Neither of these claims holds much credence in modern scholarship, though they were profoundly influential.

But discontinuity offered as potent an argument as continuity, and the most durable origin-story of English freedom was that of the ‘Norman Yoke’. This was a conceit used occasionally since the twelfth century, which imagined the Normans placing a yoke about the necks of the beleaguered English after 1066, and thereby suppressing English freedom.¹⁰⁵ It had been revived in a modest way in the sixteenth century, influenced by a later medieval narrative about how William the Conqueror had allowed the men of Kent (and only Kent) to retain their ancient liberties, while others fell under ‘the perpetuall seruyle yoke of the Normannes’, in the words of the printer and chronicler Richard Grafton (d. 1573).¹⁰⁶ It was the conflicts between king and parliament, and between factions within parliament, during the seventeenth century that brought the ‘Norman Yoke’ to its apogee. The idea of a rupture brought about by the Conquest offered the useful possibility of historicizing institutional virtues and vices: anything that was good – such as the common law, representative government, trial by jury, shires and restraint of royal and aristocratic power – could be traced back to the Anglo-Saxons and thus implanted in the deepest layers of English identity, whereas anything that was bad – such as royal tyranny and the perceived abuses of feudalism – could be presented as an imposition by the Normans.¹⁰⁷

Early modern incarnations of this myth imaginatively rooted out elements of continuity from behind a façade of discontinuity. The English, it was widely held, had always retained a memory of their underlying freedom that simmered away through centuries of repression, and this freedom could be restored by stripping away accretions of misgovernment and exploitation. Versions of the Norman Yoke argument therefore tended to be weaponised by those opposed to the current regime, creating a ‘whiggish’ or ‘radical’ brand of Anglo-Saxonism marked by appeals to usurped liberties that might yet be restored.¹⁰⁸ In the decades around the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–53) many commentators looked to this so-called ‘ancient constitution’ for support in present disputes on whether king or community represented the source of liberty (and which should guarantee it in future). Different claims were justified by looking as far back as possible into England’s constitutional past. The point here was antiquity rather than Anglo-Saxonness as such, but inevitably versions of the Norman Yoke myth came to the fore. A group known as the Levellers emphasised the need to return to Saxon precedents of representative government, while another dissenting group, the Diggers, went a step further and framed the Norman Conquest almost as a second Fall of Man.¹⁰⁹ The Restoration of 1660 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 gave rise to further bursts of interest in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ precedents, in the former case for kings as benign yet supreme leaders of the estates, in the latter case for resistance to tyranny.¹¹⁰

By the end of the seventeenth century, specific claims to Anglo-Saxon origins for parliament had been subjected to harder scholarly scrutiny by Robert Brady (1627–1700) and others, and become untenable; what remained was a more generalised ‘whiggish’ sense of the earliest Englishmen as founders of liberty and virtue.¹¹¹ Appeals to the Anglo-Saxons on this basis exercised broad appeal, cutting across partisan divisions and extending from essays to art and literature.¹¹² Sharon Turner (1768–1847) and others writing around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries started to transform the Anglo-Saxons into standard-bearers of ‘civilisation’ and, as Kathleen Wilson put it, ‘to reinvent the ancient Angles, Jutes and Saxons as Britain’s noblest savages’.¹¹³ They were still sometimes seen as primitive and uncouth. Language, which was seen as a proxy for the cultural credibility and historical worth of its speakers, proved a particular battleground.¹¹⁴ One of the great scholarly enterprises of the age, the Thesaurus linguarum septentrionalium (1703–5) by George Hickes (1642–1715) and his Oxford colleagues, actually diminished the standing of the Anglo-Saxons by identifying for the first time dialects of Old English: a grave shortcoming in an age that valued linguistic purity and refinement.¹¹⁵ Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) viewed English as ‘overstocked with Monosyllables’ relative to romance languages, and laid the blame on ‘the Barbarity of those Northern Nations from whom we are descended, and whose Languages labour all under the same Defect’.¹¹⁶ Others rose to the defence of the English language, and with it the Anglo-Saxons: Elizabeth Elstob (1683–1756) wrote about Old English in part ‘to shew the polite Men of our Age, that the Language of their Forefathers is neither so barren nor barbarous as they affirm, with equal Ignorance and Boldness’, and directly targeted Swift in asserting that ‘the charge of Barbarity would rather fall upon those who, while they fancy themselves adorn’d with the Embellishments of foreign Learning, are ignorant, even to barbarity, of the Faith, Religion, the Laws and Customs, and Language of their Ancestors’.¹¹⁷ The Anglo-Saxons were being embraced with enthusiasm as symbols of national pride. The Northumberland antiquary William Hutchinson (1732–1814) had nothing but scorn, expressed in bold capitals, for ‘authors [who] neglect the considerations of the advantages we derived from the Saxons no less than the maxims of our common law, and the original principles of our inestimable constitution’.¹¹⁸ Alfred the Great surged to a new level of popular affection in the hearts of patriotic Britons, with appeal as both a model of traditional virtue for the Hanoverian establishment, and, for those of more radical bent, as the architect of enlightened, representative government.¹¹⁹

Alfred was chosen in late 1775 as a new name for the first ship acquired by the Continental Navy, as it began its struggle against Britain in the War of American Independence (1775–83).¹²⁰ Consciousness of Anglo-Saxon precedents was as pervasive in the American colonies as it was in England:¹²¹ even though a great many people who were not of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (i.e. English) ancestry already inhabited the colonies, the Anglo-Saxons stood for more than narrowly geographical and ethnic aspects of quintessential Englishness or even Britishness. Strengthened economic and cultural ties with Britain in the eighteenth century had powerfully reinforced American associations with the motherland on many levels.¹²² American colonists had good cause to see themselves as part of a British Atlantic world, meaning that American grievances about tyrannical and unrepresentative government carried much the same weight as those of their British contemporaries, and could be couched in terms of lost ‘Anglo-Saxon’ liberty. Such claims were made widely in polemical pamphlets and essays of the 1760s and after, not least in the work of several leading figures in the intellectual formation of the new republic such as John Adams (1735–1826)¹²³ and above all Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). Jefferson’s interest in the Anglo-Saxons reached well beyond the familiar tropes of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ freedom: he actively studied (and encouraged others to study) Old English; he sought to reorganise his home state, Virginia, as a sort of neo-Anglo-Saxon farmer republic; and he proposed Hengest and Horsa, the supposed leaders of the fifth-century settlement of Kent, as ornaments for the first great seal of the United States.¹²⁴

The antiquarian impulse underlying seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism depended on informal networks of scholars and patrons, and as such rested on unstable foundations largely found outside the universities: apart from important and productive bursts of interest at Cambridge in the sixteenth century and at Oxford in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the impetus for Anglo-Saxon studies lay elsewhere.¹²⁵ Passion for past times diversified geographically and socially in the eighteenth century. Gentlemen-scholars of broad historical interest amassed coins and other artefacts, and undertook proto-archaeological excavations of barrows across England.¹²⁶ Interest in Old English (on the part of ‘Anglo-Saxonists’, a label that first appeared in 1773) and other pre-Conquest sources persisted, at varying levels of intensity, across the period, and had a symbiotic relationship with polemical uses of the Anglo-Saxons.¹²⁷ One historical study of the Anglo-Saxons by Sharon Turner, published in 1799–1805, rested on the principle that ‘a large part of what we most love and venerate in our customs, laws and institutions, originated among our Anglo-Saxon ancestors’.¹²⁸ By the time Turner’s study reached its third edition, in 1820, he could write that ‘his favourite desire has been fulfilled – a taste for the history and remains of our Great Ancestors has been revived, and is visibly increasing’.¹²⁹ That revival would lead the Anglo-Saxons in a new and troubling direction over the course of the coming century.

Racial Anglo-Saxonism in the Nineteenth Century

From about the turn of the nineteenth century, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ rhetoric took on a more explicitly ethnic, racial hue. One reason for this was a rise in scientific research on race among humans that began in the latter part of the eighteenth century, which divided humanity into broad categories based on perceived differences in skin colour, skull shape and other physical features.¹³⁰ More granular divisions followed in later decades. The Anglo-Saxons, as the earliest progenitors of the English and their cultural offshoots, presented a natural point of reference for those who sought to demarcate their modern counterparts in racial terms. By 1839, Samuel George Morton (1799–1851), a Philadelphia physician, claimed there were in fact twenty-two distinct races, and among these ‘the English or Anglo-Saxon … is inferior to no one of the Caucasian families’.¹³¹ The growth of race science converged with developments in whiggish Anglo-Saxonism in the mid-nineteenth century, in the work of William Stubbs (1825–1901), Edward Augustus Freeman and John Richard Green (1837–83). They did not adhere to a constitutional genealogy that stretched from parliament back to the witenagemot, but they did venerate the accumulation of laws and customs that had piled up over time like sediment to form the bedrock of English society and prosperity.¹³² Adopting higher standards of source criticism imported from Germany, these Victorian historians simultaneously magnified and broadened interest in the English past. They looked to continuities in local government and infrastructure, especially in the countryside, and to heroes who had supposedly personified a deep love for freedom and tradition.¹³³ Language constituted a key inheritance from the Anglo-Saxons, and so did ‘blood’ or race, which could serve as shorthand for the totality of English culture, but also as a tool to demarcate and compare the English to others.

Importantly, none of this precluded identification of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ on cultural and institutional grounds. The notion of racial Anglo-Saxonism always allowed some latitude. In both Britain and the USA it was possible for incomers (as long as they were White and Protestant) to enter the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ fold. Dutch, German, Scottish and Welsh identities were subsumed into the dominant Anglo-American majority in Revolutionary America and the early republic,¹³⁴ while Freeman and others noted that the English had happily absorbed several waves of incomers who had entered after 1066.¹³⁵ It also followed (at least for Freeman) that the runaway success of the Anglo-Saxons might be observed and replicated by other peoples.¹³⁶ There were points of contact with scientific racism – Freeman observed in 1877 that ‘ethnological and philological researches … have opened the way for new national sympathies’¹³⁷ – but the espousal of deep cultural legacies that grew out of devotion to English antiquity created a second, distinct path to racial Anglo-Saxonism.

Fed from these two streams, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ gained very considerable popular traction as a synonym for the English ‘race’ in the course of the nineteenth century.¹³⁸ Forthright proclamations of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ superiority proliferated from about the 1830s onward.¹³⁹ Just one example will suffice: an extract from a poem composed by the writer and moralist Martin Tupper (1810–89) that appeared in the short-lived British periodical The Anglo-Saxon (1849–50):

‘Stretch forth! Stretch forth! From the south to the north,

From the east to the west, – stretch forth! Stretch forth!

Strengthen thy stakes and lengthen thy cords, –

The world is a tent for the world’s true lords!

Break forth and spread over every place,

The world is a world for the Saxon Race!’¹⁴⁰

The Anglo-Saxons became most closely tied to race-based identity when their self-proclaimed heirs achieved their furthest reach. Sharon Turner, in the fourth edition of his History of the Anglo-Saxons (1823), remarked on the deep-seated proclivity of certain peoples towards outward settlement, ‘as the migratory settlers on the Ohio and the Missouri in our days are the effusions of other states, more advanced and improved’.¹⁴¹ The myth of inherent racial superiority helped explain and justify the global success of the British Empire, as well as the advance of American dominance westwards to the Pacific.¹⁴²

Tupper’s doggerel verse captures the jingoistic and pseudo-scientific character of much of this rhetoric, but racial Anglo-Saxonism was more than a populist fable: it went hand in hand with renewed, and increasingly scientific, research into early medieval archaeology, history and language. John Mitchell Kemble (1807–57) reflects this duality. Trained in Germany by leading philologists of the day such as Johann Andreas Schmeller (1785–1852) and particularly inspired by the work of Jakob Grimm (1785–1863),¹⁴³ Kemble was a polymath of formidable erudition and talent who left his mark on the study of Old English and Anglo-Saxon archaeology. Among other distinctions, Kemble was the first to observe parallels in material culture on either side of the North Sea. He put this archaeological expertise to good use when he came to examine the received account of the Anglo-Saxon settlement: ‘I confess that the more I examine this question, the more completely I am convinced that the received accounts of our migrations, our subsequent fortunes, and ultimate settlement, are devoid of historical truth in every detail.’¹⁴⁴ Kemble’s repeated use of ‘our’ here is telling, and his research into the Anglo-Saxons was shot through with a robust sense of their superiority: ‘to [Gregory the Great] it was not unknown that the Britannic islands were occupied by two populations different alike in their descent and in their fortunes; the elder and the weaker, of Keltic blood; the younger and the conquering race, an offshoot of that great Teutonic stock, whose branches had overspread all the fairest provinces of the [Roman] empire’.¹⁴⁵

In nineteenth-century Britain (and above all England),¹⁴⁶ Anglo-Saxonism or ‘Teutomania’, as it was sarcastically labelled in later years by the poet Matthew Arnold (1822–88),¹⁴⁷ served as a pillar in the construction of an expanded, democratised national identity that stretched across classes.¹⁴⁸ It was propelled furthest, and with most verve, not by scholars like Kemble and Freeman, but by novelists and other writers with mass appeal such as Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe (1819)), Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848)) and Charles Kingsley (Hereward the Wake (1866)), along with the essays of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), and (in America) the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) and Walt Whitman (1819–92). All elaborated the myth of the Norman Yoke and of Anglo-Saxon ethnic roots.¹⁴⁹ In early science fiction, the nineteenth-century image of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ global dominance could also be imagined as shaping the distant future. One novel published in 1900 envisaged an ‘Anglo-Saxon Empire’ of 2236 that looked for new victories beyond the stars, ‘the Anglo-Saxon race [having] long ago absorbed the whole of the globe’.¹⁵⁰

As will be apparent, Anglo-Saxonism took many forms in nineteenth-century Britain, and was not the only frame of reference for British identity or imperialism. Other explorations of British origins and history looked elsewhere for their explanatory power: to the general uplift generated by ‘civilisation’ or Protestant fervour, for example, while historians such as James Anthony Froude (1818–94), J. H. Round (1854–1928) and Sir John Seeley (1834–95) emphasised the enervating effects of the adversaries of the Anglo-Saxons, the Scandinavians and the Normans, or the glories of the Reformation and seafaring in the sixteenth century.¹⁵¹ These different readings of collective history and identity coexisted with the Anglo-Saxons in a rich marketplace of ideas, favoured by different constituencies as they complemented other cultural or political viewpoints.¹⁵²

‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity continued to play an important role in dialogue between the British and the Americans. It rose in prominence at certain times, such as when the end of American slavery and the expansion of British voting rights in the 1860s made the two more similar,¹⁵³ or during diplomatic rapprochement in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and retreated in times of distance or tension.¹⁵⁴ Yet American Anglo-Saxonism had subtle distinctions of its own. It was entirely possible to be simultaneously ‘an Anglo-maniac, and an Anglo-phobist’, as William H. Russell (1820–1907) wrote of the Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs (1810–85) in 1861, who was strongly opposed to the British government but cherished an idea of shared ‘Anglo-Saxon’ heritage with the English.¹⁵⁵ Some rejected Anglo-Saxon identity altogether, or argued for restraint of its worst excesses. In 1845 the Ohio lawyer (and later governor) Charles Anderson (1814–95) furiously attacked any claim that might be made for Anglo-Saxon civilisation, let alone racial superiority, while an anonymous and highly subtle 1851 essay probably by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) acknowledged the principle of Anglo-Saxon identity yet repudiated its military and racist pretensions.¹⁵⁶

Anderson and Longfellow certainly would have seen many examples of Anglo-Saxonism being invoked to help justify exclusion and aggressive expansion. ‘Anglo-Saxon’ served as shorthand for the historically dominant White Protestant population, with roots (real or imagined) in England, who saw themselves as competing for resources in the Americas against other groups. Recollections of Anglo-Saxon settlers claiming fifth-century Britain informed American claims to dominance in the nineteenth century; as one journalist put it at the onset of war with Mexico in 1846, ‘Mexico was poor, distracted, in anarchy, and almost in ruins – what could she do to stay the hand of our power, to impede the march of our greatness? We were Anglo-Saxon Americans; it was our “destiny” to possess and rule this continent – we were bound to do it! We were a chosen people, and this was our allotted inheritance, and we must drive out all other nations before us!’¹⁵⁷ Divisions among the White population within America also proved highly fertile ground for new variants of Anglo-Saxonism, as happened when the growing, industrialising cities of the northeast and the Midwest received larger waves of immigration from the 1840s.¹⁵⁸ Celebrations in New York to mark the completion of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable in 1858 (notwithstanding the fact that it failed within three weeks) prominently invoked the idea of an Anglo-Saxon bond spanning two continents – one banner read ‘Anglo-Saxon twins’, another ‘There is no such word as fail for Saxon Blood’ – and served as an opportunity to denigrate Irish migrants.¹⁵⁹

The White population of the southern states used the Anglo-Saxons to frame themselves in opposition to both the White northerners and to the Black population. Tensions over slavery in the run-up to the American Civil War (1861–5) prompted some in the south to tout themselves as the descendants of chivalrous Norman knights opposed to a puritanical north full of Anglo-Saxons, on the model of Ivanhoe. ¹⁶⁰ Not surprisingly, this attitude changed after the Civil War, and the defeated Anglo-Saxons became a new parallel for the south, as the supposed bearers of democratic tradition arrayed against Norman tyranny.¹⁶¹ That analogy was layered upon Lost Cause ideology and racial confrontation in the work of Thomas Dixon Jr (1864–1946). Unapologetic racism couched in terms of the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ figured prominently in his popular 1902 novel The Leopard’s Spots: a Romance of the White Man’s Burden 1865–1900. Members of the Ku Klux Klan, the protagonists of the story and, as Dixon put it, an ‘Invisible Empire of White Robed Anglo-Saxon Knights’, at one point hung a placard from the corpse of a lynched African American man that read ‘The answer of the Anglo-Saxon race’.¹⁶² Building in part on Dixon’s best-selling novels and plays (one of which provided the basis for D. W. Griffith’s even more popular 1915 film The Birth of a Nation), the Ku Klux Klan and similar societies devoted to racial segregation and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ supremacy surged in popularity in the 1910s and 1920s, when Klan membership ran to millions and stretched across the nation.¹⁶³

American Anglo-Saxonism was not solely the preserve of White claims to racial superiority. In the hands of some imaginative writers, it also provided a frame of reference for subverting inequality, especially in the slaveholding states. African American observers constructed a view of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity that centred on brutality and rapaciousness, shaped by their supposed origins as invaders of post-Roman Britain: an early proponent of this view, Hosea Easton (1798–1837), a Methodist minister from Massachusetts, wrote that ‘it is not a little remarkable that in the nineteenth century a remnant of this same barbarous people should boast of their national superiority … [and yet] practiced the same crime their barbarous ancestry had done in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries’.¹⁶⁴ Another reworking of the Anglo-Saxon myth looked to a later stage in their history, when the Anglo-Saxons themselves were subjected to servitude by their Norman conquerors. The present masters could therefore be portrayed as the descendants of slaves, undermining their position and historicising the plight of the enslaved population. A Massachusetts abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child (1802–80), published a short story in 1841 entitled ‘The Black Saxons’, which first laid that thought in the mind of a fictional slaveholder, and a Black student at Oberlin College in 1846 read a poem based on the story to a literary society.¹⁶⁵ The same essential idea was built on by Frederick Douglass (1817/18–95) in several speeches and essays of the 1840s. It enabled him to puncture the arrogance of White enslavers who saw themselves as Anglo-Saxons, reminding them that their supposed forebears were slaves to the Normans. As he put it in one speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, on 2 August 1847, ‘the proud Anglo-Saxons, overpowered in war, had their property confiscated by their haughty Norman superiors, and were enslaved upon their own sacred soil … who were the fathers of our present haughty oppressors in this land? They were, until within the last four centuries, the miserable slaves, the degraded serfs, of Norman nobles … [the Anglo-Saxons] were regarded as an inferior race – unfit to be trusted with their own rights’. But Douglass went on to add that ‘a profitable comparison might be drawn between the condition of the coloured slaves of our land, and the ancient Anglo-Saxon slaves of England’.¹⁶⁶ This reversal of roles placed the enslaved Black population in the position of the Anglo-Saxons, implicitly claiming for them what Douglass saw as the more desirable cultural and progressive legacy of America’s English heritage.¹⁶⁷ Later, Sutton E. Griggs (1872–1933) in his 1899 novel Imperium in Imperio subtly evoked this trope by alluding to the Norman yoke, but set it in a more firmly American context by contrasting the supposed ‘Anglo-Saxon’ love of freedom with the enslavement inflicted concurrently on the Black population: ‘That same hammer and anvil that forged the steel sword of the Anglo-Saxon, with which he fought for freedom from England’s yoke, also forged the chain that the Anglo-Saxon used to bind the negro more securely in the thralldom of slavery’.¹⁶⁸

The Anglo-Saxons in Popular Usage in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

In general, popular embrace of the Anglo-Saxons, and of an identity that foregrounded Anglo-Saxon biological, institutional and cultural roots, lost a significant amount of ground in the course of the twentieth century.¹⁶⁹ Discourse around race has transformed in the United States, driven by demographic and political upheaval. The ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ (WASP) element of the population, once so numerically and culturally overbearing, lost its hegemonic position in the course of the mid-twentieth century.¹⁷⁰ Reasons for this are many and debatable: migration into and within the country, with the raising and then lowering of federal barriers to immigration on a national or ethnic basis; the logical conclusion of progressive ideals espoused by the Anglo-American elite; the anti-subversive campaigns of the 1950s, which regarded the Anglo-American elite with particular disdain and suspicion; two bouts of mass mobilisation for war that helped break down differences within the White population, along with desegregation of military units after the Second World War; reaction against the assumed superiority of Anglo-American identity and the embrace of more diverse hyphenated identities; and, for European immigrants on the economic margins of American society, a desire to identify with the dominant ethnic group through discrimination on the basis of skin colour.¹⁷¹ The end result was to flatten ethnic and religious distinctions with an enlarged definition of whiteness, leaving behind the colour-based dichotomy that has always lurked behind other racial divisions.¹⁷² ‘Anglo-Saxon’ occurs occasionally as a synonym for White,¹⁷³ but has largely been superseded and is simply no longer used by most Americans. When it is invoked, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ most often represents one of many bygone and distasteful layers of exclusionary, hierarchical thinking, as demonstrated in a speech before Congress in April 2021 by Hakeen Jeffries, a Congressman from New York: ‘The foundational model of this country is e pluribus unum, out of many, one. It doesn’t say out of many Europeans, one. It doesn’t say out of many Anglo-Saxons, one. It doesn’t say out of many Confederate sympathizers, one. It doesn’t say out of many Christians, one. It certainly doesn’t say out of many nations, except Muslim countries, one.’¹⁷⁴

Usage in Britain has ended up in a similar place, with ‘Anglo-Saxon’ no longer favoured as a central component of Englishness or Britishness, though the route taken to this destination was quite different, with both internal and external factors in play. Two world wars against Germany inevitably compromised the appeal of deep Teutonic roots, though support for Germany on a cultural level persisted even during the First World War and into the 1930s (sometimes citing shared ancestry).¹⁷⁵ National identity reoriented towards local, cultural characteristics in the 1920s and 1930s, sharpened by debate about Irish home rule that changed the position of Britain and its constituent nations.¹⁷⁶ There was, at the same time, a strand of thinking that positioned the British as part of a worldwide White brethren with their cousins in the Dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.¹⁷⁷ These ways of framing race and identity progressed in later decades. Legislation on citizenship in the 1960s and after, and rhetoric from the same period directed against non-White immigrants, favoured Britishness and whiteness much more than ‘Anglo-Saxon’ descent.¹⁷⁸

This was not, however, simply a matter of the Anglo-Saxons losing their spot at the beginning of a clear trail of English (or British) historical identity: that trail itself became overgrown in the late twentieth century as the idea that there was, or should be, a single national historical narrative lost momentum. Social changes in Britain during and after the 1960s produced a more fragmented sense of national identity, with the emphasis by the end of the century on individualism and cultural diversity and less on a long shared past.¹⁷⁹ The historical dimensions of Britishness narrowed significantly, with the Second World War becoming a crucible of national identity, both in right-wing nationalist discourse that fastened on a narrative of Britain triumphing against European neighbours,¹⁸⁰ and more liberal accounts that emphasise the ‘Blitz spirit’ and the establishment of the NHS and the Welfare State immediately after the war, as part of a catalogue of progressive achievements from the abolition of slavery to the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush. ¹⁸¹

History of both the recent and distant British past gained considerably in popular interest even as it lost political centrality, becoming something that individual people had and used as a storehouse of personally fulfilling education and entertainment rather than a narrative that defined a people.¹⁸² The Anglo-Saxons were caught up in this wave, profiting rather than suffering from their reputation as distant and mysterious. They maintained a place in popular historical consciousness on an increasingly emotional basis: while reportage on the discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial in summer 1939 still mentioned the ‘blood’ that linked Rædwald with the contemporary English (frequently elided with British), the emphasis now fell on broad cultural affinities that supposedly reached across thirteen centuries.¹⁸³ Sutton Hoo remains a touchstone. The Dig, a 2021 film based on a 2007 novel by John Preston, told the story of the site’s excavation as a metonym for recent changes in British society, including the looming impact of the Second World War and tensions between metropolitan elites and the earthy, working-class regional population. The Anglo-Saxons precipitate the film’s plot, yet are surprisingly distant from its human action. In discovering an Anglo-Saxon treasure, the film suggests, the English discover something about themselves.¹⁸⁴ The baseline assumption is that the Anglo-Saxons represent an enigma, with occasional new discoveries – especially archaeological ones – offering a flash of relatability: as Ashok Kumar (1956–2010), MP for Middlesborough and Cleveland, put it before parliament in January 2008 when discussing important new Anglo-Saxon archaeological finds from Loftus, North Yorkshire, ‘[these treasures] provide us with a link to our history and tell us about the order of society in the dark ages. They also show us that those people, far from being remote from us, felt some of the same emotions that we do and had the same sense of curiosity about the world around them and their place in it’.¹⁸⁵ In particular, the Anglo-Saxons offer a vision of the past that is strongly English in character and yet distant from the metropolitan, London-centred form of the modern nation; as such, the Anglo-Saxons are often claimed as an historical proxy for regional identities within England. Wessex and Mercia both have a political party advocating for regional interests within the bounds of a former Anglo-Saxon kingdom,¹⁸⁶ and there has been a campaign since the 1990s for the return of the Lindisfarne Gospels to a location in the north.¹⁸⁷ Regional identity was a particular leitmotif in reporting on the Staffordshire hoard in 2009, which rooted the dazzling new find in the ‘mysteries of Mercia’,¹⁸⁸ while a government minister proudly observed that the eventual acquisition of the hoard for museums in Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent would mean that the ‘superb finds will be able to stay – and be enjoyed – where they belong: in the midlands where they were discovered’.¹⁸⁹ As one of the curators who eventually took on the hoard put it, ‘we’re all Mercians now’.¹⁹⁰

The Anglo-Saxons largely survive as a historical designation, and in this form are deeply embedded in British public understanding of the past. They feature in the national curriculum of (English) schools and in the labels of national heritage organisations,¹⁹¹ and attachment to them is framed in affective, emotional terms: those who are accustomed to using ‘Anglo-Saxon’ defend themselves in defending the term.¹⁹² The Anglo-Saxons’ ethnic, racial role has not evaporated completely. Displays in the museum operated by English Heritage at Sutton Hoo embraced a continuum of Anglo-Saxon and English, even British, identity in displays and videos as recently as the 2000s and 2010s.¹⁹³ But on the whole, calling attention to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity of the modern English population sits uncomfortably in public settings. England’s second national rugby union team was known from 2006 until 2021 as ‘England Saxons’, but the name was withdrawn because (as the Rugby Football Union chairman put it) the organisation needed ‘to step up its efforts to improve diversity and inclusion across our game’.¹⁹⁴ This move reflects not only consciousness of the problems posed by ‘[Anglo-]Saxon’, but also broader shifts in how race is (or is not) addressed publicly in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. Self-identified ethnicity has been promoted instead of race in censuses and other governmental contexts, with ‘White British’ emerging by 2001 as the preferred designation for the established bulk of the White population in such contexts.¹⁹⁵ This is emphatically not to deny or downplay the existence of racism in British society, but the ways in which this is articulated in modern times are often indirect, and the Anglo-Saxons have little part to play in them.¹⁹⁶

Explicitly racist usage of the term is increasingly associated with the political far right, as part of a vision of degeneracy and existential threats to western, White or national identities. These ideas are buttressed with highly selective and tendentious readings of historiography, and magnified by reverberation in racist echo chambers, now largely found on the internet.¹⁹⁷ In such quarters, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ sits alongside antisemitic and skin colour-based racist discourse, and functions as a ‘White monolith’ and a dog-whistle for the alt-right.¹⁹⁸ When statements using ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in such ways do surface in more public settings they tend to be treated with a mixture of revulsion and ridicule in both the UK and the USA, as when a widely reported speech by a Conservative Member of Parliament in 2001 lamented that ‘commonwealth immigration’ had undermined ‘our homogenous Anglo-Saxon society’,¹⁹⁹ or when a spokesperson for Mitt Romney’s Republican presidential campaign in 2012 referred to the ‘unique Anglo-Saxon heritage’ that Britain shared with the USA, which the incumbent President Barack Obama ‘didn’t fully appreciate’.²⁰⁰

Changing Scholarly Views on the Anglo-Saxons

The historicisation of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain took place in all contexts and registers, and has so far been viewed in relation to popular and political historical consciousness, but something similar took place in historical and archaeological scholarship, for related yet distinct reasons. Academic usage came to favour a deconstructed view of the Anglo-Saxons, which kept the designation but left most of their ethnic and nationalistic baggage behind, and in effect turned them back into a people of the past rather than the present. Aspects of this more qualified view began to emerge in earnest at the beginning of the twentieth century. Treasured Anglo-Saxon cultural and political inheritances of an earlier age started to be demolished with two tools honed in the nineteenth century: philology and highly targeted source criticism. Both were ultimately German imports,²⁰¹ used by (among others) Kemble and Freeman to great effect, but where they had wielded these techniques to craft their own visions of national origins, twentieth-century practitioners turned them back on the central tenets of Anglo-Saxon origin stories. Anglo-Saxon history thus became more academically rigorous but less embedded in the English grand narrative. H. M Chadwick (1870–1947) outright denied the supposedly democratic nature of early Anglo-Saxon social organisation.²⁰² F. W. Maitland (1850–1906) cut the witan down to size and downplayed the significance of the Anglo-Saxon contribution in the long-term development of English law,²⁰³ while Felix Liebermann (1851–1925) put knowledge of what Anglo-Saxon laws actually said on a much firmer footing.²⁰⁴ Probably the most influential historical survey of the Anglo-Saxons in the twentieth century was Sir Frank Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England, which first appeared in 1943. Stenton’s study was distinguished by close engagement with primary sources, and not only the relatively well-known territory of narratives, laws and charters, but also coins, place names and archaeological finds. In the words of Michael Bentley, Stenton successfully ‘built a bridge between the new social history informed by the scientism of historical and archaeological analysis, and a view of political development that turned Anglo-Saxon England into a sophisticated and centralizing nation state’.²⁰⁵ Subsequent work has followed Stenton’s lead, deepening and clarifying what various categories of source material have to say about early medieval England taken on its own terms.²⁰⁶ James Campbell and Patrick Wormald, in the 1970s and after, eloquently developed the case for an aggressive and sophisticated administrative system in England in the last century before 1066, forming a first chapter in England’s long history of strong, centralised government;²⁰⁷ crucially, though, Campbell and Wormald fastened on taxation, coinage, written instruments of government and local organs of justice, and not the more direct constitutional continuities touted in the nineteenth century and before.²⁰⁸ New roles in new (or at least changing) national myths, in this case built around the evolution of an English state and its impact on people’s lives, lay open to historians of the Anglo-Saxons.²⁰⁹

As in this case, scholars have always been comfortable carving up the Anglo-Saxon period into smaller chunks, including some that span the watersheds on either side: ‘late antiquity’ at the beginning, and ‘Anglo-Norman’ at the end.²¹⁰ But Stenton’s choice of title and periodisation in his magnum opus was also influential, for it has continued to be common for historians to write of the Anglo-Saxons as a whole and to treat the Anglo-Saxon age as a single unit running from the fifth century to 1066.²¹¹ Anglo-Saxon England ended with the death of William the Conqueror (1087) who had ‘in twenty years … transformed the immemorial Germanic kingship into a pattern of feudal sovereignty’.²¹² Despite many changes in approach, historical and archaeological scholarship on the Anglo-Saxons since Stenton has preserved ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as a term and as a chronological infrastructure. One reason for this is the deep staying power of a centuries-old label and the division of the past that it reflects. Another is that it builds on the language and patterns of thought of the first generations of professional historians, such as Stenton, who crystallised their terms of reference in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when ‘Anglo-Saxon’ held sway.²¹³

The legacy of these early generations has thus been to pass on the Anglo-Saxons as a framework despite its earlier premises being challenged on several fronts. Even a foundational tenet of the Anglo-Saxon myth – that the incoming English replaced the Britons as the dominant population group in what would become England – has been taken apart and reassembled in a very different form by several waves of archaeologists and historians.²¹⁴ In the culmination of a process that began with Kemble in the 1830s, the major narrative sources for the Anglo-Saxon settlement were deconstructed and mostly discredited by historians in the 1970s and 1980s.²¹⁵ Serious questions now had to be asked of the received view that derived primarily from these sources, which (in simplified terms) saw the Anglo-Saxons as coming in en masse as part of an orchestrated invasion, and leaping with more or less fully formed collective identities onto the beaches of eastern England. The Anglo-Saxons supposedly then became the dominant constituency by displacing or slaughtering the Romano-British population and absorbing the few survivors.²¹⁶ Gildas, Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle have huge value as windows onto how the past was viewed at their various times of composition, but knowledge of developments in the fifth and sixth centuries is now recognised as depending in large part on interpretation of material evidence by archaeologists.²¹⁷

Reaction against the historically-based model picked up momentum in the 1980s, as a group of archaeologists influenced by a wider turn against migration-based explanations of change argued that in fact there had been no (or virtually no) Anglo-Saxon migration at all, and that the substantial changes in material culture were instead a result of internal factors.²¹⁸ That position never achieved complete acceptance, and since the 2000s refinement of the study of ancient DNA and isotopic data has pointed strongly towards a significant amount of demographic movement in the post-Roman period, both across the North Sea and within Britain.²¹⁹ Interest has shifted away from whether there was a migration and instead to the nature of that migration, which may have been based on smaller groups of varied character who only coalesced into the familiar peoples and kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England after settling in Britain.²²⁰ English political formations were thus the result, not the cause of post-Roman demographic changes. This fits well with the linguistic evidence. The apparent erasure of Brittonic language and place names in lowland Britain and the scarcity of Brittonic loan-words in Old English are significant, but less so if a version of Latin was the dominant vernacular in this region; moreover, it has been argued that Brittonic did exert structural and phonological influences on English, in common with some other examples of language contact that resulted in only a few lexical borrowings.²²¹ None of this is to deny what adds up to a ‘cultural genocide’ directed against the Britons,²²² but the point is that few would now argue that the Anglo-Saxons were all ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in descent, or that they had anything approaching a coherent ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity in the fifth and sixth centuries.

The Anglo-Saxons, in dominant British popular and academic usage, have come to hold a meaning equivalent to ‘the Victorians’ or ‘the Romans’: the people who lived in England during a particular chronological window. It has certainly helped that several other European historiographical traditions also assign key phases of transition to the fifth and eleventh centuries, fitting more-or-less comfortably with what English-speakers call the Anglo-Saxon period.²²³ To excise the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ at this point would thus have only a limited impact on how the corresponding period is delineated: its principal effect might be to lighten the weight put on the political events of c. 410 and 1066 and thereby encourage interest in continuity and change across these watersheds, reinforcing a trend on-going since the later twentieth century.²²⁴ Even if much of what made the Anglo-Saxons special has gone, there has seemed to be no need to get rid of them, at least in the context of historical periodisation.

Conclusion

Since about 1100 the pre-Conquest era has occupied a grey area between myth and history. Distant in language and custom, and yet valued as the first layer of the English past, Anglo-Saxon England took on a special meaning in the later Middle Ages that it has never lost since. Often matters have turned on what were effectively ghosts of Anglo-Saxon England, conjured in support of present concerns and founded on wishful thinking, recycling of accepted wisdom and uncritical acceptance of problematic sources. Yet closer acquaintance with the pre-Conquest past from the sixteenth century onwards often fanned rather than extinguished the myths that blossomed around the Anglo-Saxons. Antiquarian enterprise and the cultural, political and (ultimately) racial ideology built around the Anglo-Saxons reinforced one another. That co-ordinated march was to some extent broken, paradoxically, as a consequence of the racial and nationalistic heights that popular Anglo-Saxonism reached in the nineteenth century: it became so tightly bound to concepts of White British and American identity that when the zeitgeist moved on, as it inevitably did, the Anglo-Saxons were left behind. Their subsequent fate in twentieth-century popular usage went in several different directions. No single interpretation holds complete sway in any individual region, but in Britain historical understanding prevails, while in other Anglophone countries (including the USA) ethno-racial meanings predominate and the rest of the world typically attaches politico-cultural connotations to ‘Anglo-Saxon’.²²⁵ The heated disputes that arose among scholars about the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in the late 2010s illustrate what happens when the mass, instant communication of the internet age forces these different usages into immediate contact with each other.²²⁶

It is not for this piece to prescribe what ought to be done in future about the Anglo-Saxons. That is one of three final points. The second is that, whatever one’s own personal view of the best way forwards, the matter should be treated with compassion, flexibility and dialogue – and with awareness that, throughout its history, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has been about more than the people and culture of early medieval England. It has always been embroiled in other discourses about how the past relates to the present, and who should claim or speak for that past. This leads to the third and last point, which is that the history of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and of the concept of the Anglo-Saxons is instructive precisely because of its contentious nature. It throws light on the nexus of nationalism, history, language and political ideology, and on how that nexus was remade to suit the changing needs of each new age and constituency. The Anglo-Saxons have never been frozen in time.