The recovery of the Anglo-Saxon past c.1770-1850

Between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a remarkable shift took place in the reception of England’s Anglo-Saxon past. During the eighteenth century the contributions of the Anglo-Saxons to English traditions of political liberty and the common law were acknowledged—and highly prized—but as a people, they were also indelibly associated with the barbarism of the Dark Ages. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, attitudes had shifted substantively. While the debt to Anglo-Saxon legal and political institutions was still acknowledged, it was, relatively speaking, diminished and the focus was rather upon their role in the development of the nation and the shaping of English national character. They were rendered more conformable forebears for the increasingly urban, domestic and commercial society of nineteenth-century England. This article analyses how such a reconceptualisation came about. Rather than concentrating on the emergence of a discourse of race or national character or tracing the emergence of rigorous philological inquiry into Old English, it focuses upon the production of historical knowledge that permitted the development of a more varied, nuanced and fuller history of the Anglo-Saxon period. In doing so, the article illuminates the porosity of the boundaries between antiquarian and historical activity, and argues that the recovery of the Anglo-Saxon past in this period was shaped by a complex set of influences, which an emphasis upon the emergence of a discourse of race alone obscures.