Anglo-Saxon Narratives. Contesting the Past in Britain 1800-2020

Abstract

This conference introduced us to the new Saxones exhibition, with interesting narratives about the representation of this ‘people’ through time. This seems an appropriate point to revisit some complementary work I did (nearly 30 years ago now) on representations of ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ in Britain. In this paper I will present an expanded and updated version of ideas about the historical and archaeological uses of concepts of Anglo-Saxon identities originally published in Lucy (1998) and Lucy (2000), and draw on my subsequent more developed theoretical framework (Lucy 2005); it is striking how much these conceptions have changed in public discourse since that time, while academic discussion has progressed on much the same lines as in the 1990s (though see now Harland 2021 for a critical overview). To affect those more public narratives, we as academics may have to be more vocal in our critiques of them.