Anglo-Saxons: Myth and History

Abstract

This article surveys how the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, and with it view of the people, culture and period that it denotes, have evolved between the early Middle Ages and the twenty-first century, focusing on usage in Britain and (latterly) North America. It begins with the genesis of the label as one of several ethnic designations in the eighth to tenth centuries (at first outside England). Subsequent sections consider the later Middle Ages, the revival of scholarly interest in the sixteenth century, the rise of popular Anglo-Saxonism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, racialised deployment of the Anglo-Saxons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and finally developments in the mid-twentieth century and after.