Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain 1783275014, 9781783275014

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DUSTIN M. FRAZIER WOOD

Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-century Britain

Volume XVIII

Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain

ISSN 2043-8230 Series Editors Karl Fugelso Chris Jones Medievalism aims to provide a forum for monographs and collections devoted to the burgeoning and highly dynamic multi-disciplinary field of medievalism studies: that is, work investigating the influence and appearance of `the medieval’ in the society and culture of later ages. Titles within the series will investigate the post-medieval construction and manifestations of the Middle Ages – attitudes towards, and uses and meanings of, ‘the medieval’ – in all fields of culture, from politics and international relations, literature, history, architecture, and ceremonial ritual to film and the visual arts. It welcomes a wide range of topics, from historiographical subjects to revivalism, with the emphasis always firmly on what the idea of ‘the medieval’ has variously meant and continues to mean; it is founded on the belief that scholars interested in the Middle Ages can and should communicate their research both beyond and within the academic community of medievalists, and on the continuing relevance and presence of ‘the medieval’ in the contemporary world. New proposals are welcomed. They may be sent directly to the editors or the publishers at the addresses given below. Professor Karl Fugelso Art Department Towson University 3103 Center for the Arts 8000 York Road Towson, MD 21252–0001 USA

Professor Chris Jones School of English University of St Andrews St Andrews Fife  KY16 9AL UK

Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9 Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF UK

Previous volumes in this series are printed at the back of this book

Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in EighteenthCentury Britain

Dustin M. Frazier Wood

BOYDELL PRESS

© Dustin M. Frazier Wood 2020 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Dustin M. Frazier Wood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2020 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978 1 78327 501 4 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper

For Patrick

Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on the Text Abbreviations

Introduction: Anglo-Saxonism, Medievalism and the Eighteenth Century

1 2 3 4

Anglo-Saxonisms of the Early Eighteenth Century

ix xi xiii xv 1

15 Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Later Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries 17 Anglo-Saxonism and the Hanoverian Succession 26 From Philology to Antiquarianism 33 Antiquaries and Anglo-Saxons 39 Antiquarian Networks and Resources for Anglo-Saxon Studies 42 Coins 45 Artefacts 50 Barrows 61 Architecture 64 Antiquarianism and Medievalism 68 Anglo-Saxon History and the English Landscape 71 Histories of England 74 Antiquarian Historiography 81 Local History 85 History, Identity and Heritage 102 Imaging and Imagining Anglo-Saxonness 104 Antiquarian Images of Anglo-Saxon England 107 Illustrating English History 115 English History Delineated 118 Anglo-Saxons and History Painting 128 The Ancestral Portrait Gallery 137

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Contents

5

Anglo-Saxonist Politics and Posterity 156 Anglo-Saxonism and Gothicism 157 The Anglo-Saxon Constitution 160 The Legislature 162 The Common Law 169 Staging the Anglo-Saxon Nation 173 Anglo-Saxonism and Political Identity 194



Conclusion: Sharon Turner’s The History of the Anglo-Saxons 197

Bibliography Index

203 225

Illustrations 1–4

5–7

8

9 10 11

12

13

14

Woodcut illustrations of Anglo-Saxon history from Ranulf Higden, The Cronycle of Englonde with the dedes of popes and emperours, and also the descripcyon of Englonde (London, 1528). Reproduced with the permission of Senate House Library, University of London 140–1 Woodcut illustrations of Anglo-Saxon history from Bede, The history of the Churche of Englande, ed. Thomas Stapleton (1565). Reproduced with the permission of Senate House Library, University of London 142–3 Woodcut depicting the arrival of Hengist and Horsa in England, from Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1634), 117. Reproduction by permission of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society. All Rights Reserved 144 Detail from title page of John Speed, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611). © The Trustees of the British Museum 145 Detail from title page of Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (1612). Reproduced with the permission of Senate House Library, University of London 145 Composite plate of Anglo-Saxon illuminations and antiquities from Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archaeologicus, 2 vols (Oxford, 1703–5). Reproduced with the permission of Senate House Library, University of London 146 George Vertue, Portrait of Egbert for Paul Rapin, The History of England, trans. and ed. Nicholas Tindal, 2 vols (London, 1732). Reproduction by permission of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society. All Rights Reserved 147 George Vertue, Portrait of Alfred the Great for Paul Rapin, The History of England, trans. and ed. Nicholas Tindal, 2 vols (London, 1732). Reproduction by permission of the Spalding Gentlemen’s 148 Society. All Rights Reserved George Vertue, Portrait of Canute for Paul Rapin, The History of England, trans. and ed. Nicholas Tindal, 2 vols (London, 1732). Reproduction by permission of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society. 149 All Rights Reserved

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15 16

17

18 19

20 21 22

Illustrations

George Vertue, ‘Tomb of Edward the Confessor’ (1724), from Vetusta Monumenta I (1747). © Society of Antiquaries of London. By kind permission of the Society of Antiquaries of London Joseph Strutt, facsimile engraving of May, June, July and August from MS Cotton Tiberius B.v., from Horda Angel-cynnan (1775). Reproduced with the permission of Senate House Library, University of London Samuel Wale, ‘King Edgar rowed down the River Dee by Eight Tributary Kings attended by his principal nobility’, engraved by William Walker for William Augustus Russell, A New and Authentic History of England, from the most remote period of Genuine Historical Evidence; to the Present Important Crisis (London, 1777). Reproduction by permission of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society. All Rights Reserved English History Delineated, No. 4: Nicholas Blakey, ‘Vortigern & Rowena; or the Settlement of the Saxons in England’, engraved by Gérard Scotin (1751). © The Trustees of the British Museum English History Delineated, No. 5: Nicholas Blakey and François Vivares, ‘Alfred in the Isle of Athelney, receiving News of a Victory over the Danes’, engraved by Gérard Scotin (1751). © The Trustees of the British Museum English History Delineated, No. 6: Francis Hayman, ‘The Battle of Hastings’, engraved by Charles Grignion (retouched and reprinted by Robert Sayer, 1778). © The Trustees of the British Museum Andrea Casali, ‘An historical picture of Edward the Martyr’ (1762). © Burton Constable Foundation Benjamin West, ‘King Alfred Dividing his Last Loaf with the Pilgrim’ (1779). The Stationers’ Company Archive

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151

152 153

153 154 154 155

The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Acknowledgments This book has been a long time in the making, and I am deeply indebted to the colleagues, mentors and friends who contributed to its development. Julian Luxford and Chris Jones offered advice during the first stages of its development. Simon Keynes generously shared his working database of artistic representations of Anglo-Saxon history, and Lucy Peltz guided me through the delightful complexities of eighteenth-century print collecting and illustration. Diana and Michael Honeybone introduced me to Maurice Johnson and the Spalding Gentle­men’s Society, which continue to captivate me. Members of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism asked questions and shared discoveries that have shaped my thinking in countless ways, and I am particularly grateful to Karl Fugelso, Rebecca Brackmann, Elizabeth Emery, Mike Evans, Jesse Swan and Jane Toswell for conversations over the years spent researching and writing this book. My research would not have been possible without the help of library, archive and museum staff. Heather Rowland, Adrian James and Magda Kowalczuk at the Society of Antiquaries of London were unfailingly generous and good-humoured in the face of my endless questions and requests to see manuscripts again and again. I owe special thanks to staff at the National Portrait Gallery, British Museum, London Library, British Library, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, the College of Arms and the Beinecke Library. I am grateful to Crispin Powell and Scott Macdonald for allowing me to work with the collections of the Duke of Buccleuch at Bowhill House. I also want to thank the staff and volunteers at National Trust and English Heritage properties, and in local museums across the country, who shared their knowledge and love of the past with me and who more than once opened early, stayed late or led me to parts of their collections that hadn’t yet been catalogued or displayed. I owe a great deal of thanks to institutions that awarded me fellowships to work on parts of this book, including the Lynne Grundy Memorial Trust, the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society and the Institute for Humane Studies. Much of my writing took place at Bethany College with the support of a Renner Visiting Fellowship, and during a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Roehampton. I continue to benefit from the advice and good sense of Laura Peters, Ian Haywood, Clare McManus, Jane Kingsley-Smith, and the wonderful ECW ECR Pets.

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Acknowledgments

I am extremely lucky to have a mentor and friend in Elizabeth Hull, who championed this project from the beginning. I am grateful to my family, born and chosen, on both sides of the Atlantic, for their unflagging encouragement for my work. I owe the greatest thanks to Patrick, who has lived with this book from the start and whose intelligence and kindness have made it and me better.

Note on the Text Throughout the eighteenth century, ‘Saxon’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, ‘English’ and ‘English-Saxon’ were used interchangeably as terms for the non-native peoples of England c.450–1066. Recent scholarship has highlighted the role of Bede and Alfred the Great, and Old English law codes, in effecting a shift from ‘Saxon’ to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ [Old English Anglisc or Angelcynn] as a collective label for a ‘nation of the English’ during the Anglo-Saxon period.1 Eighteenth-century scholars and antiquaries had access to these texts, and exhibited similarly mixed conclusions as to when and how the ‘Saxons’ became ‘Anglo-Saxons’ or ‘English’. The English translation of Paul Rapin de Thoyras’ History of England distinguishes the pagan ‘Saxons’ of the fourth to sixth centuries from the Christian ‘Anglo-Saxons’. David Hume mainly refers to ‘Saxons’ until the reign of Egbert, after which ‘English’ predominates, his appendix on ‘The Anglo-Saxon Government and Manners’ notwithstanding. Samuel Johnson followed George Hickes in identifying ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as a ‘Gothick’ language, but refers to both the Anglo-Saxon people and their language as ‘Saxon’ in the preface to the first edition of his Dictionary (1755). Elizabeth Elstob, on the other hand, who published the only eighteenth-century Old English grammar in modern English, refers to Old English as the ‘English-Saxon Tongue’. Only after the publication of Sharon Turner’s The History of the Anglo-Saxons does ‘Anglo-Saxon’ seem to have become the most common term for, in Turner’s words, ‘the people who, in different divisions, transported themselves from the Cimbric peninsula and its vicinity into England’.2 In the interest of consistency I have used ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ throughout this book, except in quotations and instances in which a particular author or work is concerned explicitly with continental and insular commonalities. I use the terms Anglo-Saxonist and Anglo-Saxonism in two senses. First, as the terms for a scholar or student engaged in the study of the language, literature, history or material remains of the Anglo-Saxon period (Anglo-Saxonist); and for that engagement or study itself (Anglo-Saxonism). In Chapters 4 and 5, the terms are used somewhat differently, to denote what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as See, inter alia: Sarah Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series 6 (1996), 25–49; Susan Reynolds, ‘What Do We Mean by “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxons”?’, Journal of British Studies 24 (1985), 395–414; Michael Richter, ‘Bede’s Angli: Angles or English?’, Peritia 3 (1984), 99–114; Patrick Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’ in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. Patrick Wormald, Donald Bullough and Roger Collins (Oxford, 1983), 99–129. 2 Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 4 vols (London, 1799–1805), I:1. 1

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Note on the Text

a person who holds ‘a belief in the importance or superiority of the Anglo-Saxon language, people, or culture (past or present)’; or that belief or set of beliefs. All dates in the text and footnotes are given in new style, including those from sources written before 1750. All quotations are given in their original spelling with the exception of contractions such as ‘wch’ and ‘yr’, which have been expanded.

Abbreviations BL British Library BM British Museum GM Gentleman’s Magazine EETS Early English Text Society MB Minute Book ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography OED Oxford English Dictionary SAL Society of Antiquaries of London SGS Spalding Gentlemen’s Society SiM Studies in Medievalism

Introduction Anglo-Saxonism, Medievalism and the Eighteenth Century Though other invaders have shaded the island with the banners of conquest, yet the effects of the Anglo-Saxon settlements have prevailed beyond every other. Our language, our government, and our laws, display our Cimbric ancestors in every part: they live not merely in our annals and traditions, but in our civil institutions and perpetual discourse. Sharon Turner1

T

his book defines and examines some of the most important forms of eighteenth-century English Anglo-Saxonism in the century separating the publication of George Hickes’s Thesaurus (1703–5) and the publication of Sharon Turner’s The History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799–1805), two works now recognised as milestones in the development of the modern understanding of Anglo-Saxon England. Hickes’s monumental multi-language grammar and antiquarian treatise, along with the catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts compiled by Humfrey Wanley that appears in the second volume of the Thesaurus, is often represented as the culmination of early modern Old English studies. Turner’s History, on the other hand, is frequently regarded as signalling a shift in English Anglo-Saxon studies away from the antiquarian mode (with all that term’s pejorative connotations) to a more academic, disciplinarily defined and increasingly scientific mode of historical, literary and material enquiry. Turner is therefore associated, in Hans Aarsleff ’s words, with the nineteenth-century ‘revival of interest in early English history, culture, language, and literature’ and with philologists such as John Josias Conybeare, John Bosworth, John Mitchell Kemble or Frederic Madden.2 Yet neither Turner’s introduction nor his footnotes speak to a sudden surge in Anglo-Saxonist enthusiasm at the turn of the century, but look back to a largely ignored tradition of eighteenth-century scholarship. Turner acknowledges numerous eighteenth-­ century editors, linguists, numismatists, art and architectural historians, literary Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 4 vols (London, 1799–1805), I:2. Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England 1780–1860 (London, 1983), 167, 162– 210; Michael Murphy, ‘Antiquary to Academic: The Progress of Anglo-Saxon Scholarship’ in Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries, ed. Carl T. Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch (Boston, 1982), 1–18. 1

2

Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness

2

scholars, and local and national historians who used the work of Hickes and fellow members of the Oxford School to undertake research and offer their own insights. These provided the raw materials with which Turner composed his account of Anglo-Saxon history, society, daily life, manners, government and trade that readers found ‘pleasing and expressive’ as well as ‘extremely interesting’.3 It is these scholars whose work I seek to restore to view. Working in the largely pre-disciplinary environment of the Enlightenment republic of letters, they engaged with a wide range of subjects including literary and linguistic studies, palaeography, codicology and diplomatic, ecclesiastical and political history, art history, archaeology and the study of food, dress and everyday life. The History of the Anglo-Saxons is one in a long line of works that was shaped by the popular belief in the Anglo-Saxon origin of a uniquely English cultural and political identity, a belief that had enjoyed widespread currency throughout the eighteenth century. This was an identity that had been reinforced in creative and imaginative forms ranging from history paintings and sculpture to drama, poetry and novels. In his introduction Turner freely acknowledges that his enthusiasm for eighteenth-century popular medievalist literature motivated him to begin AngloSaxon studies in the first place, an admission that modern scholars will recognise as the familiar pattern by which a passion for popular medievalism leads a student to pursue a career as an academic medievalist.4 Turner’s interest in and descriptions of the finer details of the literature, art and everyday lives of the Anglo-Saxons followed a course laid down by the popular historian Robert Henry and the artist, engraver and antiquary Joseph Strutt. Their depictions of Anglo-Saxon life had influenced writers, artists and dramatists for decades before Sir Walter Scott praised ‘the labours of Dr Henry, of the late Mr Strutt, and, above all, of Mr Sharon Turner’ for revealing ‘the vie privée of our forefathers’ in the Dedicatory Epistle prefixed to the first edition of Ivanhoe.5 In addition to restoring to view the accomplishments of scholarly Anglo-Saxonists, this book sets out to highlight a body of now largely forgotten works of popular Anglo-Saxonism created by eighteenth-century writers and artists, and to reconnect those works to the scholarly Anglo-Saxon studies that underpinned them and that, in cases like Turner’s, were motivated by them. Considered together, these varied but inextricable works reveal eighteenth-century English Anglo-Saxonism as one manifestation of what John Ganim has called a ‘specifically English, and secondarily European, historical medievalism’ that held at its core an understanding of the ‘rich and organic connection of the present and the past’.6 Like ‘medievalism’, the term ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ has been the subject of recent critical debate and steadily increasingly scholarly interest. In fundamental terms, medievalism has been defined as ‘the reception of medieval culture in post­medieval times’, a definition that admits of the duality of medievalism studies as a field interested in previous modes of medieval studies and, concurrently, in the remaking

3 4

81089. 5

6

The British Critic (July 1805), 382. Turner, Introduction to Anglo-Saxons; BL Add. MS 51055, fols 1v–2r; BL Add. MS Walter Scott, Ivanhoe: A Romance, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1820), I:xiii–xiv. John Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism (New York, 2005), 65.

Introduction

3

or reshaping of medieval culture at any point after the close of the Middle Ages.7 Echoing Britton Harwood, I define Anglo-Saxonism as a set of interrelated and interdependent processes in which eighteenth-century contemporaries made use of the Anglo-Saxon period, and of an idea of the Anglo-Saxon period, for ends that were at various moments and for various reasons scholarly, artistic, political, social or cultural, and bound up with the closely related processes involved in any attempt to define a historically grounded English identity.8 Anglo-Saxon studies and popular Anglo-Saxonism rarely, if ever, existed in isolation. Those antiquaries who examined the Alfred Jewel, grave assemblages or charters lived, worked and communicated in a cultural environment in which the Anglo-Saxon origins of England’s most cherished political and cultural institutions were taken for granted. The authors of Alfred: A Masque created a politically charged Anglo-Saxonist drama that reflected at least a moderate level of engagement with recent scholarship and well-established Alfredian iconography. Contemporaries rarely referred to themselves as Anglo-Saxonists, a term coined by Daines Barrington in 1773.9 However, the examination of eighteenth-century interest in and enthusiasm for Anglo-Saxonism in both its scholarly and popular forms suggests that the idea of the Anglo-Saxons probably evoked for eighteenth-century people what Stephanie Trigg has called ‘a series of subtle and varied triangulated relationships between the historical past, its cultural survival and its cultural revival’.10 Such relationships were neither nostalgic nor reactionary, nor simplistic enough to be merely conservative or radical. If anything, the Anglo-Saxons were most frequently described by eighteenth-century English writers in familial terms, with all the complications inherent in storytelling about one’s ancestors. The Anglo-Saxonism of eighteenth-century Englishness was to a certain extent an inescapable inheritance, albeit one that was also treasured and celebrated by contemporaries both English and foreign. It was, as Alicia C. Montoya has written of eighteenth-century French medievalism, an identity defined by its integration of past and present into an ‘organicist view of history and society’.11 To adopt too narrow a definition of Anglo-Saxonism would be to artificially simplify a remarkably rich and complex cultural-historical phenomenon. Recent scholarship has made significant contributions to knowledge of the development of Anglo-Saxon studies during the early modern and modern periods. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz, ‘Making Medievalism: A Critical Overview’ in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Woodbridge, 2014), 8. 8 Britton J. Harwood, ‘The Political Use of Chaucer in Twentieth-Century America’ in Medievalism in the Modern World, ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout, 1998), 391. 9 Daines Barrington, The Anglo-Saxon Version, from the Historian OROSIUS. By Ælfred the Great. Together with an English Translation from the Anglo-Saxon (London, 1773), xxi n.O. This pre-dates the earliest use identified in Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, ‘Introduction: Anglo-Saxonism and Medievalism’ in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville, 1997), 2. 10 Stephanie Trigg, ‘Introduction’ to Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture, ed. Stephanie Trigg (Turnhout, 2005), xiii–xiv. 11 Alicia C. Montoya, Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Woodbridge, 2013), 224. 7

Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness

4

However, the majority of published work on the history of medievalism has ignored most non-literary forms of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism in England. Michael Alexander’s Medievalism, for example, which traces English medievalism from c.1760, mentions the Anglo-Saxons in an eighteenth-century context in preliminary remarks on Elizabethan antiquarianism and the Glorious Revolution, and afterwards only in passing.12 The journal Studies in Medievalism has included articles on pre-nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism since its inception, though these have dealt almost exclusively with literary and philological subjects.13 Edited collections on Anglo-Saxonism have likewise paid little attention to eighteenth-century manifestations outside a literary context, with most including the period only in prefatory notes or as contextual material for essays on previous or subsequent centuries.14 A lack of appreciation for the contributions of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists has more to do, I think, with a tendency to conflate Anglo-Saxonism and Old English studies than with any other factor. One reason for this may have something to do with a view expressed in 1982 by Carl Berkhout and Milton Gatch: Serious students of Anglo-Saxon literary history, perhaps more than scholars in other areas of medieval studies, constantly encounter their predecessors in the field. Consequently, they need to understand and to evaluate both the motivations of the early scholars for studying the Anglo-Saxons and the achievements of their research.15

Whether or not students of Anglo-Saxon literature have more cause than those in other fields to examine the development of Anglo-Saxonism, there is a fundamental error in assuming that early Anglo-Saxon scholarship was concerned solely with literary studies. By overemphasising the role of Old English lexical and philological studies, and of literary representations of the Anglo-Saxons, scholars from the early twentieth century onward have created, consciously or not, an understanding Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, 2007), xxiii, 39. Although Anglo-Saxonism is admittedly a branch of medievalism, it is nonetheless surprising that Alexander all but omits it from his study. 13 This is almost certainly due to the underlying assumptions of the field rather than to any editorial policy. Notable exceptions include: D. R. Woolf, ‘The Dawn of the Artifact: The Antiquarian Impulse in England, 1500–1730’, SiM 4 (1992), 5–35; Anna Smol, ‘Pleasure, Progress, and the Profession: Elizabeth Elstob and Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Studies’, SiM 9 (1997), 80–97; Chris Bishop, ‘Civilizing the Savage Ancestor: Representations of the AngloSaxons in the Art of Nineteenth-Century Britain’, SiM 15 (2006), 59. It should be noted, however, that Bishop’s article mentions that eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism was spurred by the accession of George I. 14 See, e.g.: David Clark and Nicholas Perkins, eds, Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (Woodbridge, 2010); Frantzen and Niles, eds, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity; Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, 1990); Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg, eds, Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2000); Timothy Graham, ed., The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Kalamazoo, 2000); Anne Savage, ‘Pagans and Christians, Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Saxonists’ in Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. William Gentrup (Turnhout, 1998), 37–50. 15 Berkhout and Gatch, Anglo-Saxon Scholarship, ix. 12

Introduction

5

of Anglo-Saxonism which too often fails to challenge the assumption that eighteenth-century non-literary Anglo-Saxonism was of lesser or no lasting importance.16 This is not to say that literary analyses have made no contribution to the understanding of broader eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism. Many of the conclusions, contentions and underlying assumptions of these studies have suggested ways in which the study of Anglo-Saxonism in the later early modern period might be expanded or developed. In an article on popular literature in the pre-industrial period, John Simons defines medievalism as ‘a process by which the Middle Ages is experienced as a historical entity capable of offering meaningful and even satisfying intellectual, aesthetic, political, and religious images to subsequent societies’.17 As one strand of medievalism, Anglo-Saxonism can be defined in the same way – indeed it ought to be. Moreover, Anglo-Saxonism was in the eighteenth century (and remains) a process capable of offering to those who participated in it an opportunity to engage with the past, to examine that past with reference to the present, and the present with reference to that past. The concerns of eighteenth-century English Anglo-Saxonists were not those of their late-seventeenth-century predecessors, or of the nineteenth-century scholars whose work brought German philology to bear on centuries of Anglo-Saxon scholarship. To assess the achievements of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists in England solely or primarily by comparing them to those of other centuries is to ignore the contexts in which they lived, worked and thought. Religious controversy shaped Elizabethan Anglo-Saxonism. The Civil War and Glorious Revolution shaped late-seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxonism. For eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists the Acts of Settlement and Union, the increasing importance of the British Empire – and of England within it – in economic and political terms, and ongoing debates over the nature and powers of the crown and Parliament, were just a few of the factors that gave rise to specific questions about English history, institutions and culture(s). It is unsurprising, then, that Anglo-Saxonism was influenced by and influenced in turn the ways in which these and other contemporary concerns were addressed. My aim is not to discount the accomplishments of late seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxonists or their students, but to challenge the notion that Anglo-Saxon studies and popular Anglo-Saxonism went into decline or lost ground in eighteenth-century England. The eighteenth century did not produce another George Hickes or Humfrey Wanley, whose erudition and mammoth publications shaped subsequent Anglo-Saxon scholarship into the twentieth century. Yet neither did it see a flagging of scholarly interest in the Anglo-Saxons, as Rosemary Sweet and

16 The origins of this view in twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship can be traced to David Douglas’s highly influential claim that ‘with the solitary exception of the Dictionary compiled by Edward Lye and published in 1772, no outstanding contribution was made to Old English studies’ in eighteenth-century England. David Douglas, English Scholars (London, 1939), 355. 17 John Simons, ‘Medievalism as Cultural Process in Pre-industrial Popular Literature’, SiM 7 (1995), 5.

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Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness

John Niles have demonstrated.18 Both scholarly Anglo-Saxon studies and popular Anglo-Saxonism developed and became more widespread in response to questions raised by eighteenth-century social and political concerns. These developments in turn have contributed to the evolution of Anglo-Saxon studies as an academic discipline and, more recently, to the evolution of medieval and medievalism studies. Eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism was multi- and inter-disciplinary, preceding the stricter disciplinary divisions that emerged in universities in the nineteenth century or the local concentration around the royal and legal courts that characterised Anglo-Saxonism in the Elizabethan and Stuart eras.19 Eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism was by comparison more geographically diffuse, with many of the most active Anglo-Saxonists living at a distance from London, for instance William Nicolson in Carlisle, Samuel Pegge in Derbyshire, or Maurice Johnson and the members of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society in Lincolnshire.20 The eighteenth century also saw an interest in the Anglo-Saxons spread from the universities, Anglican establishment and Inns of Court to the wider literate population through media ranging from national and county histories, to visual art and drama, to legal textbooks. Each of the following five chapters addresses eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism from a particular perspective in order to reveal the kinds of discoveries made, the forms of engagement with Anglo-Saxon history and culture, and the ways in which Anglo-Saxonism as an idea influenced contemporary notions of England’s Anglo-Saxon past and its relevance to and significance for English identity in the present. The Anglo-Saxonism discussed here was a decidedly English strand of a broad range of eighteenth-century medievalisms in Great Britain. Recent work by Katie Trumpener and Jeff Strabone has emphasised the role of medievalism in the ‘bardic nationalisms’ of Scotland, Wales and Ireland in this period, highlighting the ways in which writers in each of these nations looked to distinguish the culture of their Middle Ages from that of England.21 Indeed, in her study of the emergence of British identity in the eighteenth century, Linda Colley observed that a sense of Britishness did not displace other identities, but instead offered a unifying political identity that operated alongside ‘organic attachments’ not only to kingdom (England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales or even Cornwall) but also to county, town and village.22 Krishan Kumar reminds us that the ‘modern insistence that we have one overriding national identity’ is historically anomalous, ‘not the acceptance of multiple identities’.23 Anglo-Saxonist Englishness is thus particular but non-exclusive, one identity among many current in eighteenth-century Britain. 18 Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 2004), 189–230; John D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901 (Oxford, 2015), 147–85. 19 Below, 10, 40, 156. 20 Below, 34, 43, 52–6. 21 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, 1997); Jeff Strabone, Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century (London, 2018). See also: Joanne Parker, ed., The Harp and the Constitution: Myths of Celtic and Gothic Origin (Leiden, 2015). 22 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), 53, 315–16. 23 Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003), 149.

Introduction

7

This study necessarily excludes, then, Anglo-Saxonism in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the wider Empire. While Anglo-Saxonist productions did appear outside England, the largest concentration came from within it, likely because of the obvious, direct relevance of the subject to English history and institutions. Recent scholarship has shown that there are also valid ancillary reasons for discussing eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism as an English phenomenon rather than a British or British Imperial one. Within Great Britain, Anglo-Saxonism was inextricably linked to Englishness as a cultural and political identity. As Colin Kidd has written, ‘the obvious de facto continuity of the historic English parliament after 1707 validated the ethnocentric notion that Britain’s political heritage resided in the history of English institutions’.24 Contemporary associations of the term ‘British’ with the Welsh or pre-Saxon Britons and the seventeenth-century identification of the English with the Anglo-Saxons ‘as conquerors rather than heirs of the Britons’ rendered Anglo-Saxonism an inherently political subject in eighteenth-century British society. At the very least it seems safe to say that when ‘Scotland’s literati rendered their native country in a sense a “historyless” nation’ and ‘[England’s] history came to stand proxy for Scotland’s’, one of the defining elements of such an Anglo-centric view of British history must have been the perceived values and characteristics of those political and social institutions that had originated in England’s Anglo-Saxon past.25 These values, as David Armitage and others have argued, centred on an image of the British as ‘Protestant, commercial, maritime and free’.26 While not self-evidently Anglo-Saxon in origin, over the course of the eighteenth century each of these character traits was discovered in or co-opted into the history of the Anglo-Saxons. As early as the Elizabethan period Matthew Parker and his circle had sought to prove that the Anglo-Saxon church had been independent of Rome, from which it was only a short step to prove the legitimacy of the Church of England.27 The idea that the English were the inheritors of a liberal political tradition was historically well established and trumpeted by writers and politicians both at home and abroad.28 The strong association of the early British empire with maritime activity resonated with stories of the arrival of the Saxons from Germany under Hengist and Horsa and the development of the Anglo-Saxon navy by Alfred the Great, the latter of which found popular expression in James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’.29 The relative abundance of Anglo-Saxon coins in private collections, the frequent antiquarian publications on 24 Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge, 1993), 205. 25 Ibid., 209–10. 26 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 173. See also: Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism (London, 1987); Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 2002), 159–200. 27 For Elizabethan Anglo-Saxonism, see: Eleanor Adams, Old English Scholarship in England: From 1566–1800 (New Haven, 1917); Frantzen, Desire for Origins, 35–50, Rebecca Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study of Old English (Woodbridge, 2012). 28 Below, 169–73. 29 Below, 184.

Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness

8

Anglo-Saxon coinage and mints, extant law codes dealing with trade, and claims by historians like John Whitaker that the Anglo-Saxons had developed a sophisticated trade-based economy, suggested that the origins of Britain’s industrial and mercantile strength also lay in Anglo-Saxon England.30 Anglo-­Saxons were presented as precursors to all four of Armitage’s defining characteristics of Britishness even before there was a Great Britain to be defined. To varying degrees and to varying extents, the idealised and frequently over-hyped virtues of Anglo-Saxon Englishness could be said to stand proxy for the character of all the subjects of the British Empire. This is not to say that Anglo-Saxonism provided a unified identity for all individuals, or not, at least, the same identity for every individual, even within England. While the grand narrative of Anglo-Saxon history presented a core of individual figures and institutions to represent the whole – King Alfred as a paternal heroking, Parliament as a time-honoured bastion of limited monarchy, the common law and juries as bulwarks of liberty – other, more localised identities fitted into Anglo-­ Saxonism as integral constituent parts. As the local histories discussed in Chapter 3 demonstrate, towns and counties and the people who lived in or near them could be seen as the inheritors of particular traditions. Local historians celebrated cities such as Winchester and London for the well-known roles they played in England’s pre-conquest religious, political and economic history. A town such as Bristol, on the other hand, could be woven into the larger English historical narrative when the author of its local history claimed that a particular event in the Anglo-Saxon period provided evidence of a continuing tradition or local character trait. The emergence of local history as a distinct and popular genre during the century provided a platform from which historians could assert that counties from Cornwall to lowland Scotland had in fact played some part in the history of Anglo-Saxon England. Though eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism was inherently English in its origin and form, it also served a larger function within Great Britain, providing a unifying narrative framework within which Scots literati, English antiquaries, emigrants to North America or political radicals could locate historical reflections of themselves and their concerns. The values and cultural characteristics which the Anglo-Saxons seem to have represented for the eighteenth-century public were a subset of those that defined the early British Empire and what it represented to those within and outside it. Whether or not the representation was founded on historical reality was often beside the point. What mattered was that an idea of Anglo-Saxon England as the cultural heartland of the British Empire was in cultural currency, and as such constantly investigated, debated and held up for reassessment and comparison in light of scholarly research and contemporary experience. Since the publication of Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny, a growing body of studies of American Anglo-Saxonism from the colonial period to the twentieth century have appeared, tied most frequently to the origins of American republicanism and the formation of social divisions along racial or class lines (as Horsman argued), or social groups (as presented most notably in Anglo-Saxonism

30

John Whitaker, The History of Manchester, 4 vols (London, 1771–5).

Introduction

9

and the Construction of Social Identity). Other studies have highlighted the Anglo-Saxonist interests of notable American figures such as Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and James Wilson.32 Such interests could lead to important political and social decisions: the influence of John Fortescue-Aland’s The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy seems to have led not only to Thomas Jefferson’s lifelong passion for Old English and Anglo-Saxon history, but to his design for a Great Seal of the United States that included Hengist and Horsa and his later insistence that Old English be included in the curriculum of the University of Virginia.33 What seems to be the case in most American Anglo-Saxonism of the eighteenth century, however, is a tendency to portray the nascent United States as a nation that sought through its founding to return to lost Anglo-Saxon rights and practices. The contrast between this understanding and that of English Anglo-Saxonism – namely that English society, institutions and laws preserved the spirit of England’s Anglo-Saxon ancestors through centuries of organic mutation and adaptation – is significant in understanding both the appeal and the malleability of Anglo-Saxonism in England.34 Following Anthony Smith, I would suggest that eighteenth-century English Anglo-Saxonism, which derived from and in many cases perpetuated earlier early modern ways of thinking about the relationship between past and present, celebrates an English identity ‘constituted . . . by the lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values’ that are shared but open to perpetual reconstruction through the reinterpretation and recombination of historical materials.35 In political terms, nationalism seems to me less well-suited to eighteenth-century English Anglo-Saxonism than ‘patriotism’, which, as Blair Worden writes, did not adhere to any particular party for any length of time, but instead represented a sense of shared ideology opposed to corruption, division, factionalism, and political and social instability.36 Considered in the wider terms comprehended by this study, I share Kumar’s preference for ‘Englishness’ over either nationalism or patriotism.37 As a non-exclusive but definable idea of English identity rooted in 31

31 Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial AngloSaxonism (Cambridge, 1981). 32 See, e.g.: H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience (Chapel Hill, 1965); Laura Kendrick, ‘The American Middle Ages: Eighteenth-Century Saxonist Myth-Making’ in The Middle Ages after the Middle Ages, ed. Marie-Françoise Alamichel and Derek Brewer (Cambridge, 1997), 121–36; Maria Jose Mora and Maria Jose Gomez-Calderon, ‘The Study of Old English in America (1776–1850): National Uses of the Saxon Past’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 97 (1998), 322–36. 33 Stanley Hauer, ‘Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language’, PMLA 98 (1983), 879–98; Julian Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 1 (Princeton, 1950), 494–5. 34 While cognisant of the fact that antiquarian, historical and political publications flowed back and forth across the Atlantic throughout much of the eighteenth century, all future subsequent references to early American Anglo-Saxonism are confined to notes for the sake of clarity. 35 Anthony Smith, National Identity (London, 1991), 29; and ‘The Origins of Nations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 12 (1989), 340–67. 36 Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (London, 2001), 168; Colley, Britons, 50–2. 37 Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, 203–25.

10

Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness

medievalism, Englishness admits of diverse manifestations in media ranging from historical accounts to reproductive prints, and of creators ranging from antiquarian clergymen to politicians, actresses and artists. In contrast to the ethnic or racial nationalism identified by Horsman and to that deployed in recent white supremacist propaganda, English Anglo-Saxonists of the eighteenth century appear to have been largely uninterested in linking Anglo-Saxonism and racialist nationalism; as such, those debates do not feature here. Eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist Englishness operated as a cultural identity that was widely shared and that, on account of its close kinship with a distinctly internationalist Gothicism (which itself included a remarkably broad range of origin narratives), admitted at least some degree of national and ethnic inclusivity.38 Eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists relied on a body of scholarly works in print and manuscript produced during the twenty-six years between the Glorious Revolution and the accession of George I. Chapter 1 provides an overview of these works, including ground-breaking projects such as George Hickes’s Thesaurus and Humfrey Wanley’s Catalogus, as well as the editions of chronicles and local research by provincial scholars such as Thomas Gale at York and William Nicolson in Cumbria. The chapter also considers the publications, activities and legacy of the Oxford School of Anglo-Saxonists that included Edward Thwaites, William and Elizabeth Elstob, and Thomas Hearne, scholars whose interrelationships with one another and whose shifting fortunes within and outside the university contributed to changes in the shape of, and support for, Anglo-Saxon studies in the early decades of the century.39 The works of Elizabeth Elstob and John Fortescue-Aland, and the political overtones of Edmund Gibson’s 1722 edition of William Camden’s Britannia, presented in the second part of the chapter, represent the shift from university-based Anglo-Saxon studies to the wider, more diffuse Anglo-Saxonism linked to contemporary poetry, drama and visual art that characterises the eighteenth century. Early eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists clearly engaged in scholarship and produced creative works at least in part to address political and social concerns. Like Rebecca Brackmann, whose study of the Anglo-Saxon scholarship of Lawrence Nowell and William Lambarde reveals the connection between their work and the policies of William Cecil and the wider Elizabethan court, I too would ‘query the very notion that medieval studies arising from political or social goals were “suspect and reprehensible”’.40 Neither are examples of imaginative and creative Anglo-Saxonist productions necessarily suspect. That eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism was motivated by social or political concerns does not negate the validity or value of the discoveries of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists, or the appeal of Anglo-Saxonist literature and art. Scholarly analysis, political commentary and popular 38 Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999). 39 David Fairer, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies’ in The History of the University of Oxford: V, ed. L. Sutherland and L. Mitchell (Oxford, 1986), 807–29. 40 Brackmann, Elizabethan Invention, 9.

Introduction

11

entertainment often co-existed in eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist publications, and often in ways that were mutually supportive. Contemporary politics also coloured the Anglo-Saxon studies undertaken by fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London and its corresponding members, and their publications in Gentleman’s Magazine and the Society’s own Archaeologia. Chapter 2 provides an outline of the work of Anglo-Saxonist antiquaries in sections respectively devoted to numismatics, portable artefacts, barrow excavations and architecture. Despite recent work on eighteenth-century antiquarianism by Rosemary Sweet, Daniel Woolf and fellows of the Society of Antiquaries, relatively little has been said about antiquaries’ interest in or interpretation of the physical remains of the Anglo-Saxons.41 This is likely due to two related factors. First, the only monograph history of the Society, published in 1956, contains strikingly few references to eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxon studies by society members and, citing David Douglas, claims rather curiously that after 1730 ‘the study of national history offered no chance of preferment or patronage, since it could hardly be turned to the glory of a German dynasty’.42 Second, and importantly for more recent work, attempts to undermine the pejorative connotations often attached to the term ‘antiquary’ by highlighting the role played by antiquaries in the development of Enlightenment scientific practice and scholarly professionalism have tended to obscure the importance of amateurism and medievalist enthusiasms to antiquarian practice. Chapter 2 presents an analysis of eighteenth-century antiquarian Anglo-Saxon studies that highlights both the scientific and the amateur, revealing the ways in which identity (personal, local and national), aesthetic appreciation and enjoyment shaped the evolution of Anglo-Saxon studies and the channels through which antiquarian Anglo-Saxon studies reached wider, more popular audiences. Many, if not all, eighteenth-century English local historians were antiquaries themselves who drew on antiquarian research to construct new historical narratives that described the present-day English landscape in terms of the past. Chapter 3 draws on the work of Daniel Woolf, who outlines an eighteenth-century ‘transition in thinking about the past’ that involved both an increasingly visual sense of history and the evolution of historiographical knowledge as a type of ‘cultural currency’.43 Both elements are obvious in new histories of England by Paul Rapin and David Hume, which established a more or less standard narrative of Anglo-Saxon history to which Robert Henry and Joseph Strutt added detailed descriptions of historic manners, customs and material culture. The importance of Anglo-Saxon history is also evident in works such as William Hutchinson’s A View of Northumberland and John Milner’s The History and Survey of the Antiquities of Winchester, which bring county and local history into conversation with national historical narratives. As local historiography developed over the course of the century the story of a town’s or 41 Bernard Nurse, David Gaimster and Sarah McCarthy, eds, Making History: Antiquaries in Britain, 1707–2007 (London, 2007); Sweet, Antiquaries; Woolf, ‘Dawn of the Artifact’. 42 Joan Evans, A History of the Society of Antiquaries of London (Oxford, 1956), 98. Aside from passing references, most mentions of Anglo-Saxon antiquities in Evans’s work refer to items published in Archaeologia and are presented in catalogue fashion. 43 Daniel Woolf, ‘From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500–1700’, Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005), 33–70.

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12

county’s Anglo-Saxon history became an essential and patriotically charged element in the stories of the particular places of England. These works were in demand by a highly literate middle- and upper-class population who were also buyers of increasing numbers of tour guides that contained antiquarian and historical material as a matter of course.44 Examining national and local historiography alongside one another reveals the regular, repeated attempts of local literati to participate in the construction of an aggregate historical narrative in which contemporary England could be viewed and even experienced as an Anglo-Saxon landscape.45 The creative and political Anglo-Saxonisms that are the subjects of Chapters 4 and 5 rested on a foundation of textual scholarship, antiquarian enquiry and historiography. It is these forms of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism that are most easily recognisable to scholars familiar with Victorian and later medievalist literature and art. What set creative and political Anglo-Saxonism apart and bound them together was a common reliance on notions of character, values and identity that were believed to be an inheritance from the Anglo-Saxons and to constitute important aspects of Englishness. Although the pairing of drama, poetry, sculpture and visual arts with political thought and jurisprudence may at first seem unlikely, the two were in fact remarkably and revealingly similar in the ways they deployed the idea of England’s Anglo-Saxon past. Chapter 4 presents a series of case studies or close readings of images of objects, people and events from Anglo-Saxon history, and situates those case studies within the broader context of eighteenth-century artistic and print culture. Examples include antiquarian engravings; illustrations in popular histories of England produced for consumption by a broad social spectrum of readers and viewers; the first three prints in the series English History Delineated, which depicted events from Anglo-Saxon history for collecting and for educational and decorative use; and history paintings of Anglo-Saxon subjects commissioned by elite patrons and created by well-known artists for public and private display. In every case artists combined research into Anglo-Saxon history and culture with imaginative elements intended to render their works immediate and emotionally engaging. In their depictions of Anglo-Saxon heroes and heroines, their implicit advocacy for visual and imaginative approaches to historical study, and their adaptation of Anglo-Saxon subjects to fit ideals of artistic taste, these images encouraged viewers to appreciate and even emulate cultural virtues and ideals defined as being Anglo-Saxon in origin. Each of the works discussed in Chapter 4 bears examination and assessment on artistic grounds, as well. For example, while Alfred: A Masque has been the subject of a range of musicological and literary scholarship, here an analysis of the masque’s content and presentation of the life of its title character sheds light on the ways in which Anglo-Saxonist politics, drama and history combined to inform visual 44

2008).

Charles Lancaster, Seeing England: Antiquaries, Travellers and Naturalists (Stroud,

45 This may be what Kathleen Wilson has referred to as ‘transforming imperial trauma into noble national triumph through the power of historical surrogation’, though the implication that imperial expansion was somehow ignoble or harmful in the eyes of local historians seems to me harder to substantiate. See: Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2002), 85–9.

Introduction

13

representations of Alfred as the nation’s paternal hero-king. The chapter also considers the accomplishments of Joseph Strutt, whose Horda Angel-cynnan, published in 1775–6, reveals the ways in which first-rate Anglo-Saxon scholarship could and did contribute not only to scholarly understanding of the Anglo-Saxons but to popular representations and artistic interpretations of the early medieval English past.47 Such representations and interpretations have received most scholarly attention, however, as they appear in the works of eighteenth-century philosophers, politicians and lawyers such as Bolingbroke, Montesquieu and Blackstone. Political Anglo-Saxonism of the late seventeenth, early eighteenth and later eighteenth centuries has received significant and sustained scholarly attention.48 The majority of such scholarship has focussed on eighteenth-century party politics, radicalism and ancient constitutionalism, only rarely considering the diverse forms of scholarly and creative Anglo-Saxonism that circulated alongside political writing and language throughout the century. Only Hugh MacDougall’s Racial Myth in English History explores eighteenth-century political Anglo-Saxonism as a wider cultural phenomenon.49 Although brief, MacDougall’s fourth chapter links Anglo-Saxonism to writers such as Bolingbroke, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Hume; notes the dedication of Edmund Gibson’s Britannia to George I; and makes the claim that eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism stood ‘for an inherited Gothic genius for creating and maintaining free institutions [and] came also to champion good business sense and the virtue of prosperity’.50 As Chapter 5 demonstrates, Anglo-Saxonism provided eighteenth-century politicians with a unifying language with which to discuss English political institutions and the societal values and ideals they represented. A close reading of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England or Bolingbroke’s Idea of a Patriot King reveals concerns shared by antiquaries, historians and artists. As John Fortescue-Aland wrote in 1714, the Anglo-Saxon-originated ‘Law of England is . . . the Foundation of all our Happiness; it secures to us our Estates, our Liberties, and our Lives’.51 In every decade of the century, Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric was deployed by individuals on both sides of the parliamentary divide, as well as by their critics and supporters throughout the country. That same rhetoric shaped popular Anglo-Saxonist dramas that revivified the Anglo-Saxon past as a vehicle for political commentary. Anglo-Saxonist dramas celebrated the Act of Union of 46

Michael Burden, Garrick, Arne and the Masque of Alfred: A Case Study in National, Theatrical, and Musical Politics (Lampeter, 1994). 47 Joseph Strutt, Horda Angel-cynnan: or, a Compleat View of the Manners, Customs, Arts, Habits, etc. of the Inhabitants of England, from the Arrival of the Saxons till the reign of Henry the Eighth, 3 vols (London, 1775–6). 48 Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in the Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London, 1958); Newman, Rise of English Nationalism; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715– 1785 (Cambridge, 1995). 49 Hugh MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover, 1982), 75–88. 50 Ibid., 75. 51 John Fortescue-Aland, The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy (London, 1714), iii–iv. 46

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1707 and British naval victories, urged vigilance during periods of political unrest, and reflected contemporary anxieties over issues ranging from dissatisfaction with Robert Walpole’s ministry to the French Revolution. What this suggests is not that Anglo-Saxonism was a partisan issue, but that it was an essential element of England’s political culture, identity and discourse, recognised and widely celebrated as such by writers throughout Britain and beyond. As such, Anglo-Saxonism appears as a historically informed rhetoric of English political and cultural exceptionalism that, while readily and frequently co-opted by Whigs, Tories and Radicals to serve various ends at various moments, carries with it a clear strain of patriotism rooted in a shared sense of Anglo-Saxon Englishness. Eighteenth-century Britain saw the production of a vast number of manuscripts, excavation reports, articles and other published works that made undeniable contributions to knowledge about the Anglo-Saxon period. Simultaneously, the spread of interest in the Anglo-Saxons to the wider literate public, the appearance of Anglo-Saxonist works of art and literature, and the regular use of Anglo-Saxonist language in English politics contributed to ‘bringing about a change in the quality of historical consciousness’.52 By the end of the century it was possible and increasingly commonplace for the English to define themselves with reference to an Anglo-Saxon inheritance. As Turner wrote, the Anglo-Saxons had become integral to England’s ‘perpetual discourse’, and Anglo-Saxonism the sine qua non of a historically defined concept of Englishness.

Louis Mink, ‘On the Writing and Rewriting of History’ in Historical Understanding (Ithaca, 1987), 89–105 (104). 52

1 Anglo-Saxonisms of the Early Eighteenth Century

I

Not only our Histories, but our Language, our Laws, our Customs, our Names of Persons and Names of Places, do all abundantly testify, that the greatest part of your Majesty’s Subjects here, are of SAXON Original. Edmund Gibson1

n a letter to the Swedish antiquary Eric Benzelius written late in the summer of 1704, Humfrey Wanley announced the imminent publication of George Hickes’s Thesaurus, a work now widely regarded as the single most significant eighteenth-century contribution to Anglo-Saxon scholarship. The first of its two volumes, by Hickes, was ‘full of uncommon Learning, relating to the Laws, Customs, &c. of our Saxon Ancestors’; the second, Wanley noted, contained ‘my Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon MSS’.2 The two volumes represented the culmination of decades of work on the grammar of Old English and other septentrional languages. Hickes’s Old English grammar became the standard for more than a century, and Wanley’s catalogue contained a comprehensive survey of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in England that would remain unrivalled for more than 250 years.3 Critical response to the Thesaurus offered unqualified praise, and over the course of the following twenty years four editions of an abridgement of the first volume were published, each containing testimonies to the enduring value of Hickes’s work. As late as 1837, J. M. Kemble praised Hickes’s contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies, despite the fact that by Kemble’s day the advent of scientific philology had ‘render[ed] his grammars rather dangerous than useful’.4 The achievements of Hickes and Wanley, like those of most of the other authors discussed in the first half of this chapter, are relatively well known to scholars of medievalism and the history of medieval studies thanks to Eleanor Adams, David William Camden, Britannia, ed. Edmund Gibson, 2nd edn (London, 1722), 2. Humfrey Wanley to Eric Benzelius, 28 August 1704, Uppsala, University Library G:19:1b, fol. 206, in Letters of Humfrey Wanley: Palaeographer, Anglo-Saxonist, Librarian 1672–1726, ed. P. L. Heyworth (Oxford, 1989), 236. George Hickes, Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus, 2 vols (Oxford, 1703–5), the second volume of which contains Humfrey Wanley, Librorum ett. Septentrionalium, qui in Angliæ Bibliothecis extant, nec non multorum Vett. Codd. Septentrionalium alibi extantium Catalogus Historico-Criticus. 3 N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957). 4 Francisque Michel, ed., Bibliothèque Anglo-Saxonne (Paris, 1837), 13. 1

2

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Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness

Douglas and David Fairer, although Douglas’s observation that Old English studies saw a marked decline after the 1720s has led on occasion to a mistaken assumption that eighteenth-century scholars had little or no interest in Anglo-Saxon literature, history and culture.5 It is nevertheless necessary to review both the publications available to and produced by early eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists before considering the scholarly and popular forms of Anglo-Saxonism that relied on them. Not only do these works reveal the highly collaborative nature of eighteenth-­century Anglo-Saxon studies, they also exhibit a clear presentism – defined by Louise D’Arcens as ‘arguably the essence of medievalism itself ’ – that would shape a variety of forms of Anglo-Saxonism as the century progressed.6 Wanley’s letter to Benzelius contains one of the most common forms of evidence for the admixture of medieval studies and medievalism that characterises eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism in his reference to ‘our Saxon Ancestors’. Wanley assumes kinship with and claims descent from the creators of the manuscripts he has painstakingly identified and catalogued. Moreover, the possessive pronoun asserts an ownership claim over the Anglo-Saxon past that extends beyond Wanley to the English people, who share with him a common Anglo-Saxon identity. Hickes shared these sentiments, writing to Thomas Parker that he had begun Anglo-Saxon studies ‘purely out of a zeale to make known the Language, Customes, Lawes, and manners of our ancestres, and to set our English antiquities in a good Light’.7 Within a decade of Hickes’s letter fellow Anglo-Saxonists hailed the return of a ‘Saxon’ to the throne of England in the person of George I, whose accession provoked a surge in popular Anglo-Saxonist enthusiasm that ranged from works of philological scholarship to poetry and plays, all of which employed a rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. In 1722 the scholarly Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, dedicated his second edition of William Camden’s Britannia to George I, claiming that George’s English and German subjects were in fact one and the same people, united in a common ‘Saxon’ origin. While Hickes’s Thesaurus was the work of ‘a man, who hath spent 9 yeares in hard labour, and broken his constitution in bringing the antiquities of his country out of dust, and darkness to light’, Gibson’s edition was the latest iteration of a celebrated work of English history that was already associated with a historically grounded patriotism.8 Within two decades of the Thesaurus’s publication, the combination of medievalism and national pride that drove Hickes had come to characterise eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric rooted in Anglo-Saxon textual and linguistic scholarship. This would underpin scholarly and popular Anglo-Saxonism throughout the eighteenth century.

5 Adams, Old English Scholarship; Douglas, English Scholars; Fairer, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies’. 6 Louise D’Arcens, ‘Presentism’ in Medievalism, ed. Emery and Utz, 181. 7 George Hickes to Thomas Parker, 1 June 1704, BL Stowe MS 750, fol. 2r. 8 Hickes to Jonathan Kimberley, 19 June 1705, in A Chorus of Grammars: The Correspondence of George Hickes and his Collaborators on the Thesaurus linguarum septentrionalium, ed. R. Harris (Toronto, 1992), 411.

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Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Later Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries Shortly after his establishment of the university printing press in 1672, the Oxford vice-chancellor John Fell outlined an ambitious publishing agenda that included ‘The liturgicks and homilies of the Ancient English-saxons’.9 When the Bodleian received Francis Junius’s manuscripts and fount of Anglo-Saxon type in 1677, Fell recognised in them a means of advancing the tradition of Anglo-Saxon scholarship whose luminaries included William Nowell, William Lambarde, John Selden, William Somner, Abraham Wheelocke and Junius himself.10 Their scholarship led Fell to identify three pressing needs: an updated Old English dictionary, an authoritative Old English grammar and a comprehensive catalogue of AngloSaxon manuscripts.11 In 1678 Fell published Obadiah Walker’s translation of John Spelman’s life of King Alfred the Great, a text that sparked a renewed interest in Alfred as a model of Anglo-Saxon kingship and led ultimately to the emergence of what Simon Keynes identifies as a ‘cult’ of Alfred the Great as England’s hero-king and national father-figure.12 Six years later Fell published the first volume of medieval chronicles edited by Thomas Gale and William Fulman, which included the highly influential first edition of pseudo-Ingulph’s history of Croyland Abbey.13 Having been encouraged by Fell and Thomas Marshall (editor of a 1665 edition of the Anglo-Saxon and Gothic gospels), in 1689 George Hickes completed his Institutiones Grammaticæ Anglo-Saxonicæ et Mœso-Gothicæ, the first Old English grammar since that of Ælfric (composed c.998).14 By the century’s end Thomas Gale’s Historiæ Britanicæ, Saxonicæ, Anglo-Danicæ, Scriptores XV (which included Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniæ, Nennius’s Historia Britonnum and Eddius’s Vita Sancti Wilfredi), Thomas Tanner’s Notitia Monastica and Edmund Gibson’s edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had all been published at Oxford.15 So too had Christopher Rawlinson’s edition of Alfred the Great’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which marked Stanley Morison, John Fell, The University Press and the ‘Fell’ Types (Oxford, 1967), 39. Harris, ed., Chorus of Grammars, 6–7; Harry Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press: Vol. I, to the Year 1780 (Oxford, 1975), 124–5. 11 Fairer, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies’, 809; for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Anglo-Saxon scholarship, see: Adams, Old English Scholarship; Berkhout and Gatch, AngloSaxon Scholarship; Brackmann, Elizabethan Invention; Douglas, English Scholars; and Graham, Recovery of Old English. 12 John Spelman, Ælfredi Magni Anglorum Regis, ed. and trans. Obadiah Walker (Oxford, 1678). 13 William Fulman, ed., Rerum Anglicarum Scriptorum Veterum (Oxford, 1684). 14 Harris, ed., Chorus of Grammars, 4–8. Francis Junius, Quatuor D. N. Jesu Christi Evangeliorum versiones perantiquæ duæ, Gothica scil. et Anglo-Saxonica, ed. Thomas Marshall (Dordrecht, 1665). William Somner’s Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum (London, 1659) included an edition of Ælfric’s grammar. 15 Thomas Gale, ed., Historiæ Britanicæ, Saxonicæ, Anglo-Danicæ, Scriptores XV (Oxford, 1691); Edmund Gibson, ed. and trans., Chronicon Saxonicum (Oxford, 1692); Thomas Tanner, Notitia Monastica (Oxford, 1695). For Gibson’s edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, see: Angelika Lutz, ‘The Study of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the Seventeenth Century and the Establishment of Old English Studies in the Universities’ in Graham, Recovery of Old English, 1–82; Norman Sykes, Edmund Gibson: Bishop of London 1669–1748 (Oxford, 1926), 11; Fairer, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies’, 811. 9

10

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the first appearance of Old English poetry printed in metrical half-lines. As such, it represented a continuation of the work on Anglo-Saxon poetry begun by Junius, whose transcript of BL Cotton MS Otho A.vi probably served as one of Rawlinson’s sources (the other being Bodleian MS Bodl. 180).16 This period also saw the publication in London of Henry Wharton’s Anglia Sacra, a collection of hagiographies and biographies of medieval English churchmen including Wulfstan, Anselm and St Oswald.17 In 1693 James Wright published his English translation of Monasticon Anglicanum, the three-volume collection of Old English and Latin charters edited by William Dugdale in collaboration with Roger Dodsworth that had become a standard reference work for legal and historical studies related to England’s monasteries.18 As the titles of these publications suggest, a concern with legal and religious issues coloured much Anglo-Saxon scholarship of the seventeenth century, though the danger of appearing sympathetic to Catholicism remained high for scholars interested in the pre-Reformation past. As late as 1678 the publication of Spelman’s Alfred the Great had attracted parliamentary attention on account of Obadiah Walker’s notes that cast non-Protestants in a positive light.19 Fortunately for Anglo-Saxon scholars, attitudes toward historical studies of monasticism softened dramatically after 1689, and Wharton’s Anglia Sacra appeared without known incident. Four years later Thomas Tanner remarked regretfully that the Elizabethan antiquary William Camden had been ‘forced to apologize for barely mentioning the monasteries’.20 This softening of attitudes probably stemmed in part from the overwhelmingly positive reception of contemporary French scholarship by the Jesuit Jean Bolland and his successors on the Acta Sanctorum, and the Benedictine Jean Mabillon, whose De re diplomatica laid the foundation for modern studies of medieval charters. Both scholars enjoyed a wide European readership and set new scholarly standards by applying humanist, often secularist critical approaches to the analysis and editing of medieval saints’ lives and ecclesiastical legal documents.21 An acceptance of the need to study monastic records also owed much to the practical utility of manuscript studies: monastic charters had the power to elucidate the descents of landownership and usage rights. As Wright noted, the Monasticon was ‘admitted as a good Circumstantial Evidence in the Courts of Westminster where the Records therein transcribed could not . . . be otherwise recovered’.22 Although a pervasive anti-Catholic sentiment continued to plague scholarship and politics Christopher Rawlinson, An. Manl. Sever. Boethi Consolationis Philosophiæ Libri V. Anglo-Saxonice Redditi ab Alfredo, Inclyto Anglo-Saxonum Rege (Oxford, 1698). See also: Kevin Kiernan, ‘Alfred the Great’s Burnt Boethius’ in The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (Ann Arbor, 1998), 7–32. 17 Henry Wharton, Anglia Sacra (London, 1691). 18 James Wright, trans. and ed., Monasticon Anglicanum, 3 vols (London, 1693); William Dugdale, ed., Monasticon Anglicanum, 3 vols (London, 1655–73). 19 Adams, Old English Scholarship, 77–8. 20 Tanner, Notitia Monastica, Preface. 21 Donald Sullivan, ‘Jean Bolland (1596–1665) and the Early Bollandists’ and Rutherford Aris, ‘Jean Mabillon (1632–1707)’ in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, Volume 1: History, ed. Helen Damico and Joseph B. Zavadil (New York, 1995), 3–14, 15–32. 22 James Wright, trans. and ed., Monasticon Anglicanum (London, 1693), ‘To the Reader’. 16

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throughout the century, Anglo-Saxonists were increasingly viewed as being on the side of the ecclesiastical and political establishment, and were therefore able to deal more or less unapologetically with works by and about Anglo-Saxon religious figures and their communities. In the preface to Institutiones, Hickes explicitly tied Old English and AngloSaxon studies to contemporary legal practice, encouraging the ‘young gentry who adorn the Inns of Court . . . to give themselves to Saxon studies, and to survey all the monuments of venerable antiquity written in the Saxon language and characters (Britain’s own peculiar treasure)’.23 Hickes’s emphasis on the venerability of AngloSaxon texts and the utility of Old English for members of the legal profession, like his inclusion of an Anglo-Saxon coronation oath, reflected his own politics and personal circumstances. In the year Institutiones was published Hickes was suspended from preferment as Dean of Worcester Cathedral after refusing to swear the oath of allegiance to William and Mary. Institutiones is in part a political and religious statement couched in the language of Anglo-Saxonist philology. After being deprived of his deanship and subsequently declared outlaw for refusing to recognise his deprivation, Hickes remained officially in hiding until the Lord Chancellor, John Somers, secured a writ of nolle persequi in 1699.24 It was during this period – explored in great detail by Richard Harris – that Hickes carried out much of his work on the Thesaurus, primarily by means of the assistance of Anglo-Saxonists in Oxford and his network of correspondents abroad.25 It is a testament to the power of Hickes’s intellect and the esteem in which his contemporaries held him that though few of them shared his political convictions they nonetheless offered their advice, contributed content, and provided him with loans of manuscripts and transcriptions of material in libraries inaccessible to him. Hickes’s experiences also highlight the peculiar political power of AngloSaxon studies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. R. J. Smith and Colin Kidd have pointed out that Anglo-Saxon studies had featured in Whig and Tory polemic throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, and would remain intimately connected with partisan writing beyond 1714.26 Yet Somers, a leading member of the Whig Junto, supported Hickes, a nonjuring bishop and adviser to James II. During his period of outlawry Hickes also maintained close ties with William Nicolson, White Kennett, Edward Thwaites and Edmund Gibson, all Church of England clergymen who were not nonjurors. What united them was a shared commitment to Anglo-Saxon studies and a belief in the intimate connection of those studies with England’s political and cultural identity. Among Hickes’s most important supporters during this period were the palaeographer and librarian Humfrey Wanley and the philologist Edward Thwaites. Wanley, who taught himself Old English by ‘transcrib[ing] the Saxon Grammar & 23 George Hickes, Institutiones grammaticæ Anglo-Saxonicæ et Mœso-Gothicæ (Oxford, 1689), Preface. 24 For Hickes’s religious career during this period, see: Douglas, English Scholars, 105–14, and Harris, ed., Chorus of Grammars, 28–38. 25 Harris, ed., Chorus of Grammars. 26 R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge, 1987), 14–49; Kidd, British Identities, 83–98.

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the Catalogue of Saxon Books’ from Hickes’s Institutiones, arrived in Oxford in 1695 and began cataloguing Anglo-Saxon manuscripts as an Assistant Librarian in the Bodleian.27 Within three years Hickes told Wanley that ‘I have learnt more from you, than ever I did from any other man’, a compliment that accurately captures their relative standing as manuscript scholars.28 After leaving Oxford for London, Wanley spent three years completing his historical and critical Catalogus of AngloSaxon manuscripts that would become the second volume of the Thesaurus.29 So thorough was the Catalogus that, according to Neil Ker, by 1957 ‘less than a dozen manuscripts containing a considerable amount of Old English [had] been found in English libraries since Wanley wrote’.30 The Catalogus remains the only source of information on several manuscripts that have since been lost, damaged or destroyed.31 In some instances, such as the entry for BL Cotton Vitellius A.xv (the Beowulf manuscript), Wanley penned the earliest known note on manuscripts of particular interest to later scholars.32 Long after Hickes’s grammars were superseded and despite Harris’s estimation that Wanley’s contribution ‘remains the greatest asset of Hickes’s Thesaurus’, it is important to remember that Wanley’s access to libraries and information about the contents of those he did not visit personally depended on letters of introduction from Hickes and his associates.33 It must also be remembered that the Catalogus was one part of the Thesaurus, a work associated first and foremost with Hickes (assuming other scholars’ prefatory essays, dedications, citations and marginal glosses can be seen as accurate indicators); eighteenth-century scholars rarely mentioned how they located the manuscripts they referenced.34 While Wanley identified and catalogued Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, Edward Thwaites taught and led the Oxford School of Anglo-Saxonists, members of whom contributed to the content and success of the Thesaurus. In 1698 Thwaites published an edition of the Old English Heptateuch, Job and Nicodemus, a fragment of Judith, and Ælfric’s preface to Genesis without a translation, which suggests a certain degree of optimism for the future of Old English philological scholarship Wanley to Charlett, 15 October 1694, Letters of Humfrey Wanley, ed. Heyworth, 5, xv. Hickes to Wanley, 14 March 1698, BL Harley MS 3779, fol. 65. 29 Eileen Joy, ‘Thomas Smith, Humfrey Wanley, and the “Little Known Country” of the Cotton Library’, Electronic British Library Journal (2005), 29; Harris, ed., Chorus of Grammars, 63–71. 30 Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts, xiii. 31 The Catalogus is the primary authority for all or part of nineteen Cotton MSS from Galba, Otho, Tiberius and Vitellius presses; BL Additional 34652, fol. 2; Bodleian Rawlinson Q. e. 20 (15606); and Kassel Landesbibliothek, Anhang 19 (Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts, nos. 156, 157, 168–73, 175–81, 183, 195, 222, 224). Also included was Lambeth Library MS 487, the Finnsburg Fragment (Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts, no. 282). See: Ker, 503. 32 ‘In hoc libro, qui Poeseos Anglo-Saxonicæ egregium est exemplum, scripta videntur bella quæ Beowulfus quidam Danus, ex Regio Scyldingorum stirpe Ortus, gessit contra Sueciæ Regulos.’ Wanley, Catalogus, 219. 33 Harris, ed., Chorus of Grammars, 67. Thomas Tanner introduced Wanley to the keeper of the Cotton Library in 1695 and Arthur Charlett to Bodley’s Librarian in the same year. In 1700, Hickes introduced Wanley to Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, whose librarian Wanley became in 1708. Letters of Humfrey Wanley, ed. Heyworth, 12–13; Douglas, English Scholars, 127. 34 A notable exception is Joseph Strutt, for whom see below, 83–4, 112–14. 27

28

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and a ready market. It was a groundbreaking work that remained the standard edition until 1922.36 As Margaret Clunies Ross and Amanda Collins have pointed out, Thwaites published his text at considerable risk to his career. When he dedicated the text to Hickes – at the time still under proscription – ‘the vice-chancellor . . . threatened to suppress the edition unless Thwaites cut out the dedication’. Thwaites refused and, despite continued threats, publication went ahead.37 The appearance of the imprimatur of vice-chancellor Meare and a dedication to the outlaw and fugitive ‘Viro Summo, Georgio Hickesio, S.T.P. Literaturæ Anglo-Saxonicæ Instaurati’ on facing pages in Heptateuchus remains a striking juxtaposition, and a striking commentary on the personal and fiercely loyal community sentiment that united Anglo-Saxonists at the turn of the eighteenth century. Thwaites was also a dedicated and pioneering teacher of Old English in a period when Hickes’s Institutiones and William Somner’s Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-­ Anglicum, copies of which had become prohibitively expensive and rare, represented the only textbooks.38 As Thwaites wrote in despair to Wanley, ‘I have 15 young Students . . . and but one Somner for them all.’39 To meet the needs of his students he led work on Vocabularium Anglo-Saxonicum, a wordlist extracted from Somner’s dictionary, and Grammatica-Anglo-Saxonica, a condensed version of the Old English grammar from Hickes’s Thesaurus, both intended as textbooks for students. Publication of the Grammatica was probably supported by Christopher Rawlinson, to whom Thwaites dedicated it and whom he described as an ‘excellent man . . . distinguished among the patrons of Saxon Literature’.40 Together the Vocabularium and Grammatica-Anglo-Saxonica provided contemporary and future scholars with an affordable means of beginning Old English studies. Thwaites’s interest in Ælfric inspired William Elstob’s edition of Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, first published in 1701, and his sister Elizabeth’s An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-day of St Gregory, a masterful edition of Ælfric’s Old English life of Gregory the Great containing a facing-page modern English translation and erudite essays in both the introduction and appendix.41 Elizabeth Elstob also published the first Old English 35

35 Edward Thwaites, Heptateuchus, Liber Job, et Evangelium Nicodemi; Anglo-Saxonice. Historiæ Judith Fragmentum; Dano-Saxonice (Oxford, 1698). Thwaites’s edition was based on Bodleian MS. Laud misc. 509. 36 S. J. Crawford, ed., The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, Ælfric’s Treatise on the Old and New Testament and his Preface to Genesis, EETS, Original Series 160 (London, 1922), esp. vii. 37 Margaret Clunies Ross and Amanda J. Collins, ‘Thwaites, Edward (bap. 1671, d. 1711)’, ODNB; Fairer, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies’, 812–13. 38 Somner, Dictionarium; A Treatise of Gavelkind, both name and thing (London, 1660). See also: Kathryn Lowe, ‘“The Oracle of His Country”? William Somner, Gavelkind, and Lexicography in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ in Graham, Recovery of Old English, 281–300; Graham Perry, ‘An Incipient Medievalist in the Seventeenth Century: William Somner of Canterbury’, SiM 9 (1997), 58–65. 39 Thwaites to Humfrey Wanley, 14 January 1699, Bodleian MS Eng. Hist. c. 6, fols 100–1. 40 Thomas Benson, Vocabularium Anglo-Saxonicum (Oxford, 1701); Edward Thwaites, Grammatica-Anglo-Saxonica ex Hickesiano Linguarum septentrionalium thesauro excerpta (Oxford, 1711). 41 Elizabeth Elstob, An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-Day of St. Gregory: Anciently used in the English-Saxon Church (London, 1709).

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grammar in modern English, to which we will return.42 Each of these works was groundbreaking in its own right, and all were inspired or supported by Thwaites. The shared academic interests of Thwaites and Hickes, and the accomplishments of Thwaites’s students, allowed Hickes to draw on a tradition of Anglo-Saxon scholarship as well as recent advances as he prepared the first volume of the Thesaurus. His Old English grammar contains extracts from Thwaites’s Heptateuchus and Rawlinson’s Boethius, as well as references to all of the Anglo-Saxon texts produced in Oxford between 1677 and 1701. The ‘Dissertatio Epistolaris’, Hickes’s masterpiece of diplomatic studies, includes William Elstob’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, and Sir Andrew Fountaine’s essay on Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Danish coinage (with contributions from Elstob and Thwaites). Hickes’s use of literary and homiletic examples to advance his arguments in the ‘Dissertatio’ displays the influence and assistance of Thwaites and his students, all of whom were dedicated to the study of precisely these types of materials. His detailed study of palaeography testifies to just how much he had learned from Wanley. The Thesaurus is thus a marker of Hickes’s accomplishments as well as those of generations of Anglo-Saxon scholars who, spurred by legal and religious concerns, created the essential underpinnings for his scholarship. The Thesaurus also carries clear markers of Hickes’s Anglo-Saxonist patriotism. In letters to Robert Harley and John Smith, Hickes claimed to have created the work ‘for the honour of our English republick of letters, and antiquities in particular’.43 He dedicated the Thesaurus to Prince George of Denmark, consort of Queen Anne. Addressing George as ‘Hereditary Prince of the Danes, Norwegians, Vandals and Goths’, Hickes argues for the shared linguistic – and thus political – origins of the modern-day peoples whose ancient languages the Thesaurus contains. Unfortunately patriotic sentiment did not ensure sales. Despite securing 392 subscribers, the extremely specialised nature of the Thesaurus coupled with its cost – 2l. 8s. by 1704 and 3l. by 1713 – meant that it remained out of reach of most readers.44 In 1708 Hickes authorised and partially wrote an epitome of the ‘Dissertatio Epistolaris’ in Latin, published in William Wotton’s name (later translated by Maurice Shelton), to which he added an Old English edition of the Athanasian Creed by Elizabeth Elstob, a series of notes on Anglo-Saxon coins by Thwaites and two wills and a charter of King Edgar from the Harleian Library, probably as a means of recouping the costs of printing the Thesaurus and of drumming up additional sales.45 In his dedication of this epitome to James Brydges, Paymaster-General of Her Majesty’s Forces during the War of the Spanish Succession, Wotton amplifies Elizabeth Elstob, Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue, First given in English: With an Apology for the Study of Northern Antiquities (London, 1715). 43 Harris, ed., Chorus of Grammars, 390; George Hickes to Robert Harley, 10 February 1708, Historical Manuscripts Commission Reports: Manuscripts of the Duke of Portland, Volume 4 (London, 1898), 477. See also: Seth Lerer, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Pindar: Old English Scholarship and Augustan Criticism in George Hickes’s Thesaurus’, Modern Philology 99 (2001), 26–30. 44 Harris, ed., Chorus of Grammars, 106. An advertisement by Thwaites announcing the increasing cost survives in BL 683.k.11. 45 William Wotton, Linguarum vetterum septentrionalium thesauri grammatico-critici, & archæologici, auctore Georgio Hickesio, conspectus brevis (London, 1708). Thwaites’s pamphlet was sold as Notæ in Anglo-Saxonum Nummos (Oxford, 1708). 42

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Hickes’s patriotism, claiming that the Thesaurus ‘revives the Heroic Deeds of our Ancestors . . . and proposes them to the Imitation of late Posterity’.46 With an eye to the realities of the Act of Succession 1701, given Prince George’s ill health and Queen Anne’s lack of a surviving child, Wotton also stressed the relevance of the Thesaurus ‘to those Noble Nations that are joined in Alliance with us to repel by a just War impending Tyranny’ and particularly to ‘the illustrious Nations of Germany, in discovering whose Antiquities [it] will be of singular Service’.47 This shift in rhetorical emphasis from the common ancestry of all the northern European nations to the special consanguinity of the English and the Germans presages the more overt rhetorical changes that occurred following the accession of George I. Whether or not the Conspectus Brevis was directly responsible for increasing sales of the Thesaurus remains unclear, but it achieved its own moderate success. In 1714 Elizabeth Elstob offered unqualified praise for the work and noted that it ‘very well deserves to be reprinted, since I hear it is very scarce’.48 A small number of sales did not necessarily limit the Thesaurus’s reach. College, university and cathedral libraries made the scholarly advances contained in the Thesaurus available to current and former students, members of the clergy, and the increasing numbers of antiquaries engaged in Anglo-Saxon studies as the century progressed and whose activities are the subject of the next chapter. As late as 1782, the lawyer and antiquary Joseph Ritson would write with first-hand knowledge that the Thesaurus was a ‘mine of literary treasure . . . which never had nor will have its equal’.49 Hickes’s knowledge of Anglo-Saxon charters and Wanley’s mastery of insular palaeography enabled them to engage critically with Mabillon’s discoveries, at times refining Mabillon’s conclusions in light of early medieval English manuscript evidence.50 By doing so they demonstrated the utility of his findings and provided other Anglo-Saxonists with a means of dating and proving the authenticity of the charters they studied. The Thesaurus helped to put English Anglo-Saxonists on the European intellectual map. As Hilkiah Bedford’s unpublished biography of Hickes demonstrates, scholars from across Europe acknowledged the Thesaurus’s value and Hickes’s accomplishment in print and personal correspondence, often repaying Hickes with gifts of their own publications.51 Two years before he put his name to the Conspectus Brevis, William Wotton praised the Thesaurus alongside Isaac Newton’s Opticks as a national triumph and a sign of the quality of English scholarship: if ‘the French and the Germans, the Italians and the Spaniards’ owe a debt to George Hickes, so did the English who were ‘able now to draw up an Accurate History of This and all following quotations are from Maurice Shelton’s translation and edition of Wotton’s text. Maurice Shelton, trans. and ed., Wotton’s Short View of George Hickes’s Grammatico-Critical and Archeological Treasury of the Ancient Northern Languages (London, 1735), iv–v. 47 Ibid. 48 Elstob, Rudiments, 70. 49 Joseph Ritson, Observations on the First Three Volumes of the History of English Poetry (London, 1782), 48. 50 Alfred Hiatt, ‘Hickes against Mabillon in the Republic of Letters’, Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009), 351–73; Aris, ‘Jean Mabillon’. 51 Bodleian MS Eng. misc. e. 4, fols 46r–49r. Bedford notes that the Thesaurus was praised by writers in Tuscany, Rome, Venice, the Netherlands, Sweden, France and Germany. 46

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the Alterations of our Language since we were a People, to this Time’.52 The AngloSaxon scholarship contained in the Thesaurus was proof of England’s intellectual standing and a work that defined the linguistic – and therefore, according to Hickes and Wotton, the national – origins of the English people. Before considering the ways in which Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric was deployed in the decades following the publication of the Thesaurus, it is worth noting at least some of the ways in which the work of Hickes, Wanley, Thwaites and the Elstobs influenced later eighteenth-century Old English studies. Crucially for future scholarship, Hickes and Thwaites established a critical and scholarly framework for dealing with Anglo-Saxon texts, and developed tools with which new scholars could acquire a working knowledge of Old English.53 Among the best examples of the enduring value of these tools is the collection of copies that survive in the antiquary Richard Gough’s collection of printed ‘Saxon Literature’ now housed at the Bodleian Library. In addition to a remarkably clean second-hand copy of Hickes’s Institutiones, Gough owned three copies of the Vocabularium Anglo-Saxonicum. Gough purchased the first of these in 1761, and used it (presumably alongside Hickes’s Institutiones) to complete an English translation of Gibson’s Chronicon Saxonicum in 1768/9. In doing so he acquired sufficient mastery of Old English to add terms he found in the Chronicon to the Vocabularium where they did not appear in the printed text. Gough also purchased a copy of the Vocabularium in 1768 that had formerly belonged to Humfrey Wanley, who had added terms from the AngloSaxon gospels. This edition had entered the Harleian Library and made its way to Gough via the sale of the books of the Oxford antiquary and Anglo-Saxonist Francis Wise, for whom it had been bought as a gift from a sale of Harleian books in 1743. The final copy of the Vocabularium in Gough’s collection came from the library of Samuel Smalbroke, who added to the title page a motto from the Aeneid: ‘seek out your ancient mother’.54 In 1772 Gough’s name appeared on the list of subscribers to Edward Lye’s Dictionarium Saxonico et Gothico-Latinum, the long-awaited successor to Somner. Lye had already made a name for himself as an Anglo-Saxonist thanks to his 1743 edition of Junius’s Etymologicum Anglicanum, in which he praised the philological achievements of Hickes, Thwaites and Elstob, and to which he prefixed a new grammar of his own.55 According to Palmer Whalley, Lye’s edition turned a profit of £600, a fact that indicates a steady or even growing market for Anglo-Saxonist philological studies four decades after the publication of the Thesaurus.56 Throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century Lye supplemented a transcript of Francis Junius’s manuscript Old English dictionary with vocabulary from texts published since the 1680s, and from an assortment of charters and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entries William Wotton, A Defense of the Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, In Answer to the Objections of Sir W. Temple, and Others (London, 1705), 39. 53 Douglas, English Scholars, 114. 54 These copies are Bodleian Gough Sax. Lit. 47, 175 and 176. 55 Francis Junius, Etymologicum Anglicanum ex Autographo descripsit & accessionibus permultis auctum edidit, ed. Edward Lye (Oxford, 1743). 56 BL MS Add. 32325, fols 255r–256v, in The Correspondence of Edward Lye, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross and Amanda J. Collins (Toronto, 2004), 330. 52

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for the years 1043 to 1079. Proposals to publish the dictionary secured subscriptions not only from antiquaries such as Gough and Charles Lyttelton (President of the Society of Antiquaries of London), Oxford and Cambridge college libraries, bishops and archbishops (including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Secker, who advanced £50 toward the cost of completing and printing it), and members of the peerage, but also booksellers from Britain and abroad, clear evidence of the support and patronage of the intellectual, clerical and political elite and a small but identifiable general market. Although Lye died before completing the project, the Dictionarium was continued and edited by the Anglo-Saxonist Owen Manning and published in 1772. In turn it served as a foundation text for the later dictionaries of Joseph Bosworth and Thomas Northcote Toller.58 Among those who benefitted from Lye’s work was his neighbour Thomas Percy, who relied on Lye when writing a dissertation comparing Germanic and Celtic languages for the introduction to his edition of Paul Henri Mallet’s Histoire de Dannemarc.59 In addition to their published works, early eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists left unfinished projects in manuscript that informed later publications. David Wilkins used William Elstob’s manuscript collections toward an edition of the Old English laws to complete his Leges Anglo-Saxonicæ, a parallel Old English–Latin edition of Anglo-Saxon law codes published in 1721 that became the standard edition for the rest of the century.60 Elstob’s transcript of Alfred the Great’s Orosius served as the basis for a proposed edition by Joseph Ames in the late 1730s, before being published by Daines Barrington in 1773.61 Members of the Oxford School – particularly Thwaites – also supported John Smith, who in 1722 completed his late father’s edition of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in a parallel Latin–Old English text that included a life of Bede originally written by Mabillon and twenty-seven appendices containing the text of a collection of Anglo-Saxon charters now lost.62 Smith’s critical, scholarly text superseded Abraham Wheelocke’s 1644 edition and was not substantially re-edited for 175 years.63 It also carried clear medievalist overtones. Dedicated to the Deacon and Canons of Durham Cathedral, its frontispiece depicts the cathedral’s east window above an altar dedicated to Bede and St Cuthbert, inviting readers to imagine themselves within a sacred space, an exercise in visual hagiography reiterated in an engraving of Bede’s tomb inscribed ‘BEDA VENERABILIS’. 57

Clunies Ross and Collins, eds, Correspondence, 30–1. Ibid., 32, 33n44; Margaret Clunies Ross and Amanda J. Collins, ‘Lye, Edward’, ODNB. Edward Lye, Dictionarium Saxonico et Gothico-Latinum . . . accedunt Fragmenta Versionis Ulphilanæ, necnon Opuscula quædam Anglo-Saxoncia, ed. Owen Manning (London, 1772). 59 Paul Henri Mallet, Northern Antiquities: or, A Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, and other Northern Nations; Including those of Our own Saxon Ancestors, trans. and ed. Thomas Percy, 2 vols (London, 1770), I:xxvi–xxxiii. 60 David Wilkins, Leges Anglo-Saxonicæ Ecclesiasticæ & Civiles (London, 1721). 61 Barrington, Orosius, xix. 62 Michael Murphy, ‘Edward Thwaites, Pioneer Teacher of Old English’, Durham University Journal 53 (1980–1), 159; John Smith, ed., Historiæ ecclesiasticæ gentis Anglorum libri quinque (Cambridge, 1722); Jean Mabillon, Annales Ordinis S. Benedicti Occidentalium Monachorum Patriarchæ . . . Tomus Primus (Paris, 1703), 589–91. 63 Abraham Wheelocke, Venerabilis Bedæ Historia Ecclesiastica: cui accessere Leges AngloSaxonicæ (Cambridge, 1644). 57

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Smith’s text highlights the connection between Bede, the Ecclesiastical History and the Durham ecclesiastical community of Smith’s own day, while encouraging readers to engage in a kind of imaginative pilgrimage to Durham to pay tribute to the celebrated Anglo-Saxon historian whose physical remains continued to be preserved and honoured by the patriotic chapter. That the decade that followed the publication of the Thesaurus saw repeated efforts to publicise and popularise Hickes’s work makes it clear that his contemporaries saw value in doing so, even when their support carried potential political or professional cost. Thwaites’s Grammatica began a process of institutionalising the Old English grammar of the Thesaurus as the standard for new students of the language. The release of three editions of the Conspectus Brevis in Latin and in English translation likewise indicates a desire not only to elevate Hickes’s masterpiece to canonical status, but to introduce Anglo-Saxon studies to a wider audience. Insofar as such publications represent attempts to popularise Anglo-Saxon studies, they occupy a middle ground between scholarly and popular forms of medievalism. Publicising the cultural value of Anglo-Saxon studies required Wotton and Shelton, not to mention the Anglo-Saxonists themselves, to iterate explicitly the links between Anglo-Saxon history and language, and contemporary English life and culture. Nowhere does this desire appear more strongly than in the works of two Anglo-Saxonists to whom Hickes had been a mentor: Elizabeth Elstob and John Fortescue-Aland. Anglo-Saxonism and the Hanoverian Succession The first edition of The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy appeared in 1714, almost a decade after the Thesaurus. Its editor, John Fortescue-­ Aland, claimed to have published the text in celebration of England’s limited monarchy: Therefore that this happy Constitution might not be forgot, I thought it a piece of Service to my Country, to make this Treatise publick; and I have no Reason to doubt but it will live, as long as the Protestant Religion, our Liberties, and the Laws continue and have a Being . . .64

Echoing Hickes, Fortescue-Aland attributes a common Anglo-Saxon origin to two of the three supports of the English constitution: popular liberties and the rule of law.65 According to Fortescue-Aland, the Anglo-Saxons had accomplished what the Romans had not, replacing the ‘barbarous Customs and Manners’ of the Britons with ‘a new Language . . . and Volumes of Laws both Ecclesiastical and Civil’.66 From this revolution, he traces the evolution of Anglo-Saxon law from the early seventh-century code of Ethelbert of Kent, to the establishment of a folc riht (identified as the proto-common law) for all of England by Alfred the Great, to

64 65 66

Fortescue-Aland, Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, xxxv. Below, 160–72. Fortescue-Aland, Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, xvii.

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the restoration and confirmation of the laws of Alfred by Edward the Confessor.67 Paramount, however, is the continuation of the common law tradition through the Norman invasion. ‘The Normans, who invaded the Saxons, did not so much alter the Substance, as the Names of Things’, says Fortescue-Aland. William I did not enforce Norman law but ordered ‘the Laws of England, to be kept and observed under grievous Penalties’.68 By presenting the English constitution and common law as interlocking pieces of a continuous, unbroken legal tradition, Fortescue-Aland sidesteps the Norman Yoke theory of English constitutional history that had dominated much of late-seventeenth-century political debate.69 Rather than advocating the recovery of lost liberties, Fortescue-Aland presents a legal tradition with the ability to adapt over time to meet the needs of a changing nation and that retains the Anglo-Saxon spirit of the laws fundamentally unaltered. By means of this interpretation of English legal history he places those subject to contemporary English common law in an unbroken cultural continuum extending from the seventh century down to 1714. This Anglo-Saxonist interpretation of English constitutional history is not a call for a return to an ‘earlier, more equal form of organisation, before the development of private property and the state’, as Christopher Hill has claimed of arguments like Fortescue-Aland’s.70 It is in fact the opposite. Fortescue-Aland maintains that the ‘Stream of the Laws of Edward the Confessor, flowing from a Saxon Fountain, and containing the Substance of our present Laws and Liberties . . . [is] the Foundation of all our Happiness . . . our Estates, our Liberties, and our Lives, and all that is dear to us in this Life’.71 There is no need for a return, for nothing has been lost. The system of laws that secures life, liberty and property constitutes a continuation and a preservation of cultural values established by the Anglo-Saxon kings and preserved in Fortescue-Aland’s day by a limited monarchy and the rule of law. The celebration of legal continuity and the freedoms such continuity has maintained becomes ipso facto a medievalising celebration of England’s Anglo-Saxon heritage and of the Anglo-Saxonness of its contemporary legal system. Fortescue-Aland’s critique of contemporary misinterpretation of the common law by lawyers and jurists owes even more to the influence of George Hickes than does his Anglo-Saxonist approach to common law jurisprudence. Fortescue-Aland criticises the apparently widespread opinion that mastery of English law required only a knowledge of legal French, ‘whereas ‘tis plain, that having Recourse to the Saxon Originals is . . . [a] Necessity, to a perfect Knowledge of the true Reason of the Law, which for want thereof is so often and so grossly mistaken’.72 The following thirty pages of his preface contain a passionate and finely reasoned argument for the study of Old English by lawyers as a means of better understanding the content, nature and spirit of the common law. He thus advocates reform, but by means of education in history and philology rather than political action. To study the Anglo67 68 69 70 71 72

Ibid., xvii–xxv. Ibid., xxvi. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, 50–122; below, 160–3. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, 55. Fortescue-Aland, Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, iv, xxviii. Ibid., lii.

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Saxon laws in Old English is, to Fortescue-Aland, a means of bringing honour to the English people, law and language.73 Published in the final months of Queen Anne’s reign (or rather, the few months preceding George I’s accession), The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy stands at a turning point in the history of Anglo-Saxonism as much as in the political history of England. Prior to the accession of George I, the work of English Anglo-Saxonists had been motivated by politically charged debates over the origins of the Church of England and the English constitution. With the augmentation of the role of Parliament and the increasing political stability that followed George’s accession, Anglo-Saxonist historical study lost much of its political urgency – though not its political nature or relevance – and the locus of Anglo-Saxon studies shifted from ecclesiastical and university settings to the more diffuse networks of educated professionals, clergy and gentry engaged in an increasingly respectable and popular antiquarian culture.74 The questions that had motivated Anglo-Saxon studies since the Elizabethan era had been answered – at least to the satisfaction of early eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists – by Hickes’s circle and their predecessors. By the end of 1714 the English could celebrate their identity as a people living under a government constituted of a limited monarchy, an elected Parliament and a system of laws handed down by their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. Still, the need for further study of Old English and the English legal tradition was neither dead nor unrecognised, as Fortescue-Aland demonstrates. Nor was his the only voice calling for increased public attention to Old English during the period of transition from Stuart to Hanoverian rule. In her Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue, Elizabeth Elstob argues forcefully for the study of Old English not as a means of better understanding the English legal system but as an essential element for understanding and appreciating the English language and the people who speak it. Responding to Jonathan Swift’s A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English tongue, Elstob attacks critics who dismiss Anglo-Saxonists (and all medievalists) as ‘men of low Genius’ and the English language as incompatibly ‘barren and barbarous . . . in this Age of Learning and Politeness’.75 For Elstob, Swift’s attack on her native tongue was tantamount to an attack on the nation’s honour and, by extension, on England and Englishness. ‘The Love and Honour of one’s Countrey’ force Elstob to write, ‘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’.76 She neatly transforms Swift’s critique into proof of his intellectual laziness and contempt for England’s national cultural inheritance. The antiquaries at whom Swift sneers are ‘our greatest Divines, and Lawyers, and Historians’, all of whom value the careful study of Old English philology and manuscripts.77 She turns Swift’s attacks on the ‘crudeness’ of English against him in a series of excerpts from Latin, Greek and French poetry celebrating Ibid., liv. Smith, Gothic Bequest, 43. 75 Jonathan Swift, A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English tongue, 2nd edn (London, 1712), 40. 76 Elstob, Rudiments, iii. 77 Ibid., viii. 73

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naturalness and directness in literature and language – exactly those characteristics Swift finds contemptible in the everyday English spoken by those around him. For Elstob, the origins of the English church, law and history are inseparable from ‘the Original of our present Language, which is the Saxon’.78 The integrity of English culture and language is fundamental and fundamentally Anglo-Saxon. Elstob’s view continued to find adherents. Writing sixty-seven years later in response to Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, Joseph Ritson remarked that ‘the origin and fundamental principles, as well of our language as of our poetry, are to be sought for among the remains of the Saxon literature’ and that Warton, by claiming otherwise, ‘either deceived hisself, or finds it in his interest to deceive others’.79 Elstob and Fortescue-Aland advocated Old English grammatical and literary study as a means of more thoughtfully engaging in contemporary political and cultural life, and in doing so sought to retain for Anglo-Saxon studies a sense of urgency and necessity for the intellectual concerns of Hanoverian Britain. By writing in English rather than Latin and by focusing their arguments on professional practice and everyday life, they also sought to widen the audience for Anglo-Saxon studies by addressing both scholarly and popular readers. Fortescue-Aland wrote for aspiring young lawyers and politicians, Elstob for anyone with an interest in the relationship between Old and Modern English but especially ‘others of my own Sex, [who] might be capable of the same Satisfaction . . . reaped from the Knowledge I have gained from this Original of our Mother Tongue’.80 Writing for a popular audience did not compromise the scholarly integrity of either scholar’s work. Both cited their sources in detailed footnotes and both emphasised the importance of the Thesaurus; Elstob addressed her preface to Hickes, who had urged her to write The Rudiments of Grammar.81 There is a remarkable amount of overlap in the sources cited in the two works: of the twenty Anglo-Saxonist scholars (including Elstob herself) listed in Fortescue-Aland’s bibliography, eighteen appear in Elstob’s Rudiments, among them Somner, Junius, Thwaites, Benson, Hickes, Wanley and Gibson. Their ability to deploy specialist treatises in works aimed at a relatively broad lay readership derived from their shared understanding of Old English as a still vital language, one that continued to sound and signify in the speech of contemporary English men and women. Fortescue-Aland asserted that one could not ‘tell twenty, or name the Days of the Week, but he must speak Saxon’, and peppered his scholarly commentary with examples of Old English words and pronunciations still in use in various parts of the country. In the pairing of Old and Modern English in Rudiments of Grammar, Elstob provided, in the words of Kathryn Sutherland, ‘an apparatus and an environment through which the Anglo-Saxon past can speak directly to the

Ibid., ix. Ritson, Observations on the First Three Volumes, 3. 80 Fortescue-Aland, Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, lv–lxxxii; Elstob, Rudiments, ii. 81 Even though Fortescue-Aland did not praise him explicitly in The Difference, Hickes wrote to John Chamberlayne that ‘Mr. Fortescue hath dealt more honourably by me, tho’ the pains I took for him were not much more than I took for you’. Harris, ed., Chorus of Grammars, 112–13. 78

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eighteenth-century present’.82 In fact, both works are scholarly Anglo-Saxon studies and conscious acts of Anglo-Saxonist medievalism, prefiguring by three hundred years M. J. Toswell’s claim that, for British medievalists and medievalismists, ‘the very language spoken every day sonorously and savagely recalls the historical and political foundations of the nation, the geographical and linguistic boundaries of the individual in society’.83 In the works of early eighteenth-century philological Anglo-Saxonists, the (Old) English language becomes a synecdoche for English identity; not only the process of language acquisition but the very act of speaking narrows the conceptual divide between past and present and affirms the fundamental Anglo-Saxonness of modern-day (Old) English speakers. There is some evidence that Elstob had begun to put her ideas into practice. According to Ralph Thoresby, who visited Elizabeth and William at their London home in 1712, Elstob had trained a nine-year-old ‘poor boy she keeps’ to read Latin and Old English well enough to transcribe the Textus Roffensis.84 This transcript, now in the British Library, contains a series of extracts written by James Smith that display a steadily increasing confidence in recreating the Rochester script of the original, with corrections and annotations in Elizabeth Elstob’s hand, attempts at rubrication and a facsimile of the illumination marking the start of the Rochester Cartulary (which Elstob recreated in a presentation copy on vellum for Robert Harley).85 Although undoubtedly exceptional, the example of Elizabeth Elstob and her pupil attests to the apparent sincerity of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists when they insisted that Old English was a language easily recognised and readily mastered by those without a formal education, as well as a language with real practical utility and benefit. For those without the interest or capability to master Old English, Elstob highlighted another means of recognising the nation’s Anglo-Saxon inheritance. She dedicated the Rudiments to Caroline of Ansbach, Princess of Wales, ‘in whose Royal Offspring the Saxon line is to be continued’. Her dedication reinforces and subtly undermines a quotation from George Hickes, printed on the title page, by suggesting that if the recently crowned George I represented a return of a Saxon to the throne of England, it was Caroline, as wife of the future George II and mother of the young Frederick, future Prince of Wales, who guaranteed the continuation of that line and embodied physically and figuratively the nation’s ‘MOTHER-TONGUE’. Fortescue-Aland had dedicated the first edition of The Difference to his patron Sir Thomas Parker who, as Lord Chief Justice and a privy councillor to Queen Anne, was also a member of the regency council charged with ensuring the Hanoverian succession following the queen’s death. Within a year Fortescue-Aland had inscribed

82 Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Elizabeth Elstob (1685–1756)’ in Medieval Scholarship, ed. Damico and Zavadil, 67. 83 M. J. Toswell, ‘Lingua’ in Medievalism, ed. Emery and Utz, 121. 84 The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S. Author of the Topography of Leeds (1677–1724). Now first published from the original manuscript, ed. Joseph Hunter, 2 vols (London, 1830), II:131. 85 BL Stowe MS 940, fols 3, 21; BL Harley MS 1866.

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a copy of his work to Caroline of Ansbach, after being appointed solicitor general to Caroline’s husband thanks to Parker’s patronage.86 A more pronounced familial rhetoric appears in the second edition of Edmund Gibson’s Britannia. In his dedication of the 1695 edition to John Somers, Gibson noted that his translation presented the text in its ‘true Native English’ as a corrective to the Latinate ‘foreign Modes and Fopperies’ of earlier editors.87 In 1722 he dedicated the new, revised and expanded text ‘To the King’. Echoing and amplifying the claims of the Anglo-Saxonist philologists, Gibson declared that if we enquire from whence our Saxon Ancestors came, we shall find, that it was from your Majesty’s Dominions in Germany . . . and now, after a Disunion of so many Ages, they live again under the Protection and Influence of the same common Parent.88

The emphasis on blood relation in Elstob’s and Gibson’s dedications shifts the paradigm of Anglo-Saxonism from radical or Anglican polemic, or niche academic interest, to political and cultural orthodoxy. The dedication of Britannia can be read as a concise expression of what the Anglo-Saxons had begun to represent for historically conscious English readers: their forebears. Expressions of loyalty thus became expressions of a belief in the shared Anglo-Saxon origin of king and people and in the contemporary importance of that shared origin to English identity. Gibson’s dedicatory epistle draws a clear distinction between those who are true Saxon subjects of the king and those who are not. Those aspects of British culture derived from the Saxons are not Highland Scottish, Welsh, Cornish or Irish; nor are the ancestors common to the king’s German subjects and the ‘greatest part’ of his British ones Celtic Britons. Yet neither are these peoples necessarily excluded. Gibson’s emphasis on the evidentiary status of language, laws and place names opened out cultural (if not ethnic or nationalist) Anglo-Saxonism to all those whose daily lives he characterised as embodiments of Britain’s Anglo-Saxon inheritance. Equally important are the descriptions of the Anglo-Saxon virtues contained in such dedications. Only those ‘who are capable of sacrificing the Religion and Liberties of their Country’ could, Gibson claimed, deny the ‘manifold Blessings’ bestowed upon the kingdom by the accession of the Elector of Hanover as George I.89 Gibson’s pious thanks turn to a description of the particular characteristics that endear the king to his subjects: wisdom, courage, steadiness and graciousness; to which can be added Protestantism and respect for popular liberties. Elstob calls these virtues ‘Princely and Heroick’.90 For both, the appearance of such character traits in George I endears him to his people and ‘entitles [him] to the Love of every Subject, as a Prince of our own Blood’.91 Whereas Prince George of Denmark had functioned for Hickes as a representative of the family of northern 86 Copy now BL 288.e.5. Anon., A New and General Biographical Dictionary, Volume I (London, 1798), 175. 87 Camden, Britannia, ed. Gibson (1722), Dedication. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Elstob, ‘Dedication’. 91 Camden, Britannia, ed. Gibson (1722), Dedication.

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nations of which the English were a part, George of Hanover in his role as George of Great Britain symbolised for Gibson the reunification of that family and a living reminder to the English of their Saxon identity. The distinction was not lost on Maurice Shelton, who published an English translation of Wotton’s Conspectus Brevis in 1735 as a means of making Hickes’s Thesaurus available to a wider audience. In his dedication to James Reynolds, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, Shelton paraphrases Gibson, asserting that the work provides a ‘vast Insight’ into the language, laws and constitution of the ‘Saxons, from whom His present most Excellent MAJESTY . . . and the greatest Part of his Subjects . . . are descended’.92 Shelton’s text, advertised in The London Evening-Post as ‘very useful for Lawyers, Historians, Antiquaries, and all Lovers of Polite Learning’, spurred Edward Lye to encourage the publication of the revised second edition of 1737.93 In addition to celebrating the achievements of Hickes and his collaborators, Shelton praised Elstob, Fortescue-Aland and David Wilkins for bringing Old English to public attention by demonstrating its ‘utility’. Less than a decade later Lye took up the same line, noting that Shelton, Wotton and Fortescue-Aland had succeeded in making Hickes’s work better known and demonstrating the benefits of Anglo-Saxon studies.94 This strain of celebratory Anglo-Saxonism also appears in poetry and drama published in the first decades of the century. Among the best (if least subtle) examples of contemporary attempts to marry Anglo-Saxonism to patriotic and nationalistic rhetoric appear in the work of the physician and poet Sir Richard Blackmore. In 1695 Blackmore had written Prince Arthur, a paean to William III that opens with the lines, ‘I Sing the Briton, and his Righteous Arms’ – a Briton who returned after a European exile ‘To re-enthrone fair Liberty, and break / The Saxon Yoke, that gall’d Britannia’s Neck’.95 Blackmore’s Arthur saves a Britain in thrall to the Satanic forces of the pagan Saxons, in an awkward poetic grafting of traditional associations of Arthurian mythology with the Stuarts onto William of Orange.96 In 1723 Blackmore recycled much of his plot for a new epic loosely based on the life of Alfred the Great and dedicated to Frederick, Prince of Wales. In a baldly opportunistic aboutface, Blackmore declares that Alfred’s ‘Character is so compleat, that there is no Ornament of political Virtue to be named, which he did not possess in an eminent Degree’, and that he is a fitting model for the young Frederick because he is ‘one of the greatest Monarchs, that ever ruled this or any foreign Nation, a Prince sprung from the ancient Saxon Race of your own native Land’.97 Alfred: An Epick Poem follows a young Alfred on an odyssey around the Mediterranean in which he battles the forces of Satan and Satan himself, before returning to England after Æthelred’s death to save the country from heathen Danish invaders. In the eyes of Blackmore, who enjoyed a certain degree of literary fame during his lifetime, Anglo-Saxonism was a positive, patriotic mode and an appropriate vehicle for princely panegyric. 92 93 94 95 96 97

Shelton, Short View. Clunies Ross and Collins, eds, Correspondence, 83 and letters 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 32. Junius, Etymologicum Anglicanum, Preface. Richard Blackmore, Prince Arthur. An Heroick Poem. In Ten Books (London, 1695), 1. MacDougall, Racial Myth, 20–47. Richard Blackmore, Alfred: An Epick Poem (London, 1723), xliii, Dedication.

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Nicholas Rowe had employed similar tactics in The Royal Convert, staged at Drury Lane to mark the Act of Union of 1707, which concludes with the marriage of the fictional British princess Ethelinda to the fictional Aribert, son of Hengist. Despite the play’s overt celebration of Queen Anne, it is the Saxon Aribert who takes the throne and whose marriage to a British queen ensures stability and future greatness.98 A similar commingling of ‘Saxon’ and ‘British’ appears in George Jeffreys’s 1724 play Edwin, a celebration of patriotic kingship loosely based on the life of the titular seventh-century king of Northumbria.99 All three works pre-date what Christine Gerrard has identified as a literary and artistic shift of the 1730s and 1740s, when Anglo-Saxons began to appear as symbols of ‘solidity, stability, and reverence . . . not as an antiquarian curiosity but as part of a still vital political heritage’, rather than one-dimensional symbols of Gothic barbarism.100 These earlier works, which appeared soon after the publications of the Oxford School, suggest that Anglo-Saxon history had begun to take on positive political associations even before the death of Queen Anne. From Philology to Antiquarianism Like Elstob, Fortescue-Aland and Shelton, early eighteenth-century Anglo-­ Saxonist drama and poetry benefited from a more popular, historical and antiquarian strand of Anglo-Saxon studies and Anglo-Saxonism that developed concurrently with the philological and textual research discussed earlier in this chapter. Among the most influential works in this strand are Edmund Gibson’s 1695 and 1722 editions of Britannia and William Nicolson’s English Historical Library, published in three volumes between 1696 and 1699. After completing his edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Gibson turned his attention to a new English translation of William Camden’s Britannia to correct Philemon Holland’s, published in 1637 and riddled with errors of fact and translation.101 Taking Camden’s final 1607 text as his starting point, Gibson added to his translation an accurate map and notes on local history and archaeological discoveries for each county.102 Gibson’s editorial method mirrored Hickes’s: rather than relying on textual sources, he solicited contributions from antiquaries with specialist knowledge of particular counties, and who were familiar with local antiquities of all periods. Gibson’s edition proved extremely popular. The 1722 edition contained a new chapter on Anglo-Saxon coins along with improved maps by Robert Morden, and further editions appeared in 1753 and 1772, before a new translation was prepared by Richard Gough in 1789.103 Nicholas Rowe, The Royal Convert (London, 1716). George Jeffreys, Edwin: A Tragedy (London, 1724). For both plays, see below, 176–9. 100 Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth 1725–1742 (Oxford, 1994), 129. 101 Sykes, Edmund Gibson, 16. 102 Stuart Piggott, ‘William Camden and the Britannia’ in The Changing Face of English Local History, ed. R. C. Richardson (Aldershot, 2000), 12–29. 103 Sykes, Edmund Gibson, 18; Adams, Old English Scholarship, 330–4. See also: Gordon Copley, ed., Camden’s Britannia: Surrey and Sussex (London, 1977), xiii–xvi; below, 40, 50, 84–5. 98

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Like Gibson’s edition of Britannia, William Nicolson’s English Historical Library quickly established itself as a sine qua non for anyone who intended to write any part of the history of England.104 The fourth chapter, which contains a critical survey of printed and manuscript material related to the Anglo-Saxons and Danes, opens with an attack on William Temple, patron of Jonathan Swift and a leading ‘ancient’ in the Battle of the Books: The Authors (he says) of those barbarous and illiterate Ages are few and mean; and perhaps the rough Course of those Lawless Times and Actions, would have been too ignoble a Subject for a good Historian. The Times were not so Lawless, nor the Authors so Few and Mean, as he imagines . . . We have a pretty good Stock of their Laws, and Historical Treatises; and those that have been conversant in ‘em, do not think they have thrown away their Time upon so ignoble a Subject, as some may fancy it.105

Nicolson, the first Anglo-Saxon lecturer at Oxford and an associate of Junius and Fell, had supported Hickes during the 1690s, contributing information on runic inscriptions for the Thesaurus and notes on the northern counties for Gibson’s Britannia. Nicolson continued to collect manuscripts and maintained an active correspondence with linguists and antiquaries until his death in 1727. Expanded editions of the English Historical Library were published in 1736 and 1776, and for the duration of the eighteenth century it ‘provided a standard and essential bibliographical reference’ for antiquaries and historians.106 Nicolson intended the English Historical Library as a starting point for further research, writing of the need for corrections of ‘the mistakes and errors of every page in our several Historians’.107 In 1707 England’s first single-authored narrative history appeared in the shape of Laurence Echard’s The History of England.108 In his preface Echard claims to have undertaken ‘the Perusal of all the Monkish Writers’, which he describes as ‘a Labour highly disagreeable to the Taste and Genius of this refin’d Age’ but necessary for his design to be ‘an impartial Historian as well as an impartial Judge’.109 It was precisely those who refused to engage with medieval source material that Elizabeth Elstob scorned in Rudiments, but even Gibson acknowledged that the prose style of chronicles and vitae were off-putting to most Augustan readers.110 Echard’s perusal led him to take an ambivalent view of the Anglo-Saxon era: although the early Saxons were ‘Heathen . . . hateful to God and

William Nicolson, The English Historical Library (London, 1696). Ibid., 41. 106 Clyve Jones and Geoffrey Holmes, eds, The London Diaries of William Nicolson Bishop of Carlisle 1702–1718 (Oxford, 1985), 11–17; Fairer, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies’, 814. 107 Nicolson to Ralph Thoresby, 29 October 1696; quoted in Jones and Holmes, eds, London Diaries of William Nicolson, 14. 108 Laurence Echard, The History of England, From the First Entrance of Julius Cæsar and the Romans, To the End of the Reign of King James the First (London, 1707). Two volumes bringing the history to the reign of William and Mary were published in 1718. 109 Ibid., Preface. 110 Edmund Gibson to Thomas Tanner, 21 October 1694, Bodleian MS Tanner 25, fols 250–1. 104 105

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Man’, their settlement in England led them to Christianity and thus to civility.111 They had, however, brought ‘a general Change of Names, of Language, of Customs, of Laws, of Arms, of Discipline, of Possessions, of Titles, of Religion, and even of the whole Face of Nature . . . Upon which account we may justly date the Original of all these among us, as well as our Nation it self, from these our Saxon Ancestors’.112 In Echard’s eyes no less than Gibson’s or Elstob’s, the Anglo-Saxons wiped away Roman and British culture and established in their place the ancestral language, culture and government of the modern English people. Although Echard’s history proved popular enough to warrant a third edition by 1720, it was far from the kind of national history dreamt of by Nicolson, which would require the efforts of scholars with specialist knowledge of all periods of English history and every town, village and hamlet in the country, ‘the joynt Labours of a Society of English Antiquaries and Historians’.113 Nicolson’s emphatic description of such a society as English is a pointed reminder of the feeling amongst many of his contemporaries that England was falling disgracefully behind other European nations in institutionalising the study of its medieval past. In France the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres provided a forum for medieval studies alongside its prevailing focus on classical antiquities; and a growing number of antiquarian publications had already begun to emerge from Scandinavia, Italy and the Low Countries. The sixteenth-century society of antiquaries established by Robert Cotton had been disbanded and never reinstituted, and while members of the Royal Society frequently discussed antiquarian subjects, it remained primarily a home for the study of natural philosophy. Such societies dedicated themselves to advancing knowledge in the service of their respective nations; scientific discoveries signalled a thriving national intellectual culture and so served as markers of prestige. As Nicolson recognised, the foundations for an antiquarian society had been laid: grammatical, ecclesiastical, legal and bibliographical resources were available, as were critical editions of medieval chronicles and charters and critical frameworks for analysing, contextualising and establishing the age and authenticity of newly discovered medieval documents. What remained was to bring the objective scholarship and critical approach developed by philological Anglo-Saxonists to bear upon a new programme of enquiry into the history and culture of Anglo-Saxon England. Perhaps no one better characterises the cultural shift toward antiquarian Anglo-Saxonism than Thomas Hearne. Like Hickes a nonjuror, Hearne worked in the Bodleian Library until his forced resignation in 1716, after which he spent the remaining twenty years of his life editing and publishing medieval chronicles. Theodore Harmsen identifies Hearne’s as an essentially text-based approach to medieval scholarship that also made use of antiquarian evidence gathered from collaborators and correspondents and presented in miscellany fashion, a style not unlike the ‘Dissertatio Epistolaris’. Unlike Hickes, however, Hearne designed his work for

Echard, History of England, 38. Ibid., 45. 113 Nicolson to Ralph Thoresby, 29 October 1696, in Jones and Holmes, eds, London Diaries of William Nicolson, 14. 111

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marketability, becoming one of the earliest English medievalists to support himself through his independent research and publishing.114 Hearne’s first publication in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies was his edition of John Spelman’s Life of Ælfred the Great, with ‘considerable additions, and several historical remarks’.115 Published in 1709, Hearne’s edition helped to excite renewed interest in Alfred and inspired Francis Wise’s Annales Rerum Gestarum Ælfredi Magni (1722), which criticised Spelman’s use of a much embellished account written by Matthew Parker and presented an alternative in a new edition of Asser’s original text.116 Of more enduring significance was Hearne’s edition of Textus Roffensis, which despite being based on an incomplete transcription made by Sir Edward Dering in 1632, remained ‘the best available edition . . . until modern times’ (Elizabeth Elstob’s transcript was more complete, but remained in manuscript form).117 Similar in nature were his edition of Hemming’s Cartulary and the Liber Wigorniensis, collections of Old English and Latin charters compiled in the eleventh century.118 In other of Hearne’s publications Anglo-Saxon material sat alongside later medieval texts. Most important of these is his first edition of ‘The Battle of Maldon’, printed as the seventh appendix to a 1726 edition of the fourteenth-century chronicle of John of Glastonbury.119 Similar instances include his essay identifying the Alfred Jewel as the head of an aestel, printed in the seventh volume of his edition of John Leland’s Itinerary; extended reflections on the utility of Anglo-Saxon coins for historical study; and commentary on the origin of shires and Anglo-Saxon architecture, in his preface to a collection of discourses by Elizabethan antiquaries.120 As an editor and publisher Hearne was also concerned to ensure sales of his works. In contrast to expensive folio publications like the Thesaurus or Britannia, Hearne’s editions were issued in limited numbers, printed for subscribers in relatively affordable formats. Although Edmund Gibson complained to Arthur Charlett that Hearne printed too few copies of previously unpublished texts, the limited numbers ‘ensured that the series as a whole drew together a largely coherent group of leading scholars and antiquaries, representative of eighteenth-century antiquarianism’.121 The security of a guaranteed market allowed Hearne to edit with a meticulous fidelity to source material inspired by Hickes. ‘I am so religious in that 114 Theodore Harmsen, Antiquarianism in the Augustan Age: Thomas Hearne 1678–1735 (Oxford, 2000). 115 Thomas Hearne, ed., The life of Ælfred the Great, by Sir John Spelman, . . . with considerable additions, and several historical remarks (Oxford, 1709). 116 Simon Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England 28 (1999), 268–72; below, 123–6, 179–84. 117 Harmsen, Antiquarianism in the Augustan Age, 252–3. 118 Thomas Hearne, ed., Hemingi Chartularium Ecclesiæ Wigorniensis (Oxford, 1723). 119 Thomas Hearne, ed., Iohannis Glastoniensis, confratris & monachi chronica sive historia de rebus glastoniensibus, 2 vols (Oxford, 1726), II: 570–7. See also: Roberta Frank, ‘The Battle of Maldon: Its Reception, 1726–1906’ in The Battle of Maldon Fiction and Fact, ed. Janet Cooper (London, 1993), 241–3. 120 Thomas Hearne, ed., The itinerary of John Leland the antiquary, 9 vols (Oxford, 1710– 12), VII: xxiii–xxvi; A Collection of Curious Discourses, Written by Eminent Antiquaries Upon several Heads in our English Antiquities (Oxford, 1720), xlviii–cxi. 121 Harmsen, Antiquarianism in the Augustan Age, 227; Edmund Gibson to Arthur Charlett, 2 January 1719/20, quoted in Adams, Old English Scholarship, 138.

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Affair’, he wrote, ‘that I transcribe the very Faults’. Hearne’s friendly relationship with many of his subscribers also reveals a collaborative, correspondence-based approach to historical scholarship that would come to define antiquarianism as the century progressed. Anglo-Saxonists active at the time but whose names appear infrequently in published works – such as the numismatist and historian George Ballard (who later befriended Elizabeth Elstob and helped her obtain a post in the Duchess of Portland’s household), the manuscript collector Richard Graves, the politician James West or the Lincolnshire lawyer Maurice Johnson – come to light in an examination of Hearne’s correspondence.123 Other, better-known antiquaries, including politicians and peers, appear frequently in Hearne’s published lists of subscribers. Through his editions and collections Hearne provided important new materials for Anglo-Saxon studies and helped disseminate antiquarian discoveries made by or known to his friends and correspondents. Although his politics prevented him becoming a member of the antiquarian societies discussed in the next chapter, Hearne occupied a prominent position in contemporary antiquarian culture and helped to bring the methodological advances and textual practices of the Oxford School to a new generation of Anglo-Saxonists. His success, and the diversity of his subscribers and correspondents, provides clear evidence of an interest in medieval English history – particularly early medieval history – amongst a reading public that included the nobility, gentry, urban professionals, and less wealthy readers like Ballard. Hearne’s publications represent the crossover books of their day: heavily researched and carefully edited texts that provided pleasurable edification to antiquarian readers.124 Hearne and Nicolson demonstrate in their own ways approaches to Anglo-Saxon studies that sought to overcome the widespread antipathy to the subject, which required not only a mastery of dead languages unfamiliar even to most linguists, but a critical engagement with primary source material written in a style unlike the Greek and Roman histories so familiar to polite readers. For all that the Thesaurus demonstrated the obvious benefits to knowledge that resulted from objective, critical analysis of medieval documents and artefacts, even William Wotton conceded that such specialised research would inevitably appear ‘frivolous and minute . . . to those who are not curious’.125 The appeal of Anglo-Saxon studies was limited, and its continuing vitality depended on the curiosity of a new generation of scholars. Alongside his examples demonstrating the utility of Anglo-Saxon studies, Hickes included in the ‘Dissertatio Epistolaris’ what Maurice Shelton referred to as ‘Miscellaneous Matters, of which he heartily wishes a Saxon Collection were composed’.126 Anglo-Saxon coinage, taxation, oaths and saints appear on the list alongside ‘a Draught of British-Roman-Saxon-Topography, such an one as he hopes to see finished by an Anglo-Saxon Antiquary’.127 Just as Fell had done forty years 122

122 Thomas Hearne to Richard Mead, 10 December 1722, quoted in Harmsen, Antiquarianism in the Augustan Age, 235. 123 Harmsen, Antiquarianism in the Augustan Age, 130–3. 124 Below, 72, 110, 114–15. 125 Harmsen, Antiquarianism in the Augustan Age, 364–7. 126 Shelton, Short View, 44. 127 Ibid, 45.

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earlier, Hickes outlined a plan for future studies which the Thesaurus and other contemporary Anglo-Saxonist publications made possible. Saints’ lives aside, however, the items in Hickes’s list are historical and antiquarian (in the sense that they are concerned with physical remains and topographical subjects), whereas the work of the Oxford School centred on philological and bibliographical studies. Hickes’s list of tasks reflects a change already taking place in Anglo-Saxonism in 1705, and the direction in which the study of England’s Anglo-Saxon past would continue for the rest of the century. The scholarly editions, reference works and epitomes of the first decades of the eighteenth century underpinned generations of research into Anglo-Saxon history and culture. These critical tools also reflected and disseminated affective modes of Anglo-Saxonism, not least through Anglo-Saxonists’ claims that their research proved the vitality and utility of Old English and that their English readers were already engaged in the enactment of their Anglo-Saxon cultural inheritance. Scholarly Anglo-Saxonism was inspired by, participated in and helped to shape imaginative, popular and patriotic Anglo-Saxonisms by urging a reconceptualisation of English Anglo-Saxonness not as an abstract concept but as a lived experience, whether or not those who lived it were conscious of doing so. The accession of a ‘Saxon’ monarch helped to increase the patriotic cachet of antiquarianism and historiography even as it prompted new Anglo-Saxonist poetry, drama and visual art. Whereas earlier forms of English medievalism had tended to focus on the origins of political institutions, laws and the church, the eighteenth century witnessed a shift in interest toward local history and local antiquities, the origins of local customs and the relevance of Anglo-Saxon practices to contemporary life. The scholarly, popular and creative works discussed in the following chapters were the results of the cross-fertilization of popular and scholarly modes of Anglo-Saxonism, reflecting and simultaneously becoming further proofs of the inseparability of Englishness and Anglo-Saxonness.

2 Antiquaries and Anglo-Saxons The mistakes of antiquaries are, of all other writers, the most excusable; they are often working under ground, where very little light is to be had . . . William Clarke1

T

he scholarship of the Oxford School and their successors coincided with the revival and eventual re-establishment of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the earliest minutes of which defined its remit as ‘the subject of Antiquities; and more particularly . . . such things as may illustrate or relate to the History of Great Britain’, including ‘Antient Coins, books, sepulchres or other Remains of Antient Workmanship’.2 Although the early membership – including Wanley, William Elstob, the herald Peter le Neve, the archivist George Holmes and Thomas Madox, Historiographer Royal – reflects the textual and philological interests of the Oxford School, by the time the Society formally constituted itself in January 1718 its members reflected a more diverse range of interests.3 It was the antiquaries who excavated and examined the physical and documentary remains of Anglo-Saxon England, and who encouraged the study of the Anglo-Saxon period to a wider and more socially diverse audience. Eighteenth-century antiquarian culture was less partisan than the clerical, university and legal networks of earlier decades, and membership of institutions such as the Society of Antiquaries ‘was never a matter of political or religious affiliation’.4 Also in contrast to the specialist philological interests of the Oxford School, by the early eighteenth century antiquarianism had become ‘a common pastime, a leisure activity, for the gentry and aristocracy’.5 Fellows of the Society included clergymen, lawyers, doctors, artists, and members of the nobility and gentry from across the country. As Rosemary Sweet writes, ‘to examine the figures who made up the antiquarian community of the eighteenth century is to consider how a large proportion of those who comprised the social and intellectual elite of this period understood the past, its interpretation and its meaning for contemporary life’.6 William Clarke, The Connexion between the Roman, Saxon, and English Coins, deduced from observations on the Saxon weights and money (London, 1767), xii. 2 BL MS Harley 7055, fol. 1. 3 Joan Evans, A History of the Society of Antiquaries of London (Oxford, 1956), 57; SAL MS 268. 4 Sweet, Antiquaries, 53; SAL MS 268; Evans, History of the Society, 58. 5 Woolf, Social Circulation, 147. 6 Sweet, Antiquaries, xiv. 1

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Recent research by Sweet and Daniel Woolf, among others, has highlighted the scholarly methods and contributions of early modern and eighteenth-century antiquaries, whose methods ‘foreshadowed many aspects of the modern pursuit of historical objectivity’.7 Eighteenth-century antiquaries laid the foundations of modern literary studies and of art and architectural history.8 Yet they did so from within an intellectual context that found disciplinary specialisation of a twentiethor twenty-first-century kind highly undesirable. If ‘the most important underlying principle of antiquarianism was that antiquities could confirm and illustrate the facts of history’, one of the most important motivations for antiquarian study was a belief in the patriotic nature of an engagement with the past.9 Maurice Johnson assured Thomas Hearne that he was ‘valud by all Lovers of Truth, the Old English Constitution, & the History & Antiquities of their Native Country’.10 When Richard Gough published his edition of Camden’s Britannia in 1789, he did so for ‘love of my country and of honest fame’.11 Unlike many modern scholars, antiquaries acknowledged the role that local, regional and national identities and affiliations played in shaping their research. ‘The Study of Antiquitys’, the Society of Antiquaries’ first minute book begins: ‘has ever been esteem’d a considerable part of good Literature, no less curious than useful . . . as it preserves the venerable remains of our Ancestors’.12 Antiquaries sought not the past but their own past; and according to Francis Wise, it was in the Anglo-Saxon period that ‘our history may be said to begin’.13 Eighteenth-century antiquaries referred habitually to ‘our Saxon ancestors’, a use of the possessive found far less frequently to refer to the ancient Britons, rarely to refer to the Danes and Normans, and less frequently still to the Romans. Antiquaries’ conscious or unconscious use of the same familial rhetoric used by Elstob, Fortescue-Aland and Gibson highlights the extent to which Englishness had become bound up with the Anglo-Saxon past. But antiquaries’ connection to the past was more than patriotic rhetoric. Love itself drove eighteenth-century antiquaries no less than it did their nineteenth-century successors analysed by Carolyn Dinshaw.14 In a letter to Thomas Hearne written about the same time as Johnson’s, Edward Lye remarked that ‘I am so much in love with the study of Antiquities . . . I doubt not but I shall read the rest of the Books, you have oblig’d the world with . . . with the greatest pleasure.’15 After Ibid., xvi. Ibid., Chs 1–3; Jan Broadway, ‘“Ocular Exploration, and Subterraneous Enquiry”: Developing Archaeological Fieldwork in the Mid-Seventeenth Century’, The Antiquaries Journal 92 (2012), 353–69. 9 Sweet, Antiquaries, 13. 10 Maurice Johnson to Thomas Hearne, 16 July 1720, Bodleian MS Rawlinson letter 7, no. 95. 11 William Camden, Britannia, ed. Richard Gough, 3 vols (London, 1789), I:viii. 12 SAL MB I:53; Evans, History of the Society, 58. 13 Francis Wise, A Letter to Dr Mead concerning some antiquities in Berkshire (Oxford, 1738), 10. 14 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, 2012), 35–6. 15 Edward Lye to Thomas Hearne, 18 February [1734/5], Bodleian MS Rawlinson letter 7, no. 195; Clunies Ross and Collins, eds, Correspondence, 79n1. 7

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his Memoirs of Learned Ladies met with criticism in the Monthly Review, George Ballard wrote in despair to Charles Lyttelton that ‘I have always been a passionate lover of History & Antiquity, Biography & Northern Literature’, and that he would ‘commit [his research] to the flames’ rather than risk further censure.16 Comments such as these remind us of the ‘constant attachment to the object of attention’ that characterises many – perhaps most – eighteenth-century antiquaries as amateurs, as lovers of the past.17 For many antiquaries, love of the past was inseparable from love of the local. Near the end of his life, Maurice Johnson wrote that medieval studies ‘must be agreable to me, who have much of the Amor patriae’, and that he undertook antiquarian research on his home town of Spalding, Lincolnshire ‘to perpetuate its History: and vindicate It’s Honor’.18 Lye, Ballard and Johnson practised antiquarianism in different social, economic and political contexts; their love of the past cut across class lines. Instances of antiquarian Anglo-Saxonism, each grounded in an attempt to better understand a particular object, be it manuscript, coin or buckle, are best understood as instances of interdependent passion and scholarship in service of the elucidation of Anglo-Saxon history and historical culture.19 Letters, essays and scholarly publications on Anglo-Saxon subjects can be expressions of their writers’ excitement and personal investment as much as of their commitment to the creation and dissemination of knowledge. John Niles has characterised the eighteenth century as a ‘period of consolidation’ during which antiquaries developed and refined the scholarly programmes of seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxonists and the Oxford School, and laid the essential groundwork for nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon studies.20 I do not wish to contest this conclusion. Rather, in adopting a perspective on eighteenth-century antiquarian Anglo-Saxonism that does not focus on antiquarianism’s contributions to academic or professional historiography and archaeology – the norm since the publication of Arnaldo Momigliano’s ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’ – I seek to foreground the ways in which antiquaries discovered in and assigned to AngloSaxon remains different types of intellectual, emotional and aesthetic value, even as they sought to identify and classify those objects according to rigorous scientific standards.21 Doing so requires a return to manuscript material that has remained marginal to much recent scholarship. The unpublished material considered here confirms Jan Broadway’s claim that ‘manuscripts circulated widely and could be as influential in antiquarian circles as published works’ in a period normally associated with the dominance of print culture.22 Manuscript sources reveal previously unrecognised discoveries in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies as well as personal details George Ballard to Charles Lyttelton, 22 May 1753, Bodleian MS Ballard 42, fol. 220r. Dinshaw, How Soon is Now, 22. 18 Maurice Johnson to William Stukeley, 18 August 1753, in The Correspondence of William Stukeley and Maurice Johnson, 1714–1754, ed. Michael and Diana Honeybone (Woodbridge, 2014), 186. 19 Louise Fradenburg, ‘“So That We May Speak of Them”: Enjoying the Middle Ages’, New Literary History 28 (1997), 205–30. 20 Niles, Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, 147–85; cf. Sweet, Antiquaries, 189–230. 21 Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950), 285–315. 22 Broadway, ‘Ocular Exploration’, 354. 16 17

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that elucidate antiquaries’ motivations for engaging in Anglo-Saxonist research, alongside imaginative and reflective observations that were, on the whole, less likely to appear in print. Examined together, antiquarian print and manuscript sources enable us to understand antiquarian Anglo-Saxonism as an activity that was as important for the formation of critical canons as it was for developing and disseminating various modes of imaginative engagement with the Anglo-Saxon past. Antiquarian Networks and Resources for Anglo-Saxon Studies The publication of Hickes’s Thesaurus, the grammatical works of Thwaites and Elstob, and editions such as Wilkins’s Leges Anglo-Saxonicæ, Smith’s Ecclesiastical History and Gibson’s Chronicon Saxonicum enabled any moderately wealthy reader to acquire the basic technical skills and historical knowledge necessary for pursuing an interest in England’s Anglo-Saxon past. These publications also made it possible for antiquaries without the linguistic training or proclivity for textual studies to frame their discoveries of coins, charters and artefacts within a narrative of AngloSaxon history that was rapidly coming into focus. In a period in which ‘increasing currency was given to the importance of antiquities to patriotism and to national honour’, and in which Anglo-Saxonism was linked to English linguistic, cultural and political identity, any artefact could provide antiquaries with both a means of situating their localities within an emerging narrative of national history that emphasised England’s Anglo-Saxon origins, and of validating the contributions of their parishes, towns or counties to the original establishment of national institutions.23 Antiquarianism might therefore be seen as one manifestation of the wider, growing social appreciation for national history that took place in Britain after 1714, and antiquarian societies as the few eighteenth-century institutions that supported and encouraged Anglo-Saxon studies. For antiquaries in London, the Cotton, Royal and Harleian libraries, open to anyone who could acquire an introduction to their librarians, constituted the largest collection of Old English texts outside the universities.24 For those who could not travel to London themselves, fellow antiquaries could transcribe Anglo-Saxon texts, as George Ballard did for Charles Lyttelton, or librarians could provide them for a fee.25 Resources for Anglo-Saxon studies were not restricted to London and the universities. Wanley’s Catalogus contained entries for the cathedrals of Exeter, Wells, Lichfield, Durham, Worcester and Lincoln, and the libraries of Thomas Sweet, Antiquaries, 197; below, 85–9. For London libraries, see: A. Prescott, ‘“Their Present Miserable State of Cremation”: The Restoration of the Cotton Library’, in Sir Robert Cotton as Collector, ed. C. J. Wright (London, 1997), 391–454; Nigel Ramsay, ‘Libraries for Antiquaries and Heralds’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Volume II: 1640–1850, ed. G. Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (Cambridge, 2006), 134–57; Colin Tite, The Manuscript Library of Sir Robert Cotton (London, 1994); C. E. Wright, Fontes Harleiani (London, 1972). For university libraries, see: Ian Philip, The Bodleian Library in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1983), 62; Bruce Dickens, ‘The Making of the Parker Library’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 6 (1972–6), 29–30. 25 Bodleian MS Ballard 42, passim; John Baynard to John Thorpe, 26 September 1734, SAL MS 202, fol. 16r. 23

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Thynne at Longleat, Wiltshire, Thomas Cartwright at Aynhoe Park, Oxfordshire, Ralph Thoresby at Leeds, and John Moore at Ely.26 These and other private collections provided provincial antiquaries with access to crucial primary and secondary resources. In 1726 George Holmes loaned his copy of Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum to the Rochester antiquary John Thorpe, who was seeking evidence of AngloSaxon Rochester not included in Textus Roffensis.27 Edward Lye borrowed the Exeter Book in 1758 thanks to the assistance of his friend, fellow antiquary and Dean of Exeter, Charles Lyttelton, and returned it in 1762 to Lyttelton’s successor, the new dean and President of the Society of Antiquaries, Jeremiah Milles.28 The networks that brought Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and expensive or rare printed editions into the hands of provincial antiquaries enabled them to play as important a part in contemporary Anglo-Saxon studies as their urban peers. The spread of antiquarianism from the universities and London also led to the formation of provincial gatherings such as the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (SGS), founded in Lincolnshire in 1710 by Maurice Johnson as a learned society, library and museum. For antiquarian members of the SGS or its short-lived sister societies in Peterborough and Stamford, regular meetings, a sprawling correspondence network, and access to the Society’s collections provided opportunities for mutual encouragement and support in carrying out research on the many artefacts uncovered as a result of the drainage projects that were transforming the Fenland landscape.29 Far from isolated, the SGS occupied a central position in antiquarian culture in the first half of the century, particularly in studies of nearby sites such as Peterborough Cathedral and Croyland Abbey, and in the dissemination of information about finds in the Midlands and East Anglia. Members included such noteworthy antiquaries as William Clarke, Charles Lyttelton, Samuel Pegge and William Stukeley, the cathedral historian Browne Willis, the artist and engraver George Vertue, and the printer William Bowyer.30 With numerous international correspondents and close ties to the Royal Society and Society of Antiquaries, the SGS also provided interested provincial antiquaries with connections to national and international scholarly networks. When Maurice Johnson completed his illustrated history ‘Of Lincoln Mint and Money there Coined’, transcripts were sent to London Societies and interested correspondents ranging from the Bishop of Lincoln to the mathematician Emanuel Mendes da Costa.31 The contribution of the periodical press to the facilitation and dissemination of antiquarian research should not be understated. While the Society of Antiquaries, Royal Society and Spalding Gentlemen’s Society received the majority of Longleat and Aynhoe Park retained their libraries throughout the century; Thoresby’s was dispersed gradually, and Moore’s was purchased by George I and presented to the University of Cambridge in 1715. Letters of Humfrey Wanley, ed. Heyworth, 300n1. 27 John Baynard to John Thorpe, 2 August 1726, SAL MS 202, fol. 26r. 28 Clunies Ross and Collins, eds, Correspondence, letters 128, 131, 132, 140, 144, 147. 29 Michael and Diana Honeybone, eds, The Correspondence of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society 1710–1761 (Woodbridge, 2010), ix–xxx. 30 William Moore, The Gentlemen’s Society at Spalding: Its Origin and Progress (London, 1851). 31 Maurice Johnson, ‘Of Lincoln Mint and Money there Coined’ (1740), SGS Archive. 26

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specialised antiquarian communications in the form of correspondence or visits from members, periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine regularly included antiquarian pieces that were reprinted in provincial publications, notably those in expanding urban centres such as Edinburgh and Newcastle.32 Periodicals such as the Philosophical Transactions and later the Society of Antiquaries’ own Archaeologia – the latter printed by the antiquary John Nichols, who also printed and after 1788 edited the Gentleman’s Magazine – carried more specialised articles on Anglo-Saxon artefacts, structures and manuscripts. The relative lack of attention paid to the relationship between antiquarianism and the popular press has led to incorrect assumptions that eighteenth-century antiquarian medieval studies were largely invisible to the wider reading public.33 Ian Jackson has demonstrated that eighteenth-century provincial readers were neither cut off from one another nor excluded from a sophisticated print culture; and that they were at no disadvantage to readers resident in London when it came to acquiring new books and periodicals. Rather, ‘it seems likely that the existence of a sense of community among their readers was a factor in the mid-eighteenth-century success of the new genre of the magazine: by soliciting and printing readers’ contributions, magazines, like provincial newspapers, drew readers into the authorship of what they read’.34 There is no reason then to discount provincial antiquaries’ contributions to Anglo-Saxon research in ways that were locally and nationally significant, and intellectually well informed. Their contributions could reach the widest audiences via the pages of weeklies or monthlies, copies of which were found in inns and coffeehouses where they were read many times over, passed from hand to hand or even read out in private or public gatherings. The reprinting in a number of newspapers of notices of the delay in publication of Wilkins’s Leges Anglo-Saxonicæ reflects a widespread subscriber base and thus a more geographically diffuse interest in Anglo-Saxon subjects than might be expected.35 The following sections outline developments in Anglo-Saxon studies made by eighteenth-century antiquaries with reference to a subset of the vast number of Anglo-Saxon objects and subjects discussed at meetings of the Society of Antiquaries or SGS, or recorded in letters and print, over the course of the century, and highlights the ways in which the increasingly scientific description and interpretation of those finds participates in imaginative and affective modes of medievalism. Several trends also emerge from the extant records. Early in the century an emphasis on charters and coins predominated, likely a result of the interest of Hickes and his contemporaries in those materials and their consequent appearance in works like the Thesaurus. Later an interest in physical structures such as churches, cathedrals 32 C. Lennart Carlson, The First Magazine: A History of The Gentleman’s Magazine (Providence, 1938), 29–82, 151–69. 33 Evans, History of the Society, 137, 193, 207; Martin Myrone, ‘The Society of Antiquaries and the Graphic Arts: George Vertue and his Legacy’ in Visions of Antiquity: The Society of Antiquaries of London 1707–2007, ed. Susan Pearce (London, 2007), 114. 34 Ian Jackson, ‘Approaches to the History of Readers and Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, The Historical Journal 47 (2004), 1051. 35 A notice printed in London’s Daily Courant on 29 June 1719 was reprinted in Newcastle, Edinburgh, and other London papers.

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and architectural remains emerged alongside documentary and numismatic studies. Finally, from the 1760s onward, a surge of interest in barrow excavations took hold as more scientific methods of archaeology and architectural historiography began to be formulated. While these distinctions should not be drawn too sharply, they reveal a continuous and evolving antiquarian engagement with Anglo-Saxon remains throughout the century, underpinned by scientific modes of analysis and a sense of affiliation with the Anglo-Saxon past on the part of English antiquaries. Coins Coins represent the single largest category of antiquities studied by eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists. They had been collected by gentlemen for inclusion in their cabinets of curiosities since the Tudor period, and were often passed down as family heirlooms or bequeathed to larger collections on the death of their owners.36 Of particular importance to early Anglo-Saxonists was Sir Robert Cotton’s collection, which contained 210 specimens, 34 of which were illustrated in John Speed’s History of Great Britaine (1611).37 Though many of the coins disappeared between Cotton’s death in 1631 and their transfer to the British Museum in 1753, at least 160 remained when Samuel Pegge catalogued them in 1748.38 The Bodleian, Harleian and Royal libraries also contained extensive numismatic collections, the use of which by scholars such as Gibson, Hickes and Fountaine resulted in a general acknowledgement of ‘the integral importance of coins for Anglo-Saxon studies . . . as axiomatic’.39 Antiquaries saw coins as valuable adjuncts to historical study, and by 1700 a number of guides instructed collectors in how to identify and learn from the coins in their possession.40 In his preface to Ducatus Leodiensis Ralph Thoresby described his collection of Anglo-Saxon coins spanning the reigns of King Edwin of Northumbria (minted 617) to Edward the Confessor (minted 1042), and defended numismatic study on the grounds that ‘many truly great Men, and Masters of much useful Knowledge, have both collected such, and deduced learned Arguments applicable to the best Purposes’.41 Joseph Addison, Roger Gale and John Evelyn reiterated that coins showed the faces of great men, supplied the names of historical figures not provided by other sources, helped to verify the dates of historical events, and supplied visual evidence of historical material culture.42 For Anglo-Saxonist antiquaries, coins presented a vital source of information that could, in the words of Woolf, ‘Dawn of the Artifact’, 7–12. Gay van der Meer, ‘An Early Seventeenth-Century Inventory of Cotton’s Anglo-Saxon Coins’ in Sir Robert Cotton as Collector, ed. C. J. Wright (London, 1997), 168. 38 Dolley, ‘Cotton Collection’, 75–7. 39 Michael Dolley, Anglo-Saxon Pennies (London, 1964), 14. 40 Sweet, Antiquaries, 14. 41 Ralph Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis (London, 1715), xiv–xv; cat. 339–48. 42 Joseph Addison, Discourses upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (London, 1726), 13–20; John Evelyn, Numismata, a discourse of medals, ancient and modern (London, 1697); J. Jobert, The Knowledge of Medals: or, Instructions for those who apply themselves to the study of medals both ancient and modern, trans. Roger Gale (London, 1697). See also: Sweet, Antiquaries, 14; David Alvarez, ‘“Poetical Cash”: Joseph Addison, Antiquarianism, and Aesthetic Value’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 38 (2005), 509–31. 36 37

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Charles Combe, ‘elucidate a part of the English history, at present involved in much uncertainty and obscurity’.43 Coins’ reference value led antiquaries to collect casts when originals were unavailable. After obtaining a few coins of Edward the Martyr from a hoard discovered near Oakham in 1749, Maurice Johnson wrote to William Stukeley to request ‘duplicates . . . and Casts in silver or the best Pewter’ for his personal collection.44 Coins also held evocative potential as a kind of numismatic portrait gallery in which the faces of Anglo-Saxon kings became the embodiments of English history. Evelyn referred to coins as ‘the most lasting and (give me leave to call them) Vocal Monuments of Antiquity’, and Addison referred throughout the Dialogues to coins ‘telling’ their viewers about the past.45 This anthropomorphising follows the virtuoso tradition of seventeenth-century writers like Henry Peacham, who claimed that antiquities provided ‘the pleasure of a world of learned Lectures’ and opportunities to be imaginatively transported into the past.46 The allure of an imaginative engagement with the Anglo-Saxon past appears in Robert Cotton’s collection, which contained a number of ‘rare types’ from Mercian mints discovered on Cotton’s lands, almost all of which were located within the boundaries of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom.47 Maurice Johnson, whose home at Spalding lay just within the bounds of Mercia at its eighth-century height, followed Cotton’s lead in the 1740s when he set out to acquire coins ‘of our Mercian Kings & Princes, & all the Monarchs from Egbert’.48 Like Cotton, Johnson approached the collecting of Anglo-Saxon coins by identifying himself and his home town with reference to its Anglo-Saxon past; his scholarly interests followed his imaginative self-­ identification as a latter-day Mercian. Anglo-Saxon coins might also have borne increased signification within the wider realm of popular antiquarianism. Linda Colley has argued that a ‘close and surprisingly harmonious relationship between a landed ruling class and a broad commercial community was a vital source of stability’, and that a ‘cult of commerce became an increasingly important part of being British’ in the first half of the eighteenth century. If this was the case, then the use of Anglo-Saxon coins to identify early English mints and markets, to locate power centres, and to elucidate early medieval spheres of authority may well have been an activity that carried particularly patriotic overtones.49 For anyone with sufficient disposable income, from the nobility to professionals, merchants and clerics, collecting Anglo-Saxon coins represented a form SALMB XVIII:264–5. Maurice Johnson to William Stukeley, 16 December 1749, in Honeybone and Honeybone, eds, Stukeley and Johnson, 175; SGS MB V:54v. For the significance of the Oakham hoard, see: C. E. Blunt and C. S. S. Lyon, ‘The Oakham Hoard of 1749, Deposited c.980’, The Numismatic Chronicle, 7th series 19 (1979), 111–21. 45 Evelyn, Numismata, 1; Addison, Discourses, passim. 46 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London, 1634), 112, 105; Woolf, Social Circulation, 175. 47 Michael Dolley, ‘The Cotton Collection of Anglo-Saxon Coins’, The British Museum Quarterly 19 (1954), 78. 48 Maurice Johnson to William Stukeley, 16 December 1749, in Honeybone and Honeybone, eds, Stukeley and Johnson, 175–6. 49 Colley, Britons, 56. 43

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of polite antiquarianism. One antiquary complained that a Gloucestershire resident on whose property ‘half a peck of Saxon coins’ had been found in 1785 had ‘become rather pert and mercenary’ as a result of ‘having so many visitors and customers’, making the coins expensive and difficult for collectors to obtain.50 Even Jonathan Swift, adversary of philological Anglo-Saxonists like Elizabeth Elstob, complained that a ‘Fellow’ in Leicester had refused to sell him three Anglo-Saxon coins.51 The minute books of the Society of Antiquaries provide evidence of regular and sustained interest in Anglo-Saxon coins throughout the century, beginning with a list of four ‘Saxon Antiquities’, all coins, in the opening pages of the first volume, and an early but unrealised plan to produce a complete description of English coinage beginning with the Anglo-Saxons.52 Fellows of the Society discovered several previously unknown coin types, including several pennies of Æthelred and a half penny of Edward the Confessor at Welwyn.53 The Society also received reports of AngloSaxon coins discovered abroad, including Anders Celsius’ account of coins bearing the word London in runic characters found at Uppsala, and Gustavus Brander’s account of two hoards containing Anglo-Saxon coins, one at Jönköping and another ‘100 miles inland from Riga’.54 Such finds provided early evidence – though not understood fully at the time – of the economic links between England and Scandinavia in the early Middle Ages.55 Hoards unearthed in England received more notice than those found elsewhere, and were more likely to be noticed in the periodical press. They also tended to contain greater information about the circumstances of the coins’ discovery. Two reports of the same 1738 find of five hundred silver coins of Harold II and William I appear in the minutes of the Society of Antiquaries in 1739 and 1743. The first report (which William Bogdani also reported to the SGS) described the coins and their archaeological context but made no mention of anyone but David Papillion, the antiquary who reported the discovery.56 George Vertue’s later account reveals that Joseph Coats, a carpenter, discovered the hoard on land owned by Samuel Jeaks of Rye, and told Jeaks of the discovery.57 Several years later the York antiquary Francis Drake described a hoard composed primarily of the coins of Canute, Edward the Confessor and Harold II discovered during dredging in the river Ouse. His letter is remarkable for its identification and correct dating of soil strata by means of coins found in successive layers as they were removed by workmen, indicating that Drake or a reliable source had been present and recorded the excavation as it progressed.58 The Newcastle General Magazine and Scots Magazine reported the Rev. Dr Mutlow, ‘Account of some Antiquities found in Gloucestershire’, Archaeologia 7 (1785), 380. 51 Jonathan Swift to the Earl of Pembroke, 13 June 1709, quoted in Woolf, Social Circulation, 244. 52 SAL MB I:47, 53, 77; SAL MS 265, fol. 36r. 53 SAL MB I:261, VII:8, III:183. 54 SAL MB VII:68. 55 Runic coins presented problems for numismatists throughout the century. See, e.g.: GM 44 (1774), 312; GM 45 (1775), 567. 56 SAL MB II:251; SGS MB III:48–9. 57 SAL MB III:154. 58 SAL MB 5, 9–11. 50

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discovery of a burial containing ‘two small silver Saxon coins of a sort called Sticaes, one of which is Ethilred . . . These were some of the coins of our ancient Northumbrian kings. Ethilred reigned in 779’.59 The reference to ‘our ancient Northumbrian kings’ suggests that some readers were expected to see in this brief notice a piece of their own history. While it is impossible to know precisely why the note was included or how many readers noticed it, its language suggests that its writer was conscious of its potential interest to a local, northern readership. All three discoveries provide a glimpse into the ways in which artefacts were discovered, recorded and reported, and serve as salient reminders that Anglo-Saxon coins, like many other artefacts, only reached antiquaries via the labourers who discovered them in the course of their day-to-day work and who recognised the objects’ value to upperclass collectors.60 The work of Anglo-Saxonist numismatists reached its eighteenth-century climax with the publication of William Clarke’s Connexion of the Roman, Saxon, and English Coins. In his preface, Clarke attributed the appearance of his book to Martin Folkes’s discovery of the Anglo-Saxon pound, though it also depended on the resolution of a long-standing argument over the authenticity of Anglo-Saxon gold coins.61 Ten years earlier, in a series of essays based on coins exhibited at the Society of Antiquaries, manuscript sources and personal experience, Samuel Pegge had argued convincingly that the Anglo-Saxons minted in gold and that Anglo-Saxon coins displayed considerable artistic achievement.62 Drawing on the work of Pegge and earlier antiquaries enabled Clarke to construct tables enumerating the denominations of Anglo-Saxon coinage, their relative values, and their metallic composition. Equally important was Clarke’s situation of the coins within a historical framework. Not only did his research emphasise the ‘incredible poverty’ of the late Roman Empire and set ‘the origin of our own nation, our Parliaments, and other national customs, in a juster light’, it encouraged readers to think of ‘the current money of his present Majesty . . . [in] relation to that of Edward the Confessor’, assuring them that Anglo-Saxon and eighteenth-century mintmasters ‘went upon the same plan’.63 The Connexion contains as much historical commentary on Anglo-Saxon society and polity as on coinage, reflecting Clarke’s stated goal of using numismatic scholarship to contribute to the development of an English historical narrative. Clarke’s work received widespread praise in the popular press. One editor wrote of Clarke’s marriage of numismatics with history that ‘upon a close inspection, they prove so intimately connected with it, that they are necessary for elucidating the propositions he lays down . . . we believe no author ever threw greater lights upon those parts of history . . . and we will venture to pronounce, that his work will always hold a most respectable rank in the republic of letters’.64 The Monthly Review referred to the Connexion as ‘the profoundest literature’, evidence of ‘the The Newcastle General Magazine 4 (1753), 219; The Scots Magazine 15 (1753), 200. Woolf, ‘Dawn of the Artifact’, 18–31. 61 Clarke, Connexion, vii. 62 Samuel Pegge, A Series of Dissertations on Some Elegant and very Valuable Anglo-Saxon Remains (London, 1756), i–xi. 63 Clarke, Connexion, viii, 4, ix–x. 64 The Critical Review 24 (1767), 241–53, 321–31. 59

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honour of the present age, and of our own country in particular’. Letters in praise of Clarke appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for two years, and the London Magazine reprinted his ‘Table of Saxon Coins’ in October 1768.66 Such commentary makes plain the absence of disciplinary boundaries from antiquarian research such as Clarke’s, and a clear understanding of the applicability of advances in knowledge from one field of study to a wide range of others, from literature and history, to archaeology, economics and politics. Praise for Clarke’s work also highlights the editor’s assumption that antiquarian intellectual achievements reflected positively on wider English intellectual culture. The Connexion provided an important reference work for subsequent studies of Anglo-Saxon coinage, and seems to have excited renewed interest in the subject. Samuel Pegge and Richard Gough published works on the coins of the Archbishops of Canterbury and King Canute, respectively.67 Richard Southgate, owner of one of the largest private collections of Anglo-Saxon coins in England, and Charles Combe, who researched and catalogued coins that would later comprise part of the Hunterian Museum, circulated plans for major publications on Anglo-Saxon coinage and its application to the study of history in the 1780s, but unfortunately both died before finishing their projects.68 The fourth issue of Archaeologia contains a particularly striking example of the interest excited by Anglo-Saxon finds, the body of knowledge that had accumulated as a result of numismatic study, and the continuing development of increasingly scientific archaeological methods.69 In the article, Guyon Griffith documents the discovery in St Mary Hill, London, of an AngloSaxon brooch and clay pots containing 300–400 pennies of Edward the Confessor, Harold II and William the Conqueror, carefully noting every aspect of the archaeology of the find.70 Griffith draws on published and unpublished sources to identify the mints and moneyers active in each of the three reigns. His conclusion that the hoard probably belonged to ‘some moneyer, or other . . . curious person connected with the mintage’ seems likely to be correct, and his argument for an advanced state of English minting in the eleventh century justified.71 His careful recording and analysis attests to eighteenth-century antiquaries’ rigorous approaches to archaeological research.72 It also reveals a personal interest in English remains strong 65

65 Monthly Review 38 (1768), 55. The review began on pages 55–62 and continued in Monthly Review 38 (1768), 337–54 and Monthly Review 39 (1768), 89–94. 66 See, for example: GM 37 (1767), 358; London Magazine 37 (1768), 521. 67 Samuel Pegge, An Assemblage of Coins, Fabricated by the Authority of the Archbishops of Canterbury (London, 1772); SAL MB XII:373; SAL MB XIV:131–8. For Gough, see: Catalogue of the Coins of Canute, King of Denmark and England, with Specimens (London, 1777); GM 47 (1777), 342; GM 48 (1778), 167–8. 68 SAL MB XVIII:264–5; J. S. Martin, ‘Some Remarks on Eighteenth-Century Numismatic Manuscripts and Numismatists’ in Anglo-Saxon Coins: Essays Presented to F. M. Stenton, ed. Michael Dolley (London, 1961), 227–36. 69 Discoveries were not uniformly well documented. See, e.g.: SAL MB XXII:395. 70 Guyon Griffith, ‘Account of Coins, &c. found in digging up the Foundations of some old Houses near the Church of St. Mary Hill, London, 1774’, Archaeologia 4 (1776), 358. 71 Ibid., 361. 72 Sweet, Antiquaries, 149–53; Broadway, ‘Ocular Exploration’.

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enough to lead Griffith to relegate a set of Roman burials found deeper in the same spot to a dismissive postscript. Griffith’s letter exemplifies one of the many ways in which numismatics contributed to historical study of the Anglo-Saxon period. Narrative historiography often included references to numismatic discoveries made over the course of the century as a form of supporting evidence for larger claims. Richard Gough added a plate and eight pages of commentary on a series of Anglo-Saxon coins to the introduction to his edition of Britannia, to illustrate Anglo-Saxon history.73 Gough’s sources included Fountaine’s essay from Hickes’s Thesaurus and a number of unpublished essays, but by far the most important were Samuel Pegge’s Assemblage and Dissertation, Clarke’s Connexion, and the manuscripts of George North, who had contributed an ‘epistolary dissertation’ to Clarke’s Connexion. Like previous editors of Britannia, Gough sought to update Camden’s text with the ‘improvements’ in antiquarian knowledge since the previous edition.74 In the field of numismatics, eighteenth-century antiquaries demonstrated their ability to construct both a chronological and a historical framework based on the Anglo-Saxon coins they discovered, and their ability to utilise those coins in the study of subjects ranging from orthography to regal authority to international trade and relations in the early Middle Ages. Artefacts Compared with the advances in numismatics, antiquarian research on other types of Anglo-Saxon artefacts lagged far behind. Without overt pictorial symbolism or the names of kings, moneyers or mints to guide them, antiquaries frequently confused Anglo-Saxon remains with British, Roman, Danish or later medieval ones. Individual passions also influenced attributions of artefacts to particular periods or cultures, as with Francis Wise’s near obsession with Alfred the Great or William Stukeley’s with the druids.75 Cases such as these, much more rare than commonly believed, gave rise to the enduring image of the credulous antiquary of satirical poetry and engravings. Far from universally myopic and gullible, however, when eighteenth-century antiquaries attempted to interpret Anglo-Saxon remains they tended to do so cautiously and only after marshalling impressive (if not always convincing) arrays of primary and secondary sources to support their assertions. Even so, those artefacts that were examined prior to the archaeological excavations of Bryan Faussett and James Douglas were generally misattributed, with a few notable exceptions.76 Camden, Britannia, ed. Gough, I:cxi–cxix. Ibid., cxi; cf. John Nichols, The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester, 4 vols (London, 1795–1815), I:xli–xlii. 75 Wise believed that the White Horse at Uffington had been carved by the West Saxons as a memorial to the victory of King Alfred over the Danes at Ashdown in 871. See: Wise, Letter to Dr Mead; David Haycock, William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archaeology in Eighteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2002), 160–88. 76 C. J. Arnold, An Archaeology of the Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, 2nd edn (London, 1997), 1–3. Among the items misattributed to the Anglo-Saxons were ‘the mace of Augustine the Monk’ held at the Ashmolean Museum and a gold medal in the Bodleian that was widely believed to have been a token of Edward the Confessor given to cure scrofula. See: A. 73

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In some cases, however, misidentifications can be illustrative. Edward King displayed a small stone figure at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries, which he identified as a Saxon idol to Minerva, whom the pagan Saxons ‘admitted . . . into the Number of their Deities [and] worshipped for her Wisdom, and for inspiring prudent Conduct, as well as Valour’.77 King’s identification rested on such insufficient supporting evidence that a contemporary commentator added ‘Quare?’ as marginalia in the minute book.78 This carving, described with no trace of scholarly analysis, demonstrates the tendency of some antiquaries to rely on narrative and classical sources rather than careful physical examination of the objects in front of them. At the same time, King’s attempts to classicise a supposedly Anglo-Saxon artefact might well represent an attempt to equate Anglo-Saxon with Roman culture and thus an argument for the cultural and aesthetic value of Anglo-Saxon art. The uniformly positive characteristics he describes – the Anglo-Saxons’ love of wisdom, prudence and valour – attest to King’s positive perception of Anglo-Saxon culture. Broadly speaking, the Anglo-Saxon artefacts displayed at meetings of antiquarian societies or mentioned in eighteenth-century periodicals fall into three categories: jewellery and personal effects, ecclesiastical objects, and objects related to grants and boundaries. For the latter two categories antiquaries turned to textual authorities such as Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to identify and date the artefacts they studied. Where jewellery and personal effects bore inscriptions or stylistic similarities with known coin types, they could be identified with reasonable success. For those lacking inscriptions, however, antiquaries identified many artefacts as Anglo-Saxon on the grounds that they did not look obviously British, Roman, Norman or later medieval. While far from perfect, such efforts constituted the first attempts to characterise and classify a range of Anglo-Saxon artefacts by period and place of origin. Jewellery and Personal Effects Two of the earliest discoveries of Anglo-Saxon artefacts were made at Holkham in Norfolk, where ‘many Corpses’ were discovered along with beads, spearheads and two fibulae.79 The Society of Antiquaries’ minutes label the fibulae ‘British Antiquities’, while William Stukeley referred to them as ‘Danish’.80 Despite this disagreement, the association of the ornaments with the early medieval period suggests at least some ability to identify post-classical, pre-Conquest antiquities; and the comparison of the two newly discovered fibulae with one in the collection of Heneage Finch indicates that antiquaries were aware of the value of stylistic comparison for the dating of early medieval artefacts. MacGregor and J. Turner, ‘The Ashmolean Museum’ in University of Oxford, ed. Sutherland and Mitchell, 647; Samuel Pegge, ‘A Dissertation on an antient Jewel of the Anglo-Saxons’, Archaeologia 1 (1770), 161–7. 77 SAL MB XII:62–7; XV:40–1. 78 SAL MB XII:67. 79 SAL MB I:68. 80 William Stukeley sketched the two fibulae alongside a third in the collection of Lord Winchilsea, and labelled all three ‘Danish Antiquitys’ in his commonplace book: SAL MS 265, 57.

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Later in the century Daines Barrington sent a description of a piece of jewellery that typifies the highly detailed and increasingly visual recording styles that were coming to predominate amongst early archaeologists, but failed to identify the distinctive gold and garnet brooch that bore a striking resemblance to previously discovered Anglo-Saxon ornaments.81A similar discovery of a burial and grave-goods at Carlton in Yorkshire offers a tantalising but brief description of ‘a set of large human Bones, white as Ivory, and a Helmet standing over the Head in a Nich. Some Saxon Characters appear’d on the Wall, and the Date 992’, but no indication of what became of the helmet or the remains.82 Importantly for later archaeologists and historians, though little understood at the time, was the discovery of the Trewhiddle Hoard by workers searching for tin in a streambed in 1774. According to Philip Rashleigh, ‘a silver cup, which is now used for wine at the Communion Table, in which were several antient pieces of ornament’, was found seventeen feet underground along with ‘many of the most curious Saxon coins ever discovered at one time’.83 Several coins of the ninth-­century King Burgred of Mercia served as evidence for dating the entire assemblage, and a plate published alongside Rashleigh’s note in Archaeologia depicts twenty-four items, many of them fragments of pieces later reassembled. Rashleigh hoped that displaying the finds to the Society of Antiquaries would yield information to help identify some of the fragments, but in 1792 he wrote to report that he had received no information and so had undertaken a second, more thorough examination of the objects himself, with minor success.84 Rashleigh’s was one of the century’s major discoveries of an Anglo-Saxon hoard and one that, thanks to the inclusion of coins, could be dated with some precision. One antiquary stands out in the study of Anglo-Saxon artefacts: Samuel Pegge. Although he has been sharply criticised by some commentators, Pegge’s letters and essays on Anglo-Saxon subjects demonstrate a comparative approach to antiquarian research and a refusal to accept received wisdom as incontrovertible evidence, if not uniformly convincing arguments.85 In his Dissertation on an antient Jewel of the Anglo-Saxons (1752), Pegge challenged the identification of a well-known AngloSaxon medal in the Bodleian collection as a cure for scrofula. He begins by quoting earlier writers and antiquaries and proceeds to analyse the piece on stylistic, orthographic and numismatic grounds. Pegge attributes the medal to ninth-century Mercia, but confesses that he cannot give a fixed date of production and that equally strong evidence from tenth-century coins suggested a range of possible dates of SAL MB XV:40–1. The jewel bears a strong resemblance to other high-status pieces such as the Kingston Brooch (World Museum Liverpool, M6226) and the gold pectoral cross from Ixworth, Suffolk (Ashmolean Museum, AN1909.453), and Barrington’s assumption that it belonged to some larger assemblage or ornament seems correct. 82 GM 3 (1733), 492. 83 Philip Rashleigh, ‘Account of Antiquities discovered in Cornwall, 1774’, Archaeologia 9 (1789), 187. 84 Philip Rashleigh, ‘Farther Accounts of Antiquities discovered in Cornwall, 1774’, Archaeologia 11 (1794), 83–4. 85 Evans, History of the Society, 131: ‘Samuel Pegge was an ecclesiastical climber . . . a bad speaker and a clumsy writer, and contributed little, though he remained a Fellow until his death.’ 81

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creation. At about the same time, he submitted a short letter on a fragment of brass to the Gentleman’s Magazine under the anagrammaton ‘Paul Gemsegge’. Inscribed on one side Drihten and on the other Fecit, the fragment had been ‘bought out of a brasier’s shop in Canterbury, where coins of the ancient Saxons are often found’. Pegge translates drihten (‘Dominus, or Lord’) and notes the use of a rounded E and C in fecit, both of which he identifies as having been used on Anglo-Saxon coins, ‘especially those of the ecclesiastics’.86 Three years later he made an early argument identifying the Alfred Jewel as the head of an aestel, asserting that ‘Ælfred himself . . . sent not coined money with the copies of his [translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care] . . . but a stylus, or instrument for writing, of the value of 50 mancussæ’.87 Pegge based his argument on close readings of textual sources, in marked contrast to Jeremiah Milles’s counter-argument of March 1765.88 Another notable contribution from Pegge identifies a gold ring ‘enamelled, of good workmanship, and in fine preservation’, as having belonged to Bishop Alhstan of Sherburne.89 While he admits that the ring might have belonged to another of several bishops of London called Alhstan, ‘the dragon of Wessex, so apparent in the first lozenge, plainly fixes the jewel, in my eye, to that kingdom’.90 Pegge goes to extraordinary lengths to make his argument, incorporating sources ranging from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to Paul Rapin’s History of England to show that Mercian artisans had possessed the requisite technical skill in gilding and enamelling to create such an object.91 The resulting concise history of Anglo-Saxon royal and prelatical jewellery is notable for its insistence on the quality and beauty of AngloSaxon metalwork. In his earlier comments on the Alfred Jewel, Pegge had referred to its ‘exquisite workmanship, far superior to what might be expected from the rude state of arts in those times’.92 The ring itself is ‘so elegant a piece of work’, a description that echoes his account of ‘the elegance of Offa’s coins’ and his earlier Series of Dissertations on some elegant and very valuable Anglo-Saxon Remains (1756). If Anglo-Saxon mints were capable of producing objects of ‘beauty’, Pegge reasons, ‘there necessarily was an equally good taste and delicacy in embroidery and jewelry, drawing, engraving, casting, &c.’.93 While Pegge’s methodological approach may appear lacking in rigour by modern standards, his conclusion as to the provenance of Alhstan’s ring may well have Paul Gemsegge [Samuel Pegge], ‘Anglo-Saxon Fragment’, GM 24 (1754), 282. Samuel Pegge, ‘Observations on . . . Mr. Wise’s Conjecture concerning the famous Jewel of King Alfred’, Archaeologia 2 (1773), 70. 88 Jeremiah Milles, ‘Observations on the Aestel’, Archaeologia 2 (1773), 75–9. 89 Samuel Pegge, ‘Illustration of a gold enamelled Ring, supposed to have been the Property of Alhstan, bishop of Sherburne’, Archaeologia 4 (1776), 47–68; SAL MB XIII:149– 60. ‘Ealhstan’ appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle fighting for Egbert and Aethelwulf in 823/5 and 845/8, respectively; his death and fifty-year prelacy at Sherborne are recorded in the entry for 867/6. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, trans. and ed. Michael Swanton, rev. edn (London, 2000), 60–1, 64–5, 68–9. 90 Pegge, ‘Illustration’, 48–51. 91 The depth and quality of Pegge’s work contrasts sharply with accounts of similar material such as that recorded in SAL MB XI:64. 92 Pegge, ‘Observations’, 73. 93 Pegge, ‘Illustration’, 54, 63. 86 87

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been correct. (The ring in question bears a strong stylistic resemblance to several ninth-century rings, including two of Æthelwulf and Æthelswith now in the British Museum.94) More generally, his descriptions of the objects he studied contained far more information than was common amongst his contemporaries, antiquarian or otherwise. Pegge’s willingness to evaluate Anglo-Saxon artefacts more or less on their own terms led him to identify the high level of technical and artistic skill of Anglo-Saxon artisans and, by extension, to offer a rebuttal to the commonplace description of Anglo-Saxon artefacts as ‘rude’ or ‘barbarous’, thus directly challenging contemporary ideas about the tastefulness and aesthetic merit of Anglo-Saxon art. Ultimately, it was his willingness to advance multiple possibilities and to satisfy himself with having challenged the popular mythology surrounding well-known artefacts that makes his contributions unique and, in retrospect, ahead of their time. Ecclesiastical Artefacts Antiquarian interest in Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical artefacts arose from a number of factors, including a largely discredited but still widely held belief in an apostolic Anglo-Saxon church, the popularity of Ælfric’s homilies amongst early translators of Old English texts, the availability of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and a narrative of English history that equated the introduction of Christianity with the development of Anglo-Saxon literary and artistic culture.95 It also stemmed from the popularity of antiquarianism amongst clergymen who had vested interests in antiquities related to their own and nearby parishes, and for whom antiquarian research and publication could lead to patronage or preferment. More prosaically, Anglo-Saxon studies, like antiquarianism more generally, provided a source of intellectual stimulation for university educated, energetic clergy who found themselves serving parishes in isolated corners of the country.96 Among the artefacts in this category was the Bayeux Tapestry, of interest both for its relation to the events of 1066 and the visual information it provided about late Anglo-Saxon material culture. Elizabeth Carson Pastan points out that Bernard de Montfaucon deployed the engravings of the Tapestry published in the second volume of Les Monumens de la Monarchie Françoise (1730) in service of a nationalist reading of French history, but the engravings could also be interpreted to suit English national interests.97 In 1750 Montfaucon’s English editor criticised his omission of ‘many Circumstances . . . as they regard more particularly the English Affairs’, and assured readers that they would find more information about Anglo-Saxon culture in Montfaucon’s work than they might expect.98 The editor’s commentaries on each of the Tapestry’s scenes foreground the actions of English characters and refer to English antiquarian sources, draw attention to the ‘modern Spades, Shovels and BM 1829,1114.1 and AF.458. Below, 82, 92, 100. 96 Sweet, Antiquaries, 49–56. 97 Elizabeth Carson Pastan, ‘Montfaucon as Reader of the Bayeux Tapestry’ in Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages, ed. Janet T. Marquardt and Alyce A. Jordan (Newcastle, 2009), 89–110. 98 A Collection of Regal and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of France, 2 vols (London, 1750), I:i–ii. 94 95

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Pickaxes . . . [which] deviate but little from these antient Patterns’, and translate each of the Tapestry’s Latin inscriptions into English, effectively Anglicising the Tapestry and its historical narrative.99 Unfortunately, the absence of canons of art historical criticism made analysis of non-textual Anglo-Saxon religious remains extremely difficult. This was nowhere more plain than in the case of supposed Anglo-Saxon fonts, which appeared regularly in antiquarian discussions after 1750.100 Of the five examples noted here – from Alphington, Bridekirk, Thorpe Salvin, East Meon and Winchester – to illustrate the reasons for which fonts were ascribed to the Anglo-Saxons, only that at Bridekirk has since been identified as bearing characteristics of Dano-Saxon art. The Bridekirk font was well known on account of its inclusion in Gibson’s edition of Britannia. Also included was the text of a letter from William Nicolson to William Dugdale in which Nicolson incorrectly transcribed and translated the runic inscription on the font’s south face, and identified the language as ‘a mixture of the Danish and Saxon tongues’.101 In a paper read to the Society of Antiquaries in 1767, Charles Lyttelton agreed with Nicolson, but dated the inscription to the eleventh century on the assumption that the church must have had an earlier font ‘on its first erection’, which Lyttelton believed must have pre-dated the arrival of the Danes.102 Both the Alphington and Thorpe Salvin fonts received Anglo-Saxon attributions on the basis of the circular arches with which they are decorated, a common practice prior to the classification of architectural styles and periods at the end of the eighteenth century.103 Francis Douce correctly identified the four seasons in the iconographic programme of the Thorpe Salvin font, but interpreted them as a reminder that ‘the baptismal rite might be performed at all times of the year’ because ‘among our Saxon ancestors, baptism was required to be administered within nine, or sometimes within thirty, days’ of birth.104 Richard Gough used a comparative approach to identify the font at East Meon as Anglo-Saxon on the basis that it bore a resemblance in shape and colour to the font at Winchester attributed to Birinus, the seventh-century saint who had converted the West Saxons to Christianity.105 The font at Winchester was in turn identified on account of its similarity to the font at Lincoln Cathedral (all three were in fact twelfth-century Tournai fonts), a 99 Ibid., 24, 19, 27. This edition was later superseded by the complete but smaller-scale engraving of the entirety of the Bayeux Tapestry in Andrew Coltée Ducarel, Anglo-Norman Antiquities considered, in a Tour Through Part of Normandy (London, 1767). 100 One of the best surveys of antiquarian studies of medieval fonts appears in Richard Gough, ‘Description of the old Font in the Church of East Meon, Hampshire, 1789: with some Observations on Fonts’, Archaeologia 10 (1792), 183–207. 101 Camden, Britannia, ed. Gibson (1722), II:1007. Inability to identify – much less read – runes led one antiquary to ascribe the sixteenth-century font at Chipping to the AngloSaxons: GM 49 (1779), 588. 102 Charles Lyttelton, ‘Description of an antient Font at Bridekirk, in Cumberland’, Archaeologia 2 (1773), 131–3. 103 Richard Holden, ‘Description of the Reliefs on the Font at Thorpe Salvin in Yorkshire’, Archaeologia 12 (1796), 207–8; for the Alphington font see: SAL MB VII:232. 104 Francis Douce, ‘Illustrations of the Reliefs on the Font at Thorpe Salvin’, Archaeologia 12 (1796), 209–10. 105 Gough, ‘Description’; Richard Gough, ‘The Font in Winchester Cathedral’ in Vetusta Monumenta II (London, 1789), Plates 39–40 et seq.

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circumstance that led to the assumption that, as Birinus had established the bishoprics of Winchester and Dorchester, and the bishopric of Dorchester had later been translated to Lincoln, the fonts must have been commissioned to commemorate Birinus’s accomplishments. The misidentification of the iconography of the panel as scenes of Birinus’s miraculous deeds accords an unusually privileged status to hagiographic accounts typical of John Milner, whose History of Winchester celebrated Birinus and the miracles associated with him in the story of the conversion of the West Saxons and the establishment of Winchester Cathedral.106 Gough praised the Winchester font as a ‘venerable monument’ and noted with a hint of national pride that even if the foliage decorations depicted foreign plants, ‘the workmanship, at least, may be accounted our own’.107 Jeremiah Milles described the Alphington font as ‘enriched with Grotesque Figures in a very good Taste’; those on the font at Thorpe Salvin warranted a plate and a second essay in the twelfth volume of Archaeologia. Despite the enthusiasm with which they were described and the extent to which their tastefulness was held up as evidence of Anglo-Saxon artistic achievement, all were of a later date. Although he mistook the Bridekirk font, William Nicolson correctly identified the cross shaft at Bewcastle as Anglo-Saxon.108 Nicolson bemoaned the largely illegible state of many of the runes, but in 1742 George Smith provided the Gentlemen’s Magazine with a detailed sketch of the extended runic inscription on the west face of the shaft, followed by an engraving and a letter in which he attempted to date the cross and translate its inscriptions.109 Frequent mentions of the monument in print and manuscript over the course of the century notwithstanding, debate continued in 1794 when William Hutchinson included engravings of all four faces of the shaft in his History of the County of Cumberland.110 Even if antiquaries could not translate the Bewcastle Cross’s inscriptions they agreed that it was Anglo-Saxon or Saxo-Danish, on both stylistic and palaeographic grounds. A similar preoccupation with inscriptions dominated studies of the Ruthwell Cross, which Nicolson also visited in 1697 and 1704.111 In a letter to Edward Lhwyd, Nicolson wrote with excitement of ‘a most ravishing Runic monument’ with an ‘inscription, which most affected me . . . The old Danish letters are the most fresh and fair that I ever saw.’112 Noting the similarity of the Latin letter-forms with those in a manuscript attributed to Byrhtferth of Ramsey, Nicolson concluded that the Ruthwell Cross must also be Below, 99–102. Gough, ‘Font’, 6. 108 William Nicolson to Obadiah Walker, 2 November 1685, quoted in Albert Stanburrough Cook, ed., Some Accounts of the Bewcastle Cross between the Years 1607 and 1861 (New York, 1914), 3–10. 109 George Smith, ‘The Explanation of the Runic Obelisk’, GM 12 (1742), 132, 318, 368–9. 110 William Hutchinson, The History of the County of Cumberland, and some Places Adjacent, from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time, 2 vols (Carlisle, 1794). 111 Brendan Cassidy, ‘The Later Life of the Ruthwell Cross: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present’ in The Ruthwell Cross: Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 8 December 1989 (Princeton, 1992), 10. 112 William Nicolson to Edward Lhwyd, 24 May 1697, in John Nichols, ed., Letters on Various Subjects, Literary, Political, and Ecclesiastical, to and from William Nicolson, D.D., 2 vols (London, 1809), I:63. 106 107

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of pre-Conquest date. When Alexander Gordon published engravings and a commentary on the cross in his Itinerarium Septentrionale, he distinguished between the ‘Saxon’ and ‘Runic’ sides of the cross, and speculated that ‘perhaps, it had been originally a Saxon Monument . . . defaced by the Danes . . . and carv’d afresh, with other Figures, and a Runic Inscription’.113 Neither Nicolson nor Gordon, nor even Thomas Pennant, who visited Ruthwell in 1772, could reconcile the juxtaposition of the two scripts, the ‘work of different times and different nations . . . of the christian Saxons . . . [and] of the Danes’.114 A more technical analysis of the Cross informed a discussion at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries in March 1789, shortly before yet another engraving and essay appeared in the second volume of Vetusta Monumenta.115 A postscript note related that the engraving had been sent to the Danish antiquary and runologist Grímur Thorkelin, but his eventual response provided no assistance.116 Other stone sculptures were correctly and more confidently identified as AngloSaxon. Building works at Dewsbury Minster in 1766 and 1767, for instance, led to the discovery of two sculptures and a tomb, all correctly identified as Anglo-Saxon, and Samuel Pegge identified a third Anglo-Saxon stone ‘taken out of a Grave’ and inscribed ‘Donfrid’ that remains on display in Holy Trinity Church, Wensley.117 Although Richard Gough expressed scepticism about alleged Anglo-Saxon tombs in his Sepulchral Monuments, he made exceptions for the ‘figure of AILWIN, who founded Ramsey abbey, A.D. 969 . . . one of the oldest genuine sepulchral monuments among us’, and that of Edward the Confessor at Westminster, identified as a Norman replacement of an Anglo-Saxon original.118 Gough’s scepticism did not, however, prevent his falling victim to George Steevens, who forged a stone memorial to King Hardicanute in 1789.119 Steevens’s decision to link the stone to Hardicanute and his use of a script that resembled other inscriptions that had been identified as Anglo-Saxon demonstrates his recognition of the attractiveness of such an object to members of the antiquarian community.

Alexander Gordon, Itinerarium Septentrionale: or, a Journey Thro’ most of the Counties of Scotland, And Those in the North of England (London, 1726), 161, Plates LVII–LVIII. 114 Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides; MDCCLXXII (Chester, 1772), 96–7. 115 SAL MB XXIII:77, 79. 116 Vetusta Monumenta II (London, 1789), Plates 54–5 et seq.; Sweet, Antiquaries, 222n134. 117 Thomas Dunham Whitaker, Loidis and Elmete; or, An Attempt to Illustrate the Districts in those Words by Bede; and Supposed to Embrace the Lower Portions of Aredale and Wharfdale, together with the Entire Vale of Calder, in the County of York (Leeds, 1816), 301; SAL MB XIII:282–3. 118 Richard Gough, Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain Applied to Illustrate the History of Families, Manners, Habits, and Arts, at the Different Periods from the Norman Conquest to the Seventeenth Century, Part I (London, 1786), lxxxix, xcii, 1. 119 Arthur Sherbo, The Achievement of George Steevens (New York, 1990), 59–60; GM 60 (1790), 217–18, 290–2. 113

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Artefacts connected to particular abbeys or cathedrals held especial interest for antiquaries, who tended to connect them to notable royal or ecclesiastical figures.120 In 1748 William Stukeley presented a supposed Anglo-Saxon reliquary to the Royal Society that he claimed had come from Croyland Abbey.121 Stukeley’s attribution rested almost entirely on the fact that the reliquary had been found by his daughter Frances at St Neot’s, that St Neot was buried at Croyland, and that a passage from the Historia Croylandensis ‘gives us the story of the murder of the abbot there, and his Monks, perpetrated by the barbarous Danes, in the year 870’, an account that seemed to Stukeley to match the reliquary’s iconographic programme.122 Despite the assured tone of his essay, Stukeley privately admitted that ‘we know nothing of it, but by conjecture’.123 Thomas Astle exhibited a similar reliquary to the Society of Antiquaries in early 1788. It too consisted of oak panels covered with inscribed and enamelled copper, and bore ‘a mosaic pattern not inelegant’ on the reverse. Although Astle claimed that it was ‘undoubtedly of a much later date than . . . that which was preserved in the Cathedral of Hereford called the Shrine of St Ethelbert . . . [or] the shrine formerly belonging to the Monastery of Croyland, preserved in the Museum of the late Gustavus Brander’ (presumably the object presented by Stukeley), he assumed that it had been made ‘towards the end of the tenth, or the beginning of the eleventh century’.124 Antiquarian interest in ecclesiastical remains and the appearance of those remains in the periodical press parallels a gradual slackening of the anti-Catholicism that had dogged antiquaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when, as Daniel Woolf has written, ‘the collection of artifacts from the past raised godly eyebrows [because] they bore a superficial resemblance to the collection and adoration of relics’.125 Stukeley’s heroic-sounding description of the monks of Croyland and Astle’s complimentary commentary on the Malmesbury reliquary would not have been acceptable even fifty years earlier. That they appeared in print at all suggests that, at least amongst those interested in antiquities, the issue of religion was settled enough to allow for inquiry into the nation’s past not to be guided solely by political or religious strictures. Historical and comparative art historical approaches, however, were not separated entirely from Anglo-Saxonist beliefs linked to the English church. Like fonts, reliquaries that could be linked to Anglo-Saxon churches or monasteries proved too tempting for antiquaries not to read their iconographic programmes in light of surviving textual narratives, and not to identify ecclesiastical remains as works of art created to commemorate pivotal moments from the foundational period of the English church. SAL MB II:116–17; SAL MS 265, fol. 1; Maurice Johnson to William Stukeley, 3 January 1752, in Honeybone and Honeybone, eds, Stukeley and Johnson, 132; GM 49 (1779), 535–7. 121 William Stukeley, ‘An Account of an antient Shrine, formerly belonging to the Abbey of Croyland’, Philosophical Transactions, 45 (1748), 579–81; ‘An Account of an Antient Shrine’, London Magazine 19 (1750), 505. 122 Ibid. 123 William Stukeley to Maurice Johnson, 20 December 1749, SGS Archive. 124 SAL MB XXII:294–7; Vetusta Monumenta II (1789), Plates 51–2, et seq. 125 Woolf, ‘Dawn of the Artifact’, 15. 120

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Grant and Boundary Markers Antiquaries regarded artefacts related to grants and boundaries nearly as highly as charters as valuable sources of information for establishing genealogical and tenurial descents. Thomas Pownall’s essay on the ‘Boundary Stone of Croyland Abbey’, for example, engaged in a debate that stretched back to William Camden.126 Citing the Croyland Chronicle, Pownall identified the stone as the base of a cross shaft set up by Abbot Turketyl in 948 to mark ‘the bounds of Guthlac’s monastery’, the surrender of those lands to King Eadred, and Eadred’s subsequent regranting of them to Croyland. Its survival into the present day marked ‘a singular instance’ of an Anglo-Saxon boundary stone that had remained in situ for 825 years with ‘the record of its being so placed continuing and existing at the same time’.127 In his history of Croyland published in 1783, Richard Gough challenged Pownall’s claims, citing James Essex’s first-hand account and descriptions of local boundary-walking traditions from the SGS minute books to identify the stone as a later, probably fourteenth-century erection.128 Gough’s references to the ‘warm controversy’ over the stone’s dating – controversy that continued for more than a decade after the publication of Pownall’s letter – bear witness to the level and tenor of antiquarian engagement with remains deemed to be of especial historical significance. Among the best-known Anglo-Saxon tenurial artefacts were the Boarstall and Pusey Horns, and the Horn of Ulph at York. With a relative abundance of documentary evidence relating to the horns and the manors to which they were connected, antiquaries revisited them regularly as their knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon period developed. Attributed to the reigns of Canute and Edward the Confessor, the horns belonged to a period from which many coins and charters had survived and on which antiquaries had already expended considerable energy. The Horn of Ulph was discussed first at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries in April 1718, during which members voted to engrave and print Samuel Gale’s drawing.129 Gale’s essay on the horn, later revised by William Stukeley and printed in the first volume of Archaeologia, includes an extended history of York Minster in the Anglo-Saxon period, and the series of grants made to it by Anglo-Saxon kings. Gale emphasises the continuity of those grants not under Edmund, titular king of the English during Canute’s regnal year in the north of England, but under Canute himself, whose ‘peaceable and pious reign’ led to the donation of lands to the cathedral by Ulph, York’s ‘great benefactor’.130 Gale stresses the common use of horns and the similarities of grant-making practices in Anglo-Saxon and Dano-Saxon England: ‘Not only the Danes’, Gale argues, ‘but the English Saxons also, were very well acquainted with this usage and custom’.131 In his attempt to establish the practice of cornage tenure, 126 Thomas Pownall, ‘On the Boundary Stone of Croyland Abbey’, Archaeologia 3 (1775), 96–100. 127 Ibid., 99, 100, 96. 128 Richard Gough, The History and Antiquities of Croyland-Abbey in the County of Lincoln, Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica XI (London, 1783), xiii–xvi. 129 SAL MB I:11, 19, 21. 130 Samuel Gale, ‘An Historical Discourse upon the antient Danish Horn, kept in the Cathedral Church of York’, Archaeologia 1 (1770), 172. 131 Ibid., 177.

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Gale mentions both the Pusey and Boarstall horns. The latter belonged to John Aubrey, ‘to whom this Estate has descended, without Alienation or Forfeiture, from before the Conquest to the present time’.132 The emphasis on continuity appears in the essay published in Archaeologia, which recounts Edward the Confessor’s grant of Boarstall to the huntsman Nigel in exchange for the head of a particularly ferocious boar, and includes a description of the horn and a facsimile of a medieval map of Boarstall depicting Nigel, Edward and the boar’s head.133 ‘A coloured Drawing, exquisitely finish’d’ of the Pusey Horn was presented to the Society as a gift, and was later engraved for publication in Archaeologia.134 Charter horns were especially treasured as physical links between antiquaries and the Anglo-Saxon past. Gale’s careful explanation of the use of horns by both Anglo-Saxon and Danish kings of England, and their importance to landownership, helped to bridge the divide between Anglo-Saxons and Danes, Anglo-Saxon England and the Danelaw, in much the same way that his description of Thomas Fairfax’s rescue of the horn and ‘restoration’ of its gold ornaments in the years after the Civil War bridges the divide between the eleventh and the eighteenth century. Details of the current owners of the Boarstall and Pusey horns, and the emphasis on the unbroken descent of the families and institutions to which the lands and horns were originally granted, helped to situate them historically in narratives that highlighted their social, legal and cultural significance. George Hickes had described Charles Pusey’s appearance with the horn in Chancery in 1684, when the judges ‘with universal admiration, received, admitted, and proved’ the horn by which ‘Canute had conveyed the manor of Pusey’, and so decided in Pusey’s favour. The Boarstall Horn spurred Aubrey to engage in numerous acts of medievalism, including commissioning painted window-glass depicting the horn, furniture carved with boar’s heads, and a decorative print of Boarstall village framed by a genealogy connecting Nigel to Aubrey himself.135 Antiquarian engagement with charter horns provides some of the best evidence of the ways in which affective and scholarly engagement with Anglo-Saxon remains allowed antiquaries to revisit, repeat, surround, protect, recombine, reinterpret and reshuffle the past.136 Beyond claiming that Anglo-Saxon art was beautiful or pointing to the similarities between eighteenth-century and Anglo-Saxon material culture, the explanation and deployment of charter horns by antiquaries is characterised by what Bruno Latour identifies as an epistemological approach to the past, an approach that was equally ready to accommodate linear time, polytemporality, or both, and that also characterised much of eighteenth-century antiquarian culture.137 SAL MB XII:379–80. SAL MB XII:381a. For the Boarstall Horn see: Gale, ‘Historical Discourse’, 176–7; Anon., ‘Of the Borstal Horn’, Archaeologia 3 (1775), 15–19. 134 SAL MB XII:469; Anon., ‘Of the Pusey Horn’, Archaeologia 3 (1775), 13–14; Jacob, Earl of Radnor, ‘Observations on the Pusey Horn’, Archaeologia 12 (1796), 397–400. 135 Dustin Frazier Wood, ‘Charter Horns and the Early Modern Antiquarian Imagination’, SiM 26 (2017), 67–86. 136 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Harlow, 1993), 75. 137 Ibid., 71–5. 132 133

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Barrows As objects of curiosity and potential sources of treasure, burials, especially barrows, had intrigued antiquaries and fortune hunters for centuries.138 As early as 1711 Peter Le Neve wrote to the Royal Society of the discovery of a number of urns near Elmham in Norfolk, discovered by labourers repairing a fence who ‘accidentally pitch’d upon a Pot, which they expected to have been full of Money, and fell to ransacking; but finding nothing but Dust and Ashes, went to their work again’. The discovery later came to the attention of local antiquaries who went on to excavate more than 120 urns in the cremation cemetery now known as Spong Hill.139 In November 1722 Dr Samuel Knight sent ‘an account of barrows upon a heath six or seven Miles East of Ipswich, one larger in the Middle, the rest in a Circle round it’, but could not date them.140 Twenty years later two more letters from other correspondents reported the excavation of barrows at Hackendon Banks in the Isle of Thanet.141 The ‘many bones and sculls’ unearthed there were believed to have been Anglo-Saxon or Danish, remains of a battle that took place in 853.142 According to John Lewis’s history of Thanet, ‘these Banks are the Graves of those English and Danes which were killed in a Fight here . . . as one Bank is greater than the other, that Bank is the Place where the Danes were buried, who are said to have been defeated’.143 Despite tradition, neither letter claimed explicitly that the barrows contained Anglo-Saxon burials, a result of the near impossibility of dating human remains in the absence of coins or other easily identifiable material in the immediate archaeological context. Apart from these instances, few antiquaries expressed a scholarly interest in Anglo-Saxon barrows until Bryan Faussett and James Douglas began the excavations that would later be celebrated as foundational in the history of Anglo-Saxon archaeology.144 As a child Bryan Faussett witnessed Charles Fagg’s excavation of twenty-six barrows at Chartham in June 1730, in which were discovered ‘Bones, Arms, & Such things’ including several fibulae, a silver buckle, a green glass beaker and two earthen pots that Fagg believed to be Roman.145 Faussett later wrote that Chartham was the place where Julius Caesar had defeated the Britons, and it was his desire to find more remains to substantiate this claim that led him to begin excavations of his own 138 Barry Marsden and Bernard Nurse, ‘Opening the Tomb’, in Making History, ed. Nurse, Gaimster and McCarthy, 95; L. V. Grinsell, ‘Barrow Treasure, in Fact, Tradition, and Legistlation’, Folklore 78 (1967), 1–38. 139 Peter Le Neve, ‘An Extract of a Letter, giving an Account of a large number of Urns dug up at North Elmham in Norfolk’, Philosophical Transactions 28 (1712), 257; Catharine Hills, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Spong Hill, North Elmham: Part I, East Anglian Archaeology 6 (Gressenhall, 1977), 6. 140 SAL MB I:71. Evans, History of the Society, 67 identifies this as the nearby Devil’s Ring, but neither it nor any other group of barrows in the area precisely matches Knight’s account of the number of barrows or the distance from Ipswich. 141 SAL MB IV:127, 139. 142 Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, ed. Swanton, 64–7. 143 John Lewis, The History and Antiquities, as well Ecclesiastical as Civil, of the Isle of TENET, in KENT, 2nd edn (London, 1736), 167. 144 Marsden and Nurse, ‘Opening the Tomb’, 95; Arnold, Archaeology of the Early AngloSaxon Kingdoms, 3. 145 SAL MB I:255.

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in the mid-1750s.146 The first barrows Faussett opened were indeed Roman, but he soon realised that they were much later than the invasion of 54 bce.147 In notebooks from his excavations of barrows at Kingston from 1767 to 1773, Faussett described the burials as those of ‘Romans Britonized, and Britons Romanized’ that probably continued in use ‘after the arrival of the Saxons in this isle’, but noted that he had found nothing that appeared to him to be Anglo-Saxon.148 Over the course of two decades Faussett opened more than seven hundred tumuli in eastern Kent, assembling the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon artefacts in England while maintaining his opinion that the remains were Romano-British. It is sadly ironic that Faussett, a respected and meticulous antiquary, spent the majority of his career pioneering Anglo-Saxon archaeology in complete ignorance of the fact that he was doing so. Faussett recorded his excavations in a series of notebooks entitled Inventorium Sepulchrale, each pertaining to a particular group of barrows and containing accounts of the size, position and contents of each barrow in order of excavation. The notebooks and artefacts remained in the Faussett family in 1844, when Thomas Wright wrote enthusiastically that on seeing the artefacts ‘the followers of Hengst and Horsa seem to rise up before us . . . [and] we see at once the refinements of Saxon life . . . and the skill and taste of Saxon workmen’.149 Ten years later Wright’s patron Joseph Mayer bought the collection for Liverpool Museum, an event marked by a lecture by Wright and the subsequent publication of Charles Roach Smith’s edition of Inventorium Sepulchrale. Smith’s introduction describes Faussett’s collection by category – personal ornaments, toilette apparatus, weapons, implements and utensils, scales and weights, pottery, glass and coins – and bears witness to the variety and sheer volume of artefacts he unearthed.150 Smith and Wright explained Faussett’s misattribution of the artefacts, observing that he ‘found Roman coins, and he concluded very hastily that the date of their deposit must have been the reign in which they were struck’.151 The thoroughness of Faussett’s archaeological documentation was unparalleled in its time, and his familiarity with numerous sites enabled him to compare each burial with those nearby and in other barrow groups. Faussett’s system of cross-referencing and copious, carefully labelled sketches rendered his mistaken attributions almost inconsequential. He had succeeded in forming a collection of Anglo-Saxon artefacts grouped, classified and catalogued, only waiting to be named. In 1793 James Douglas did just that in Nenia Britannica, a landmark study of Anglo-Saxon funerary remains. Douglas’s interest in barrows developed during time spent constructing new fortifications at Chatham Lines, near Rochester, where 146

160.

Bryan Faussett, Inventorium Sepulchrale, ed. Charles Roach Smith (London, 1856), 36,

147 Of Faussett’s first excavations at Crundale in 1757 and 1759, barrows 24–7 seem to be a set of related Anglo-Saxon burials. Faussett, Inventorium Sepulchrale, 177–200. 148 Ibid., 37–9. 149 Thomas Wright, ed., The Archaeological Album; or, Museum of National Antiquities (London, 1844), 10. 150 Faussett, Inventorium Sepulchrale, xx–xlix. 151 Thomas Wright, A Lecture on the Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries of the Ages of Paganism, Illustrative of the Faussett Collection of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities (Liverpool, 1854), 4–5; GM 134 (1854), 605–6.

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he became acquainted with local antiquaries including Thomas Fisher, John Thorpe, Samuel Denne, Edward Jacob and Faussett’s son, Henry, who gave him access to his father’s collection.152 Like Faussett, Douglas undertook regular barrow excavations throughout his life and kept detailed records of his methods and discoveries. By the time of his death in 1819 he had undertaken or examined barrow excavations in at least twenty-five sites in Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire and Manchester.153 Such a wide geographical range allowed Douglas to examine his own collection of artefacts alongside those in the Faussett collection and to develop a classification system that considered those artefacts as evidence in a geographic and historical context not limited to a single county. In doing so he established new canons for the identification of archaeological discoveries, most importantly by stressing the need for a comparative approach to identifying ‘the relics discovered in our antient sepultures’, which included an awareness of the dates of coins deposited with similar types of artefact in different parts of the country in order to establish the earliest possible date of deposition.154 Douglas correctly identified Anglo-Saxon shields, weapons and personal accessories, and noted similarities in the workmanship of other types of relics from his own and the Faussett collections, and those pictured in Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia (1658), which Douglas correctly judged to be Anglo-Saxon. He also devised a rough classification system for Anglo-Saxon barrows, which he argued were usually campaniform and most commonly found in clusters. These clusters of barrows tended to be situated on marginal land, located near villages with Anglo-Saxon names, and found almost exclusively in areas that in the early medieval period had been under Anglo-Saxon rule.155 The correspondence of shape, size, location and nature of the artefacts contained, led Douglas to the correct conclusion that he had identified a characteristic Anglo-Saxon barrow ‘type’. In 1854 Thomas Wright announced that ‘the first correct principles of our national archaeology were obtained in the investigation of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries’.156 Faussett and Douglas set new standards in archaeological reporting, published the earliest accurate cross-sections of excavated barrows and depictions of excavations in progress, identified the impact of soil types on the preservation of artefacts, and engraved artefacts in the condition in which they were found instead of an imagined pristine state. They also shifted historical paradigms. Ignoring the popular belief that barrows marked sites of battle and contained the remains of warriors, both Faussett and Douglas found in Anglo-Saxon barrows evidence of ‘a people in a state of peace, and in general possession of the country’, and made much of the remains 152 Ronald Jessup, Man of Many Talents: An Informal Biography of James Douglas 1753– 1819 (London, 1975), 24–6. 153 Ibid., 172–3. 154 James Douglas, Nenia Britannica: or, A Sepulchral History of Great Britain (London, 1793), 127. Despite the claims of Thurlow Leeds and Ronald Jessup, Douglas was not ‘the first man to recognise the remains of the Anglo-Saxons in England’, except perhaps in the narrowly defined context of Anglo-Saxon barrow inhumation assemblages. See: E. Thurlow Leeds, The Archaeology of the Anglo-Saxon Settlements (Oxford, 1913); Jessup, Man of Many Talents, 176. 155 Douglas, Nenia Britannica, 177–8. 156 Wright, ‘Lecture’, 3.

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of women and children, and the fact that fewer barrows contained weapons than had been assumed.157 While neither succeeded in dating his finds with precision, Faussett and Douglas began the process of identifying and differentiating pagan and Christian Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and burials. Architecture Recent research has brought much needed attention to the contributions of eighteenth-century antiquaries to the development of the Gothic Revival, highlighting the increasingly scientific archaeological methods adopted by architects and the importance of antiquarian research on individual buildings.158 Philip Aspin has pointed out that antiquarian studies of Gothic architecture turned on a language of patriotism and English identity, building on Sweet’s observation that churches represented the ‘embodiment of the collective memory of society’.159 As Sweet and Peter Lindfield have observed, eighteenth-century architectural historians frequently applied the terms ‘Saxon’ and ‘Gothic’ to all Anglo-Saxon, Romanesque and Gothic architecture in England, in some cases using both terms to connote patriotism and national pride.160 Although some antiquaries referred to Anglo-Saxon and Norman buildings as ‘Saxon’ in opposition to the pointed ‘Gothic’, terminology remained notoriously slippery throughout the century.161 Prior to the 1760s, the few examples of Anglo-Saxon architecture that appeared in print or antiquarian minute books and correspondence normally consisted of references to tombs, sketches of recently demolished or crumbling churches, or historical accounts of notable foundations such as Croyland Abbey. The first mention of an Anglo-Saxon structure in the minutes of the Society of Antiquaries appears in an entry from January 1730, when Samuel Gale ‘shewed a Drawing of the Saxon Chappell (wherein the Saxon Kings were crowned) adjoining to the Parish Church of Kingston on Thames’.162 Gale’s interest in the Chapel of St Mary lay not in the church itself but in the story that seven tenth-century Anglo-Saxon kings had been crowned there.163 It would be another eighteen years before Smart Lethieullier recommended the same ‘Little old Chapel not long since pull’d down at Kingston upon

Douglas, Nenia Britannica, 176; Faussett, Inventorium Sepulchrale, 36–7. Sweet, Antiquaries, 237–72; Alexandrina Buchanan, ‘Architectural Antiquarianism in the Early Nineteenth Century’ in Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice, 1700–1850, ed. Lucy Peltz and Martin Myrone (Aldershot, 1999), 169–80; J. Mordaunt Crook, John Carter and the Mind of the Gothic Revival (London, 1995); Philip Aspin, ‘“Our Ancient Architecture”: Contesting Cathedrals in Late Georgian England’, Architectural History 54 (2011), 213–32; Peter Lindfield, Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors 1730–1840 (Woodbridge, 2016). 159 Aspin, ‘Our Ancient Architecture’, 213; Sweet, Antiquaries, xiv–xv. 160 Sweet, Antiquaries, 240–1; Lindfield, Georgian Gothic, 17–41; Simon Bradley, ‘The Englishness of Gothic’, Architectural History 45 (2002), 325–41. 161 Sweet, Antiquaries, 251. 162 SAL MB I:242. 163 The original Anglo-Saxon chapel collapsed later the same year after grave-digging weakened its foundations. 157

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Thames’ as an example of a church ‘proper to be carefully Examined’ by antiquaries interested in surviving Anglo-Saxon architecture.164 The antiquarian tendency toward over-reliance on textual sources in dating surviving medieval structures undoubtedly led to many misattributions of Norman buildings as Anglo-Saxon, for example in Cromwell Mortimer’s essay on Romsey Abbey and David Papillion’s identification of the church at Axminster as a memorial to ‘the several Saxon princes that was slain in a battle about two miles from [the] town’.165 Even less well-founded was James Theobald’s claim that St Peter’s Church, Oxford was the very building erected ‘by St. Grymbald a monk, about the year of our Lord 886’, shortly after the foundation of the university by Alfred the Great.166 Not all antiquaries fell into this trap, however. Lethieullier correctly identified the timber stave church at Greensted, Essex as an Anglo-Saxon structure and theorised that it had been built to house the body of St Edmund on its translation from London to Norfolk in 1013.167 George Vertue’s drawings of the church excited the interest of Walter Johnson, who sent a detailed letter and his own sketch to his father Maurice, who presented them at an SGS meeting.168 Ten years later William Stukeley ‘exhibited a Drawing of an old, but beautiful Saxon Church, called Stow Church, Lincolnshire’ and promised to provide a copy for engraving by the Society.169 Both Greensted and Stow probably date to the late tenth or early eleventh century, and both were identified as Anglo-Saxon on the basis of visual and material rather than textual evidence.170 After mid-century, Lethieullier and Stukeley demonstrate the increasing ability to correctly identify Anglo-Saxon churches, an ability that resulted in large part from the work of Charles Lyttelton, who in Sweet’s words ‘played a pivotal role in establishing the systematic study of architectural history’.171 Lyttelton’s dissertation, ‘On the Antiquity of Brick Buildings in England, Posterior to the Time of the Romans’, contained one of the earliest commentaries on the development of Anglo-Saxon architecture in the centuries before and after 1066. ‘The Saxon mode of building, which continued with very little alteration till about K. Stephen’s time, was widely different from the Gothic’, Lyttelton wrote, a fact he had ‘endeavoured to ascertain by accurate drawings’ of primarily late Anglo-Saxon and Norman churches in Lincoln, York and Canterbury.172 Not only did Lyttelton recognise the differences between Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Gothic architecture, he was also the first to Smart Lethieullier to Charles Lyttelton, 3 March 1747/8, BL Stowe MS 752, fol. 21v. SAL MB III:199–200, V:187, VI:75–6. 166 SAL MB VII:192. Theobald’s willingness to posit an Anglo-Saxon origin for St Peter’s had more to do with his reverence for Alfred the Great than with any of its architectural characteristics. 167 Smart Lethieullier to Charles Lyttelton, 17 January 1751, BL Stowe MS 754, fols 49r– 50r. An edited version of Lethieullier’s account was published alongside a set of engravings of Greensted as Plate VII of the second volume of Vetusta Monumenta in 1789. 168 SGS MB V:95, VI:111. 169 SAL MB VIII:342. 170 H. M. Taylor, Anglo-Saxon Architecture, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1965), I:262–4, II:584–93. 171 Sweet, Antiquaries, xvi. 172 Charles Lyttelton, ‘On the Antiquity of Brick Buildings in England, posterior to the time of the Romans’, Archaeologia 1 (1770), 141; SAL MB VI:4, VII:20, VIII:3. 164 165

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recognise the Anglo-Saxon re-use of Roman brick ‘when they could easily procure it’.173 James Essex’s essay on brick and stone buildings extended Lyttelton’s conclusions, correctly identifying St Michael’s Church, St Albans as a late tenth-century construction and offering further evidence for the similarities of late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman building styles.174 By combining textual evidence with a comparative approach to architectural history and close analysis of church fabric, Lyttelton and Essex began the process of defining the characteristics and construction methods of Anglo-Saxon churches. James Bentham took up their research in The History and Antiquities of the Conventual Church of Ely, the introduction to which contained the first published scholarly history of Anglo-Saxon architecture.175 Bentham overturned the common claim that Anglo-Saxon churches were ‘generally Timber Buildings, or, if of Stone, with upright walls only’, and demonstrated that Anglo-Saxon churches had incorporated stone arches and columns.176 Taking aim at writers such as Thomas Warton, who credited the Normans with having ‘introduced arts and civility’ to the unrefined English, Bentham wrote that such a ‘mean opinion . . . appears to me to be without any manner of foundation’ and explicitly claimed that Anglo-Saxon churches posessed both beauty and elegance.177 Incorporating research by James Essex, Thomas Gray and Lyttelton himself, Bentham’s Ely presented readers with examples of churches that demonstrated how architectural styles had changed ‘by degrees’ from the sixth century to the sixteenth.178 Printed five times between 1771 and 1808, Bentham’s analysis established itself as the pre-eminent analysis of medieval architecture before the publication of Thomas Rickman’s Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture in 1817.179 Bentham’s arguments on behalf of the ‘elegance’ of Anglo-Saxon churches led to his identification of the Church of St Martin’s, Canterbury, as the original church granted by King Ethelbert of Kent to his Christian wife Bertha and as the first church of Augustine.180 He correctly identified ‘the many subterraneous rooms . . . artfully disposed’ of St Andrew’s, Hexham, as those built by Bishop Wilfrid in the late seventh century. From these structures and others at York, Lincoln, Monkwearmouth-Jarrow and Ripon, Bentham provided early proof that Anglo-Saxon church construction had incorporated ‘Pillars, Arches, Vaulted roofs, Windows, Porticos, Galleries, and a variety of Altars, with their proper ornaments and decorations’, evidence ‘that Architecture was carried in that age to some considerable

Lyttelton, ‘Antiquity of Brick Buildings’, 143. James Essex, ‘Remarks on the Antiquity and the different Modes of Brick and Stone Buildings in England’, Archaeologia 4 (1786), 86–98. 175 James Bentham, The History and Antiquities of the Conventual and Cathedral Church of Ely (Cambridge, 1771), 15–31. 176 Ibid., 15; cf. Sweet, Antiquaries, 247–8. 177 Thomas Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1762), II:208; Bentham, Ely, 15. 178 Bentham, Ely, 39. 179 John M. Frew, ‘James Bentham’s History of Ely Cathedral: A Forgotten Classic of the Early Gothic Revival’, The Art Bulletin 62 (1980), 292. 180 Bentham, Ely, 18–20. 173

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degree of perfection’. Bentham was the first architectural historian to consider Anglo-Saxon towers, which he believed had been introduced in the tenth century as receptacles for bells.182 Though not unerring in his conclusions, and not without his detractors, Bentham successfully expanded the accepted Anglo-Saxon architectural repertoire and contributed directly to the chronological definition of architectural styles and periods.183 Easily overlooked, however, is the connection between Bentham’s praise for Anglo-Saxon churches constructed by Bishop Wilfrid and his claim that ‘the Church and Monastery at Ely founded by St Etheldreda, were built under his direction’. Bentham’s identification of the ruins of the eleventh-century abbey church as the ‘considerable remains of this ancient Saxon Monastery’ reveals the limitations of his ability to distinguish phases of ‘Saxon’ architecture as clearly as it demonstrates his reverence for Ely’s Anglo-Saxon origins.184 A more overt expression of Bentham’s Anglo-Saxonism occurred in 1771, two years after the discovery and disinterment of the bones of Archbishop Wulfstan, Ealdorman Byrhtnoth (commemorated in ‘The Battle of Maldon’) and five other Anglo-Saxon bishops, during building works in the choir. After measuring the bones of all seven of these ‘worthies’ – noting that Byrhtnoth’s were ‘remarkable for their length, and proportionably strong’ – Bentham oversaw their reinterment in Bishop West’s chapel, behind a ‘row of small Gothic niches of stone’ which he inscribed with their names and dates of death.185 Bentham’s insistence on the distinctive characteristics of Anglo-Saxon and Gothic architecture did not prevent him from identifying an elaborate fifteenth-century Gothic chapel as a fitting monument to his Anglo-Saxon predecessors. The impact of Lyttelton and Bentham on English architectural studies may be inferred from the increasingly detailed descriptions of correctly dated Anglo-Saxon churches published in the last three decades of the century, including such notable examples as the church of St Paul at Jarrow.186 John-Charles Brooke’s essay on Kirkdale Church in North Yorkshire is perhaps the most accurate, detailed study of an Anglo-Saxon parish church published in the eighteenth century.187 It also contains a striking example of the way in which encounters with Anglo-Saxon buildings could provoke emotional responses in antiquaries. Even though Brooke remarks that the church ‘makes but a mean appearance’, he notes that its situation is ‘extremely beautiful and romantic’ and ‘well adapted to give us an idea of the wisdom and piety of our Saxon ancestors, in chusing for such a purpose, a situation so well calculated to 181

Ibid., 25–6. Ibid., 29–30. 183 Edward Ledwich, ‘Observations on Our Antient Churches’, Archaeologia 8 (1787), 165–7; William Wilkins, ‘A Description of the Church of Melbourne in Derbyshire, with an Attempt to explain from it the real Situation of the Porticus in the ancient Churches’, Archaeologia 13 (1800), 290–309. 184 Bentham, Ely, 24. 185 James Bentham, ‘Extract of a Letter . . . concerning certain Discoveries in Ely Minster’, Archaeologia 2 (1773), 364–6. 186 SAL MB XI:207–9. 187 John-Charles Brooke, ‘An Illustration of a Saxon Inscription on the Church of Kirkdale in Rydale in the North-Riding of the County of York’, Archaeologia 5 (1779), 188–206. 181

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inspire with devotion’.188 Brooke’s response to Kirkdale invokes an idea of the picturesque that is inseparable from Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and one that locates beauty in the imaginative experience of the past. His encounter leads him to affirm a feeling of historical continuity that stands in sharp contrast to the feelings of irreparable loss and discontinuity that historians frequently identify in antiquarian studies of architectural remains.189 Brooke also studied the Anglo-Saxon inscription on an interior wall of Aldbrough Church in East Yorkshire, which he believed ‘to have been built by the Saxons, though it now has a more modern appearance, owing to the succession of repairs it has undergone’.190 As at Kirkdale, the church at Aldbrough was a rare survival of Anglo-Saxon architecture and as such ‘must particularly engage the attention of us, their descendants’.191 Samuel Pegge responded, clarifying that although ‘our Saxon ancestors’ created the inscription and the wall on which it appeared, the rest of the church belonged to a later period.192 John Carter offered numerous examples of ‘Saxon’ architecture in his Ancient Architecture in England that, while no means universally correct, provided further support for Pegge’s argument that even though few entire Anglo-Saxon buildings remained, many buildings contained Anglo-Saxon elements that held considerable value for architectural historians.193 Through ongoing antiquarian exchanges, analytical frameworks for understanding and classifying Anglo-Saxon architecture gradually emerged. By the end of the century even composite structures such as Aldbrough Church, with its tenth- or eleventh-century nave, twelfth-century chancel and early thirteenth-century tower, could be accurately described and identified as Anglo-Saxon in origin, and so fitted into the historical narratives of their locales and regions. Antiquarianism and Medievalism The breadth of eighteenth-century antiquarian interest in Anglo-Saxon remains cannot be ignored. In addition to the general fields already addressed, antiquaries continued to analyse Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and to apply the information contained in them to the identification and dating of artefacts and other remains. In March 1760 the bulk of one meeting of the Society of Antiquaries was taken up with a discussion of the introduction of glazing and stonecutting for the construction of Anglo-Saxon churches; another with Thomas Percy’s essay on Anglo-Saxon Ibid., 200. Margaret Aston, ‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973), 231–2; Alexandrina Buchanan, ‘Interpretations of Medieval Architecture, c.1550–c.1750’ in Gothic Architecture and its Meanings 1550–1830, ed. Michael Hall (Reading, 2002), 36; Sweet, Antiquaries, 241. 190 John-Charles Brooke, ‘An Illustration of a Saxon Inscription remaining in the Church of Aldbrough, in Holdernesse, in the East-Riding of the County of York’, Archaeologia 6 (1782), 41. 191 Ibid., 39. 192 Samuel Pegge, ‘Observations on the present Aldbrough Church at Holderness, proving that it was not a Saxon Building, as Mr. Somerset contends’, Archaeologia 7 (1785), 86–9. 193 John Carter, Ancient Architecture in England, Part I: The Orders of Architecture in the British, Roman, Saxon and Norman Æras (London, 1795), 13–30; SAL MB VI:111. 188

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minstrels in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which Percy significantly expanded in the second edition in response to Samuel Pegge’s critiques.194 Even subjects such as the ‘Vineyard Controversy’ and dietary habits captured the interest of at least some antiquaries.195 Although some contemporaries deemed them frivolous, debates over these and similar subjects can fairly be seen as evidence of the involvement of Anglo-Saxonist antiquaries in the emergence of cultural, social and anthropological approaches to historical research, approaches that would only become coherent methodologies decades or centuries later. By the end of the century antiquaries had produced a diverse and growing body of research on Anglo-Saxon coins, artefacts and architectural remains, and had disseminated that research in manuscripts, books and the periodical press. These data provided insights into Anglo-Saxon trade, warfare, architecture, laws, burial practices and the activities of daily life. The increasing amount of physical evidence from the Anglo-Saxon period supported new comparative modes of enquiry, analysis and documentation, especially in excavations. Each new discovery brought with it the potential for some moment in Anglo-Saxon history to be reimagined and reinterpreted, some facet of Anglo-Saxon culture to be understood in greater depth, and the picture of English history to be rendered in greater detail. For eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists every discovery had the potential to provide physical corroboration of the accounts of Anglo-Saxon authors, and in turn the materials necessary for reinterpreting Anglo-Saxon literature, history and culture. The antiquary and historian Sharon Turner included an entire volume on Anglo-Saxon manners, customs, and social and political practices in his History of the Anglo-Saxons.196 It must also be remembered, however, that such discoveries also inspired – and, in the case of Turner and antiquaries such as Maurice Johnson and John-Charles Brooke, were inspired by – imaginative forms of Anglo-Saxonism that attracted wider, more diverse audiences than did the more or less scholarly publications of antiquaries. As the following chapters demonstrate, the same discoveries that underpinned scholarly advances also informed creative and ideological expressions of Anglo-Saxonism that were as likely to ignore or subvert antiquarian scholarship as to replicate it. Antiquaries did not operate in intellectual or cultural isolation; their discoveries could and did lead to non- or anti-scholarly expressions of medievalism as readily as to scholarly ones. Equally important is the fact that antiquarian interactions with ‘monuments’, a term used in the eighteenth century to describe almost any physical artefact, were 194 SAL MB VIII:233, X:152; Samuel Pegge, ‘Observations on Dr. Percy’s account of Minstrels among the Saxons’, Archaeologia 2 (1773), 100–6; Thomas Percy, The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London, 1767); Bertram H. Davis, Thomas Percy: A Scholar-Critic in the Age of Johnson (Philadelphia, 1989), 153–5. 195 Samuel Pegge, ‘Of the Introduction, Progress, State, and Condition, of the Vine in Britain’, Archaeologia 1 (1770), 319–32; Samuel Pegge, ‘The Question considered, whether England formerly produced any Wine from Grapes’, Archaeologia 3 (1775), 53–66; Daines Barrington, ‘Mr. Pegge’s Observations on the Growth of the Vine in England considered and answered’, Archaeologia 3 (1775), 67–95. See also: Samuel Pegge, ‘Remarks on the Bones of Fowls found in Christchurch-Twynham, Hampshire’, Archaeologia 4 (1776), 414–20. 196 Below, 197–201.

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themselves in many cases acts of imaginative reconstruction.197 Historical remains are as much evidence as memorials to individuals or individual acts of creation that could be reconstructed by combining textual scholarship, physical examination and scientific analysis. As monuments, Anglo-Saxon remains of all kinds possessed a value that was intellectual as well as aesthetic and emotional, bound up with antiquaries’ sense of their own historical identity. William Nicolson’s encounter with the ‘ravishing’ Ruthwell Cross, John-Charles Brooke’s imaginative temporal relocation at Kirkdale, and Maurice Johnson’s readiness to identify himself as Mercian when discussing his Anglo-Saxon coins, verify Ed Risden’s observation that historical monuments ‘draw past (actual or fictional) and present (actual or imagined) into instantaneous experience, creating an interpretable sense of awe that can move an audience both emotionally and intellectually’.198 The clergy who preached in Anglo-Saxon churches, like the judges who decided cases based on charter horns, understood the ‘monuments’ of the Anglo-Saxon past in terms of their continuing relevance to the everyday lives of English people, and by their still vital role in England’s physical and institutional landscapes. As the patriotically motivated interpreters of such monuments, antiquaries became both their preservers and participants in the telling of their stories – stories that inspired (and were in some cases inspired by) not just other antiquaries, but the artists and writers whose works are discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Even more than their nineteenth-century successors, eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists inhabited the dual role of scientist and amateur, spurred by ‘love of truth’ and love of country to dedicate themselves to the systematic study of the past.199 To excavate, analyse, discuss, engrave and publish accounts of Anglo-Saxon remains was to ensure the survival of historical evidence for future generations of antiquaries with greater knowledge and technical skills at their disposal. It preserved for every member of English society those fragile objects which possessed the power to evoke emotional and imaginative engagements with the nation’s origins.

Maria Grazia Lolla, ‘Monuments and Texts: Antiquarianism and the Beauty of Antiquity’, Art History 25 (2002), 432. 198 Ed Risden, ‘Monument’ in Medevialism, ed. Emery and Utz, 158–9. 199 Dinshaw, How Soon is Now, 35–6; Archaeologia 1 (1770), ii. 197

3 Anglo-Saxon History and the English Landscape

Our historians, with a disgraceful partiality, have stigmatized the Saxons with the epithets of cruelty and injustice . . . Without the Saxon arms, this island, like the regions of the east, would have been over-run and desolated by a banditti . . . and become a den of thieves, pirates, and robbers.

E

William Hutchinson1

ighteenth-century antiquaries and philologists conceived of their work on Anglo-Saxon language and culture as a contribution to the elucidation of national history. By publishing scholarly editions of medieval texts, illustrating or clarifying passages in chronicles or charters with physical artefacts, or examining the political and economic history of Anglo-Saxon England through numismatics, Anglo-Saxon scholarship provided a wealth of new information that could be put to use by historians, many of whom were themselves antiquaries. Historians shared with antiquaries a view of the past that encompassed both the objective and the affective. Laurence Echard wrote that ‘the Business of an Historian is not barely to tell his Reader a true and faithful story’ but ‘to inrich his Understanding, to elevate his Thoughts, and even to captivate his Affections’.2 More suggestive is Thomas Hearne’s claim that national history ‘brings the Times past into our present View, makes us as it were co-eval with the celebrated Heroes of former Times’.3 Reading history thus became a polytemporal act facilitated by historians working in a genre that demanded imaginative engagement. Long established historical tradition encouraged readers to see the origins of the English kingdom, its counties and its place names as Anglo-Saxon. As this chapter will demonstrate, eighteenth-century historians concerned with the Anglo-Saxon past provided readers with an evolving if contested narrative of Anglo-Saxon history that was fundamentally linked to ideas of England and Englishness simultaneously past and present. Developments in Anglo-Saxon studies coincided with what Daniel Woolf and Karen O’Brien have identified as a dramatic shift in the prestige attached to national history, to overall historical awareness, and to ‘an enhanced sense of imaginative William Hutchinson, A View of Northumberland, 2 vols (Newcastle, 1778), I:iv–vii. Echard, History of England, Preface. 3 Thomas Hearne, Ductor Historicus: or, A Short System of Universal History, and an Introduction to the Study of it, 3rd edn (London, 1714), 127. 1

2

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participation’ in history on the part of English readers.4 This shift was not limited to metropolitan and university elites. Rosemary Sweet’s study of urban histories reveals the flourishing historiographical culture in provincial towns, where literacy and reading significantly expanded during the century.5 Although debates over historical literacy rates remain ‘essentially irresolvable’, evidence suggests that the vast majority of English urbanites possessed at least some degree of functional literacy by the end of the century.6 For town officials, merchants, and military and naval officers, those involved in legal, medical and clerical professions, and city-dwelling members of the gentry and nobility (regardless of gender) literacy was all but universal.7 Urbanites were not only more likely than rural households to read and own books, but to own books of a non-religious nature, primarily chapbooks, periodicals and histories.8 Lending libraries made such works available to readers across a wide socio-economic spectrum, as evidenced by David Allan and Stephen Colclough.9 At Bristol Library, a third of all books borrowed between 1773 and 1784 fell into the broad category of ‘History, Travel and Antiquities’, while more than a fifth of loans from the cathedral libraries at Lincoln and Durham were historical, antiquarian and biographical works.10 Even if few historical works appeared in print runs of more than 500 to 750 copies, the presence of printers (many of whom were booksellers and book lenders) in provincial towns and the proliferation of lending libraries meant that provincial readers could access historical texts with greater ease than ever before.11 Hume’s ‘historical Age’ was one in which provincial audiences and urban professionals as well as aristocratic and genteel readers produced, consumed and engaged imaginatively with their national pasts. If the English were who they were because of something that was uniquely theirs, the historical origins of the nation were unique above all else. The Anglo-Saxon monarchy and common law had been cited as foundational elements of the English state since the seventeenth century, and from 1714 onward writers regularly 4 Daniel Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000) and ‘From Hystories to the Historical’; Karen O’Brien, ‘The History Market in Eighteenth-Century England’ in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. Isabel Rivers (London, 2001), 106. 5 Sweet, The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1997); Colley, Britons, 37. 6 David Allan, A Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England (London, 2008), 4; W. A. Speck, Literature and Society in Eighteenth-Century England 1680–1820 (London, 1998), 11. 7 Speck, Literature and Society, 11; John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), 167–8; Roger S. Schofield, ‘Dimensions of Illiteracy in England, 1750–1850’ in Literacy and Historical Development: A Reader, ed. Harvey J. Graff (Carbondale, 2007), 299–314. 8 Carl Estabrook, Urbane and Rustic England (Manchester, 1998), 201. 9 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 167–81; Allan, Nation of Readers, 152–4, passim; Stephen Colclough, Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1870 (Houndmills, 2007), 74–87. 10 Paul Kaufman, Borrowings from the Bristol Library, 1773–1784: A Unique Record of Reading Vogues (Charlottesville, 1960), 121; Allan, Nation of Readers, 177. 11 William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004); James Raven, ‘The Book Trades’ in Books and Their Readers, ed. Rivers, 21–2.

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identified the Hanoverian dynasty as a line of Saxon kings who shared a common cultural and ethnic ancestry with their English subjects.12 While eighteenth-century historians placed relatively little emphasis on Anglo-Saxon ethnicity in comparison with their Victorian successors, such cultural and political identifications served to reinforce the monarchy and English political institutions whilst offering a cohesive identity for English society as a whole.13 Claims to Anglo-Saxon identity were not new, of course, stretching back well into the Middle Ages.14 Eighteenth-century historiographical Anglo-Saxonism was not a novel idea, but a novel iteration of a recurrent theme in English historical, social and political thought. Those who espoused a belief in a fundamentally Anglo-Saxon English identity – however loosely conceived – bolstered their arguments by constructing new historical narratives from the raw materials of literary, philological and antiquarian research. Harnessing the rhetorical and ideological force of the Anglo-Saxon past required the telling of stories in which Hengist, Alfred the Great and the Hanoverian kings could be seen to be related and in which contemporary English readers could recognise themselves and their environment. Yet historians were divided as to how such narratives ought to be written. While Anglo-Saxonists espoused a philological and antiquarian approach that sought to present the past as a continuous narrative filled with detail and incongruities, and as the source for the origins of national manners and customs that took recognisable shape in the rituals of everyday life in the present, polite Augustan writers sought to provide readers with moral and political instruction derived from a highly literary presentation of historical figures and their actions that was modelled on the works of classical authors.15 Most historians adopted an essentially antiquarian approach, engaging critically with a wide range of primary and secondary sources cited in footnotes and marginal annotations; those who adopted a more literary or philosophical approach generally adopted a much lighter touch where sources were concerned, often mentioning their authorities in passing within the running text. Many eighteenth-century writers and thinkers felt that a new history of England was an intellectual and cultural necessity.16 William Temple wrote that it ‘is a Shame to be ignorant in the Affairs of our own Country’ but that it was almost inevitable that English readers were so, ‘since for that end a Man must read over a Library rather than a Book, and . . . must be content to forget more than he remembers’.17 Looking back to the Renaissance, Temple mourned the fact that English chroniclers had failed to provide a counterpart to France’s François Eudes de Mézeray, Spain’s 12 Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny; MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History, 89–124. 13 See, e.g.: MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History, 7–50; Brackmann, Elizabethan Invention; Scragg and Weinberg, eds, Literary Appropriations, 1–92. 14 Lynn Staley, The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (Notre Dame, 2012); above, 000. 15 Joseph Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, 1991), 267–90. 16 Above, 33–5. 17 William Temple, An Introduction to the History of England, 3rd edn (London, 1708), Preface.

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Juan de Mariana, or the Holy Roman Empire’s Pedro de Mexía.18 To encourage ‘some worthy Spirit, and true Lover of our Country’ to compose a national history, Temple presented his Introduction to the History of England: an overview of English history to 1087. Despite concluding the Introduction with an enumeration of the benefits to English power, political stature, culture and learning derived from the Norman Conquest, Temple insisted that the English retained three fundamental components of their Anglo-Saxon national identity: their country’s name (England), their language (‘the Body and Substance of what still remains’), and their ‘Forms of Government . . . Laws and Institutions’.19 Temple’s is an orthodox view of the relationship between the English and their Anglo-Saxon forebears, and representative of the way in which eighteenth-century English Anglo-Saxonists conceived of the fundamentally historical definition of Englishness. One of the most important determinants of identity and history was the relationship of individuals and the past with the physical landscape, and the sense of connection that came from belonging to a particular region, county, town or village. Adam Fox’s exploration of the relationship between locality, orality, literacy and memory in England makes clear the fact that, for English people, ‘memories of the past comprised part of that local knowledge from which people derived a sense of identity and pride based upon place’.20 For scholars of medievalism, ideas and memories about place and history constitute affective and intellectual spaces and ‘possibilities for connection, invention, or consolation’.21 The relationship between Maurice Johnson’s antiquarianism and love for his home town of Spalding bears out this claim, as do John-Charles Brooke’s sense of temporal transportation on looking at the church at Kirkdale, and historians’ frequent encouragements to readers to see themselves in the Anglo-Saxon past, whether national, county or local.22 The historically defined identity of England was not monolithic but composite, a national communion comprised of smaller communities. This chapter explores the ways in which historians constructed an idea of Anglo-Saxon history and contributed to its establishment in popular understanding as the defining, foundational period in England’s national story by writing the histories of those many, multi-layered communities: the kingdom, the county and the town. Histories of England Despite Temple’s wish for a native historian to take up the task of writing a new national history, neither of the two most influential eighteenth-century histories of England was written by an Englishman. Paul Rapin’s Histoire de l’Angleterre, edited and translated by Nicolas Tindal in 1727, quickly ‘established itself as the nearest thing to a standard history of England’ before being eclipsed in popularity by the Ibid. Ibid., 304–5. 20 Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), 215. 21 Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, ‘Anglo-Saxon Horizons: Places of the Mind in the Northumbrian Landscape’ in A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes (Philadelphia, 2006), 2. 22 Above, 41, 67–8. 18

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Scotsman David Hume’s History of England. Before Rapin, however, came Laurence Echard’s The History of England, published by Jacob Tonson in 1707. Echard provided a generally unflattering narrative of Anglo-Saxon history: the Heptarchy consisted of endless battles without ‘Reason or Equity’ and, despite the ‘mild and glorious’ reign of Egbert and the assertion that Alfred the Great ‘so firmly fix’d’ the monarchy ‘that it continued ever since’, by 1066 the dissolute English had opened themselves up to conquest in much the same way the dissolute Britons were portrayed as being responsible for the conquest of the fifth century.24 Echard’s Anglo-Saxons remain the ancestors of the nation but function as a cautionary tale: ‘Since Divisions and Factions, Immorality and Impiety occasion’d such great Miseries to our Ancestors’, Echard wrote, readers would do well to remember ‘That the same Causes ordinarily produce the same Effects’.25 Philip Hicks and Laird Okie have observed that contemporaries viewed Echard as a Tory partisan on account of his tendency to moralise and to emphasise the role of ‘accident’ and divine providence in history.26 For all his denigration of the Anglo-Saxons, however, Echard’s account assumes the Anglo-Saxon ancestry of the English people and the continuation of the English monarchy from Egbert and Alfred the Great to the present day that accorded with the dominant Whig view.27 Such ambivalence was necessary for Echard, who structured his history as an extended metaphor in which England passed from ‘Darkness to Twilight’ with the unification of the Heptarchy by Egbert in the eighth century, from ‘Twilight to Day-light’ with the arrival of the Normans, and on to an illustrious eighteenth-century present.28 Rapin’s History, by contrast, situates the Anglo-Saxons as the heroes of English history. In his preface to the English edition, Tindal wrote that the difficulty Rapin met with in teaching himself about the Anglo-Saxons ‘inspired him with the design of clearing this part of the English History’ by writing a detailed account of the period from the arrival of Julius Caesar to the Norman Conquest.29 Rapin already enjoyed notoriety for his Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Tories, a Whiggish explication of England’s political parties written for European readers.30 Rapin shared the Whigs’ belief in the Anglo-Saxon origins of England’s constitution, an idea so integral to his conception of English national and cultural history that it drives the History forward. It also serves as the source for a strong sense of British exceptionalism, encapsulated in Rapin’s assertion that ‘every one knows this truly fortunate 23

John Kenyon, The History Men (London, 1983), 39, 41–54. Ibid., 63–4, 70, 133. 25 Ibid., 133. 26 Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (Houndmills, 1996), 148; Laird Okie, Augustan Historical Writing: Histories of England in the English Enlightenment (Oakham, 1991), 32–5. 27 Below, 160–2. 28 Echard, History of England, 63, 135. 29 Paul Rapin, The History of England, trans. Nicholas Tindal, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1732), I:Preface. 30 Originally published in The Hague in French in 1717, it appeared almost immediately in English as Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys; or, an Historical Dissertation upon Whig and Tory, trans. John Ozell (London, 1717). 23

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Isle, by her Riches and the excellent Constitution of her Government long since established, enjoys a Happiness unknown to the rest of the World’.31 Rapin’s History met with immediate success. Its author’s ability to engage critically with historical sources, to avoid polemical language, and to present his findings in a narrative that was both erudite and engaging ‘enchanted Englishmen, who were so accustomed to the distortions and invectives of party history’.32 Numerous formats appeared over the following decades, ranging from a deluxe two-volume folio edition with illustrations by George Vertue, to pamphlets sold serially at sixpence for readers one reviewer sneeringly called ‘persons in the lowest stations of life, [who] are more intent upon cultivating their minds, than upon feeding and cloathing their bodies’.33 Philip Hicks calculates that nearly 18,000 copies of Rapin’s History were sold between 1725 and 1755, making it a truly popular history and one of the most widely read of its time.34 Crucially, in Karen O’Brien’s words, it ‘played a role in the political education of the nation’ through its focus on an idea of ‘historically transcendent Saxon liberties’ and adoption of a ‘dialectics of liberty and prerogative, parliaments and kings, the nation and the Norman feudal yoke’.35 Despite this important role, recent scholarship has paid little attention to the manner in which Rapin shaped his narrative of Anglo-Saxon history or his interpretation of and commentaries on individual historical figures.36 Rapin reiterates the importance of divine providence and the characters of individual kings found in Echard’s history, but emphasises the decisions of Anglo-Saxon councils (presented as a kind of proto-Parliament) as catalysts for social and institutional change. Citing Gildas and Bede, Rapin argues that ‘the Calamities which fell upon the British Nation’ resulted from the Britons’ having abandoned Christian observance and given in to ‘Excess and Debauchery’.37 They allowed themselves to be duped by Vortigern, who ‘prevented them from maturely reflecting on the Consequences’ of inviting in the Saxons to protect them from the Picts and Scots.38 After detailing a series of battles between Saxons and Britons – the latter under the leadership of Vortimer, Ambrosius and Arthur – Rapin reflects on the causes of the Saxon conquest of England. ‘It must be own’d, in the first Place’, he writes, ‘that God was pleas’d by a just Judgment to punish the Britons for their enormous Crimes’. Divine justice manifested itself in British internal dissension and a lack of strong leadership in the immediate post-Roman period, which together led to the Britons’ downfall. As Rapin presents them, British kings come in two types: models

Rapin, History, I:iii. Hicks, Neoclassical History, 148. 33 B. T., ‘Letter to Mr. Bavius’, Grub Street Journal 247 (19 September 1734), 1. 34 Hicks, Neoclassical History, 147. 35 Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997), 18, 16; Hicks, Neoclassical History, 146–9; Okie, Augustan Historical Writing, 47–64. 36 Rapin appears in most of the recent studies mentioned here. The only study dedicated to his life is Nelly Girard d’Albissin, Un Précurseur de Montesquieu: Rapin-Thoyras; premier historien français des institutions anglaises (Paris, 1969). 37 Rapin, History, I:29. 38 Ibid., I:30. 31

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of warrior-kingship such as Ambrosius and Arthur, or, as the majority (including Vortigern), examples of what not to do and whom not to be.39 From this point on Rapin refers not to Saxons but to ‘the Anglo-Saxons, [who] introduc’d a new Face of Things in Great Britain’.40 Conversion to Christianity occurs simultaneously with a series of revolutions amongst the unequal kingdoms of the Heptarchy, at the end of which England is unified thanks to ‘the Providence of God, whose good Pleasure it was to raise England by degrees . . . to her present height of Grandeur and Power’.41 England flourishes under Egbert and Alfred, both of whom Rapin holds up as models of good kingship.42 Even Harold II, whose right to the throne Rapin questions, is ‘endowed with all the Virtues which form a great Prince’ and dies ‘with his Sword in his Hand, in defence . . . of his Country’s Cause, against the ambition of the Duke of Normandy’.43 Drawing on the editions of Anglo-Saxon historical and legal texts published in the preceding half century, Rapin presented contemporaries with a densely annotated scholarly history of Anglo-Saxon England that was also thoroughly Anglo-Saxonist in its portrayal of Anglo-Saxon kings as models of patriotic virtue, its celebration of Anglo-Saxon political institutions, and its insistence that Anglo-Saxon and English were interchangeable terms.44 By contrast, David Hume opened the final volume of his History of England with an assurance that he would pass quickly ‘through the obscure and uninteresting period of Saxon annals’.45 Hume’s Saxons are ‘the most distinguished both by their manners and political institutions’ of the ‘barbarous nations’, whose ‘sudden, violent, and unprepared revolutions . . . are so much guided by caprice, and terminate so often in cruelty, that they disgust us’.46 The history of the Heptarchy consists of a succession of names and events so empty of meaning ‘that the most profound or most eloquent writer must despair of rendering them either instructive or entertaining to the reader’.47 Unification under Egbert promised ‘the agreeable prospect of future tranquillity’, but the arrival of the Danes initiated centuries of unrest that resulted in the Anglo-Saxons being ‘reduced . . . to grievous servitude’ under Canute and his successors.48 The restoration of Anglo-Saxon rule under Edward the Confessor rather than the descendants of his elder half-brother Edmund Ironside was a result of ‘a people like the English’ being ‘so little accustomed to observe a regular order in the succession of the monarchs’.49 Edward, educated in Normandy, filled his

Ibid., I:40–2. Ibid., I:45. 41 Ibid., I:64. 42 Ibid., I:62–141. Rapin’s account of Alfred consisted almost entirely of a paraphrase of Spelman’s 1678 Aelfredi Magni Anglorum Regis. 43 Ibid., 142. 44 Temple, Introduction to the History of England, 61. 45 David Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the Revolution in 1688 . . . A New Edition, with the Author’s last Corrections and Improvements, 8 vols (London, 1782), I:2. 46 Ibid., I:16, 2. 47 Ibid., I:28. 48 Ibid., I:66. 49 Ibid., I:158. 39

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court with Normans and affected their manners and speech, as did his courtiers and many nobles who had lost ‘all national pride and spirit’.50 Hume’s focus on instability and disunity, like his repeated criticisms of an Anglo-Saxon church slavishly devoted to Rome, reinforces his wider emphasis on liberty as the defining feature of English history. Unlike Rapin, whose ‘ignorance and partiality’ were ‘totally dispicable’ to him, Hume argued that English liberty had been established by the ancient Saxons but immediately eroded by constant warfare and Catholic zealotry, only to resurface in the reign of Henry VII.51 Hume’s citations of medieval chronicles in footnotes notwithstanding, his opposition to antiquarianism and its scholarly manifestations meant that the work of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists had little effect on the narrative sections of the History or Hume’s attitude toward the Anglo-Saxon period.52 Only in an appendix on ‘The Anglo-Saxon Government and Manners’ does antiquarian scholarship come to the fore. Instead of using that scholarship to argue for anything approaching the English constitution (an argument Hume suggests is motivated by ‘faction’), however, Hume reaches the conclusion that ‘the Anglo-Saxon government became at last extremely aristocratical’ and employed a justice system marked by practices ‘very different from those which prevail at present among all civilized nations’.53 Constant warfare, lack of contextual detail from contemporary sources, an aristocratic government and a debased justice system led Hume to conclude that England’s medieval history contained ‘nothing but reversals . . . fluctuation and movement’, a litany of instability and irrationality with little to offer an enlightened, civilized eighteenth-century reader.54 Hume does find virtuous Anglo-Saxons to serve as models for modern audiences. Hume’s description of Egbert is less effusive than Rapin’s, but far from negative: he is a prince who merited his subjects’ allegiance ‘by the splendor of his victories, the vigour of his administration, and the superior nobility of his birth’, and who could not be equalled by his successors.55 Alfred the Great, darling of eighteenth-century English historians, possessed ‘noble and elevated sentiments’, ‘heroic spirit’ and ‘generous views’.56 Hume’s entirely uncritical presentation of the story of Alfred’s time on Athelney – disguised as a peasant, living with a neat-herd and burning the cakes – exhibits a romanticised or sentimentalised vision of a past in which ‘every circumstance is interesting, which attends so much virtue and dignity, reduced to such distress’.57 His regret that ‘Fortune’ had placed such figures as Alfred, Egbert and even Harold II – a well-liked and capable ruler who fought valiantly to defend his country at the Battle of Hastings – in the wrong historical age, ought to be seen as an encouragement to readers to engage with them imaginatively and emotionally. Ibid., I:232. Hume to Abbé le Blanc, June 1753, in The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols (Oxford, 2011), I:179. 52 Hicks, Neoclassical History, 178. 53 Hume, History of England, 1782, I:215. 54 O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, 89; Hicks, Neoclassical History, 171–82. 55 Hume, History of England, 1782, I:66. 56 Ibid., I:77. 57 Ibid., I:79–81. 50 51

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Eighteenth-century England’s two most influential histories of England, then, present a study in contrasts where the Anglo-Saxons are concerned. Rapin’s focus on Anglo-Saxon liberty and constitutionalism established a Whig narrative of Anglo-Saxon history as standard, which in turn led to a reaction by Hume in the form of a non-partisan, anti-Anglo-Saxonist national narrative in which particular Anglo-Saxons could be admired but their culture could not. There were, however, more important differences. As John Kenyon wrote, Hume saw his history ‘as a philosophic construct, and never aimed at a complete or accurate recapitulation of events’, while Rapin (and Tindal) set out to create a more accurate, scholarly national history than any before.58 Rapin’s was a politically inflected narrative with all the apparatus necessary for antiquaries and scholars; Hume’s, an equally inflected, more literary and less heavily annotated narrative celebrated for its erudition and taste.59 The two great eighteenth-century histories of England served to bring Anglo-Saxon history to a wide popular audience but neither provided new insights into the Anglo-Saxon past. Rather, they collated existing materials and provided alternative models of how early medieval sources and antiquarian scholarship might be shaped into a narrative form. Importantly for the development of popular Anglo-Saxonism, Rapin and Hume narrated England’s Anglo-Saxon history in a style that was simultaneously informative, entertaining and sentimental. Mark Salber Phillips’s observation that Hume’s History should be read as a composition for a reading public that admitted and even celebrated pathos in its representation of historical figures applies equally to Rapin and even Echard.60 All three writers’ reliance on Henry Savile’s edition of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum shaped their narratives, all of which are essentially chronicles punctuated with episodes of ‘a kind of biographical drama’.61 Thus the story of Hengist and Horsa is inseparable from the account of the beautiful Rowena, either the daughter or niece of Hengist, whose presence at a banquet leads the lecherous British king Vortigern to give Kent to the Anglo-Saxons.62 The history of the kingdoms of the Heptarchy is largely one of battles and successions, and of the conversion of each kingdom, usually thanks to the intervention of royal women such as Queen Bertha, wife of Ethelbert of Kent. But the Heptarchy also offered figures such as King Edwin of Northumbria, whose youthful sufferings, battle for the throne, divinely inspired reign and tragic death counterbalance what is otherwise largely a calendar of names and regnal years.63 Egbert, Æthelwulf, Alfred the Great and Edward the Elder receive extended treatment, but so too does Edwy, portrayed as a royal example of virtue in distress whose tragic love affair Kenyon, History Men, 52. Ibid., 49–56. 60 Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven, 2013), 67–76. 61 John Sharpe, trans., The History of the Kings of England and the Modern History of William of Malmesbury (London, 1815), xiv; Henry Savile, ed., Rerum Anglicarum Scriptores post Bedam præcipui, ex vetustissimis codicibus manuscriptis nunc primum in lucem editi (London, 1596), 2–168. 62 Echard, History of England, 38; Rapin, History, I:31–2; Hume, History of England, 1782, I:21. 63 Echard, History of England, 51–3; Rapin, History, I:47–9; Hume, History of England, 1782, I:42–4. 58

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with Elgiva (Ælfgifu) and unjust treatment and eventual overthrow at the hands of Bishop Dunstan and his ‘cabal’ provided historians with an opportunity to engage in anti-Catholic polemic.64 Historians questioned the veracity of tales of King Edgar’s relationship with Elfrida (Ælfthryth) but all devoted significant space to recounting the story of Edgar’s murder of Elfrida’s husband Athelwold (with or without her complicity), her involvement in the murder of Edward the Martyr, and her role in securing the throne for her son Æthelred the Unready, whose personal and political failures – and the consequent period of Danish rule – are implicitly linked to his wicked mother.65 Edward the Confessor appears as a weak, overly pious ruler whose pro-Norman inclinations are at odds not only with English culture but with the noble if over-reaching Godwin and his heroic son Harold, who try but fail to save England from hostile invaders.66 The success of Tindal’s translation of Rapin’s History inspired a stream of competitors and imitators, from better-known figures such as Thomas Carte and William Guthrie to the dozens of popular ‘New’ and ‘General’ histories of England published over the course of the century, the majority of which tended to give relatively more space to sentimental and dramatic episodes than did Echard, Rapin or Hume.67 Among the most important by-products were the inexpensive epitomes, the most successful of which was John Lockman’s A New History of England by Question and Answer, an adaptation of Rapin’s text that ran to twenty-five (mostly illustrated) editions between 1729 and 1811, making it quite possibly the best-selling history of England of the eighteenth century.68 Lockman confines the history of the Britons and Romans to a brief prefatory section, states simply that Parliament is ‘as old, no doubt, as the Saxon government in this Kingdom’, and begins his history with Egbert, emphasising the heroic and pathetic episodes highlighted by Rapin.69 These episodes aimed to draw readers into an imaginative engagement with an AngloSaxon past in which memorable events impacted directly on the makeup and fate of the English nation. Indeed, Echard, Rapin and Hume regularly refer to ‘the nation’ throughout their histories, in the process revealing a conception of the Anglo-Saxons or English that characterises eighteenth-century English Anglo-Saxonism. In his history of the Heptarchy Rapin refers within the space of a few pages to Ethelbert’s ‘Subjection of all the Nations of the Anglo-Saxons’, to Ina’s foundation of a college at Rome ‘for Echard, History of England, 87; Rapin, History, I:104–6; Hume, History of England, 1782, I:115–17. 65 Echard, History of England, 89–93; Rapin, History, I:109–11, 117–18; Hume, History of England, 1782, I:123–9; below, 129–31. 66 Echard, History of England, 114–33; Rapin, History, I:129–42; Hume, History of England, 1782, I:158–95. 67 Paul Rapin, The History of England, trans. James Kelly (London, 1732); Thomas Carte, A General History of England from the earliest times to A. D. 1654, 4 vols (London, 1747–55); William Guthrie, A General History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar, to the Revolution of 1688, 4 vols (London, 1744–51). Okie, Augustan Historical Writing, 135–78. 68 John Lockman, A New History of England, in English and French, by Question and Answer. Extracted from the Most Celebrated English Historians, Particularly M. Rapin de Thoyras (London, 1729). 69 Ibid., 6–7, 1. 64

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the Instruction and Reception of the English Ecclesiasticks’ and ‘the Entertainment and Lodging of the Kings and Princes of the same Nation’, and to the fact that Offa’s unification of Mercia and East Anglia was, without the ‘mutual Affections of the two Nations’, ‘rather destructive than advantageous to the State’.70 Nation thus differentiates the people from the state, a distinction reinforced by Rapin’s questioning whether or not ‘the Nation had a right to elect Harold on exclusion of Edgar [Ætheling]’ following Edward the Confessor’s death in 1066.71 Hume likewise describes the inability of Danish invaders or English kings and nobles to oppose ‘the united voice of the nation’, however limited that nation might have been in Hume’s interpretation.72 Echard adopted precisely this usage when he argued that the Danish conquest was a conquest of the state of England but that ‘all the Nation of the English’ chose to recognise Sweyn Forkbeard as their king.73 All three historians use ‘nation’ to refer to all of the Anglo-Saxons in England and to smaller groups of Anglo-Saxons within it, both during and after the Heptarchy. Echard went further, claiming that by the early eleventh century the Danes who had settled in England ‘came to incorporate and make a Part of the English Nation without Distinction’, a remarkably inclusive definition of nationhood that foreshadowed Rapin’s inclusion of Britons and Danes within the English population.74 The ‘nation’ that readers met in eighteenth-century histories of Anglo-Saxon England was thus regionally and ethnically heterogenous; the Anglo-Saxonness of Englishness was not racial but cultural and geographic. Antiquarian Historiography Arguably the most important contributor to widening and deepening the focus of Anglo-Saxonist historiography was Robert Henry, whose The History of Great Britain highlighted the importance of manners, habits and customs to any understanding of the nation’s past. Henry aimed ‘to give the reader a concise account of the most important events . . . together with a distinct view of the religion, laws, learning, arts, commerce, and manners of its inhabitants, in every age’.75 More than simply shifting focus, Henry turned the formal construction of English historiography on its head by dividing the history of Great Britain into ten sections and by further dividing each section into seven chapters detailing, in order: civil and military history, religion, law and government, learning, the arts, commerce, and ‘manners, virtues, vices, remarkable customs, language, dress, diet, and diversions’.76 Henry believed that this format, inspired by the Italian scholar Ludovico Muratori’s Anti­ quitates Italicæ Medii Ævi, would make his history richer, more correct and more Rapin, History, I:57n2, 61, 63. Ibid., I:138. 72 Hume, History of England, 1782, I:158. 73 Echard, History of England, 105. 74 Ibid., 114; Rapin, History, I:59, 135. 75 Robert Henry, The History of Great Britain from the first invasion of it by the Romans under Julius Cæsar to the present day. Written on a new plan, 2nd edn, 10 vols (London, 1788), I:ix–x. 76 Ibid., I:xii. 70 71

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easily digestible for readers with varied interests.77 Like Muratori, Henry believed that the study of medieval history constituted a patriotic act and the publication of it a service to the nation.78 According to Henry, it was impossible to understand ‘the real character of the English nation, now one of the greatest, bravest, and most flourishing nations on earth . . . without acquiring a previous knowledge of the history, laws, government, and manners of the Anglo-Saxons’.79 Phillips correctly observes that Henry ‘addressed his enlargement of history’s social vision to the needs of present-day audiences in a great commercial and polite nation’, and in the second volume of his History he did so by marrying a broad view and a more or less objective presentation of his research to an overarching Anglo-Saxonist perspective.80 ‘The whole people of England are deeply interested in the history of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors’, Henry wrote, suggesting that modern English readers both had a stake in and were affected by the Anglo-Saxon past.81 Eschewing the sarcastic anti-Catholicism of Hume and the providential approach of Echard and Rapin, Henry presents Anglo-Saxon history as a story of more and less able rulers who make better and worse political decisions, who interact with the church and other European kingdoms and rulers, and who carefully manage relationships with the Welsh, Scots and Danes. Henry carefully and critically employed nearly every printed source on Anglo-Saxon history – including recent publications such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of English Poetry and Northern Antiquities, and William Clarke’s Connexion of the Roman, Saxon and English Coins – and he emphasised the value rather than the limitations of ‘monkish’ writers. Henry demonstrates the advanced state of learning at several points in Anglo-Saxon history, particularly in the immediate post-conversion period of the late seventh and eighth centuries, when ‘some of the English clergy . . . were admired by all Europe as prodigies of erudition’.82 Introducing the full text of a letter from Alcuin to Charlemagne, he elevates Alcuin’s intellect and prose style by apologising for his own translation, which ‘falls much short of the spirit and elegance of the original Latin’.83 Henry also provides evidence that the Anglo-Saxons were neither uncultured nor uncivilised, stressing their reverence for poets and poetry, their skill in metalwork and, most importantly and at greatest length, their commercial prowess. The resulting image of Anglo-Saxon culture is more positive even than Rapin’s. In the most antiquarian and technical chapter of his Anglo-Saxon volume, Henry capitalised on recent advances in numismatics to draw connections between AngloSaxon England and modern Britain. The cessation of internecine warfare and the unification of the Heptarchy under Egbert made domestic trade safer and more free, increased England’s bargaining power with other European kingdoms, and brought Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Antiquitates Italicæ Medii Ævi, 6 vols (Milan, 1738–42). Susan Nicassio, ‘Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750)’ in Medieval Scholarship, ed. Damico and Zavadil, I:37. 79 Henry, History of Great Britain, II:vi. 80 Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, 2000), 5. 81 Henry, History of Great Britain, II:vi. 82 Ibid., 317–18. 83 Ibid., 336–8. 77 78

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prestige to English monarchs who negotiated marriages with European royal houses. Trade led to an expanded navy to ensure the safety of merchants’ ships and domestic security, a formulation that must have struck a chord with readers used to associating Britain’s mercantile and naval superiority with Alfred the Great and ‘Rule, Britannia’ (written for James Thomson’s Alfred: A Masque in 1740).84 Henry’s discussion of the denominations, weights and metallic composition of Anglo-Saxon coins extends over seventeen pages, and culminates in a ‘Table of the Names of the Anglo-Saxon denominations of Money, and of real Coins; with the weight of each of them in Troy grains, and value in the present money of Great Britain’, a remarkable product of careful comparisons of purchasing power across centuries.85 ‘Must it not appear incredible to us’, Henry asks, ‘that our ancestors . . . paid as much money for four sheep as for an acre of the best arable land?’, referring to his table comparing livestock costs during the reigns of Æthelred and George III.86 None of Henry’s other volumes contains such a table or an approach that draws past and present into dialogue and direct comparison in so immediate a manner. Painstaking research enabled Henry to construct a study of early medieval English commercial life in vivid detail, in which he urged readers to compare their own experiences with those of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. If, as Phillips argues, Henry believed that ‘contemporary interest in the economy and the arts was joined to an associated awareness of a kind of historical distance that separated current readers from social life in the past’, it is also true that in his Anglo-Saxon volume Henry recognised and effectively utilised the power of scholarly, patriotic and affective Anglo-Saxonism to bridge that chronological and conceptual divide. Henry inspired the artist, antiquary and historian Joseph Strutt to write The Chronicle of England, which simplified Henry’s model and applied it to an examination of ancient British and Anglo-Saxon history. Strutt also added dozens of engravings reproduced from manuscripts in the British Museum to illustrate his text on the presumption that ‘a view of the very idea of our ancestors must give additional pleasure in the perusal of their history’.87 The centrality of these engravings to the Chronicle certainly demonstrates Strutt’s power to visualise, and suggests that he assumed that others also ‘saw’ the past they read about.88 Like Strutt’s earlier Horda Angel-cynnan, discussed in detail in the next chapter, the Chronicle of England broke new ground that went far beyond a conviction that visual evidence could help readers better understand history. Strutt’s division of the work into civil history, religious history and the history of manners and customs, each complemented by carefully chosen images, effectively demonstrated that the Anglo-Saxon period could be understood visually thanks to a wealth of surviving primary evidence that only awaited an informed and sympathetic viewer. Strutt encouraged his readers to view the past alongside him and offered a remarkable range of visual material including militaria, dress, coins, ploughs, Below, 184. Henry, History of Great Britain, II:488–505. 86 Ibid., 513–14. 87 Joseph Strutt, The Chronicle of England. Vol. I. From the Arrival of Julius Caesar to the End of the Saxon Heptarchy (London, 1777), iv. 88 Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 160. 84 85

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ships, buildings, burials, and a striking facsimile of the Incipit to Luke from the Lindisfarne Gospels. A facsimile and analysis of a mappa mundi from Cotton Tiberius B.v included in Strutt’s second volume provides a particularly clear example of his ability to examine Anglo-Saxon artefacts closely and to evaluate them on their own merits: How far they understood geography, at this period, may be seen by an old map delineated about the latter end of the ninth century, which, however, devoid of truth it may be in some particulars, yet there is something in the general idea, or form, which plainly shows that the designer must have had better information of things than could have been expected, especially when we consider how few the travellers of this age were, and how confined their expeditions, and that learning of all kinds was chiefly, if not entirely, confined to monks, who scarcely ever quitted their cells.89

Such consideration aims to erode the commonplace belief that the Middle Ages were a time of insularity and ignorance, an effect heightened by Strutt’s half-joking reference to cloistered monks in the midst of a work marked by its frequent references to Anglo-Saxons travelling, studying and creating works of art and scholarship. Strutt describes manuscripts and artefacts as ‘superb’ and ‘extremely curious and valuable’, and expresses sorrow over a manuscript containing ‘great variety of delineations . . . [of] the celestial sphere’ that had been ‘mutilated by some sacrilegious hand’.90 By combining scientific antiquarian methodology, print technology, artistic training and innovative historiographical method, Strutt created a history of Anglo-Saxon England that was also an idea of Anglo-Saxon culture. While Strutt maintains an objective approach to his materials throughout the Chronicle, he understood and even encouraged readers to partake in imaginative and affective engagements with ‘our ancestors’, whose world appeared in his engravings. More representative of the antiquarian approach to history-writing than Henry or Strutt is Richard Gough, whose three-folio-volume edition of Britannia included a new translation of Camden’s original text, edited versions of Gibson’s 1695 and 1722 additions, and extensive annotations and supplemental material compiled by Gough during more than twenty years of antiquarian tours in England, Scotland and Wales. He also used information gleaned from his own extensive library, the Society of Antiquaries and the British Museum.91 Further notes on each county came from antiquaries with specialised local knowledge, such as Samuel Pegge, Daines Barrington and John Nichols.92 Typical of Gough’s practice with regard to Anglo-Saxon material is his footnote to Camden’s statement that ‘The county of Kent saith that . . . this county was never conquered like the rest of England, but submitted by treaty to the Conqueror’s dominion, reserving all its liberties and free customs antiently held Strutt, Chronicle, II:248. Ibid., I:349. 91 John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols (London, 1817–58), VII:799–809, 843–56. 92 Rosemary Sweet, ‘Richard Gough: The Man and the Antiquary’ and Julian Pooley, ‘“An Insatiable Thirst for Antiquities”: The Collaborative Friendship of Richard Gough and John Nichols’, The Bodleian Library Record 22 (2009), 120–41, 142–61. 89

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and used.’ Gough notes Gibson’s quotation from and shorthand reference to William Somner’s 1647 Treatise on Gavelkind and a new citation of Thomas Richardson’s The Common Law of Kent.93 Such a dense and intricate form of textual construction conveys a clear understanding of the antiquary’s task as understood by Gough and his collaborators. To engage adequately with developments in antiquarian scholarship required an engagement with centuries of argument and counter-argument, discovery and modification. One contemporary reviewer observed that an ‘English gentleman cannot well be without Camden’s Britannia’; after the appearance of a second edition in 1806 antiquaries would continue to read, cite and emend Gough’s edition well into the nineteenth century.94 For all its richness, by the late eighteenth century the intricate and exhaustive scholarly apparatus of Gough’s approach to national history had grown too specialised to attract a broad, general readership. Antiquarian methodology did, of course, influence more literary modes of historiography, as evidenced by the marginal annotations, footnotes and source citations that appear in almost every eighteenth-century history of England. Because the hallmarks of antiquarian textual construction became those of mainstream historiography to a significant extent, an argument can be made for the fundamental antiquarianism of almost any eighteenth-century English history. Though few antiquaries or historians enjoyed the reputation of Rapin or Hume, or the sales of Lockman, historians of all genres found ready, if often small or local, audiences for their works. Local History Eighteenth-century local historians engaged in a form of regional and civic memorialisation that had constituted a central feature of gentry culture and identity since the Elizabethan era. Jan Broadway has identified three aims of early modern local historiography that apply equally to the eighteenth century: establishing the genealogies of significant families and the descents of their estates, providing topographical descriptions of England’s various and multi-layered administrative divisions, and illustrating correct, moral behaviour through descriptions of virtuous and responsible ancestors.95 Individuals like Sir Thomas Shirley ‘derived considerable satisfaction from being able to trace his family back in the direct male line to a Saxon thane’, while the Wakes of Bourne traced their lineage to the eponymous Hereward.96 Richard Temple installed a family tree tracing his lineage to ‘the Saxon Earls of Leicester’ in his Gothic Temple at Stowe.97 Like genealogical material, manuscripts relating to particular families, estates, towns and religious establishments 93

1788).

Thomas Richardson, The Common Law of Kent: or, the Customs of Gavelkind (London,

GM 60 (1790), 100. Jan Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Manchester, 2006). 96 Broadway, No historie so meete, 155; Maurice Johnson, ‘Armes and Memoires of Families in Lincolnshire’ (c.1710–55), SGS Archive. 97 Stowe: A Description of the House and Gardens of His Grace the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, K. G., &c. &c. at Stowe, in the County of Buckingham (London, 1838), 33. 94 95

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constituted a rich source of historical material that was generally available to antiquaries who could secure an introduction to their owners or caretakers.98 So too did architectural remains and topographical features, accessible to anyone with the leisure and financial means to visit them. These sources were supplemented and interpreted with reference to Old English grammars and printed editions of Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Anglo-Saxon laws, later medieval chronicles and new national histories. By discovering and interpreting evidence from their particular locales, provincial intellectuals could contribute to the incremental expansion of England’s historical narrative while simultaneously celebrating the real or imagined cultural heritage of their county or the civic achievements of their town. As the ‘building blocks of the nation in both its ancient and modern state’, England’s counties exerted a potent force over the writing of local history. All local administration and public office in England depended on property ownership within a particular county, and ‘the conduct of county business was a significant part of the persona of the public life of the propertied Englishman’.99 But personal identity derived from one’s place of origin marked the important events of life, regardless of class: baptism, marriage, legal testimony, land rentals and tenures, and records of employment or political appointment all included the individual’s home county in the list of personal identifiers.100 William Camden had conceived of England in terms of its counties and constructed the Britannia as a chorography or county-by-county tour, a model used earlier by William Lambarde in the thoroughly Anglo-Saxonist first county history, A Perambulation of Kent.101 In the seventeenth century, William Dugdale made the genealogies and estates of gentry families key components of his Antiquities of Warwickshire, establishing a model that informed all subsequent county histories.102 The focus on gentry and nobility became ever more pronounced in county histories as the century progressed, in part because most of the antiquaries who wrote them were members of, or professionally aligned with, those families in whose repositories they conducted their research and to whom they dedicated their works.103 As administrative units, counties connected eighteenth-century and Anglo-Saxon England, derived as they were (or were imagined to be) from the kingdoms of the Heptarchy and the political reforms of Alfred the Great. Within counties, governance depended on the landed families and churches whose control of particular lands conferred on them the power and the obligation to perform local administrative functions. For county historians of the eighteenth century, citing origins in the Anglo-Saxon period meant establishing not only the origin of a Woolf cites Sir John Strangeways, a ‘leading Somerset gentleman, [who] was fond of showing off the old Saxon deed to his manor of Chiselborough’ to his visitors, in ‘Dawn of the Artifact’, 19. 99 Sweet, Antiquaries, 37. 100 Estabrook, Urbane and Rustic England, 9. 101 William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (London, 1576); Brackmann, Elizabethan Invention; Sweet, Antiquaries, 189–94; Kenyon, History Men, 1–17. 102 William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire (London, 1656). 103 Jack Simmons, ‘The Writing of English County History’ in English County Historians, ed. Jack Simmons (Wakefield, 1978), 1–21. 98

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particular geographic area with locatable boundaries, but also the origin of the right to govern that area and the social position such a right to governance conferred. This emphasis on genealogy and authority often resulted in narrative historiography being confined to the introduction of a given county history. Where Anglo-Saxon history entered into the work after the introductory section, it usually appeared in the form of a citation of a charter contained in Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum, or extracts from Domesday Book, Bede or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.104 As the century progressed, historians’ tendency to add ever lengthier extracts and ever more tables, charts, maps and engravings caused many county histories to grow exponentially in size and cost. In 1656 Dugdale’s Warwickshire comprised a single volume of 826 quarto pages. The second edition of Edward Hasted’s History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (1797–1801) filled nearly 7500; and John Nichols’s History of Leicestershire ran to eight massive folio volumes printed over sixteen years (1795–1815). For all their richness, eighteenth-century county histories remained the purview of wealthy patrons and elite buyers. The sense of administrative permanence, stability and continuity from the AngloSaxon era to the modern age that permeates county histories also appears in urban histories. The concentration of clergymen, lawyers and physicians whose income and social status gave them access to documentary material and the leisure time for touring, studying and writing made provincial urban centres natural sites for history-writing. While urban historians were driven by the same cultural impetus to locate the origins of their respective locales that motivated national and county historians, they were also motivated by dramatic demographic shifts in England’s towns and cities that led to a significant increase in their importance to English (and wider British) economic, military and political expansion. The urban histories of the late eighteenth century reflect the increasing cultural and economic influence of towns and attest to contemporary belief that ‘the past could lend prestige and reflected glory; antiquity commanded respect and conferred status’.105 Rosemary Sweet notes that urban histories are characterised by their distinctive ‘optimism, their sense of achievement, and their belief in progress’.106 Nevertheless, writers of local histories sought the earliest possible origins of their respective towns and traced lines of cultural descent that placed special emphasis on the continuity of local traditions and practices from past to present. Urban histories also provided raw material that could be cannibalised by authors and booksellers to serve the growing market for travel guides. Unlike county and urban histories, which were printed in runs of 250 to 500 copies for subscribers, travel and tour guides often appeared in initial runs of 1000 or more and were

See, e.g., Peter Whalley, ed., The History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire, 2 vols (Oxford, 1791), I:1; Nathaniel Salmon, The History and Antiquities of Essex (London, 1740), 10, 11, 17, 20, 23; Philip Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, 2 vols (London, 1768), I:1–39; Stebbing Shaw, The History and Antiquities of Staffordshire, 2 vols (London, 1798), I:2, 89, 231–64, 380. 105 Rosemary Sweet, The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1997), 2. 106 Ibid., 276–7. 104

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regularly reprinted over years or decades.107 With the turnpike boom of the middle third of the eighteenth century and a dramatic increase in domestic travel, came a demand for utilitarian guides containing information related to roads, tolls, coaches, inns, notable locations and, for those with time and money to spare, notes on local history and historic landmarks they might visit.108 Although the historical content of most eighteenth-century travel guides tended to be general and minimal, with ‘the etymology of the place name and a brief discussion of the town’s foundation and pretensions to antiquity almost invariably [providing] the basis for a general introduction to the town’, in places such as Winchester and Hastings relatively more space was given to historical material.109 The Southampton Guide of 1768 included a history of the town ‘out of respect for the good sense of the Publick’, suggesting that readers expected history to appear in such works regardless of whether or not they actually read it.110 However, Alexandrina Buchanan has observed that for those who were interested, tourism ‘turned every object encountered into a potential curiosity, which could broaden the mind and encourage local or national pride’.111 For the informed tourist, such pride could stem from Anglo-Saxon associations as readily as from any other source. County and urban historians alike sought to bring their particular localities into the national community by identifying their county’s or town’s origin and articulating its contribution to England’s history, development and contemporary glory. The distinguishing features of county and urban histories – clearly defined territorial boundaries, claims to Anglo-Saxon origins or importance, and emphasis on historical community and continuity – are precisely those which Anthony Smith identifies as ‘the underlying sentiments and aspirations that nationalist ideology and nationalist language and symbols evoke’.112 As we have seen, however, eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism relied on ideas of linguistic and cultural kinship quite distinct from the ethnically and racially based nationalisms of later centuries.113 The reformulation of English national identity in response to ‘the growing consciousness of England as a prominent identity in the world’ relied intrinsically on the definition of England’s landscape and people in historical terms.114 County and urban historians, whose writing concretised particular examples of those characteristics for particular parts of England, emerged early in the century as the primary composers of the 107 Ibid. The most popular were guides to Southampton, Bath, Brighton and other resort or spa towns. 108 M. J. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain 1700– 1850 (Oxford, 1995), 297–307. 109 Sweet, Urban Histories, 108. 110 Anon., Southampton Guide (Southampton, 1768), 1. 111 Buchanan, ‘Interpretations of Medieval Architecture’, 33. 112 Anthony Smith, The Rise of Nations (London, 1991), 78. 113 J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge, 1994), 46; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). 114 Lancaster, Seeing England, 15. Lancaster’s comment relates to Elizabethan anti­ quarianism, but the parallels between sixteenth- and eighteenth-century processes of English identity formation warrant considerable exploration.

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new national history, and their work contributed to the inculcation of an increasingly well-defined idea of Englishness reliant on ‘a form of historicist culture and civic education’.115 Local historians sought to identify and celebrate the roles their respective localities had played in the foundation and evolution of England as a kingdom and of the English as a people, building up a composite picture of English geographical, cultural, political and linguistic origins from a patchwork of local narratives. Their efforts were explicitly and implicitly participatory: whether through armchair or actual tourism, historians engaged and sought to engage readers in a mode of viewing the English landscape that was fundamentally historical and that required equal parts observation and imagination. A complete survey of approaches to the Anglo-Saxon past in eighteenth-century local histories is beyond the scope of this book. Instead I focus on four case studies, local accounts of one county and three towns, the historians of which exhibit more or less representative approaches to writing the histories of their respective places during the Anglo-Saxon period. These case studies represent different regions of England and localities whose fifth- to eleventh-century histories are in some ways markedly different: the northern county of Northumberland, remnant of the AngloSaxon kingdom of Northumbria and strongly associated with Danish invasion and settlement; the East Midlands town of Stamford, Lincolnshire, one of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw; the southern town of Winchester, former capital of Wessex and England; and Bristol, a West Country port city with relatively little association with the Anglo-Saxon period. Northumberland A reader of William Hutchinson’s A View of Northumberland would be forgiven for assuming that the work was little more than an exercise in local patriotic Anglo-Saxonism. The first volume opens with a fold-out genealogy of the kings of Bernicia, Deira and Northumberland, followed by an introduction in which Hutchinson reminds readers that Northumberland was ‘established in the reign of Ælle’ and that the county retains its Anglo-Saxon name. For Hutchinson as for later scholars such as Steve Watson, the county is ‘an artefact of the early medieval’, defined relative to the boundaries of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom.116 After a brief, dismissive treatment of Roman and Romano-British history, Hutchinson attacks those historians who, ‘with a disgraceful partiality, have stigmatized the Saxons with the epithets of cruelty and injustice’, when in fact, he claims, they had given the English ‘the maxims of our common law and the original principles of our inestimable constitution’. The Romans had introduced foreign luxuries that rendered the Britons a people of ‘despicable impotence’ among whom ‘public virtues were extinguished, and an abjectness of spirit universally prevailed’; Hengist and his successors saved them from the Pictish and Scottish ‘barbarians’.117 The Britons’ gratitude is short-lived, and they turn on Hengist in what Hutchinson characterises as typical British fashion: Smith, Rise of Nations, 78. Steve Watson, ‘Touring the Medieval: Tourism, Heritage and Medievalism, in Northumbria’, SiM 11 (2001), 240–1. 117 Hutchinson, Northumberland, I:iv. 115

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no sooner were they relieved from the most abject state . . . than . . . they began to regard those who had rescued them with jealousy, to be discontented with their former resolutions, to imagine future evils, and to devise projects of the grossest ingratitude. The heroic Saxons received the intelligence with contempt, and looked upon the ingratitude with abhorrence.118

After the arrival of Ida in 547, Hutchinson cites the succession of his kinsman ‘Glappa’ as evidence ‘of the ancient elective power of the Saxons, who regarded not any pretensions to hereditary right’.119 A predictably lengthy, dramatic and sentimental account of the sufferings and eventual triumph of King Edwin precedes a recital of the names of a succession of little-remembered rulers under whom the kingdom was ‘rent by innumerable factions, and an universal anarchy prevailed’ until its conquest by Egbert in 826.120 What might be expected to be a story of Danish invasion and conquest in the later Anglo-Saxon period is anything but: following Athelstan’s victories over the Danes ‘we find the government of Northumberland reposited in nominees of the Crown, who assumed the titles of Earls of Northumberland’.121 Decades of Danish control are, in Hutchinson’s hands, no more than a brief setback that gives way to the foundation of an earldom that, like its incumbent Hugh Percy, had been elevated to a dukedom just a decade before Hutchinson began writing. Hutchinson’s preoccupation with Anglo-Saxon politics – in particular his characterisation of the Saxons as the high-minded saviours of the Britons – echoes the Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric of Edmund Gibson, Elizabeth Elstob, John Fortescue-Aland and Paul Rapin fifty years earlier.122 This is unsurprising given that, as Helen Berry notes, Hutchinson wrote his history based on a tour he took in the summer of 1776, and published it in a region where public debate and political engagement were fostered in print media and local learned societies.123 The opening pages of A View of Northumberland contain a patriotically charged description of an independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom of elected monarchs who, in partnership with their southern kin, saved England first from the Picts and Scots and then from the Danes, ‘a banditti, worse than Tartars’, who would have turned the country into ‘a den of thieves, pirates, and robbers’.124 Hutchinson’s patriotism is national, certainly, but it is above all local: the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria acts as the critical lens through which readers ought rightly to view their county’s historic and contemporary landscape. Given the text’s quarto format and numerous illustrations, those readers were almost certainly members of the professional and upper classes. If their present gentility removed them from the realities of ancient or modern

Ibid., I:vi. Ibid., I:ix–x. 120 Ibid., I:xi–xv, xxvi. 121 Ibid., I:2–3. 122 Helen Berry, ‘Landscape, Taste and National Identity: William Hutchinson’s View of Northumberland (1776–8)’ in Northern Landscapes: Representations and Realities of NorthEast England, ed. Thomas Faulkner, Helen Berry and Jeremy Gregory (Woodbridge, 2010), 254. 123 Ibid., 252–3. 124 Hutchinson, Northumberland, I:vii. 118

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warfare, Hutchinson assured them that they were ‘derived from a race of heroes, who purchased immortal honours in the annals of their country’.125 The measured, scholarly style of Hutchinson’s main text - which is, after all, the account of a middle-aged solicitor’s antiquarian summer tour – contrasts sharply with the jingoistic fervour of his introduction. Alongside family pedigrees, descriptions of country houses and sketches of Roman altars discovered in the towns along Hadrian’s Wall, Hutchinson includes extracts from the correspondence of Roger Gale with early- and mid-century antiquaries such as John Horsley (author of Britannia Romana), Sir John Clerk (antiquary and vice-president of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh), Maurice Johnson and William Stukeley. He supplements these letters with published editions of chronicles and the histories of Henry and Strutt, which appear in copious footnotes. As John Nichols would write, Hutchinson was first and foremost an ‘industrious Antiquary’ and a ‘Solicitor of respectability’, who ‘devoted his leisure hours to the pursuits of Literature’.126 A View of Northumberland, like his later county histories of Durham and Cumberland, typifies the restrained, gentlemanly, antiquarian style that characterises eighteenth-century county histories.127 For all its introductory Anglo-Saxonism, A View of Northumberland contains a relatively small amount of Anglo-Saxon material, another feature it shares with most other county histories. Unsurprisingly, the most detailed section on Anglo-Saxon England appears in Hutchinson’s account of Lindisfarne, which contains the full text of a charter taken from Leland’s Collectanea and a thirty-seven-page catalogue of the Bishops of Lindisfarne from the early Anglo-Saxon period to the removal of Cuthbert’s bones to Durham in 1070.128 Hexham also receives special notice on account of its beauty and its association with Wilfrid, and provides Hutchinson with an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of his antiquarian predecessors.129 After viewing a monument supposed to belong to the eighth-century King Alfwold, Hutchinson notes that Gale and Stukeley had visited the crypt in 1726, and describes his following in their footsteps in language redolent with contemporary notions of the sublime: The massive Claustrum was heaved from the mouth of the vault by iron crows and rollers, at which the ground trembled over the arches – by a ladder we descended about 20 feet, into the regions of the dead, where avaricious curiosity making an anxious research after the objects of its desire, so compleatly occupied the mind, that scarce one reflection was agitated, for those, over whose ashes we wantonly trampled.130

Ibid., I:2–3. John Nichols, ed., Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols (London, 1817–58), I:421; William Hutchinson, The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, 3 vols (Newcastle, 1785–94); and William Hutchinson, The History of the County of Cumberland, and some Places Adjacent, from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time, 2 vols (Carlisle, 1794). 127 Berry, ‘Landscape, Taste and National Identity’. 128 Hutchinson, Northumberland, II:113–50. 129 Ibid., I:88. 130 Ibid., I:102. 125

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Despite noting that the crypt is ancient and built from recycled Roman stone, Hutchinson does not explicitly identify it as Wilfrid’s construction. Instead, his description highlights the overwhelming sense of pleasure and imaginative or emotional transportation that comes from occupying historic space. Hutchinson’s curiosity and veneration for antiquity utterly displace his reverence for the dead. In other instances, locations with strong Anglo-Saxon associations are passed over with a few words. Hutchinson notes that Bede’s ‘residence was at Jarrow, situated within a few miles’ of him during his visit to Newcastle, but satisfies himself (and his readers) with a view of the church and village of Jarrow from the grounds of Fenham Hall, where he was entertained by the Ord family.131 Single sentences suffice for the church at Norham, resting place of King Ceolwulf; for Welton Tower, where ‘we trod the hallowed ground where Finan, as Bede tells us, then Bishop of Lindisfarn, baptized Sigebert King of the East Saxons, and Penda King of the Mercians’; and for Milfield and Broomridge, which Hutchinson identifies as ‘the residence of the Saxon Kings of Bernicia, after the death of Edwin’ and the location of the Battle of Brunanburh, respectively.132 Hutchinson does, however, note regretfully that the farmland around Yeavering contains no remains to suggest that a ‘royal palace’ ever existed there despite its being the residence of ‘King Edwin and his Queen Ethelburga, after his conversion by Paulinus’, considering the ways in which ‘place and landscape participate in the idea of conversion and in the process of change at religious, social, or agricultural levels’ in a manner not dissimilar to Clare Lees and Gillian Overing in the early twenty-first century.133 Like most county and local histories, Hutchinson takes care to note any place where Danish attacks had occurred or where Anglo-Saxon kings had won notable victories over British or Danish enemies (usually with a reference to Bede or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), including those at Bamburgh Castle, which, readers are informed, ‘give the traveller an idea of the state of palaces and strongholds, in the remotest æra of our Saxon ancestors in Britain’.134 Hutchinson’s status as a tourist and traveller is never long out of view, nor are his observations on other tourists, such as those who, visiting Walltown, are ‘shewn a well among the cliffs, where it is said Paulinus baptized King Egbert’. His prim observation that ‘it is more probable it was Edwin’ reveals simultaneously his sense of intellectual superiority and his readiness to accept local lore as evidence for the presence of Anglo-Saxon remains in the landscape.135 Notably, Hutchinson assumes that the actual or armchair tourists who read his history possess both the interests and the intellectual resources at his command. A View of Northumberland requires at least a casual familiarity with major antiquarian publications of the previous century, a thorough knowledge of English history and an interest in the landed families whose estates and lineages Hutchinson describes. He also assumes, implicitly, that readers will share his understanding of the modern landscape as a composite of

131 132 133 134 135

Ibid., II:370, 431. Ibid., II:24, I:138, 261. Ibid., I:244; Lees and Overing, ‘Anglo-Saxon Horizons’, 14. Hutchinson, Northumberland, II:154. Ibid., I:44.

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‘layered pasts’ and his ‘sense of their simultaneity’. Anglo-Saxon history frames Hutchinson’s narrative and provides the foundation on which his county, like his history of it, is built. His combined role as tourist, historian and Anglo-Saxonist leads him to articulate that history as a series of stories about places that exist in multiple times and a series of landmarks that demonstrate the continuing vitality of the Anglo-Saxon past in the late eighteenth-century present. 136

Stamford In his preface to The Antiquities and Present State of Stamford, a combination urban history and tour guide, William Harrod casually dismissed three previous histories of his town. Richard Butcher’s 1646 history was inaccurate and scarce, Francis Howgrave’s of 1726 too short and too expensive, and Francis Peck’s much lengthier history, published in 1727, presented valuable material in a ‘broken disjointed manner’ according to an ‘ill chosen method’.137 Sweet notes the ‘contemptuous audacity’ with which Harrod ‘dismissed Peck’s erudition’ but borrowed ‘nine parts out of ten’ for his own text, and identifies Harrod’s inexpensive duodecimo history as an example of ‘popularization (and the concomitant plagiarizing) of antiquarian research’ that fuelled the ‘explosion’ of urban histories in the eighteenth century.138 Indeed, the appearance of three histories of a relatively small market town in the East Midlands in the course of sixty years was remarkable and due in large part to Stamford’s being, in the eyes of its historians, not just ‘a Town remarkable in the Annals of English History’ but the first English town.139 In the first book of Academia Tertia Anglicana, Peck identified Stamford’s proximity to Ermine Street but reported that he could find no evidence either of a Roman settlement or of the titular university believed to have been established there by the legendary British king Bladud.140 Rather, the town had been founded in the fifth century when Hengist and his Saxon followers fought their ‘very first battle . . . at our Stanford’, defeating the Picts and Scots whom he characterises as ‘ravaging barbarians’. Claiming that Vortigern first granted Hengist lands in Lincolnshire (only granting him Kent after meeting Rowena), Peck stakes a claim for Stanford – a spelling that emphasises the name’s etymology from the Old English ‘stone ford’ – as the original home of the Anglo-Saxons in England. Peck’s dismissive attitude toward the Britons and reference to the Picts and Scots as barbarians contrasts sharply with his remarkably positive characterisation of Hengist, who, Peck argues, brought gavelkind tenure to Kent, and ‘Borough-English’ (a system of inheritance whereby younger sons inherited the property of fathers who died intestate) to Stamford. Stamford’s claim to fame derives not only from its antiquity Lees and Overing, ‘Anglo-Saxon Horizons’, 10. William Harrod, The Antiquities and Present State of Stamford, 2 vols (Stamford, 1785), I:i–ii. Richard Butcher, The survey and antiquitie of the towne of Stamford in the county of Lincolne (London, 1646); Francis Howgrave, An Essay of the Ancient and Present State of Stamford (Stamford, 1726). 138 Sweet, Urban Histories, 65; Harrod, Stamford, I:iii. 139 GM 89 (1819), 584. 140 Francis Peck, Academia Tertia Anglicana: or, the Antiquarian Annals of Stanford (London, 1727), 1:1–5, 26. 136 137

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but from the fact that it preserves Anglo-Saxon customs brought to England by the ‘gallant’ Hengist.141 Peck’s positive assessment of Hengist precedes his celebration of Wilfrid, identified as the founder of St Leonard’s Priory, just outside the town. Previous writers had identified Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire as the site of Wilfrid’s first foundation, on the grounds that Stamford in Lincolnshire lay in Mercia and so out of the control of Wilfrid’s king, Oswy of Northumbria. Citing John Smith’s recently published edition of Bede and personal communications with Smith himself, Peck asserts that eastern Mercia had come under Northumbrian domination following Oswy’s defeat of Penda in 655. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for that year, he argued, identified the foundation of Peterborough Abbey by Oswy and Peada (Penda’s son and Oswy’s son-in-law) jointly, which suggested that Oswy exerted control over the region. Peck dedicates an entire book of his history to Wilfrid’s life, which he concludes with a direct address to the reader in which he recalls encountering ‘a very antient chappel’ while riding through Oundle in 1723, which ‘I am persuaded . . . belonged heretofore to that very monastery, wherein Vilfrid, our founder died’. A rare instance of the possessive, Peck’s affective encounter led him to imagine that monks of Stamford had aided in the ceremonial transportation of Wilfrid’s body back to Ripon for interment.142 Book 3 carries the history of Stamford to 1066, a period when it became one of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw. Unsurprisingly given Peck’s Anglo-Saxonist bias, the Danes appear as barbarians in contrast to the ‘orderly, quiet’ English people.143 Peck’s refusal to attribute the construction of the castle or town walls to the Danes is striking, as is the greater emphasis he places on the supposed construction of a second castle outside the town by Edward the Elder, which led to the Danes’ forced surrender and departure. Peck stresses that Edmund Ironside’s division of the kingdom in 939 lasted just three years before Edmund retook the town, ‘ever since which time, (notwithstanding the Danes almost constantly infested some or other parts of England) those cities remained subject to the Saxons’.144 Sixty years later Harrod shifted focus dramatically, writing that ‘Stamford was reckoned one of the five great cities of the Danish kingdom’ and remained known as such ‘as long as the Danes kept any footing in the kingdom’, because its inhabitants were mostly Danish and the remaining English became ‘Danes in affection, religion, and every thing but descent’.145 According to Harrod it was the Danes who built Stamford’s castle and walls, and the Danes who readily submitted to Sweyn Forkbeard in 1013, removing the town from Saxon control.146 Harrod’s affinity with the Danes constitutes a rejoinder to Peck’s enthusiastic Anglo-­Saxonist narrative.

141 142 143 144 145 146

Ibid., 1:20–2. Ibid., 2:46. Ibid., 3:2, 10. Ibid., 3:10–13, 25. Harrod, Stamford, I:6–7. Ibid., I:10–13.

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One thing the two historians did agree on was the town’s primacy over nearby Peterborough. Following Peck, Harrod notes that St Leonard’s ‘began to be built at the same time with Peterborough minster, but [was] finished before it’; he reiterates that it is ‘the oldest conventual church in all South Mercia’.147 Both identify a charter of 972 from Edgar to Peterborough Abbey granting the abbey a mint at Stamford, confirming its status as a market town and royal burgh. Peck notes with apparent delight that Henry of Huntingdon referred to the confirmation of Peterborough ‘by Stanford’, suggesting that eleventh-century Peterborough was ‘a sort of an obscure place . . . by a more noted town called Stanford’.148 Peck and Harrod also shared an obvious admiration for Æthelflæd of Mercia, daughter of Alfred and sister of Edward the Elder, who receives a three-page biography in Peck’s history and two pages in Harrod’s Stamford.149 Both historians describe her as a saviour of the town and one of its earliest benefactors and improvers, and as a warrior equal to her brother. Finally, both Harrod and Peck take pains to point out traces of the pre-Conquest past still visible or discoverable in the local landscape. Harrod claims that Edward the Elder’s castle ‘stood by the north road where the Nuns’ farm now is’, which ‘Mr Truman rents of the Earl of Exeter’.150 Peck (and after him, Harrod) identifies an earthwork on the edge of Burghley Park as a defence created in Edward’s battles with the Danes, a claim based on local legend and the discovery of AngloSaxon coins there by ‘Mr Gibbon, a Gent of very good credit’, an account derived from John Moreton’s Natural History of Northampton-shire.151 In turns to local lore and local authority such as these, Peck and Harrod participated in what Adam Fox identifies as a long-standing tradition of local legends about Danish incursions, a tradition that stretched back to the sixteenth century and beyond.152 In doing so they married antiquarian practice with socially determined and orally transmitted local memorial culture, producing printed histories that were, above all, celebrations of the local past. For both Peck and Harrod, as for Butcher a century earlier, Stamford is defined by its pre-Conquest origins. Although both Harrod and Peck disparage Butcher’s text, his medievalism matches their own. In some instances Peck’s Anglo-Saxonism leads him to distort Stamford’s history, as in the case of the town’s Danish occupation or the over-emphasis on Wilfrid’s role in elevating the town to prominence and eventually to a royal borough. Although Harrod writes admiringly of Edward the Elder and describes Danegeld as a tax paid ‘by the Saxon kings to the Danes to keep them from invading us’, he places much greater emphasis on Stamford’s status as one of the Five Boroughs than does Peck.153 Harrod’s praise for stained glass windows depicting St Oswald, St Edmund and St Edward in St Ibid., I:60. Peck, Academia Tertia Anglicana, 3:23–5; Dugdale, Monasticon, I:66. 149 Peck, Academia Tertia Anglicana, 3:11, 15–18; Harrod, Stamford, I:12–13. 150 Harrod, Stamford, I:13, 283. 151 John Moreton, The Natural History of Northampton-shire; with Some Account of the Antiquities (London, 1712), 545; Peck, Academia Tertia Anglicana, 3:12; Harrod, Stamford, I:138. 152 Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 243–8. 153 Harrod, Stamford, II:137–8, 205. 147

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John’s Church, and his description of Stamford’s Gothic churches as ‘vastly great and magnificent, and also vastly beautiful’, suggests a sympathy with the medieval that is above all local – that assumes an us that is fixed in place but imaginatively mobile through time.154 Bristol Unlike Stamford and Winchester, both of which historians linked to decisive battles and foundational years, the origins of Bristol remained obscure. Camden had noted correctly that the city had emerged from relative obscurity at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, but Bristolians sought greater antiquity for their wealthy, busy, militarily and economically important city.155 To Andrew Hooke, ‘Mr. Camden has turned out my greatest Adversary’, a ‘Goliath of the Antiquaries’ against whom Hooke’s Bristollia stood ‘in Defence of my Native Place’.156 Hooke’s valiant defence of his city’s ‘eminence’ led him to identify Bristol as a 2000-year-old trading port famed by the ancients; in Hooke’s eyes, mid-eighteenth-century Bristol was as it always had been.157 Four decades later William Barrett took up Hooke’s battle with Camden, staking a claim for Bristol’s essential Anglo-Saxonness on the grounds of Barrett’s own scholarship and the historic forgeries of his young collaborator, Thomas Chatterton.158 Barrett met the fifteen-year-old Chatterton in 1768, shortly after the opening of the new Bristol Bridge and nearly two decades after Barrett had begun research on the city’s history. Chatterton showed Barrett ‘a few genuine deeds, accounts and other medieval records which he had acquired from St Mary Redcliffe’, where his family had been sextons for several generations.159 These genuine manuscripts won Barrett’s trust and led him to accept a collection of forged poetry, prose and chronicles by Chatterton himself, all of which Chatterton claimed had been written for the (historical) merchant William Canynge by the (imaginary) fifteenth-century priest Thomas Rowley, who had translated several of them from the (imaginary) Anglo-Saxon monk Turgot.160 Rowley’s ‘A Discorse on Brystowe’ provided Barrett with an illustrated account by an Anglo-Saxon writer, exactly the kind of material

Ibid., II:108. Camden, Britannia, ed. Gibson (1722), I:94. 156 Andrew Hooke, Bristollia: or, Memoirs of the City of Bristol, Both Civil and Ecclesiastical (London, 1748), vi–vii. 157 Ibid., 1–55. 158 William Barrett, The History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol (Bristol, 1789). 159 James Bettey, The First Historians of Bristol: William Barrett and Samuel Seyer (Bristol, 2003), 5; Nick Groom, ‘Thomas Chatterton was a Forger’, The Yearbook of English Studies 28 (1998), 278. 160 For Chatterton’s life and the controversy surrounding his Rowley works, see, inter alia: Nick Groom, Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (New York, 1999); Daniel Cook, Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760–1830 (Houndmills, 2013); Ian Haywood, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction (London, 1987); The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. David Taylor, 2 vols (Oxford, 1971). 154 155

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he had been unable to find. Although Barrett followed Hooke in assuming that Bristol had been a British settlement and offered the nearby Roman camp at Abone as further evidence for his claim, Barrett noted that he had no archaeological, topographical or textual evidence for the date of Bristol’s foundation. The Anglo-Saxons had wiped away all previous traces by ‘new modelling it’ with ‘fresh foundations and enlargements’, and a new name derived not from the Britonnic Caer Brito but from the Old English Bricgstow, or ‘town of the bridge’.162 Turgot’s references to Bristol’s right to the tolls on the river Severn provided Barrett with evidence for the importance of trade in Bristol early in the Anglo-Saxon period. If, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, John Stow, Henry of Huntingdon and John Leland suggested, Danes had raided the lands around the Severn in the ninth and tenth centuries, it stood to reason not only that Bristol and its shipping had been worth raiding, but that Edward the Elder had reinforced the town with a castle and walls just as Turgot claimed.163 Similarly, Turgot’s claim that Ælle (a fictional town hero and subject of many of Chatterton’s Rowley poems) was appointed keeper of Bristol’s castle – ‘synce hee routted the Danes at Watchette wythe hys Brystowans’ – appeared to be corroborated by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 897, which recorded a Danish attack on Watchet and subsequent departure down the Severn.164 Most important of all, however, was the family of Aylward Meaw or Sneaw, ‘a Saxon nobleman of the greatest rank and fortune, descended from Edward [the Elder]’, whose grandson Brictric – the first historical figure attached to Bristol in Britannia – ‘resided much at Bristol, and distinguished it greatly’ by increasing the town’s trade and shipping at the expense of surrounding towns.165 Barrett’s inclusion of the Rowley material stemmed from a desire to reveal Bristol’s history with what Daniel Cook calls the ‘aims of determining both cultural validity and historical truth’.166 Given the debate over the authenticity of the Rowley material that raged in the late 1770s and 1780s between various members of the antiquarian community, and the popularity of various editions of Chatterton’s works published during this period, Barrett’s decision to include previously unpublished Rowley material ‘faithfully transcribed’ so that ‘the judicious reader may be enabled the better to form his opinion concerning that controversy’ has usually been seen as evidence that Barrett’s Bristol is ‘another wrongheaded pro-Rowleian project’.167 Yet Barrett’s approach to the Rowley material is typical of contemporary antiquarian methods. In his discussion of Christ Church, he notes that Rowley’s manuscript records the church’s foundation in 920 by Ælle and the erection of its spire by Aylward Sneaw in 1004, information which is ‘a little uncertain’. ‘It is certain’, however, that workmen who repaired the spire in 1765 claimed to have discovered the date 1003 or 1004 in a stone near its pinnacle, and that during reconstruction in 1787 161

Barrett, Bristol, 31–4. For the full text, see Chatterton, ed. Taylor, I:93–104, II:865–74. 162 Barrett, Bristol, 6, 30, 16. 163 Ibid., 31–2, 191–3. 164 Ibid., 32, 202–3; Gibson, Chronicon, 129. 165 Barrett, Bristol, 35, 203–4. 166 Cook, Thomas Chatterton, 164. 167 Barrett, Bristol, vii; Cook, Thomas Chatterton, 163. 161

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workmen found a walled-in ‘statue of a Saxon earl’, evidence that appeared to Barrett to corroborate the manuscript provided to him by Chatterton.168 The surviving medieval city walls rested on what Barrett assumed were the ‘old large and thick foundation’ of those built by Edward the Elder, ‘preserved to this day in the same line and situation’.169 Despite Richard Gough’s scathing, pedantic review, Barrett’s Bristol demonstrates an approach to local historiography that aligns with common contemporary practice, relying on a combination of extracts from textual sources, antiquarian discoveries and the contemporary landscape to describe a modern urban landscape as a palimpsest of past people, places and actions.170 If Barrett’s approach mirrored that of contemporary antiquaries, so too did Chatterton’s. As Marilyn Butler points out, Chatterton’s invention of Rowley and Turgot ‘served the rising tide of local (or regional, or national) patriotism’ in England just as James Macpherson’s invention of Ossian served that patriotism for Scottish readers.171 Chatterton’s creation of an Anglo-Saxon chronicler and his fourteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist antiquarian translator reveals a keen awareness of the attraction Anglo-Saxon materials would have held for Barrett, an antiquary in search of reliable source material for the history of his town. In Chatterton’s prose works on the history of Bristol, Rowley becomes a kind of Barrett. So does William Canynge, the historical figure for whom Rowley was supposed to have written and who according to Rowley possesses a collection of British, Roman and Anglo-Saxon coins unsurprisingly similar to Barrett’s. In addition to printing Rowley’s account ‘Of the auntiaunte forme of Monies’, supposedly based on Canynge’s collection, Barrett inserts a table of weights and measures of AngloSaxon coins from William Clarke’s Connexion and refers to Hickes’s Thesaurus and Britannia as evidence that coins had been minted at Bristol.172 For all Barrett’s (actual or feigned) scepticism as to the authenticity of the Rowley manuscripts, the Anglo-Saxonist material Chatterton produced contained obvious attractiveness to Barrett or any other antiquary. The title of Rowley’s account of Canynge’s cabinet – ‘England’s Glorye revyved’ – proclaims antiquarianism and local historiography as patriotic activities, precisely the way in which eighteenth-century historians and antiquaries characterised their own work. The explicit and implicit Anglo-Saxonism of Chatterton’s Rowley material asserts the relevance of provincial centres to national history in much the same manner as local historiography as a genre.173 Chatterton’s forgeries and Barrett’s Bristol also advance a common claim that the glorious Anglo-Saxon past recorded by (imaginary or real) medieval Bristolians remained alive and visible to readers in the present.

Barrett, Bristol, 464. Ibid., 193. 170 GM 59 (1789), 921–4. 171 Marilyn Butler, Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Cultural History (Cambridge, 2015), 106. 172 Barrett, Bristol, 15, 37–40, 44–5. 173 Butler, Mapping Mythologies, 107. 168 169

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Winchester When John Milner’s history of Winchester appeared in 1799, it joined a succession of local histories stretching back nearly two centuries. The most recent was The History and Antiquities of Winchester, a two-volume work published in 1772 and adapted for sale as an illustrated tour guide at a cost of 1s. 6d.174 Milner dismissed this history as a ‘servile’ and ‘blind’ copy of earlier authors’ mistakes and the guidebook as ‘mere extracts of the former work . . . adopting all the errors which that contains’.175 Its deficiencies notwithstanding, Milner claimed that copies of this previous text were so difficult to procure that his bookseller had commissioned him to write a new history, which Milner completed within a year.176 Unlike Peck and Barrett, Milner could draw on a range of source materials to prove Winchester’s existence and importance as a British and Romano-British town. His account of Saxon Winchester begins not with foundation, therefore, but with destruction, and an apparently damning criticism of Cerdic, the town’s conqueror. In 515 or 516 . . . our city underwent the most terrible revolution which it has ever yet experienced, by falling into the hands of this fierce Pagan conquerer . . . After this great revolution little remained of the former city except the situation, a great part of the walls and some of the houses, adequate to the small number of the victorious people.177

Milner’s distaste for the pagan culture of ‘our fierce ancestors’ derives from their representation by Gildas and Bede: Cerdic’s followers are destroyers of art and architecture, murderers of women and children, and enemies of civilised life. He describes Cerdic as ‘a general illustrious in his descent from Woden’, who came to Britain after hearing ‘that a nobler scene was now open to his valour’ there than in Germany. After defeating the Britons several times in pitched battle, Cerdic and his son Cenric eventually annihilate a British army in the New Forest and besiege the town of Venta before capturing the (immediately renamed) ‘Wintanceaster, or Winchester’, ‘expressive of its former importance as a Roman station’.178 In relating these events, Milner reveals the bias that informs his description: Cerdic may have been ‘the most powerful king in the island’, but he was not a Christian. For Milner, a Catholic priest who would establish a reputation as one of England’s most outspoken religious controversialists, and a man for whom Roman Catholicism and patriotism were inseparable, Cerdic’s paganism could only be proof of Saxon military power, not Saxon cultural superiority.179 Milner’s account of Cerdic does, however, provide a foundation on which to build the subsequent history of the city. Given that Milner framed his history as ‘in a great measure, the history of the Gewissi, or West Saxons’, and of their capital that Anon., The History and Antiquities of Winchester, 2 vols (Winchester, 1772); The Winchester Guide (Winchester, 1780). 175 John Milner, The History Civil and Ecclesiastical, & Survey of the Antiquities, of Winchester, 2 vols (Winchester, 1798–1801), I:Preface:12. 176 Ibid., I:5. 177 Ibid., I:65–6. 178 Ibid., I:71. 179 Nichols, Illustrations, V:678–729. 174

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had been ‘until within a few centuries . . . sometimes the metropolis of the whole kingdom’, Cerdic functions in Milner’s narrative as the founder of the English state and monarchy.180 The ‘most terrible revolution’ remains the most terrible revolution. No event in twelve centuries had had such an impact on the city’s fortunes. By destroying the Romano-British city, Cerdic allowed Winchester to rise from its own ashes in a new form, a provincial town re-founded as the seat of the island’s most powerful and eventually its only monarch. Milner adopts a providential explanation for the survival and subsequent rise of Winchester and Wessex. After a century of illiteracy, paganism, poverty, drunkenness and lawlessness, the conversion of Kinegils is an act of divine providence that ‘bestow[ed] upon them all the benefits of humanity and civilization’.181 The saviour of ‘our ancestors’ was ‘St. Birinus, a zealous priest . . . who being informed of the state of Christianity in Britain, presented himself to pope Honorious’ and requested a deputation to convert the English.182 Milner contended that the miracles attributed to Birinus by William of Malmesbury, John Brompton and other chroniclers were not fabrications but true miracles, insisting that the monastic writers on whose sources Milner and every other historian relied told stories about Catholic AngloSaxon saints and martyrs that were factually true. Kinegils, ‘whose passion for war was now turned into a zeal for religion’, becomes the founder of Winchester Cathedral and, Milner implies, of the city’s Catholic tradition. After Kinegils’ death and burial in the new cathedral – ‘where his remains are still preserved with due veneration’ – the history of Winchester becomes one of gradual growth into greater pre-eminence.183 Milner praises the piety of AngloSaxon monarchs who retired to monastic or religious life, attacking historians who would ‘condemn this abdication, as superstitious’ but ‘extol it, as an act of heroism, if it were grounded on a philosophic contempt of wealth and state’.184 Throughout Milner’s history, kings and bishops work together to improve the city, which becomes the scene of nationally important events. The Danish sack of Winchester in 871 provides an opportunity for King Ethelbert and the future King Alfred to display ‘ardent and persevering courage . . . tempered with the purest patriotism and religion’.185 The traces of such heroic actions remained visible and beneficial to the inhabitants of late eighteenth-century Winchester. The remains of Kinegils, Kenewalch and Egbert survived in mortuary chests in public view within the cathedral and appear at the top of the decorative frontispiece of Milner’s second volume. Tradition and recent antiquarian research alike held that Alfred the Great was just outside the walls, at Hyde Abbey.186 A canal built for the citizens by Bishop Ethelwold in the ninth cenMilner, Winchester, I:Preface:15, 5. Ibid., I:86. 182 Ibid., I:88. 183 Ibid., I:92. 184 Ibid., I:104n1. 185 Ibid., 125–27. Milner’s constant reiteration of Winchester’s ability to rise from destruction greater and more beautiful than it was before combines Milner’s medievalism and religiosity, and functions as a primary theme of the work. Smith, Gothic Bequest, 105–70. 186 While Milner was writing, Henry Howard wrote to the Society of Antiquaries to report that he had discovered the coffin of Alfred there. Henry Howard, ‘Enquiries concerning the Tomb of King Alfred, at Hyde Abbey, near Winchester’, Archaeologia 13 (1807), 309–12. 180 181

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tury remained a ‘benefit . . . still felt by its inhabitants’. Winchester’s Anglo-Saxon past was both visible and active. In 1799, one year after Milner completed the first volume of his history, his publisher, James Robbins, printed a pocket-sized edition entitled A Short View of the History and Antiquities of Winchester.188 In the advertisement to the fifty-page octavo guide, Robbins stated that it was ‘intended for the use of strangers, and other persons who have not the leisure to read, or else have not the means of procuring, the above-mentioned larger work’.189 For the new or less wealthy resident, or the traveller short of time, A Short View could serve as an inexpensive, historically based tour guide to Winchester. The Short View skips from Kinegils to Egbert to Ethelwulf, stating matter-of-factly that the latter ‘enriched’ the city ‘with the first municipal charter that we find mention of in history’. The city retains the weights and measures given to it by monarch ‘since the reign of king Edgar, who first appointed the Winchester measure to be the standard of the whole kingdom’.190 Following the Norman Conquest the city became home to the ‘public archives, particularly doomsday-book’, which, through a historical and rhetorical sleight of hand, the guide claims is ‘called, from this circumstance, Rotulus Wintoniensis’.191 Winchester becomes the glorious first capital of England and the preserver of the history of England’s Anglo-Saxon past. It even, the Short View suggests, helped to bring about a kind of Anglo-Saxon restoration in the marriage of Henry I to ‘Maud, heiress of the West Saxon princes’, in 1100.192 The second volume of Milner’s Winchester contains extended commentary on Winchester Cathedral that took its place alongside Bentham’s Ely as a landmark study of Gothic architecture, and cemented his reputation as an architectural historian.193 Milner’s work also dominated the market for histories of Winchester for nearly half a century despite – or perhaps on account of – the controversial nature of his readings of ecclesiastical history. Robbins published a second, corrected edition in 1809, and a third followed in 1838 with a life of Milner by F. C. Husenbeth; the Short View reached its eleventh edition c.1840.194 Although it devotes far more space to the period following the Norman conquest than to the Anglo-Saxon period, Milner’s introduction, like his dedication to Countess Chandos Temple, frames Winchester’s history in terms of its Anglo-Saxon past. For Milner, to ignore the ‘sepulchres in our city of the princes to whom we are indebted for our Christianity [Kinegils], our Monarch [Egbert], and our Constitution [Alfred]’ would be either ‘gross ignorance, stupid apathy, or base self love’.195 In a history that combines 187

Milner, Winchester, 160. Anon., A Short View of the History and Antiquities of Winchester (Winchester, 1799). 189 Ibid., 1. 190 Ibid., 6, 35. 191 Ibid., 8. 192 Ibid., 8. 193 Nichols, Illustrations, V:702–29; Lindfield, Georgian Gothic, 183–4; Sweet, Antiquaries, 262–3; David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Woodbridge, 2015), 51; J. Taylor, ed., Essays on Gothic Architecture (London, 1800). 194 D. E. Gilmour, An Historical and Descriptive Guide to the City of Winchester, 11th edn (Winchester, n.d.), refers to the third edition as having ‘just been published’. 195 Milner, Winchester, I:3. 187

188

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religious and patriotic Anglo-Saxonism, Milner transforms a small market town of five thousand inhabitants into the birthplace of England and Englishness.196 The illustrations in Milner’s Winchester, like the tourist guidebooks that epitomised it, assured readers and tourists that the traces of Winchester’s glorious Anglo-Saxon past could be seen, felt and admired all around them. History, Identity and Heritage In his article on medievalism and heritage tourism in modern-day Northumberland, Steve Watson reflects that tourists who ‘seek access to the medieval beyond that which the heritage industry offers’ might do so if – and only if – ‘heritage operators and others can rehabilitate the notion that the present is a continuation of the past and not differentiated from it’.197 It is precisely the idea of the continuity of past and present that permeates eighteenth-century histories of England and that underpins the Anglo-Saxonism apparent in them. By identifying the arrival of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in the fifth century as an event that, in Laurence Echard’s words, occasioned in England ‘a general Change of Names, of Language, of Customs, of Laws, of Arms, of Discipline, of Possessions, of Titles, of Religion, and even of the whole Face of Nature’, historians staked a claim for the Anglo-Saxon origins not only of the English people but of the English landscape.198 National historians constructed a narrative of English history in which the Anglo-Saxons swept away an enervated Romano-British culture and replaced it with an English one that had survived the Norman Conquest. Citing Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Echard, Rapin and Hume no less than Henry and Strutt overlaid the English landscape with a map of Anglo-Saxon England not dissimilar from the one engraved and printed in editions of Britannia. Local historians engaged in the same process, reaching for the highest possible antiquity for their counties and towns. Like national historians, they tended to present the Anglo-Saxon era as the start of a history that continued to shape the natural and artificial landscapes of everyday life. It may well be that eighteenth-century historians identified a moment when past and present became disconnected, but, if they did so, that moment either pre-dated or coincided with the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, whose language, institutions and customs displaced earlier ones and remained vital and visible in the human and physical landscapes. In some sense, then, the Anglo-Saxonist aspects of eighteenth-century English national, county and local histories functioned as heritage as much as historiography. Certainly Anglo-Saxonist historians encouraged English women and men to see themselves as the descendants of Anglo-Saxon forebears, often invoking a language of inheritance to do so. By engaging in the kind of Anglo-Saxonism found in Rapin and Hutchinson, or by emphasising the Anglo-Saxon foundation or re-foundation of a particular town in the manner of Peck, Milner or Barrett, historians not only interpreted the past but directed their readers to encounter that past in a particular manner. If, as heritage scholars have argued, experiences with heritage in the form 196 197 198

Sweet, Urban Histories, 6. Watson, ‘Touring the Medieval’, 256. Echard, History of England, 45.

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of ‘places and spaces where we preserve an account of the past for ourselves and others’ are constitutive of ‘memory, identity and affect’, eighteenth-century historians’ attempts to shape their readers’ understanding of the English landscape as an Anglo-Saxon space must be understood as early steps toward the construction of an English heritage.199 Indeed, Watson identifies eighteenth-century tourists of medieval sites as ‘the vanguard of what was to become the heritage industry’, an observation evidenced by William Hutchinson, whose A View of Northumberland records the activities of a scholar-cum-tourist in the words of a historian-cum-tour-guide.200 As members of the antiquarian community, eighteenth-century historians crafted their narratives from within a tradition in which literary, historical and cultural evidence was inextricably bound up with the geographic, the personal and the material, a confluence that medievalism-ists have identified as constitutive of a virtual space for place- and identity-based meaning-making practices.201 National and local histories invited a wide range of readers into this space to encounter an Anglo-Saxonist interpretation of English history that was simultaneously an idea of Anglo-Saxon Englishness.

Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton and Steve Watson, Introduction to Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures (London, 2017), 5. 200 Watson, ‘Touring the Medieval’, 249. 201 Lees and Overing, ‘Anglo-Saxon Horizons’, 3. 199

4 Imaging and Imagining Anglo-Saxonness

Thus I present to my countrymen, the portrait of their great ancestors, and bring to light the elder glories of a noble nation: which ought with the greatest care to be preserved, and handed down to posterity. Joseph Strutt1

P

hilological, antiquarian and historical research on the Anglo-Saxon period frequently overlapped with various forms of imaginative or affective Anglo-Saxonism. In the majority of cases this type of Anglo-Saxonism served to reinforce an ideology of identity and belonging: literary and linguistic scholars heard the echoes of Old English in religious rites, legal arguments and everyday speech; historians studied the Anglo-Saxon history of their home towns or counties; antiquaries analysed the physical remains of the Anglo-Saxon past carefully, lovingly and at times too creatively, as they sought to develop narratives that brought them into closer contact with their ancestral past. The results of their research – textual or physical, oral or aural – could be popularised and celebrated as evidence of England’s particular heritage. In this and the next chapter I examine some the ways in which artists, writers and politicians engaged in creative and popular forms of Anglo-Saxonism as they reacted to or sought to capitalise on broader cultural sentiment about the character of the English people and their polity. As Aranye Fradenburg and Carolyn Dinshaw have pointed out, scholarship, creativity and enjoyment are inseparable aspects of medievalism in all its forms.2 Given the clear evidence provided by recent scholarship for the confluence of these three aspects in medieval, early modern, nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglo-Saxonism, there is no reason to assume that this was not just as much the case in eighteenth-century England.3 Dinshaw’s claim that exposure to various representations of the Middle Ages provides postmedieval audiences with expanded ‘temporal repertoires [that] include extensive nonmodern . . . temporal possibilities’ is borne out when we consider artistic, literary and political forms of

Strutt, Horda Angel-cynnan, iv. Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now; Fradenburg, ‘So That We May Speak of Them’. 3 Frantzen and Niles, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity; Clark and Perkins, Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination; Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England. 1

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eighteenth-century English Anglo-Saxonism alongside scholarly ones. In other words, information about Anglo-Saxon history and culture that was ultimately derived from academic research constituted one source of raw material from which eighteenth-century English women and men could construct images of their ancestral past and themselves in relation to it. The manifold ways in which that material was combined with ideas about the Anglo-Saxons drawn from literary, visual and popular culture must in turn have influenced how contemporaries read AngloSaxon history, in much the same way that it influenced other imaginative renderings across a range of media. Ideological and creative Anglo-Saxonism inspired both new expressions of ideological and creative Anglo-Saxonism and new philological, antiquarian and historical scholarship; so too did Anglo-Saxon studies inspire both further Anglo-Saxon studies and new expressions of creative and ideological Anglo-Saxonism. The line between medieval studies and medievalism thus becomes exceptionally blurry, often to the point of non-existence. For example: a direct line can be drawn from Hearne’s Life of Alfred the Great to David Garrick’s portrayal of Alfred at Drury Lane in 1751, a performance that concluded with the Anglo-Saxon king singing ‘Rule, Britannia!’. Contemporaries could just as easily – and perhaps more readily – have developed their ideas about Alfred and Anglo-Saxon England from a play (or poem, or image) as from a scholarly text. To some extent the varieties of Anglo-Saxonism examined here and in the next chapter are more familiar and more readily recognisable on account of their being both performative (that is, they represent medieval lives and events to post-­medieval audiences for rhetorical effect, aesthetic appreciation or entertainment value) and affective (that is, they seek to elicit emotional reactions to and engender a sense of cultural affinity with the past). The two modes need not be mutually exclusive and often reinforce one another, particularly in works of art that illustrated national history for exhibition goers, readers of illustrated histories of England, or audiences of dramas that couched political and cultural commentary in medievalist terms. Any division of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist productions into clear groupings must be artificial inasmuch as each example is intimately bound up with others, both earlier and later, across a variety of modern academic disciplinary boundaries. In literature, visual art and political writing we find Anglo-Saxonism in its clearest and arguably its most varied forms. For present purposes I have grouped the examples in the following chapters into the broadly artistic and the broadly political, though examples of Anglo-Saxonist artwork appear in Chapter 5 and politics in Chapter 4. My aim is to reveal the interdependence of each of these forms of Anglo-Saxonism with the others in light of the sources, events and individuals that influenced their creation and with an eye to their implicit participation in the reinforcement and celebration of an idea of Englishness rooted in the Anglo-Saxon past. Over the course of the eighteenth century interest in the physical appearance and daily lives of the nation’s Anglo-Saxon ancestors steadily increased, leading to the production of plays and poetry with Anglo-Saxon themes, studies of Anglo-Saxon clothing and pastimes, and the rise of Alfred the Great as Britain’s semi-legendary, semi-historical national hero. While many of the works discussed here were based 4

4

Dinshaw, How Soon is Now, 6.

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on antiquarian scholarship, they were not intended as scholarly works themselves. Rather, artists seem to have assumed a basic knowledge of Anglo-Saxon history that would enable viewers to understand and respond intellectually and emotionally to artworks with Anglo-Saxon themes. The early emergence of a core group of subjects such as St Augustine preaching to Ethelbert and Bertha of Kent, the lives of Alfred the Great and Canute, or the Battle of Hastings, suggests that artists and publishers illustrated and embellished episodes from a more or less pre-determined outline of Anglo-Saxon history that enjoyed some level of currency amongst the reading public. The styles they employed varied widely, as did the media and formats in which works were produced, their intended audiences, or the demands of their commissioners. Demand for visual representations of the Anglo-Saxons developed as a result of several interconnected factors. The depiction of Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Saxon artefacts in works such as Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, and the increasing attention to detail apparent in the publications of plates of coins, churches and other antiquities, had led to ‘a visual sense of the past and its objects, both extant and vanished’ amongst educated English readers.5 This development was roughly contemporaneous with the revival of interest in antiquarian Saxonism and the publication of new editions of Anglo-Saxon texts in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century.6 Following the Act of Succession, and particularly after 1714, Anglo-Saxon subjects gained a certain cultural cachet, especially AngloSaxon kingship and the origins of England’s limited parliamentary monarchy. If, as Edmund Gibson claimed, the Saxon elector-cum-king George I was ‘the common Parent’ of his German and English subjects, the accession of the House of Hanover represented a return to origins for the English people whose Anglo-Saxon political and cultural institutions constituted the core of the newly created Great Britain.7 Rendering the Anglo-Saxon past into visual form thus became an act of patriotic genealogy; to depict of the Anglo-Saxons was in some ways equivalent to creating a national family portrait gallery. It is unsurprising, therefore, that visual representations of the Anglo-Saxons tended to be accompanied by descriptions of AngloSaxon virtues, habits and mores. If images had the power to help viewers better internalise national historical narratives, they also had the power to shape those narratives by providing a kind of imaginative evidence of the appearance, manners and characters of the figures they depicted.8 The images of Anglo-Saxon subjects discussed here constitute a small proportion of the total number of images of Anglo-Saxon England created by English artists over the course of the eighteenth century. Excluded, for example, are facsimile editions of Domesday Book and charters, topographical and architectural prints, and recreated maps of Anglo-Saxon England. While many of these images exhibit high levels of artistic and technical skill, they were intended for audiences in possession of greater subject-specific knowledge than were the majority of the Woolf, ‘Hystories’, 56. See above, 17–26. 7 Camden, Britannia, ed. Gibson (1722), I:2. 8 Woolf, ‘Hystories’, 57; Anthony Smith, The Nation Made Real: Art and National Identity in Western Europe, 1600–1850 (Oxford, 2013), 108–15. 5

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book illustrations, decorative engravings and history paintings that are the focus of this chapter. A notable exception (and one to which I will return) is the work of Joseph Strutt, published in the last quarter of the century and intended for a general readership and as a guide for artists depicting Anglo-Saxon subjects. Although I have been selective, I do not wish to suggest that the eighteenth century saw the creation of vast numbers of works of art with Anglo-Saxon subjects. Compared with Greek and Roman mythology, the works of Shakespeare, James Macpherson’s Ossian poetry, notable figures of the Renaissance and Civil War, or contemporary military and naval heroes, the Anglo-Saxons occupied a modest position in the hierarchy of historical subjects depicted by eighteenth-century artists.9 What works did exist were in large part devoted to well-known episodes from popular histories by Rapin and Hume, or limited to figures such as Alfred the Great, whose character and exploits lent themselves to artistic representation.10 Yet despite relatively modest numbers and competition from more fashionable themes, imaginative representations of the Anglo-Saxons enjoyed a wider appreciation and more dynamic ‘market lives’ (to borrow Louise Lippincott’s term) than might be expected.11 The interconnection of text and image in antiquarian and imaginative forms of Anglo-Saxonism developed out of and reinforced a widely held belief in the Anglo-Saxonness of the English as a people. If, as Daniel Woolf has argued, by the eighteenth century it was possible for British readers ‘to think in ways that were fundamentally historical’ for the first time, the prevalence of visual representations of the early medieval past provides clear evidence that much of that thinking was reflective, or at least culturally self-directed.12 For a culture self-­ defined as Anglo-Saxon, these imaginative backward glances were also inward ones aimed at defining in greater detail the character of the Anglo-Saxons and their modern descendants. Each of the following examples is in some respect representative of the ways in which scholarship and imagination commingled in works that presented and interpreted England’s Anglo-Saxon origins visually for popular audiences. Antiquarian Images of Anglo-Saxon England English depictions of Anglo-Saxon England circulated long before the eighteenth century. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Wynkyn de Worde published a series of editions of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon that contained steadily increasing numbers of illustrations. The 1528 edition included woodcuts of 9 Timothy Clayton, The English Print 1688–1802 (New Haven, 1997), 237–59; David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 1993), 190–213. 10 An excellent – and to my knowledge the only – study of representations of the AngloSaxons in eighteenth-century British art appears in Keynes, ‘Cult of King Alfred’. 11 Louise Lippincott, ‘Expanding on Portraiture: The Market, the Public, and the Hierarchy of Genres in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ in The Consumption of Culture 1600– 1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London, 1997), 76. 12 Woolf, ‘Hystories’, 37.

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Rowena, of the Danes returning to England following the death of King Alfred, of King Edward the Elder meeting with the Danes, and of the murder of Edward the Confessor’s brother Alfred in 1036 (Figs 1–4).13 Forty years later, Thomas Stapleton’s translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History presented readers with woodcuts illustrating various historical episodes including, among others, two scenes related to the establishment of Christianity (Figs 5–6) and a triptych depicting King Oswald on the night before his death in battle against Penda of Mercia in 641 (Fig. 7).14 Neither de Worde nor Stapleton included accurate historical detail in their illustrations. De Worde’s images depict dress that would probably have looked old-fashioned to readers; Stapleton’s present figures in sixteenth-century costumes. These early woodcuts seem to have been included not to imaginatively recreate the world of the Anglo-Saxons, but to express visually those episodes deemed to be particularly important or instructive for contemporary readers. By far the greatest number of depictions of Anglo-Saxons in an early modern work appeared in the lavishly illustrated 1577 edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles.15 The Historie of Englande in Holinshed’s first volume contained what was for the time a remarkably lengthy narrative history of the Saxons and Anglo-Saxons, illustrated with 135 images of kings, battles, ships, towns and interiors (though many were repeated impressions of the same woodcut).16 While the portraits of individual kings such as Wihtred of Kent occasionally include costume pieces that suggest the distant past, most of the Anglo-Saxons wear sixteenth-century garb.17 Interiors contain early modern furnishings and decor, Danes and Anglo-Saxons sail in carracks, and cities are besieged with cannon.18 Their lack of historical accuracy notwithstanding, Holinshed’s images do instil the events and people he describes with a heightened sense of reality and immediacy that must have made the edition a desirable and even decorative high-status object. Richard Verstegan created a more academically informed set of images for A Restitution of decayed Intelligence, published six times between 1605 and 1673 and one of the most frequently cited Saxonist antiquarian works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an editorial aside preceding his account of the arrival of Hengist and Horsa on the Isle of Thanet, Verstegan outlines his reasons for including their portrait in his work: And because these noble Gentlemen were the very first bringers, and conductors of the ancestors of the English-men into Brittaine, from whence unto their Posterity the possession of the Country hath ensued, I thought fit here in pourtraiture to set downe their first Arrivall; therewithall to shew the manner of the Apparell which Ranulf Higden, The Cronycle of Englonde with the dedes of popes and emperours, and also the descripcyon of Englonde (London, 1528), fols xli, lxvi, lxxii. 14 Bede, The history of the Church of Englande, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Antwerp, 1565). 15 Raphael Holinshed, The First volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, conteyning the description and chronicles of England, from the first inhabiting unto the Conquest (London, 1577). 16 Ibid., 111–289. 17 Ibid., 191. 18 For interiors see, e.g., 151, 173, 189, 253; for ships, 215, 240, 272; for sieges with cannon, 144, 181, 243. 13

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they wore; the Weapons which they used, and the Banner or Ensigne first by them there spread in the field.19

Despite its many anachronistic details, Verstegan’s engraving joins early modern English identity with a clearer attempt at accuracy in historical detail than illustrations in any earlier work (Fig. 8). Hengist and Horsa wear belted tunics with toggle fastenings and carry curved swords (probably the seax, though Verstegan does not refer to it as such), and Hengist holds a crossbow on one shoulder. The ships in the background are long and shallow with square sails. Each of these details matches Verstegan’s description of the dress and military equipment of the continental Saxons and his understanding of Bede’s account of their arrival in Britain.20 Verstegan’s attention to historical detail remained the exception rather than the rule throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though the Restitution may have informed the frontispieces to John Speed’s Theatre of England (Fig. 9) and Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (Fig. 10).21 Both depict Saxons with long hair, dressed in skirted robes and carrying spears, and Drayton’s wears a cloak and carries a small shield, elements that were, according to Verstegan, typical of ‘the old Saxons’.22 The publication of Hickes’s Thesaurus signals a shift in the ways antiquaries employed print technologies to reproduce images of Anglo-Saxon England. In his Preface and in the ‘Dissertatio Epistolaris’ Hickes refers explicitly to charters, artefacts and samples of Old English manuscript illuminations that appear in a series of facsimile plates engraved by Michael Burghers. One of the most impressive of these plates contains samples of scripts, coins, a ring, and a line engraving of the St Luke miniature from the Lichfield Gospels (Fig. 11).23 This scientific or reproductive approach also characterises the images of the Bayeux Tapestry in the second volume of Montfaucon’s Monumens de la Monarchie Françoise. Rather than ‘improving’ the tapestry to suit modern artistic tastes, Montfaucon commissioned exact reproductions of Antoine Benoît’s drawings, thereby assigning them evidentiary value for the study of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman history and material culture.24 Montfaucon’s English translator recognised this fact in a series of notes that carefully critique his interpretation of the tapestry, correctly identifying it as an embroidery and suggesting that it might not be contemporary with the events depicted and might not be an unquestionably reliable representation of events; rather, its value as a depiction of eleventh-century material culture was that it could help modern viewers to better understand the way their ancestors lived.25 Each of these engravings, like those discussed in the previous chapters, aimed to provide antiquaries with a means

Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities. Concerning the most noble and renowned English nation (London, 1634), 116. 20 Ibid., 116–18. 21 John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, presenting an exact geography of the Kingdomes of England, Scotland, Ireland and the Iles adioyning (London, 1611); Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (London, 1612). 22 Verstegan, Restitution, 56–7. 23 Hickes, Thesaurus, I:viii. 24 Pastan, ‘Montfaucon as Reader’, 93; above, 54–5. 25 Regal and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of France, I:i–ii, 17–21, 24–9. 19

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of studying objects to which they did not have physical access and with the tools necessary for comparing and classifying new ones as they were discovered. A similar approach informs the engravings of antiquities and portrait prints designed by George Vertue for the illustrated folio edition of Rapin’s History, a series reissued with an introductory essay under the title The Heads of the Kings of England.26 For the first volume of the History Vertue engraved portraits of Egbert (‘taken from a silver coin of the king’), Alfred the Great (‘from an ancient picture preserved in University College at Oxford’) and Canute (‘as represented on several of his silver coins, three of which are engraven at the bottom of this plate’) (Figs 12–14), as well as the tomb of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey that would later be reproduced in greater detail in the first volume of Vetusta Monumenta (Fig. 15).27 Surrounding the portraits are what Francis Haskell refers to as ‘little representations of some episode dating from the same period as the monument which [Vertue] treated in the most fanciful rococo idiom’. Though Haskell contends that Vertue, like many of his contemporaries and predecessors, juxtaposed accurate representations with ‘illustrated narratives . . . drawn in a manner that suggested the modern boudoir’, to dismiss these vignettes on stylistic grounds is to miss the point of their inclusion.28 First, while the portraits of Egbert, Alfred and Canute adhere closely to Vertue’s sources and, in the case of Egbert and Canute, include reproductions of those sources, none of the accompanying narrative images constitutes more than a suggestive sketch. Vertue writes that ‘the utmost care has been taken and the most diligent enquiry made after the best authorities’ for the portraits, yet says nothing of what he calls ‘the ornaments’. While he describes the portraits and his manner of reproducing them in great detail, he often omits the framing episodes altogether from his commentary.29 Second, Vertue’s engravings of the portraits appeared in an antiquarian publication with crossover appeal to a wider readership interested in reproductive art prints as well as historical material. Whether or not the combination of antiquarian detail and anachronistic elements and styles strikes the retrospective gaze as incongruous, Vertue’s engravings can be seen as an attempt to present readers of Rapin’s History with images of English monarchs that were as accurate as possible, and as an encouragement to reader-viewers to engage visually and imaginatively with the distant past. Vertue thus echoes Verstegan’s claim that an image of Hengist and Horsa ought to be understood as a portrait of the ancestors of modern-day Englishmen, and looks forward to the arguments advanced by Joseph Strutt later in the century. Rather than an exemplar of the eighteenth century’s lack of historical awareness or unwillingness to depict the past accurately, Vertue’s prints look outward to antiquarian best practice as seen in the works of Montfaucon, and forward to the sentimental and affective creations of history painters and book illustrators later in the century.

George Vertue, The Heads of the Kings of England, Proper for Mr. Rapin’s History . . . Collected, Drawn, and Engraven, with Ornaments and Decorations (London, 1736). 27 Ibid., 5–9. 28 Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, 1993), 289. 29 Vertue, Heads of the Kings, 5. 26

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Like Vertue’s Heads of the Kings of England, James Granger’s Biographical History of England advocated the study of portraits of historical figures as a form of self-education that was also a patriotic pastime. To these benefits Granger added another: entertainment. For the viewer, a collection of portrait prints became ‘a kind of speaking chronicle’ that would ‘delight the eye, recreate the mind, impress the imagination, fix the memory, and thereby yield no small assistance to the judgment’.30 Granger presented readers with chronologically arranged biographical sketches of eminent figures accompanied by details of existing portrait prints and the publications in which they appeared. Readers were encouraged to acquire and arrange the prints themselves, and subsequent editions of Granger’s text were sold with interleaved blank pages that allowed readers to do so, creating personalised extra-illustrated editions. According to Lucy Peltz, Granger’s book ‘appealed unexpectedly to a large audience of general readers and brought converts to the pleasures of portrait collecting and extra-illustration’.31 The prints produced to satisfy the demands of that audience provide evidence for the availability and nature of portraits of AngloSaxon figures in eighteenth-century Britain. In the first edition Granger included entries for eight portraits of Alfred the Great, primarily Vertue’s images for Rapin and various editions of Alfred’s Life, and one each of Egbert, Canute, Edward the Confessor, Asser and St Dunstan; a supplemental volume added Harold II, Bede and Anselm, and removed Asser.32 Aside from Vertue’s portrait prints, each of these images appeared in rare seventeenth-century editions or in eighteenth-century texts such as Montfaucon’s Monumens de la monarchie françoise and Andrew Ducarel’s Anglo-Norman Antiquities. The image of Dunstan comes from Hickes’s Thesaurus, a line engraving of an image Granger judged to be ‘not bad for that barbarous age’. Granger’s entries represent a small proportion of the total number of available portraits of Anglo-Saxons. A Biographical History extra-illustrated by the 5th Duke of Buccleuch contains twenty eighteenth-century prints of Anglo-Saxon subjects published in England, France and Italy; in the early nineteenth century William Fleming assembled thirty-seven portraits of Anglo-Saxon kings and saints, all but one of which was published before 1800.33 The National Portrait Gallery has identified more than sixty portrait prints of Anglo-Saxon figures produced in the eighteenth century, most of which were based on coins, or medieval or early modern precursors.34 Numerous competing prints of popular kings such as Alfred and Canute circulated simultaneously, indicating 30 James Granger, A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution: Consisting of Characters disposed in different Classes, and adapted to a Methodical Catalogue of Engraved British Heads, 2 vols (London, 1769), Preface. 31 Lucy Peltz, Facing the Text: Extra-Illustration, Print Culture, and Society in Britain, 1769–1840 (San Marino, 2017), 32. 32 Granger, Biographical History, 1–30; James Granger, A Supplement, Consisting of Corrections and large Additions, to a Biographical History of England, Referred to their proper Places in that Work (London, 1774), 3, 14, 16. 33 James Granger, A Biographical History of England, 3rd edn (London, 1779), extraillustrated by Walter Montagu Douglas Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch, Bowhill House, Selkirk, Scot 1. BSM 52/2; James Granger, A Biographical History of England, 5th edn (London, 1824), extra-illustrated by William Fleming, National Portrait Gallery, London. 34 These prints are collected in two ‘Sitter Boxes’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

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both demand and a diverse market. Portrait prints of Anglo-Saxons almost certainly circulated widely, a fact that has become obscured due to the fragile, ephemeral medium that rendered them accessible and affordable in the first place. Edward Rowe Mores went significantly farther than Vertue in a slender volume containing fifteen line engravings reproducing images from the paraphrase of Genesis then attributed to Cædmon. At twenty-four, Rowe Mores had already distinguished himself as a scholar of Anglo-Saxon coin inscriptions and historical architecture, and would go on to write the first history of English type-founders.35 In his earliest explicitly Anglo-Saxonist publication, he advocated the use of AngloSaxon manuscript illuminations for art historical study, advertising in his subtitle that the work illustrated ‘Anglo-Saxon habits, rites and buildings of the tenth century’. Unfortunately, Rowe Mores’s prefatory paragraph provides information on the manuscript’s provenance, but offers no additional commentary on the images or guidance on how to interpret them.36 Careful, critical consideration of what AngloSaxon manuscript illuminations could and could not provide for eighteenth-century scholars, readers and artists finally appeared in Joseph Strutt’s Horda Angel-cynnan, in the introduction to which Strutt argued that it was possible to know what the Anglo-Saxons had worn and eaten, and what their favoured weapons and pastimes had been. This information came from those manuscripts that had supplied historians and philologists with material for centuries. Unlike Rowe Mores, however, Strutt stated plainly that Anglo-Saxon illuminators had lacked knowledge of, or had been unconcerned with, the quotidian details of previous eras, and as a result had depicted everyone in the styles of their own times.37 His consultation of ‘all [manuscripts] in the public libraries that are illuminated, or at least all that have come to my knowledge’, had revealed that roughly contemporary manuscripts produced by different hands at different locations ‘agree[d] in every particular of dress, customs, &c. even in the minutiae’, thus providing evidence for the evolution of Anglo-Saxon material culture over time.38 At the heart of Strutt’s project lay a desire to allow readers to engage imaginatively with the Anglo-Saxon past even as they acquired accurate information about it. Combining high-quality engravings with historical anecdotes and closely reasoned readings of the visual evidence provided by Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, Strutt constructed a composite image of the Anglo-Saxons that ranged from clothing, ornaments and weapons to social relations, work and pastimes.39 Horda Angel-cynnan interweaves marginal citations and footnotes on Old English and Anglo-Saxon customs with sixty-seven plates of illustrations derived primarily from manuscripts in 35 For Rowe Mores’s life, see the Introduction to Edward Rowe Mores, A Dissertation upon English typographical founders and founderies (1778): with a catalogue and specimen of the typefoundry of John James (1782), ed. Harry Carter and Christopher Ricks (Oxford, 1961). 36 Edward Rowe Mores, Figuræ Quædam Antiquæ ex Cædmonis Monachi Paraphraseos in Genesin (Oxford, 1754). 37 Strutt, Horda Angel-cynnan, I:i–ii. 38 Ibid., I:i. 39 Strutt begins with discussions of Anglo-Saxon fortifications, warfare, architecture and government, making his survey of Anglo-Saxon culture as comprehensive as would have been possible. As the earlier sections were largely derivative of earlier antiquarian studies presented in Chapter 2, I have not included them here.

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the Cotton library and library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, using a careful system of plate and figure numbers to link text and image. The resulting work highlights the details of life as a means of endowing great events and notable individuals with immediacy and reality, and does so in a far more accessible style and format than earlier antiquarian publications of its depth and thoroughness.40 Strutt’s discussion of Anglo-Saxon costume is rich and largely accurate, even to the point of identifying changes in trends from century to century using textual and orthographic evidence derived from Wanley’s Catalogus. Strutt illustrates the ‘close coats, reaching only to the knee, and . . . short cloak over their left shoulder’ worn by the common people and the more sumptuous versions of the same garment worn by the royalty and nobility, with reproductions of all twelve panels of the Anglo-Saxon calendar from Cotton Tiberius B.v (Fig. 16).41 An assortment of accessories including hats, crowns, shoes and brooches appears on Plate 23, taken from a range of sources including manuscripts and coins.42 Hunting, hawking, riding, field sports, feasting and music, and even such seeming minutiae as tableware, food and drink, and cooking practices, receive careful treatment and illustration.43 Horda Angel-cynnan presents the Anglo-Saxons as productive and industrious farmers and artisans, as sailors and merchants, and as skilled participants in a domestic and international woollen trade.44 Strutt’s ability to present Anglo-Saxon England as a rich, diverse, living environment enabled him to highlight the parallels between AngloSaxon and contemporary England, narrowing the conceptual divide between polite eighteenth-century readers and their putative ancestors. A reviewer for the Monthly Review drew this connection explicitly, writing that ‘it is extremely entertaining to look back upon the manners, we may even say sentiments, of our progenitors, and by comparing their actions and thoughts with our own, see in what articles of use or refinement we may boast an advantage’.45 Horda Angel-cynnan quickly became ‘one of the most widely read antiquarian sources of the time’, a result of the same cultural trends that saw increasing attention paid to manners, customs and everyday life in historiography and the proliferation of more imaginative representations of episodes from Anglo-Saxon history.46 It should also be connected to what Nick Groom identifies as changes in social practice such as the rising popularity of hunting for sport, linked to the ‘manly’ pursuits of the Saxons and Anglo-Saxons.47 Strutt’s work underpins those chapters of Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons concerned with dress and habits, 40 Brenda Hough, ‘A Consideration of the Antiquarian and Literary Works of Joseph Strutt, with a Transcript of a hitherto Inedited Manuscript Novel’, doctoral thesis, Queen Mary College, University of London (1984), 141. My reading of Horda Angel-cynnan is indebted to Hough’s thesis, which remains the single book-length study devoted entirely to Strutt’s works. 41 Strutt, Horda Angel-cynnan, Plates 10–12. 42 Ibid., 46–7. 43 Ibid., 48–9, Plates 16–17. 44 Ibid., 73–4. 45 The Monthly Review 51 (1774), 106. 46 Sweet, Antiquaries, 331; above, 81–5. 47 Nick Groom, ‘Eighteenth-Century Gothic before The Castle of Otranto’ in The Harp and the Constitution, ed. Parker, 42; cf. Colley, Britons, 170–3.

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where Turner praises ‘the industrious and useful Strutt’, asserting that ‘nothing can more satisfactorily illustrate the manners of our ancestors than such publications’ as Horda Angel-cynnan.48 Despite Strutt’s hope that the work would prove useful to artists, it was not until the nineteenth century that its impact on book illustration and decorative art became discernible.49 Siân Echard makes the compelling argument that antiquarian images possessed the power to ‘establish a link across the centuries through recognition and human contact’, reinforcing a sense of the medieval past as simultaneously a distant and a familiar place.50 Reproducing historical remains in print form allowed antiquaries to imagine themselves interacting with objects in the past, providing viewers with a virtual experience of discovery and an opportunity for critical interpretation. Because these images appeared primarily in relatively expensive scholarly publications issued in limited print runs, often for subscribers, they tended to remain within the scholarly rather than the popular realm. If, as the editors of Early Modern Medievalisms argue, the practices and conventions of medievalist scholarship imposed distance between the reader of the scholarly publication and the past, the textual conventions of most of the texts in which antiquarian images of the Anglo-Saxons appeared likely limited the appeal of such works for all but a particular community of scholars and amateur historians.51 But the recovery of the past through scientific means was only one aspect of eighteenth-century antiquarian Anglo-Saxonism. It also included works such as Granger’s Biographical History and Strutt’s Horda angel-cynnan, and the extremely popular Gentleman’s Magazine, which regularly contained antiquarian articles and illustrations. As a number of recent studies have made clear, eighteenth-century antiquarianism was an intensely visual mode of interacting with the past and a cultural practice that contributed to the development of English print culture in meaningful ways.52 Lucy Peltz and Martin Myrone point to ‘the increasing scale and refinement of antiquarian publishing’ as the century progressed as evidence that illustrated antiquarian books ‘became objects of desire in their own right’.53 Images created by and for antiquaries thus had the capacity to bridge the divide between past and present, providing opportunities for

Turner, Anglo-Saxons, II:54n20. For a contemporary response, see The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal 51 (1774), 101–5. 50 Siân Echard, Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2008), 46. 51 Alicia C. Montoya, Sophie van Romburgh and Wim van Anrooij, eds, Introduction to Early Modern Medievalisms: The Interplay between Scholarly Reflection and Artistic Production (Leiden, 2010), 10. 52 Peltz and Myrone, eds, Producing the Past; Dana Arnold and Stephen Bending, eds, Tracing Architecture: The Aesthetics of Antiquarianism (Oxford, 2003); Sam Smiles, ‘The Art of Recording’ in Making History, ed. Nurse, Gaimster and McCarthy, 123–5. 53 Peltz and Myrone, eds, Producing the Past, 3. For further details of antiquarian illustration and print culture, see the following contributions to that volume: Maria Grazia Lolla, ‘Ceci n’est pas un monument: Vetusta Monumenta and Antiquarian Aesthetics’, 15–34; Martin Myrone, ‘Graphic Antiquarianism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Career and Reputation of George Vertue (1684–1756)’, 35–54; Sam Smiles, ‘British Antiquity and Antiquarian Illustration’, 55–66. 48 49

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know­ledgeable viewers to engage with Anglo-Saxon history and culture in ways that were simultaneously scientific, imaginative and aesthetically pleasing. Illustrating English History A flourishing antiquarian print culture found a popular correlate in the illustrated histories of England published in a range of formats that enabled broad sections of the population to participate in the literary and visual economy.54 T. S. R. Boase has traced the rise in popularity of illustrated histories of England in this period, while William St Clair has identified the end of perpetual copyright in 1774 as the catalyst for a significant increase in the amount of visual material in printed books and a decrease in the cost of illustrated texts.55 Both have drawn connections between book illustrations and history painting and, following Hans Hammelmann, point to the fact that many eighteenth-century artists either created book illustrations themselves or provided the models on which engravers and illustrators based their designs.56 Simon Keynes has begun to uncover the role of leading artists in illustrating Anglo-Saxon history, particularly the life of Alfred the Great.57 However, outside Keynes’s study, there is a near absence of scholarly attention to artistic representations of Anglo-Saxon subjects in this period. It is therefore worth considering both the nature of illustrations and the characteristics of the visual narrative of AngloSaxon history advanced by illustrated popular histories as a genre. As in historiography more generally, Rapin’s History of England played a key role in the development of eighteenth-century illustrated history books. Along with Vertue’s portrait prints, the second edition, published in 1732, contains a series of unsigned decorative vignettes that mark the beginning of each of its books. In the absence of captions or labels, readers were expected to identify the subject of each one from the accompanying text. Books 2 through 5 begin, respectively, with Rowena bearing a cup to Vortigern, Augustine and a group of monks preaching to Ethelbert of Kent, three kings swearing fealty to Egbert (according to Rapin, Egbert’s claim to the kingship of all England rested on his possession of the thrones of Wessex, Sussex, Essex and Kent but ‘as for the other three Kingdoms . . . he was contented with reserving Sovereignty over them, permitting them to be governed by kings who were his Vassals and Tributaries’), and the St Brice’s Day massacre.58 A more imaginative image accompanies the ‘Dissertation on the Government, Laws, Manners, Customs, and Laws of the Anglo-Saxons’: a scribe sits in front of a group of robed figures, some bearing sceptres, a fanciful scene suggesting an Anglo-Saxon Parliament of lords and commons. Composed with a minimum of detail necessary for identification, these vignettes share a common style with those included alongClayton, English Print, 22–3, 118–22; O’Brien, ‘History Market’, 106; James Raven, Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2014), 241–4. 55 T. S. R. Boase, ‘Macklin and Bowyer’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1963), 148–77; St Clair, Reading Nation, 134. 56 Hans Hammelmann, Book Illustrators in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. T. S. R. Boase (New Haven, 1975), 4–5. 57 Keynes, ‘Cult of King Alfred’, 303–11. 58 Rapin, History, I:30, 45, 82, 117, 147. 54

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side each of Vertue’s portraits (a map of the Heptarchy, Alfred’s wars with the Danes, Canute commanding the waves to recede). Collectively, they illustrate a series of turning points in Anglo-Saxon history stretching from the arrival of Hengist to the death of Edward the Confessor, represented by Vertue’s engraving of Edward’s tomb in Westminster Abbey. Book 6 opens with a depiction of the coronation of William the Conqueror – a fitting conclusion to a series of images of Anglo-Saxon England that emphasise the role of kings, their characters, and their laws in the development of a recognisably English state, itself represented on a fold-out map of Britain.59 By contrast, John Lockman’s abridgement of Rapin, published by Thomas Astley as an inexpensive alternative to the Vertue-illustrated folio edition, contains five illustrations designed by Samuel Wale and engraved by George Child.60 The young Wale would go on to establish himself as the pre-eminent illustrator of history books in the middle decades of the century and to play an active role in the foundation and administration of the Society of Artists and the Royal Academy, where he became the first Professor of Perspective in 1768. Though some scholars have treated Wale’s work dismissively, recent research by Isabelle Baudino, coupled with Hammelmann’s insightful comment that Wale was ‘often ill-served by his engravers’, represents a view more in accord with Wale’s contemporary reputation and his surviving drawings.61 Wale tended to depict memorable and dramatic episodes, which he rendered in an accessible, energetic style. In some cases, such as ‘King Edgar rowed down the River Dee by Eight Tributary Kings’ (Fig. 17), designed for William Russell’s New and Authentic History of England, Wale’s ability shines through in the faces of the rowers, Edgar’s proud stance and the delicate splashing of water off the oars. Here as so often Wale’s design ‘catch[es] a significant incident and tells its story plainly’, while still managing to ‘add something significant to our understanding of the text’ by rendering it both complex and immediate.62 In these instances Wale’s illustrations come closest to the eighteenth-century meaning of the term, shedding additional light on the history they accompany by providing the reader (now viewer) with a level of detail and interpretation beyond the scope of the historian. The popularity of Lockman’s text helped to establish Wale’s compositions as standard models for illustrating Anglo-Saxon history.63 Edward the Martyr appears on horseback in front of Elfrida outside the gate of Corfe Castle in an arrangement easily identifiable in Andrea Casali’s vast, bright oil painting of the same scene exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1760. The crowned Canute sitting on the shore with waves lapping at his feet and his courtiers hovering over him, one hand outstretched to command the sea to retreat, survives in numerous imitations, including Edward Edwards’ ‘Canute, Commanding the Sea to Retire’ of 1773. For Thomas Mortimer’s New History of England, published in 1766, Wale illustrated seven turning points in Anglo-Saxon history: Augustine preaching to Ethelbert and Bertha (borrowed Ibid., 163. Lockman, New History of England (1747). 61 Isabelle Baudino, ‘Samuel Wale (1714–1786), a Foundation Member of the Royal Academy’, British Art Journal 18 (2017), 60–72; Hammelmann, Book Illustrators, 90; Edward Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters (London, 1808), 116; Keynes, ‘Cult of King Alfred’, 303–11. 62 Hammelmann, Book Illustrators, 90. 63 Above, 80. 59

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from an illustration in Verstegan’s Restitution); Alfred the Great establishing laws and counties; ‘The Insolent Behaviour of Dunstan to K. Edwy on the Day of his Coronation’; the murder of Edward the Martyr; the St Brice’s Day massacre of 1002 (among Wale’s most visceral images); the landing of William the Conqueror; and the swearing of fealty to William by the bishop and citizens of London.64 In William Russell’s New and Authentic History of England, published eleven years later, Wale’s images of Augustine, Alfred the Great, Edward the Martyr, and the landing of William reappeared, alongside depictions of the Earl of Devon capturing the magical raven banner of the Danes for Alfred, Athelstan ordering an English translation of the Bible, the apocryphal story of Edmund I being stabbed by Leolf the robber, and Edgar being rowed down the river Dee.65 A more melodramatic bent appears in Wale’s designs for Temple Sydney’s New and Complete History of England, which contains depictions of the monks of Bangor being slaughtered on the command of Æthelfrith of Northumbria and the nuns of Coldingham Abbey cutting off their own noses to avoid being raped by marauding Danes, alongside more commonplace images of Alfred and Canute.66 Edward Barnard’s The New, Impartial and Complete History of England serves as a useful comparison to histories illustrated by Wale, and as an example of a work in which antiquarian and imaginative images appeared side by side. Of the six episodes illustrative of Anglo-Saxon history, Edward Edwards’ images of the death of Edward the Martyr and of Canute imitate Wale directly, while Alfred the Great dividing his loaf with a hungry pilgrim bears a resemblance to Benjamin West’s 1778 oil painting of the same scene. William Hamilton’s depiction of Alfred being rebuked for burning the cakes and of the English under Edward the Elder defeating a Danish army represent more or less original designs, while that of the Battle of Hastings was inspired by a 1751 image by Francis Hayman for the series English History Delineated. To these narrative scenes the publisher added a selection of antiquarian plates – including ‘A New Collection of English Coins from Egbert to Hardicanute: Accurately taken from the Originals’, and five composite images of ‘Portraits and Dresses of the Kings of England . . . prior to the Norman Conquest’ – that lend intellectual heft to a highly derivative popular history.67 Albeit brief, this survey reveals notable patterns in the images contained in illustrated histories of England. Illustrations tended to reinforce the content of histories by focusing on important moments in religious history – such as the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, or instances in which an ecclesiastic such as Dunstan acted in a high-handed or unlawful manner that threatened to make the Thomas Mortimer, A New History of England, from the Earliest Accounts of Britain, to the Ratification of the Peace of Versailles, 1763, 3 vols (London, 1766); Verstegan, Restitution, 144. 65 William Augustus Russell, A New and Authentic History of England, from the most remote period of Genuine Historical Evidence, to the Present Important Crisis (London, 1777). 66 Temple Sydney, A New and Complete History of England, from the Earliest Period of Authentic Intelligence to the Present Time (London, 1773). 67 Edward Barnard, A New, Impartial and Complete History of England: from the very earliest period of authentic information, and most genuine records of historical evidence, to the end of the present year (London, 1790). 64

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crown subservient to the church – and on turning points in national political history, such as Alfred’s establishment of laws and counties or the landing of William the Conqueror. In other cases, they engaged in a kind of moralistic commentary by depicting instances in which monarchs or religious figures acted in ways that demonstrated virtuous or wicked (or perhaps foolish) behaviour, for instance the bravery of the nuns of Coldingham, Alfred’s generosity toward the hungry pilgrim, or Æthelred’s impetuous massacre of Danes settled in England. In terms of their content these illustrations thus align with conventional eighteenth-century narratives that saw in the Anglo-Saxon period the foundation of the English church, the establishment of the English constitution, the origins of the limited monarchy, and the virtues of medieval figures whom Lockman refers to as ‘near relations’ of modern English readers.68 Equally important is the clear influence of early illustrations of Rapin’s History and the corpus of Samuel Wale on the subjects chosen for inclusion in illustrated histories. The frequent imitation of these images in later published histories and in the decorative prints and history paintings discussed below suggest that the visual templates that allowed eighteenth-century English readers and viewers to ‘see’ the Anglo-Saxon past appeared first in book illustrations, which then inspired more celebrated and better remembered history paintings. English History Delineated In a bid to capitalise further on the success of their illustrated editions of Rapin’s History, in February 1751 John and Paul Knapton issued notices inviting subscriptions for English History Delineated, a series of fifty prints of ‘the most memorable Actions and Events, from the Landing of Julius Caesar to the Revolution’. The scheme was ambitious in its aims and scope: The best Authors will be consulted for the Dresses, Arms, Customs and Manners of the ancient Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, who have successively inhabited this Island. At the Bottom of each Print a short Account of the History will be inserted, by way of connecting the Series together as much as the Nature of this Design will admit. And in the Choice of Subjects, Care will be taken that they be, First, Important, or interesting; Secondly, Striking, or such as will make good Pictures; Thirdly, So different from each other, as to afford an agreeable Variety.69

Owing to financial mismanagement on the part of the Knaptons and Robert Dodsley, with whom they jointly commissioned the series, only the first six prints were published.70 These six were designed by Nicholas Blakey and Francis Hayman, and engraved by Charles Grignion the Elder, Gérard Scotin and Simon François Ravenet. Blakey lived and worked primarily in Paris and was famous for his illustrations of Alexander Pope’s works.71 Hayman had achieved success as a painter for Vauxhall Lockman, New History, Preface. London Evening Post, 1 February 1750, 3. 70 Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond (New Haven, 1983), 56–8. 71 Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters, 3–4. 68 69

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Gardens and Drury Lane Theatre and, despite the dismissiveness of Horace Walpole’s biographical sketch of him, was later referred to as ‘unquestionably the best historical painter in the kingdom, before the arrival of [Giovanni Battista] Cipriani’ in 1755.72 Together, they were charged with undertaking ‘the first attempt that was made in England to produce a regular suite of engravings from our national history’.73 The Knaptons’ proposal highlights the role of the print market in marrying national history and patriotism to visual art and art collecting: of the three advertised criteria, two relate to the engravings’ aesthetic appeal and entertainment value. Their historical content could be important or interesting – the historical significance of any given episode chosen for illustration would, the Knaptons promised, both pique the curiosity and capture the attention of prospective buyers and those to whom they might display the engravings after purchasing them. A surviving handbill inviting subscriptions advertises four images taken from Anglo-Saxon history: ‘The Saxons obtaining a Settlement in England. The Subject, Vortigern falling in Love with Rowena the Daughter of Hengist, at a Feast to which her Father had purposely invited him’; ‘The Conversion of the Saxons to Christianity by St Austin the Monk’; ‘Alfred the Great laying the Foundation of the Naval Power of England’; and ‘The Battle of Hastings’. Possibly on the advice of those ‘Gentlemen of Taste and Knowledge’ whom the Knaptons invited to comment on their plans, Blakey and Hayman illustrated the period from the arrival of Caesar to the Norman Conquest with three scenes from Roman and British history, and three from Anglo-Saxon.74 While Vortigern and Rowena and the Battle of Hastings remained, the conversion depicted is that of the Britons, while Alfred appears not as a wise and aged monarch but as a young king hiding from the Danes in the Isle of Athelney.75 Issued first in 1751, then in 1752 as a six-print series entitled ‘The Antient History of England’, and finally in 1778 following Robert Sayer’s acquisition of the plates, all three prints proved reasonably successful and, if imitation is any indication, exerted a remarkable influence on later representations of their respective scenes.76 Lippincott has observed that the popularity of old master paintings and portraiture, and rising incomes amongst the growing middle classes, had created a ‘new Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England; with some account of the principal artists; and incidental notes on other arts; collected by Mr. George Vertue; and now digested and published from his original Mss. by Mr. Horace Walpole, 2nd edn, 4 vols (London, 1782), IV:124–5; Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters, 50–2. 73 Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters, 4. 74 An annotated copy of the proposal and a draft response preserved in the ‘ABC of Arts and Sciences’ in the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society Archive suggests some members actually responded to the Knaptons’ invitation. The three prints covering the pre-Saxon period were ‘The Landing of Julius Caesar’, ‘Caractacus, the British Prince, before Claudius at Rome’ and ‘The Conversion of the Britons to Christianity’. 75 Multiple copies of each of these prints are now in the British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings. All references here are to the first impressions unless otherwise stated: ‘Vortigern and Rowena’, BM 1877-06-09-1706; ‘Alfred in the Isle of Athelney, receiving News of a Victory over the Danes’, BM 1855-06-09-1829; ‘The Battle of Hastings’, BM 1866-04-07-170. 76 London Daily Advertiser (3 April 1752), 1; Lippincott, Selling Art, 58. 72

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environment’ of collecting and connoisseurship in early Georgian London.77 The wealthy were encouraged to collect not only for their own enjoyment but also as a means of contributing to the improvement of English society and manners through the cultivation of aesthetic appreciation.78 ‘If Gentlemen were Lovers of Painting, and Connoisseurs’, wrote Jonathan Richardson, ‘many Summs of Money which are now lavish’d away . . . would be laid up in Pictures, Drawings, and Antiques, which would be . . . an Improving Estate’.79 English History Delineated responded to patriotic sentiment and fashion, and entered a visual economy in which illustrated histories, antiquarian publications, guides to notable towns, and images of artefacts and architectural remains all contributed to a visual consciousness of the past amongst the English reading public.80 High-quality artistic historical prints provided collectors with a means of participating in an emergent national artistic culture that was already closely linked to national identity and patriotism, and that would become more so following the establishment of the Society of Artists and Royal Society of Arts which encouraged and celebrated history painting.81 Vortigern and Rowena Nicholas Blakey’s design for ‘Vortigern and Rowena’ (Fig. 18) depicts the legendary deciding moment in the settlement of the Saxons in England, when the Saxon general Hengist presents his niece to the British king as part of a plot to secure lands in England for himself and his followers. According to the caption, taken almost verbatim from Rapin: Hengist perceiving the impression Rowena’s beauty made upon the King, made a certain signal to his Niece, upon which going to the Sideboard, she filled a Golden Cup with Wine & presented it on her knees to the King. Vortigern immediately rose up to give her a salute, which Rowena received in a very respectful manner, & making a profound reverence withdrew leaving the King full of Love & Desire.82

Blakey depicts the penultimate moment in this short narrative, in which a besotted Vortigern salutes Rowena, who kneels bare-breasted before him. The Britons and Saxons seated at the table behind Vortigern and the three bards standing behind Rowena look intently at the king, their expressions ranging from curious to expectant. The viewer is expected to know what the characters in the scene do not: that Vortigern’s inability to master his desire will lead him to grant Hengist the kingship of Kent in exchange for Rowena, an agreement that will lead to the Saxon conquest of England. Lippincott, Selling Art, 55–70. Peltz, Facing the Text, 115–16. 79 Jonathan Richardson, Two Discourses, I. An essay on the art of criticism, as it relates to painting . . . II. An argument in behalf of the science of a connoisseur, etc. (London, 1719), Part II:47. 80 Hammelmann, Book Illustrators, 4. 81 Clayton, English Print, 235–59; Richard Godfrey, Printmaking in Britain (New York, 1978), 40–53; Hammelmann, Book Illustrators, 6; Lippincott, Selling Art, 73; Peltz, Facing the Text, 28, 60. 82 Nicholas Blakey, ‘Vortigern and Rowena’, BM 1877,0609.1706; Rapin, History, I:95. 77 78

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Rapin based his version of the story on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, which describes Rowena as Hengist’s co-conspirator.83 In the text accompanying Blakey’s image Rowena comes forward at Hengist’s direction, stepping into the centre of the action from her place on the side. In the eighteenth-century version of the story, Rowena is a dutiful Saxon woman, one whose beauty and obedience (and possible complicity) lead to her people’s eventual triumph. Not merely the seductress of Geoffrey’s anti-Saxon fable, Rowena becomes a sympathetic, perhaps even admirable model of femininity. Blakey’s ‘Vortigern and Rowena’ stands at a turning point in the fortunes of Rowena in Anglo-Saxon historiography. Rapin’s was the last eighteenth-century history of Anglo-Saxon England to relate the meeting of Vortigern and Rowena as anything more than a legend of questionable veracity, although Juliet Feibel links Rowena’s disappearance from serious historiography with ‘a dramatically increased presence in painted histories’.84 Feibel identifies six paintings of the scene between 1750 and 1800, all of which retain elements of Blakey’s original design.85 As the result of a process begun by Angelica Kauffmann, whose ‘Vortigern enamoured with Rowena’ was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1770, Rowena was transformed into a figure of historical significance and legendary romance, the virginal Saxon beauty who sacrificed herself to the lustful, foolish Vortigern in order to secure a new homeland for her people. By 1793, when Robert Bowyer displayed William Hamilton’s ‘Rowena Introduced to Vortigern King of the Britons’ in his Historic Gallery, Rowena had become more Saxon saint than Saxon heroine.86 Vortigern, on the other hand, appears in Rapin’s history as a tyrant whose immoderation leads to his downfall and his kingdom’s ruin. Shortly after meeting Rowena he divorces his wife, alienates his children and councillors, and grants the kingship of Kent to Hengist without consulting its governor.87 This characterisation stuck. When William Henry Ireland’s pseudo-Shakespearean Vortigern appeared in print and on stage at Drury Lane in 1796, the depiction of Vortigern closely resembled Rapin’s.88 Rapin constrasts the foolish tyrant with Hengist, a model of Saxon warrior-kingship, whose ‘Valour and Experience, the Soundness of his 83 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007), 128–31: ‘egressa est puella de thalamo aureum ciphum vino plenum ferens’. Aaron Thompson translated the passage similarly in The British History, Translated into ENGLISH from the LATIN of Jeffrey of Monmouth. With a large preface concerning the authority of the History (London, 1718), 186. 84 Juliet Feibel, ‘Vortigern, Rowena, and the Ancient Britons: Historical Art and the Anglicization of National Origin’, Eighteenth-Century Life 24 (2000), 6. 85 In addition to Blakey’s engraving, Feibel mentions paintings by John Hamilton Mortimer (1779), Angelica Kauffman (1770), Jean François Rigaud (1779) and William Hamilton (1793); as well as Francis Hayman’s Vortigern and Rowena (c.1758). Feibel, ‘Vortigern, Rowena, and the Ancient Britons’, 2. 86 Feibel, ‘Vortigern, Rowena, and the Ancient Britons’, 13–16; Robert Bowyer, Exhibition of Pictures, Painted for Bowyer’s Magnificent Edition of the History of England (London, 1793), 10. 87 Rapin, History, I:94–6. 88 William Henry Ireland, Vortigern, an Historical Tragedy, in Five Acts . . . and Henry the Second, an Historical Drama (London, 1799).

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Judgment, his Address, his engaging and condescending Behaviour, warranted in some Measure his Success’.89 ‘Vortigern and Rowena’ provides a commentary on the relative virtues and merits of the Britons and Saxons through its depiction and description of its main characters.90 While the Britons succumb to the Saxons as a result of Vortigern’s poor leadership and weak will, the Saxons’ strength and subtlety lead to their eventual conquest of England and its inhabitants. Rowena embodies a traditional belief in Germanic chastity and model womanhood, derived from descriptions in Tacitus’s Germania and reiterated with increasing detail by Verstegan and succeeding generations of antiquaries.91 Blakey’s Rowena therefore presents to viewers a model of virtue in the figure of the first Anglo-Saxon woman mentioned in the nation’s history. The meeting of cultures and the transfer of cultural, military and political dominance implicit in this narrative are reinforced by Blakey’s choice of costume and detail (a hodgepodge of Roman, British and later medieval elements) and his arrangement of the figures in a Baroque manner more evocative of a stage set than any identifiable locale. Vortigern’s plumed helmet and armour are nearly identical to those used by contemporary artists to represent Roman costume. His status as king of the Britons is communicated clearly by means of the incorporation of the three bards at the far right of the scene, one of whom holds a harp, which by the mid-eighteenth century had come to represent ‘an art that honor[ed] the organic relationship between a people, their land, and their culture’.92 Blakey includes no specific cultural details in the appearance or costumes of Hengist and his followers, an all but universal trend in prints and paintings created before the publication of Strutt’s research on early medieval manners and customs. Hengist’s new castle appears as a distant shape in the background, and the banquet takes place beneath oak trees (a common feature in many of the prints and paintings of Anglo-Saxon England) and amidst statuary and ornaments evocative of a number of historical periods and styles.93 Blakey’s polychronic approach perhaps unintentionally de-historicises an episode that the Knaptons touted as an important historical event. Of course, ‘Vortigern and Rowena’ depicts a romanticised myth, a visually interesting and presumably also an imaginatively satisfying episode that contemporary viewers probably understood to be legendary rather than factual. As described by Rapin and envisioned by Blakey, the meeting of Vortigern and Rowena symbolizes the point at which a virtuous, intelligent and militarily superior Saxon culture supplants a decadent and enervated Romano-British one, and thus the moment when the Anglo-Saxon cultural and political tradition takes root in England.

Rapin, History, I:91. Above, 76–9, 93–4. 91 Tacitus, Germania, trans. M. Hutton, rev. E. H. Warmington (Cambridge, 1970), 156– 61; Verstegan, Restitution, 49–50; Strutt, Chronicle, I:315 and Horda Angel-cynnan, I:74–8. 92 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 19. 93 For the importance of oak trees in artistic representations of English and British history, see: Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 3–34; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1996), 135–84. 89

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Alfred the Great Rapin’s recasting of the Saxon settlement in England as a step toward the eventual establishment of a Christian Anglo-Saxon kingdom rather than the destruction of a Romanised native culture by barbarian hordes was vital to rewriting the history of every subsequent era. Yet it was not the most recognisable episode from AngloSaxon history for eighteenth-century audiences. By far the most common subject for artistic representations of Anglo-Saxon England was Alfred the Great, a figure fast becoming a national hero. Simon Keynes and Joanne Parker have traced the emergence and development of the ‘cult of Alfred’ over centuries, linking its eighteenth-century manifestations to medieval, early modern and later ones extending into the twentieth century.94 A series of images created in the latter half of the seventeenth century participated in the not-undisputed celebration of Alfred as the founder of the University of Oxford. Around 1661 Thomas Walker commissioned the earliest of these, a portrait inscribed ‘Alfredus Fundator’, for the Master’s Lodgings at University College, where it remains. This portrait served as the basis for a now lost portrait, commissioned for the Bodleian Library c.1670, for a statue installed over the University College gate, and for engravings by Michael Burghers and George Vertue for editions of Alfred’s Life by Thomas Hearne and Francis Wise. Other extant depictions of Alfred included those in Spelman’s Ælfredi Magni Vita, which contained engravings of two busts in the refectory of Brasenose College, a portrait at St Alban’s Cathedral, and two decorated windows at All Souls’ College. As Keynes writes, ‘Alfred the Great entered the eighteenth century as the perfect image of a medieval king’, an image reinforced by Richard Blackmore’s dedication of Alfred: An Epick Poem to Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1725, and Frederick’s cultivation of an image of himself as a modern-day Alfred in the 1730s and 1740s.95 It is fitting, then, that the Knaptons chose to represent the period from 449 to 1066 with a single print, ‘Alfred in the Isle of Athelney’ (Fig. 19), which depicts the king receiving news of the victory of Earl Oddune over the Danes at Kenwith Castle. Alfred’s time in Athelney was well known thanks to a series of biographies, beginning with Matthew Parker’s ‘prettified’ 1574 edition of Asser’s Vita containing ‘well-intentioned interpolations from other sources telling how the great king was scolded by a neat-herd’s wife for allowing her cakes to burn, and how he disguised himself as a minstrel to penetrate the Danish camp’.96 Rapin based his version of the story on Hearne’s edition of Spelman’s Ælfredi Magni Vita, which was itself based on Parker’s text.97 Rapin added details taken from the chronicles of John of Worcester and William of Malmesbury, and from Hearne’s philological and antiquarian observations. Only Francis Wise’s scholarly Latin edition of 1722 stripped away the 94 Keynes, ‘Cult of King Alfred’; Joanne Parker, ‘England’s Darling’: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester, 2007). 95 Keynes, ‘Cult of King Alfred’, 269; Dustin Frazier Wood, ‘Alfred: A Masque and AngloSaxonist Patriotism in Britain, 1740–1773’ in Rule, Britannia? Britain and Britishness, 1707– 1901, ed. Peter Lindfield and Christie Margrave (Newcastle, 2015), 121–42; Burden, Garrick; below, 181–3. 96 Clare Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, 1990), 26. 97 Rapin, History, I:90–7; Hearne, Life of Ælfred, 54–65; Spelman, Ælfredi Magni, 29–35.

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additions of earlier editors, though Wise’s erudition could not compete with the romanticised version of Alfred’s life that had captured the public imagination. The episodes that inform ‘Alfred in the Isle of Athelney’ come from a relatively short section of Asser’s Vita: the battle of Chippenham that signalled Alfred’s retreat appears in Chapter 53, and the subsequent three chapters describe the Anglo-Saxon victory at Kenwith (Cynuit), Alfred’s seclusion in the Isle of Athelney, and his victory over the Viking king Guthrum at Edington.98 Asser makes no mention of Oddune, or of Alfred’s being in Athelney prior to the defeat of the Danes at Kenwith, or of the capture of the raven banner.99 Rapin’s account matches ‘Alfred in the Isle of Athelney’ more closely, including all three elements, but makes no mention of Oddune coming to Alfred to relay the news or deliver the banner.100 Neither the appearance of Oddune (the man holding the banner) and the man beside him, nor of the troop of men in the background, can be explained by reference to Rapin or Asser’s Vita. Blakey’s depiction of the scene at Athelney aligns closely, however, with Alfred: A Masque, written by James Thomson and David Mallet and first performed at Cliveden in 1740 for Frederick, Prince of Wales.101 The masque draws heavily on Rapin’s History, with embellishments from details in Hearne’s edition. Thomson’s introductory ‘Argument’ matches Blakey’s scene almost perfectly, down to Alfred’s attire, the dense woodland setting, the cottage in the background, and the presence of Oddune, Earl of Devon, described in Act II as ‘the warrior bright with Danish spoils’ who arrives with the banner and a troop of loyal Saxon soldiers. Only the soldier who accompanies Oddune cannot be readily identified, but could be Alfred’s son Edwin, who appears in a similar role in the 1745 and 1751 versions of the masque staged at Drury Lane. While it is impossible to prove that Blakey based his depiction on one of the three versions of Alfred: A Masque published between 1740 and 1751/2 when he designed ‘Alfred in the Isle of Athelney’, there is no reason why he should not have known the masque, which was well received at Cliveden and at Drury Lane revivals in 1741, 1745 and 1751.102 At the very least, Blakey’s imaginative embellishments on Rapin’s history match the setting and events of Alfred: A Masque remarkably closely. As in the masque, Blakey’s Alfred is not the aged, crowned king of the University College or Vertue portraits, but a muscular young man whose simple tunic and sandals suggest a virtuous primitive simplicity that draws attention to his character despite the fact that Oddune, not Alfred, is the episode’s hero. As in ‘Vortigern and Rowena’, Blakey’s romanticised version of the story bears a deeper significance that lies in the king’s character and in the future consequences of the event being depicted. Blakey’s inclusion of the symbolic accoutrements from Vertue’s portrait print sig98 Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (London, 1983), 83–5. 99 Oddune appears as Odda, ealdorman of Devon, the Anglo-Saxon commander of the forces at Kenwith in the account of the battle by the chronicler Athelweard; and the AngloSaxon Chronicle B, C, D and E mention the capture of the Reafen during this battle. See: Keynes and Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great, 248n99. 100 Rapin, History, I:92. 101 James Thomson, Alfred: A Masque (London, 1740). 102 Burden, Garrick, 44–50.

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nals his participation in an established tradition of Alfredian iconography. In the lower left, a bow, a full quiver of arrows and a harp stand propped against a tree. The bow and arrows may represent Alfred’s love of hunting, described by Asser as a lifelong pursuit.103 They may also reinforce the exigencies of his recent condition, as a woodsman living by foraging and hunting, or suggest the martial prowess of a figure notable for his military leadership but who has neither arms nor armour in the scene. The harp’s intended symbolism is much more straightforward: according to tradition, following the victory at Kenwith Alfred entered the Danish camp disguised as a minstrel in order to obtain information on the numbers, provisions and plans of his enemy.104 While this episode was undoubtedly a romanticised fabrication, it was perhaps based on a germ of truth – Asser relates that Alfred spent his childhood hunting and listening ‘day and night, to English poems’.105 Whatever the historical basis for Alfred’s symbolic accoutrements in Blakey’s scene, their inclusion suggests that Alfred is both warrior and poet, a natural leader who possesses physical strength and intellectual refinement in equal measure. What Blakey’s scene suggests about Alfred’s character, Thomson’s masque sets out in ample detail. Revived eleven times between 1751 and 1773, the masque provides evidence of the ways in which eighteenth-century audiences conceived, or were encouraged to conceive, of Alfred as England’s quintessential hero-king, and of themselves as the modern-day inheritors of Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon legacy.106 The version of the masque examined here is that of 1751, a reworking of Thomson’s text by David Mallet. Thomson’s original 1740 version, written for the moral and political education of the Prince of Wales as much as for any dramatic value, is discussed in the next chapter.107 While Alfred laments his fate and the fate of his country, every other character describes his virtues explicitly and hyperbolically. In the opening lines the peasants Corin and Emma elevate him to superhuman status, describing him as ‘Modest of carriage, and of speech most gracious, / As if some saint or angel in disguise’, who ‘steals . . . into the heart / And makes it pant to serve him’.108 When Oddune describes the depredations he has witnessed he assures Alfred that ‘to bear, with such a prince, / The worst of ills, exile, or chains, or death, / Is happiness, is glory’.109 From the outset Alfred appears to his subjects – and thus to audiences of the masque – as a paragon whose virtue inspires English peasants and nobles alike. Corin unwittingly equates Alfred and England in his promise to serve and protect the king: ‘Who loves his country, is my friend and brother.’110 Alfred’s virtues as a man and as a ruler overlap repeatedly in the praises heaped on him throughout the masque. These come primarily from the Hermit, a character who disappeared from later versions but who in the 1751 script served as Alfred’s 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

Keynes and Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great, 75. Rapin, History, I:92. Keynes and Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great, 75. Frazier Wood, ‘Anglo-Saxonist Patriotism’. See below, 182–4. David Mallet, Alfred: A Masque (London, 1751), 2. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 2.

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spiritual guide.111 Particularly important to the Hermit are those virtues that shape Alfred’s relationship to his subjects. He encourages the king to pity human weakness, to maintain a ‘manly heart’ that is generous to those who suffer, to conquer fortune, to pursue virtue yet sit apart from the ‘vain and transient joys’ of life. Adhering to these ideals, the Hermit assures Alfred, will allow him to achieve the noblest aim: rational, wise, Christian kingship.112 Alfred responds by calling on heaven to witness his oath: To be the common father of my people, Patron of honor, virtue and religion . . . 113

In two lines Thomson articulates the most concise expression of the eighteenth-century popular understanding of Alfred the Great as an English, Anglo-Saxon hero. The opening lines of the Prologue, added for David Garrick (who played Alfred at Drury Lane), explicitly link Alfred to the modern nation and state: In arms renown’d, for arts of peace ador’d, Alfred, the nation’s father, more than lord, A British author has presum’d to draw, Struck deep, even now, with reverential awe; And sets the godlike figure fair in view – O may discernment find the likeness true.114

Within seconds of the masque’s opening the audience is asked to judge the accuracy of Garrick’s portrayal of their shared ancestor. Either through knowledge of the details of Alfred’s life or through some undefined, inherited intuition, the discerning eighteenth-century viewer is expected to know Alfred from the moment he appears on stage. Garrick goes on to extol Alfred’s military achievements and educational and administrative reforms, and to reiterate his role as the protector and architect of a still recognisable England. The Prologue suggests that the masque is unnecessary for telling the story of Alfred’s struggles against the Danes, or in fact any part of his life. It exists to celebrate Alfred as a historical figure, a moral exemplar, and a prototypical English king. It is this Alfred that Blakey captures in ‘Alfred in the Isle of Athelney’, a ‘godlike’ figure poised on the edge of personal and national greatness. The Battle of Hastings Although Alfred the Great represented the ideal Anglo-Saxon hero-king, the most heroic scene of the three Anglo-Saxon prints in English History Delineated concerns not Alfred, but Harold Godwinson. ‘The Battle of Hastings’ (Fig. 20) is a natural The hermit may have taken the place of St Cuthbert, whose appearance to Alfred in a dream was mentioned by Rapin as one of the ‘idle Tales of the Monks’ that embellished the legend of Alfred but had no substance. Rapin, History, I:92. The story was probably derived ultimately from Ingulph, via Spelman or Hearne. See: Spelman, Ælfredi Magni, 30; Hearne, Life of Ælfred, 58–9. 112 Mallet, Alfred: A Masque, 18. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., ‘Prologue’. 111

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choice of concluding scene for a pictorial history of Anglo-Saxon England and was almost certainly one of the most well-known episodes in English history to any mid-eighteenth-century viewer. Rapin describes Harold as a model warrior and king. At Hastings he stands at the centre of ‘his faithful English’ who emulate him ‘like Men who thought life and Death contemptible’. He ‘directed, encouraged, assisted & relieved’ his followers, seeming to ‘court danger, that he might teach his troops to despise it’.115 Like Alfred, Harold inspires loyalty in his followers simply through modelling correct behaviour and heroic virtues. Unlike Alfred, Harold meets a tragic end. The caption describes his death poetically as the moment when ‘an Arrow Winged with the destruction of England pierced the head of Harold, with whose breath fled the fortune of the day, to perch on the Normans Crest’. Francis Hayman’s depiction of Harold’s death heightens the dramatic effect of the text to a degree unmatched in either of Blakey’s designs. Hayman represents Hastings as a crush, with men and horses dead or dying in the foreground, Harold and his bodyguard at centre, the Normans in the right-hand middle distance, and silhouettes of soldiers in the background. The reticulated armour, anachronistic though it is, appears in high detail. The ‘large eyes’ and ‘lively expression of character’ that characterise Hayman’s work are evident on the faces of the Anglo-Saxon soldiers who look with horror at the arrow-stricken Harold, as well as in the expressions of the fallen soldiers in the foreground.116 The sky symbolises the outcome, with dark clouds over the heads of the English giving way to clear skies over their Norman enemies. As a historical figure Harold presented a difficulty for Rapin, who before discussing Harold’s life and reign felt it necessary to assert his Anglo-Saxon descent. ‘Edward was the last King of Ecbert’s Race, tho’ not the last Saxon King, as some have affirmed, since his Successor was of that Nation.’117 The half-Danish Harold had obtained the crown through political manoeuvring that resulted in the exclusion of Edward’s half-brother Edgar Ætheling and his own election over William of Normandy, whom Edward had nominated as his successor. Harold could easily have been viewed as a Danish usurper rather than a lawful Anglo-Saxon ruler. It was the former, negative perspective that Rapin was at pains to repudiate, and he did so by referencing a ‘Dissertation’ on Anglo-Saxon government and manners that followed his narrative of Anglo-Saxon history. Any claim of William’s was invalid, Rapin objected, because ‘altho’ Edward had nominated Duke William . . . either by Will, or otherwise, the Nomination would have been of no Force, unless confirmed by the Assembly of the States’. Harold’s election by the witenagemot that gathered to settle the succession following Edward’s death sanctioned his rule according to the will of the people in an early version of Parliament. The right of the witenagemot to exclude Edgar was less clear to Rapin, who argued that its elective power had been ‘abus’d at this Juncture’ but that Edgar’s inexperience rendered him unfit for rule. ‘After Harold was crown’d’, Rapin claimed, ‘there was not a Person in the Kingdom but what own’d him for Sovereign, and paid him 115 116 117

Francis Hayman, ‘The Battle of Hastings’, BM 1866,0407.170. Brian Allen, Francis Hayman (New Haven, 1987), 49. Rapin, History, I:137.

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Obedience’. In the end it was as much popular acclaim and obedience as legal technicalities that sanctioned Harold’s rule. Hayman foregrounds Harold’s kingliness and tragic heroism. ‘The Battle of Hastings’ is less simplistic than either ‘Vortigern and Rowena’ or ‘Alfred in the Isle of Athelney’, and more unlike Rapin’s text. Hayman’s most striking departure from Rapin’s history is his placement of Harold on a rearing white stallion rather than ‘on Foot . . . expos’d to equal Danger with the meanest Soldier’, one of many instances in which an eighteenth-century artist imposed a contemporary artistic device (here, an equestrian pose commonly associated with royal portraiture) to emphasise a point about his subject’s personality in familiar visual terms.119 In Rapin’s text Harold’s moral exemplarity derives from his popularity and solidarity with the people and his insistence on fighting alongside them; Harold’s visual representation on horseback requires a modification of history as given in the text below the engraving, in turn allowing for a further elevation of Harold’s reputation. In the caption the Anglo-Saxons fight in the darkness while in the scene light falls squarely on Harold in the moment of his death, highlighting the whiteness of his tabard and horse, the gleam of his armour and crown (which remains curiously unshadowed despite the shadows that darken the rest of his helmet), and his expression. The clearest detail and highest contrast appear in the area around him, with a gradual obscuring of line as distance from the king increases, even for those figures on the same plane. Although Rapin emphasises the flight to safety of a great many Anglo-Saxon soldiers, in Hayman’s depiction of the Battle of Hastings Harold’s death and the dead soldiers surrounding him take centre stage. Tobias Smollett summed up the character of Harold and the importance of his death in the second edition of his Complete History of England, which included a reduced version of Hayman’s design engraved by Charles Grignion: 118

Thus died Harold, in defence of English liberty, against the usurpation of foreign power . . . he seems to have been, in all respects, well qualified to wield the sceptre with reputation to himself and happiness to his subjects; for he was humane, affable, intelligent, and his generosity was equal to his extraordinary courage. His death put an end to the dominion of the Anglo-Saxons in England, after it had continued above six hundred years, since the reign of Hengist, the first king of Kent.120

For Smollett, as for Rapin before him, the tragedy of Hastings constitutes the tragic loss of a heroic English king and the end of Anglo-Saxon England, and carries with it the potential loss of England’s Anglo-Saxon culture. Anglo-Saxons and History Painting English History Delineated stands at the head of a gradual increase in the frequency with which figures and episodes from Anglo-Saxon history appeared in history paintings and decorative engravings. Given its basis on Rapin’s History, the 118 119 120

Ibid., I:138. Ibid., I:141. Tobias Smollett, A Complete History of England, 2nd edn, 4 vols (London, 1758), I:372.

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Knaptons’ series ought to be seen as early evidence for their contribution to the expansion of the market for historically inspired genre prints that flourished in England until the end of the Victorian era.121 In fact, the illustrations to Rapin’s History and the episodes imagined by Blakey and Hayman in English History Delineated represent the first appearance of those subjects most frequently depicted by later eighteenth-century artists whose history paintings rendered the Anglo-Saxon past visible for collectors and exhibition-going audiences. The emphasis on compelling stories, memorable figures and personal character apparent in these images was part and parcel of a growing taste for history-writing that ventured beyond politics, religion and warfare. Mark Salber Phillips has demonstrated the shift in the nature of history-writing in this period, arguing that as history became more popular (that is, accessed and consumed by a wider body of readers of all genders) and more focused on the manners and customs of past ages, the ‘neoclassical stress on exemplarity’ shifted to a stress on emotional accessibility. The resulting change in focus from moral correctness to pathetic engagement can be seen in the many images of Anglo-Saxon ‘virtue in distress’ that appeared in the exhibition rooms of the Society of Artists, Royal Academy of Arts and the literary galleries of the 1780s and 1790s, where history paintings ‘participated in the invention of a cultural tradition and canon’ of stories of Englishness.122 Among the best examples of this trend are the numerous depictions of the life of Ælfthryth (c.945–1000/1), the crowned and anointed queen of King Edgar and the mother of Æthelred the Unready. Recognised today as a politically powerful figure, in the eighteenth century Ælfthryth was better known as Elfrid or Elfrida, a modernised, feminised version of Holinshed’s ‘Alfred’.123 According to Rapin, the young and lascivious King Edgar heard of Elfrida’s beauty and sent the East Anglian earl Athelwold to confirm the reports and invite Elfrida to court if they were correct. Instead, Athelwold married her himself and attempted to conceal his actions, only to be found out and killed by an enraged Edgar, who then married Elfrida (whose complicity depended on the historian).124 Treason, lust and power, not to mention the involvement of a king and a beautiful woman, proved impossible for eighteenth-century writers and artists to resist. Aaron Hill’s drama Elfrid: or the Fair Inconstant presented its title character as power-hungry and scheming. ‘Were this King gone! or wou’d he never go! / I know not which of those to wish with Joy, / My Vertue points me one, one my Desire’, she soliloquises, before choosing Edgar for the power it will bring her and as retaliation for the now-repentant Athelwold’s earlier duplicity.125 Abandoning historical verisimilitude for tragic effect, Hill ends the play with the deaths of both Elfrid and Athelwold, leaving Edgar to lament the loss of his friend, though not of his would-be lover. Hill’s play flopped at Drury Lane in 1710, and neither did its 1723 revival nor its later reworking under the 121 David Alexander, Affecting Moments: Prints of English Literature Made in the Age of Romantic Sensibility 1775–1800 (York, 1993), 6; Clayton, English Print, 235–59. 122 Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 75–9; Louisa Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (Oxford, 2006), 29. 123 Holinshed, Chronicles of England, 232–33. 124 A concise version of the story appears in Rapin, History, I:109. 125 Aaron Hill, Elfrid: or the Fair Inconstant (London, 1710), 21.

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name of Athelwold, in which the deaths are more spectacular and the dialogue less believable than in the original, meet with any greater success.126 In 1752 the poet, editor and garden designer William Mason published Elfrida, A Dramatic Poem, which simplified the narrative and presented Elfrida as a virtuous maiden caught between the affections of the doting Athelwold and the overbearing Edgar, and at the mercy of a father who seeks revenge against Athelwold for compromising his plans to secure influence over the king. John Draper referred to Mason’s Elfrida as ‘the true “she-tragedy” of the period, pathetic without ethos, tearful usually without cause’.127 A work very much of its time, six editions of Elfrida appeared between 1752 and 1772, when Mason adapted it for the stage. After its premier at Covent Garden on 21 November, Elfrida played thirty-one nights by the end of February and enjoyed nine revivals over the following two decades.128 Even before Elfrida made its transition from poetic to dramatic representation of Anglo-Saxon history, Elfrida, Edgar and Athelwold had become regular figures in the visual arts. In 1761 Andrea Casali exhibited ‘An historical picture of K. Edgar, Elfrida, and Athelwold’ at the second exhibition of the Society of Artists of Great Britain, which was organised to promote and exhibit contemporary British art and which explicitly linked native art with national pride and patriotic expression.129 The next year Casali showed ‘An historical picture of Edward the Martyr’ (Fig. 21), an image that extended and complicated Elfrida’s story.130 The son of King Edgar and stepson of Elfrida, Edward ruled for three years after his father’s death in 975 before being murdered by followers of his stepmother. Elfrida’s role in the murder remained a subject of historical debate that spilled over into the popular understanding of the story. When John and Josiah Boydell published a print of Casali’s painting in 1773 it bore the title ‘Edward the Martyr Stabbed by Order of his StepMother Elfrida at Corfe Castle’, highlighting Elfrida’s role in what some historians presented as a scheme to place her son Æthelred, then still a minor, on the throne and to rule through him. This tension between Elfrida as virtuous maiden in distress and Elfrida as power-hungry murderess must have broadened her appeal as a character, and probably explains the disparity between Hill’s presentation and Mason’s, between those artworks that presented her as a maiden morally superior to the men surrounding her and those that foregrounded her role in Edward’s death. Only Thomas Burgess’ untraced ‘The death of Duke Athelwold after his marriage with Elfrida’ suggests a break with the standard repertoire of Elfrida images, presumably shifting focus to Edgar’s role in Athelwold’s death and to the faults of the king rather than Athelwold or Elfrida. It is tempting to see in eighteenth-century treatments of The Dramatic Works of Aaron Hill, 2 vols (London, 1760), I:ix–xv, 345–6. John Draper, William Mason: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Culture (New York, 1924), 177; Dustin Frazier Wood, ‘Seeing History: Illustration, Drama and the National Past’ in Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon, eds, Romanticism and Illustration (Cambridge, 2019), 70–93. 128 Ben Ross Schneider, ed., Index to The London Stage 1660–1800 (Carbondale, 1979). 129 Matthew Hargraves, ‘Candidates for Fame’: The Society of Artists of Great Britain 1760– 1791 (New Haven, 2005), 15–19. 130 Society of Artists of Great Britain, A Catalogue of the Pictures, Sculptures, Models, Drawings, Prints, etc. of the Present Artists (London, 1760), 3; Free Society of Artists, Catalogue (London, 1761), 4. 126 127

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Elfrida precisely the anti-feminist forces identified by Pauline Stafford in her studies of tenth-century responses to the historical Ælfthryth, a woman whose political influence and powerful character represented a threat to the male-dominated hierarchies of her society.131 The contest between loyalty to Athelwold and love or lust for Edgar apears in Angelica Kauffmann’s ‘The interview of King Edgar with Elfrida, after her marriage to Athelwold’ (1771), engraved by William Wynne Ryland in 1772, as well as in William Hamilton’s ‘King Edgar’s first interview with Elfrida’ (1774). A similar emotional thrust probably characterised a third image by Andrea Casali, of ‘Ethelwold introducing King Edgar to his Wife Elfrida’ (1778), labelled in the Society of Artists exhibition catalogue as ‘a sketch’ and so presumably a preparatory study or an alternative model for his 1761 oil painting.132 In a rare explicit reference to the artist’s source, the catalogue entry for Casali’s 1778 sketch concludes with the words, ‘See Rapin, Vol. 1. (8vo Edition) Page 406’.133 Such a note probably became necessary in the years after the dramatic premier of Mason’s Elfrida. At the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition in 1774, the miniaturist James Nixon had displayed a portrait of the actress Elizabeth Hartley ‘in the character of Elfrida’, later engraved by William Dickinson. The following two decades saw the appearance of numerous images from the play, including James Birchall’s ‘Orgar and Elfrida’ (1784), Jean François Rigaud’s ‘Penitence, as described in Mason’s Elfrida’ (1791), and a full-length portrait of Elizabeth Hartley as Elfrida by James Roberts and ‘The Vow of Elfrida’ by Thomas Stothard for the Bell’s British Theatre edition of 1797. Such works suggest that Mason’s stage production had begun to replace – or at least to compete with – historical accounts as the accepted version of Elfrida’s story in the popular imagination, and that audiences confronted with these characters were more likely to think of poetry or drama than a published history. In their images of the tenth-century queen, her husbands and her children, eighteenth-century history painters revealed the blurred line that separated Anglo-Saxon history from Anglo-Saxonist creative literature. Where Anglo-Saxon subject paintings became widely known or widely replicated in the form of decorative prints or book illustrations, they may well have blurred the line between imagination and historical reality further. Such was almost certainly the case for two images of the daughters of William de Albanac being presented to Alfred III of Mercia. First recorded by the Tudor antiquary John Leland, the story held that when Alfred III requested one of William’s daughters for his wife, William paraded them in front of the king naked and declared, according to Benjamin West’s subtitle to a 1778 painting, ‘“Here be my three daughters, chuse to wife which you list; but, rather than you should have one of them to your concubine, I would slay her with mine own hand.” [Leland’s Itin. vol. iii. p. 58]’.134 Another example of 131 Pauline Stafford, ‘The King’s Wife in Wessex’, Past and Present 91 (1981), 3–27; Pauline Stafford, ‘The Portrayal of Royal Women in England, Mid-Tenth to Mid-Twelfth Centuries’ in Medieval Queenship, ed. Janet Parsons (Stroud, 1994), 143–67. 132 Royal Academy of Arts, The Exhibition of the Royal Academy (London, 1774), 13. 133 Algernon Graves, The Society of Artists of Great Britain 1760–1791, The Free Society of Artists 1761–1783 (London, 1907), 52. 134 Royal Academy of Arts, The Exhibition of the Royal Academy (London, 1778).

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virtue in distress, the episode caught the attention of the public sufficient for Josiah Boydell to exhibit a chalk drawing of the painting at the Royal Academy exhibition the following year and to publish an engraving of it by Jean Baptise Michel for sale as a decorative print.135 The fact that the painting was commissioned by the 3rd Duke of Rutland, who traced his ancestry back to William de Albanac, and that Boydell’s engraving bore the simplified title ‘Alfred the Third King of Mercia’ around the Duke’s arms suggests either that the episode was believed to be historical or that the Duke of Rutland wished viewers to think that it was.136 West’s inclusion of a textual reference in his work’s extended title and in the catalogue of the Royal Academy exhibition highlights the connection he sought to draw between history painting and historical fact, though whether West, Boydell or the public knew that historians going back to Leland himself believed the story to be apocryphal is unknown and probably unlikely. As was the case with Elfrida, a compelling and memorable story was at least as important as the veracity of the history that lay behind it. According to the catalogues of the Society of Artists, Free Society of Artists and Royal Academy of Arts, a total of forty-three paintings of scenes from Anglo-Saxon history appeared in exhibitions held between 1760 and 1800. The most popular subject was Alfred the Great, who appeared in eleven works; followed by Elfrida, Edgar and Athelwold in ten works; Vortigern and Rowena, William the Conqueror and St Augustine preaching to King Ethelbert of Kent, each the subject of four works; and Alfred III and William de Albanac, and Dunstan rebuking King Edwy, each pair appearing in two works. In general terms, these paintings, drawings and engravings depict recognisable and pivotal moments in history, such as the establishment of the Anglo-Saxons in England, the conversion of the English to Christianity, the pivotal reign of Alfred the Great and the Norman Conquest; they highlight episodes apparently chosen to elicit emotional responses, as in the case of Elfrida, Edward the Martyr, Alfred III or Dunstan rebuking Edwy for leaving a council of state to visit his mistress Elgiva (following Rapin, Dunstan was widely seen as an exemplar of monkish overreaching who created trouble for Edwy and the kingdom in order to advance the cause of power-hungry monasteries). Gunhilda, Canute, Edward the Confessor, Lady Godiva (Godgifu of Mercia) and Earl Goodwin, and a depiction of the Heptarchy, appeared once each. Though relatively few in number, these subjects provide evidence for the basic narrative of Anglo-Saxon history current in the late eighteenth century, or at least for those elements of the narrative with which viewers could be assumed to be familiar enough that they could and would undertake the imaginative work of filling in the rest of the story. If those stories and that broader narrative were more sentimental, more sensational or more romantic than they have become since, or even than they appeared in eighteenth-century histories, their depiction by some of the century’s leading artists for display in the premier exhibitions of contemporary art attests to their ability to capture the artistic imagination. Nor should it be forgotten that Anglo-Saxon subjects attracted the praise of artists, patrons and connoisseurs. Casali’s ‘The story of Gunhilda’, daughter of Canute 135 136

187.

West’s painting is now lost. For the print, see BM 1842,1112.61. Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven, 1986),

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and wife of Emperor Henry III, exhibited in 1760, won the Society of Artists’ second premium of fifty guineas and was engraved for sale as a decorative print by John Boydell.137 Although Edward Edwards disparaged the painting as ‘shewy, tawdry in the colouring, and, in the composition, theatrical and trifling’, its subject and handling were viewed much more positively by the Society, which had been founded in part to nurture an English school of history painting. All three of Casali’s early Anglo-Saxon subject paintings were eventually purchased and might even have been commissioned by Casali’s primary English patron William Beckford for Fonthill Splendens, his Wiltshire estate. Beckford’s purchase of these well-known, publicly debated, large-scale works (each measured 8’6” by 7’) is notable for several reasons. As Louise Lippincott notes, ‘history painting appealed primarily to artists and patrons with ready capital, a taste for speculation, and a high desire for public recognition’.138 The fabulously wealthy Beckford, a Jamaican-born planter who made his fortune in the transatlantic sugar trade and entered British politics as an MP before becoming Lord Mayor of London, sought to secure social acceptance by ‘invest[ing] heavily in the bricks and mortar of respectability’.139 Purchasing paintings based on episodes from Anglo-Saxon history, with its associations with the English people, liberty and limited monarchy, provided Beckford with a means of showcasing his patronage of the arts, his wealth, and his politics. The patriotic overtones of the purchase would not have been lost on those members of the nobility, aristocracy and metropolitan elite whom Beckford entertained at Fonthill in the 1760s, and who lavished praise on his taste and hospitality. Beckford’s purchase and display of the pictures of Gunhilda and Edward the Martyr constitutes a direct link between imaginative Anglo-Saxonism of the type espoused by William Pitt and the Temples of Stowe, of whom Beckford was a political ally.140 Like the statues of the Saxon deities by Michael Rysbrack and Peter Scheemakers’ bust of Alfred the Great on display in the gardens at Stowe, Casali’s Anglo-Saxon paintings at Fonthill were unlike the artworks that surrounded them, a distinctness that must have heightened their rhetorical effect for Beckford’s guests.141 A similar connection between Anglo-Saxon history painting and the demonstration of social, cultural and political influence can be identified in John Boydell’s presentation of Benjamin West’s ‘King Alfred Dividing his Last Loaf with the Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters, 24; Graves, Society of Artists, 52. Lippincott, ‘Expanding on Portraiture’, 78. 139 Perry Gauci, William Beckford: First Prime Minister of the London Empire (New Haven, 2013), 157. 140 Ibid., 156–63. 141 For Stowe, see below, 159, 184. Sold by Beckford’s son at auction in 1801, ‘Gunhilda’ and ‘Edward the Martyr’ were eventually acquired by the Constable family and are now on display in their original papier-mâché frames at Burton Constable Hall, Yorkshire. ‘Edgar and Elfrida’ (now untraced) was purchased for £24 3s., and Gunhilda for £21, by the Salisbury druggist and art dealer Henry Jeffrey. Jeffrey probably also purchased ‘Edward the Martyr’, though it is not listed by name in the catalogues of the 1801 auction when it was likely sold. See Lots 197 and 198 in Henry Phillips’s annotated sale catalogue, now in the library of the Wallace Collection, London. For more on the sale, see: Robert J. Gemmett, ‘“The tinsel of fashion and the gewgaws of luxury”: The Fonthill Sale of 1801’, Burlington Magazine 150 (June 2008), 381–8. 137

138

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Pilgrim’ (Fig. 22) to the Stationers’ Company in June 1779.142 Exhibited at the Royal Academy the same year, the painting was later engraved by William Sharp, the leading English line engraver of his day, and published by Boydell in November 1782.143 Since then it has remained on display at Stationers’ Hall, where it now hangs in the Card Room. Boydell’s gift represents one of the many instances in which his ‘generosity was turned to account by private subscriptions to prints’, and the large initial investment was made possible by his success as one of the foremost fine art print sellers of the day.144 Boydell had published prints of Casali’s ‘Gunhilda’ and ‘Edward the Martyr’, of Robert Edge Pine’s 1763 prize-winning painting of Canute the Great, and of West’s earlier painting of the apocryphal story of Alfred III and the daughters of William de Albanac. Like Beckford, Boydell was a man of wealth and political ambition, and his gift of West’s painting could not have hurt his rise to the position of Master of the Stationers’ Company in 1783. Moreover, West’s position as Historical Painter to George III must have made the painting a high-value object as well as a ‘noble and elegant Present’.145 Alfred’s elevation to the status of national hero would have lent the gift an inherently patriotic quality, and the depiction of the king providing for the poor would certainly have played well with a livery company that regularly began its council meetings with a distribution of gifts to financially distressed liverymen and their families. Boydell’s choice of subject testifies to his recognition of the potential political and social benefits that could result from commissioning and displaying works of art inspired by carefully selected scenes from Anglo-Saxon history or legend. Other, less celebrated commissions and purchases also occurred. Angelica Kauffmann’s ‘Vortigern, King of Britain, enamoured with Rowena, at the banquet of Hengist, the Saxon General’, a reworking of Blakey’s ‘Vortigern and Rowena’, and ‘The interview of King Edgar with Elfrida’, said to have ‘raised Kauffmann’s reputation to the highest point’ when it was displayed, were ‘left upon the Painters hands’ when the original commissioner failed to purchase them in 1771. They were soon snapped up by John Parker and his wife Theresa.146 The Parkers, close friends of Joshua Reynolds and notable patrons of the arts, displayed Kauffmann’s paintings at Saltram House near Plymouth in a neoclassical suite of rooms designed by Robert Adams. The following year William Wynne Ryland showed drawings of both paintings at the Royal Academy, and later offered engraved copies of ‘Vortigern and Rowena’ for sale. In a revealing partnership between artist and engraver/print

Minutes for 13 April 1779, Court Book N, Worshipful Company of Stationers, London. Peter Cannon-Brookes, The Painted Word: British History Painting: 1750–1830 (Woodbridge, 1999), 65. 144 Clayton, English Print, 236; Alexander, ‘Print Makers’, 23–4; Hermann Arnold Bruntjen, John Boydell (1719–1804): A Study of Art Patronage and Publishing in Georgian London (New York, 1985). 145 Minutes for 22 June 1779, Court Book N, Worshipful Company of Stationers, London. 146 Victoria Manners and G. C. Williamson, Angelica Kauffmann (London, 1924), 38; Wendy Wassyng Roworth, ‘History Paintings for Saltram’, in Angelica Kauffman: A Continental Artist in Georgian England, ed. Wendy Wassyng Roworth (London, 1992), 61–2; Therese Parker to Fritz Robinson, 24 August 1775, BL Add. MS 48218, fols 212–13. 142 143

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dealer, Kauffmann hand coloured some of the plates herself, narrowing the aesthetic divide between the original painting and the reproductive print.147 The number of history paintings with Anglo-Saxon subjects was never great. Even in 1774, when three Anglo-Saxon subject paintings were shown at the Royal Academy exhibition, they made up less than 1 per cent of the 364 works listed in the catalogue.148 At the same time, it must be remembered that history paintings as a genre made up on average no more than 10 per cent of the works in any given exhibition. Many contemporaries would have agreed with the view expressed in the Public Advertiser that ‘the Superiority of History-Painting, over Works of every Kind, is now universally acknowledged’, but in practice the difficulty and expense of producing and selling narrative history paintings meant that they remained less common than works in other genres.149 The inclusion of one, two or three paintings of Anglo-Saxon subjects in a category comprised of perhaps thirty works in an exhibition meant that Anglo-Saxon history occupied an amount of visual space comparable to any other historical subject.150 Furthermore, as Keynes has pointed out in his study of the numerous history paintings treating scenes from the life of Alfred the Great, many of ‘the artists who found inspiration in the Anglo-Saxon past . . . formed part of the artistic elite’ of their day. Hayman, Wale, Kauffmann and West provide just four examples of celebrated and influential artists (both within and outside the institutional settings of the Society of Artists and the Royal Academy) whose Anglo-Saxon subject paintings were commissioned and purchased by patrons of the arts and engraved for sale as decorative prints as readily as their paintings inspired by other historical periods.151 When Robert Bowyer opened his Historic Gallery in Pall Mall in 1793 he was in some senses fulfilling the mission that the Knaptons and Dodsley had failed to complete forty years earlier with English History Delineated. In his proposal for an illustrated edition of Hume’s History of England, Bowyer claimed that the combination of history and visual art was worthy of public approval on the grounds that together they presented ‘those events which have formed the political government, the religion, the manners, and the character, of a great nation’, a statement that reflected the shift in historiography exemplified in the works of Robert Henry and Joseph Strutt.152 Bowyer sought to demonstrate his patriotism while turning a profit by commissioning leading artists to create a series of works illustrating

Angelica Gooden, Miss Angel (London, 2005), 116; David Alexander, ‘Kauffman and the Print Market in Eighteenth-century England’, in Angelica Kauffman, ed. Roworth, 143; Royal Academy of Arts, The Exhibition of the Royal Academy (London, 1770), 12; (1771), 12. 148 Royal Academy of Arts, The Exhibition of the Royal Academy (London, 1774). 149 Solkin, Painting for Money, 269–72; Public Advertiser (26 May 1769), 4; Lippincott, ‘Expanding on Portraiture’, 76. 150 Haskell, History and Its Images, 159–201; Solkin, Painting for Money; Martin Butlin, Introduction to Painted Word, ed. Cannon-Brookes, 7. 151 Keynes, ‘Cult of King Alfred’, 294; David Alexander, ‘Print Makers and Print Sellers in England, 1770–1830’, in Painted Word, ed. Cannon-Brookes, 23–9; Lippincott, ‘Expanding on Portraiture’. 152 Bowyer, Exhibition of Pictures, 23. 147

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English history.153 By 1793, however, the ‘honour of first bringing before the Public’ a visual depiction of the nation’s history, manners and character in a complete series was Bowyer’s only in the limited sense that visitors to his gallery could see a complete series of paintings illustrating the history of England at one time in the same physical space.154 The growth of the print market, the increasing popularity of antiquarianism, and the publication of numerous illustrated histories of England had accustomed English readers to seeing historical events, figures and material culture rendered visually in a variety of media. The influence of Vertue and Wale becomes particularly important when considering the episodes Bowyer commissioned to illustrate Hume’s History. Of the eighteen paintings displayed by Bowyer in the first exhibition, one-third dealt with Anglo-Saxon subjects.155 Of the thirteen prints illustrating the Anglo-Saxon period in the published edition, only two allegorical plates by Phillipe-Jacques de Louther­ bourg – ‘The Saxon Kings’ and ‘The Heptarchy’ – constituted innovative imagery. The remaining images depicted episodes with which readers and exhibition attendees had become familiar. These included William Hamilton’s interpretation of the Vortigern and Rowena legend, two scenes from the life of Alfred by Richard Westall and Francis Wheatley, a painting by Benjamin West in which Edgar Ætheling presents the crown of England to William I, Augustine preaching to Ethelbert, Edwy and Elgiva, Canute reproving his courtiers, and the Battle of Hastings.156 Bowyer offered visitors neither a new narrative nor a new means of imaginatively accessing England’s past, but a series of images of familiar episodes on a larger scale than had been available before. The vast majority of these paintings and engravings displayed little or no concern with antiquarian authenticity, relying instead on details that suggested historical alterity (approximately ‘medieval’ clothing or ‘Gothic’ architecture, for instance) and dramatic, often highly romanticised episodes as subject matter. Anglo-Saxon history was given classical dress by Blakey and Kauffmann, Italianised by Casali, decked in high medieval plate armour by artists and book illustrators alike, and rendered all but unidentifiable by West. It is of little value to judge eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxon history paintings on the basis of historical accuracy. Just as the authors of Alfred: A Masque and Elfrida drew on history to create poetry and drama that appealed to contemporary audiences and that responded to contemporary tastes, what mattered to eighteenth-century history painters was not anthropological or archaeological verisimilitude but rather the animation of the national past in visual forms that satisfied the aesthetic and cultural demands of their own time.157 Visual representations of the Anglo-Saxons were created and deployed for a range of aesthetic, social, political and economic purposes. What unites these images, besides their artistic merits, is the way in which each one dramatises an 153 Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, 5–13; Boase, ‘Macklin and Bowyer’; Cynthia Roman, ‘Pictures for Private Purses: Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery and Illustrated Edition of David Hume’s History of England’, doctoral thesis, Brown University, 1997. 154 Roman, ‘Pictures for Private Purses’, 3. 155 Bowyer, Exhibition of Pictures, 5–16; 22. 156 David Hume, The History of England, 5 vols (London, 1806). 157 Smith, Nation Made Real, 5–20, 108–39.

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event from English history in a manner designed to attract attention and to elicit emotional responses from artistically and historically aware members of the public. In some senses, anachronistic details may have served to make relatively obscure or unfashionable Anglo-Saxon subjects more acceptable or more marketable. Rowena’s bare-breastedness and neoclassical gown, Anglo-Saxon soldiers in plate armour, the assassination of an Edward the Martyr in Italian Renaissance dress: any one of these would almost certainly have been more readily recognisable and presumably more aesthetically appealing to a polite eighteenth-century viewer than would carefully researched representations of Anglo-Saxon robes, hauberks and timber buildings. By resetting the Anglo-Saxon past in more familiar contexts – be they classical, later medieval or contemporary – artists and collectors consciously engaged in acts of medievalism by translating the past into terms familiar and acceptable to spectators in the present, and by presenting their creations as a form of entertainment and a source of aesthetic pleasure. In the process they reinforced a recognisable narrative of Anglo-Saxon history and familiarised viewers with a cast of historical characters whom they were encouraged to imagine as the ancestors of modern English women and men. Artistic Anglo-Saxonism thus participated in the patriotic celebration of England’s Anglo-Saxon origins by providing opportunities for imaginative engagement and identification with the national past. The Ancestral Portrait Gallery Just as the accession of George I spurred renewed interest in the Anglo-Saxons amongst English antiquaries, it also gave new impetus to a movement to define the English as an Anglo-Saxon people. Edmund Gibson’s declaration that ‘the greatest part of your Majesty’s Subjects here, are of SAXON Original’, drew an explicit connection between the commonplaces of everyday life and the essential (Anglo-)Saxonness of the English people.158 Antiquaries took up the challenge to locate the Anglo-Saxon origins of the English by studying the material culture of the pre-Conquest period, situating historic remains in larger historical narratives, and identifying buildings and monuments as landscape features in which past and present converged. For historians such as Henry and Strutt, an expansion of the historian’s remit to include the traditionally antiquarian subjects of historical manners and customs underpinned scholars’ and artists’ attempts to render early medieval history more accessible, familiar and human. Artists drew upon, extended and complicated these practices, translating textual scholarship into imaginative, visual forms. As the print seller Robert Macklin wrote, ‘what the Poet or Historian achieves by long and laboured detail, the Painter accomplishes by an instantaneous effect’.159 As creators of visual narratives that operated alongside or in competition with textual ones, artists exerted a powerful influence over contemporary ideas about the English past. If the English were encouraged to see themselves as modern-day Anglo-Saxons, visual art provided a kind of imaginative mirror in which Camden, Britannia, ed. Gibson (1722), Dedication. Robert Macklin, Catalogue of the Third Exhibition of Pictures Painted for Mr. Macklin by the artists of Britain illustrative of the British Poets, and the Bible (London, 1790), iv. 158

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eighteenth-century viewers could see themselves reflected in what Joseph Strutt referred to as ‘the portrait of their great ancestors’.160 Whether antiquarian facsimile, oil painting, decorative print or book illustration, no eighteenth-century image of the Anglo-Saxon past can be separated from the textual narratives that informed its creation. Books and periodicals framed images in text and keyed images to specific points in the narrative through the use of page turns, symbols or bracketed references that signalled to readers when to break off reading to study an illustration. The same practice occurred in galleries, where, as Louisa Calè has written, ‘visiting an exhibition took the shape of intermittent acts of viewing and reading, in which readers turned into spectators and spectators turned into readers’ as they turned their gaze from catalogue to artwork and back again.161 Individual prints almost always carried some text, whether the lengthy extracts of English History Delineated or the short labels that accompanied most antiquarian prints and book illustrations, the latter of which were frequently available for purchase as loose prints. Such a firm textual reliance makes clear that even in a century in which national history enjoyed growing popularity and in which there existed at least a basic visual vocabulary for depicting the Anglo-Saxon period, only a small proportion of the viewers of any given history painting or print could have been expected to identify it without assistance. At the same time, a title or short extract alone could only hint at the significance of a given episode within that larger narrative of national history. To be understood a history painting required its textual counterpart, be it a narrative history of England, a catalogue entry, or a simple title inscribed on the frame or page. What differentiates one image of Anglo-Saxon England from another is the aesthetic that informed its creation and consumption. Here too textuality plays a defining role. Images displaying an antiquarian aesthetic emphasise accuracy, reference particular sources and, in many cases, provide facsimile or scale images of material remains for use by scholars without access to the originals. Creating high-quality antiquarian images demanded time and skill, with the result that many antiquarian prints became collectible art objects in their own right.162 For images displaying a popular aesthetic, by contrast, prevailing artistic styles and tastes tend to dominate. Intended to have a broader public appeal and to succeed commercially, they display a greater reliance on narrative than scientific analysis or interpretation, a more or less standard use of ‘medieval’ or ‘medieval-style’ details, and a tendency to adapt Anglo-Saxon figures and episodes to fit the poses, arrangements and styles of more modern English and continental schools. Emphasising sentimental, emotional or patriotic subjects, such paintings undoubtedly aimed to marry history with aesthetic pleasure or entertainment in a historical idiom. Illustrated editions of Rapin or Hume or Granger’s Biographical History provide instances in which the two aesthetics coexisted in single works. The same reader-viewers who purchased illustrated histories, oil paintings and decorative prints also purchased antiquarian periodicals, books and engravings, and often for the same reasons. 160 161 162

Strutt, Horda Angel-cynnan, I:iv. Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, 8. Peltz and Myrone, eds, Introduction to Producing the Past.

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The range of visual representations of the Anglo-Saxon past speaks to a diverse audience of reader-viewers who imagined the past in different ways in different circumstances. In exhibitions at the Royal Academy, Society of Artists or Free Society of Artists, the oil paintings, prints and drawings themselves stood proxy for a textual narrative of Anglo-Saxon history. In Bowyer’s Historic Gallery or in the extra-illustrated pages of Granger’s Biographical History, images and narrative draw nearer together as viewers read the short descriptive passages in the catalogue as a means of ordering and understanding a series of paintings or prints. In illustrated histories of England (including Strutt’s Horda Angel-cynnan), image and text come as near as possible to merging, providing the reader-viewer with an almost synaesthetic experience in which text signifies image and image signifies text. In such instances the ‘diligent labour’ of the historian and the imaginative recreation of the artist merge to create a potentially experiential past for those able and willing to imagine it. Central to each of these instances is the interplay of scholarly account and imaginative representation, an interplay that is necessarily translational and adaptive and that defines popular medievalism. In the process of imagining and interpreting the Anglo-Saxons, artists helped to make them real, a gallery of imagined and imaginable ancestors whose stories brought to life the origins of the English people.

.

Figure 2. (right) Danes arriving in England (Book 5, fol. lxv verso)

Figure 1. (above) Rowena (Book 5, fol. xli)

Figures 1–4. Woodcut illustrations of Anglo-Saxon history from Ranulf Higden, The Cronycle of Englonde with the dedes of popes and emperours, and also the descripcyon of Englonde (London, 1528)

Figure 3. Edward the Elder meeting the Danes (Book 5, fol. lxvi verso)

Figure 4. The murder of Alfred, brother of Edward the Confessor (Book 5, fol. lxxii verso)

Figure 5. (above) St Augustine preaching to King Ethelbert of Kent (fol. 31r) Figure 6. (left) King Ethelbert commissions the building of St Paul’s in London and St Andrew’s in Rochester (fol. 52r)

Figures 5–7. Woodcut illustrations of Anglo-Saxon history from Bede, The history of the Churche of Englande, ed. Thomas Stapleton (1565)

Figure 7. The Death of St Oswald (fol. 77r)

Figure 8. Woodcut depicting the arrival of Hengist and Horsa in England, from Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1634), 117

Figure 9. (left) Detail from title page of John Speed, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611) Figure 10. (right) Detail from title page of Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (1612)

Figure 11. Composite plate of Anglo-Saxon illuminations and antiquities from Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archaeologicus, 2 vols (Oxford, 1703–5)

Figure 12. George Vertue, Portrait of Egbert for Paul Rapin, The History of England, trans. and ed. Nicholas Tindal, 2 vols (London, 1732)

Figure 13. George Vertue, Portrait of Alfred the Great for Paul Rapin, The History of England, trans. and ed. Nicholas Tindal, 2 vols (London, 1732)

Figure 14. George Vertue, Portrait of Canute for Paul Rapin, The History of England, trans. and ed. Nicholas Tindal, 2 vols (London, 1732)

Figure 15. George Vertue, ‘Tomb of Edward the Confessor’ (1724), from Vetusta Monumenta I (1747)

Figure 16. Joseph Strutt, facsimile engraving of May, June, July and August from MS Cotton Tiberius B.v., from Horda Angel-cynnan (1775)

Figure 17. (above) Samuel Wale, ‘King Edgar rowed down the River Dee by Eight Tributary Kings attended by his principal nobility’, engraved by William Walker for William Augustus Russell, A New and Authentic History of England (London, 1777) Figure 18. (opposite top) English History Delineated, No. 4: Nicholas Blakey, ‘Vortigern & Rowena; or the Settlement of the Saxons in England’, engraved by Gérard Scotin (1751) Figure 19. (opposite bottom) English History Delineated, No. 5: Nicholas Blakey and François Vivares, ‘Alfred in the Isle of Athelney, receiving News of a Victory over the Danes’, engraved by Gérard Scotin (1751)

Figure 20. (above) English History Delineated, No. 6: Francis Hayman, ‘The Battle of Hastings’, engraved by Charles Grignion (retouched and reprinted by Robert Sayer, 1778) Figure 21. (left) Andrea Casali, ‘An historical picture of Edward the Martyr’ (1762)

Figure 22. Benjamin West, ‘King Alfred Dividing his Last Loaf with the Pilgrim’ (1779)

5 Anglo-Saxonist Politics and Posterity 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.

I

Ann Yearsley1

n 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.2 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

Ann Yearsley, Earl Goodwin, an Historical Play (London, 1791), 69–70. See, inter alia, Colley, Britons, 336–7; Gerrard, Patriot Opposition; Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979), 50–7; Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, 94–109; Kidd, British Identities; Kidd, Subverting; Newman, Rise of English Nationalism; J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, rev. edn (Cambridge, 1987); Smith, Gothic Bequest. 1

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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.3 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.4 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’.5 Although particular individuals certainly deployed Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric cynically or uncritically to achieve specific partisan ends in particular situations, a broader analysis of Anglo-Saxonism reveals an ideology rooted not in partisan polemic but in a widely shared patriotic belief in the early medieval origins of the political nation. Anglo-Saxonism and Gothicism In order to consider Anglo-Saxonism in these terms, it is necessary to define political Anglo-Saxonism in distinction to Gothicism. Samuel Kliger’s The Goths in England outlines Gothicism as a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political, religious and cultural movement focused on the Germanic origins of English government and the associated cultural characteristics of ‘vigor, hardiness, and zeal for liberty . . . humanity, honor and simplicity’, a definition that has been refined and extended by R. J. Smith, and situated in a wider European context by Colin Kidd and Ian Wood.6 The currency of Gothicism (or Gothic constitutionalism) in eighteenth-century European culture has led many scholars to conflate the differing meanings of the term ‘Gothic’ as it was used by writers on history, ethnography and constitutional history, and to assume that those writers also conflated the range of meanings of ‘Gothic’ available to them.7 While a complete explication of the uses of ‘Goth’ and ‘Gothic’ in the period is outside the scope of this chapter, it is necessary to dispel the idea that ‘Gothic’ and ‘Saxon’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ were interchangeable. In his Introduction to the History of England, William Temple describes the Saxons as a ‘Branch of those Gothick Nations which Swarm[ed] from the Northern Hive’, 3

85–9.

Frantzen, Desire for Origins, 52; MacDougall, Racial Myth, 73–86; Wilson, Island Race,

4 David Conway, In Defence of the Realm: The Place of Nations in Political Liberalism (Aldershot, 2004), 120. Conway refers to twentieth-century historians such as Herbert Butterfield and John Pocock, the latter of whom continues to exert a deservedly strong influence on scholarship relating to constitutional theory in the long early modern period. 5 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), 680. 6 Smith, Gothic Bequest; Kidd, British Identities; Ian Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013). 7 Above, xiii-xiv, 64–6.

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but goes on to write of the internecine wars, conversion to Christianity, and cultural and military encounters that led to a series of changes in government through which the ‘Old Saxons’ become ‘Saxons’. Finally Temple identifies a new political order, signalled by his use of the term ‘English’ from the point in his narrative at which Egbert unifies the peoples of the Heptarchy into a single kingdom.8 Rapin revised Temple’s narrative in fundamental ways by recasting Vortigern’s grant of the kingship of Kent to Hengist as the trigger for a Gothic political crisis. According to Rapin, Hengist’s accession necessitated a new constitution under which the Saxon soldiers consented to Hengist becoming their king on the condition that he exercised ‘no power but what they consented to’ and agreed to be limited by the authority of the witenagemot.9 Later writers such as Samuel Squire and David Hume followed and expanded upon Rapin’s line of reasoning, with Hume writing in his appendix on ‘The Anglo-Saxon Government and Manners’ that the Saxons’ extermination and enslavement of the Britons resulted in their establishing a purer form of valorous Germanic libertarianism in England than was the case in those areas conquered by the equally Gothic Franks.10 English historians’ accounts of the Danes and Normans recognise their common ancestry with the Anglo-Saxon English whose lands they sought to conquer, but presented them as having strayed from the ‘Gothic constitution’ that the Anglo-Saxons had preserved and developed into a new and distinctly English form. Just as the histories discussed in Chapter 3 tended to articulate the Anglo-Saxons’ arrival in England as a break with the pre-medieval past that brought with it rebirth or re-foundation, political histories of England saw the establishment of Anglo-Saxon England as a pivotal moment in the history of Germanic political institutions when English practice diverged from continental. The same distinction appears in the works of other European writers such as Montesquieu and Gabriel Bonnot in France, and Paul Henri Mallet in Denmark, each of whom identified the ‘Goths’ as the common ancestors of the English, French and Danish peoples while seeking to delineate the distinct legal cultures that had developed in each nation.11 Scottish, Irish and Welsh writers also engaged with the ideology of Gothic origins, whether by defining the uniqueness of Celtic legal culture or by claiming, as John Pinkerton did, that the Gothic world included most of western and southern Europe.12 Gothicism was thus a shared idea of international common kinship (though one that was contested by writers of various nationalities to meet individual and national needs) that sought to identify the pre-medieval origins of northern nations as a means of explaining the ways in which those nations took shape during and after the Middle Ages. Anglo-Saxonism, by contrast, was a Temple, Introduction to the History of England, 44, 47–62, 69. Rapin, History, I:iv–v. 10 Samuel Squire, An Enquiry into the Foundation of the English Constitution; or, an Historical Essay upon the Anglo-Saxon Government both in Germany and England (London, 1745), 165–8; Hume, History of England, 1782, I:197–229. 11 Wood, Modern Origins, 37–51; Gabriel Bonnot, Observations sur L’Histoire de France, 6 vols (Kehl, 1788), I:253–79; Mallet, Northern Antiquities, I:164–6. 12 John Pinkerton, A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths (London, 1787); Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Cork, 2004). 8

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political and cultural ideology that emphasised English national singularity. Though the two ideologies could be mutually supportive, they did not have to be. An English writer need not have celebrated a shared Gothic ancestry in order to celebrate their Anglo-Saxon cultural or political inheritance. For eighteenth-century English and European thinkers, the Gothic origins of the Anglo-Saxons provided a foundation of general cultural and political characteristics on which to construct a narrative of modern England’s uniqueness as the inheritor of a distinct Anglo-Saxon political-­ cultural tradition. Both Gothicism and Anglo-Saxonism took concrete form in the gardens of Stowe, Buckinghamshire, home of Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham. Sometime between 1730 and 1732, Temple installed a ‘Saxon Temple’ consisting of an altar surrounded by seven statues in Portland stone representing the Saxon deities Sunna, Mona, Tiw, Woden, Thuner, Friga and Seatern, each on a pedestal incised with the god’s name in runic characters. The statues were designed by Michael Rysbrack, then the most celebrated sculptor in England, from Verstegan’s engravings of the ‘Saxon Idolls’ in A Restitution of decayed intelligence.13 In 1741, the statues were removed from their original grove and placed alongside James Gibbs’ Temple of Liberty (later confusingly – or confusedly – renamed the Gothic Temple), in which stained glass windows depicted the arms of the kingdoms of the Heptarchy and a family tree painted on an interior wall traced Cobham’s ancestry back to the AngloSaxon Earls of Leicester. Whereas the Saxon Temple celebrated the mythical origins shared by the English and the other Gothic nations of Europe, the more imposing Temple of Liberty celebrated a specifically Anglo-Saxon cultural and political tradition with distinct lineages and titles. Together, the two temples represent the most forthright example of political medievalism in what Malcolm Baker describes as the ‘most coherent, extensive and accessible of eighteenth-century sculptural displays set up to promote a certain view of British liberty through a narrative of national history’.14 Temple’s commissions demonstrate a nuanced understanding of Gothicism and Anglo-Saxonism that remains a useful means of distinguishing the close relationship and the distinctive features of the two ideologies.15 Situating eighteenth-century political Anglo-Saxonism within a broader cultural context that includes philological studies, antiquarianism, historiography, visual art and literature, reveals an informed understanding of Anglo-Saxon legal and political history on the part of the English public. This understanding was influenced as much by an imaginative engagement with the past shaped by popular culture as by explicitly political writing. In other words, Anglo-Saxonist ideology formed one of the most foundational – and ipso facto non-partisan – aspects of contemporary conceptions of English political identity and national consciousness. And while the John Kenworthy-Browne, ‘Rysbrack’s Saxon Deities’, Apollo 122 (1985), 221. Malcolm Baker, Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture (London, 2000), 129. George Bickham’s The Beauties of Stow: or, A Description of the Most Noble House, Gardens & Magnificent Buildings therein, of the Right Honble Earl Temple, Viscount & Baron Cobham (London, n.d.), contains a unique drawing of the altar around which the Saxon deities once stood. 15 Joan Coutu, Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Montreal, 2006), 104–5. 13

14

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eighteenth-century English combination of Anglo-Saxonist politics and cultural identity would, in Colin Kidd’s words, ‘pav[e] the way for the more overtly racialist and ethnic-determinist Saxonism which would prevail in nineteenth-century English discourse’, mainstream eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist political ideology depended not on ethnicity but on a celebration of shared political and societal institutions.16 In order to reassess the function of Anglo-Saxonism in eighteenth-century political discourse and popular culture, therefore, we must first consider how contemporary writers understood the Anglo-Saxon legislature and the origins of the common law, the two institutions that governed what domestic and foreign commentators considered to be the defining features of the peculiarly Anglo-Saxon character of the English people and their relationship with the English crown. The Anglo-Saxon Constitution Eighteenth-century political Anglo-Saxonism received considerable impetus from the centrality of the Whig conception of the ancient constitution to the Revolution settlement and Bill of Rights of 1689. In its simplest form, Whig orthodoxy maintained that the English constitution was an inheritance, a set of Anglo-Saxon institutions that had guaranteed the liberties and rights of the people for more than a millennium; that the constitution had been threatened but not destroyed by the Normans; and that it had been preserved and strengthened through centuries of struggle against the forces of tyranny on the part of liberty-loving Englishmen. By contrast, seventeenth-century Tories held that royal authority was absolute and divine, an argument most clearly articulated in Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha.17 Crucial to the Whig model was the antiquity of Parliament, conceived of by Whigs as the institution that granted power to the crown on behalf of the people and that acted as a check on that power. Anglo-Saxonists such as John Fortescue-Aland married this belief to the natural right and contract theories advanced by John Locke in Two Treatises of Government (the first of which refuted Filmer’s claims), arguing that the only legitimate government was that established by the consent of the governed to protect their liberty and property.18 Mainstream eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist political ideology thus became, to some extent, an analogue of Locke’s legitimation of the Glorious Revolution, just as Locke himself seems to have conceived of the Anglo-Saxon constitution as an ideal model for the present.19 Robert Molesworth Kidd, British Identities, 91. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha; or the Natural Power of Kings (London, 1680). 18 Subsequent editions and reprints appeared in 1694, 1698, 1700, 1704, and the work was reprinted roughly every five years until the definitive sixth edition by Thomas Hollis in 1764. Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction’ to John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1988). 19 ‘The settlement of the nation upon sure ground of peace and security . . . can no way so well be done as by restoring our ancient government; the best possible that ever was, if taken and put together all of a piece in its original constitution.’ Locke to Edward Clarke, 8 February 1689, in The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. Esmond de Beer, 8 vols (Oxford, 1976–89), III:545; Laslett, ed., Two Treatises, 78. For an extended discussion of the impact of Locke’s theories on eighteenth-century political discourse, see Ellen Meiksens Wood, Liberty and Property (London, 2012), 258–83. 16 17

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summarised the practical implications of this ideology, writing that ‘the Executive Power has as just a Title to the Allegiance and Obedience of the Subject, according to the Rules of known Laws enacted by the Legislative, as the Subject has to Protection, Liberty and Property’.20 All three components – consensual government, a limited monarchy working alongside Parliament, and a set of laws that ensured the safety, liberty and property of the governed – existed in a state of equilibrium dependent on the reciprocity of each branch with the others. It was an equilibrium described and regularly celebrated by individuals from across the political spectrum as having derived to the English from their Anglo-Saxon ancestors, who had refined a Germanic political order that had become corrupted in the governments of the other Gothic nations of Europe. Broadly speaking, then, eighteenth-century English political Anglo-Saxonism can be characterised by what Kathleen Biddick terms a moderate ‘presentism’, its adherents ‘look[ing] into the mirror of the Middle Ages and ask[ing] it to reflect back’ a political history that led to their own often idealised status quo.21 Although challenged by the ‘pastism’ of Tories early in the century, and of radicals and reformers in the 1770s, ‘80s and ‘90s, which argued for a return to historical models that were lost or in danger of being lost, the works of political thinkers, partisan historians and historical dramatists share both pride in the Anglo-Saxon past and a belief that the best features of the Anglo-Saxon constitution lived on in the English people. Key to political Anglo-Saxonism was the balance of power between the legislature, which represented ‘the people’, and the crown. Neither Whigs nor Tories questioned the centrality of the monarch to the constitution. In broad terms, seventeenth-century Tories and Whigs had divided over their support for an absolute and a limited monarchy, respectively. For Tories, the absolute authority of the king derived from a chain of authority that reached from God to Adam to the kings of various nations (the argument of Filmer’s Patriarcha). For Whigs, royal authority derived from custom and the consent of the crown’s subjects. The success in practical terms of the Revolution settlement, the accumulation of power in the hands of Parliament during the reigns of William and Mary and Anne, and the assertion of parliamentary sovereignty implicit in the passage of the Act of Settlement of 1701, had led perforce to the formation of ideological common ground on the issue of the nation’s Anglo-Saxon political inheritance.22 In his Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys, Rapin identified the bulk of the political establishment as ‘Political or State Tories’ and ‘Moderate Whigs’, groups that shared a reverence for the Anglo-Saxon constitution and a commitment to its preservation.23 Though Rapin’s endorsement of limited monarchy in both the History of England and the Dissertation give his works a generally Whiggish slant, his harsh criticism of the ‘arbitrary Tories’ as corrupt, self-serving absolutists and of the ‘Republican Whigs’ as dangerous and unthinking fanatics, coupled with a generalised Anglophilia, makes his position more establishmentarian than partisan. Indeed, the Dissertation opens with the assertion that ‘The 20 Robert Molesworth, An Account of Denmark, with Francogallia, ed. Justin Champion (Indianapolis, 2011), 175. 21 Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, 1998), 83. 22 Kidd, Subverting, 15; Kidd, British Identities, 83. 23 Rapin, Dissertation, 48–51.

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Government of England is of a particular kind, and the only one of the Sort in the World’, a statement that includes members of all parties in a proclamation of English political exceptionalism addressed to a European readership.24 The Glorious Revolution and Act of Settlement catalysed political and historical enquiry into the origins and nature of Parliament and into the Anglo-Saxon period generally. Many of the scholarly Anglo-Saxonists whose works are discussed in Chapter 1 responded to this enquiry. Within a decade of George I’s coronation, Gibson’s edition of Britannia and Elstob’s Rudiments of Grammar had appeared. So too had Fortescue-Aland’s The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, which adapted the immemorialism of Sir John Fortescue to an Anglo-Saxonist ideology, and David Wilkins’s Leges Anglo-Saxonicæ, the long-awaited collection of Anglo-Saxon law codes first proposed by William Lambarde in the sixteenth century.25 Like most antiquarian Anglo-Saxonist publications of this period, each of these works explicitly linked contemporary politics with Anglo-Saxon history, marrying political theory with English identity. In their endorsement of the study of Old English, Fortescue-Aland and Elstob employed both functionalist arguments that demonstrated the utility of Old English studies, and emotional appeals to national pride in an ancestral language that resonated in the everyday speech of English people, a tactic also employed by later legal historians such as Francis Gregor and James Ibbetson.26 Anglo-Saxonists saw in charters, law codes and chronicles the raw materials for elucidating in scholarly terms a narrative of English political culture that rested largely on custom. Two general lines of enquiry can be discerned in these and succeeding Anglo-Saxonist publications: the composition and function of the Anglo-Saxon witenagemot and the Anglo-Saxon origins of the common law. Taken together, these two issues defined the relationship between Anglo-Saxon kings and their subjects, a relationship frequently touted as a model for contemporary political life and performed on the eighteenth-century stage. The Legislature With the triumph of the Whig ideology of the ancient constitution came a shift in the ways English writers framed their discussions about the function and relative influence of the crown and Parliament, as well as a new set of questions regarding their origins and development.27 If sovereignty were located in the legislature rather than the monarch, and if the legislature could be identified as Saxon or Anglo-Saxon in origin, it became necessary to define the ancient legislature in order to understand

Ibid., 1. See above, 25–32. 26 Francis Gregor, ed., De laudibus legum Angliæ . . . Translated into English, illustrated with the notes of Mr. Selden, and great variety of remarks with Respect to the Antiquities, History, and Laws of England (London, 1737), lviii–lix; James Ibbetson, Three Dissertations. I. On the Folclande and Boclande of the Saxons. II. On the Judicial Customs of the Saxon and Norman Ages. III. On the National Assemblies under the Saxon and Norman Governments. With a General Introduction, and Notes and Illustrations, 2nd edn (London, 1782), 5. 27 Smith, Gothic Bequest, 43–70. 24 25

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the modern one. For Gothicists, Tacitus’ description of early Germanic assemblies represented the prototype for the legislative bodies of modern European nations.29 According to Tacitus, the ancient German people, chiefs, generals, priests and kings met ‘on days set apart’ to settle legal disputes and decide matters of collective importance.30 For Anglo-Saxonists, however, the Germanic council provided a prototype for a specific institution: the witenagemot. Old English manuscripts provided Anglo-Saxonists with primary evidence for the existence and function of the witenagemot. Fortescue-Aland refers to Bede’s account of Ethelbert’s formulation of the first Anglo-Saxon law code ‘with the Thought, or Advice of his Wise-men’, and to Alfred’s collation of previous law codes into a new folc riht ‘with the Advice of his Parliament’.31 For Fortescue-Aland the centrality of the Anglo-Saxon wites or wise-men to the law-making process was unmistakeable. It was also prescriptive, to the extent that ‘every Saxon King’ confirmed some existing laws and wrote new ones, ‘tho’ by the Advice of his Parliament . . . as is now done in every Reign’.32 Locating the origins of Parliament in the witenagemot became common practice for historians and political writers, despite widely varied opinions as to how closely the two institutions resembled one another in practical terms.33 In Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone wrote admiringly of ‘the general assemblies of the principal and wisest men in the nation . . . which was not reduced to the forms and distinctions of our modern parliament; without whose concurrence however, no new law could be made, or old one altered’.34 Although the existence of the witenagemot was accepted as fact, the question of its precise composition at any given point in time remained a matter of debate. Anglo-Saxonists turned to the evidence provided by charters and law codes in search of answers. In his Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, William Somner defined the Anglo-Saxon witenagemot as ‘Synodus, sapientum vel prudentum consessus, concilium, comitia. a Synode, Councill, or assembly of Counsellors, a meeting of wise men, as in Parliament’. A century later Edward Lye substituted ‘Senatus’ for Somner’s ‘comitia’ (Lye’s Dictionarium provided only Latin translations of Old English words), but added an entry for witan, which he defined as ‘primores civitatis vel regni’ alongside a note that the term appeared throughout the AngloSaxon law codes. Perhaps no work was more important in precipitating this shift in 28

H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1979), 43. 29 See, e.g.: George St Amand, An Historical Essay on the Legislative Power of England (London, 1725), 59–66; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 165; Bolingbroke, A Dissertation Upon Parties (London, 1735), 140–7. 30 Tacitus, Germania, 147–9. 31 Fortescue-Aland, Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, xvii, xxiii–xix. 32 Ibid., xviii. 33 Ibbetson, Three Dissertations, 116; Squire, Enquiry; James Burgh, Political Disquisitions; or, An Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses, 3 vols (Philadelphia, 1775), I:5, 24, 83–4. 34 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 5th edn, 4 vols (London, 1773), IV:412. 28

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definition than Wilkins’s Leges. Prior to 1721 only partial collections of the AngloSaxon laws had been published, notably in Lambarde’s Archaionomia, Wheelocke’s edition of Archaionomia (which included the laws of William the Conqueror, Henry I, and the Canons of Edgar and Ælfric), and extracts in Hickes’s Thesaurus. By including the laws of the early Kentish kings and correcting a number of printing errors in the earlier editions, Wilkins succeeded in creating an edition that initiated the modern study of Old English laws.35 The Leges quickly became a basic reference for historians of Anglo-Saxon England, cited regularly until the appearance of Benjamin Thorpe’s edition in 1840.36 Wilkins’s parallel Old English and Latin edition presented readers with a clear, well-edited version of the original texts alongside more or less literal translations that rendered Old English more accessible to scholars with limited linguistic training. Subscribers included Fortescue-Aland, Gibson and Nicolson, the latter of whom contributed a prefatory chapter on previous editions of the AngloSaxon laws.37 Most importantly for legal and political historians, Wilkins’s was the first scholarly edition of an Old English text to provide clear evidence that Anglo-Saxon kings had issued legislation with the advice of councillors. It also provided important evidence for understanding Anglo-Saxon social structures, land tenures, and the terms of military and administrative service, all of which could be extrapolated from the various law codes. With the collection of laws to supplement previously published editions of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the analytical tools provided in Hickes’s Thesaurus, the grammars of Hickes and Elstob, and the dictionaries of Somner, Benson and Lye, historians set out to construct deeper, more comprehensive histories of AngloSaxon society and legal institutions. Despite the availability of textual evidence, however, authors could not always refrain from adding suppositions and assumptions drawn from their own preconceptions and experiences of contemporary politics. In remarks on the nature of the Anglo-Saxon witenagemot prefaced to An Historical Essay on the Legislative Power of England, George St Amand expressed what he regarded as a truism: that ‘in every Government, Power results from, and is the natural Consequence of, Property or Estates’.38 It was exactly such a restriction of political power to the propertied classes that St Amand found in the Anglo-Saxon laws, in the composition of Note, for example, the strong correlation between Wilkins’s text and subsequent collections such as: Benjamin Thorpe, Ancient Laws and Institutes of England (London, 1840); Dorothy Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents I: 500–1042, 2nd edn (London, 1979); Timothy Graham, ‘William Elstob’s Planned Edition of the Anglo-Saxon Laws: A Remnant in the Takamiya Collection’ in Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on His 70th Birthday, ed. Simon Horobin and Linne Mooney (York, 2014), 275–6, 295–6. 36 Thorpe, Ancient Laws, ix. Thorpe’s edition is heavily indebted to Wilkins despite Thorpe’s disparagement of his predecessor. 37 Subscribers also included the Archbishops of Canterbury and York; the Dukes of Chandos, Devonshire, Dorset and Roxborough; Lord Carteret; and the antiquaries William Clarke, Samuel Denne, Roger Gale, Samuel Gale, Peter le Neve, Thomas Tanner and Brown Willis. 38 St Amand, Historical Essay, 66. 35

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the witenagemot and thus in the foundations of the English legislature. After an extended discussion of the works of Robert Brady and James Tyrrell, and a series of extracts from Wilkins’s Leges, St Amand defined the composition of the AngloSaxon witenagemot.39 During the Heptarchy, he claimed, kings governed with the advice of councils made up of all the kingdom’s landholders, an arrangement that eventually gave way to a more selective council of larger landowners.40 St Amand counted amongst the members of the post-unification ‘Saxon Legislature’, the ‘Earls, Bishops and Abbots . . . and also others denoted . . . by the Word Wita’, by which he seems to have meant the ‘Graves of the Hundreds or Tythings, who were Elective’.41 This ambiguity and emphasis on elective representation might have arisen from a lack of clear definition in the law codes; it is more likely that St Amand’s desire to demonstrate that the Anglo-Saxon legislature mirrored that of Hanoverian England led him to impose an eighteenth-century reality on his early medieval source material.42 While the inclusion or exclusion of the commons from political participation would become a central concern for radical propagandists later in the century, St Amand’s understanding of the post-Alfredian witenagemot as the preserve of the landed elite remained that of mainstream historical Anglo-Saxonism. Rapin remained ambivalent about ‘the Antiquity of the Commons Right to sit in Parliament’, maintaining that those who argued for and against the inclusion of the commons in the witenagemot ‘dispute upon bare Conjectures’ because any proof had likely been destroyed at the Conquest or the Dissolution. In an uncharacteristically lengthy footnote Tindal comes close to contradicting Rapin, arguing from St Amand’s Historical Essay that the witenagemot of the Heptarchy consisted of the greater landowners but that after unification each tything sent a representative to the national assembly, and thus that an elected Commons participated in the legislature at least from the reign of Egbert.43 Hume, writing almost forty years later, counted abbots and bishops, aldermen or governors of counties, and those who occupied the general category of wites amongst the members of Anglo-Saxon society involved in government councils.44 Hume lamented that this particular historical point had become a divisive political issue and a source for polemic: as our modern parties have chosen to divide on this point, the question has been disputed with the greater obstinacy, and the arguments on both sides have become, on 39 The fact that St Amand frames his history of the legislature in terms of the seventeenthcentury historians Brady and Tyrrell, respectively an arch-Tory and arch-Whig writer, reveals the continued political potency of the issues of parliamentary origins and of the ‘proper’ members of the legislature. See: Robert Brady, An Introduction to the Old English History (London, 1684); Robert Brady, A Complete History of England (London, 1685); Robert Brady, An Historical Treatise of Cities and Burghs (London, 1690); James Tyrrell, ed., The General History of England, 3 vols (London, 1700–4). 40 St Amand, Historical Essay, 90–3. 41 Ibid., 93. 42 Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 2006), 156. 43 Rapin, History, I:155n1. 44 Hume, History of England, I:200–4.

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Hume agreed with neither claim. Citing the Historia Eliensis, he argued that only those who possessed ‘forty hydes, or between four and five thousand acres’ would have been entitled to a place amongst the wites for the purposes of legislating.46 Although subject to considerable variation amongst historians, Hume’s forty-hyde qualification was also the definition of a ‘freeman’, used to denote those eligible for active political participation during the Anglo-Saxon period. It was also, as Rosemary Sweet has pointed out, a term closely linked to borough privileges and to local and parliamentary elections in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and so would have resonated with contemporary readers.47 According to the Scots jurist John Millar, it was the freemen who ‘determined the common affairs of their several districts’ and who made up the smaller witenagemots of the Heptarchy. Their freeman status came from their having been ‘allodial proprietors of the kingdom’, that is, landowners rather than landholders.48 Following unification, it was the freemen who continued to wield local authority and the most prominent of whom, the ‘greater thanes’, made up the national witenagemot.49 Identifying the Anglo-Saxon freemen was vitally important for the simple reason that, as Millar put it, the influence and power of the landed proprietors ‘might . . . be regarded as the voice of the nation’.50 During the eighteenth century few in England would have disagreed with the notion that the people participated in politics via their elected and hereditary representatives in the legislature, or that in a political context ‘the people’ were themselves a subset of the population. A bill passed in 1711 required candidates for county seats to possess real estate worth £600 per year, and those for borough seats £300.51 In 1765 John Brown listed those eligible for election as ‘the landed gentry, the beneficed country clergy, many of the more considerable merchants and men in trade, [and] the substantial and industrious freeholders or yeomen’.52 The poor were certainly excluded, as were most artisans, merchants and members of the middling and professional classes who did not own substantial property. Mainstream Anglo-Saxonist historians understood that the ancient constitution included a legislature comprised of propertied men elected by those

Ibid., I:201–2. Ibid., I:203. 47 Rosemary Sweet, ‘Freemen and Independence in English Borough Politics c.1770– 1830’, Past and Present 161 (1998), 84–115; Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991), 1–70. 48 John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government (London, 1787), 132. 49 Ibid., 133–4. 50 Ibid., 134. 51 Dickinson, Liberty and Property, 115. 52 John Brown, Thoughts on Civil Liberty, on Licentiousness and Faction (Dublin, 1765), 92. Brown’s list reflects the development in the eighteenth century of a steadily increasing trend to include men of mercantile property amongst the politically eligible classes. 45

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whose office or property holdings conferred on them a status sufficiently elevated to qualify them to vote.53 Even property and tradition did not guarantee an unchanging political order, however. Hume went on to argue that, while Anglo-Saxon legal institutions had preserved the people’s liberty, by the eleventh century the government had ‘become extremely aristocratical: [the] royal authority was very limited; the people . . . were of little or no weight and consideration’.54 For some writers, the idea that the English constitution had changed its shape over time to meet the needs of the English people while preserving its essentially liberal character, provided a means of explaining the fundamental identity of the Anglo-Saxon and modern legislatures in spite of their apparent differences in composition and function. For others, the fact that freeman status had not been a perennial guarantee of political participation even during the Anglo-Saxon period, provided just one example of the ways in which corrupt elites threatened the liberty of the many members of the English population who were ineligible for political participation. Unlike moderates and mainstream Anglo-Saxonist thinkers who exhibited an evolutionary ‘presentist’ medievalism, most late eighteenth-century radicals employed a ‘pastist’ rhetoric that highlighted ‘moral difference between a medieval exemplarity’ and the ‘impoverished present’ represented by what they saw as the increasing illiberalism of George III’s reign.55 Radicals combined a Lockean conception of a natural right to life, liberty and property with a belief in an Anglo-Saxon constitution under which all men participated in government. To this they added a rejection of the ‘confident claim that the Glorious Revolution had fully restored the constitution’.56 Obadiah Hulme agreed that while the political nation had been formally established under Alfred the Great, the constitution had been introduced at the time of the arrival of the Saxons in England.57 The distinction is an important one. While most Anglo-Saxonist historians and those who expressed a more conservative Anglo-Saxonist patriotism tended to refer to the constitution in terms of its evolution, radicals held fast to the belief in an Anglo-Saxon constitution of unchanged and unchangeable principles. Foremost among these, radicals claimed, was the people’s ‘natural right to a share in the legislature’.58 According to Obadiah Hulme, the Anglo-Saxon government was characterised by an elective monarchy, annual consultations of the representative assembly by the monarch, local popular assemblies, a militia rather than a standing army, and a judicial system based on the jury.59 Thus far he shared the views of mainstream political Anglo-Saxonism. For Hulme, however, as for Major

Sweet, ‘Freemen and Independence’, 97. Hume, History of England, 1782, I:204. 55 Biddick, 83; Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, 33. 56 Dickinson, Liberty and Property, 204. 57 Obadiah Hulme, An Historical Essay on the English Constitution (London, 1771), 3–33. 58 Granville Sharp, A Declaration of the People’s Natural Right to a Share in the Legislature; which is the Fundamental Principle of the British Constitution of State, 3rd edn (Dublin, 1776), 28. 59 Ibid., 50. 53

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John Cartwright, each of these practices had been corrupted by morally bankrupt administrations that had undermined the elective process: All men will grant, that the lower house of parliament is elected by only a handful of the commons, instead of the whole; and this, chiefly by bribery and undue influence . . . An assembly of such men is founded on iniquity: consequently, the fountain of legislation is poisoned. Every stream, how much soever mixed, as it flows with justice and patriotism, will still have poison in its composition.60

Cartwright’s borrowing of the fountain metaphors of early eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist legal writers, whether intentional or not, provides a clue to the understanding of the English legal tradition that underpins his argument. Although it never mentions the Anglo-Saxons explicitly, Cartwright’s pamphlet Take Your Choice relies heavily on the constitutional history of Hulme’s Historical Essay. The cover presents readers with two sets of contrasting ideas: ‘Representation and Respect’ against ‘Imposition and Contempt’, and ‘Annual Parliaments and Liberty’ against ‘Long Parliaments and Slavery’. Cartwright’s ideas were expanded upon by radicals such as Capel Lofft, who asserted that ‘a noble part, a characteristic, an essential of our free Saxon constitution, are ANNUAL PARLIAMENTS . . . They are, it is true, intirely opposite to factious and corrupt interests’.61 The more scholarly James Burgh wrote that ‘the members of [the] wittena gemots, or parliaments, were mayors, or officers, who held their offices only one year, at the end of which they were obliged to divest themselves of all power, and to assemble the people for new election’.62 As a consequence, the legislative tradition and the ancient rights ‘which [our] Ancestors thought worth preserving’ had been corrupted.63 In order to combat that corruption, Cartwright urged his readers, it was necessary to reform Parliament by restoring what he portrayed as its original Anglo-Saxon principles and practices.64 In its attitude toward Parliament the radical position makes clear its non-revolutionary nature. Rather than abolish the current Parliament and establish a new one, radicals such as Cartwright and Burgh were more inclined to press for the reallocation of parliamentary seats, the elimination of rotten boroughs from representation, and some form of franchise expansion.65 Moreover, as H. T. Dickinson writes, like many radicals Burgh and Cartwright ‘explicitly denied that they wished to undermine monarchical government or planned to abolish monarchical privileges’.66 Although radicals frequently stretched historical sources beyond reason 60

57.

John Cartwright, Take Your Choice! (London, 1776), ix; Goodwin, Friends of Liberty,

61 Capel Lofft, An Argument on the Nature of Party and Faction. In which is considered, The Duty of a Good and Peaceable Citizen at the Present Crisis (London, 1780), 54. 62 Burgh, Political Disquisitions, I:84. 63 Cartwright, ‘Dedication’ of Take Your Choice. 64 George Bernard Owers, ‘Common Law Jurisprudence and Ancient Constitutionalism in the Radical Thought of John Cartwright, Granville Sharp, and Capel Lofft’, The Historical Journal 58 (2015), 51–73; Smith, Gothic Bequest, 137–8. 65 Burgh, Political Disquisitions, I:39–54. 66 Dickinson, Liberty and Property, 229.

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to fit their claims, annual elections feature in Squire’s Whiggish An Enquiry into the Foundation of the English Constitution and the rather more impartial Ibbetson, who sought to establish the composition of the witenagemot from the signatories of Anglo-Saxon law codes and charters, argued convincingly for a wider Anglo-Saxon franchise that included both smaller and larger landholders.67 Squire and Ibbetson themselves relied on the works of Hickes, Gibson, Wilkins and Fortescue-Aland, scholars whose names also appear in radical tracts and pamphlets. Although radicals and establishmentarians disagreed as to the health of the Anglo-Saxon constitution, they were inextricably linked by a shared intellectual tradition. Nor did radicals necessarily envisage pure democracy, or even the removal of the property requirement for representatives in the House of Commons. Cartwright’s insistence that ‘Every man is free; and therefore he ought to vote’, did not prevent him from agreeing with Blackstone’s defence of a franchise limited by property qualifications on the grounds that the very poor would be tempted to sell their votes and so only those with independent means could be expected to vote impartially.68 The expanded franchise and annual parliaments that late-century radicals claimed to be hallmarks of the Anglo-Saxon constitution seem to have been expected to lead to the same ends envisaged by the conservatives of 1714. The Common Law Anglo-Saxonist perspectives on English common law shared an emphasis on change and evolution over time that characterised most scholarly Anglo-Saxonist interpretations of the constitution. Matthew Hale’s The History of the Common Law of England, first published in 1713, set out what would become the predominant Anglo-Saxonist understanding of the common law tradition.69 Like the legislative process, common law practice was in Hale’s view inherently and necessarily consultative, a legal tradition that had developed organically in response to the needs of the people and according to their experiences.70 Central to Hale’s belief in the ‘Strength and Obligation, and the formal Nature of a Law’ was its approval by the English people, whose contractual relationship with the monarch nullified any given monarch’s power to alter the common law without their consent.71 Any and all changes must have been viewed by the political community as beneficial, else they would not have been approved. Hale could not countenance the idea that the ‘exigencies and conveniencies’ of the people would lead them to approve new laws that were not in their own best interest or, by extension, to approve any radical changes to laws that had been proven to be good through long practice. It was this positivist understanding that led him to conclude that while the laws had changed Squire, 154–78; Ibbetson, Three Dissertations, 90–114. Cartwright, 23, 29–31. 69 Michael Lobban, ‘Custom, Nature and Authority: The Roots of English Legal Positivism’ in The British and their Laws in the Eighteenth Century, ed. David Lemmings (Woodbridge, 2005), 41–2; Matthew Hale, The History of the Common Law of England, 3rd edn (London, 1739), 65–70. 70 Hale, Common Law of England, 57. 71 Ibid., 57, 63. 67

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and improved over time, they ‘are the same English Laws now, that they were 600 Years since in the general’.72 Hale’s chronology is conscious, informed by his reading of William Lambarde’s Archaionomia, his conclusion that the laws of Edward the Confessor (a twelfth-century tract believed at the time to be contemporary with Edward’s reign) were ‘more full and perfect than the rest’, and his legal interpretation of the Norman Conquest as ‘not a Conquest upon the Country or People, but only upon the King of it’.73 Locating the origin of a particular unwritten law may have been impossible; locating the origin of the common law tradition was not. The lack of documentary or traditional evidence for the laws of the Britons, the known establishment of various law codes under the kings of the Heptarchy, the existence and function of the AngloSaxon witenagemot, the regular evolution of the laws of Mercia, Wessex and the Danelaw, and their eventual collation under Edward the Confessor, provided Hale with evidence that the English common law tradition was rooted in the nation’s Anglo-Saxon past. Hale argues that William’s victory over Harold gave him only that power that Edward had held, and only with the consent of the English people. He thus presents the Norman Conquest as a lawful process in which the common law bound William to abide by the terms of his coronation oath. In his discussions of William’s subsequent confirmations of the Confessor’s laws in response to English unrest, Hale reaffirms the power of the English people to safeguard their laws and their form of government.74 Fortescue-Aland’s assertions that the laws of England had originated under the Anglo-Saxons and that ‘the Foundations, the main Pillars, and Corner Stones of this ancient, noble Building’ of the Anglo-Saxon common laws were still standing, though ‘fitted up and adorn’d with other Materials now’, point to an understanding of the history of the common law heavily influenced by Hale.75 Fortescue-Aland differed from Hale in one important point, however, when he qualified the importance of Edward the Confessor as a law-maker. According to Fortescue-Aland, Edward only validated and updated the laws in force when he came to the throne. The real origins of a systematic common law lay in the folc riht developed by Alfred by collating and updating the law codes issued by his predecessors.76 Like Hale, Fortescue-Aland believed that the laws had remained in force through the Norman Conquest, and so, despite changes in their particular forms, it was possible to see in ‘the Stream of the Laws of Edward the Confessor, flowing from a Saxon Fountain . . . the Substance of our present Laws and Liberties’.77 Later in the century William Blackstone echoed Fortescue-Aland’s imagery when he wrote that it was no more possible to trace every change of the common law than to ‘discern the changes in the bed of a river, which varies it’s shores by continual decreases and Ibid., 58. William Lambarde, Archaionomia, sive de priscis Anglorum Legibus (London, 1568); Hale, Common Law of England, 4, 89–90. For the laws of Edward the Confessor, see Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1999), 6. 74 Hale, Common Law of England, 94–110. 75 Fortescue-Aland, Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, xv–xvii, xiii. 76 Ibid., xviii–xxv. 77 Ibid., xxviii. Above, 26–8. 72 73

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alluvions’. Although Blackstone argued that the Norman Conquest represented a rupture in the history of the common law, he maintained a belief in its Anglo-Saxon origins and argued that, in the centuries since 1066, the Anglo-Saxon spirit of the law had reasserted itself. Throughout the century the Anglo-Saxonist view of English common law remained, in the words of Patrick Wormald, ‘beloved of political radicals as well as professional lawyers’.79 As codifications of approved practices current in the periods in which they were written, Anglo-Saxon laws and charters were recognised to be valuable sources of information about Anglo-Saxon culture. Hume’s dissertation on ‘The Anglo-Saxon Government and Manners’ contains a series of generalisations about Anglo-Saxon political practices extrapolated from Wilkins’s Leges, alongside commentaries on currency and livestock, trial by jury and land tenures.80 With increasing historiographical emphasis on habits and customs came a greater reliance on Anglo-Saxon law codes – and on Wilkins’s edition – as sources of evidence for changing social and cultural practices that were detailed in the works of Joseph Strutt and Sharon Turner.81 By applying the information contained in the Old English laws to the writing of new histories of England, scholars provided readers with greater knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon past and suggested that the legal institutions that shaped eighteenth-century English life were similar or identical to those that had shaped life before the Conquest. In doing so they reinforced Hale’s assertion that the common law was ‘singularly accommodated to the Frame of the English Government, and to the Disposition of the English Nation’, and that its long use had made it a part of ‘their very Temperament’.82 Foreign commentators also cited the common law as evidence that the English enjoyed a charmed political existence. According to Voltaire, ‘the English nation is the only one on earth which has . . . established this wise system of government’ of a limited monarch, non-feudal aristocracy and representative legislature.83 The result was that, unlike in France, in England ‘you will hear nothing . . . about high, middle or low justice’, but only of equality before the law.84 Twenty years later, Montesquieu delivered a similar judgment in L’Esprit des Lois, characterising the English constitution as ‘the model of a government whose end was political liberty’.85 Liberty, as Montesquieu defined it, was ‘that tranquillity of spirit which comes from the opinion that each one has of his security, and in order for him to have this liberty the government must be such that one citizen cannot fear another’.86 Unlike France, which had adopted and retained feudal laws, the English had developed 78

Blackstone, Commentaries, I:17, IV:409. Wormald, English Law, 9. 80 Hume, History of England, 1782, I:197–229. 81 Above, 83–4, 112–14; Henry, History of Great Britain, II:276–310; Strutt, Chronicle; Strutt, Horda Angel-cynnan; Turner, Anglo-Saxons. 82 Hale, Common Law of England, 44. Hale’s conclusions related to the English rather than to the British people. This distinction tends to disappear in eighteenth-century texts, which elide English, Welsh and Scottish identities into an ‘English’ or ‘British’ composite. 83 Voltaire, Letters on England, trans. Leonard Tancock (London, 1980), 45. 84 Ibid., 48–50. 85 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, xxv. 86 Ibid., 157. 78

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the ‘fine system . . . found in the forests’ of ancient Germany, into what Voltaire and Montesquieu believed to be Europe’s most enlightened form of government.87 Though sceptical of what he regarded as unsubstantiated claims for an unbroken descent of the Germanic form of government via the Anglo-Saxons to the eighteenth-century English, the Swiss-born political theorist Jean-Louis de Lolme considered the English constitution to be the only one that had managed ‘to find a remedy for the evils which, from the very nature of Men and things, seem to be irremediable’, providing prosperity, freedom and order by means of limited government and the rule of law.88 Like the Anglo-Saxonists, de Lolme believed that the Anglo-Saxon common law and legislature had changed over time and ‘prepared the establishment of the present English Constitution’.89 At the same time, de Lolme recognised that by the late eighteenth century a historically informed understanding of the Anglo-Saxon legal inheritance was not necessarily that of the majority of the political classes or the politically aware public. The late eighteenth-century radical platform, which posited that the Anglo-Saxon constitution was an ideal model to which the government must return, was little more than wishful thinking. Even so, de Lolme did not ‘wish to explode a doctrine, which, in the opinion of some persons, giving an additional sanction and dignity to the English Government contributes to increase their love and respect for it’.90 Although belief in such a doctrine may have been historically inaccurate, it was excusable if it resulted in the celebration of a constitution that its subscribers and outside observers considered the best model of good government. Native and foreign commentators can thus be seen to have joined philologists, antiquaries, historians and artists in encouraging the English to identify themselves as the inheritors of Anglo-Saxon legal institutions that continued to have an impact on social and cultural practices in real and measurable ways.91 Certainly ideas about the Anglo-Saxon origins of Parliament and the common law could be and were frequently deployed by political writers for polemical purposes, but it is important to acknowledge that those ideas were to a meaningful extent more than propaganda or polemic. J. R. Maddicott states categorically that from the reign of Æthelstan as king of the English (927–39) to the death of Edward the Confessor, Anglo-Saxon royal councils exhibit regularity, a formal structure and a defined agenda that make them ‘the direct forebears of the councils of post-Conquest England and the parliaments which were the councils’ descendants’.92 The Anglo-Saxon assemblies were also national in nature, and as a regular feature of governance helped to ensure societal and political harmony by providing a non-military means of reaching consensus.93 In his magisterial study of Anglo-Saxon law, Patrick Wormald identifies in the works of Hale, Blackstone and Edmund Burke conclusions about its nature and about the Ibid., 164. Jean Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England (London, 1790), 280. 89 Ibid., 7–9. 90 Ibid. 91 See, e.g.: Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 325–32; Voltaire, Letters on England, 47–50; Hale, Common Law of England, 57–9. 92 J. R. Maddicott, The Origins of the English Parliament 924–1327 (Oxford, 2010), 2–3. 93 Ibid., 32–41. 87

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importance of Alfred the Great as lawmaker that remained at the forefront of scholarship until the twentieth century. Important for present purposes is that Wormald acknowledges the merits of some eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist scholarship, while acknowledging that seventeenth-century Whig ideology often exerted a more powerful force than scholarship over popular ideas about the relationship between the Anglo-Saxon constitution and that of eighteenth-century England.94 Mary Richards identifies a clear strain of Anglo-Saxonism in the Old English laws themselves, which she characterises as ‘statements asserting the common culture of AngloSaxon England’ that ‘forge their own tradition’ distinct from other contemporary societies on the continent.95 Harry Potter’s recent history of the English constitution likewise asserts the distinctness of Anglo-Saxon laws, their growth and development before the Conquest, and their continuing vitality under successive monarchs after 1066.96 In short, eighteenth-century Anglo-­Saxonists formulated and disseminated nuanced ideas about the Anglo-Saxon origins of England’s political institutions based on careful study of available resources and reached measured conclusions of real scholarly merit. To assume otherwise is to misread much eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist political writing as well as the relationship of that writing to wider eighteenth-century British culture. Staging the Anglo-Saxon Nation Dramatists took up the ideologies of political Anglo-Saxonism and repackaged them in the form of entertainment, presenting the public with embodiments of what Joseph Strutt called ‘portraits of their great ancestors’. Like the galleries discussed in the previous chapter, theatres are spaces in which ‘interpretation and imagination are needed to decipher . . . inter-related spectacles’ that were closely linked with politics, patriotism and national cultural identity.97 In eighteenth-­century Anglo-Saxonist drama, history and culture become intertwined with political commentary: writers responded to contemporary political concerns by bringing readers and audiences face to face with recognisable ancestral figures whose dramatic representations ‘function as a kind of animated iconography’ by which ‘the course of history is confirmed, beliefs and values are reinforced, and status and allegiance are made clear’.98 By all appearances, audiences were expected to identify with the political values and ideals of Anglo-Saxon figure-characters, and there is substantial evidence that they did so. The remainder of this chapter considers a cross-section of Wormald, Making of English Law, 4–14. Mary P. Richards, ‘Anglo-Saxonism in the Old English Laws’ in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Frantzen and Niles, 42. 96 Harry Potter, Law, Liberty and the Constitution: A Brief History of the Common Law (Woodbridge, 2015), 9. 97 Louise H. Marshall, National Myth and Imperial Fantasy: Representations of Britishness on the Early Eighteenth-Century Stage (London, 2008), 6; Hargraves, Candidates for Fame, 15–19; Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, 18–20; John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public (New Haven, 1995); Solkin, Painting for Money, 19–23. 98 John D. Niles, ‘Appropriations: A Concept of Culture’ in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Frantzen and Niles, 219. 94 95

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eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist literary works that held up imaginative glimpses of the Anglo-Saxon past as a means of commenting on contemporary politics. The line between historical and popular political Anglo-Saxonism was rarely if ever a clear one, a result of the apparently widespread acceptance of Hale’s notion that English law had become part of the English character. Moreover, regular references to the shared Saxon ancestry of the Hanoverian royal family presented them as the natural successors to the English throne, the Anglo-Saxon heads of an AngloSaxon body politic.99 Regardless of the genuine emotion, opportunism or cynicism that motivated it, such Anglo-Saxonist patriotic sentiment was simultaneously politically adroit and historically informed.100 The same sentiment – and the same approach – can also be identified in the numerous works of Anglo-Saxonist creative literature written over the course of the century. Anglo-Saxonist literature stands in an uneasy relationship with eighteenth-century literary genres such as the Gothic or Romantic. While scholarship linking political and literary Gothicism often assumes a role for Anglo-Saxon history, that role remains undefined and understudied.101 The multivalency of the term ‘Gothic’ in eighteenth-century parlance further obscures the fact that in visual art, architecture and literature, ‘Gothic’ more frequently referred to high and later medieval culture than to the early medieval art and literature of the Anglo-Saxons. Although they might well have suggested what Anne Stevens calls a ‘gothic atmosphere’, Anglo-Saxon subjects appear in Gothic literature only infrequently, being much more common in historical drama and historical novels.102 Antiquaries such as Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton posited an Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition that, for all Percy’s praise, remained anterior to the emergence of the poetic tradition they identified in the ballads and romances most commonly associated with early Romanticism.103 Warton explicitly rejects Anglo-Saxon poetry as ‘jejune and intricate . . . for the most part little more than religious rhapsodies’, and severs it from the romance tradition.104 It is not my intention here to claim Anglo-Saxonist poetry, drama or fiction for any particular literary era or movement, even if such a claim could be supported. Instead, I follow a number of scholars whose research collectively outlines a tradition of poetry and drama in English beginning at least as early as the sixteenth century that explicitly links Anglo-Saxon history Camden, Britannia, ed. Gibson (1722), Dedication. Robert Mayhew, ‘Edmund Gibson’s Editions of Britannia: Dynastic Chorography and the Particularist Politics of Precedent, 1695–1722’, Historical Research 73 (2000), 239–61. 101 See, e.g., the introductions to Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, eds, The Gothic World (London, 2014) and Jerrold E. Hogle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, 2002); James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge, 1999), 50–60. Michael Gamer curiously neglects the Anglo-Saxons in his discussion of Joanna Baillie’s Ethwald in Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge, 2000), 153–60. 102 Anne Stevens, British Historical Fiction before Scott (London, 2010), 86. 103 Thomas Percy, The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1767), I:ii-x. 104 Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols (London, 1774–81), I:vi; Groom, ‘Eighteenth Century Gothic’. 99

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with contemporary politics. While much work remains to be done to identify the intersections of Anglo-Saxonist creative literature with particular eighteenth-­ century literary and cultural movements, for present purposes my focus remains on the political and historical themes that link Anglo-Saxonist literary works regardless of period or genre. Writers of Anglo-Saxonist drama drew heavily on the works of antiquaries, historians and artists to create vivid representations of Anglo-Saxon figures and events that served as vehicles for patriotic celebration and political commentary. In most cases, the historical and antiquarian detail in any given drama is limited to character names and primary story elements. Some writers added antiquarian details to their plots, aiming for what passed for verisimilitude in costumes, props or sets. Nicholas Rowe seems to have studied Verstegan’s Restitution to create a Saxon altar not unlike the one Rysbrack created for Richard Temple, and Aaron Hill planned but failed to have his play Athelwold performed in ‘old Saxon Dress’ that included furs like those believed to have been worn by Anglo-Saxon royalty and nobility.106 Every play about Alfred the Great includes the magical raven banner of the Danes, probably a result of its familiarity from Vertue’s portrait print and images like ‘Alfred in the Isle of Athelney’.107 Numerous plays contain footnotes in which playwrights direct readers to their sources, and in doing so co-opt scholarly practice to support political and historical arguments in the form of creative literature.108 The anonymous Alfred the Great, Deliverer of his Country exhibits a preoccupation with topography that suggests its author was familiar with – and perhaps engaged in – county or local historiography: the Danish soldier Oscital reports that Alfred’s troops ‘pass’d Burcomb, Cumpton, Sutton, Austic . . . and crossing of the Nadder, / They push’d us quite to Hyndon’.109 More frequently, however, dramatists seem to have presented Anglo-Saxon characters in the same medieval-ish styles used by artists for history paintings and book illustrations. It is likely that Thomas Stothard’s depictions of Mason’s Elfrida for Bell’s British Theatre reflect actual stage practice more closely than do individual dramatists’ antiquarian-inspired stage directions, many of which might never have been actualised. Rather than dismissing anachronistic staging as evidence of ignorance or disinterest in Anglo-Saxon history and culture, I would suggest that on the stage, as on canvas, medievalist ‘translations’ of early medieval scenes into contemporary styles simply served to make Anglo-Saxon history more 105

Leah Scragg, ‘Saxons Versus Danes: The Anonymous Edmund Ironside’; Julia Briggs, ‘New Times and Old Stories: Middleton’s Hengist’; and Jacqueline Pearson, ‘Crushing the Convent and the Dread Bastille: The Anglo-Saxons, Revolution and Gender in Women’s Plays of the 1790s’ all in Literary Appropriations, ed. Scragg and Weinberg, respectively 93–106, 107–21, 122–37; Curtis Perry, ‘“For They Are Englishmen”: National Identities and the Early Modern Drama of Medieval Conquest’ in Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, ed. Curtis Perry and John Watkins (Oxford, 2009), 172–95. 106 Rowe, Royal Convert; Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector (Oxford, 2003), 146; Tacitus, Germania, 157; Strutt, Horda, 23, 47. 107 Above, 110–11, 123–6. 108 Among the writers discussed here, Joanna Baillie, Anne Fuller, Ebenezer Rhodes and the anonymous author of Alfred the Great: Deliverer of his Country include footnotes or explicit references to scholarly sources in their works. 109 Anon., Alfred the Great: Deliverer of his Country (London, 1753), 6–7. 105

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fashionable and accessible. Dramatists staged an imagined Anglo-Saxon England; they did not aim to accurately and precisely recreate it. Although dramatists did not depict the witenagemot or the making of law codes, Anglo-Saxonist dramas consistently focus on the themes of good and bad counsel, loyalty and treachery to the nation, the consequences of lawful and lawless behaviour, and the relationship between the actions of kings and the welfare of their subjects. Just as in visual art, the protagonists of Anglo-Saxonist political dramas, poems and novels are kings and would-be kings, figures who embody the kingdom and its people. If patriotism and liberty were central themes in many or even most history plays produced in England during the eighteenth century, as Louise Marshall points out, the regular identification of the Anglo-Saxon period as the historic origin of political liberty and of English political identity suggests that Anglo-Saxonist historical drama must have resonated particularly strongly with audiences encouraged to think of themselves as the descendants of Anglo-Saxon forebears.110 In many cases, writers used dedications and prologues as opportunities to draw the connection in explicit demonstrations of ‘the double consiousness and juxtaposition of past and present that characterize popular medievalism’.111 When David Mallet’s revised version of Alfred: A Masque premiered at Drury Lane in 1751, David Garrick delivered a prologue in which he assured all ‘free BRITONS’ that the author of the masque is ‘Struck deep, even now, with reverential awe’ for Alfred, and expressed his hope that their ‘discernment’ will ‘find the likeness true’. This hopeful invitation constitutes an act of double medievalism: not only does the playwright recreate the Anglo-Saxon past to celebrate Frederick, Prince of Wales (who was in the audience), he also casts the audience as Anglo-Saxons who must validate the portrayal of their king, whom they will instinctively recognise. In order for either identification to take place, the imagined Anglo-Saxon England of the masque must also be familiar, as must the political ideals Alfred espouses and represents; those of his enemies must be abhorrent. Anglo-Saxonist drama, and to a lesser extent poetry and fiction, relied on the assumed Anglo-Saxon identity of its audiences and readers for its rhetorical effect. The fact that politicians of all persuasions espoused Anglo-Saxonist political ideology ensured that Anglo-Saxonist drama always carried patriotic overtones; at the same time, the relative safety of Anglo-Saxonism enabled dramatists to use it as a language for criticising the monarch or the government without fear of accusations of sedition or disloyalty. By inflecting their plays with Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric, dramatists also sought to offer guidance, encouragement, comfort or reassurance to the nation during periods of political uncertainty, or to remind audiences and politicians of the dangers of straying from those putative Anglo-Saxon political ideals that defined the political community of England and, increasingly, of the British Empire. Englishness and Britishness The earliest known Anglo-Saxonist play of the eighteenth century is Nicholas Rowe’s tragedy The Royal Convert, which premiered at the New Haymarket Theatre in November 1707. Set in fifth-century Kent, The Royal Convert dramatizes 110 111

Marshall, National Myth, 9. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 81.

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an imaginary power struggle between the pagan King Hengist of Kent (son of the Hengist) and his brother Aribert for the love of the Christian British princess Ethelinda. The plot is further complicated by Aribert’s secret conversion to Christianity and marriage to Ethelinda (both of which take place before the play begins), and by Hengist’s betrothal to the pagan Saxon princess Rodogune, who promises twenty thousand Saxon warriors to aid Hengist’s war against the Britons. To make matters even more complex, Rodogune falls in love with Aribert when Hengist confesses his love for Ethelinda. After a series of confrontations between the principal characters, and conflicts between Saxon and British forces, the play concludes with Hengist’s death at the hands of a common soldier, the defeat of Rodogune’s Saxon troops and her flight from Kent, and the accession of Aribert to the Kentish throne. In the play’s closing speech Ethelinda reveals that a ‘venerable, old, and Saint-like Hermit’ has revealed to her a future in which ‘a British Queen shall rise, / Great, Gracious, Pious, Fortunate and Wise . . . And her chief Glory shall be to UNITE. / Picts, Saxons, Angles, shall no more be known, / But Briton be the noble Name alone’.112 The Royal Convert thus deploys a mythologised Anglo-Saxon past to celebrate Queen Anne and the Act of Union. Michael Caines has observed that the play’s pro-establishment, Whiggish politics might have formed part of Rowe’s attempts to secure patronage.113 If so, they were successful: soon after the publication of The Royal Convert he obtained the first of several government posts. The marriage of Anglo-Saxonism and British patriotism probably explains the play’s seven revivals – including one performance on 24 November 1762 ‘By Command of their Majesties’ – and nineteen print editions over the course of the century.114 Curiously, no character in the play refers to England or Britain as a political entity. Rowe only distinguishes his characters as ‘Saxons’ and ‘Britons’, in a strained substitution of national identities where one might expect references to the nationstate. Rowe’s lexical gymnastics suggest that he either felt or responded to anxiety surrounding the celebrations of a Kingdom of Great Britain that threatened to obscure the identities of its constituent peoples even as it brought them together. The play’s final lines likewise look to the future. Aribert and Ethelinda will rule Kent, not England or Britain; the significance of their imaginary union remains in the future. Lurking behind the action of the play and its celebration of national unity, however, is the Saxon invasion and the founding of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent – and eventually of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England – that dominates what was formerly British land and a British culture. Rowe’s hazy, quasi-historical setting incorporates accepted historical ‘facts’ about the life and kingship of the first Hengist and his wars with British leaders such as Lucius and Ambrosius Aurelianus, but abandons history altogether at the point of Hengist’s death. Celebrating the new union of England and Scotland led Rowe to soften contemporary historians’ narratives of triumphal Englishness in favour of a conciliatory Anglo-Saxonist Briton-ness, or in Marshall’s words to ‘elide . . . cultural division . . . in order to create a Ibid., 83. Michael Caines, ‘Introduction to The Biter, Ulysses, and The Royal Convert’ in The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe, Volume II: The Middle Period Plays (London, 2017), 10–11. 114 Ibid. 112 113

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composite British identity’.115 Rowe’s approach seems to have worked: as a reviewer of the 1762 revival observed, Ethelinda’s closing lines were ‘not wholly inapplicable to the present times’.116 A more confused and confusing attempt at inter-national unity appears in John Brown’s Athelstan, in which the titular character sides with a Danish force under the tyrannical and irrational Gothmund to capture London and overthrow the English monarchy. A series of rousing speeches by the captive Anglo-Saxon soldier Egbert, and Athelstan’s discovery that his daughter Thyra is also among Gothmund’s captives, lead him to repent before accidentally stabbing and being stabbed by Thyra, just as the Anglo-Saxon army overruns the Danish camp. Brown’s prologue, spoken by ‘the Genius of Britain’, warns ‘the Sons of Freedom’ to ‘Behold, your Country’s faithless Foe, once more / With threatning Squadrons crowd yon hostile Shore’. It challenges those who might consider treasonous acts to ‘view the Rebel’s Fate; / Nor hope, thy Arm can shake a free-born State: / See Blood and Horror end what Guilt began: / And tremble at thy Woes, in Athelstan’.117 Written at the height of the Seven Years’ War, when fears of a French invasion were high and memories of the ’45 still fresh, Athelstan assured audiences that, in J. D. Hainsworth’s words, ‘England can only be overcome if traitors take the side of its enemies, and . . . that such traitors will inevitably come to a bad end’.118 Athelstan’s patriotism rests on an uneasy but revealing conflation of terms for the Anglo-Saxons and their kingdom. In Act I, Scene II the Danish warriors Goodwin and Harold discuss the destruction of London – ‘England’s chief Boast’ – and ‘England’s Overthrow’, but thank the ‘Gods, / Who sow Dissension in these British Hearts!’119 Egbert, the personification of loyalty and bravery, names himself ‘A Briton’ and later insists he bears ‘a Briton’s Heart’ even as he laments for ‘bleeding England’.120 When Egbert confronts Athelstan in Act II, Scene VII he blames England’s downfall and the enslavement of the Britons on Athelstan’s treachery, to which Athelstan responds: Witness Heav’n, How dear hath England’s Happiness and Fame Been to my Soul! How, on this dreadful Morn, When Vengeance led me to the Field of Death, My bleeding Heart wept for my Country’s Woe, And half subdu’d Revenge! – Behold these Tears – These Tears proclaim, I am a Briton still!121

Marshall, National Myth, 41. Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle (17–19 November 1762), quoted in Caines, ‘Introduction’, 11. 117 John Brown, Athelstan, A Tragedy (London, 1756). 118 J. D. Hainsworth, ‘King Lear and John Brown’s Athelstan’, Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (1975), 472. 119 Brown, Athelstan, 3–5. 120 Ibid., 9, 21. 121 Ibid., 30. 115

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This confusion of terms reaches its climax in Athelstan’s exclamation for ‘Britain! hapless Britain!’, a term used only here to refer to a kingdom that every other character refers to as England.122 Brown cannot quite detach his celebratory British patriotism from a core of celebratory Englishness represented in his choice of setting, plot and characters, and in the words those characters speak. To be British in Athelstan is to espouse Anglo-Saxonist political ideals and to conflate England’s Anglo-Saxon history with the history of Britain, and thus to define Britain and Britishness in terms of England and Englishness. Like The Royal Convert, Athelstan is both Anglo-Saxonist and anti-Anglo-Saxonist, trapped between its (imagined) historical politics and Brown’s desire to inspire united British feeling in response to wartime uncertainties. The conflation of English and British political history occurs frequently in Anglo-Saxonist drama, though not universally. In George Jeffreys’s Edwin, apparently inspired by the seventh-century king of Northumbria, a ‘Saxon Monarch’ rules a ‘British’ land and people.123 By contrast, Joanna Baillie unflinchingly presents the imaginary Saxon king Ethwald of Mercia as the opponent of invading Britons in Ethwald: Part One, and allows him to dream of ‘England’s crown, / United and entire’ in Ethwald: Part Two.124 In every Anglo-Saxonist drama the nomenclature of the Anglo-Saxon state remains in play, always visible in the uneasy relationship of ‘Saxon’ and ‘English’, ‘Briton’ and ‘British’, terms Anglo-Saxon characters use almost interchangeably to define themselves against hostile forces that seek to destroy their liberal political institutions. ‘The Nation’s Father, More than Lord’ Anglo-Saxonism found its national hero in Alfred the Great, who represented England’s archetypal defender and monarch. In addition to portraits and history paintings, Alfred made regular appearances on the eighteenth-century stage, in poetry and in political writing, leading to the emergence of a ‘cult of Alfred’ that endured well into the twentieth century.125 Alfred’s was a useful and flexible character, able to be employed in the service of the monarch or as a focus for oppositional or radical politics, but always as a model of exemplary kingship. Samuel Johnson’s London compares the city of Johnson’s day with that of Alfred’s and finds familiar institutions lacking by comparison: A single jail, in Alfred’s golden reign, Could half the nation’s criminals contain; Fair Justice then, without constraint adored, Held high the steady scale, but sheathed the sword; No spies were paid, no special juries known, Blessed age! but ah! how different from our own!126 Ibid., 31. Jeffreys, Edwin, Prologue. 124 Joanna Baillie, A Series of Plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind, 2 vols (London, 1802), II:277. 125 Keynes, ‘Cult of King Alfred’; Parker, England’s Darling, 61–78; Eric Gerald Stanley, ‘The Glorification of Alfred King of Wessex (from the Publication of Sir John Spelman’s Life 1678 and 1709, to the Publication of Reinhold Pauli’s, 1851)’, Poetica 12 (1981), 103–33. 126 Samuel Johnson, London: A Poem, in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal, 2nd edn (London, 1738), 18. 122

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Like James Thomson’s Liberty, London joined an established tradition of Whig poetry, and more specifically what David Armitage calls ‘a decade of early Hanoverian princely panegyric and oppositional poetry’ that culminated in Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot King.127 While in other writings Bolingbroke celebrated the Anglo-Saxon origins of England’s limited government, common law and legislature, his patriot king is distinctly ahistorical, an abstract rather than a specific model.128 For Anglo-Saxonists who followed Bolingbroke, however, patriot kingship became synonymous with Alfred.129 Like Hale, Bolingbroke attributed the endurance and excellence of English legal institutions to a spirit of liberty that characterised the ancient Saxons and their Anglo-Saxon descendants. Whereas Hale focused on the role of the law, however, Bolingbroke identified the king as the lynchpin of the English constitution. ‘Nothing can so surely and so effectually restore the virtue and public spirit, essential to the preservation of liberty’, he wrote, ‘as the reign of a Patriot King’.130 Bolingbroke’s patriot king espouses an Anglo-Saxonist understanding of good governance, upholding a free constitution, operating within the constraints of a limited monarchy, and gathering around himself a ‘wise and good’ administration, perhaps a conscious allusion to the wites of the Anglo-Saxon witenagemot.131 Alexander Bicknell’s The Patriot King; or, Alfrid and Elvida consciously links patriotic kingship with Alfred and Anglo-Saxonism: From History’s pure Page the Mind illume; By Scenes reviv’d, from ALFRED’s halcyon Days, (Whose well-conducted Reign exceeds all Praise) At once would fan fair Freedom’s sacred Fire, And with Respect for Rule the Heart inspire; Those rare Examplers, for your Guidance bring, A patriot People, and a patriot King: And while he paints the Scene, he would create, In ev’ry Breast, a Wish to emulate; A Wish, to make their Happiness your own, And find your Weal reflected from the Throne; To tyrant Pow’r, though tremblingly alive, Or loss of Liberty would scarce survive. The Laws with duteous Fervour to obey, And bow submissive to a gentler Sway. Thus may Britannia’s Sons again renew David Armitage, ‘A Patriot for Whom? The Afterlives of Bolingbroke’s Patriot King’, Journal of British Studies 36 (1997), 403; see also Gerrard, Patriot Opposition; Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714 (Oxford, 2005). 128 Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England (London, 1743), 52; Bolingbroke, Dissertation, 143–4. 129 Bernard Cottret, ed., Bolingbroke’s Political Writings (New York, 1997), 52–3; Richard Wheeler, ‘Prince Frederick and Liberty: The Gardens of Hartwell House, Buckinghamshire, in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Garden History 34 (2006), 80–3; Armitage, ‘Patriot’, 401–4. 130 Cottrett, ed., Bolingbroke’s Political Writings, 73. 131 Ibid., 136, 183. 127

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The glorious Scenes here pourtray’d to their View; The envy’d Height ere long they may attain, And GEORGE’s rank with ALFRED’s happy Reign.132

Bicknell’s emphasis on the revivification of the past as a means of inspiring emulation by contemporary audiences makes his act of medievalism explicit: he urges the audience to recreate the spirit of Alfred’s England just as he has recreated it in the drama. In an ‘Advertisement’ to the published edition Bicknell lamented that the play had not been staged when he wrote it, when, because ‘the kingdom was . . . threatened with an invasion from the united powers of France and Spain, its effect, had it then been brought on the stage, must have been greater than at any other period’.133 Whether or not Bicknell’s alternatively florid and saccharine paeans to loyalty and civic virtue would have succeeded on the stage, his belief that a play about Alfred the Great could have inspired an imperilled nation and its monarch to wise and brave action attests to the applicability and appeal of popular political Anglo-Saxonism. The Alfred of every Anglo-Saxonist drama – a symbol of national unity and bravery, and of the necessity of supporting the monarch in times of national crisis – was the same Alfred chosen by the Knaptons for English History Delineated. Without fail, writers depicted Alfred’s emergence from Athelney and his victory over the Danish army in 878. Alfred’s story became a mirror image of that of eighteenth-century Britain, and offered an optimistic picture of national triumph over foreign adversaries after decades of warfare and fears of invasion. Alfredian literature echoes Dustin Griffin’s insightful comment that the bombast of eighteenth-century English patriotic verse was rarely entirely celebrative but often ‘involved anxiety and ambivalence about the state of the nation and its prospects’.134 Whether readers or viewers of Alfredian dramas feared for their country or mourned its lost former glory, Anglo-Saxonism constituted a patriotic idiom tied to national origins and national institutions. Long before Alfred was ‘England’s Darling’ he was ‘the nation’s father, more than lord’, a wise, brave, benevolent Anglo-Saxon leader who ensured his country’s safety and eventual greatness and in whom the public were encouraged to see the features of their own ‘Saxon’ kings.135 One of the earliest associations of Alfred with eighteenth-century English royalty appeared in Thomas Hearne’s dedication of his edition of The Life of Ælfred the Great to Queen Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, who was encouraged to see in the work ‘a Repaired Image of one of YOUR Ancestors’.136 With the accession of George I there developed what would prove to be an enduring association of Alfred with the House of Hanover that seems to have begun with Richard Blackmore’s Alfred: An Epick Poem. Dedicated to Frederick, grandson of George I and future Prince of Wales, Blackmore’s poem aimed to inspire Frederick to emulate Alfred and Alexander Bicknell, The Patriot King; or, Alfred and Elvida (London, 1788). Ibid., 32. 134 Dustin Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2005), 12. 135 Mallet, Alfred, Prologue. 136 Hearne, Life. 132 133

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to celebrate ‘Heroick Virtue and the Glory of his Country’.137 Unfortunately for readers then and now, Blackmore believed that historical epics required elevated diction, a strong Christian character and a focus on ‘divine Instruction’ over entertainment, but not historical accuracy. The twelve-book work thus fills the thirty-year span from Alfred’s childhood journey to Rome to the death of Ethelred with a Mediterranean odyssey during which Alfred witnesses examples of good and bad governance and, with the help of his British tutor Guithun, develops the wisdom and bravery necessary to defeat the Danes and rule England. Along the way Alfred battles wild animals and armies, discovers the economic and military benefits of navies, resists demonic attacks, and protects innocents of all ranks, events interrupted in Book VIII when an angel reveals to him a vision of the progress of England that concludes with ‘Kings of high Merit and Heroick Fame’ arriving in England ‘From the old Seats, whence Alfred’s Fathers came’ and the eventual accession of Frederick himself, ‘a Genius just and bright / No less the People’s than the Court’s Delight’.138 James Thomson seems to have alluded to Blackmore’s epic in a remarkably similar scene in Alfred: A Masque, first performed for Frederick less than two years after the publication of The Idea of a Patriot King. In Act I, Scene 5 Alfred seeks advice from a hermit, who describes a heavenly vision in which the country’s future has been revealed to him. That future leads inexorably to a time when ‘guardian laws / Are by the patriot . . . / Won from corruption’ and ‘th’ impatient arm / Of liberty, invincible, shall scourge / The tyrants of mankind’.139 The vision depresses Alfred, who spends most of the masque lamenting his people’s suffering. After much exhortation from the hermit to remember virtue and persevere in times of distress, Alfred vows to rule for his people and the nation’s posterity: To . . . make this land Renown’d for peaceful arts to bless mankind, And generous war to humble proud oppressors; If not to build on an eternal base, On liberty and laws, the public weal; If not for these great ends I am ordain’d, May I ne’er idly fill the throne of England!140

Alfred’s modernity is as obvious as Thomson’s politics, which lead him to present the Anglo-Saxon king as the champion of a limited monarchy, civic virtue, industry, trade, the arts, political liberty and the rule of law. In the context of the play, Alfred’s vow serves as a kind of coronation oath, spoken at a turning point in his battle against the Danes and thus in the fortunes of the country. Thomson’s Alfred, like Bolingbroke’s patriot king and Blackmore’s child prodigy, is of course Frederick, Prince of Wales – or at least, Frederick as many hoped he would be

137 138 139 140

Blackmore, Alfred, i. Ibid., 292. Thomson, Alfred, 17–18. Ibid., 19.

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when he came to the throne. The Prince’s early death in 1752 put an end to such hopes, but it did not sever the imagined link between Alfred and the Hanoverian kings of England. Endowing Alfred or any ideal patriot king with the epithet of father was not without complications. To do so was to run the risk of portraying the historical Alfred as an absolute ruler in Filmerian terms, and so to undermine the Anglo-Saxonist understanding that England’s monarchy was from its origin limited. Thomson’s father figure, like Bolingbroke’s, is however Lockean rather than Filmerian. Like Bolingbroke, Thomson created a patriot king whose power he equated with a duty of care. Alfred’s obligation to protect and support his subjects, not divine descent or divinely sanctioned inheritance, gives him his power.142 His subjects owe him loyalty because he maintains the rule of law, accepts limitations on his rule, heeds wise council, and governs himself and the kingdom for the good of the people. In the decades following the public premier of Alfred at Drury Lane in 1751, Alfred became a regular character on page and stage, appearing in works ranging from the anonymous and probably never performed Alfred the Great, Deliverer of his Country of 1753 to the ballet Alfred the Great: or, The Danish Invasion, performed at Sadler’s Wells in 1797.143 In addition to the plays, Anne Fuller’s The Son of Ethelwulf presented the same series of events in a novel published first in two volumes in Dublin and then in a single, shorter London edition, both dated 1789. None of these works breaks significant new ground. They are distinguished mainly by their inclusion of Alfred’s supposed infiltration of the Danish camp disguised as a minstrel and by the relative importance of Alfred’s relationship with his wife Ealhswith to the action of the play. Despite their common storyline – or perhaps because of it – Alfredian dramas seem to have met with ready audiences wherever they were published or performed. Perhaps most importantly, Alfredian dramas were perennially applicable and safely patriotic: they contrasted the Danish enemies of the nation (almost universally pagan, cruel, lawless and irrational) with its brave and loyal Anglo-Saxon defenders, and held up Alfred as a model of virtue to be emulated by audiences who already celebrated him as a national hero. Audiences and playwrights recognised the hyperbolic language they used to praise Alfred. But, as Ebenezer Rhodes assures us (through the character of Albanac), ‘This language, over-rapt’rous as it seems, / May be to you disgusting; and yet . . . It is alone the heart of loyalty / Which prompts it’.144 Alfred’s appeal extended far beyond the stage, as the numerous portraits and history paintings discussed in the previous chapter demonstrate. Alfred was also associated with contemporary naval victories and heroes, a logical connection given the widely held belief that he had founded the English navy to defend against Danish 141

Oliver Cox, ‘Frederick, Prince of Wales, and the First Performance of ‘Rule, Britannia!’, The Historical Journal 56 (2013), 931–54; Burden, Masque of Alfred; Frazier Wood, ‘Alfred the Great’; Parker, England’s Darling, 62–5. 142 Locke, Two Treatises, 303–18. 143 See also Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 26–31; Parker, England’s Darling, 61–70; Keynes, ‘Cult of King Alfred’, 274–81. 144 Ebenezer Rhodes, Alfred, an Historical Tragedy, to which is added A Collection of Miscellaneous Poems (Sheffield, 1789), 24. 141

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invasion (referenced in one of the vignettes accompanying Vertue’s portrait print).145 The premier of Alfred: A Masque also marked the first public performance of ‘Rule, Britannia’ – written to commemorate Edward Vernon’s victory at Porto Bello in November 1739 – as the masque’s closing scene.146 The bust of Alfred sculpted by Peter Scheemakers for the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe carried an inscription describing Alfred as ‘the mildest, justest, most beneficent of Kings; who drove out the Danes, secured the Seas, protected Learning, established Juries, crush’d Corruption, guarded Liberty, and was the Founder of the English Constitution’.147 Two decades later, Henry Hoare designed the Alfred Tower at Stourhead, Wiltshire in response to a peace agreement with Spain in the course of the Seven Years’ War. In a letter to Lord Bruce, Hoare drafted a dedicatory inscription that attributed recent British victories ‘by Land & Sea, in Europe, Asia, Africa & America, [that] stopd the Effusion of human blood & given peace & rest to the Earth’, to the ‘Lessons’ taught them by Alfred.148 From Hoare’s perspective, Alfred’s foundation of the English navy, militia and monarchy, and his staunch defence of English liberty, had borne fruit in the form of victory over the French and Spanish and the assertion of British naval dominance. Hoare’s tower celebrated Alfred in what had become and would remain familiar terms: as a patriot king whose rule had ensured the survival and eventual greatness of an exceptional nation. Kings and People Alfred provided dramatists with a model for other Anglo-Saxon kings, many of whom expressed their reverence for him to other characters in their respective plays. Anglo-Saxonist conceptions of the mutually supportive constitutional relationship that existed between English kings and the English people manifested itself on stage in repeated instances of loyal subjects reminding their kings to put the good of the country before personal desires and ambition. In George Jeffreys’s Edwin, the young nobleman Albert urges King Edwin to remember ‘Your Country’s Cause that stands or falls with yours’, in his attempt to convince Edwin to forego vengeance and erotic passion and to focus on ruling well.149 Similarly, in the first edition of Aaron Hill’s tragedy Elfrid, or the Fair Inconstant, the same King Edgar that William Mason characterised as a lecherous tyrant appears as the voice of reason, musing that ‘A King’s best Lodging is his Subjects Heart’.150 From the first appearance of Alfred: A Masque See the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 896/7 in Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, ed. Swanton, 89–91. 146 Robert Beatson, Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain from the Year 1727, to the Present Time, 3 vols (London, 1790), I:72; Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon’, Past and Present 121 (1988), 74–109; Gerald Jordan and Nicholas Rogers, ‘Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in Mid-Hanoverian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 28, (1989), 201–10; Burden, Masque of Alfred, 44–97. 147 Bickham, Beauties of Stow, 24. 148 Henry Hoare to Lord Bruce, 18 November 1762, quoted in Kenneth Woodbridge, Landscape and Antiquity: Aspects of English Culture at Stourhead 1718 to 1838 (Oxford, 1970), 55. 149 Jeffreys, Edwin, 45. 150 Hill, Elfrid, 9; above, 130–1. 145

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to John O’Keefe’s Alfred: or, The Magic Banner, presenting kings in moments of personal crisis served as a useful device for articulating good and bad kingship. In most cases kings must combat their passions, whether for vengeance or ambition (as in Edwin and Joanna Baillie’s Ethwald) or, more commonly, erotic love that threatens to tear their attentions away from national concerns (as in most Alfred dramas, plays based on Edgar, Elfrida and Athelstan, or plays about Edwy). On stage, as so often in histories, whether a king received praise or censure depended on his ability to behave selflessly. A common motif in Alfredian dramas presents Alfred as torn between fear for his wife and duty to his country. In a preface to the print edition of Alfred, John Home defended himself against the attacks of critics who resented ‘that the hero, the legislator, is degraded to a lover, who enters the Danish camp, from a private, not a public motive, and acts the part of an impostor’.151 Despite regular references to negotiated peace and fuller details of the Danelaw than any other play, Home’s portrayal of Alfred as equal parts loyal husband and selfless king threatened the stereotype of Alfred that Home mocked: that of a ‘spirit too sublime and aetherial to descend to human passions or human actions’.152 Alexander Bicknell sought to avoid the criticism levelled at Home in his The Patriot King, in which Alfred declares that ‘My dear Elvida too, torn from my arms – / Distracting thought! – Forgive, fair excellence, / If in my kingdom’s wrongs enrapt, I gave / Thy loss a second place among my woes’.153 Ebenezer Rhodes avoided the problem altogether by mimicking the much praised description of Alfred in Baculard d’Arnaud’s Les Délassemens de L’homme sensible, in which ‘Ethelwitha’ appears as the daughter of the loyal nobleman William d’Albanac, who tests Alfred to ensure the purity of the young king’s motives and the safety of his daughter’s virtue.154 When the soldier Ethelbert urges Alfred to command Ethelwitha to marry him, Alfred declares that ‘Kings are the legal delegates of heav’n’ and that to ‘exercise an arbitrary tyranny / Over the mind and body of another’ would corrupt his rule.155 Even when Ethelwitha travels to Alfred’s camp on the eve of battle, the fate of England remains his priority. In most Anglo-Saxonist dramas, Alfred’s greatness stems in large part from his unwillingness to put his own or his family’s needs above those of his people. Anglo-Saxonist dramas written during the last quarter of the eighteenth century display a heightened interest in the monarch’s responsibility to govern lawfully and for the good of the people. This interest reflects the emergence of the ‘officially constructed patriotism which stressed attachment to the monarchy . . . and the desirability of strong, stable government by a virtuous, able and authentically British elite’, described by Linda Colley.156 The same years witnessed ‘a renewed period of active Home, Alfred, vi; Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 30. Home, Alfred., ix–x. 153 Bicknell, Patriot King, 7. 154 François Thomas-Marie de Baculard d’Arnaud, Délassements de l’Homme Sensible, our Anecdotes Diverses, Tome Premier (Paris, 1783), 1–16; The European Magazine, and London Review 4 (December 1783), 450–2. Baculard d’Arnaud’s story is a confused reworking of the apocryphal story described above, 131–2. 155 Rhodes, Alfred, 46–7. 156 Colley, Britons, 145. 151

152

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legislation’ in which Parliament and the monarch took more active and prescriptive roles in managing domestic and foreign affairs in response to the American and French Revolutions and the Gordon Riots.157 It is therefore unsurprising that these decades gave rise to a series of plays focused on the relationship between AngloSaxon kings and their people, each set against a backdrop of invasion or domestic unrest. Despite the immediacy of such concerns, it is nevertheless important to remember that the fundamental unity of crown and commons had been a core component of mainstream political Anglo-Saxonism since the Glorious Revolution.158 What we find in plays written during the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s are more fraught depictions of kings who must overcome both internal and external threats in order to ensure the safety of the English and their liberties. Richard Cumberland’s The Battle of Hastings presented audiences with not one but two kings: Harold II, the last king of Anglo-Saxon England, and Edgar Ætheling, the last surviving male descendent of the royal line of Wessex and a contender for the throne. As the play opens, Edgar (under the pseudonym ‘Edmund’), who has left Harold’s camp to visit Edwina, insists on going off to fight against the Norman army. ‘Can I, oh tell me . . . sleep’, he asks, ‘whilst war’s insulting shout / Fills the wide cope of heav’n, and every blast / Wafts to my ear my country’s dying groans?’159 When he returns to camp Harold questions his absence, to which Edgar responds that he has come ‘to claim / The privilege of my progenitors, / And die for England’. The Earl of Northumberland urges Harold to question Edgar under threat of force, but the king refuses. ‘By gentle habits let us draw mens hearts’, he says, ‘And bind them to us not enforcedly, / But lovingly and freely’, demonstrating an unexpected but firmly Anglo-Saxonist philosophy of kingship.160 Later, Edgar reveals his identity and challenges Harold’s right to rule. Harold claims that when the witenagemot elected him ‘of force / Obey’d I them, and by a king’s best title, / My subjects free election, took the crown’.161 Harold’s patriotic submission to the witenagemot – whose decision Edgar challenges – aligns him with the Anglo-Saxonist belief in the elective nature of Anglo-Saxon kingship from which the modern limited monarchy had developed; Edgar’s emotional response, by contrast, suggests bravery and fine feeling but not the hallmarks of an Anglo-Saxon king. Nevertheless, Edgar rushes to Harold’s defence in battle and brings the dead king’s body back to the camp, where he crowns himself and rallies the Anglo-Saxon troops to a bold but doomed counter-attack

157 David Lemmings, Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century: From Consent to Command (Basingstoke, 2011), 7–11, 143–71; Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy 1714–1760, 2nd edn, rev. Charles Stuart (Oxford, 1962), 8–9; Nicholas Rogers, ‘The Gordon Riots and the Politics of War’ and John Seed, ‘“The Fall of Romish Babylon anticipated”: Plebeian Dissenters and Anti-Popery in the Gordon Riots’ both in The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Ian Haywood and John Seed (Cambridge, 2012), respectively 21–45, 69–92. 158 Colley’s remark aligns with the racial Anglo-Saxonism that Horsman argues took political form at about this time. Reginald Horsman, ‘Origins of Racial Anglo-AngloSaxonism in Great Britain before 1850’, Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976), 390. 159 Richard Cumberland, The Battle of Hastings, a Tragedy (London, 1778), 18. 160 Ibid., 26. 161 Ibid., 58.

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with a recitation of the glories of Alfred, Edmund Ironside and Harold. Though brave, Edgar ultimately appears foolish and rash, a would-be king undone by his sentimentality and ego, and by his inability to abide by the law or the will of the people he believes it is his right to rule. Jane West displays a more ambivalent attitude in her presentation of two highly regarded kings of England in Edmund, surnamed Ironside, published at York in 1791. Fighting a losing battle against the combined forces of his treacherous brother Edrick and the Danish King Canute, Edmund remains steadfast in his commitment to his people’s safety. ‘The thought of law-givers – the fire of heroes – / The statesman’s care – the soldier’s toil, must all / Center in me’, he says to the despondent Queen Elgiva. He later asks, ‘Does not the soul, that warms each peasant’s bosom / Boast as divine an origin as mine?’163 West’s Edmund exhibits a consistently hyperbolic goodness that wins him the admiration of soldiers and nobles, and of Canute, who praises ‘Edmund’s worth’ and refers to him as a ‘Hero’.164 Indeed, the play’s dramatic tension arises largely from West’s presentation of Edmund (who strives to be ‘a Patriot King’) and Canute as equally virtuous characters.165 When they meet in single combat neither can gain the upper hand; after recognising one another as equals they agree to divide England into two kingdoms, England and the Danelaw, to avoid further bloodshed. West thus characterises the historical rupture of Canute’s conquest as an agreement between kings made in the best interests of their (joyous) English subjects. When Edmund dies at Edrick’s hand, West Anglo-Saxonises Canute by having him promise that ‘the worthy and the brave, / Briton or Dane, alike shall claim my care’ if the ‘States of Wessex’ name him ‘by their decree, their future Sovereign’.166 In the play’s final lines the ‘great’ (an epithet repeated throughout the play) Danish invader becomes an English constitutional monarch and the embodiment of Anglo-Saxon kingship. 1791 also witnessed the publication of Ann Yearsley’s Earl Goodwin, two years after its successful run in Bristol and Bath. Earl Goodwin is one of the few eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist historical dramas to have received significant scholarly attention, in part as a result of recent interest in Yearsley as a working-class woman writer whose works grappled with contemporary politics.167 Unlike Cumberland and West, Yearsley highlights the doom that falls on a country when a king – in this case Edmund Ironside’s half-brother, Edward the Confessor – neglects his people and gives himself over to his own passions and prejudices. Edward’s people damn him as a ‘passive dupe’ and a ‘blind bigot’ who would rather pray and allow 162

Ibid., 76. Jane West, Edmund, surnamed Ironside in Miscellaneous Poems, and a Tragedy (York, 1791), 148. 164 Ibid., 159–60. 165 Ibid., 186. 166 Ibid., 222. 167 See, inter alia: Mary Waldron, Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton: The Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, 1753–1806 (Athens, 1996), 173–205; Lisa Kasmer, Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760–1830 (Lanham, 2012), 49–65; Katherine Newey, ‘Women and History on the Romantic Stage: More, Yearsley, Burney, and Mitford’ in Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840, ed. C. Burroughs (Cambridge, 2000), 79–101. 162 163

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his favourite Norman councillors and clerics to rule than tend to the needs of a troubled nation. Goodwin, Earl of Wessex and father of Edward’s spurned wife, Edith, resolves to confront Edward not for his daughter’s sake but because ‘the groans of lab’ring hinds / Make the winds heavy, while their troubles roll / Like billows to the foot of Edward’s throne, / And dashing there, are lost in wide dispersion’, a line that highlights the unheard complaints of working people and so perhaps suggests Yearsley’s reformist or even radical sentiment.168 Even Edward’s own mother, Emma, who walks across burning ploughshares to prove herself innocent of accusations that she has had sexual relations with her confessor, condemns her son as a ‘parricide of virtue’.169 When Goodwin and his followers march on London, Edward’s nobles refuse to fight against their own people and appear to agree with Goodwin’s terms. Edward, however, replies scornfully (according to Yearsley’s stage direction): ‘Go, vaunting Saxon! When didst thou subdue / A British King by threats’.170 Edward’s devotion to the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury leads him to un-king himself by disowning his Saxon identity and opposing Goodwin, who becomes the defender of the ‘Saxon’ people of England. Edward eventually relents and banishes Canterbury from court, but remains unable to master his own religious fervour. Goodwin’s assassination by a priest loyal to Canterbury throws the court into confusion, and as the play ends a disconsolate Edward appears once again as the king of an insecure and imbalanced country. Although Yearsley offers support for revolutionaries in France in the play’s epilogue, Earl Goodwin is primarily a commentary on domestic rather than international politics.171 Lisa Kasmer and Katherine Newey highlight contemporary fears that George III secretly fostered absolutist ambitions and that his dependence on the Earl of Bute, like Edward’s reliance on the Archbishop of Canterbury, endangered the nation and the rights of the people by encouraging corruption and the appointment of political placemen.172 Indeed, Yearsley explicitly links Edward and George III in a note criticising the lack of royal mercy apparent when ‘twenty men be suspended of a morning, on a spot of some few yards wide, in London, and under the cognizance of our Most Gracious Sovereign George III’, a reference to the hanging of twenty men at Newgate on 2 February 1785 and to the unusually high number of hangings there for non-capital offences between 1784 and 1793.173 George III’s inability or unwillingness to extend mercy in the form of royal pardons becomes a mirror image of Edward’s refusal to heed the complaints of his subjects. Earl Goodwin’s clear engagement with contemporary politics has made the play the subject of scholarly enquiry, but its participation in a century-long tradition of Anglo-Saxonist drama remains largely unacknowledged. Like West or Cumberland, or any other author of an Anglo-Saxonist play, Yearsley invokes Yearsley, Earl Goodwin, 12, 3–4. Ibid., 24. 170 Ibid., 44. 171 For the connection of Earl Goodwin and the French Revolution, see: Waldron, Lactilla, 201–3; Kerry Andrews, ed, The Collected Works of Ann Yearsley, 3 vols (London, 2014), II:xvii; Pearson, ‘Crushing the Convent’. 172 Kasmer, Novel Histories, 62–4; Newey, ‘Women and History’, 89. 173 Yearsley, Earl Goodwin, 90; The London Magazine 4 (1785), 144. 168 169

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an Anglo-Saxonist definition of patriotic kingship that underpins her criticism of Edward the Confessor and George III, and her casting of Goodwin (whose reputation she claims has been ‘blackened’ by the ‘ambitious Monks’ who composed medieval chronicles) as the people’s champion.174 Earl Goodwin adheres to the Anglo-Saxonist concept of kingship as an obligation to care for and protect the English people. Selfish, irrational and ambitious kings come to bad ends unless, as in Yearsley’s play, loyal and virtuous subjects intervene to guide them back toward responsible and effective governance. In Anglo-Saxonist drama, the offering of advice to kings by their subjects and the willingness of kings to heed good and reject bad advice stands proxy for the role of Parliament in governing the nation. Virtuous, lawful behaviour earns good kings the love and loyalty of their subjects, which ensures peace and prosperity. Tyrannical or self-serving behaviour engenders unrest and instability and frequently leads to national tragedy. In almost every eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist literary work loyal subjects cheer and advise their kings, a theme that reinforced the value of representative government and that mirrored the act of writing itself, in which self-proclaimed loyal subjects created entertaining works that encouraged the patriotic spirit of their contemporaries. Few writers articulated the relationship between king and subject so succinctly as Anne Fuller. In the dedication of her Alfredian novel The Son of Ethelwulf, written during the first prolonged period of George III’s recurrent madness, Fuller assures the future George IV that ‘All truly loyal hearts felt, that the prerogatives of majesty, the liberties of England, had still a vigilant guardian’ in a Prince who, when his father recovered in 1789, gave up a Regency only recently granted him by Parliament and ‘gave in his own conduct the most sacred, and most energetic lesson, of submission to the laws’.175 Throughout the novel Alfred, whose identity is here defined with reference to his father, listens to the stories of those around him and dedicates himself to helping everyone he meets, from shepherds and injured peasants to the nobles who follow him into battle. Fuller’s Son of Ethelwulf thus echoes Blackmore’s Alfred not only in its dedication to a prince whose future glory is assured if only he follows in the footsteps of his Anglo-Saxon predecessors, but in its emphasis on the shared needs and reciprocal obligations of the monarch and his people. Church and State Writers of Anglo-Saxonist drama frequently contrasted English political order with malevolent pagan Danes and Catholic Normans, and display a generally ambivalent attitude toward the non-Anglo-Saxon peoples of Britain. In Alfred the Great, Deliverer of his Country, British, Scottish and Welsh leaders join the Anglo-Saxons to fend off the invading Danish army. In Joanna Baillie’s Ethwald, Mercian characters frequently fight against Britons, although in Ethwald: Part Two English and Britons alike fall victim to the ceaseless, pointless warfare that results from Ethwald’s uncontrollable imperial ambition. Dramatists’ reluctance to categorise Britons and Scots as hostile foreigners stemmed from the need to write for a united British audience 174 175

Yearsley, Early Goodwin, Preface. Anne Fuller, The Son of Ethelwulf, 2 vols (Dublin, 1789), I:v–vi.

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rather than a strictly English one, a point to which I will return. It might also reflect the popularity of Celtic revivalism, which developed alongside Anglo-Saxonism through the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century.176 The title of Rowe’s The Royal Convert refers to Aribert, who has recanted a childhood vow made ‘at Woden’s cruel Altar . . . never to forgo our Country’s Gods’.177 Hengist ultimately sentences Aribert to death for marrying Ethelinda, an act he views as a form of religious and political treason. Act IV opens on ‘a Temple adorn’d according to the Superstition of the Antient Saxons’ with statues of Thor, Woden and Freya, all three of which appear in Louis Du Guernier’s frontispiece for the printed edition.178 Although Hengist and Rodogune are tainted by their paganism, they also subvert it. When Hengist sentences Aribert to death as a human sacrifice, Rodogune convinces a pagan priest to free Aribert and help him escape by disguising him in a spare set of robes. Later, seeing Ethelinda on the rack, Hengist commands the priests to release her, swearing ‘by my injur’d Love, a name more sacred / Than all your Function knows, your Gods and you, / Your Temples, Altars, and your painted Shrines, / Your holy Trumpery shall blaze together’.179 Rowe presents paganism as terrifying and visceral but ultimately impotent, dependent for its power on the whims of its individual adherents. Ethelinda and Aribert, on the other hand, remain virtuous, patient and, in the final two acts, relatively passive, adherents to Christianity who overcome physical and spiritual threats and ascend the throne of a united people. More than a simple celebration of the Act of Union, The Royal Convert makes use of antiquarian scholarship – particularly the depictions of Saxon deities and description of pagan religious rites in Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence – and the contemporary visual media of stage design to portray a moment when the nation’s Anglo-Saxon ancestors abandoned paganism for the Christianity of their British neighbours and subjects. Through the middle decades of the century the Danes came to represent the pagan antithesis of the Christian English. Emma, the shepherdess of Thomson’s Alfred, describes England’s enemy as ‘the haughty, cruel, unbelieving Dane’.180 In Athelstan the Danish soldier Harold celebrates Gothmund as ‘Denmark’s proudest Boast! / Whom mighty Odin, the dread God of War, / Hath crown’d with England’s Conquest’, while Gothmund taunts the captive Egbert with the epithet ‘audacious Christian’.181 When Harold announces later in the play that the gods demand human sacrifices, Egbert argues that Harold’s gods are ‘the vain Creation / Of Fear and Cruelty’, not divine guides but manifestations of Danish lawlessness and depraviSee, e.g., Parker, The Harp and the Constitution; Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism; Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven, 1994); Philip Connell, ‘British Identities and the Politics of Ancient Poetry in Later Eighteenth-Century England’, The Historical Journal 49 (2006), 161–92. 177 Rowe, Royal Convert, 15. 178 Du Guernier almost certainly copied from the images in Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence. If, as Boase suggests, ‘stage practice influenced the design’ of such frontispieces, Rowe’s production displayed more antiquarian influence than the script. Hammelmann, Book Illustrators, 4. 179 Rowe, Royal Convert, 80. 180 Thomson, Alfred, 6. 181 Brown, Athelstan, 6–7. 176

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ty. John Home’s Alfred displays a near obsession with paganism. The Danish chief Rollo enters with the words ‘Odin be praised’ and casually swears ‘By Thor’s right arm’, and when the princess Ronex agrees to join the Anglo-Saxons against Hinguar, she binds her pact with Alfred by invoking ‘Frea, eldest goddess of the sky, / The ancient arbiter of human things’.183 Hinguar curses ‘By Hela’s sulphur’d fires’, charges into battle shouting ‘Odin for Denmark!’, and makes a vow by ‘Loda’s altar, stain’d with human blood’.184 Though Home probably derived his description of every other god from the fifth chapter of Percy’s Northern Antiquities, ‘Loda’ comes from James Macpherson’s Ossianic forgery Fingal, in which Macpherson explains that ‘by the spirit of Loda, the poet [ie, Ossian] proably means Odin, the great deity of the northern nations’.185 It is possible to read Home’s reference to Loda as a simple mistake, the conflation of two systems of mythology that enjoyed widespread popularity in the context of the late-century craze for Northern and Gothic literatures. It is equally possible, and perhaps more likely, that the Scottish Home knowingly equated Loda with Odin in an attempt to merge Celtic and Germanic Gothicism and thus to posit a common ancestry for the English and (at least the Lowland) Scots.186 Like historians, writers of Anglo-Saxonist drama presented Danish paganism as one aspect of a barbarism that posed a serious threat to a united Anglo-Saxon England and to English freedom and lawfulness. Thus in Brown’s Athelstan, Gothmund threatens to send Egbert to ‘the deep Norwegian Mine, / Among these Slaves the Vassals of my Sword’; threatens Thyra with gang rape unless she cooperates with his plan to entrap her father; and refuses Athelstan’s demand that Thyra be returned to him, proclaiming that ‘Violence is our Law.’187 As a synecdoche for the nation’s enemies, the Danes are characterised by their adherence to a false religion, their irrationality, their violence and their lawlessness. They thus provide a useful example of the ‘obviously hostile other’ against which, as Colley argues, eighteenth-century Britons sought to define themselves. Dramatic representations of the Danes bear all the hallmarks of ‘the French as [Britons] imagined them to be, superstitious, militarist, decadent and unfree’, and audiences must have been expected to see in conflicts between Danes and Anglo-Saxons their own conflicts with France and other Catholic European nations.188 Indeed, the final decades of the century saw a marked upturn in the number of Anglo-Saxonist dramas displaying strong anti-Catholic sentiment. In place of a generic English Christian-ness set against Danish paganism, writers such as Frances Burney, Thomas Warwick, Ann Yearsley and Joanna Baillie presented readers and audiences with visions of an Anglo-Saxon England under attack from a malevolent Catholic priesthood already established within its borders. In Ethwald, Hexulf of St Albans seeks to gain power by coming between kings and their people. When King Oswal proposes to sleep in the open air with Ethwald and his troops to celebrate 182

182 183 184 185 186 187 188

Ibid., 20. Home, Alfred, 347, 348, 361. Ibid., 363, 366, 317. James Macpherson, Fingal, An Antient Epic Poem (London, 1762), 151. This is one of Pinkerton’s arguments in his Dissertation. Macpherson, Fingal, 7, 39, 52. Colley, Britons, 5.

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their victory over an invading army of Britons, Hexulf degrades the soldiers by urging Oswal to spend the night in the abbey offering prayers of thanksgiving to St Alban, ‘To whom, in truth, you owe the victory’.189 As Ethwald descends into madness in Ethwald: Part Two, Hexulf convinces the Saxon hero Woggarwolfe to exchange his weapons, armour and treasure for monastic robes, and then forms a gang of ruffians and monks who kill any noble who opposes Ethwald’s wars or Hexulf ’s growing influence over the king and queen. Before being murdered by one of Hexulf ’s henchmen, the public-minded nobleman Ethelbert calls both Ethwald’s sycophantic followers and Hexulf ’s monks ‘slaves’, comparing their hypocrisy and superstition with the honesty of the ‘valiant freemen’ who infiltrate the castle and kill the despotic king as the play ends. Yearsley attacks the priesthood more directly: after being censured by a papal legate for his interference in civil matters, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury continues to scheme against Goodwin and Edward, before being stabbed to death by the rebellious soldiers of Goodwin’s son Tostie, whose hatred of Normans and of ecclesiastical influence drives him to rebel even after Edward has seen the error of his ways and banished Canterbury. Yearsley’s epilogue bids ‘PRIESTCRAFT, avaunt! avaunt, REBELLION, too! / We’ve done, thank Heav’n, at present, Sirs, with you’, a warning that equates the tyranny of Catholicism with the horrors of civil insurrection.190 No Anglo-Saxonist drama displays a stronger anti-Catholic sentiment than two works based on the life of King Edwy: Thomas Warwick’s Edwy (1784) and Frances Burney’s Edwy and Elgiva (1795).191 Both plays focus on Edwy’s secret marriage to his cousin Elgiva and the actions of Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury, that lead to their divorce and ultimately to Elgiva’s death. At the heart of the conflict in both dramas lies the fact that canon law prohibited Edwy’s marriage to Elgiva on the grounds of consanguinity, but civil law did not. Thus the contest between Edwy and Dunstan embodied the contest between native English law and foreign Roman law, between limited monarchy and an absolutist papacy. It is worth noting that eighteenth-century historians tended to side with Edwy: Rapin cites the episode as evidence of the biases of monastic chroniclers who praised the obviously corrupt Dunstan, Hume as evidence of the savagery and irrationality of the medieval church.192 Henry condemns Dunstan and his ‘monkish followers, who exclaimed against this marriage as a most horrid and unpardonable crime, and treated both the king and queen with the most indecent rudeness’.193 Contemporary artists reinforced this perspective in paintings such as William Bromley’s ‘The insolence of Dunstan to King Edwy’ and William Hamilton’s ‘Edwig and Elgiva’, the latter commissioned by Robert Bowyer for the Historic Gallery. Readers and audiences would have approached Warwick’s

Baillie, Series of Plays, 141. Yearsely, Earl Goodwin, Epilogue. 191 Also notable is the American senator Charles Jared Ingersol’s equally anti-Catholic Edwy and Elgiva, performed at the New Theatre in Philadelphia in 1801. 192 Rapin, History, I:104; Hume, History of England, 1782, I:116–17. 193 Henry, History of Great Britain, II:74, contra Elizabeth Deirdre Gilbert, ‘Desires and History: Historical Representation in Frances Burney’s Edwy and Elgiva and Joanna Baillie’s Ethwald’, European Romantic Review 17 (2006), 327–34. 189

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and Burney’s plays with at least a reasonable chance of knowing the story and its moral in advance. In the opening act of Warwick’s Edwy, Elgiva admits to her mother Emmeline that she fears Dunstan, whom Emmeline calls ‘the imperial priest, / Tyrant alike of subject and of king’.194 Edwy too alleges that Dunstan aims ‘to snatch the reins of civil rule’.195 Once he has convinced the pious courtier Athelstan to abduct and imprison Elgiva, Dunstan admits as much, assuring Athelstan that ‘Religion’s voice . . . Absolves the subject tho’ a Prince’s blood / Should stream upon the contest’.196 The ‘involuntary check’ Athelstan experiences when he hears Dunstan’s ‘dark’ words betrays his instinctive fear of a religious figure whose methods involve the circumvention of justice and the potential murder of a lawful king.197 Burney’s Dunstan is more forthright. As the play opens he raves that his ‘Will was Law / In Edred’s reign’ but that Edwy refuses to follow his counsel. Edwy’s tutor and advisor Aldhelm warns Edwy that, despite Edred’s death, Dunstan maintains power over the common people and ‘waits the moment / To seize once more supreme authority’.198 Burney presents Dunstan as a tyrant, a figure blinded by his religious zeal and lust for power. Edwy, on the other hand, ‘rules himself, or listens but to Aldhelm, / Who would forego each priestly privilege / To cast the Land on civil Government’. To counter Aldhelm’s influence and Edwy’s independence, Dunstan foments rebellion amongst the peasants by ‘calling for their passions, and their interests, / By raising fears unnam’d, and Hopes mysterious’, sowing unrest to bring about the king’s downfall.199 Burney’s evil priest espouses zealotry, tyranny and irrationality, and risks civil war to secure power; by his own admission Dunstan is the antithesis of Anglo-Saxonist kingship and of the balance embodied in the Anglo-Saxon constitution. Both Warwick and Burney end their plays with the murder of Elgiva (by Dunstan and at Dunstan’s order, respectively), the death of Edwy, and, to reassure audiences that traitors must come to bad ends, the fall of Dunstan himself. In Warwick’s version Emmeline stabs Dunstan in revenge for the murder of her daughter, and Burney’s final act sees Dunstan driven to near madness as he prays unsuccessfully for forgiveness for his crimes. The anti-Catholicism of each of these works responds directly to contemporary political events. Earl Goodwin celebrates the abolition of church authority by the National Assembly of France and reflects English anxieties over the possible consequences of the French Revolution, while Edwy and Elgiva captures the period of uncertainty that followed the passage of the Catholic Relief Acts of 1778 and 1791.200 Despite the vitriolic language of Yearsley and Burney (whose brother Charles contributed a prologue to Edwy and Elgiva that describes medieval peasants as the ‘abject slaves’ of Rome), the anti-Catholic sentiment of most Anglo-SaxThomas Warwick, Edwy. A Dramatic Poem (London, 1784), 8. Ibid., 53. 196 Ibid., 58. 197 Frances Burney, Edwy and Elgiva in The Complete Plays of Frances Burney, Volume 2: Tragedies, ed. Peter Sabor (London, 1995), 60. 198 Ibid., 16, 21. 199 Ibid., 42. 200 Waldron, Lactilla, 202. 194 195

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onist drama focuses on the pretensions of ecclesiastical figures to power in the civil realm. Historians were well aware of the fact that monks, bishops and archbishops had shaped the laws of Anglo-Saxon kings and sat in the witenagemot, and that Old English law codes provided special privileges for ecclesiastical establishments. Yet scholarly and popular belief in the moral goodness and efficacy of the English common law rested on an understanding of it as a fundamentally secular institution preserved by a secular monarch whose power derived from the people rather than divine right or papal sanction. Always outside royal jurisdiction and therefore beyond the reach of legal institutions that contemporaries believed had ensured the balance of the Anglo-Saxon constitution, Danish pagans and Catholic priests alike functioned as personifications of absolutism and as the antithesis of Anglo-Saxon political ideals. Linda Colley has written that the ‘bulk of the Catholic hierarchy . . . was usually eager to associate itself with occasions of royal celebration’ after the passage of the Catholic Relief Acts, and that the rapprochement between Catholics, dissenters and the king as head of the Church of England ‘served to endorse the monarchy’s claim to be prime symbol of national unanimity’.201 Colley’s claim is borne out not only in the fact that every Anglo-Saxonist drama implicitly reiterates the dangerous consequences that arise from weak or compromised kings, but also from the appearance of good priests in a number of Anglo-Saxonist dramas. Among the most obvious is the hermit in Thomson’s Alfred, who counsels the king and urges him to greatness. In Earl Goodwin and Edwy the dutiful, principled and civic-minded Alwine and Aldhelm appear as foils to the power-hungry Archbishop of Canterbury and Dunstan. Interestingly, both Alwine and Aldhelm are Bishops of Winchester, the capital of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex and for much of Anglo-Saxon history the capital of England. The association of these characters with the seat of Anglo-Saxon government marks them as representatives of a kind of ‘national’ Catholicism (and thus a proto-Church of England) that supports the king and his laws. The appearance of Aldwine and Aldhelm, and the hermit of Alfred: A Masque, provided audiences with examples of Anglo-Saxons whose religious beliefs did not preclude their loyalty to crown and country. Although we cannot know how believable these patriotic priests were to audiences and readers, we can see in them an understanding of the relationship of the English church and the English state that remains more or less consistent in dramatic, poetic and fictional representations of the Anglo-Saxon past. Anglo-Saxonism and Political Identity Approaching political Anglo-Saxonism from the perspective of popular drama in tandem with political writing provides important insights into the nature of political Anglo-Saxonism itself. First, political drama reflects mainstream Anglo-­Saxonist understanding of political history that does not change over the course of the century. Whether Whig or Tory, radical, reformist or conservative, Anglo-Saxonism is a constant theme in the political discourse of eighteenth-century England and, in Linda Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation 1760–1820’, Past and Present 102 (1984), 120. 201

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important ways, in the self-reflective political discourse about eighteenth-century Britain. During a century when politicians held fast to the Anglo-Saxon identity of the constitution and the common law, political Anglo-Saxonism functioned as an ideology of English (and then of British) political exceptionalism and as a rhetoric of English (and then of British) patriotism. In this respect, eighteenth-century political Anglo-Saxonism runs parallel to the Anglo-Saxonism of the Tudor and Stuart periods. Historians, legal scholars and political commentators posited the continuity of the common law and constitution as the defining features of the Georgian political order, and writers reinforced these beliefs in dramas that presented, in Curtis Perry’s words, ‘Saxon virtue as the key to something like a national character’.202 Like their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors, eighteenth-century writers shaped political Anglo-Saxonism into accessible, popular stories that emphasise the roles of patriotic kings and patriotic subjects alike in safeguarding the kingdom and its system of government. In retrospect, the insistent Englishness of Anglo-Saxonism appears at odds with contemporary discourses of Britishness. Nicholas Rowe’s The Royal Convert and John Brown’s Athelstan hint at the limitations of Anglo-Saxonism as an ideology of national identity: try as they might, neither author could reconcile the distinct nations of Britain with the necessary Englishness of the Anglo-Saxonist patriotic mode. But they did not have to. An important distinction lies in the difference between Anglo-Saxonist nationalism and political Anglo-Saxonism, two concepts thrown into clearer contrast by reading scholarly and popular political writing as a thematically unified body of literature. The origins of Anglo-Saxonist nationalism are undeniably visible in eighteenth-century England, from the underlying racial theory of Thomas Percy’s introduction to Northern Antiquities to the cultural imperialism identified by scholars such as Kathleen Wilson and Reginald Horsman.203 The origins of political Anglo-Saxonism, however, stretch back to the Anglo-Saxon period itself. The political virtues celebrated by the writers of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist drama – kingship defined as an obligation to the people, a belief in the value of representation and council, loyalty to the crown (particularly in times of crisis), support for and submission to the rule of law – in short, a belief in the AngloSaxon origins of the English constitution and in attitudes essential for safeguarding that constitution – were virtues celebrated by English, wider British, and European writers alike.204 Finally, political writing and political drama share with other forms of popular Anglo-Saxonism an explicitly stated desire to encourage emulation on the part of readers and viewers. If visual art encouraged eighteenth-century English women and men to imagine themselves as Anglo-Saxons, scholarly and popular political writing encouraged them to live that Anglo-Saxonism in their attitudes and responses to political events. To participate in politics was, in a very real way, to perform Anglo-Saxonism, to revivify (or at least claim to revivify) political ideals Perry, ‘For They Are Englishmen’, 193–4. Mallet, Northern Antiquities, i–xl; Wilson, Island Race, 85–6; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 10–24, 29–34. 204 Kidd, Subverting, 205–15. 202 203

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believed to be Anglo-Saxon in origin in much the same way that dramatists staged an imagined Anglo-Saxon England to remind their audiences and readers of their obligation to uphold those ideals. Historiography and legal scholarship informed both types of performance, but did not necessarily make them either historical or scholarly, conservative or reformist. Alternatively ‘pastist’ and ‘presentist’ in its outlook, eighteenth-century political Anglo-Saxonism was also inherently ‘futurist’ – whether the Anglo-Saxon past thrived in the present or had been degraded over time, the idea of that past provided a model for a desirable political future.205 The popular belief in and celebration of political Anglo-Saxonism is perhaps best understood in de Lolme’s terms, as a ‘useful fiction’ that provided a unifying national political narrative rather than a divisive one.206

205 206

Biddick, 83. De Lolme, Constitution of England, 8.

Conclusion Sharon Turner’s The History of the Anglo-Saxons

I

This nation exhibits the conversion of ferocious pirates, into a highly civilized, informed, and generous people – in a word, into ourselves. Sharon Turner1

n his preface to the second volume of The History of the Anglo-Saxons, Sharon Turner makes his most impassioned and poetic defence of Anglo-Saxon studies. He chides the polite ‘philosopher’ who prefers ‘the metaphysical speculations of the easy chair’ to the ‘drudgery of research’ into Anglo-Saxon history and culture. ‘This indolence has been mistaken for elegance; this ignorance for philosophy’, he writes.2 Turner couches his criticism in a familiar Anglo-­Saxonist rhetoric of inheritance, writing of ‘forefathers’, ‘ancestors’ and ‘descendants’ to draw together his readers and his subject emotionally and imaginatively. For Turner, the Anglo-Saxons – a term he uses to denote all the inhabitants of England and Lowland Scotland who claimed descent from the continental Germanic peoples who settled there in the early Middle Ages, and their descendants down to the present day – were to be studied and celebrated as the founders of ‘the British nation . . . diffused . . . with glory into every quarter of the globe’.3 To disregard Anglo-Saxon history was to disregard the history of one’s self, one’s kingdom and, by 1800, the history of the British Empire. There was nothing new in Turner’s argument. By claiming that the AngloSaxons ‘live not merely in our annals and traditions, but in our civil institutions and perpetual discourse’, Turner consciously or unconsciously echoed Edmund Gibson, Elizabeth Elstob and other Anglo-Saxonists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who made functionalist arguments for the study of Old English and Anglo-Saxon literature.4 Modern scholars rightly emphasise Turner’s critical use and careful citation of primary sources, a characteristic also praised in the works of Hickes and other members of the Oxford

1 2 3 4

Turner, Anglo-Saxons, II:xii. Ibid., II.x–xi. Ibid., II.xii. Ibid., I:1; above, 19, 29–31.

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School. While Turner’s footnotes certainly contain numerous references to AngloSaxon manuscripts from the Cotton collection, they are also replete with references to the works of his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors. Notable among them are Smith’s edition of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Gibson’s Chronicon Saxonicum, as well as Wilkins’s Leges Anglo-Saxonicæ, references to which appear frequently in all four volumes.6 Turner’s reliance on these editions constitutes an affirmation of their scholarly worth and a guarantee to his readers that the authors display a standard of accuracy and scholarliness that Turner insists on for himself. In his fourth volume, which contains ‘as correct a picture of their manners, government, laws, literature, religion, and language, as the imperfect documents which remain will enable us to compose’, Turner cites the works of eighteenthcentury antiquaries as often as Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.7 In ‘Their Money’, for example, Turner supplements references to manuscript laws and charters with Samuel Pegge’s commentary on Anglo-Saxon gold coins, the manuscripts of the late Thomas Astle, and the opinion of an unnamed ‘antiquarian friend’ (perhaps Stebbing Shaw or Rogers Ruding) on the sceatta.8 His chapter on Anglo-Saxon architecture includes a quote from Andrew Ducarel on Greensted Church and an assertion that ‘the chief peculiarities of Anglo-Saxon architecture . . . [are] a want of uniformity of parts, massy columns, semicircular arches, and diagonal mouldings’, a paraphrase of John Carter’s argument in Ancient Architecture in England.9 Turner derives an exceptionally large proportion of his information on Anglo-Saxon costume, houses, furniture, luxuries, sports and amusements from the works of Joseph Strutt, and his footnotes in these and the chapters on music and painting suggest that Turner’s research was essentially a review of the manuscripts cited by Strutt in Horda Angel-cynnan.10 This might appear curious were it not for the fact that the two scholars shared a common approach to antiquarian research and a prose style that non-specialist readers found readable and accessible.11 In the end, John Niles’s observation that the appeal of The History of the Anglo-Saxons ‘lies not so much in its eloquent style . . . nor in original research . . . but rather in the straightforward and genial manner in which [Turner] sets forth what are largely the fruits of other persons’ labours, all of them sifted by his orderly mind’, is the most accurate assessment of Turner’s scholarship.12 5

Karen O’Brien, ‘English Enlightenment Histories, 1750–c.1815’ in The Oxford History of Historical Writing Volume 3: 1400–1800, ed. José Rabasa et al. (Oxford, 2012), 529–31; Horsman, ‘Origins’, 394; Louise D’Arcens and Chris Jones, ‘Excavating the Borders of Literary Anglo-Saxonism in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Australia’, Representations 121 (2013), 95–6; Donald White, ‘Changing Views of the Adventus Saxonum in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Scholarship’, Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971), 585–6. 6 Turner, Anglo-Saxons, I:279n53; II:ix. 7 Ibid., IV:v. 8 Ibid., IV:154–70. 9 Ibid., IV:451, 455–6; Andrew Coltée Ducarel, Anglo-Norman Antiquities considered, in a Tour Through Part of Normandy (London, 1767), 100; Carter, Ancient Architecture, 13–30. 10 Turner, Anglo-Saxons, IV:75–107, 444–51. 11 The British Critic 26 (1805), 182. 12 Niles, Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, 174. 5

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But Turner also indulged in the kind of Anglo-Saxonist celebrations of the nation’s past more commonly found in imaginative and political productions. His descriptions of Anglo-Saxon government and laws reflect pride in precisely the same sort of English exceptionalism admired by Montesquieu and Voltaire, and celebrated by legal Anglo-Saxonists from Fortescue-Aland to Burke. ‘Perhaps no country in Europe’, Turner claims, ‘can exhibit such an ancient record of the freedom of its people, and the limited prerogatives of its ruler’.13 Turner insists that the cyning’s rights were ‘definite and ascertained’, that the ‘gemot of the witan . . . resembled our present House of Lords’, and that the Anglo-Saxons instituted ‘the happy and wise institution of the ENGLISH JURY, which has contributed so much to the excellence of our national character, and to the support of our constitutional liberty’.14 Turner devotes a staggering 250 pages to the life and ‘moral character’ of Alfred the Great.15 His celebration of Alfred as a moral and political exemplar redirected energy he had previously channelled into a ‘tragedy on the life of Alfred’ that remained locked in a desk drawer while he strove to make a name for himself as a historian.16 A direct link can be drawn between Turner’s sentimental attachment to Alfred and the History, which he began after reading ‘Ragnar Lodbrog’s celebrated Death Song’.17 Convinced that Lodbrog had died in England and despairing of the ‘chasms and obscurities, in which this important part of an history, and the life of our great Alfred remained’, Turner set out to write a new history of Anglo-Saxon England that incorporated evidence from medieval literature and that looked beyond the borders of Britain.18 Turner nests his account of Ragnar Lodbrog and his sons within his history of the life and reign of Alfred the Great, rendering the second volume a composite of hero stories written in a manner that teeters uneasily (though enjoyably) between scholarship and romance.19 It was this combination that attracted readers. In his review of the first volume, John Pinkerton casually remarked that ‘the history of the Anglo-Saxons is so generally known, at least in its most important features, that we need not analyse the present production’, and proceeds to critique Turner’s use of several outdated secondary sources.20 The British Critic offered a generally positive assessment of the first three volumes, noting Turner’s readings of poetry and the Bayeux Tapestry as sources for serious historiography.21 A separate review of the fourth volume praised Turner’s ‘pleasing and expressive representations of domestic life’, expressed regret that it cannot extract the entire chapter on ‘Their Chivalry’, referred to Cædmon’s Turner, Anglo-Saxons, IV:270. Ibid., 270, 273, 335. 15 Two further Alfredian epics appeared in the years Turner was publishing his History: James Cottle, Alfred, an Epic Poem, in Twenty-Four Books (London, 1800) and Henry James Pye, Alfred: An Epic Poem (London, 1801). 16 BL Add. MS 51055, fols 1v–2r. 17 James Johnstone, Lodbrokar-Quida; or The Death-Song of Lodbroc; now first correctly printed from various Manuscripts, with a free English translation (1782). 18 Diary of Sharon Turner, Part 2, BL Add MS 81089, 599. 19 Turner, Anglo-Saxons, II:107–57. 20 The Critical Review 28 (1800), 17; BL Add MS 81089, 604–5. 21 The British Critic 26 (1805), 179–89, 379–88. 13

14

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Hymn as ‘striking’ and ‘well entitled to perusal’, and lamented that ‘Mr. Turner has neglected to give something like a catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Literature’ alongside extracts and translations that included the first appearance in print of passages of Beowulf.22 Although the first edition sold only 311 copies in two years, Longman, Hurst, Orme and Rees issued a second edition in two folio volumes in 1807. Writing to his neighbour Benjamin D’Israeli, grandfather of the future Prime Minister, Turner remarked that his ‘Chief additions . . . are on the origin of Romances . . . the Histy of the Anglo-Saxon Poetry and on the Histy of Christianity’.23 Turner refers to Judith as ‘a romance written when the old Anglo-Saxon poetry was still in fashion’ and compares Cædmon’s Hymn with Paradise Lost, concluding that these poems, along with Beowulf, represent evidence that ‘the Anglo-Saxons had begun to compose long narrative poems, full of fancy, which seem to be justly entitled metrical romances, unless the higher term of heroic poem be more appropriate’.24 In a chapter on the ‘copiousness’ of Old English, Turner highlights Anglo-Saxon words in the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Cowley, Pope, Thomson and Gibbon, carefully selecting figures from the English literary canon to assert the vitality and utility of Old English, just as Elizabeth Elstob had done ninety years earlier.25 It is this combination of literary studies, historiography and medievalism more than any other that appealed to Romantic-era readers and that led to the establishment of Turner’s work as the standard history of Anglo-Saxon England for much of the nineteenth century.26 The History of the Anglo-Saxons provides a useful lens through which to look back over the course of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxon studies and popular Anglo-Saxonism, and a reminder of their evolution. While Turner was pioneering in some aspects of his work – his contextualisation of Anglo-Saxon history within a broader historical narrative of the early medieval North, for example, or his presentation of and appreciation for Old English poetry – in terms of the content and arrangement of the four volumes, Turner’s primary achievement was one of synthesis. The accumulated scholarship of the past century enabled Turner to locate necessary materials and carry out his research, and to present the Anglo-Saxon period not as a series of quotations from chronicles and law codes but as a narrative fleshed out with the finer details of the lives of his own and his readers’ AngloSaxon ancestors. The eventual popularity of Turner’s History, like its ideologically motivated celebration of Alfred and the political institutions that distinguished the English from other European peoples and nations, indicates a readership that, as we have seen, had become accustomed to the regular appearance of Anglo-Saxon Ibid., 379–88. Turner to D’Israeli, 30 April 1807, Bodleian MS Dep Hughenden 245/4, 53–4. 24 Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1807), II:316–17. 25 Ibid., 467–71; Turner, Anglo-Saxons, 1st edn, IV:515–19. 26 MacDougall, Racial Myth, 92–5; Louise D’Arcens and Chris Jones, ‘Excavating the Borders of Literary Anglo-Saxonism in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Australia’, Representations 121 (2013), 85–106; Joep Leerssen, ‘Comparing What, Precisely? H. M. Posnett and the Conceptual History of “Comparative Literature”’, Comparative Critical Studies 12 (2015), 201–5. 22 23

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subjects in the popular and scholarly press, creative arts and political discourse. In short, Turner’s work demonstrates that the eighteenth century was anything but a dark period in Anglo-Saxon studies or popular Anglo-Saxonism. Like Hickes’s Thesaurus a century earlier, The History of the Anglo-Saxons testifies not only to the discoveries and advances in knowledge that made possible its creation, but to the dynamic and diverse popular ideas about the Anglo-Saxon past that inspired its author and that captured the intellect and imagination of its readers and reviewers. Eighteenth-century developments in Anglo-Saxon studies and the popular appreciation for Anglo-Saxon history and culture – each informing, inspiring and reinforcing the other – established for contemporaries a notion of what it meant to be English. If a nation was, as Samuel Johnson defined it in his Dictionary, ‘a people distinguished from another people; generally by language, original or government’, the English people of 1800 were, by definition, an Anglo-Saxon nation.27 Elizabeth Elstob, Edmund Gibson and John Fortescue-Aland had said as much almost a century earlier. Turner, a product of the antiquarian tradition and (like Joseph Strutt) a critical analyst of Anglo-Saxon texts, came to the same conclusion after surveying a somewhat larger body of evidence again in the 1790s. What is most telling about eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism is the fact that over the course of the century the Anglo-Saxons became an established feature of antiquarianism, historiography, the arts and politics; became, at least for literate elements of the population, popular. Anglo-Saxonism also became increasingly participatory. Just as national and local histories encouraged readers to conceive of and inhabit the English landscape in Anglo-Saxonist terms, so visitors to exhibitions of the Royal Academy and audiences at Drury Lane encountered interpretations of the AngloSaxon past that elicited feelings of pride in Anglo-Saxon character traits and values identified as their own. The language of politics demanded an acknowledgement of the Anglo-Saxon origins of England’s limited monarchy and common law from anyone who wished to participate in English or British political life. During the eighteenth century, Anglo-Saxonism was one element in identity formation for English people who, to borrow an expression from Kathleen Wilson, ‘positioned themselves in a narrative of the past’ in order to define themselves and their contemporaries in the present and for the future.28 We cannot, however, identify an Anglo-Saxonism. There was neither one definition of Anglo-Saxon history or culture, nor of Englishness, and it is unlikely that the Anglo-Saxon(ist) component(s) of any given person’s English identity matched anyone else’s. In the Introduction I outlined a distinction between ‘scholarly’ and ‘popular’ Anglo-Saxonism that the intervening chapters have necessarily undermined. My structuring of this study around modern academic disciplinary boundaries has, I hope, revealed the inability of mono-disciplinary approaches to grapple with the numerous, often conflicting influences that shaped any given expression of Anglo-Saxonism in eighteenth-century England or, for that matter, at any other time or in any other place. As Allen Frantzen and John Niles write of earlier and later Anglo-Saxonisms, the idea of England’s Anglo-Saxon 27 28

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755). Wilson, Island Race, 3.

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cultural inheritance was ‘a major historically contingent cultural construction’, but a construction that remains perpetually unstable.29 Between 1703 and 1805, AngloSaxonism provided English artists, writers and thinkers with a historically rooted language with which to respond to social, cultural, political and religious changes as England and Britain took on new roles in domestic and international arenas. The currency and potency of Anglo-Saxonism is founded on a plurality of AngloSaxonisms: it is an ideology that creates a shared Anglo-Saxon identity out of the disparate voices, perspectives, analyses, emotional engagements, and needs of those who participate in its constantly evolving articulation. In my exploration of some of the ways in which the idea of Anglo-Saxon England manifests itself in eighteenth-century English culture, I have argued for a re-evaluation of the significance of the early Middle Ages and of popular medievalism for a century not normally associated to any significant degree with either. My aim has been to suggest one potential methodology for studying an understudied cultural phenomenon. I have hinted at some of the questions that must arise from discovering and contextualising eighteenth-century AngloSaxonism in this way. There are, of course, any number of examples of AngloSaxonism not included in this book, from garden follies to map-making to theology, from Anglo-Saxonist feminism to Anglo-Saxonist colonialism. There is also the question of the relationship of Anglo-Saxonism to other eighteenthcentury medievalisms in England, Britain and elsewhere. If Anglo-Saxonism is a narrative uninterrupted and largely unimpeded by the Enlightenment, the links between early modern and Victorian Anglo-Saxonisms bear re-examination. New questions arise about the ways in which the cultural diffusion of ideas about Anglo-Saxon England and its relationship to Englishness that occurred over the course of the eighteenth century shaped nineteenth- and twentieth-century receptions and re-evaluations of those ideas, which continue to shape our own constructions and re-constructions of the medieval past. In 1714 John Fortescue-Aland wrote that ‘History and Antiquity is the Glass of Time’, a phrase that suggests the concurrent, overlapping temporalities that exist within any given re-membering of the Middle Ages.30 Over the course of the eighteenth century, English antiquaries, historians, artists and politicians presented the public with examples of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon institutions, character traits, and social and cultural values mirrored their own. In the process of editing law codes, establishing canons of criticism for antiquities and architectural remains, writing local and national histories, identifying and celebrating national heroes, and enquiring into the origins of the institutions and values that underpinned the modern state, eighteenth-century English AngloSaxonists produced scholarship, literature, art and political ideologies. In the process, they contributed to the formation of an idea of Englishness in which contemporaries were able to see in themselves a reflection of their Anglo-Saxon past, and in the Anglo-Saxon past a reflection of themselves.

29 30

Frantzen and Niles, eds, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, 11–12. Fortescue-Aland, Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, lxxxii.

Bibliography Manuscripts British Library Additional MS 48218, ‘Morley Papers. Correspondence and papers of the family of Parker, Barons Boringdon and Earls of Morley, of Saltram, co. Devon; 1648–1904’ Additional MS 51055, Diaries of Sharon Turner, 1828–1837 Additional MS 81089, Autobiography of Sharon Turner (1768–1847) Harley MS 1866, Facsimile Extracts from Textus Roffensis on Parchment by Elizabeth Elstob, c.1719 Harley MS 3779, Letters to Humfrey Wanley, 1692–1725 Harley MS 7055, Papers of Humfrey Wanley Stowe MS 750, Letters to Thomas Parker, 1704–39 Stowe MS 752–54, Letters to Charles Lyttelton, 1743–60 Stowe MS 940, Facsimile Extracts from Textus Roffensis on Paper by James Smith, 1712

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Society of Antiquaries of London MS 202, Letters mainly to John Thorpe, senior [Thorpe Bequest], 1705–50 MS 265, William Stukeley, ‘Minute Book of the Antiquarian Society London’, 1718–24 MS 268, A Register-Book of the Members of the Antiquary Society, 1718–41 Minute Books, 1718–1800

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Index absolutism  160–1, 183, 188, 192, 194 Act of Settlement (1701)  5, 160, 161, 162 Act of Union (1707)  5, 13, 33, 177, 190 Adams, Eleanor  15 Addison, Joseph  45–6 Alcuin 82 Alfred the Great  73, 79, 123–6 biography of by Sharon Turner  199 edited by Francis Wise  123 edited by John Spelman  17, 18, 123 edited by Thomas Hearne  36, 105, 123, 181 burial place  100 ‘cult’ of  17, 123, 179 dramatic representations of  105, 175, 199 Alfred 191 Alfred: A Masque  3, 12, 83, 124–6, 136, 176, 182–3, 190, 194 See also David Mallet; ‘Rule, Britannia!’; James Thomson Alfred the Great, Deliverer of his Country 175 Alfred the Great: or, The Danish Invasion 183 The Patriot King: or, Alfrid and Elvida 180–81 as founder of English navy  83, 119, 183–4 images of  106, 107, 123–6, 181, figs. 13, 19, 22 book illustrations  108, 116–8 history paintings  132, 133–5, 136 portraits 110–2 laws of  26–7, 86, 163, 167, 170, 173 as model king  75, 77, 126, 180 as national hero  8, 13, 134, 179, 181, 200

in novels  183, 189 poetic representations of  32–3, 123, 125, 179–82 romantic relationships of  185 sculptures of  123, 133 translation of Boethius  17 and University of Oxford  65 virtues of  78, 125, 183 Alfred the Great, Deliverer of his Country  175, 183 Alfred Jewel  3, 36, 53 Alhstan, Bishop of Sherburne  53 amateurism  11, 41, 70, 114 Ambrosius, Aurelius  76–7, 177 American Revolution  8–9, 186 Ames, Joseph  25 anachronism  108–10, 127, 137, 175–6 ancestry Anglo-Saxon  3, 16, 82, 132 and blood relation  31, 73, 174 Gothic  23, 158–9, 161, 191 imaginative engagement with  83, 84, 110, 137 and language  16, 35, 162 patriotic  23, 197 and place  67–8 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  17, 24, 33, 51, 53, 86, 87, 92, 94, 97, 102, 124 n.99, 164 Anglo-Saxonism artistic  see history painting; prints and engravings affective  38, 41, 104, 105 American 8–9 and Anglo-Saxon studies  2, 5, 10, 15–38, 69, 83, 105, 200–01 See also Old English; philology antiquarian  see antiquarianism definitions of  2–3

226

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distinct from Gothicism  157–60 dramatic  see drama exclusivity of  31 historiographical  73, 79–81, 83, 91, 95, 98, 102–3, 174 See also historiography inclusivity of  8, 31, 157 interdisciplinary nature of  6, 201–2 as lived experience  28–30, 83, 89–93, 95–6, 97–8, 102, 104, 113, 137, 201 and Old English studies  4–5 popular  32, 38, 69, 79, 105, 160, 200 and politics  7, 28, 31, 33, 38, 102, 105, 133, 156–96 See also constitution; kingship; law Stuart  5, 195, 202 Tudor  5, 195, 202 as unifying ideology  194–5, 196 Victorian 202 See also ancestry; Anglo-Saxonist; antiquarianism; Englishness; heritage; identity; medievalism; nationalism; polytemporality; race Anglo-Saxonist definitions of  xiii–xiv, 3 Anne, Queen  22, 23, 28, 30, 33, 161, 177, 181 Anselm, St  18, 111 antiquarianism as affective engagement  74, 84, 104 and amateurism  41 and Anglo-Saxonism  41, 42, 69, 98, 106–7, 201 collaborative nature of  35–6 and correspondence  19, 35–6, 37, 43 in drama  175, 175 n.108, 190, 190 n.178 Elizabethan  4, 36 and historiography  12, 73, 77–8, 81–5, 91, 103, 137 and imagination  69–70, 117 interdisciplinary nature of  49 and locality  41, 43, 95 and manuscript culture  41 negative attitudes toward  1, 11 as pastime  39 as patriotic activity  40, 98 and politics  33, 39, 159, 162 popularity of  28, 39, 46, 93, 113, 136 and print culture  12, 43–4, 72, 84, 115 and religion  54, 58

scholarly methods of  41, 45, 54, 64–5, 78, 85, 97, 110, 114, 175 and social class  28, 41, 48 and temporality  60, 74, 114–5 and visual culture  105–6, 107–15, 114 n.53, 117, 138–9 See also Society of Antiquaries of London; Spalding Gentlemen’s Society antiquities  45–68, 83–4, 108–10, 112–5 arms and armour  52, 62, 63, 64, 108–9, 112 crosses 56–7 fonts 55–6 jewelry  51–4, 61, 62 pottery  61, 62 reliquaries 58 tombs  25, 57, 64, 100 n.186, 110, 116, fig. 15 See also barrows; Bayeux Tapestry; coins; manuscripts Archaeologia  11, 49, 52, 59, 60 archaeology  2, 33, 40–1, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 61–4, 97 architecture  11, 36, 45, 64–8, 69, 86, 99, 101, 106, 112, 120, 136, 174, 198, 202 Arthur, King  32, 76–7 Asser  36, 111, 123–5 Astle, Thomas  58, 198 Astley, John  116 Athelney, Isle of  78, 119, 124, 181, fig. 19 Aubrey, John  60 Augustine, Saint  66, 106, 115–7, 132, 136, fig. 5 Ælfric  17, 20, 21, 54, 164 Ælle, King of Northumbria  89 Æthelflæd of Mercia  95 Æthelfrith of Northumbria  117 Æthelred, King (‘the Unready’)  47, 80, 83, 129, 130 Æthelstan, King  172 Æthelswith 54 Æthelwulf  54, 79 Baillie, Joanna  179, 185, 189–90, 191–2 Ballard, George  37, 41, 42 Bamburgh Castle  92 Bangor 117 barbarism  33, 34, 58, 77, 90, 93, 94, 111, 191

Index of art  54 of manners  26 of language  28 Barnard, Edward  117 Barrett, William  96–9, 102 Barrington, Daines  3, 25, 52, 84 barrows  11, 45, 61–4 Battle of the Books  34, 73 ‘The Battle of Maldon’  36, 83 Bayeux Tapestry  54–5, 109–10, 199 Beckford, William  133, 134 Bede  25–6, 51, 54, 76, 86, 87, 92, 94, 99, 102, 108, 109, 111, 163, 164, 198, figs. 5, 6, 7 Bedford, Hilkiah  23 Bell’s British Theatre  131, 175 Bentham, James  66–7, 101 Beowulf  20, 200 Bernicia  89, 92 Bertha, Queen of Kent  66, 79, 106, 116–7 Bewcastle Cross  56–7 Bicknell, Alexander  180–1, 185 Biddick, Kathleen  161 Bill of Rights (1689)  160 Birchall, James  131 Birinus, Saint  55–6, 100 Blackmore, Sir Richard  32, 123, 181–2, 189 Blackstone, William  13, 163, 169, 170–1, 172–3 Blakey, Nicholas  118–27, 129, 134, 136, figs. 18, 19 Bodleian Library  see Bodleian under libraries Bogdani, William  47 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, 1st Viscount  13, 180–1, 182–3 Bolland, Jean  18 Bosworth, John  1, 25 Bowyer, Robert  121, 135–6, 139, 192 Bowyer, William  43 Boydell, John  130, 133–4 Boydell, Josiah  130, 132 Brady, Robert  165 Brander, Gustavus  47, 58 Bristol  8, 72, 89, 96–8, 187 British Empire  5, 7–8, 12 n.45, 157, 176, 197 Britons (ancient)  7, 31, 32, 40, 61–2, 75, 76, 80, 81, 89–90, 93, 99, 118, 119,

227

120, 121, 122, 158, 170, 187, 189, 192 as term for modern British people  176–9, 191 Broadway, Jan  41, 85 Brooke, John-Charles  67–8, 69, 70, 74 Bromley, William  192 Brown, John  166, 178–9, 190, 191, 195 Browne, Sir Thomas  63 Brunanburh 92 Brydges, James  22 Burgess, Thomas  130 Burgh, James  168 Burghers, Michael  109, 123 Burgred, King of Mercia  52 Burke, Edmund  172, 199 Burney, Charles  193 Burney, Frances  191, 192–4 Burton Constable Hall  133 n.141 Butcher, Richard  93, 95 Bute, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of  188 Byrhtferth of Ramsey  56 Byrhtnoth (ealdorman)  67 cabinets of curiosities  45, 98 Cædmon 112 Cædmon’s Hymn 199–200 Caesar, Julius  61, 75, 118, 119 Camden, William  10, 16, 18, 33, 40, 50, 59, 84, 85, 86, 96 Canute  47, 49, 59–60, 77, 187 images of  106, 110, 111–2, 116–7, 132–3, 134, 136, fig. 14 Caroline of Ansbach, Princess of Wales 30–1 Carte, Thomas  80 Carter, John  68, 198 Cartwright, Major John  167–9 Cartwright, Thomas  43 Casali, Andrea  116, 130–1, 132–4, 136, fig. 21 Catholic Relief Acts (1778)  193–4 Catholicism  99, 100, 194 negative attitudes toward  18–9, 78, 80, 82, 189, 191–3 Cecil, William  10 Celsius, Anders  47 Celtic cultures languages and literatures  25, 191 law 158

228

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revivalism 190 Cenric 99 Ceolwulf, King of Northumbria  92 Cerdic 99–100 Chamberlayne, John  29 n.81 Charlett, Arthur  20 n.33, 36 charters  3, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 35, 36, 42, 44, 59, 71, 87, 91, 95, 101, 106, 109, 162, 163, 169, 187, 198 charter horns  59–60, 70 Chartham, Kent  61–2 Chatterton, Thomas  96–8 Christianity Anglo-Saxons convert to  56, 77, 79, 82, 117, 119, 132, 158 Britons convert to  119 and culture  100 and learning  82 See also St Augustine; Church of England; paganism; priests; Protestantism chronicles  34, 71, 73, 79, 100, 111, 189 editions of  10, 17, 33, 35–6, 91 used as source material  24–5, 53, 59, 78, 86, 123, 162, 192, 200 See also Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Church of England  6, 7, 19, 28, 31, 194 churches  see architecture See also ecclesiastical under antiquities Civil War (English)  5, 60, 107 Clarke, William  39, 43, 48–50, 82, 98, 164 n.37 class  8–9, 86 gentry  19, 37, 39, 48, 72, 85, 86, 91, 164, 166 middle  12, 37, 39, 72, 91, 119, 166 upper  37, 39, 46, 48, 72, 86, 91, 164, 166, 172 working  48, 61, 187 Clerk, Sir John  91 coins  45–50, 51–3 as aids to dating artefacts  59, 61 casts of  46 collections of  7, 45, 46–7, 49, 70, 98 hoards of  47–8 images of  50, 83, 106, 109, 110, 113, 117 and mints  8, 43, 46, 48 as portraiture  46, 110, 111 study of  see numismatics Coldingham Abbey  117, 118

Colley, Linda  6, 46, 185, 186 n.158, 191, 194 Combe, Charles  46, 49 constitution Anglo-Saxon  13, 78, 79, 156, 158, 160–2, 166–7, 193–4 English  28, 76, 157, 168, 180 evolution of  26–7, 160, 167, 169–70 and national character  161, 172, 195, 199 origins of  26, 28, 75, 89, 101, 118, 167, 184 Gothic  161, 162–3, 157, 158 immemorialism of  162 See also courts; jury; law; monarchy Conybeare, John Josias  1 Corfe Castle  116, 130 Cornwall  6, 8, 31, 52 coronation oath  19, 170, 182 Cotton Library  see Cotton under libraries Cotton, Sir Robert  35, 45, 46 county histories  see county under historiography courts legal  6, 18, 19, 60 royal  6, 10, 77–8, 182, 188 Croyland Abbey  17, 43, 58, 59, 64 Croyland Chronicle 17 Cumberland, Richard  186, 188–9 Cuthbert, St  25, 91, 126 n.111 da Costa, Emanuel Mendes  43 Danelaw  60, 89, 94, 170, 185, 187 danegeld 95 Danes dramatic representation of  178–9, 187, 189–91 as enemies of English nation  77, 90, 94 included in English nation  40, 81, 158 in local legend  95 raven banner of  117, 124, 175 d’Arnaud, Baculard  185 Deira 89 de Lolme, Jean-Louis  172, 196 Dering, Sir Edward  36 de Worde, Wynkyn  107–8 Dickinson, William  131 Dinshaw, Carolyn  40, 104 D’Israeli, Benjamin  200 Dodsley, Robert  118, 135

Index Dodsworth, Roger  18 Domesday Book  87, 101, 106 Dorchester 56 Douce, Francis  55 Douglas, David  5 n.16, 11, 15–6 Douglas, James  50, 61–4 Drake, Francis  47 drama  2, 3, 12, 13–4, 173–94 and antiquarianism  175 and historiography  105, 136, 161, 175–6 as political commentary  33, 125–6 See also Alfred the Great: Deliverer of His Country; Alexander Bicknell; John Brown; Frances Burney; Richard Cumberland; Aaron Hill; John Home; Charles Jared Ingersol; George Jeffreys; David Mallet; John O’Keefe; Ebenezer Rhodes; Nicholas Rowe; theatres; James Thomson; Thomas Warwick; Jane West; Ann Yearsley Drayton, Michael  109, fig. 10 Ducarel, Andrew Coltée  55 n.99, 111, 198 Dugdale, William  18, 43, 55, 86, 87 du Guernier, Louis  190 Dunstan, Archbishop  80, 111, 117, 132, 192–3 Durham  25–6, 42, 72, 91 Eadred, King  59 East Anglia  43, 81 Echard, Laurence  34–5, 71, 75, 76, 79–81, 82, 102 Edgar, King  22, 80, 95, 101, 129, 164 dramatic representations of  129–30, 184, 185 images of  116, 117, 129–31, 132, 133 n.141, 134, fig. 17 Edgar Ætheling  81, 127, 136, 186–7 Edmund, St  65, 96 Edmund I  117 Edmund Ironside  59, 77, 94, 187 Edward the Confessor  59, 60, 77, 80, 81, 108, 127 coins and medals of  45, 47, 48, 49, 50 n.76 dramatic representations of  187–9, 192 images of  111, 132, fig. 4 laws of  27, 170–1, 172

229

tomb of  57, 110, 116, fig. 15 Edward the Elder  79, 94–5, 97–8, 108, 117, fig. 3 Edward the Martyr  46, 80 images of  116, 117, 130, 132–4, 137 fig. 21 Edwards, Edward  116, 117, 133 Edwin, King of Northumbria  45, 79, 90, 92 dramatic representations of  33, 179, 184–5 Edwy 79 dramatic representations of  185, 192–4 images of  117, 132, 136 Egbert, King  46, 53 n.89, 75, 77–80, 82, 90, 92, 100, 101, 158, 165 images of  110, 111, 115, 117, fig. 12 Elfrida (Ælfthryth)  80, 129, 130–1 images of  116, 130–1, 130–3, 133 n.141, 134, 175 dramatic representations of  129, 136, 184–5 Elgiva (Ælfgifu)  79–80, 132, 136, 192–4 images of  132, 136 Elstob, Elizabeth  10, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26–35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 47, 90, 162, 164, 197, 200, 201 Elstob, William  10, 21–2, 24, 25, 39 Englishness  9–10, 28, 129, 201–2 and Anglo-Saxonness  3, 6, 8, 38, 40, 71, 81, 102, 103, 105, 195 and Britishness  7, 176–9, 195 historical nature of  12, 14, 74, 89, 202 engravings  see prints and engravings Essex, James  59, 66 Ethelbert, King of Kent  26, 66, 79, 80, 163 images of  106, 115, 116, 132, 136, figs. 5, 6 Ethelburga (Æthelburh) of Northumbria 92 Etheldreda, Saint  67 Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester  100–1 ethnicity  10, 31, 73, 81, 88, 160 Evelyn, John  45–6 exceptionalism English  14, 162, 184, 195, 199 British  184, 195 Exeter Book  43 exhibitions  105, 129–32, 135–9, 201 extra–illustration  111, 139

230

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Fagg, Charles  61 Fairfax, Thomas  60 Faussett, Bryan  50, 61–4 feudalism  76, 171 Filmer, Robert  160–1, 183 Finan, Bishop of Lindisfarne  92 Finch, Heneage, Earl of Winchelsea  51 Fleming, William  111 Folkes, Martin  48 Fortescue–Aland, John  9, 10, 13, 26–33, 40, 90, 160, 162, 163–4, 169–71, 199, 201, 202 Fountaine, Sir Andrew  22, 45, 50 Fox, Adam  74, 95 Fradenburg, Aranye  104 Frederick, Prince of Wales  30, 32, 123, 124, 176, 181–3 freeman status  166–7 French Revolution  14, 186, 188, 193 Freya  159, 190, 191 Fuller, Anne  175 n.108, 183, 189 Fulman, William  17 futurism 196 Gale, Roger  45–6, 91, 164 n.37 Gale, Samuel  59–60, 64, 164 n.37 Gale, Thomas  10, 17 Garrick, David  105, 126, 176 gavelkind  85, 94 genealogy  59, 60, 85–7, 89, 106 Gentleman’s Magazine  11, 44, 49, 53, 56, 114 Geoffrey of Monmouth  121 George I  4 n.13, 10, 13, 16, 23, 28, 30–1, 43 n.26, 106, 137, 162, 181 George II  30 George III  134, 167, 181, 188–9 George, Prince of Denmark (consort of Queen Anne)  22, 31–2, 181 German history  7, 31, 99, 122, 157, 158, 163, 172, 191 German language and philology  5, 25 German people  16, 23, 106, 197 Gerrard, Christine  33 Gibbs, James  159 Gibson, Edmund  19, 29, 35, 36, 40, 45, 90, 106, 137, 164, 169, 197, 201 edition of Anglo–Saxon Chronicle 17, 24, 33, 42, 198

edition of Britannia  10, 13, 16, 31–4, 55, 84–5, 162 Gildas  17, 76, 99 Glorious Revolution  4, 118, 160–2, 167 Godwin, Earl of Wessex  80 dramatic representations of  187–9, 192, 193, 194 Gordon, Alexander  57 Gordon Riots  186 Gothic language  17, 24 Gothic Revival  191 in architecture  64–8, 85, 101, 136 Gothicism  10, 13, 32–3, 157–60, 162–3, 174, 191 Gough, Richard 24, 25, 49, 55–6, 57, 59, 98 edition of Britannia  33, 40, 50, 84–5 Granger, James  111–2, 114, 138, 139 Graves, Richard  37 Gray, Thomas  66 Greensted Church  65, 198 Gregor, Francis  162 Gregory the Great  21, 53 Griffith, Guyon  49–50 Grigion, Charles, the Elder  118, 128, fig. 20 Gunhilda (daughter of Canute)  132–4 Guthrie, William  80 Hale, Matthew  169–71, 172, 174, 180 Hamilton, William  117, 131, 136, 192 Hanoverian dynasty  11, 30–2, 73, 106, 174, 181, 183 Hardicanute  57, 117 Harley, Robert, Earl of Oxford  22, 30 Harold II  47, 49, 77, 78, 80, 81,170 dramatic representations of  156, 186–7 images of  111, 126–8, fig. 20 Harris, Richard  19, 20 Harrod, William  93–5 Hartley, Elizabeth  131 Hasted, Edward  87 Hastings 106 Battle of  78, 117, 119, 126–8, 136, 186–7, fig. 20 Hayman, Francis  117, 118, 119, 121 n.85, 126–8, 129, 135, fig. 20 Hearne, Thomas  10, 35–7, 40, 71, 105, 123, 124, 126 n.111, 181 Hengist  7, 9, 33, 73, 79, 89–90, 93–4, 108, 128, 158, 177

Index images of  109, 110, 116, 119, 120–2, 134, fig. 8 Henry of Huntingdon  95, 97 Henry, Robert  2, 11, 81–3, 84, 91, 102, 135, 137 Heptarchy  75, 77, 79, 80–1, 82–3, 86, 158, 159, 165, 166, 170 visual representations of  116, 132, 136 heritage  7, 27, 33, 86, 89, 102–3 Hexham  66, 91–2 Hickes, George  5, 19–24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31–2, 33, 34, 35–6, 37, 44, 45, 60, 169, 197–8 Institutiones Grammaticæ AngloSaxonicæ et Mœso-Gothicæ 17, 19–21, 24 Thesaurus  1–2, 10, 15, 16, 21–4, 26, 38, 42, 50, 98, 109, 111, 164, 201, fig. 11 Higden, Ranulf  107–8, figs. 1, 2, 3, 4 Hill, Aaron  129–30, 175, 184 historiography 11–12 Anglo-Saxonist  73, 82 and antiquarianism  41, 50, 81–5, 199 county  11–12, 86–9, 89–93, 102, 175 divine providence in  75, 76, 100 of everyday life  82–3, 113, 135, 171 local  11–12, 85, 98, 175 as memorialisation  85, 95 national  11–12, 34–5, 73–85 See also histories of under England and sentiment  78–80, 83, 113, 129 urban  8, 72, 87–9, 93–102 history painting  12, 110, 128–39, 122, 131, 175 and book illustration  115, 118, 136 and historiography  132, 138 and patriotism  119–20, 129, 133 and print market  130, 134–5, 136, 137 See also James Birchall; Nicholas Blakey; William Bromley; Thomas Burgess; Andrea Casali; Edward Edwards; William Hamilton; Francis Hayman; Angelica Kauffmann; John Hamilton Mortimer; Robert Edge Pine; Jean François Rigaud; Thomas Stothard; Samuel Wale; Benjamin West; Richard Westall; Francis Wheatley Hoare, Henry  184 Holinshed, Raphael  108, 129 Holland, Philemon  33

231

Holmes, George  39, 43 Home, John  185, 191 homilies  17, 21, 22, 54 Hooke, Andrew  96–7 Horsa  7, 9, 62, 79, 108, 109, 110, fig. 8 Horsley, John  91 Horsman, Reginald  8–9, 10, 195 Howgrave, Francis  93 Hulme, Obadiah  167–8 Hume, David  11, 13, 72, 75, 77–81, 82, 85, 102, 107, 135–6, 138, 158, 165–7, 171, 192 Hutchinson, William  11, 56, 71, 89–93, 102, 103 Hyde Abbey  100 Ibbetson, James  162, 169 identity and Anglo-Saxon studies  19 Anglo-Saxonism and  8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 42, 104, 159–60, 176 British  6, 177–8 cultural  7, 10, 173 English  6, 9, 14, 31, 32, 64, 73, 88, 109, 157, 159, 62 gentry 85 historical  3, 70 local  41, 74, 85, 86, 103 multiplicity of  6, 7, 74 national  120, 173 and Old English  28–30 political  2, 7, 28, 162, 167, 176, 194–6 illustration in books  12, 45, 50, 76, 80, 83, 91, 99, 102, 105–18, 129, 131, 135–9, 175, 190 in manuscripts  43, 96 Ingersol, Charles Jared  192 n.191 Ingulph  17, 126 n.111 inheritance  see ancestry interdisciplinarity 1, 2, 6, 40, 49, 105, 156, 201 Ireland  6, 7 Ireland, William Henry  121 James II  19 Jarrow  66, 67, 92 Jeffreys, George  179, 184 Johnson, Maurice  6, 37, 40, 41, 43, 46, 65, 69, 70, 74, 91

232

Index

Johnson, Samuel  179–80, 201 Johnson, Walter  65 Judith  20, 200 Junius, Francis  17, 18, 24, 29, 34 juries  8, 167, 171, 184, 199 Kauffmann, Angelica  121, 131, 134–5, 136 Kemble, John Mitchell  1, 15 Kennett, White  19 Kent gavelkind tenures in  85, 94 given to Hengist  79, 93, 120–1, 158 histories of  86, 87 Keynes, Simon  17, 107 n.10, 115, 123, 135 Kidd, Colin  7, 19, 157, 160 King, Edward  51 kingship Anglo-Saxon  17, 77, 106, 187, 189, 193, 195 British (ancient)  76–7, 122 Christian  126, 194 divine  160, 161 dramatic representations of  33, 176, 179–89 elective  81, 90, 127–8, 158, 167, 186 and paternalism  126, 183 patriotic  33, 105, 180, 182, 187, 189, 195 See also Bolingbroke virtuous  77, 183, 184–5, 189 warrior  76–7, 121 See also Alfred the Great; Hanoverian dynasty Knapton, John and Paul  118–9, 122, 123, 129, 135, 181 Lambarde, William  10, 17, 86, 162, 164, 170 landholding and political participation  86, 165, 166, 169 landscape as historical space  12, 74, 88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 98 and identity  74, 88, 91, 102–3 imaginative engagement with  11–12, 89, 92, 102–3, 201 and memory  102–3 law Anglo-Saxon  26–7, 35, 81–2, 102, 115, 163, 165, 169, 171, 194, 198

editions of  25, 86, 164, 202 Leges Anglo–Saxonicæ Ecclesiasticæ & Civiles  25, 162, 164, 71 canon 192 English  9, 27, 161, 170 civil  192, 194 common  8, 72, 160, 169–73, 180, 201 evolution of  26–7, 169–70, 172 and Old English  15–6, 27–9, 32 Anglo-Saxon origins of  13, 74, 89, 160, 162, 170, 171, 199 and English character  174, 195 Gothic 172 kings subject to  185–9 lawyers  13, 27 28, 29, 32, 40, 87, 171 Leicester, Earls of  85, 159 Leland, John  36, 91, 97, 131–2 Le Neve, Peter  39, 61, 164 n.37 Lethieullier, Smart  64, 65 Lewis, John  61 Lhwyd, Edward  56 liberty  8, 27, 76, 78, 79, 133, 157–61, 167–8, 170–1, 176, 180, 184, 199 libraries  19, 20, 112 antiquarian 43 Bodleian  20, 24, 35, 45, 123 British Museum  84 cathedral  23, 42–3, 72 collegiate  23, 25, 113 Cotton  42, 45, 113 Harleian  22, 24, 42, 45 lending 72 private  24, 42–3, 43 n.26 Royal 42 Lichfield Gospels  109, fig. 11 Lincolnshire  43, 55–6, 65, 93–4 Lindisfarne  91, 92 Lindisfarne Gospels  84 Lippincott, Louise  107, 119–20, 133 literary galleries  121, 135–6, 138, 139, 192 Locke, John  160–1, 167, 183 Lockman, John  80, 85, 116, 118 London  6, 8, 43, 44, 47, 65, 119–20, 178, 179–80, 188 Loutherbourg, Phillipe-Jacques de  136 Lucius (British leader)  177 Lye, Edward  5 n.16, 24–5, 32, 40–1, 43, 163, 164 Lyttelton, Charles  25, 41, 42, 43, 55, 65–8

Index Mabillon, Jean  18, 23, 25 MacDougall, Hugh  13, 157 Macklin, Robert  137 Macpherson, James  98, 107, 191 Madden, Frederic  1 Madox, Thomas  39 Mallet, David  124, 125, 176 See also James Thomson Mallet, Paul Henri  25, 158 Malmesbury 58 Manning, Owen  25 manuscripts catalogues of  1, 15, 17, 20, 34 circulation of  19, 41, 43 editing of  24, 25 forged 96–8 illuminated  83–4, 109–10, 112–3 as mode of publication  14, 41–2, 69 study of  18, 23, 28, 44, 56, 68, 163, 198 maps  33, 60, 84, 87, 102, 106, 116, 202 Marshall, Thomas  17 Mary II  19, 161 Mason, William  9, 130–1, 175, 184 Mayer, Joseph  62 medievalism  38, 44, 74, 95, 102–3, 114, 137, 157, 159, 167, 181, 200, 204 and Anglo-Saxon studies  26, 30 and antiquarianism  44, 60, 68–70 definitions and characteristics of  2–6, 15–16, 104–5, 139, 176 and religion  100 n.185 Mercia  46, 70, 81, 94–5, 170, 179, 189 Millar, John  166 Milles, Jeremiah  43, 53, 56 Milner, John  11, 56, 99–102 minstrels  68–9, 123, 125, 183 Molesworth, Robert  160–1 monarchy elective  81, 90, 127–8, 158, 167, 186 limited  8, 26–8, 106, 118, 133, 161, 182–3, 186, 192, 201 monasteries  18, 43, 58, 59, 67, 94, 100, 132, 192 Montesquieu  13, 158, 171–2, 199 Montfaucon, Bernard de  54, 109, 110, 111 Moore, John  43 Mores, Edward Rowe  112 Moreton, John  95 Mortimer, Cromwell  65 Mortimer, Thomas  116–7

233

museums  43, 49, 50 n.76, 58, 62 British Museum 45, 54, 83, 84 national histories  see histories of under England nationalism  6, 9–10, 31, 88, 157, 195 See also English; national under identity navy  7, 14, 83, 107, 119, 182, 183–4 Nennius   17 Newcastle  44, 92 Newgate Prison  188 Newton, Isaac  23 Nichols, John  44, 84, 87, 91, 55–6, 57, 70, 164 Nicolson, William  6, 10, 19, 37 English Historical Library 33–5 Niles, John  5–6, 41, 198, 201–2 Nixon, James  131 nonjurors  19, 35 Norman Yoke  27, 76, 156 North, George  50 Northumberland  89–93, 102 See also Bamburgh Castle; Brunanburh; Jarrow; Lindisfarne; Newcastle; William Hutchinson Northumbria  48, 89–93 novels  2, 174, 176, 183, 189 Nowell, William  10, 17 numismatics  8, 11, 22, 33, 36, 37, 38, 42, 44, 45–50, 51, 52, 71, 82–3, 112, 198 oak trees  122 Oakham 46 O’Brien, Karen  71–2, 76 Oddune (Odda), Earl of Devon  123–5 Odin  99, 159, 190, 191 Offa, King of Mercia  53, 81 O’Keefe, John  185 Old English  15–26, 28–31 dictionaries  17, 24, 163 functionalist arguments for study of  29–30, 32, 38, 162, 197, 200 grammars  15, 17, 21–2, 86 and legal study  19, 27–9, 164, 171 as living language  29–30, 38, 104, 200 poetry  18, 20 printing of  17–8 scholarship  1, 4, 16, 20–21, 112–3 teaching of  9, 21, 30 Ossian  see James Macpherson

234

Index

Oswald, King of Northumbria  18, 96, 108, fig. 7 Oswy, King of Northumbria  94 Oxford School  2, 10, 19, 25, 33, 37, 38, 39, 41 Oxford University  16–25, 34, 65, 123 paganism  32, 35, 51, 64, 99–100, 177, 183, 189–91, 194 See also Freya; Odin; Thor palaeography  2, 22, 23, 50, 52, 56, 113 Papillion, David  47, 65 Parker, John and Theresa  134 Parker, Matthew  7, 36 Parker, Thomas  16, 30–1 Parliament  5, 7, 160–9, 185–6, 189 Anglo-Saxon  8, 76, 80, 115 composition of  165–9 origins of  28, 48, 165 n.39, 172 See also witenagemot pastism  161, 167, 196 patriotism  9, 157, 185, 195 Anglo-Saxonist  14, 22–3, 38, 83, 89, 90–1, 167 and antiquarianism  38, 40, 42, 64, 70, 98 and commerce  46 in drama  33, 173, 175–9, 181, 183, 189 and historiography  82, 98 in poetry  32–3, 98, 181 religious  102, 194 and visual art  106, 111, 119–20, 130, 133, 135, 137 See also patriotic under kingship patronage 12 and antiquarianism  11, 54 of books  25, 87 of history paintings  132, 133, 134, 135 Paulinus 92 Peada, King of Mercia  94 Peck, Francis  93–5, 99, 102–3 Pegge, Samuel  6, 43, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52–4, 57, 68, 69, 84, 198 Peltz, Lucy  111, 114–5 Penda, King of Mercia  92, 94, 108 Pennant, Thomas  57 Percy, Thomas  25, 68–9, 82, 174, 191, 195 periodicals  43–4, 47, 58, 69, 72, 138 provincial  44, 72 Peterborough  43, 94, 95

Phillips, Mark Salber  79, 82, 83, 129 philology  1, 4, 5, 16, 19–21, 24, 27–8, 30, 31, 33, 35, 38, 39, 71, 73, 104, 105, 112, 123 See also Old English Picts  76, 90, 93, 177 picturesque 68 Pine, Robert Edge  134 Pinkerton, John  158, 191 n.186, 199 Pitt, William  133 poetry  2, 10, 12, 16, 18, 28–9, 32, 38, 50, 68–9, 96–8, 105, 107, 130, 131, 136, 176, 200 Alfredian  32–3, 123, 125, 179–82 Old English  18, 176, 199, 200 politeness  28, 32, 37, 47, 73, 82, 113, 137, 197 polytemporality  60, 71, 93 Pope, Alexander  118, 200 Pownall, Thomas  59 presentism  16, 161, 167, 196 priests  96, 99, 100, 188, 190–4 prints and engravings  129, 130, 131–6, 138–9 antiquarian  12, 59–60, 106–7, 110 collecting of  119, 120 English History Delineated 118–29 portrait  111–2, 115, 175, 184 See also Robert Bowyer; John Boydell; Josiah Boydell; Michael Burghers; Louis du Guernier; Charles Grignion the Elder; Robert Macklin; Simon François Ravenet; William Wynne Ryland; Gérard Scotin; William Sharp; George Vertue Protestantism  7, 18, 26, 31, 194 race  8, 10, 81, 88, 157, 160, 186 n.158, 195 radicalism  8, 13, 14, 31, 161, 165, 167–9, 171, 172, 179, 188, 194 Ramsey  56, 57 Rapin, Paul Thoyras de  11, 85, 90 Dissertation sur le Whigs et les Torys 161–2 The History of England  53, 74–82, 115, 120, 121, 123–4, 126 n.111, 127–8, 158, 165 abridgements of  116 and visual culture  110–11, 118, 128–9, 131, 138, figs. 12, 13, 14 See also Nicolas Tindal

Index Rashleigh, Philip  52 Ravenet, Simon François  118 Rawlinson, Christopher  17–8, 21 readers and reading of antiquarian texts  22, 37, 110, 114–5, 198–201 literacy rates  72 of historiography  2, 12, 71–2, 79, 81–2, 83, 88–9, 107, 120 of periodicals  44, 48 popular  29, 129, 198–201 provincial  44, 48, 72 and social class  37, 72, 76, 85, 87, 103 and viewing  25–6, 83–4, 105–6, 110, 111, 116, 118, 136–9 reformism  27, 161, 168, 188, 194, 196 republic of letters  2, 22, 48 Reynolds, James  32 Reynolds, Joshua  134 Rhodes, Ebenezer  175 n.108, 183, 185 Richardson, Jonathan  120 Richardson, Thomas  85 Rickman, Thomas  66 Rigaud, Jean François  121 n.85, 131 Ripon  66, 94 Ritson, Joseph  23, 29 Roach Smith, Charles  62 Robbins, James  101 Roberts, James  131 Rochester  30, 43, 62 Romans (ancient) antiquities of  48, 51, 61–2, 66, 91–2, 97, 122 culture of  26, 35, 37, 40, 51, 102, 123 history of  37, 80, 89, 93, 99–100, 107, 119 law of  192 Romanticism  78, 132, 174, 200 Rowe, Nicholas  33, 175, 176–8, 190, 195 Rowena  79, 107–8, 119 images of  115, 119–22, 124, 128, 132, 134, 136, 137, figs. 1, 18 Royal Academy of Arts  116, 121, 129, 131, 132, 134, 135, 139, 201 Royal Society  35, 43, 58, 61 Royal Society of Arts  120 Ruding, Rogers  198 ‘Rule, Britannia!’  7, 83, 105, 184 runes  34, 47, 47 n.55, 55, 56, 56 n.101, 57, 159

235

Russell, William Augustus  116, 117 Ruthwell Cross  56–7, 70 Ryland, William Wynne  131, 134 Rysbrack, Michael  133, 159, 175 St Albans  66, 123, 191–2 St Amand, George  164–5, 165 n.39 saints  18, 37–8, 55, 100, 111 Savile, Henry  79 Saxons (ancient)  76–7, 108–9, 162–3, 197 Scheemakers, Peter  133, 184 Scotin, Gérard  118, figs. 18, 19 Scotland  6, 7, 8, 31, 84, 98, 177, 197 Scots (ancient)  76, 82, 90, 93, 189 Scott, Sir Walter  2 sculpture  2, 12, 57, 98, 123, 133, 159, 184 Secker, Thomas  25 Selden, John  17 Seven Years’ War  178, 184 Shakespeare, William  107, 121, 200 Sharp, William  134 Shaw, Stebbing  198 Shelton, Maurice  22, 23 n.46, 32, 33, 37 Sigebert, King of the East Saxons  92 Smalbroke, Samuel  24 Smith, Anthony  9, 88 Smith, George  25–6 Smith, James (serving boy of William and Elizabeth Elstob)  30 Smith, John  22, 25–6, 42, 56, 94, 198 Smith, R. J.  19, 157 Smollett, Tobias  128 Society of Antiquaries of London  11, 25, 39–70, 84, 100 n.186 Society of Artists of Great Britain  116, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 139 Somers, John  19, 31 Somner, William  17, 21, 24, 29, 85, 163, 164 Southampton  88, 88 n.107 Southgate, Richard  49 Spalding, Lincolnshire  41, 46, 74 Spalding Gentlemen’s Society  6, 43, 44, 47, 59, 65 Speed, John  45, 109, fig. 9 Spelman, Sir John  17, 18, 36, 77 n.42, 123 Squire, Samuel  158, 168–9 Stamford, Lincolnshire  43, 89, 93–6 Stapleton, Thomas  108, figs. 5, 6, 7 Stationers’ Company  134

236

Index

Stothard, Thomas  131, 175 Stow, John  97 Stowe, Buckinghamshire  85, 133, 159, 184 Strutt, Joseph  2, 11, 13, 91, 102, 107, 110, 122, 135, 137, 138, 171, 173, 198, 201 The Chronicle of England 83–4 Horda Angel-cynnan  13, 112–4, 139, 198, fig. 16 Stukeley, William  46, 50, 51, 58, 59, 65, 91 sublime 91 suffrage 168–9 Sweet, Rosemary  5–6, 11, 39–40, 64–5, 72, 166 Sweyn Forkbeard  81, 94 Swift, Jonathan  28–9, 34, 47 Sydney, Temple  117 Tacitus  122, 163 Tanner, Thomas  18, 20 n.33, 164 n.37 taxation  37, 95 Temple, Richard, Viscount Cobham  85, 133, 159, 175 Temple, William  34, 73–4, 157–8 Textus Roffensis  30, 36, 43 Thanet  61, 108 theatres  173–6, 192 n.191 Covent Garden  130 Drury Lane  33, 105, 119, 121, 124, 126, 129, 176, 183, 201 Haymarket 176 Sadler’s Wells  183 Theobald, James  65 Thomson, James  7, 83, 124–6, 180, 182–3, 194 See also Alfred: A Masque under Alfred the Great; David Mallet; ‘Rule, Britannia!’ Thor  159, 190, 191 Thoresby, Ralph  30, 43, 45 Thorkelin, Grímur  57 Thorpe, Benjamin  164 Thorpe, John  43, 63 Thwaites, Edward  10, 19–22, 24–6, 29, 42 Thynne, Thomas  42–3 Tindal, Nicolas  74–5, 79, 80, 165 Toller, Thomas Northcote  25 Tories  14, 19, 75, 160, 161–2, 165 n.39, 194 Toswell, M. J.  30

tour guides  12, 87, 99, 101, 102 tourism  84, 86, 87–9, 90, 91, 92–3, 95, 102–3 trade  2, 8, 50, 69, 82–3, 97, 113, 133, 166, 182 translations textual  3, 17–26, 31, 32, 33–4, 54, 55, 74–5, 80, 82, 84, 96, 98, 108, 109, 117, 163–4, 200 visual  137, 139, 175 Trewhiddle Hoard  52 Turner, Sharon  1, 2, 14, 69, 113–4, 171, 197–201 Tyrrell, James  165 Vernon, Edward  184 Verstegan, Richard  106, 108–10, 117, 122, 159, 175, 180, fig. 8 Vertue, George  43, 47, 65, 76, 110–2, 115–6, 123, 124–5, 136, 175, 184, figs. 12, 13, 14, 15 Vetusta Monumenta  57, 65 n.167, 110, fig. 15 Voltaire  13, 171–2, 199 Vortigern  76–7, 79, 93, 158 images of  115, 119, 120–2, 124, 128, 132, 134–5, 136, fig. 18 Wale, Samuel  116–8, 135, 136, fig. 17 Wales  6, 7, 84 Walker, Obadiah  17, 18 Walker, Thomas  123 Walpole, Horace  119 Walpole, Robert  14 Wanley, Humfrey  1, 5, 10, 15–6, 19–20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 29, 39, 42–3, 113 Warton, Thomas  29, 66, 174 Warwick, Thomas  191, 192–3 Wessex  53, 89, 100, 115, 170, 186, 187, 188, 194 West, Benjamin  117, 131–2, 133–4, 135, 136, fig. 22 West, James  37 West, Jane  187, 188 Westall, Richard  136 Wharton, Henry  18 Wheatley, Francis  136 Wheelocke, Abraham  17, 25, 164 Whig  14, 19, 75–6, 160, 161–2, 165 n.39, 169, 173, 177, 180, 194

Index historical narratives  79, 160, 162 Whitaker, John  8 White Horse of Uffington  50 n.75 Wihtred, King of Kent  108 Wilfrid, Bishop and Saint  66, 67, 91–2, 94, 95 Wilkins, David  25, 32, 42, 44, 162, 164, 165, 169, 171, 198 William I  27, 47, 49, 118, 127, 164, 170 images of  116, 117, 132, 136 William III  32, 161 William of Malmesbury  79, 100, 123 Willis, Browne  43, 164 n.37 Winchester  8, 88, 89, 96, 99–102, 194

237

Winchester Cathedral  55–6, 100–2 Wise, Francis  24, 36, 40, 50, 123–4 witenagemot  127, 158, 162–9, 170, 176, 180, 186, 194 Woolf, Daniel  11, 40, 58, 71–2, 107 Wotton, William  22–4, 26, 32, 37 Wright, James  18 Wright, Thomas  62, 63 Wulfstan, Archbishop of York  21, 67 Wulfstan, St  18 Yearsley, Ann  5, 187–9, 191, 192, 193 Yeavering 92 York  10, 47, 59, 65, 66

Medievalism I Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination edited by David Clark and Nicholas Perkins II Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau Alicia C. Montoya III Memory and Myths of the Norman Conquest Siobhan Brownlie IV Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages Louise D’Arcens V Medievalism: Key Critical Terms edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz VI Medievalism: A Critical History David Matthews VII Chivalry and the Medieval Past edited by Katie Stevenson and Barbara Gribling VIII Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors, 1730–1840 Peter N. Lindfield IX Petrarch and the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France: Translation, Appropriation, Transformation Jennifer Rushworth X Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century Andrew B.R. Elliott XI Translating Early Medieval Poetry: Transformation, Reception, Interpretation edited by Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons XII Medievalism in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones Shiloh Carroll

XIII William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas Ian Felce XIV Derek Jarman’s Medieval Modern Robert Mills XV François Villon in English Poetry: Translation and Influence Claire Pascolini-Campbell XVI Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones KellyAnn Fitzpatrick XVII Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood edited by M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus

M E D I E VA L I S M

David Matthews, Professor of Medieval and Medievalism Studies, University of Manchester.

This book explores scholarly Anglo-Saxon studies and imaginative Anglo-Saxonism during a century not normally associated with either. Early in the century, scholars and politicians devised a rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon inheritance in response to the Hanoverian succession, and participants in Britain’s burgeoning antiquarian culture adopted simultaneously affective and scientific approaches to AngloSaxon remains. Patriotism, imagination and scholarship informed the writing of Enlightenment histories that presented England, its counties and its towns as Anglo-Saxon landscapes. Those same histories encouraged English readers to imagine themselves as the descendants of Anglo-Saxon ancestors – as did history paintings, book illustrations, poetry and drama that brought the Anglo-Saxon past to life. Drawing together these strands of scholarly and popular medievalism, this book identifies Anglo-Saxonism as a multifaceted, celebratory and inclusive idea of Englishness at work in eighteenthcentury Britain. DUSTIN M. FRAZIER WOOD is a Senior Lecturer in English at the

University of Roehampton. Cover illustration: Joseph Strutt, facsimile engraving of the incipit to Luke from the Lindisfarne Gospels, engraved for The Chronicle of England (1777), volume 1, plate 20. By kind permission of the Society of Antiquaries of London. COV E R D E S I G N : S I M O N LO X L E Y

An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and Wood, Dustin668 M Mt razier Anglo-Saxonism and the o Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Boydel Hope Ave, Rochester NYdea 14620–2731 (US)

& Brewer, ncorporated, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central, http //ebookcentral proquest com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail action?doc D 6145919 Created rom nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-08-06 00 12 04

DUSTIN M. FRAZIER WOOD

Copyright © 2020. Boydell & Brewer, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

ong before they appeared in the pages of Ivanhoe and nineteenth-century Old English scholarship, the AngloSaxons had become commonplace in Georgian Britain. The eighteenth century – closely associated with Neoclassicism and the Gothic and Celtic revivals – also witnessed the emergence of intertwined scholarly and popular Anglo-Saxonisms that helped to define what it meant to be English.

Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-century Britain

A valuable addition to both our understanding of Anglo-Saxonism, and of eighteenth-century culture. Eloquently written, the book will be the key reference for any future understanding of the way in which eighteenth-century culture received the Anglo-Saxon period.

DUSTIN M. FRAZIER WOOD

Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-century Britain