The Romans can be studied without apology. Vikings are marketed with cinematic enthusiasm. Celts are endlessly romanticised, their mystique carefully preserved. But introduce the Anglo-Saxons, the civilisation-forming population that gave England (and, consequently, much of the world) its language, law, and cultural and political seedbeds, and just watch the institutional mood darken. Cambridge and Nottingham Universities are just the latest to have found the very phrase ’Anglo-Saxon’ sticking in their institutional throats.
Across academia, heritage bodies, and cultural bureaucracies, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is being methodically edged out of polite usage. University departments quietly rename themselves. Museum labels are sanitised. School materials grow evasive. In its place comes the bloodless substitute: ‘early mediaeval English,’ a term so neutered it could describe anyone and, therefore, means absolutely nothing. We are assured this is scholarly refinement. It is nothing of the sort. It is historical airbrushing driven by ideology.
I recently bought a biography of King Æthelstan, the first monarch of a united English nation. It purports to be a formative study of this most influential of Anglo-Saxon kings. The sleeve notes positively gush: “England’s founding father deserves this book: at once scholarly and accessible.” Also: “A fascinating, meticulously researched and vital new study.” But, in the introduction, the author himself states that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has, recently, become ‘controversial’, citing the rise of extremism as a reason not to use the term.
The author goes on to assert that “any notion that tenth century England was homogenous in racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, or religious terms, is radically misplaced. Æthelstan knew this better than anyone.” Did he now? I’d like to know how a 21st century academic knows what made a 10th century English king think like a civil servant wearing a lanyard.
The historical reality is straightforward. After Rome’s withdrawal from the island of Britain in the 5th century, Germanic migrants—Angles, Saxons and Jutes—settled in significant numbers. They established the kingdoms that, eventually, became England. They forged Old English, the linguistic ancestor of modern English. They shaped legal codes, land systems, and governance structures. Even England’s name is theirs. This is not scanty nationalist mythology. It is the consensus of chronicles, archaeology, place-name studies, and genetic research. On average, 25%-40% of the modern British DNA is still attributable to the Anglo-Saxons, 1600 years after their first settlement. That is across the whole island of Britain. When one goes further to the south and the east of Britain (i.e., present day England), that percentage is significantly greater.
Yet in elite discourse, the Anglo-Saxons are endlessly qualified into near non-existence. They were not a people but a ‘network.’ Not settlers but ‘cultural transmitters.’ Not demographically meaningful but merely ‘symbolically dominant.’ One could be forgiven for suspecting that the goal is not accuracy but dilution.
The intelligentsia’s discomfort is not about evidence. It is about implications. To acknowledge a foundational Anglo-Saxon ethno-cultural core is to concede that Britain, like every historic nation, emerged from particular peoples and not abstract processes. That continuity exists. That heritage has demographic as well as institutional roots.
But this jars with the governing worldview of the contemporary Anglophone elite, who prefer their respective nations to be framed as administrative constructs: fluid, interchangeable, and morally weightless. In that worldview, majority European ancestry is something to be obfuscated rather than championed. Foundational status implies legitimacy; legitimacy implies inheritance; inheritance implies boundaries. Thus, they have the incentive to rhetorically thin the founders out.
As ever, the American culture wars have further poisoned the well. In the United States, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ became entangled with critiques of ‘WASP power’ and racial hierarchy (the acronym ‘WASP’ stands for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Rather than disentangle historical terminology from modern political misuse, British institutions have imported this anxiety wholesale. The solution was not clarification but avoidance. If extremists misuse a term, the term must go.
If activists dislike a label, the label is retired. Historical precision becomes subordinate to reputational risk.
What makes the pattern unmistakable is its asymmetry. No campaign exists to rename the Roman Empire for fear of imperial associations. No one proposes retiring the word ‘Viking’ because of raiding ultra-violence. Indigenous ethnonyms worldwide are defended—quite rightly—as essential to cultural dignity. Only the Anglo-Saxons are deemed too dangerous to name. Sensitivity, it seems, only operates in one direction.
Strip away the academic phrasing, and something cruder emerges: an almost reflexive suspicion of the historical consciousness among ordinary people. For many Britons, Anglo-Saxon heritage is simply part of the national story: a matter of language, ancestry, and place. But elite commentary often recasts such identification as reactionary, exclusionary, or intellectually ignorant. Pride in minority heritage is celebrated wholeheartedly as empowerment, whereas pride in majority heritage is pathologised as grievance. The message lands clearly—some pasts are safe to honour; others must be handled with embarrassment.
Of course, Britain’s population history, like that of any other nation, is mixed. Anglo-Saxon migrants integrated with Romano-British populations. Later came Norse settlement, then Norman (who were themselves of Norse heritage), and centuries of further exchange. But mixture does not erase formative influence.
The modern English language remains structurally Germanic. The earliest English law codes are Anglo-Saxon. Settlement patterns, shire systems, place names, and many imperial measurements trace back to their original governance. Fusion occurred, unquestionably, but it happened around a dominant cultural framework established by the ancestors of the modern English, ancestors whose identity our elite institutions now dare not name. Complexity, in this debate, is rarely used to add layers. It is used to subtract foundations.
When elites grow visibly uncomfortable with the historic majority, public trust corrodes even further. People know when their inheritance is being downsized. They notice when institutions speak more confidently about Britain’s culpabilities than its civilisational formation. They hear the hesitation around naming the very population that made England culturally, linguistically, and politically possible, while immigrant communities are lionised time and again. Erasure rarely announces itself. It treads softly, through euphemism, substitution, omission. Delete the word. Blur the category. Reframe the founders as a footnote. And then insist nothing has been lost.
Despite the fever dreams of the clerisy, none of this requires chauvinism or racial mysticism. England’s story is cumulative: Brittonic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Norman, global. A confident nation can hold all of these threads without embarrassment. But confidence requires proportion. The Anglo-Saxons were not the only makers of England, but they were the pivotal ones. To treat them as linguistically awkward or politically inconvenient is to demote history to fashion. A civilisation unsure how to name its founders is a civilisation unsure of itself. And when the people notice that hesitation, they draw their own conclusions—not just about the past, but about the class now tasked with narrating it.
The Vanishing Anglo-Saxon
Detail from Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Entries for the years 824 to 833. Abingdon, mid eleventh century, housed in the British Library.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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The Romans can be studied without apology. Vikings are marketed with cinematic enthusiasm. Celts are endlessly romanticised, their mystique carefully preserved. But introduce the Anglo-Saxons, the civilisation-forming population that gave England (and, consequently, much of the world) its language, law, and cultural and political seedbeds, and just watch the institutional mood darken. Cambridge and Nottingham Universities are just the latest to have found the very phrase ’Anglo-Saxon’ sticking in their institutional throats.
Across academia, heritage bodies, and cultural bureaucracies, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is being methodically edged out of polite usage. University departments quietly rename themselves. Museum labels are sanitised. School materials grow evasive. In its place comes the bloodless substitute: ‘early mediaeval English,’ a term so neutered it could describe anyone and, therefore, means absolutely nothing. We are assured this is scholarly refinement. It is nothing of the sort. It is historical airbrushing driven by ideology.
I recently bought a biography of King Æthelstan, the first monarch of a united English nation. It purports to be a formative study of this most influential of Anglo-Saxon kings. The sleeve notes positively gush: “England’s founding father deserves this book: at once scholarly and accessible.” Also: “A fascinating, meticulously researched and vital new study.” But, in the introduction, the author himself states that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has, recently, become ‘controversial’, citing the rise of extremism as a reason not to use the term.
The author goes on to assert that “any notion that tenth century England was homogenous in racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, or religious terms, is radically misplaced. Æthelstan knew this better than anyone.” Did he now? I’d like to know how a 21st century academic knows what made a 10th century English king think like a civil servant wearing a lanyard.
The historical reality is straightforward. After Rome’s withdrawal from the island of Britain in the 5th century, Germanic migrants—Angles, Saxons and Jutes—settled in significant numbers. They established the kingdoms that, eventually, became England. They forged Old English, the linguistic ancestor of modern English. They shaped legal codes, land systems, and governance structures. Even England’s name is theirs. This is not scanty nationalist mythology. It is the consensus of chronicles, archaeology, place-name studies, and genetic research. On average, 25%-40% of the modern British DNA is still attributable to the Anglo-Saxons, 1600 years after their first settlement. That is across the whole island of Britain. When one goes further to the south and the east of Britain (i.e., present day England), that percentage is significantly greater.
Yet in elite discourse, the Anglo-Saxons are endlessly qualified into near non-existence. They were not a people but a ‘network.’ Not settlers but ‘cultural transmitters.’ Not demographically meaningful but merely ‘symbolically dominant.’ One could be forgiven for suspecting that the goal is not accuracy but dilution.
The intelligentsia’s discomfort is not about evidence. It is about implications. To acknowledge a foundational Anglo-Saxon ethno-cultural core is to concede that Britain, like every historic nation, emerged from particular peoples and not abstract processes. That continuity exists. That heritage has demographic as well as institutional roots.
But this jars with the governing worldview of the contemporary Anglophone elite, who prefer their respective nations to be framed as administrative constructs: fluid, interchangeable, and morally weightless. In that worldview, majority European ancestry is something to be obfuscated rather than championed. Foundational status implies legitimacy; legitimacy implies inheritance; inheritance implies boundaries. Thus, they have the incentive to rhetorically thin the founders out.
As ever, the American culture wars have further poisoned the well. In the United States, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ became entangled with critiques of ‘WASP power’ and racial hierarchy (the acronym ‘WASP’ stands for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Rather than disentangle historical terminology from modern political misuse, British institutions have imported this anxiety wholesale. The solution was not clarification but avoidance. If extremists misuse a term, the term must go.
If activists dislike a label, the label is retired. Historical precision becomes subordinate to reputational risk.
What makes the pattern unmistakable is its asymmetry. No campaign exists to rename the Roman Empire for fear of imperial associations. No one proposes retiring the word ‘Viking’ because of raiding ultra-violence. Indigenous ethnonyms worldwide are defended—quite rightly—as essential to cultural dignity. Only the Anglo-Saxons are deemed too dangerous to name. Sensitivity, it seems, only operates in one direction.
Strip away the academic phrasing, and something cruder emerges: an almost reflexive suspicion of the historical consciousness among ordinary people. For many Britons, Anglo-Saxon heritage is simply part of the national story: a matter of language, ancestry, and place. But elite commentary often recasts such identification as reactionary, exclusionary, or intellectually ignorant. Pride in minority heritage is celebrated wholeheartedly as empowerment, whereas pride in majority heritage is pathologised as grievance. The message lands clearly—some pasts are safe to honour; others must be handled with embarrassment.
Of course, Britain’s population history, like that of any other nation, is mixed. Anglo-Saxon migrants integrated with Romano-British populations. Later came Norse settlement, then Norman (who were themselves of Norse heritage), and centuries of further exchange. But mixture does not erase formative influence.
The modern English language remains structurally Germanic. The earliest English law codes are Anglo-Saxon. Settlement patterns, shire systems, place names, and many imperial measurements trace back to their original governance. Fusion occurred, unquestionably, but it happened around a dominant cultural framework established by the ancestors of the modern English, ancestors whose identity our elite institutions now dare not name. Complexity, in this debate, is rarely used to add layers. It is used to subtract foundations.
When elites grow visibly uncomfortable with the historic majority, public trust corrodes even further. People know when their inheritance is being downsized. They notice when institutions speak more confidently about Britain’s culpabilities than its civilisational formation. They hear the hesitation around naming the very population that made England culturally, linguistically, and politically possible, while immigrant communities are lionised time and again. Erasure rarely announces itself. It treads softly, through euphemism, substitution, omission. Delete the word. Blur the category. Reframe the founders as a footnote. And then insist nothing has been lost.
Despite the fever dreams of the clerisy, none of this requires chauvinism or racial mysticism. England’s story is cumulative: Brittonic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Norman, global. A confident nation can hold all of these threads without embarrassment. But confidence requires proportion. The Anglo-Saxons were not the only makers of England, but they were the pivotal ones. To treat them as linguistically awkward or politically inconvenient is to demote history to fashion. A civilisation unsure how to name its founders is a civilisation unsure of itself. And when the people notice that hesitation, they draw their own conclusions—not just about the past, but about the class now tasked with narrating it.
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