Abstract
The reconstitution of continuities, of a suitable history which links present to past, characterizes most societies in moments of transition. The past alone, observed Disraeli, energizes an atrophied race when all else fails. An invented past, wisely manipulated, not only 'explains the present', but 'moulds the future'.' Invented continuities, to paraphrase Hobsbawm's over-used expression, are most likely to develop in modern communities.2 Indeed, the quest for historic continuities is to be looked for especially in those places and at those times in which a national identity emerges and crystallizes.3 But not only new or immature nations, or groups seeking to attach themselves to a real or an imagined 'nation', legitimize innovation by inventing a tradition. In some of the oldest national communities, exemplified in the 'mature' nation-states, identities have been challenged, defined and re-defined in diverse processes of inclusion (in the nation), exclusion (from it) and transformation.4 The case of the construction of an integrative English identity, through the possession and reinvention of an Anglo-Saxon inheritance, may illustrate the usages of the remote past in a society which was the first to be exposed to the related effects of industrialization and modernization. Although a great deal has been written on the meaning of medievalism in the 'age of industry', most studies of the Victorian usages of the Middle Ages focus on neo-feudalism and the cult of chivalry related to it.5 There is not one monograph on the development of Saxonism, or English Teutonism and the cultural significance of the veneration of pre-Norman England. The few studies we do have fix on the period after 1870, thus conveniently relating the preoccupation with ethnicity to modern imperialism and the ascendant, new 'democratic' Toryism.6 Earlier and formative phases in the evolution of a racial notion of Englishness are quite neglected.
Published Version
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