Has not every restitution of the ancient Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the 8th century?
-- Thomas Jefferson, August, 13, 1776

Although the concept of a distinct, superior Anglo-Saxon race, with innate endowments enabling it to achieve a perfection of governmental institutions and world dominance, was a product of the first half of the nineteenth century, the roots of these ideas stretch back at least to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those Englishmen who settled in America at the beginning of the seventeenth century brought as part of their historical and religious heritage a clearly delineated religious myth of a pure Anglo-Saxon church, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they shared with their fellow Englishmen an elaborately developed secular myth of the free nature of Anglo-Saxon political institutions. By the time of the American Revolution Americans were convinced that Anglo-Saxon England before the Norman Conquest had enjoyed freedoms unknown since that date. The emphasis was on institutions rather than race, but since the sixteenth century, both on the European continent and in England, the Anglo-Saxons had also been firmly linked to the Germanic tribes described by Tacitus.

The first enthusiastic English interest in Anglo-Saxon England was a product of the English Reformation. As early as the 1530s the Saxon church was studied to provide propaganda to justify Henry VIII's break with Rome. The main object of the research was to show that the English church was returning to the purer practices of the period before 1066. Supposed Anglo-Saxon precedents were used to support the argument that England had cleansed the Roman Catholic Church of the abuses introducted through the centuries of papal power.

The key figure in establishing a historical base for the new Anglican church that emerged under Elizabeth was Archbishop Matthew Parker. To justify the Elizabethan church settlement, Parker became a major patron of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, collecting manuscripts, encouraging the study of the Anglo-Saxon language, and publishing texts. Depending heavily on the help of his secretary, John Joscelyn, Parker effectively initiated the serious study of pre-Norman England. Although the object of Parker's group was to establish the antiquity of the customs of the new English church, his efforts also stimulated an interest and pride in general English history in the Anglo-Saxon period. John Foxe, in his Acts and Monuments (1563), emphasized the early development of English church practices, but he also stressed the uniqueness of the English and thier nature as "a chosen people," with a church lineage stretching back to Joseph of Arimathea and his supposed visit to England, and with John Wyclif as the true originator of the Reformation. The religious propagandists of the late sixteenth century defended a church that was particularly English in its inspiration. Whatever the errors of the rest of Europe, it was believed that the English had cleansed of corruption a church whose roots stretched back to shortly after the time of Christ.

The interest in Anglo-Saxon religious sources, which helped to justify the break with Rome, also eventually helped overturn the Arthurian legends, which had dominated medieval accounts of the origins of the English people. Rather than the traditional story of the settlement of England by Brutus, his Trojans, and Britons, which had been given its greatest elaboration by Geoffrey of Monmouth, emphasis now shifted to the Germanic tribes as colonizers of Anglo-Saxon England. In emphasizing the Germanic origins of the English, antiquarians of the early seventeenth century linked the English arguments to the general Germanic movement in Europe and ultimately to Tacitus.

Lauding the peculiar qualities of the Germanic people had been common on the Continent since the early years of the Reformation; German reformers drew an analogy between the earlier "Germanic" or "Gothic" destruction of the universal Roman Empire and the new destruction of the universal Roman Church. Theories were advanced which foreshadowed the ultra-Teutonism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1580 Goropius Becamus, a Flemish physician, argued that German was the first of all languages and had been spoken in the Garden of Eden by Adam. This argument was too outlandish even for most Teutons, but Goropius's emphasis on the great antiquity and excellence of the German language gained many followers in England as well as on the Continent. Throughout the seventeenth century Continental arguments in praise of the Germanic heritage were cited in English works on the origins and institutions of the Anglo-Saxons.

The linking of superior institutions to a particular people was given a major impetus in England by the writings of Richard Verstegen and William Camden. In 1605 Verstegen dedicated his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence to James I, "descended of the chiefest blood royall of our ancient English-Saxon Kings." Verstegen wrote with passion of England's Germanic and Anglo-Saxon past, the Germanic roots of the English language, and, surprisingly for this early date, the common racial origin of the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Using Tacitus as his source, he described the courage and high principles of the Germanic tribes, and he emphasized that the English, like the Germans, were an unmixed race; the great invasions of England by the Danes and the Normans merely reunited old brethern. Discussions of the English as a perfect blend of the great northern peoples was not common until the nineteenth century, and Verstegen foreshadowed later racial interpretations of the German and Saxon past.

William Camden did not espouse the Germanic cause with the same vigour and consistency as Verstegen, but in his Britannia he helped to overturn medieval accounts of the English past by his attack on the theory of descent from Brutus and his Trojans. Later, in his Remaines concerning Britaine, he argued that the English were descended from a great German people, and he saw God's hand in the guiding of the Angles and Saxons to England. Both Verstegen and Camden were interested in the special characteristics of the English as a people as well as in the institutions of the Anglo-Saxon period.

The emphasis on the Anglo-Saxons and a vigourous branch of the sturdy Germanic tree continued as one thread in the political arguments of the seventeenth century. As yet, not all agreed that political liberty had been brought to England by the Anglo-Saxons (Sir Edward Coke traced English liberties back long before that time), but the emphasis on Anglo-Saxons as particularly able Germans now became a commonplace in writings on English history. The primary source for Germanic characteristics was Tacitus's Germania, which was constantly used over the following centuries to defend the idea of the Germans as a freedom-loving, noble race. "In the peoples of Germany," wrote Tacitus, "there has been given to the wrold a race untainted by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no one but themselves." This "pure" race, he argued, had a high moral code and profound love of freedom and individual rights; important decisions were made by the whole community. These ideas were woven into seventeenth-century discussions of Anglo-Saxon political institutions; "some have sent us to Tacitus and as far as Germany to learn our English constitution" was the comment of an English pamphleteer.

In the first half of the seventeenth century the political and legal history of the Anglo-Saxons became a central issue in the growing rift between Parliament and the Crown. Parliamentarians found in the supposed antiquity of Parliament and of English common law a rationale for opposition to royal pretensions. The scholarly basis for the opposition to the king was often provided by the research or men associated with the Society of Antiquaries. Deeply involved in the basic work of the society were Sir Robert Cotton, John Selden, and Sir Henry Spelman: Cotton blamed the loss of the legal privileges of the Saxon period on the Norman Conquest; Selden praised Anglo-Saxon law in contrast to the later developments of royal absolutism; and Spelman emphasized the oppression of post-Conquest feudal tenures and bcame and ardent advocate of the Anglo-Saxon language.

As royal pretensions increased in the first decades of the seventeenth century, the parliamentarians defended English rights as rooted in the immemorial law and custom. Anglo-Saxon history was corrupted to provide a defence for parliamentary arguments. Two famous documents -- the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum and the Mirror of Justices -- whose true origins were late medieval were used to bolster the claims that King Alfred had instituted annual sessions of Parliament and universal male suffrage, and that the House of Lords had been a part of the English Constitution since the time of Edward the Confessor.

The most famous of the parliamentarians who used and developed a historical myth to resist the king was Sir Edward Coke. Coke stressed the antiquity of the common law, the common law courts, and the House of Commons, but he was not in the tradition of those like Verstegen who saw a Germanic origin for much that was best in England. Coke was more peculiarly English in his arguments; he traced the history of the common law of England back before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to time immemorial.

Ultimately, sharp differences developed among those who opposed royal power. Coke believed that the common law had survived unscathed from the most distant times and should at all costs be protected; but the Levellers thought that the common law had been corrupted by post-Conquest tyranny, and that it should be swept away. The arguments of the Levellers and their successors were ultimately to be of more importance to the American colonists than those of Coke, though Coke did much to popularise the idea of the supreme abilities of the Anglo-Saxons. Like the later colonial revolutionaries, the Levellers believed that the excellent government which had existed before the Norman Conquest had to be restored by abolishing all the abuses that had crept into English law and government since that time. But, whatever the arguments as to the state of England prior to the Anglo-Saxons and on the condition of England after the Norman Conquest, there was general agreement that the England of the Anglo-Saxons had been a country in which the citizens were protected by good laws and in which representative institutions and trial by jury flourished. The myth of a pure Anglo-Saxon church, developed in the sixteenth century, was in the seventeenth century joined by a more powerful myth of free Anglo-Saxon government.

When in England the violence and turmoil of a half century subsided in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, there emerged a classic "Whig" view of the past. In this view a golden age of good government had existed in England prior to the Norman Conquest. The Conquest had eroded English liberties, but had been followed by a long struggle for the restoration of good government, of which the foundation had been the Magna Carta and the capstone the seventeenth-century victories over the usurpations of the Stuarts. As a result of these victories England was a nation with a continuity of law and institutions stretching back more than a thousand years, a nation inhabited by Anglo-Saxons who had always been freedom-loving, and who had always exhibited an outstanding capacity for good government.

Not all Englishmen accepted the classic Whig view. There were anti-Whigs, like Thomas Hobbes, who saw Anglo-Saxon society in a truer light, and there were also the "Real Whigs" or "Commonwealthmen," who believed that the struggles of the seventeenth century had failed to restore to England the liberties that had existed before the Norman Conquest. The Real Whigs were often more enthusiastic about the Anglo-Saxons than those who accepted the more general Whig interpretation of the past, for they were anxious to contrast the Anglo-Saxon government with the government accepted by modern Englishmen. The Real Whigs also wrote of the Germanic peoples from whom the Anglo-Saxons had sprung. Particularly influential was Robert Molesworth's Account of Denmark, published in the 1690s, which praised "the northern nations" for introducing the arts of good government and foreshadowed the eighteenth century interest in the Scandinavian peoples as part of a dominant Germanic family.

In the seventy years after 1660 the myth of Anglo-Saxon England flourished in English politics, and fascination with the period was heightened by a flowering of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, particularly at Oxford. In these years the study of the Anglo-Saxon language and sources was advanced by a whole group of prominent scholars, including Francis Junius, Edward Thwaites, George Hickes, and Humphrey Wanley. These scholars did nothing to correct the prevailing myths concerning Anglo-Saxon freedom, and their linguistic studies did much to expand the interest in links between the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic peoples. The eighteenth-century English view of the Anglo-Saxons was a mythical one produced by two centuries of religious and political conflict and reinforced by the image of the Germanic peoples that originated with Tacitus and was elaborated by a whole serious of post-Reformation Continental writers.

As colonial Englishmen the settlers in America fully absorbed the mythical view of the English past developed between 1530 and 1730. They perceived the Anglo-Saxons only through the distortions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious and political controversy and through its supporting scholarship. They imbibed the general Whig theory of history, but where they differed most sharply from the majority of Englishmen was in eventually accepting the minority English viewpoint that the English constitution had not been cleansed of the religious and political abuses that had emerged since the Conquest. In the mid-eighteenth century it was the English radicals, the Real Whigs, who appealed most strongly to Americans dissatisfied with their relationship to the English political establishment. For a time the colonials, like the English, were proud of their constitution as settled by the Glorious Revolution, but by the time of the American Revolution they wholeheartedly welcomed the views of those English radicals who were asking for a reform of the English system in order to restore its pristine Anglo-Saxon vigour.

The books which established a defended the Whig view of English history were readily available and popular in colonial America. Law, the training ground for so many Revolutionary politicians, was the most traveled route to Anglo-Saxon England. Colonial law students were weaned on the Institutes of Sir Edward Coke, particularly "Coke on Littleton," the standard first law text in the colonies. Jefferson admired "old Cooke" all his life, and shortly before he died expressed the view that while Coke had made good Whigs of American lawyers, the shift to Blackstone (whose first volume was published in England in 1765) had helpted to produce Tories in America as well as in England. The pamphlets of the Revolutionary era are filled with citations from Coke, yet Blackstone also believed in the freedom of the Anglo-Saxon period and stressed the merits of Tacitus's depcition of the early Germanic tribes.

American lawyers also learned of the supposed freedoms of pre-Conquest England from a variety of other texts on English land tenure. At the heart of the Whig writings on feudalism was the belief that the feudal system was introduced into England only at the time of the Norman Conquest. Anglo-Saxon England, according to this view, was a land of yeoman farmers. To many Americans the sweeping away of entail and primogenture after the Revolution eliminated the last remnants of the feudal system and restored the fredoms of the period before 1066. The works of Sir Henry Spelman and Sir John Dalrymple, which were well known in the colonies, depicted Anglo-Saxon England as a land free from the burdens of feudalism.

The colonists believed fully that the Anglo-Saxons were a particularly successful branch of the freedom-loving Germanic peoples described by Tacitus. Tacitus's Germania was readily available in colonial America, often in translation, and was enjoyed by many, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Tacitus's ideas also reached the colonists through a variety of other books. When Montequieu, in L'espirt des lois, used Tacitus for his explanation of the influence of the Germanic peoples, he was following a trend rather thank breaking new ground. Montesquieu's popularity, however, helped confirm the view that the British political system could be traced to the woods of Germany.

More generally read than Montequieu was Paul de Rapin-Thoryas's History d'Angleterre, which was translated into English in 1726. Rapin was very popular in the colonies. He presented a thoroughly Whig view of English history, emphasizing that the Anglo-Saxons were Tacitus's Germans, creating the basis of English parliamentary government in a new homeland. The effect of Rapin's work was enhanced in the colonies on the eve of the Revolution by the publication of the English radical Catherine Macaulay's History of England. Again liberty was depicted as traveling with the Anglo-Saxons from the woods of Germany across the sea to England.

The flow of works across that Atlantic was particularly strong on the eve of the Revolution. A pamphlet which was subsequently woven into the very fabric of Revolutionary constitutonal argument was the Historical Essay on the English Constitution, published in London in 1771. This radical publication achieved considerable popularity in both England and the United States. It carried praise of Anglo-Saxon institutions to the extreme in discussing the origins of the English constitution. The Anglo-Saxon England described here was a democratic country of united local communities, meeting in an annual parliament and enjoying trial by jury: "if ever God Almighty did concern himself about forming a government for mankind to live happily under, it was that which was established in England by our Saxon forefathers." The Normans, the pamphleteer argued, had brought political and religious oppression to England and had inaugurated a long, continual struggle between Saxon freedom and Norman tyranny.

When in the early summer of 1776 Pennsylvania representatives were preparing to meet to draft their influential new constitution, an anonymous author in Philidelphia summarized the arguments of the Historical Essay, with his own comments, to guide the Pennsylvanian in their constitution-making. This pamphlet by "Demophilus" was entitled The Germanic Principles of the Ancient Saxon, or English Constitution. It was issued just after the printing of the Declaration of Independence, and the author included that document at the end of his own work. The Pennsylvanians, he argued, should need little convincing that "this ancient and justly admired pattern, the old Saxon form of government, will be the best model, that human wisdom, improved by experience, has left them to copy."

The extensive pamphlet and protest literature of the 1760s and 1770s revealed the extent to which hte colonists had learned the lessons taught by the Whig interpreters of English history and, in particular, by the eighteenth-century Real Whigs. The revolutionaries drew their precedents and principles from a wide variety of historical and contemporary sources, but whatever their various inspirations there was a strong, general belief that they were acting as Englishmen -- Englishmen contending for principles of popular government, freedom, and liberty introduced into England more than a thousand years before by the high-minded, freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons from the woods of Germany. The various ingredients in the myth of Anglo-Saxon England, clearly delineated in a host of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works, now appear again in American protests: Josiah Quincy, Jr. wrote of the popular nature of the Anglo-Saxon militia; Sam Adams stressed the old English freedoms defended in the Magna Carta; Benjamin Franklin emphasized the freedom the Anglo-Saxons had enjoyed in emigrating to England; Charles Carrol depicted Saxon liberties torn away by William the Conquerer; and Richard Bland argued that the English constitution and parliament stemmed from the Saxon period. Patrick Henry was reputed to have been licensed to practice law after a month or two studying "Coke on Littleton" and a digest of the Virginia Acts, and he wrote his resolution against the Stamp Act on the fly leaf of Coke's famous work. George Washington admired the pro-Saxon history of Catherine Macaulay, and she visited him at Mount Vernon after the Revolution.

The vision of heroic, freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon England permeates the arguments of the Revolutionary generation, but it is in the writings of Thomas Jefferson that the theme appears most strongly, and he best reveals the form in which the myth was transmitted to future generations. Although Jefferson read deeply in the works of the classic parliamentary propagandists of the seventeenth century, his predeliction was not for Standard Whig interpretations of the period after 1688, but for those radical Real Whigs who argued that many of the corruptions introduced into the English constitution after the Norman Conquest still existed in the eighteenth century. The Anglo-Saxons, thought Jefferson, has lived under laws based on the natural rights of man; after 1066 these rights had been eroded by the impositions of kings, clerics, lawyers, and by the whole system of feudalism.