However, it is only part of a more comprehensive self-definition of Englishness developed in the nineteenth century but traceable to earlier centuries, which formed the bedrock of British attitudes to Continental Europe until at least the Second World War. Origins And Establishment Of Anglo-Saxonism 3 As early as the fourteenth century, as illustrated by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the myth had taken hold that the England of sturdy yeomen was essentially an Anglo-Saxon country, although it had succumbed to the ‘Norman yoke’ in160;1066.[ 5][ 5] Deanne Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare,...suite The myth received new impetus in160;1534, when Henry160;VIII’s break with Rome prompted English scholars to seek evidence of an essentially independent Anglo-Saxon church that could serve to legitimise the (re-)establishment of a separate English church.[ 6][ 6] David160;C.
Douglas, English Scholars, 1660-1730, rev. 160;ed. ,...suite The following century the myth of an ancient Anglo-Saxon society of simple but jealously independent small-holders suffering under the Norman yoke again served a political purpose by opponents of the Stuarts who they likened to the Normans. Subsequently the Whigs and radicals embraced the myth, which provided a common narrative in the many national histories published in the eighteenth century. [ 7][ 7] Reginald Horsman, ‘Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in...suite160; 4 The appearance of an English translation of Germania by the late Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus and in160;1776 the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which drew liberally from Germania, added new underpinnings to the myth by presenting the ancient Germans as suitable ancestors for England’s Anglo-Saxons. Gibbon, who acknowledged Tacitus as the first modern historian, endorsed his view that the Germans had established a primitive society of free men based upon the principles of justice, equality and fairness. The Germans were poor, brutal and illiterate, and lived in a state of nature, but they ‘found compensation for this savage state in the enjoyment of liberty.’[ 8][ 8] Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,.
..suite Accordingly, ‘the most civilised nations of modern Europe issued from the woods of Europe; and in the rude institutions of these barbarians we may still distinguish the original principles of our present laws and manners.’[ 9][ 9] Ibid. , p. 160;349. .
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