As the first century drew to a close, the historian Tacitus composed a short book, Germania. In it he tried to shame his fellow Romans by touting the superior morality of Northern barbarians.
Thus with their virtue protected they live uncorrupted by the allurements of public shows or the stimulant of feastings. Clandestine correspondence is equally unknown to men and women. Very rare for so numerous a population is adultery, the punishment for which is prompt, and in the husband's power... No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted. Still better is the condition of those states in which only maidens are given in marriage, and where the hopes and expectations of a bride are then finally terminated. They receive one husband, as having one body and one life, that they may have no thoughts beyond, no further-reaching desires, that they may love not so much the husband as the married state. To limit the number of their children or to destroy any of their subsequent offspring is accounted infamous, and good habits are here more effectual than good laws elsewhere. (Tacitus 1942)
A skeptical reader of “Clandestine correspondence is … unknown” might object that, being illiterate, ancient Germans could not correspond at all. Such a reader would make a genre error. In Germania Tacitus was using the already-ancient trope of contrasting louche, luxurious urban manners with simple rustic virtue.[1] Though enlivened by second-hand ethnographic details, Germania is a work of didactic fiction. It is important for what follows to remember that Tacitus’ fictional Germany was built against Rome, and that everyone who took it up later drew on this contrast. Tacitus’ imaginary Germans were manly, independent, courageous, and self-governing. Status differences were relatively small, ostentation discouraged.[2] All these points were meant to rebuke Romans.
Germania was lost until 1425. After its rediscovery, the first to make use of it were German Protestants who, whether from naiveté or opportunism, took its description of ancient Germans at face value. The book let them “claim that they had once been not only the equals but even the superiors of their Italian tormentors” (Benario 2004). This idea that an early and pure Christianity survived in the fastnesses of Northern Europe, uncorrupted by ever-decadent Rome, would come in handy later.
In the 19th century a number of English historians appropriated Germania for similar purposes. They decided that the English of late antiquity were German migrants and belonged to the same social and cultural pattern, which let them use Tacitus to supplement the extremely scant archive on English society and politics before the 1066 conquest. John Mitchell Kemble’s The Saxons in England, first published in 1848, leans heavily on Tacitus to describe a society of free men who held “land within the limits of the community” in which each was “entitled to vote with his fellows upon all matters concerning the general interests of the community.” “He is at liberty to make his own alliances, to unite with other freemen in the formation of gilds or associations for religious or political purposes” (Kemble 1876, 132–33). John Richard Green’s 1874 Short History of the English People tells the story with more literary panache:
For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England itself… [to] the heart of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the northern seas. (Green 1895 10)
In their villages lay ready formed the social and political life which is round us in the England of to-day. .. the "township," … formed a complete and independent body... Within the township every freeman or ceorl was equal. It was the freeman who was the base of village society. He was the "free-necked man" whose long hair floated over a neck which had never bowed to a lord. He was the "weaponed man" who alone bore spear and sword, and who alone preserved that right of self-redress or private war which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless outrage. (Green 1895, 10–12)
… But even in the earliest forms of English society of which we find traces this right of self-defence was being modified and restricted by a growing sense of public justice. (Green 1895, 9)
“Never bowed to a lord” was the tendentious claim that, despite archaeological and literary evidence to the contrary, pre-Norman English were not really feudal. “The eorl was distinguished from his fellow-villagers by his wealth and nobler blood … but his claim to precedence rested simply on the free recognition of his fellow-villagers.” Green does describe two lower classes – landless agricultural workers and slaves – but his emphasis an idealized egalitarian society of free small farmers.[3] Saxonism was an implicit, and sometimes explicit, rebuke of the Norman-descended feudal aristocracy that still exercised considerable power in Britain in the 19th century, and useful for a middle class that wanted to claim, however fancifully, descent from pre-Norman English.
This freeman is most emphatically gendered. Writes Kemble,
The natural divisions into which all human society must be distributed … are the Free and the Unfree, those who can protect themselves and those who must be in the protection of others. Even in the family this distinction must be found, and the wife and son are unfree in relation to the husband and the father; they are in his mund [protection]. From this mund the son indeed may be emancipated, but not the wife or daughter... Married to one free woman who shares his toils, soothes his cares, and orders his household, he becomes the founder of the family—the first unit in the state: the son who springs from this marriage, completes the family, and centres in himself the blood, the civil rights and the affections of his two progenitors. It is thus, through the son, that the family becomes the foundation of the state.(Green 1895)
Lest we miss the point, Kemble glosses this last sentence with “It is probably in this sense that the Hindu Institutes assert, “Then only is a man perfect when he consists of three persons united, his wife, himself, and his son.” Manu, ch. ix. 45.”
It is worth pausing to consider the relations of authority here. On the one hand, it is possible to understand these alleged Saxons as precocious moderns. In other words if one of the problems of the British 19th century, broadly speaking, is how to build a coherent society as the glue of feudalism dissolves – widening suffrage, a mobile urban working class, the weakening confessional hegemony of the state church – then Saxonism provides a reassuring answer: yes of course we English can do it, because it is in our blood. Feudalism, the argument went, was not the true pattern of English society, but a temporary French imposition. In that connection we can link Saxonism to the ideological category of modernity, that is the ideal of a society of rational, independent individuals, held together only by broad, formal institutions like law and markets (in contrast, always, to “custom” or a “traditional society” in which people are tightly bound to kin, Lord, priest, and inherited practice). This will be an important use for economist Alfred Marshall. Up to this point, then, the independent, responsible, self-controlled Englishman sounds like the liberal ideal of John Stuart Mill, and could be easily extended to women in their capacity as competent adults. But for many Victorian thinkers, men are only free when they rule women. As we have seen this particular theme can be traced straight back to Tacitus, who celebrated the alleged fidelity of German wives. Thus we cannot dismiss the gender politics of these writings as a mere reflection of antique Victorian prejudices. The kind of society that Marshall had in mind did not so much scale relations of authority back as reorganize them: the category of the free man was most persuasive when he ruled a woman. The later (and still routine) conflation of household with head of household in economics has a deep history.
Let us consider a few more examples to trace the political uses of Saxonism. An influential example was Walter Scott’s 1820 romance Ivanhoe. Set in 12th-century England, Scott imagined that a small Saxon gentry lingered a century after the Norman conquest, clinging to some of their former land and status. A Norman knight kidnaps a Saxon noble and his beautiful ward in order to force a marriage with her and get her land. An impromptu force of Saxon brigands rescues them, aided by a mysterious Black Knight. The Saxon brigands are Scott’s reimagination of the Robin Hood story, casting the outlaw Robin as a virtuous Saxon. After the rescue Robin, standing beneath an ancient oak before his approving men, arranges various affairs, deals with loot and captives, and otherwise dispenses justice and mercy. As proceedings draw to a close,
The Black Knight, who had seen with no small interest these various proceedings, now took his leave of the Outlaw in turn; nor could he avoid expressing his surprise at having witnessed so much of civil policy amongst persons cast out from all the ordinary protection and influence of the laws. (Scott 1830)chapter 33
As the alert reader suspects, the Black Knight is really Richard the Lion-Heart, legitimate king of England. He has returned in disguise from a European captivity engineered by his evil brother Prince John. Both John and Richard are Normans. John is the archetypal bad Norman: dishonest, rapacious, and haughtily contemptuous of the uncouth Saxons. But Richard is a courageous and honest Norman, who has just fought with Saxons against bad Normans. He now witnesses, beneath the oak, the innate Saxon love of justice and good government. If there is a core to Saxonism, it is this: Robin’s outlaws are innately just and lawful, unlike the ruling Normans. They are capable of ethical self-government. The narrative presents the hope that Richard will regain his throne and rule with appreciation and justice for his Saxon subjects, instead of robbing and abusing them.
Scott was a political conservative, who still imagined national integration as a matter of good nobles displacing bad nobles, constructing a new elite culture synthesizing Saxon practicality and Norman sophistication.[4] Later 19th century versions, of which we have already seen two in the histories of Kemble and Green, tended to cast Norman culture in wholly negative terms and portray Saxons as quite able to manage on their own. There seem to be several reasons. The Napoleonic Wars sparked a reaction against French culture and encouraged many English intellectuals to deny the deep cultural overlap between the two countries and instead discover, or if necessary invent, a French-free Englishness. Moreover Saxonism, especially dressed up as “Anglo-Saxonism,” became increasingly useful to justify the subjection of Ireland. Writers imagined a three-layered society: over-sophisticated Normans, practical Saxons, and savage Celts, who were routinely portrayed as sub-humans in superstitious thrall to Catholic priests. The anti-Catholic potentials of Saxonism also became useful to English writers seeking to roll back the slow progress of Catholic emancipation. Here the typical claim was that the Saxons had kept a simple, manly, and true Christianity since their conversion in the 7th century, at a safe distance from the corruptions of Rome – hence Henry VIII’s breach with the Pope was not a break with the true Church, but a return to it!
A minor figure in this tradition, now obscure but well known to Alfred Marshall, was his father, William Marshall (1812-1901). The elder Marshall was a stridently evangelical Anglican. “Evangelical” here signifies emphasis on individual conviction and enthusiasm, as opposed to the ritual, liturgy, and authority of “high church” Anglicanism, things that evangelicals thought scandalously similar to Roman Catholicism. William Marshall made his living as a clerk at the Bank of England, but after retirement in 1877 he devoted himself to writing tracts against the Roman Church. Anti-Catholic polemicists were not scarce in the 19th century.[5] If the elder Marshall has a claim to originality, it is his effort to enrich the genre with Old English vocabulary. His first published work, Lochlere, (1877) was an epic religious poem with the unusual feature that it used no words introduced into English since the Norman conquest. Whenever Marshall could not find a suitable contemporary word, he consulted his Saxon lexicon and revived an Old English term. Critics greeted the semi-intelligible result with a coolness that bordered on levity.[6] Stung, William Marshall defended his innovation in an 1878 work, The Past, Present, and Future of England’s Language.
What a language is the English of King Alfred's time! It is one more copious and richer than that spoken in Italy in the Augustan period. It is full of flexibility and life, full of expression, nervous, terse, malleable; large as it is, yet capable of being expanded to ten times its bulk. There is scarcely a single word in what I shall venture to call the Anglo-Latin, which we are all speaking, and in which I am ashamed to be obliged to write this Preface, which could not be replaced with advantage by a word from the [Old] English dictionary, or by a word drawn by natural growth from such a word. (Marshall 1878, 2)
Our grammar is a confusion of grammatical systems, our dictionary a confusion of languages; whilst the study of our learned men is given to the languages of aliens, of the dead, and even of the uncivilised, or else to questions of science, the most advanced of which take such forms as these, whether we may not derive our ancestry from tadpoles rather than from God; or as these, whether we should not give back the clouded daylight of the old Christianity of the Apostles in exchange for the starry darkness of the new Christianity of the Papal Fathers; or as these, whether we ought not to give the electoral franchise to women, and thus allow them, as being the more numerous sex, to utterly emasculate our councils… (Marshall 1878, 14–15)
Shall we go back to that [Old] English, or are we prepared to see our language lose almost entirely its English features, and become the basest of all the Latin dialects, the corruption of a corruption of Latin ? … What Englishman is there, not perverted by his classical-school education, who having a mind capable of being kindled and a spark of patriotism to kindle it does not feel his blood boil as, by the use of foreign words such as these in which I am writing this essay, he assists in speeding the progress of his native tongue to utter ruin? (Marshall 1878, 20)
I beg pardon for such extended quotation, but there is a lot of ideological work packed into these paragraphs. Language and race function as homologues. A pure original culture, which he calls “English,” is threatened by Latin culture and language. (Marshall does not even waste time with French, but goes straight to the Latin that underlies it.) Latin is a threat because of the excessive refinement of its words and the corruption of its thought, manifest in Classical literature and in the doctrine of the Roman Church. Men educated in Latin classics bring us tadpole ancestors and voting women.[7]
So let us take stock. First, Saxonism is always contrastive. Tacitus used fictitious Germans to rebuke fellow Romans; later Germans and English readers claimed to be those idealized Germans, facing a variety of Rome-derived threats: Catholicism, the Irish, the French. Saxonism thus drew together multiple ideological strands in the British 19th century: fears about exported Jacobinism and invasion by Napoleon, opposition to Catholic emancipation, and opposition to Irish home rule.
Second, at the core of the Saxon myth is the claim to an innate capacity for self-government by free men. Beyond the morally-shabby order we see around us, it says, another world is possible: solidaristic, manly, simple, and just. Men’s authority over women is not just the only permitted despotism, it is a necessary despotism, the cultural glue that holds this imagined society together. The linked notions of command and self-command are central to the ideology of Saxonism.
[1] (Thompson 2006; Reusch 2008; O’Gorman 1993). In book 2 of Plato’s Republic, almost 500 years earlier, this move is so familiar it falls flat: Socrates describes an ideal rustic life in Book 2, Glaucon mocks it, and Socrates drops the gambit.
[2] They were not, in his telling, puritans: on the contrary they enjoyed feasting and drinking all day when the opportunity arose, a detail that later appropriations of Germania generally ignored.
[3] A splendid example of the ideological work being done here may be found in an unsigned review of Kemble’s book in the , which writes, for example, that “From our conceptions of the Anglo-Saxon king and noble it is essential to exclude most of the associations and phraseology derived from Normal feudalism. … the Anglo-Saxon king and earl held their dignity as well as their land, in the character of freement, or representatives of freemen…”(Anonymous 1849, 172)
[4] Scott’s Saxons are virtuous, practical, and courageous, the kind of person you want beside you in a tight spot. But they are a bit thick.
[5] (Britten 1896)
[6] (Anonymous 1877; 1877; 1879)
[7] While the elder Marshall’s language is particularly intemperate, it points to a politics of Victorian scholarship that is worth naming. Readers of George Eliot’s Middlemarch may remember that one of the marks of the fustiness of the Anglican scholar Casaubon is that his frame of reference is Classical. He pursues his research at the Vatican library and is unfamiliar with the latest German scholarship. Critical intellectuals like Eliot, by contrast, learned German and made a point of being current with continental thought. The younger Marshall inherited from his father an antipathy to Classical scholarship and particularly to curricula dominated by it; he learned German at the first opportunity, holidayed frequently in Germany or Austria, and was deeply read in German philosophy, history, and economics.
Anonymous. 1849. “The Saxons in England (Review).” Edinburgh Review, no. CLXXIX (January).
———. 1877. “Lochlere. A Poem, in Four Parts.” British Quarterly Review 66 (131): 262–63.
———. 1879. “The Past, Present, and Future of England’s Language.” British Quarterly Review 69 (138): 541–42.
Benario, Herbert W. 2004. “Arminius into Hermann: History into Legend.” Greece & Rome 51 (1): 83–94.
Britten, James. 1896. Protestant Fiction. London : Catholic Truth Society. http://archive.org/details/protestantfictio00brituoft.
Green, John Richard. 1895. A Short History of the English People,. New York: Harper & Bros.
Kemble, John Mitchell. 1876. The Saxons in England; a History of the English Commonwealth till the Period of the Norman Conquest. A new ed., rev. By Walter de Gray Birch. 19th-Century Legal Treatises ; No. 48905-48917. London: BQuaritch.
Marshall, William. 1878. The Past, Present, and Future of England’s Language. Longmans.
O’Gorman, Ellen. 1993. “No Place Like Rome: Identity and Difference in the Germania of Tacitus.” Ramus 22 (2): 135–54.
Reusch, Johann J. K. 2008. “Germans as Noble Savages and Castaways: Alter Egos and Alterity in German Collective Consciousness during the Long Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (1): 91–129.
Scott, Walter. 1830. Ivanhoe; a Romance. New York: George Routledge and Sons.
Tacitus, Cornelius. 1942. The Complete Works of Tacitus. Modern Library College Editions. New York: Modern Library.
Thompson, Maggie. 2006. “Primitive or Ideal? Gender and Ethnocentrism in Roman Accounts of Germany.” Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity and Classics 1 (1).
