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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Retrospection is a recognized characteristic of reform movements. An appeal to the past legitimates ideological concerns which seek to replace a state of affairs considered decadent and decayed. Reforming rhetoric depends on the past as a means of proving its value and credibility. Such preservation of the past as a key organizing principle in transforming events is necessarily selective and often has a tendency towards schematization and simplification. Not only does the reforming agenda determine what aspects of the past are remembered, and hence what aspects are buried, but it also determines who is responsible for the act of remembering itself. ‘Different groups of people remember things in different ways.’ The purpose of this paper is to examine the manner in which the Anglo-Saxon past was perceived and utilized during the tenth-century monastic reform movement. It will be shown how, under an influence which was heavily Benedictine in inspiration, the collective memory of monks created a picture of the Anglo-Saxon past which was ‘all of a piece and all monastic’. The past was closely linked to the exercise of power. It will thus be shown how this monastic view of the past competed with an alternative tenth-century view and was ultimately to triumph over its competitor.
An earlier version of this paper was first presented in a somewhat different form in St Andrews in February 1995.1 am very grateful to Robert Bartlett, Richard Sharpe, Alan Thacker, David Rollason, Catherine Cubitt, and Christopher Holdsworth for discussion and comment.
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