This chapter examines the extent to which Hopkins’s poetry was shaped by his knowledge of and engagement with nineteenth-century ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ – that is, the idea that the Anglo-Saxon period played a uniquely important part in the intellectual, cultural, and political formation of the English people. This resulted, amongst other things, in a reassessment of the value of Anglo-Saxon poetry, a sustained attempt to understand its distinctive linguistic devices and alliterative verse forms, and a desire to impart something of its native energy and vigour to contemporary verse. Hopkins appears to have seen some of the idiosyncratic formal and linguistic features of his own poetry as part of this revival; the chapter traces some of the affinities and asymmetries between his work and the contemporary understanding of Anglo-Saxon verse, and concludes by suggesting areas for future research on this topic.

THE Norman Conquest brought about the assimilation of England into the burgeoning Norman Empire and the destruction of a ruling elite, producing what some scholars have viewed as a cultural watershed. John Gillingham has written that ‘the devastating experience of 1066 had meant that the correspondence between a kingdom and a people, a community of tradition, custom, law and descent … no longer applied in England’. The extent to which this ‘community of tradition, custom, law and descent’ was displaced under Norman rule is a much-debated issue, but the conquest is generally agreed to have been the end of what we now call Anglo-Saxon England. This is not to say, however, that Anglo-Saxon England ceased to be vital as a cultural construct in post-conquest England. The remembrance and re-imagining of Anglo-Saxon England in the post-conquest period is part of an ongoing cultural process that began from the first moment that William stood among the slain Anglo-Saxon nobles after the battle of Hastings.

The focus of this study is the remembrance of Anglo-Saxon England in the literature of post-conquest England and its appropriation for various social and ideological purposes. In the post-conquest representation of the pre-conquest English past the Anglo-Saxon era is characterised by two distinct periods: the period of the arrival of the pagan Saxons, and the period of the Christianised Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. This study is concerned with the representation of the later period.

For Anglo-Saxon minuscule, pointed Insular minuscule is focal (pl. 1, St Petersburg Bede), with ninth-century Southumbrian models like the Book of Cerne (pl. 4) providing the springboard. In adopting Insular minuscule as a book hand in the eighth century, English scribes turned aside from the more widely disseminated scripts in use beyond the British Isles. They are therefore sometimes said to have abandoned using an international script, even though Insular minuscule was used in the continental houses founded by Irish and English missionaries.

In Ireland Insular minuscule continues in use into modern times and in England, too, Insular-derived letter-forms continued to be used long after Caroline minuscule became, from the middle of the tenth century, the script of the reformed Benedictine houses and, increasingly, the script generally in use. From a European perspective the plates representing the Anglo-Saxon period look markedly separate and therefore ‘insular’, and the term Insular is indeed useful for English manuscripts up into the ninth century, especially in relation to manuscripts without certain provenance (for example, the script of the Book of Durrow or of the Book of Kells can be safely termed Insular when tempers run high). Close links continued between Britain and Ireland. By the middle of the ninth century, however, Viking raids had brought about ever-increasing disruption. In Northumbria most of the ruling familes disappeared, as did many of the great monasteries. Much of Mercia was devastated, and with the death of King Edmund of East Anglia in 869 opposition to the Scandinavian invaders came mainly from western and southern Mercia and from the West Saxons. The ninth century was, for learning and the making of books, more or less a period of stagnation throughout much of England, with standards picking up again in Alfred's reign. The books that survive come generally from far south of the Humber, from Wessex, Kent, and Mercia, suggesting the development of a Mercian script-province in the latter half of the eighth century and the first half of the ninth.

Although there were libraries in Roman Britain, there is very little evidence for any continuity between them and the books owned by the Anglo-Saxons. In the Anglo-Saxon era books were assembled at various places for various reasons, but evidence for these collections and their contents is usually lost. The largest collections belonged to religious communities, especially in monasteries or cathedrals, but most evidence for the rules and customs of such communities dates from after the Norman Conquest. We have several detailed twelfth-century booklists, which may include pre-Conquest holdings. But for the five centuries before 1066 neither archaeology, history nor literary investigation can supply many certainties about what libraries may have been. The written evidence from this period does not define the scope or purpose of a library, or distinguish clearly between the various functions of books or collections of books. It therefore seems appropriate in this chapter to use the term ‘library’ in its most general sense to refer collectively to the books possessed by a community or individual.

Any account of Anglo-Saxon libraries must first consider the Anglo-Saxon terminology in Latin and Old English. Arca libraria, the solution to Aldhelm’s riddle 89, refers to a chest in which books were kept; few Anglo-Saxon libraries can be shown to have been larger than one or two such chests of books. The Old English equivalent is bocciste or boccest. Armaria (‘chest’ or ‘cupboard’) is glossed as boccysta in an eleventh-century Old English gloss to Augustine’s Enchiridion in Cambridge, Trinity Coll., MS O.1.18, 2 and also in a few narrative texts.