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.

I TAKE my title from the novel of that name by Angus Wilson, who borrowed it from Lewis Carroll. Debby Banham has also already used the title for an interesting paper which addresses a different, although related, topic from mine. At the time of the conference I was, like most of us, excited by the find of a rich seventh-century burial at Prittlewell near Southend, excavated by the Museum of London archaeology service during the autumn of 2003. Discussion of this find reflects current thinking about the relationship between religious belief and burial practice, specifically early medieval Christianity and paganism, which can be set against sixty years of evolving interpretations of the significance of Sutton Hoo, a site whose discovery influenced Angus Wilson's choice of theme for his novel. While writing this paper up for publication, I was struck by the contrast between two television programmes screened in 2004 within a few weeks of each other, both on Channel 4, both purporting to present current knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon impact on Britain but presenting very different stories. The reasons for that difference seem to me to encapsulate the main theme of this paper, which revisits issues I have already discussed elsewhere.

My contention is that our attitudes, whether Anglo-Saxon or not, arise from our multiple and changing individual and collective identities, which condition the ways in which we see and interpret the world, past or present.