In an age when absolutely everything is turned into a race row, it was inevitable that the term “Anglo-Saxon” would be declared forboden. If hoop skirts, airports, and eating meat are racist, then the name of an actual ethnic group, a white ethnic group at that, was always going to be, as they say these days, problematic.
There was a row last month when a group of Trumpy congressmen said they wanted to defend America’s “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” Wokeness spreads like the coronavirus, and it was only a matter of time before Britain followed. Sure enough, England’s rugby authorities have announced that they are renaming the team until now known as the Saxons. In order to “improve diversity and inclusion across our game,” the team will be given the exciting new name “England A.”
The odd thing is that, until now, “Anglo-Saxon” had followed the opposite trajectory, ceasing to be a racial denominator and coming to stand for a set of values. I remember the last chief minister of Gibraltar, Peter Caruana, telling me that his biggest problem with the European Union was that “it wants to strike down our Anglo-Saxon model.” Mind you, Gibraltarians are not Anglo-Saxon by blood. Their ancestry is a blend of Maltese, Genovese, Portuguese, Moroccan, Jewish, and Spanish. What Caruana meant was that Gibraltar had a political culture based on parliamentary rule, the common law, and private property, a culture that was very different from the top-down dirigisme of continental Europe. It was precisely this culture that helped turn a barren rock into a financial services hub.
This is how the word is generally understood in Europe. When the French talk of “les anglo-saxons” or the Spanish of “los anglosajones,” they don’t mean people who claim descent from King Athelstan. They mean people who believe in small government, free markets, and, as they see it, unregulated jungle capitalism.
The belief that constitutional liberty had its roots in pre-Norman England was common to America’s founders. Thomas Jefferson, whose vast accomplishments included a scholarly knowledge of Anglo-Saxon literature, believed that the principles he wrote into the Declaration of Independence could be traced back through England’s 1689 Bill of Rights and back through the Magna Carta to the folkright of Anglo-Saxon law.
On the day the Declaration was signed, Jefferson formed a subcommittee with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin to design the Great Seal of the new nation. Adams suggested Hercules, to represent courageous endeavor. Franklin preferred Moses, to signal divine providence. Jefferson went along with Franklin, but he wanted the obverse to show “the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.”
This was, presumably, what the Republican congressmen were driving at, a restoration of constitutional propriety as the founders would have recognized it. But was Jefferson right? Were the principles of the new republic truly prefigured in Anglo-Saxon England, a relatively advanced state by the standards of the early Middle Ages but nonetheless one in which few people reached their 50s?
Actually, to an astonishing degree, yes, they were. What Adams would call “a government of laws, not of men” would have been a recognizable concept in 11th-century England. Other places had coronation oaths in which kings would promise to rule justly. But England was exceptional in not leaving it up to the monarch to decide whether he was doing so.
When, two centuries later, the authors of the Magna Carta sought to bind the crown to a form of conciliar government rooted in “the law of the land,” they were drawing consciously on that past.
Most 20th-century historians have shied away from this truth: It seemed altogether too triumphalist. But works by James Campbell on the late Saxon state and by J.R. Maddicott on the rise of parliament tend to vindicate those Victorian scholars who traced Anglo-American liberty to the century before the Norman conquest.
Does that make it a racial concept? Of course not. Sources differ on how many Angles and Saxons crossed from the continent to England and on the degree to which they displaced the indigenous population. But genetic studies bear out what common sense would suggest: that there was a significant mingling of populations and that the English are (in ethnic terms) Anglo-Celtic. Right from the start, the principles that would later turn into common law and limited government were developed in a multiethnic context.
Later still, the same institutional model would take root in more distant lands, differentiating Singapore from Indonesia, Bermuda from Haiti, and Israel from Syria. Anglo-Saxon values are, in fact, a perfect demonstration of how institutions transcend race. Isn’t that the most American ideal of all?
