There is a peculiar rule in modern Anglophone public life: Every people can have a past, except the one that built the country
The Romans can be studied without apology. Vikings are marketed with cinematic enthusiasm. Celts are endlessly romanticised, their mystique carefully preserved. But introduce the Anglo-Saxons, the civilisation-forming population that gave England (and, consequently, much of the world) its language, law, and cultural and political seedbeds, and just watch the institutional mood darken. Cambridge and Nottingham Universities are just the latest to have found the very phrase ’Anglo-Saxon’ sticking in their institutional throats.
