DONALD Scragg has suggested that ‘few of the authors of the Middle Ages had an interest in the Anglo-Saxon period’, and Allen Frantzen and John Niles have argued that during the Middle Ages ‘the Anglo-Saxon period had rested in relative obscurity’. While these critics are no doubt correct in observing the lack of interest shown by the major writers of the Middle English canon such as Chaucer, Langland, and Gower, this book has tried to suggest that an enduring literary interest in the Anglo-Saxon past can be seen in such texts as the Proverbs of Alfred and the Matter of England romances. This study has attempted to demonstrate that, rather than being condemned to ‘relative obscurity’ during the Middle English period, the idea of Anglo-Saxon England held a significant place in the literary and social imagination of the post-conquest English. As the point of origin, both real and imagined, of English law and cultural identity, the Anglo-Saxon past was important in the construction of a post-conquest English society that was both aware of, and placed great stock in, its Anglo-Saxon heritage.

This book has demonstrated the cultural importance of the idea of Anglo-Saxon England through an examination of the various survivals of the Anglo-Saxon past within Middle English literature from the twelfth century through to the fifteenth century. These texts show evidence of a continued interest in the Anglo-Saxon past that ranges from the localised East Sussex legend of King Alfred that underlies the twelfth-century Proverbs of Alfred to the institutional interest in the Guy of Warwick narrative exhibited by the community of St Swithun's Priory in Winchester during the fifteenth century. In each of these chapters I have examined both how the Anglo-Saxon past is reconstructed, and the social and institutional discourses that inform these constructions. While these representations of Anglo-Saxon England vary in their nature, there exist many connections and continuities between them that seem to be important in the cultural remembrance of the Anglo-Saxon era.