Eighteenth-century antiquaries and philologists conceived of their work on Anglo-Saxon language and culture as a contribution to the elucidation of national history. By publishing scholarly editions of medieval texts, illustrating or clarifying passages in chronicles or charters with physical artefacts, or examining the political and economic history of Anglo-Saxon England through numismatics, Anglo-Saxon scholarship provided a wealth of new information that could be put to use by historians, many of whom were themselves antiquaries. Historians shared with antiquaries a view of the past that encompassed both the objective and the affective. Laurence Echard wrote that ‘the Business of an Historian is not barely to tell his Reader a true and faithful story’ but ‘to inrich his Understanding, to elevate his Thoughts, and even to captivate his Affections’. More suggestive is Thomas Hearne’s claim that national history ‘brings the Times past into our present View, makes us as it were co-eval with the celebrated Heroes of former Times’. Reading history thus became a polytemporal act facilitated by historians working in a genre that demanded imaginative engagement. Long established historical tradition encouraged readers to see the origins of the English kingdom, its counties and its place names as Anglo-Saxon. As this chapter will demonstrate, eighteenth-century historians concerned with the Anglo-Saxon past provided readers with an evolving if contested narrative of Anglo-Saxon history that was fundamentally linked to ideas of England and Englishness simultaneously past and present.

Developments in Anglo-Saxon studies coincided with what Daniel Woolf and Karen O’Brien have identified as a dramatic shift in the prestige attached to national history, to overall historical awareness, and to ‘an enhanced sense of imaginative participation’ in history on the part of English readers. This shift was not limited to metropolitan and university elites. Rosemary Sweet’s study of urban histories reveals the flourishing historiographical culture in provincial towns, where literacy and reading significantly expanded during the century.