In his preface to the second volume of The History of the Anglo-Saxons, Sharon Turner makes his most impassioned and poetic defence of Anglo-Saxon studies. He chides the polite ‘philosopher’ who prefers ‘the metaphysical speculations of the easy chair’ to the ‘drudgery of research’ into Anglo-Saxon history and culture. ‘This indolence has been mistaken for elegance; this ignorance for philosophy’, he writes. Turner couches his criticism in a familiar Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric of inheritance, writing of ‘forefathers’, ‘ancestors’ and ‘descendants’ to draw together his readers and his subject emotionally and imaginatively. For Turner, the Anglo-Saxons – a term he uses to denote all the inhabitants of England and Lowland Scotland who claimed descent from the continental Germanic peoples who settled there in the early Middle Ages, and their descendants down to the present day – were to be studied and celebrated as the founders of ‘the British nation … diffused … with glory into every quarter of the globe’. To disregard Anglo-Saxon history was to disregard the history of one’s self, one’s kingdom and, by 1800, the history of the British Empire.

There was nothing new in Turner’s argument. By claiming that the Anglo-Saxons ‘live not merely in our annals and traditions, but in our civil institutions and perpetual discourse’, Turner consciously or unconsciously echoed Edmund Gibson, Elizabeth Elstob and other Anglo-Saxonists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who made functionalist arguments for the study of Old English and Anglo-Saxon literature. Modern scholars rightly emphasise Turner’s critical use and careful citation of primary sources, a characteristic also praised in the works of Hickes and other members of the Oxford School. While Turner’s footnotes certainly contain numerous references to Anglo-Saxon manuscripts from the Cotton collection, they are also replete with references to the works of his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors. Notable among them are Smith’s edition of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Gibson’s Chronicon Saxonicum, as well as Wilkins’s Leges Anglo-Saxonicæ, references to which appear frequently in all four volumes. Turner’s reliance on these editions constitutes an affirmation of their scholarly worth and a guarantee to his readers that the authors display a standard of accuracy and scholarliness that Turner insists on for himself.