This chapter examines the motivations for and practices of library formation, development and management exercised by the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (SGS), Britain’s oldest provincial learned society and second oldest museum. It contends that civic philanthropy in the form of library formation served as a core activity for SGS members throughout the first fifty years of the Society’s history, and as a key component of the society’s raison d’être. The SGS’s extensive archival and bibliographical holdings provide a means of examining the modes of acquisition, cataloguing and circulation of the three libraries under the SGS’s management in the period 1710–1755: the parish library of St Mary and St Nicolas, the library of Spalding Grammar School, and the library housed in the SGS museum. Spalding’s libraries provide a composite case study that reveals the interconnection of individual and institutional forms of philanthropy at work in eighteenth-century libraries. At the same time, the SGS emerges as a precursor of the later eighteenth-century subscription libraries and literary and philosophical societies that engaged in library formation as a means of fostering sociability, education, improvement and intellectual exchange in local communities throughout Britain.

Philological, antiquarian and historical research on the Anglo-Saxon period frequently overlapped with various forms of imaginative or affective Anglo-Saxonism. In the majority of cases this type of Anglo-Saxonism served to reinforce an ideology of identity and belonging: literary and linguistic scholars heard the echoes of Old English in religious rites, legal arguments and everyday speech; historians studied the Anglo-Saxon history of their home towns or counties; antiquaries analysed the physical remains of the Anglo-Saxon past carefully, lovingly and at times too creatively, as they sought to develop narratives that brought them into closer contact with their ancestral past. The results of their research – textual or physical, oral or aural – could be popularised and celebrated as evidence of England’s particular heritage. In this and the next chapter I examine some the ways in which artists, writers and politicians engaged in creative and popular forms of Anglo-Saxonism as they reacted to or sought to capitalise on broader cultural sentiment about the character of the English people and their polity.

As Aranye Fradenburg and Carolyn Dinshaw have pointed out, scholarship, creativity and enjoyment are inseparable aspects of medievalism in all its forms. Given the clear evidence provided by recent scholarship for the confluence of these three aspects in medieval, early modern, nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglo-Saxonism, there is no reason to assume that this was not just as much the case in eighteenth-century England. Dinshaw’s claim that exposure to various representations of the Middle Ages provides postmedieval audiences with expanded ‘temporal repertoires [that] include extensive nonmodern … temporal possibilities’ is borne out when we consider artistic, literary and political forms of eighteenth-century English Anglo-Saxonism alongside scholarly ones. In other words, information about Anglo-Saxon history and culture that was ultimately derived from academic research constituted one source of raw material from which eighteenth-century English women and men could construct images of their ancestral past and themselves in relation to it.

This book defines and examines some of the most important forms of eighteenth-century English Anglo-Saxonism in the century separating the publication of George Hickes’s Thesaurus (1703–5) and the publication of Sharon Turner’s The History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799–1805), two works now recognised as milestones in the development of the modern understanding of Anglo-Saxon England. Hickes’s monumental multi-language grammar and antiquarian treatise, along with the catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts compiled by Humfrey Wanley that appears in the second volume of the Thesaurus, is often represented as the culmination of early modern Old English studies. Turner’s History, on the other hand, is frequently regarded as signalling a shift in English Anglo-Saxon studies away from the antiquarian mode (with all that term’s pejorative connotations) to a more academic, disciplinarily defined and increasingly scientific mode of historical, literary and material enquiry. Turner is therefore associated, in Hans Aarsleff’s words, with the nineteenth-century ‘revival of interest in early English history, culture, language, and literature’ and with philologists such as John Josias Conybeare, John Bosworth, John Mitchell Kemble or Frederic Madden. Yet neither Turner’s introduction nor his footnotes speak to a sudden surge in Anglo-Saxonist enthusiasm at the turn of the century, but look back to a largely ignored tradition of eighteenth-century scholarship. Turner acknowledges numerous eighteenth-century editors, linguists, numismatists, art and architectural historians, literary scholars, and local and national historians who used the work of Hickes and fellow members of the Oxford School to undertake research and offer their own insights. These provided the raw materials with which Turner composed his account of Anglo-Saxon history, society, daily life, manners, government and trade that readers found ‘pleasing and expressive’ as well as ‘extremely interesting’. It is these scholars whose work I seek to restore to view. Working in the largely pre-disciplinary environment of the Enlightenment republic of letters, they engaged with a wide range of subjects including literary and linguistic studies, palaeography, codicology and diplomatic, ecclesiastical and political history, art history, archaeology and the study of food, dress and everyday life.

In the preceding chapters I have argued for the inextricability of scholarly and popular Anglo-Saxonism, pointing to the ways in which eighteenth-century antiquaries, historians, writers and artists exchanged information and ideas about England’s Anglo-Saxon past in numerous intentional and unintentional ways, and across what have since become more and less distinct disciplinary and generic boundaries. This chapter examines the ways in which political Anglo-Saxonism acted as a unifying ideology for eighteenth-century political writers regardless of partisan affiliation, and the ways in which dramatists and other creative writers reflected and disseminated Anglo-Saxonist political ideology through plays about events from Anglo-Saxon history. A number of recent studies have explored Anglo-Saxonist themes in eighteenth-century English political discourse, though for the most part political Anglo-Saxonism remains associated with partisan polemic and propaganda, or with theories of the ancient constitution or the Norman Yoke. While none of these associations is incorrect, each decontextualises political Anglo-Saxonism by implicitly or explicitly failing to acknowledge the extent to which Anglo-Saxonist political sentiment was shaped by and contributed to other forms of artistic production and other fields of scholarly enquiry. By examining Anglo-Saxonist political writing alongside the overwhelmingly political character of Anglo-Saxonist creative literature, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that the multivalent nature of Anglo-Saxonist thought allowed it to function as an ambient cultural-political force, and as a unifying and potentially inclusive language of patriotism firmly linked to English identity.

Although medievalism scholars such as Allen Frantzen, Hugh MacDougall and Kathleen Wilson have suggested that Anglo-Saxonism could bridge eighteenth-century party divides, they have done so within the narrower confines of literary and linguistic history, nationalism studies and racial/ imperial studies, respectively. David Conway has pointed out some of the ways in which modern political historians have too readily presented eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism as an uninformed or wilfully naive ideology. There is, however, no evidence that eighteenth-century writers who referred to ‘their “excellent” or “happy constitution”’ consciously used a ‘formulation which side-stepped the question of its historical legitimacy’.

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.

In a letter to the Swedish antiquary Eric Benzelius written late in the summer of 1704, Humfrey Wanley announced the imminent publication of George Hickes’s Thesaurus, a work now widely regarded as the single most significant eighteenth-century contribution to Anglo-Saxon scholarship. The first of its two volumes, by Hickes, was ‘full of uncommon Learning, relating to the Laws, Customs, &c. of our Saxon Ancestors’; the second, Wanley noted, contained ‘my Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon MSS’. The two volumes represented the culmination of decades of work on the grammar of Old English and other septentrional languages. Hickes’s Old English grammar became the standard for more than a century, and Wanley’s catalogue contained a comprehensive survey of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in England that would remain unrivalled for more than 250 years. Critical response to the Thesaurus offered unqualified praise, and over the course of the following twenty years four editions of an abridgement of the first volume were published, each containing testimonies to the enduring value of Hickes’s work. As late as 1837, J. M. Kemble praised Hickes’s contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies, despite the fact that by Kemble’s day the advent of scientific philology had ‘render[ed] his grammars rather dangerous than useful’.

The achievements of Hickes and Wanley, like those of most of the other authors discussed in the first half of this chapter, are relatively well known to scholars of medievalism and the history of medieval studies thanks to Eleanor Adams, David Douglas and David Fairer, although Douglas’s observation that Old English studies saw a marked decline after the 1720s has led on occasion to a mistaken assumption that eighteenth-century scholars had little or no interest in Anglo-Saxon literature, history and culture. It is nevertheless necessary to review both the publications available to and produced by early eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists before considering the scholarly and popular forms of Anglo-Saxonism that relied on them. Not only do these works reveal the highly collaborative nature of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxon studies, they also exhibit a clear presentism – defined by Louise D’Arcens as ‘arguably the essence of medievalism itself’ – that would shape a variety of forms of Anglo-Saxonism as the century progressed.

The scholarship of the Oxford School and their successors coincided with the revival and eventual re-establishment of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the earliest minutes of which defined its remit as ‘the subject of Antiquities; and more particularly … such things as may illustrate or relate to the History of Great Britain’, including ‘Antient Coins, books, sepulchres or other Remains of Antient Workmanship’. Although the early membership – including Wanley, William Elstob, the herald Peter le Neve, the archivist George Holmes and Thomas Madox, Historiographer Royal – reflects the textual and philological interests of the Oxford School, by the time the Society formally constituted itself in January 1718 its members reflected a more diverse range of interests. It was the antiquaries who excavated and examined the physical and documentary remains of Anglo-Saxon England, and who encouraged the study of the Anglo-Saxon period to a wider and more socially diverse audience. Eighteenth-century antiquarian culture was less partisan than the clerical, university and legal networks of earlier decades, and membership of institutions such as the Society of Antiquaries ‘was never a matter of political or religious affiliation’. Also in contrast to the specialist philological interests of the Oxford School, by the early eighteenth century antiquarianism had become ‘a common pastime, a leisure activity, for the gentry and aristocracy’. Fellows of the Society included clergymen, lawyers, doctors, artists, and members of the nobility and gentry from across the country. As Rosemary Sweet writes, ‘to examine the figures who made up the antiquarian community of the eighteenth century is to consider how a large proportion of those who comprised the social and intellectual elite of this period understood the past, its interpretation and its meaning for contemporary life’. Recent research by Sweet and Daniel Woolf, among others, has highlighted the scholarly methods and contributions of early modern and eighteenth-century antiquaries, whose methods ‘foreshadowed many aspects of the modern pursuit of historical objectivity’. Eighteenth-century antiquaries laid the foundations of modern literary studies and of art and architectural history.

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.