[Page numbers of the printed text appear at the right in bold.]

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Notes 1. I am thinking simply of Verstegen's A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp, 1605) and his recognition of foreign influences on the native English language. John Selden's interest in Old English laws, as set forth in his Janus Anglorum (1610), reflects legal interest in the native tradition of jurispudence (as opposed to the foreign Norman tradition) that was being codified at the time by experts such as Edward Coke. Scholars like Sir Henry Spelman who were interested in utilizing the authority of Church history naturally looked to natives, "to the antientest Authors of our Church and Church History," as Spelman wrote to Abraham Wheelock on 28 September 1638. See Eleanor N. Adams, Old English Scholarship in England from 1566-1800 (New Haven, 1917), esp. pp. 42-84; Michael Murphy, "Antiquary to Academic: The Progress of Anglo-Saxon Scholarship," in Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries, ed. Carl T. Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch (Boston, 1982), pp. 1-18; and for a general overview of seventeenth-century jurispudence and Coke's contributions to it, see Catherine Drinker Bowen, The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke 1522-1634 (Boston, 1984). Allen J. Frantzen writes that "Anglo-Saxonism encompasses the study and the construction of history, language, and literature in an attempt to articulate the national values of English culture": Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, 1990), p. 30.
2. John Mitchell Kemble, The Saxons in England, rev. ed. Walter de Gray Birch, 2 vols. (London, 1876), ch. 1. All quotations from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica [HE] are from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969; repr. 1992). All

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translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. On the authorship of this famous passage, see Eric John, "The Point of Woden," Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 5 (1992), 127-34, at 129, who argues that the passage is a Kentish interpolation acceptable to Bede.
3. Kemble, The Saxons in England, 1:22: "I look upon the genuine details of the German conquests in England as irrovocably lost to us."
4. Sir Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1943), p. 9. See R. G. Collingwood and J. N. L. Myres, Roman Britain and the English Settlements (Oxford, 1949), chs. 20-24, repr. in expanded form as Myres, The English Settlements (Oxford, 1989). See also Myres's excellent "The Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes," Proceedings of the British Academy 56 (1970), 145-74.
5. Patrick Sims Williams, "The Settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle," Anglo-Saxon England 12 (1983), 1-41, at 4. See also the recent discussion by Michael Richter, The Formation of the Medieval West: Studies in the Oral Culture of the Barbarians (New York, 1994), pp. 14-17.
6. For general background, see Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946); Peter Hunter Blair, Roman Britain and Early England 55 b.c. a.d. 871 (Edinburgh, 1963); D. P. Kirby, "Bede's Native Sources for the Historia Ecclesiastica," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 48 (1965-66), 341-71; Eric John, "Orbis Britanniae and the Anglo-Saxon Kings," in Orbis Britanni‘ and Other Studies (Leicester, 1966), pp. 1-63; Levison, "Bede as Historian," in Bede: His Life, Times, and Writings, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson (New York, 1966), pp. 111-51; Hunter Blair, The World of Bede (Cambridge, 1970); Hunter Blair, "From Bede to Alcuin," in Famulus Christi: Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede, ed. Gerald Bonner (London, 1976), pp. 239-60; Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1956); David Dumville, "Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend," History 62 (1977), 173-92; and Kirby, The Earliest English Kings (London, 1991).
7. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary (Oxford, 1991), p. 22.
8. For Schoebe and an excellent summary of scholarship, see Jan Davidse, "The Sense of History in the Works of the Venerable Bede," Studi Medievali, 3rd ser. 23 (1982), 647-95.

9. Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain from Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York, 1966); James Campbell, "Bede," in Latin Historians, ed. T. A. Dorey (London, 1966), pp. 159-90; Roger Ray, "Bede, the Exegete, as Historian," in Famulus Christi, ed. Bonner, pp. 125-40; R. A. Markus, Bede and the Tradition of Ecclesiastical Historiography, Jarrow Lecture 1974 (Jarrow, 1974), repr. in Markus, From Augustine to Gregory the Great: History and Christianity in Late Antiquity (London, 1983), ch. III; Campbell, "Bede I" and "Bede II" in his Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 1-48.

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10. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 11: "In representing the gens Anglorum as a composite people drawn from three distinct Germanic nations Bede was reflecting the common opinion of his time."

11. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England , p. 10. Nevertheless, Stenton cautions that we not "over-emphasize the distinction between the various peoples of whom the English nation was composed" (p. 9).

12. See Henry Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (University Park, 1972; repr. 1991), esp. pp. 40-50. Kemble, The Saxons in England , 1:27, argues that the paucity of data available to Bede was "probably increased by a few traditions, ill understood and ill applied, which belonged exclusively to the epical or mythological cycles of our own several tribes and races." Kemble also notes the similarity of these traditions to Gothic ones, yet examines them no further.

13. Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths (Berkeley, 1987); Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (Princeton, 1988), ch. 4. This tribal heterogeneity is identified as one of the major distinctions between the Continental Saxons and the English by C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature (New York, 1968), p. 76. In the context of literary criticism, Stanley B. Greenfield, The Interpretation of Old English Poems (London, 1972), p. 9, terms this idea the "fallacy of homogeneity." It is most evident in nineteenth-century criticism; see, for example, Hippolyte Taine's very influential 1863 History of English Literature , trans. H. van Laun (Edinburgh, 1873), p. 59. For an excellent discussion of this fallacy, see Daniel G. Calder, "Histories and Surveys of Old English Literature: A Chronological Review," Anglo-Saxon England 10 (1982), 201-44. On the purported homogeneity of names, see Richter, The Formation of the Medieval West , p. 12.

14. Wolfram, History of the Goths, p. 11.

15. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986), p. 22. For similar paradigms, see Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (Oxford, 1988), pp. 53-56.

16. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations , p. 22. There are six features in all. The three remaining are (1) a shared history, (2) a distinctive shared culture, and (3) a sense of solidarity. Limited space prevents me from taking these up.

17. Quoted by Allen J. Frantzen, "Writing the Unreadable Beowulf: Writan' and Forwritan,' the Pen and the Sword," Exemplaria 3.2 (1991), 327-57, at 331. In other words, the area of evidence need not be sifted in order to separate the fruit of objectivity from the chaff of subjectivity.

18. Richter, The Formation of the Medieval West, p. 5. On more recent notions of identity and ethnic or political formation, see the collection of essays edited by Paul Graves-Brown, Siƒn Jones, and Clive Gamble, Cultural Identity and Archaeology: The Construction of European Communities (London, 1996).

19. HE, p. 2. All further references to Bede's HE will be given parenthetically within the text.

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20. See Benedicta Ward, The Venerable Bede (Harrisburg, 1990), p. 11. Richard Hodges, The Anglo-Saxon Achievement: Archaeology and the Beginnings of English Society (Ithaca, 1989), p. 68, claims that during Bede's time "there was an emergent awareness perhaps little more of being English." Compare Bede, HE 5.9 (pp. 476-77). On the variety of distinct tribes in early Anglo-Saxon England, see Kirby, The Earliest English Kings ; and Steven Bassett, "In Search of the Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms," in The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms , ed. Bassett (London, 1989), pp. 3-27. Note also, as Levison, England and the Continent , p. 92, points out, that Boniface "called his home country transmarina Saxonia,' but he also described himself as of the race of the Angles." Wudukind of Corvey's tenth-century Saxon history seems to suggest that the Saxons and Angles were, to his point of view, the same people: John, "The Point of Woden," p. 128.

21. Leo Sherley-Price, trans., Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English People (London, 1955). The unity implied in the name "English" is discussed by Susan Reynolds, "Medieval Origines Gentium and the Community of the Realm," History 68 (1983), 375-90. Reynolds concludes that "myths of descent of peoples . . . can best be understood as one aspect of a belief in the natural, given existence of collective groups with their own customs, laws and cultures" (p. 389). One might say God-given; see, for example, the associations of gens with the chosen of God in Bede's In Genesim 1.2.3, ed. C. W. Jones, Bedae Venerabilis Opera. Pars II Opera Exegetica 1. Libri Quatuor in Principium Genesis, CCSL 118A (Turnhout, 1967), p. 37, lines 1137-41; and Hrabanus Maurus, Commentarius in Genesim (PL 108.12B and 49A). There is a strong temptation to consider Bede's too-easy tripartite division in light of the division of tribes after the flood into those of Ham, Shem, and Japheth. For Biblical parallels, especially from Samuel, see Judith McClure, "Bede's Old Testament Kings," in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 1983), pp. 76-98. Yet, unlike the authors of Samuel, Bede tellingly divides his book into five parts like the Pentateuch, the five books telling the history of the sons of Abraham and the gens Iudea. See Josephus Blanchinus, Epistola ad episcopum Gurcensem (PL 12.106B), who describes Bede's history as "Britannia in praesenti juxta numerum librorum, quibus Lex Divina scripta est." See also Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven, 1989). One cannot escape the relation of gens to the descendants of Abraham; see Genesis 17.4, John 18.35, Mark 1.1, Acts 13.16-17, and esp. Matthew 1.1-16. See also Boethius, Confessio Fidei (PL 64.1336B), where he says that "electa est una gens, in qua Dei mandata clarescent." See also Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 12.2, ed. W. M. Lindsay, Etymologiae sive Origines (Oxford, 1911): "Gens autem appelata propter generationes familiarum, id est gignendo, sicut natio a nascendo." For Isidore's understanding of the relation between a gens and a language, see Etymologiae 9.1. On the meanings of the term gens, see Alexander Souter, A Glossary of Later Latin to a.d. 600 (Oxford, 1949), p. 160; W.-H. Maigne D'Arnis, Lexicon Manuale ad Scriptores Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis (Paris, 1890), s.v.; and Charles Du Fresne Du Cange, Glossarium

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Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis (Graz, 1954), s.v.

22. HE, pp. 50-51, note 1.

23. Michael Richter, "Bede's Angli: Angles or English?" Peritia 3 (1984), 99-114; Susan Reynolds, "What Do We Mean by Anglo-Saxon' and Anglo-Saxons'?" Journal of British Studies 24 (1985), 395-414. See also H. E. J. Cowdrey, "Bede and the English People,'" Journal of Religious History 11 (1981), 501-23, who designates as English all those who are not Pictish, British, or Celtic (p. 503) and who asserts that the English consist essentially of "a self-aware ethnic unity comprehending all the Germanic elements which had settled in Britain" (p. 504).
24. Patrick Wormald, "Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origin of the Gens Anglorum," in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society , ed. Patrick Wormald (Oxford, 1983), pp. 99-129. Richter, The Formation of the Medieval West, does not address Wormald's argument; see p. 16.

25. Wormald, "Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origin of the Gens Anglorum," p. 125. Wormald cautions that "it is modern scholars, not the Anglo-Saxons, who fabricate the links between the invaders of Britain" (p. 101). Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History , p. 240, points out the obvious fact that Bede is "predominantly concerned with Northumbria," and, one might add, with the Angles whom Augustine seems to have converted first; cf. HE 1.23 (p. 68). This last fact ought to alert us to Bede's conscious strategy, since it is Bede himself who reports that Augustine came to Kent, home of the Jutes, not the Angles: "De Iutum origine sunt Canuari" (p. 50). Wormald, "Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origin of the Gens Anglorum," p. 124, puts this discrepancy down to the influence of Gregory's "tidy Roman mind." See HE 2.5, where Bede discusses ’thelberht and the "genti suae consulendo"; their kings, the oiscingas; and their invitation by Vortigern (pp. 150-51). Bede also notes that the Jutes, in the form of the perfidus rex, Eadbald, fall from the grace of the faith.

26. Wormald, "Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origin of the Gens Anglorum," pp. 105-7. Wormald reports three pieces of evidence: first, HE 2.5, on the death of ’thelbert, who ruled "over all the southern kingdoms"; second, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for a.d. 827, "and he was the eighth king who was Bretwalda'"; and, finally, a styling in the Ismere Diploma of a.d. 736. See the comments by Wallace-Hadrill, Bede's Ecclesiastical History: A Historical Commentary, pp. 57-58.

27. Reynolds, "What Do We Mean by Anglo-Saxon'?" p. 398. Bruce Mitchell, Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1995), p. 7, translates OE Engla lond as "land of the Angles."

28. The phrase is from Reynolds, "What Do We Mean by Anglo-Saxon'?" p. 404. The primacy of Canterbury in Bede's narrative is largely undisputed. Margaret Deanesly, The Pre-Conquest Church in England (New York, 1961), p. 44, calls HE "substantially a Canterbury book."

29. John Hines, "The Becoming of the English: Identity, Material Culture and Language in Early Anglo-Saxon England," Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeol-

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ogy and History 7 (1994), 49-59, at 52.

30. John, "The Point of Woden," p. 129: "Preceding the disputed passage, Bede says of the adventus Saxonum that the Angli vel Saxones came to Britain, at Vortigern's invitation in three long ships." John does not identify the edition of Bede he used for this paper, but Colgrave and Mynors, HE, p. 50, have "Tunc Anglorum siue Saxonum gens." There is no vel in this passage.

31. See Hines, "The Becoming of the English," with regard to identity. It is important to note that at the time of Bede's writing, and according to Bede, there were no Continental Angles. There can be no confusion, then, with respect to the referent of Gregory's "Angli" when applied to the slave boys. In this regard, see Marijane Osborne, "Some Uses of Ambiguity in Beowulf," Thoth 10 (1969), 18-35, at 18-19, who reports that "the verbal similarities tell us something about the essential nature of the thing named" (cited by Greenfield, Interpretation, p. 85). In other words, there is something essentially angelic about the Angles. The same obviously cannot be said of the Saxons. With respect to an idealized identity and the "birth of a Germanic consciousness," see Roberta Frank, "Germanic Legend in Old English Literature," in Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature , ed. Michael Lapidge and Malcolm Godden (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 88-106, at 104. For the literary codification of this ideal, see Graham Caie, "The Shorter Heroic Verse," in Companion to Old English Poetry , ed. Henk Aertsen and Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 79-94.

32. These figures were compiled using the Cetedoc Library of Christian Latin Texts (Turnholt, 1994), which concords all of Bede's works available in CCSL, CSEL, PL , and Sources Chr‚tiennes . For a separate concordance to the HE, see Putnam Fennel Jones, A Concordance to the Historia Ecclesiastica of Bede (Cambridge, Mass., 1929).

33. See John, "The Point of Woden," pp. 127-29.

34. Walter Goffart, Rome's Fall and After (London, 1989), p. 284. For an explanation of the conflation of gens and natio, see Margarita D¡az-Andreu, "Constructing Identities through Culture: The Past in the Forging of Europe," in Cultural Identity and Archaeology , ed. Graves-Brown et al, pp. 48-61.

35. This emphasis on home goes a long way towards explaining Bede's use of domus in HE 1.16. After the Angles attack the Britons, "At ubi hostilis exercitus exterminatis dispersisque insulae indigenis domum revursus est." Colgrave and Mynors, HE, p. 52, note 2, interpret domum in this sense as meaning "headquarters," a usage borrowed from Gildas. But see Gildas, De Excidio , para. 14: Winterbottom translates domum as "home," meaning the British home, not the military headquarters, of the troops of the expeditionary army of Maximus: see Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works , ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom (London, 1978), pp. 21 and 93. See also Genesis 12.1, "Dixit autem Dominus ad Abram: Egredere de terra tua, et de cognatione tua, et de domo patris tui, et veni in terram, quam monsrabo tibi." Compare Isidore, Etymologiarum 20.9.4: "Domus unius familiae

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habitaculum est." If the Angles are in their domus, then they must be a family. In this regard, John, "The Point of Woden," p. 128, writes: "Woden was often identified with the victor of a decisive battle that created patria and a ruling dynasty."

36. Goffart, Rome's Fall and After , p. 283.

37. Goffart, Rome's Fall and After , p. 113.

38. Goffart, Rome's Fall and After , pp. 112-13. Richter, The Formation of the Medieval West , p. 12, warns that the details in Tacitus "cannot be generalized." For a stimulating reading of Tacitus and his suspect use of Caesar, see Leo Weiner, Tacitus' Germania and Other Forgeries (Philadelphia, 1920), pp. 273-99.

39. Boethius, Confessio Fidei (PL 64.1336B). See also John, "The Point of Woden," p. 128, who invokes Wallace-Hadrill's distinction of stirps regia.

40. Goffart, Rome's Fall and After, p. 283.

41. Whether a lingua or labia (as Genesis 11.6 metaphorically puts it) constitutes a language in our sense is debatable. Intriguingly, Genesis 10.5, describing the plurality of languages, comes before the multiplication of languages at Babel. See Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford, 1995), in which Eco argues that this curious anachronism was interpreted as "recounting the diffusion of tribal dialects, not the multiplication of tongues" (p. 9). Note that Bede uses the term lingua, which according to Eco means "dialect." In other words, dialects distinguish the tribes in the Pentateuch as they distinguish the tribes in Britain.

42. But on the spurious evidence of Asser and on Asser as a forgery, see Alfred P. Smyth, King Alfred the Great (Oxford, 1995), pp. 149-98.

43. Note that the Saxons abandon the faith quickly after Cynegisl's death. ’lfric will later label Oswald a Northumbrian from Norëhymbra lande as opposed to Engla lande, where Augustine landed: see ’lfric's Life of King Oswald, in Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse, ed. Dorothy Whitelock (Oxford, 1986), pp. 77-78.