What Was Anglo Saxon Money Called

As many of my readers are probably already aware, on 16 April 2021, Punchbowl News released documents, which revealed that Trump allies in the Republican Party, led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, had founded what they were calling the "American First Caucus," which was supposed to be dedicated to promoting "Anglo-Saxon political traditions" and infrastructure that "befits the progeny of European architecture."

The caucus was immediately denounced as white supremacist. According to this article fromThe Washington Post, Greene is now trying to distance herself from the proposed American First Caucus, insisting that the documents Punchbowl News released were "a staff level draft proposal from an outside group."

This relates to a controversy that has been boiling in the field of medieval studies for years now over the use of the nameAnglo-Saxon. The term has been widely used for over two centuries to refer to the English-speaking inhabitants of Britain after the Germanic invasions of the fifth century CE until the Norman conquest in 1066. Now, though, many scholars, especially young scholars and scholars of color, argue that people should avoid applying the name in this way, because it is largely anachronistic, it inherently implies racial whiteness, and it alienates people of color. Below is a discussion of the issue, along with a few of my thoughts on the matter.

A brief disclaimer

Before I dive into this issue, I feel I should clarify that I am not a professional scholar of early medieval England. Instead, I am currently an undergraduate student approaching the end of my third year double-majoring in history and classical studies at Indiana University Bloomington. My main area of study is ancient Mediterranean history. My current intention is to earn a PhD and become a professor of ancient history. (And, yes, I am well aware that, with the current state of the academic job market, I almost certainly don't have any realistic chance of becoming a professor of anything. I am considering other options.)

The first reason I am writing about this subject is because I am personally interested in the European Middle Ages. Even though it is not my main area, I've taken multiple classes on the subject at my university and I've written multiple articles on the subject on my blog—the longest of which is this article I originally published in May 2019, in which I attempt to debunk the popular misconception that the Middle Ages as a whole were a uniquely "dark" period of human history.

The second reason I am writing this article is because the debate going on in medieval studies right now over the nameAnglo-Saxon is similar to the debate going on in ancient Greek and Roman studies over the nameclassics, which has similar problematic historical connections and implications. (If you want to know more about my thoughts on the nameclassics, I recommend this article I wrote in February 2021, in which I address the issue.)

Did the early English call themselves "Anglo-Saxons"?

Before we discuss the question of whether or not the termAnglo-Saxon should be applied historically, we need to address an important historical fact, which is thatAnglo-Saxon was never the primary name that the early English used to describe themselves. In fact, they actually almost never called themselves by this name.

When the early English wrote in their own language (i.e., Old English), they most commonly described themselves asEnglisc orAnglecynn. When they wrote in Latin, they most commonly described themselves asAngli. These names occur frequently in early English writings. The compound nameAnglo-Saxons, by contrast, mostly only appears in the Latin formAngli-Saxonesin Latin texts written by authors living in continental western Europe.

In October 2020, the scholar David Wilton published an excellent paper titled "What Do We Mean By 'Anglo-Saxon'?: Pre-Conquest to the Present" in theJournal of English and Germanic Philology, Volume 119, Number 4. In this paper, he gives an exhaustive survey of the history of the use and meaning of the wordAnglo-Saxon, which, as the subtitle of his paper suggests, spans from the earliest attestation of the name all the way up to the present day.

According to Wilton, the earliest known use of the termAngli-Saxones occurs in theHistoria Langobardorum, a history written in Latin sometime between 787 and 796 CE by the Italian Benedictine monk and historian Paul the Deacon. Paul writes in Latin:

"vestimenta vero eis erant laxa et maxime linea, qualia Anglisaxones habere solent."

This means, in English:

"Their vestments truly were loose and mostly linen, of such a kind as the Anglo-Saxons are accustomed to have."

Despite this earliest attestation of the nameAngli-Saxones in continental Latin, however, the name does not appear in any Old English or Anglo-Latin texts whatsoever until nearly a century later. The earliest known use of the nameAngli-Saxones in a text written in Britain is a charter from the year 891 CE that refers to King Alfred of Wessex (lived c. 848 – 899 CE) by the Latin titleRex Anglorum-Saxonum, which means "King of the Anglo-Saxons."

The nameAngli-Saxones, however, very quickly fell out of use in England. Alfred's son and successor Edward the Elder (lived c. 874 – 924 CE) continued to use the same title as his father, but Edward's own son and successor Æthelstan (lived c. 894 – 939 CE) dropped the titleRex Anglorum-Saxonum in favor of the even more aspirational titleRex Totius Britanniae, which means "King of All Britain."

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a silver coin minted by Alfred, King of the Anglo-Saxons, bearing his image

After Æthelstan's reign, the nameAngli-Saxones and its variants begin to fade from the corpus of Anglo-Latin literature. By the time of the Norman conquest in 1066, the name had already been mostly forgotten. After the Norman conquest, the nameAnglo-Saxons and its variants disappear almost entirely from writings produced in England. There is not a single attestation of the name inany work of Middle English literature and there are only a few attestations of the name in Anglo-Latin literature from this period.

Then, in 1586, the English antiquarian William Camden (lived 1551 – 1623) published a chorographic survey of Britain and Ireland titledBritannia. The book is written in Latin and uses the Latin nameAnglo-Saxones to refer to the English people prior to the Norman conquest, thereby artificially distinguishing them from the English people of Camden's own time. Camden's book became the defining work of English antiquarianism for centuries thereafter and greatly promoted use of the nameAnglo-Saxons.

Inspired by Camden, in 1589, the English literary critic George Puttenham (lived 1529 – 1590) published a work titledThe Arte of English Poesie, which is the earliest known work in the English language written after the Norman conquest to use the termAnglo-Saxon. Other English-language writers followed in Puttenham's footsteps and, by the mid-eighteenth century, the name was commonly used in historical contexts to refer to the English people before the Norman conquest.

ABOVE: Portrait of the English antiquarian William Camden, whose chorographic workBritannia helped revive the use of the termAnglo-Saxon

The invention of Anglo-Saxon as a racial term

In the late eighteenth century, people began to use the termAnglo-Saxon to refer to white English-speaking people of British ancestry in a racial sense to indicate that such people were seen as the true descendants of the early English from before the Norman conquest. In the nineteenth century, the racist ideology of Anglo-Saxonism developed, which held that people descended from the early English were innately racially superior to all other peoples, including not just peoples of non-European ancestries, but peoples of non-English European ancestries as well.

This ideology became tremendously popular among upper-class white people in Britain and the United States. Many prominent white British and American thinkers and intellectuals of the nineteenth century were believers in it, including the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle (lived 1795 – 1881) and the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (lived 1803 – 1882). Various forms of racial Anglo-Saxonism ultimately fed into and influenced Confederate racist ideology, twentieth-century Nordicism, and, ultimately, German Nazism.

Largely as a result of the extensive use of the wordAnglo-Saxon by nineteenth-century and twentieth-century racists, the racial meaning of the word has become by far the most common meaning across all media in nearly all English-speaking countries. One of the most common places where the wordAnglo-Saxon appears in public discourse is in the phrase "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant" or "WASP," which refers to a white person of British ancestry who is a member of a Protestant denomination of Christianity.

ABOVE: Photograph taken by Elliott & Fry in the 1860s depicting the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Caryle, who was an ardent believer in racial Anglo-Saxonism

How the term Anglo-Saxon is being used today

For his paper, David Wilton conducted an exhaustive survey of how the wordAnglo-Saxon is being used in various English-speaking countries today. He closely examined the use of the termAnglo-Saxon in diverse corpora of writings from different countries spanning over the course of twenty-seven years from 1990 to 2017. The main corpora Wilton used for his survey are the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English, the British National Corpus, and the Corpus of News on the Web (NOW Corpus).

In his paper, Wilton classifies three distinct uses of the wordAnglo-Saxon:

An ethnoracial use to refer to white English-speaking people of British descent
A historical use to refer to the English people before the Norman conquest
A politicocultural use to refer to notions of Anglo-Saxon legal traditions

Wilton defined a use of the termAnglo-Saxon as "ethnoracial" in cases where the term was applied to a specific contemporary individual, in cases where the person using the term made reference to racial physiognomy, in cases where it was used as part of the phrase "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant," and in other cases where the term was clearly being used to describe contemporary white people.

Wilton notes that the ethnoracial and politicocultural uses of the wordAnglo-Saxon are sometimes hard to distinguish from each other and that, under some definitions of race, the politicocultural use of the word might also be classified as racial. Nonetheless, he prefers to distinguish between them for the sake of greater specificity.

Wilton found that, in writings from the United States, the ethnoracial meaning of the word isoverwhelmingly the dominant usage across all media, with 66% of all uses of the word in the United States English corpora he examined being in the ethnoracial sense, 12% being in the politico-cultural sense, and only 22% being in the historical sense. He found that works of fiction were the most likely to use the word in the ethnoracial sense, with 87% of all uses of the wordAnglo-Saxon in fiction being ethnoracial.

Although Wilton did find that academic books and journal articles were somewhat less likely to use the word in the ethnoracial sense, 54% of all uses of the word in academic texts were still ethnoracial. Only 22% of uses of the word in academic texts were in reference to the English people prior to the Norman conquest. Clearly, then, for academics in the United States, the ethnoracial meaning of the wordAnglo-Saxon is still very much the primary meaning.

ABOVE: Figure from Wilton's paper showing the overwhelming dominance of the ethnoracial use of the termAnglo-Saxon in contemporary United States English

Moreover, Wilton found that the ethnoracial use of the termAnglo-Saxon was actuallyeven more dominant in works written by Canadian authors than works written by authors from the United States. Fully 74% of all uses of the wordAnglo-Saxon in the Canadian English corpora Wilton examined were in the ethnoracial sense. An additional 12% were in the politicocultural sense. Only 14% of uses of the word were in the historical sense.

ABOVE: Figure from Wilton's paper showing the overwhelming dominance of the ethnoracial use of the termAnglo-Saxon in contemporary Canadian English

The same principle held true for Australian English and New Zealand English. In Australia, 54% of all uses of the termAnglo-Saxon were in the ethnoracial sense, compared to only 19% in the historical sense. In New Zealand, 38% of uses were in the ethnoracial sense compared to only 24% of uses in the historical sense.

In Ireland, India, South Africa, Singapore, Pakistan, and Nigeria, the majority of uses of the word Anglo-Saxon were in the politicocultural sense, usually followed closely by the ethnoracial sense, with the historical sense nearly always coming in dead last as the least common use of the word.

ABOVE: Figure from Wilton's paper showing the frequency of different uses of the termAnglo-Saxon in other English-speaking countries

Of all the countries Wilton examines in his paper, there is only one country in which the historical use of the termAnglo-Saxon to refer to the English people prior to the Norman conquest is actually the most common use. Unsurprisingly, that country is the United Kingdom itself.

Wilton found that, in the United Kingdom, 76% of all uses of the termAnglo-Saxon overall and 87% of all uses of the term in academic texts were in the historical sense. By sharp contrast, only 9% of all uses overall and only 5% of all uses in academic texts were in the ethnoracial sense.

This clearly marks the United Kingdom as quite an aberration among English-speaking countries. I'm sure that British people will try to insist that they are the only ones who are using the term "correctly," but this doesn't change the fact that the United Kingdom is literally the only place on earth where the historical use of the word is the most common.

ABOVE: Figure from Wilton's paper showing the overwhelming dominance of the historical use of the termAnglo-Saxon in contemporary British English

A national divide

Given Wilton's findings, it should probably come as no surprise that, in the debate over the use of the termAnglo-Saxon, there is a notable division between scholars who grew up in the United Kingdom and scholars who grew up outside the United Kingdom.

Generally speaking, scholars who grew up in the United Kingdom are far more likely to insist that it is not problematic at all to use the termAnglo-Saxon in a historical context to describe the English people prior to the Norman conquest. Meanwhile, scholars who grew up outside the United Kingdom—especially scholars who grew up in North America—are far more likely to say that using the term in this way is problematic, because it inherently calls to mind the racist myth that the early English were a racially homogeneous and innately superior people.

This division is probably a result of the fact that scholars who grew up in the United Kingdom are more likely to have first heard the termAnglo-Saxon in history class when learning about the early English and to have heard the ethnoracial use of the term later. Scholars who grew up outside the United Kingdom, on the other hand, are more likely to have heard the ethnoracial use of the term first and the historical use of the term later. The history of a person's own experience with the term therefore has a considerable impact on how that person is likely to view it.

My personal experience

At this point, I would like to make a bit of an aside about my personal experience. I grew up in a rural area outside a small town in Indiana. I don't remember exactly when the first time I ever heard the wordAnglo-Saxon was, but the first time Idistinctly rememberhearing it was when I was in maybe fifth or sixth grade and I watched a documentary series with my mother about the history of England. The first episode of the series was about the early medieval English and I distinctly remember that the presenter—who was, somewhat unsurprisingly, an older white British man—consistently referred to them as "Anglo-Saxons."

That, however, was outside the classroom and, unfortunately, I don't remember precisely when the first time I heard the wordAnglo-Saxon in the classroom was either. I do remember that, when I was in seventh or eighth grade, we read a play in English class that was based onBeowulf, but I do not recall whether the teacher in that class specifically used the wordAnglo-Saxon. If she did, it was already a term I was familiar with, so it didn't particularly register.

ABOVE: Illustration of Beowulf battling the dragon, drawn in 1908 by the English illustrator Joseph Ratcliffe Skelton

The first time I vividly, distinctly remember hearing the precise wordAnglo-Saxon in the classroom was when I was in tenth grade English class. We were reading the novelTo Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and, to prepare us for the novel, our teacher showed us a video about the murder of Emmett Till.

Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old Black boy from Chicago. In August 1955, he was staying with relatives who lived near the town of Money, Mississippi. On 24 August, he and his cousin Curtis Jones went with some local boys to buy candy at Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market, a small local grocery shop.

There is dispute about what happened while he was in the store, since the accounts given by eyewitnesses at the time contradict each other and multiple eyewitnesses later changed their testimony, but it is clear that Till said or did something that somehow gave Carol Bryant, the white female proprietor of the store, that he was sexually interested in her.

ABOVE: Photograph of Emmett Till, taken by his mother Mamie Till Bradley on Christmas Day 1954

When Carol Bryant's husband Roy heard about what happened, he was furious. Very early in the morning on 28 August 1955, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam—who was a much larger man with reportedly more violent inclinations—broke into the home of Till's great-uncle Mose Wright, armed with pistols.

They forced Wright to show them to Till and threatened to kill him if he told anyone. They abducted Till, tied him up in the back of their pickup truck, and took him to a barn, where they beat him and tortured him. Then they took him down to the river and shot him in the head. They mutilated his corpse and dumped it into the Tallahatchie River, weighing it down with a fan they had removed from a cotton gin.

Wright refused to call the police because he was afraid for his life and he didn't think the police would be of any help, but Jones called both the sheriff and Till's mother. The police arrested Bryant and Milam for kidnapping. On 31 August, two boys fishing in the Tallahatchie River discovered Till's naked corpse, which was completely mutilated beyond all hope of recognition. The body was only eventually identified as that of Emmett Till because a silver ring Till had worn with the initials "L.T." and the date "May 25, 1943" was on the corpse's finger.

Bryant and Milam admitted during interrogation that they had abducted Till, but claimed they let him go without killing him. The two men were brought to trial in September in the face of national media attention. There was no shortage of witnesses to various stages of the murder, since the murderers had had no fear of being caught and they had made no efforts to be discrete; they knew perfectly well that violence against Black people was effectively legal and that they would never be convicted of anything.

The legal system, however, was thoroughly biased in the white murderers' favor and the jury was composed entirely of white Southern men. In his closing statement, the defense attorney John W. Whitten Jr. explicitly appealed to the jurors' racism, telling them:

"Your fathers will turn over in their graves [if Milam and Bryant are found guilty] and I'm sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men in the face of that pressure."

When all the arguments had been made, the jury went out for only sixty-seven minutes before they returned to acquit Milam and Bryant of all charges. When one of the jurors was asked why he and his fellow jurors returned so quickly, he replied they would have returned even sooner if they hadn't stopped to pick up soda.

In 1956, Milam and Bryant, having already been acquitted, openly admitted that they murdered Till in an interview with the journalist William Bradford Huie forLook magazine. Milam explicitly defended the murder, declaring that he wanted "to make an example of" Emmett Till "just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand."

ABOVE: Photograph of the men who murdered Emmett Till—J. W. Milam (left) and Roy Bryant (right)—smiling with their wives immediately after being acquitted for the murder they later confessed to having committed

Learning about Emmett Till's murder for the first time in tenth-grade English class left me absolutely shocked. I had, of course, previously been vaguely aware that lynchings had taken place in the South during the Jim Crow Era, but I had had no idea of the sheer extent to which the American legal system had protected white people who murdered Black people. It was not a topic that had ever really been covered in any of my history classes up to that point.

And there, in the middle of it all, was the wordAnglo-Saxon. I think that it was when I heard about John W. Whitten Jr.'s use of the word in his closing remarks at the trial of Bryant and Milam for the murder of Emmett Till that I first had some inkling of a realization thatAnglo-Saxon was not the perfectly neutral historical term for the English people before the Norman conquest that I had previously always thought it was.

Even after that lesson in English class, however, I assumed that John W. Whitten Jr. was simply misusing the phraseAnglo-Saxon and that it was still an appropriate term to use in historical studies. I continued to use the term for years. In fact, in an article I wrote on my blog as recently as September 2019, I refer to Ēostre as an "Anglo-Saxon goddess." It was only in around late 2019 or early 2020 that I stopped using the termAnglo-Saxon in my articles. You'll notice that, in an article I wrote in April 2020, I refer to Ēostre as "Old English," rather than "Anglo-Saxon." I did that deliberately.

ABOVE: Illustration from 1884 by the German illustrator Johannes Gehrts, representing the goddess Ēostre as the artist imagined her

Ethnic and cultural diversity in early medieval England

The fact that so many historians and medievalists continue to use the termAnglo-Saxon to refer to the English people before the Norman conquest, even though the same term is so widely used to mean "white people," only reinforces the inaccurate impression that England before the Norman conquest was a completely racially homogeneous, white society.

In reality, no one in early medieval England ever thought of themself as "white" in the contemporary racial sense. As I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2020 about race in ancient Greece and Rome, the concept of a "white race" is a modern social construct that is based on extremely superficial external physical features—not any kind of objective biological reality.

This construct did not exist in the ancient world. No one in ancient Greece or Rome ever considered themself racially "white." In fact, believe it or not, ancient Greek and Roman visual artists often used skin color to differentiategender, rather than race. In ancient Greece and Rome, men were expected to be outside in the sun and become tanned, while women were expected to stay indoors and remain pale. Therefore, it was a common convention for artists to portray men as having very dark skin and woman as having very pale skin.

Geraldine Heng, an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, provides an excellent discussion of how modern conceptions of race determined by skin color developed in her bookThe Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Chapter Four, "Color." Heng argues (convincingly in my opinion) that the conception of western European Latin Christians as racially "white" first began to emerge in around the twelfth century CE or thereabouts and developed over the course of the later Middle Ages. Thus, for the entire period before the Norman conquest, the concept of a "white race" did not really exist.

ABOVE: Ancient Roman fresco from the House of Mars and Venus in Pompeii depicting the goddess Venus with pale skin and the god Mars with dark skin as a way of distinguishing gender

Moreover, even if we apply modern conceptions of race to pre-modern history, England has always been inhabited by people of diverse ancestries and ethnicities. As I discuss in my article about race in ancient Greece and Rome, even before the English arrived in Britain, during the time of the Roman Empire, there were already people living in Britain who came from all over North Africa and the Middle East.

Forensic skeletal analyses have tentatively identified multiple individuals from Roman Britain as having most likely been of African ancestry, including the Ivory Bangle Lady, a young woman of elite status who lived in the Roman city of Eboricum (which is now the city of York) in around the fourth century CE.

Meanwhile, the Arbeia Museum in South Shields, England, displays a tombstone dating to the late Roman imperial period that was erected by a Syrian man named Barates for his wife, a British freedwoman named Regina. The inscription on the tombstone is written in both Latin and Aramaic, a Semitic language that was spoken in Syria in antiquity.

ABOVE: Tombstone of a British freedwoman named Regina erected by her husband, a Syrian man named Barates, bearing an inscription in Aramaic

The Roman Empire lost control of its territories in Britain in the fifth century CE as various Germanic peoples from what is now Denmark arrived and took control. After arriving in Britain, these Germanic peoples became the early English. Despite the arrival of the English, however, the ethnic diversity of Roman Britain did not disappear.

Additionally, during the early medieval period itself, many people came to England from Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, and other parts of western Europe. In fact, people continued to come to England from places even further afield, including North Africa and the Middle East. Some of these people attained very important positions of ecclesiastical and political authority.

An Amazigh man named Hadrian was born somewhere in North Africa sometime before 637 CE. Hadrian became a Biblical scholar and commentator and eventually moved to Italy. When the position of Archbishop of Canterbury fell vacant in 667 CE, Pope Vitalian offered it to Hadrian twice. Hadrian refused, but he introduced the Pope to his friend Theodoros of Tarsos, a Greek man who had been born in the city of Tarsos in southeastern Asia Minor in around 602 CE. Theodoros agreed to accept the position as the new Archbishop of Canterbury in 668 CE under the condition that Hadrian would accompany him to England.

The two men arrived in England in 27 May 669 CE. Theodoros became the Archbishop of Canterbury and Hadrian became the abbot of Saint Peter's Church. Together, they founded a school at Canterbury, which provided instruction in the Latin and Greek languages and also produced some of the most noteworthy scholarly work in early medieval England.

People living in early medieval England not only came from many different backgrounds; they also spoke many different languages. For one thing, during the Early Middle Ages, many Celtic people in Britain, including parts of England, still spoke various Brittonic and Goidelic languages. English people themselves spoke many different dialects of Old English, with the main ones being West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian, and Kentish.

Many educated people throughout different parts of Britain, including most members of the clergy, also spoke Classical Latin. During the early periods of early medieval English history, many speakers of various dialects of Vulgar Latin lived in England as well. During the later periods of early English history, there were speakers of Old French. Even more notably, the Norse, who began arriving in Britain in the late eighth century CE and eventually came to occupy large swathes of the country, spoke Old Norse.

Early medieval England was not a monoethnic monolingual monocultural society by any stretch of the imagination.

ABOVE: Modern icon showing what the artist imagined Theodoros of Tarsos might have looked like

How use of the term Anglo-Saxon sends an implicit message that only white people belong in early medieval English studies

The use of the termAnglo-Saxon to describe the early medieval English reinforces the false notion that early medieval England was a homogeneous white society. This, in turn, sends a message to people of color who might otherwise have had an interest in the field that the field is not for them. It also reinforces the belief among white people who are already in the field that people of color do not belong in it.

This article fromThe Washington Post discusses the experiences of Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm, a female scholar of color, in the field of early medieval English studies. The article notes that, while Rambaran-Olm was a student, her teachers constantly expressed astonishment that she had any interest in early medieval English studies. Unfortunately, it seems that some people saw Rambaran-Olm's involvement in the field as not only unusual, but outright wrong. The article says that, on one occasion, a person who turned her down for a job told her: "We couldn't figure out how to justify to our students thatyou are an Anglo-Saxonist."

Rambaran-Olm further discusses the racism that is endemic to the field of early medieval English studies in this post on Medium from June 2018. In her post, she says that she has repeatedly witnessed talented scholars of color leave the field of early English studies. She says that she has talked to some of these scholars and asked them why they chose to leave the field. The overwhelming response seems to have been that they felt they were not welcome because of the color of their skin:

"Over the past eight months I talked to several scholars of color about their choices to pivot out of early English studies. Choosing to stay anonymous for professional reasons, several told me racism was their deciding factor. They told me things like: 'I had no choice. There was no room for me,' and 'in my interactions with medievalists, I always felt ostracized and pushed out.'"

"Another said that skin color was a constant distraction to their scholarship. 'It's beyond difficult to jockey your way in and continue to try and justify your work when your currency and worth is based on your skin color. As a brown "Anglo-Saxonist" I had no currency, so I realized I needed to switch course.' Another told me about facing racist harassment from their supervisor in graduate school."

Rambaran-Olm seems to have grown increasingly disillusioned with the entire field of medieval studies in more recent years. In a video posted on YouTube on 9 September 2020, she denounces the field, saying that it has done almost nothing to address the white supremacist narratives it was founded upon and that the field as it currently exists is so extraordinarily hostile to students of color that she does not recommend that young students of color even try to get involved in the field, because it will only cause them suffering and heartache. She warns:

"Until we start grappling with these issues and start dismantling institutional bullshit, we're not going to changeanything. Until then, I do not recommend students of color to join. And, students of color, don't kid yourselves: you are not going to fix anything. We have to dismantle and burn to the ground the field in order for something better to emerge. White people need to quit trying to save this field and make it relevant until you are old enough to retire."

I cannot speak from personal experience here, because I am white and I am not a medievalist. Nevertheless, it seems to me from what I have read and seen of Rambaran-Olm's work that white medievalists in general don't realize just what an incredibly toxic environment their field apparently is for students and scholars of color.

Just for the record, I'm sure that my own field of ancient history is probably every bit as toxic for students and scholars of color as medieval studies—perhaps even more toxic—but that's a conversation for another time. The point I'm trying make here is that use of the termAnglo-Saxon only reinforces the implicit racist message that early medieval English studies is a field exclusively for white people.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Mary Rambaran-Olm from the beginning of her YouTube video about medieval studies and white supremacy

"Reclaiming" the term Anglo-Saxon ?

Many white scholars—especially white scholars who live in the United Kingdom—have tried to argue that it is imperative to "reclaim" the nameAnglo-Saxon from white supremacists. For instance, Howard Williams, a professor of archaeology from the University of Chester in the United Kingdom, wrote an essay forAeon in May 2020 in which he argues:

"When archaeologists refer to 'early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries', 'middle Anglo-Saxon settlements', 'Anglo-Saxon great square-headed brooches', 'late Anglo-Saxon coins' and so on, the term tells us about the objects and sites, when they were made or found. The term has no racial connotation whatsoever. Spurious modern racial categorisations are simply inexplicable and inapplicable for the early medieval period."

What I think Williams fails to realize is just how widely the term Anglo-Saxon is used to mean "white English-speaking people of British ancestry." The term cannot realistically be "reclaimed." Archaeologists may very well write about the "Anglo-Saxons" andthink that the term is racially neutral, but, when other people read what they've written, they will inevitably interpret "Anglo-Saxon" to mean "white people."

In this case, it doesn't especially matter what scholarsmean in their heads when they use the term; what matters is what people will actually read on the page.

Conclusion

At this point in our discussion, I think that several facts remain clear:

Anglo-Saxon is not the primary term that the early medieval English would have used to refer to themselves. In fact, they rarely ever used it.

In most countries today where the majority of people speak English, the termAnglo-Saxon is primarily used to refer to white English-speaking people of British ancestry—not the historical English people prior to the Norman conquest.

Using the termAnglo-Saxon to describe the early medieval English reinforces the false notion that early medieval England was a racially homogeneous society in which everyone was a white English-speaker.

This misperception of early medieval England drives scholars of color away from the field of early medieval English studies and reinforces the belief among white scholars that people of color don't belong in the field.

There are other, perfectly acceptable terms that we can use to refer to the early medieval English, aside from "Anglo-Saxon." For instance, we can call them "Old English," "early medieval English," "English people before the Norman conquest." Indeed, if it's already clear which period we're talking about, we can just call them "English."

Given these facts, I think that the termAnglo-Saxon is best avoided—especially in the names of departments and scholarly organizations.

I'm sure that some people will accuse me of trying to "cancel" the name Anglo-Saxon, but that's really not what I'm doing. I'm just saying that, in general, when referring to the early medieval English people, there are other names people can use that are more accurate and less harmful. I acknowledge that there are some specific contexts in which using the nameAnglo-Saxon may be necessary, such as when translating an early medieval Latin text that uses it or when talking about Alfred of Wessex and his titleRex Anglorum-Saxonum. Generally speaking, though, it's not a term that people need to be using.

I also want to clarify that I do not think that anyone who uses the termAnglo-Saxon is automatically racist. There are plenty of perfectly well-intentioned people who use the term to refer to the English people before the Norman conquest simply because they either aren't aware of or haven't considered the contemporary racial use of the word. As I have already mentioned, I myself used the term for years without fully realizing its racial implications.

In September 2019, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, a highly eminent scholarly organization devoted to the study of early medieval England, voted to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England. I think this was a wise decision and a step in the right direction—and perhaps the first step along the long road to making the field of early medieval English studies have a bit less in common with the "America First Caucus."

Hello! I'm Spencer McDaniel! I am currently a student at Indiana University Bloomington pursuing a double major in classical studies and history. I am obsessed with the ancient world and I write about it constantly. My main area of study is ancient Greece, but I also write about other areas of history as well. View all posts by Spencer McDaniel