| The political and ethnic heterogeneity of Early Medieval Britain, coupled with the early arrival of literacy to the island, resulted in the textual record of the Anglo-Saxon period being, amongst other things, a record of change and alteration: of becoming. This dissertation is designed to make sense of the contradictory picture of Germanic ethno-political identity in Anglo-Saxon Britain, with the attempt to theorize more clearly the ways in which ethnic identity was understood, transformed, and exploited to bolster social and political cohesion. In undertaking this analysis, I focus primarily on the wide array of self-produced histories of the period. Because the process of history writing is linked inexorably to the principle of collective self-fashioning, these documents evidence the strategies by which Anglo-Saxons made sense and consequence of their own history and established the parameters of their collective identity. My analysis of these texts shows that ethno-political identity in the Anglo-Saxon period was more multi-faceted, complex and ideological than is commonly acknowledged. Rather than reflect stable, virtually unchanging and unalterable entities, identities did, and indeed had to, undergo constant shifts and modifications in order to reflect and support the contemporaneous realities and needs of society. While these shifts could be due to a loss of direct political efficacy (as in the case of the Jutes) or the influence of external forces (such as is evidenced in the early usage of broad Anglian terminology in the eighth century) or conquest (as in King Alfred's promotion of the concept of the Angelcynn at the close of the ninth century), it seems likely that ethnic identity was closely connected to the social economy in which those possessing these identities operated. My findings also suggest that the manipulation and reformation of identity in the establishment of broader communities was not simply possible during this period, but necessary: only through a rationalization and accommodation of competing identities, either temporarily or permanently, was the social cohesion of the broader community achieved. |
