Anglo-Saxon
14 August 2026
Anglo-Saxon is a problematic term. Historically, it is a misnomer, and in modern use it is strongly associated with ethnic, and often white supremacist, identity. As such, it should probably be avoided in favor of terms like English, Early English, pre-Conquest, and, for the language and literature, Old English.
Anglo-Saxon is a compound of two terms originally from the Latin Anglus and the proto-Germanic *sahso, relating to blades or cutting. Both were terms for groups of Germanic peoples who settled in what is now England starting in the late fourth century C.E. The origin of these names is a bit sketchy, but it is widely thought that Anglus, or Angle, refers to a region in southern Denmark and northern Germany thought to be their home. The Latin Anglus is the root of England and English. And sax, seax in Old English, refers to a short sword or knife associated with certain Germanic tribes. In addition to the insular use we see Saxon in the name of the modern German state of Saxony.
(The story related by Bede of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—this third group may not have actually existed—arriving in 411 C.E. in three ships is a simplified, mythical description of a migration that was more complex, started earlier, and took place over a longer period.)
The compound Anglo-Saxon only appears once or twice in English-language writing prior to the Early Modern period. There are more frequent uses in Latin—mostly in Continental, not English, sources—starting with a 786 C.E. letter by Alcuin, a clergyman and scholar from Northumbria who served in Charlemagne’s court, that uses Anglorum Sax[o]nia (Saxony of the English) to refer to England, and specifically to Mercia and Northumbria—both Saxon polities. Alcuin would not likely confuse the ethnic identity of his own people by labeling them as Angles.
Latin use of the compound to refer to the people of England is first documented in Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum, written sometime before 796, in a passage that refers to the clothing of the Anglisaxones (Anglo-Saxons). All of the Latin uses of the term in Continental Latin are similar, using it to distinguish the Germanic peoples of England from their Continental cousins.
Use in pre-Conquest Anglo-Latin, however, is rarer and quite different, demonstrating that the English did not use it to refer to themselves as a single people or nation. Variants of the term appear in the extant Anglo-Latin corpus thirty-seven times. All but one of these are in regnal or ecclesiastical titles. These begin with an 891 charter that refers to Alfred as Anglorum Saxonum rex (king of the Angle-Saxons). But here and in the later titles the reference is specifically to the unified kingdom of Mercia and Wessex. When Northumbria came under a unified English rule with Æthelstan in 934, it was listed as a separate land in the regnal title, indicating that the continued use of Anglo-Saxon in regnal titles was specifically to Mercia-Wessex. The one non-titular use of the compound is in Lantfred’s c.1000 life of St. Swithun, which refers to diversis Anglosaxonum finibus (diverse Anglo-Saxon regions). The intended geographic scope of this phrase is unclear to us today, but since Swithun was bishop of Winchester, the capital of Wessex, it is likely another reference to Mercia-Wessex and not England as a whole.
There are only three uses of Anglo-Saxon in pre-Conquest English-language texts. Two of the three texts are macaronic, blending both Latin and English, so the appearance in these two texts is likely a use of the Latin. Two of these are in regnal titles, one macaronic and one all-English, mirroring the Anglo-Latin usage. The third is in the tenth-century macaronic poem Aldhelm, which contains the lines, “Ealdelm æþele sceop etiam fuit / on æðele Angolsexna” (Aldhelm was a noble poet in the land of the Anglo-Saxons). Aldhelm was of the Wessex royal house and served as abbot at Malmesbury and as bishop of Sherborne, so the Mercia-Wessex sense is likely intended here as well.
So if the Germanic peoples of England did not refer to themselves as Anglo-Saxons, what did they call themselves? There are 43 appearances of seax (Saxon) as an ethnonym in the Old English corpus, but that is in contrast to some 407 appearances of saxon in compounds, such as westseax, eastseax, and suðseax, indicating that Saxon was primarily used to refer to specific groups, and not as a demonym for the people as a whole. Instead, the word that was overwhelmingly used in pre-Conquest writing for both Angles and Saxons was englisc.
With the Norman Conquest, the already rare use of Anglo-Saxon disappeared entirely in Middle-English writing. English continued as the primary demonym. Saxon, and the Anglo-Norman Sessoun, was used historically to refer to the pre-Conquest peoples. While the compound disappeared from Middle English, Anglo-Latin writing in post-Conquest period continued to sporadically use Anglo-Saxon, again usually to distinguish the people in England from those on the Continent..
Use of Anglo-Saxon as a demonym for the English people as a whole really started with William Camden’s 1586 Latin Britannia, in which he used the term as a section title. He would go on to use Anglo-Saxones in the body of the 1607 revision of the work. Camden’s use would be picked up by George Puttenham in his 1589 The Arte of English Poesie, the first post-Conquest, English language use of the term. This period was also when the term Middle Ages was coined—Camden being one of the first to adopt the term, a time when writers were looking to the past to establish a national patrimony. Reflecting this desire, the Corpus of Early Modern English has only Puttenham’s single sixteenth-century use, contrasted with 173 appearances of Anglo-Saxon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of which 172 of these are references to the pre-Conquest period.
But in the modern period, Anglo-Saxon acquires a new sense, that of a contemporary identity marker. That 173rd use of the term in the Corpus of Early Modern English is in the transcript of a 1794 sedition trial held in Edinburgh that uses the term to refer to the English politico-legal system, as opposed to that of the Scottish. It is with this very late eighteenth-century use, and subsequent ones in the nineteenth century, that we start to see Anglo-Saxon used for contemporary, rather than pre-Conquest contexts. This usage falls into two somewhat overlapping senses. The first is as an ethnonym, a marker for Englishness (as opposed to Scottish, Welsh, or Irish identity) or more broadly for whiteness. The second is to denote the politico-economic institutions and practices of the anglophone polities of the United States and Britain, with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand sometimes included (cf. the French le Anglo-Saxon in this sense).
In present-day usage, these two senses constitute the overwhelming majority of uses throughout the English-speaking globe—Britain and Ireland excepted—with historical reference to the pre-Conquest period being a minority use. In Britain and Ireland, because of continual references to those nations’ histories, the pre-Conquest sense dominates, but even there the use as a contemporary identity marker still makes up about a quarter of all uses of the term.
The use of Anglo-Saxon as a contemporary ethnonym ranges from contexts of hardcore white supremacy to the phrase and acronym white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) to casual use as a ethnic distinction. And the politico-economic sense is not without tinges of racial identity, especially when used in a postcolonial context. As a result, the continued use of Anglo-Saxon as a historical term serves to legitimize and reinforce the racial uses, even if that is not intended.
Using Anglo-Saxon to refer to the pre-Conquest period is problematic even without considering that it may be read as legitimizing white supremacy. First, it’s anachronistic; it’s not a label the pre-Conquest peoples of England used (except, as we have seen, in regnal titles, and then only to refer to part of England). That, in and of itself is not disqualifying; many historical terms are anachronistic. More relevant is that using it carries an implication of unity in the period that did not exist. It causes us to lump together chronological, regional, religious, and political disparities. Its use also creates an artificial divide between the early medieval Anglo-Saxon and the modern English, severing the historical and cultural connections.
In short, there is no good reason for continuing to use the term Anglo-Saxon. It would be best to just let the term fade away until it only exists in the titles of old books.
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Image credit: Fair use of a screenshot from Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride (1987, 20th Century Fox) to illustrate the topic under discussion.