In My Day, We Used To Call This A Smattering

[princeofcairo]

* I know it's been forever and long since we've had a single substantive post here, but post-GenCon creates almost as much rush-and-bustle as pre-GenCon does.

* Especially because this is also pre-ConQuest; I'll be a guest at ConQuest SF (which will be in San Jose, or rather Santa Clara, this year) next weekend. The Guest of Honor will be John

Comments

edited

[richardthinks]

mean old Normans vs. doughty stout Saxons
Thanks for this. I suspected it had to be early nationalism, too, but I didn't have any data. According to Robert von Friedeburg both "Fatherland" and the idea that patriots might be better defenders/definers of the nation than the king were also born out of German prod wartime propaganda of the same period.

[barsukthom]

However, I am not too suprised at the absence of earlier infomation on the subject, as the Feelthy Noormans controlled the Church in England, and thereby the main print medium.
Chaucer, of course, WOULD have written something, except that he was a stooge of the Establishment.

[maliszew]

If I recall correctly, the usage of "Norman" really takes off after the death of Elizabeth I. The 17th century is probably the beginning of its lexicographic ascendancy, given a good push by matters political and religious, such as the Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, and the Hanoverian succession. I know the usage is firmly entrenched by the early 1700s at any rate.

[yojimbouk]

Does it really matter as long as the bloody Saxons know their place?

[richardthinks]

Gloucester? Hay-on-Wye?

[jholloway]

I don't know how much the oppressive-Normans-liberty-loving-Saxons thing was a part of this, but Matthew Parker was definitely into the idea that the pre-Conquest church was both closer to the primitive church and to Protestantism than the later model. It also makes sense that the interest in things Saxon would coincide with the Elizabethan period, which is when people really start to get seriously into reading Old English again.

[peter_erwin]

I seem to recall reading about political screeds circulating in the early 1600s which invoked an idealized, primitive democracy of sorts in Anglo-Saxon times (with references to "hundred moots" and similar assemblies), presented as a contrast to the more autocratic kingship that the Stuarts were pushing for. I'm pretty sure the "loss" of this idealized version of English governance was blamed on the Norman invasion and subsequent French domination. So I'd agree that this is probably something that got started in Elizabethan times and then took off in the 17th Century as it got linked to the growing political struggles.