In the sixteenth century, self-styled ‘antiquaries’ began to uncover, examine, and circulate manuscript sources from the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ period of English history that had predated the Norman Conquest of 1066. These manuscripts had formerly been held in abbeys and religious houses across the country. However, after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 1530s and early 1540s, this material increasingly came into the possession of private collectors. Some antiquarian scholars became proficient in the Anglo-Saxon language, now known as Old English, which more closely resembled Old Norse and Old High German than early modern English. Nevertheless, in the period assessed throughout this dissertation (c. 1560 – c. 1620), the Anglo-Saxons were increasingly seen as the first English people, and efforts were made to reassign the source of English ethnocultural and historical identity from the more patently native Britonnic populations to the transplanted Germanic groups that had migrated to Britain in the post-Roman fifth century.

In modern scholarship, early modern interest in the Anglo-Saxon past has been primarily ascribed to Protestant polemicists who sought evidence that the ancient English church had operated outside of papal influence. This dissertation evaluates other, ‘secular’ engagements with the Anglo-Saxon past in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the historical interests of legally-minded scholars for whom the English common law was the principal factor that defined their cultural and national identities.

The first part of this thesis explores the emergence in the 1560s of a conception of Englishness grounded in the Anglo-Saxon past, relative to the less discriminating sense of Romano-Britishness that characterised earlier and other contemporary perceptions of the national past. The second part traces the evolution of Anglo-Saxon scholarship throughout the late Elizabethan period of increased xenophobia and dynastic uncertainty. The final two chapters treat the deployment of these ideas of Germanic Englishness in political debates and legal treatises following the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603.

Ultimately, this thesis argues that antiquarian scholars configured their studies of English institutional history in terms of ethnic lineage, constructing implicit hierarchies of ethnic desirability wherein Germanic descent was the basis for English superiority relative to Roman, Celtic, and other Continental ethnicities.