The Legal Writing of Sir Edward Coke, the Anglo-Saxons,

¹For good reason, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has become a controversial term for its racist associations and long history of misappropriation, a convention that took hold especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but one which has earlier origins. For a useful survey of the problematic legacies inherent in Anglo-Saxon studies, see Rambaran-Olm, Breann, and Goodrich, ‘Medieval Studies: The Stakes of the Field’, 356–70. However, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has also been miscast as an ahistorical terminology in itself, and whilst ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ certainly do carry with them uncomfortable associations, Alfred the Great envisioned — and perhaps ruled over — a political entity he called the ‘kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’. As such, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was a contemporary term — a bridge between the disparate Saxon, Anglian, and Jutish kingdoms of earlier medieval England and the ‘kingdom of the English’ that emerged in the tenth century. As Catherine Karkov retains ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in her recent monograph on later Anglo-Saxon studies because she explores ‘an imagined place that was and is home to a specific type of identity’, I employ it here for the same reason; see Karkov, Imagining Anglo-Saxon England, 2.

and Lex Terrae

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