‘Normans’ vs. ‘Saxons’: Cinematic Imaginaries of Race and Nation in Angevin England, 1938–1964

Abstract

Building on Benedict Anderson’s idea about the nation being a fictive construct—an imagined community of people who see themselves as sovereign, exclusive, and one with a shared history—this article examines how the race-based opposition between ‘Saxons’ and ‘Normans’ in histories about the Angevin period was popularized in the 19th century, and how this idea was integrated into the stories of three popular films in the following century: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Ivanhoe (1952), and Becket (1964). To better understand this phenomenon, this article uses the term ‘cinematic imaginary’ to convey how the shared institutions, values, and histories that constituted ‘medieval’ nationhood were depicted in film. This article argues that, much like how historians and novelists of the 19th century imagined how people of certain races in medieval England—particularly during the period of the Angevin Empire (c. 1154–1216)—operated according to set of values and embodied certain attributes, so too did filmmakers in midcentury Hollywood bend the categories of ‘Saxon’ and ‘Norman’ to align with their conceptions of race, nation, and class conflict in the 20th century. Through an examination of these imaginaries in popular cinema, this article illuminates how 20th-century interpretations of history were presented to audiences to convey a set of ideas about a medieval past in light of modern class struggle, imperialism, racism, and nationalism.Banner image taken from The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Copyright Warner Bros, all rights reserved. Image source: www.intofilm.org/films/3539/.