A Historiographical Survey: Anglo-Saxon Kings and Kingship since World War II

Abstract

Three points by way of introduction. The first concerns the definition and delineation of the subject. Because kingship is but one ill-defined kingdom in the shifting intellectual heptarchy of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, I have been rigorous almost to the point of ruthlessness about excluding topics just at or beyond our boundaries. Not only scholarly contributions and scholars but also whole fields and subfields of historical inquiry have been precluded from consideration: the list of neglected, ignored, and relegated topics is very long indeed. Then I come to the question of whether this survey has any hopes for originality. What dreams I might have harbored for a new clarion call were quickly dashed when, early in my preparation of this article, I came on Eric John's comment that “more books have been written about Anglo-Saxon kingship than about Anglo-Saxon kings.” Once I got my torch alight I quickly realized how many footsteps already covered the path. And last, this article in some sense is offered as a memorial to Dorothy Whitelock, our greatest modern Anglo-Saxonist after Stenton. Though she did not live to complete her study of Alfred the Great, we have been assured that it will soon see the light of day. The frequency with which Whitelock's name appears in the bibliography gives some idea of her versatility and her relentless intellectual curiosity. To the study of kingship alone her first postwar contribution appears in the 1954 listings; her last—the reedition of her magisterialEnglish Historical Documents, volume 1—in 1979.The long postwar generation of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, of which we now must be standing at the far chronological end, begins with the publication of Frank Merry Stenton'sAnglo-Saxon Englandin 1943. Stenton was sixty-three when his great book appeared. Rarely has a large synthetic treatment simultaneously presented the state of the existing question and set the agenda for the next thirty or forty years.