John Foxe and the Anglo-Saxons

England in the sixteenth century was not yet Anglo-Saxon. English historians still looked to the Britons as their most ancient ancestors, apparently untroubled by the etymological connection of "English" to "Angles", and cited the practices of the Britons as evidence of the antiquity of their nation, their law, and their church. Thus John Foxe begins his history of the English church by invoking the British mother of Constantine, as if "English" and "British" were all the same, and as if the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons made no difference at all. This chapter explores Foxe's difficult relationship to England's Anglo-Saxon past in the context of the new Anglo-Saxonist scholarship emerging in the 1560s, a scholarship caught between competing notions of English national and religious identity. Foxe's handling of Aelfric needs to be understood in terms of an ongoing polemic over Anglo-Saxon religion, which shaped not only Foxe's attitude toward Aelfric but even materially shaped the text of Aelfric that Foxe prints.