Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- PART I APPROACHES AND DEBATES
- PART II THE MIDDLE AGES
- 4 Germanic power structures: the early English experience
- 5 The historiography of the Anglo-Saxon ‘nation-state’
- 6 Exporting state and nation: being English in medieval Ireland
- 7 Late medieval Germany: an under-Stated nation?
- PART III ROUTES TO MODERNITY
- PART IV MODERNITY
- Index
5 - The historiography of the Anglo-Saxon ‘nation-state’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- PART I APPROACHES AND DEBATES
- PART II THE MIDDLE AGES
- 4 Germanic power structures: the early English experience
- 5 The historiography of the Anglo-Saxon ‘nation-state’
- 6 Exporting state and nation: being English in medieval Ireland
- 7 Late medieval Germany: an under-Stated nation?
- PART III ROUTES TO MODERNITY
- PART IV MODERNITY
- Index
Summary
Let me state a certainty. Late Anglo-Saxon England was a nation state. It was an entity with an effective central authority, uniformly organised institutions, a national language, a national church, defined frontiers (admittedly with considerable fluidity in the north), and, above all, a strong sense of national identity.
It may seem extravagant to describe early England as a ‘nation-state’. Nevertheless it is unavoidable.
Historians accustomed to thinking about modern states and nations may hesitate over the confidence of these statements and feel themselves more comfortable with the following:
According to whatever standard of political value we make our judgment, the England of the tenth and eleventh centuries will be found utterly lacking in all qualities which make a state strong and keep it efficient … The principles which underlay its social structure were inconsistent and incoherent. It possessed no administrative system worthy of the name and the executive action of its king was fettered by the independence of his counsellors and rendered ineffective by the practical autonomy of the provincial government into which the land was divided.
The avowed maximum views of eleventh-century statehood are James Campbell's, the two quotations taken from papers published in 1994 and 1995; the second passage may be more surprising to anyone familiar with Sir Frank Stenton's later work. This was Stenton's first book, William the Conqueror and the Rule of the Normans, published in 1908 in Putnam's Heroes of the Nations series.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Power and the Nation in European History , pp. 125 - 142Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
- 6
- Cited by