Blood of the Isles by Bryan Sykes Read Free Book Online Page A

his military genius and his humble and scholarly character are to reality is still an open question. He reigned from 871 to 899 and was, as we shall see later, instrumental in preventing the Danish Vikings from overrunning the whole country.
    At the same time that Alfred was being resurrected in England, Protestant scholars, including Martin Luther in Germany, were creating their own origin myths for the same reason. To reinforce their independence from the Catholic Church, they drew heavily on classical writers for their justification. One of these was the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote in AD 98, ‘For myself I accept the view that the people of Germany have never been tainted by intermarriage with other peoples and stand out as a nation peculiar, pure and unique of its kind.’ Luther himself even managed to concoct a genealogy for the Germans right back to Adam, who for Christians like Luther was the father of the human race.
    What began as a declaration of religious independence from Rome transformed over the years into a virulent doctrine of Saxon/Teutonic racial superiority over the other inhabitants of the Isles that has had immense and far-reaching political and social consequences. The reinvention of a glorious English past gathered pace. The Magna Carta, in essence an unimportant concordat between King John and his Norman barons, was reborn as a declaration of Saxon independence every bit as important to the English as the US Bill of Rights is to Americans. The Puritans appealed to the myth in their bitter struggle with theCrown during the English Civil War when John Hare, one of the leaders of the Parliamentarians, wrote about his side in 1640, the first year of the war:
    our progenitors that transplanted themselves from Germany hither did not commixe themselves with the ancient inhabitants of the country of the Britain’s, but totally expelling them, they took the sole possession of the land to themselves, thereby preserving their blood, laws and language uncorrupted . . .
    Gradually the monarchy changed allegiance to suit the new origin myth. James VI/I even switched sides during the course of his own reign. Having at first asserted his entitlement to rule over both Scotland and England, based on his claim to be Merlin’s Arthur reborn, he very soon afterwards basked in the appellation of the ‘chiefest Blood-Royal of our ancient English-Saxon kings’, according to a dedication in the influential book
Restitution of Decayed Intelligence
, written in 1605 by Richard Verstegen.
    In the context of the genetics we will come to later, Verstegen was the first author to point out the potential embarrassment that the purity of the Saxon line must surely have been ‘diluted’ or ‘contaminated’ by the later arrival of large numbers of Danes and Normans. He countered this by claiming, first, that their numerical contribution was slight and, second, that both the Danes and the Normans were themselves of Germanic origin anyway, so they could have no effect on the essential racial purity of the Teutonic English.
    As the myth gained momentum, the voices raised against it became fewer and further between. The writer Daniel Defoe was one exception, parodying the whole idea of English racial purity and superiority in his poem ‘The True-Born Englishman’, written in 1701:
    The Romans first with Julius Caesar came
Including all the Nations of that Name
Gauls, Greeks and Lombards; and by Computation
Auxiliaries or slaves of ev’ry Nation
With Hengist, Saxons; Danes with Sueno came
In search of Plunder, not in search of Fame
Scots, Picts and Irish from the Hibernian shore:
And Conquering William brought the Normans O’re.
All these their Barb’rous offspring left behind
the dregs of Armies, they of all Mankind;
Blended with Britons, who before were here,
of whom the Welch ha’blest the Character.
From the amphibious Ill-born Mob began
That vain ill-natured thing, an Englishman.
    But dissenting voices were