> Both an interest in the English language and in promoting Anglo-Saxon liberties against the Norman yoke found a welcome audience amongst Tudor parliamentarians and Oxford scholars, laying the foundations for the conflict between Crown and Commons. Certainly, by the 17th century there was a growing consensus that the Anglo-Saxons were a people of exceptional liberty, who created free institutions and the common law, and who were later subjugated by the Normans. The Great Struggle through the use of Magna Carta, common law juries, Parliament and the Saxon spirit triumphed over autocratic foreign rule.
> The eminent antiquarian William Camden (1551 - 1623) in particular emphasised the founding stock of the Saxon peoples, that powerful Germanic tree from which flowered the English branch. Leaning on Tacitus’ description of the Germans as a peculiar and pure people, untainted by marriage with others, Camden and his colleagues, such as Richard Rowlands, connected England’s Saxon heritage with the Germanic languages and the cluster of northern peoples - the Danes, Germans, Normans and Dutch. This was to have profound consequences for how the nascent British Empire came to view itself, with a magnificent national story of freedom-loving Germanic settlers, capable of self-discipline and self-rule, free from outside interference, England could confidently project its destiny out into the world. This is what others have dubbed ‘Anglo-Saxonism’, the belief in the unique and masterful qualities of the English race, which could be traced back to the primeval forests of Germania. Self-government, free institutions, conventions of liberty, common law and the English language defined Anglo-Saxonism prior to WW2.