Richard Verstegan’s Response to the Tudor Myth of British Empire’

Arblaster, Paul [USL-B]

The myth of an Arthurian “British Empire” in early medieval Europe was one of the ideological and rhetorical underpinnings of the imperial theme in late-Tudor propaganda, as voiced by such influential figures as the mage, John Dee and the geographer, Richard Hakluyt. The first serious historical challenge to this myth came from Antwerp’s Richard Verstegan; a Londoner of Dutch ancestry who had become a religious refugee in the Low Countries in the 1580s. In exile, he became a prolific author in both English and Dutch. He was an early proponent of the view that both English and Dutch were offshoots of a Proto-Germanic language that he named the ‘old Teutonic tongue’. His first developed statement of this theory was in A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (1605), later reworked in his Nederlandtsche Antiquiteyten (1613). This was central to his rewriting of early British history, in which he made the English not descendants of the Trojan Brutus and heirs to an Arthurian British Empire, but of a population of migrants from Continental Europe. Far from being an island people set apart, the majority population of Britain shared common ancestry, and in essence a common language, with their European neighbours in the Low Countries, Germany, Scandinavia and Normandy. In recent years the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has become controversial — particularly in the United States — for its association with the imperial rhetoric of nineteenth-century British colonialism and American expansionism, as well as its continued racially-coded use by figures on the far right of American politics. In 2019 this prompted the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England. Furthermore, in May 2024 Cambridge University Press rebranded the journal Anglo-Saxon England under the title Early Medieval England and its Neighbours. Ironically, while ‘Anglo-Saxon’ did undoubtedly come to carry racist and imperialist overtones in the nineteenth century, its first modern conceptualisation as ‘English-Saxon’ in the writings of Richard Verstegan was intended to weaken — and not advance — the late Tudor conceptualisation of Empire as an inheritance from mythic British forebears, Brutus and King Arthur.