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historians needed a hero to replace Arthur. They found one in King Alfred, and the PR campaign
began: ‘the great and singular qualities in this king, worthy of high renown and commendation –
godly and excellent virtues, joined with a public and tender care, and a zealous study for the
common peace and tranquillity . . . his heroical properties jointed together in one piece’, wrote
John Foxe in 1563. It clearly worked: even today, Alfred is the one Saxon king that most children
have heard of – even if all they remember is that he burnt the cakes. Unlike Arthur, there is no doubt
that Alfred existed, but how close the glowing tributes to both 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 the Crown 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