2010 Summer School: The Anglo-Saxons

Only a few Americans know that Hengist and Horsa were the legendary chiefs who led the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, but Thomas Jefferson wanted to put the pair on the Great Seal of the United States.  Like many Americans and their English forebears, Jefferson believed that the American love of liberty can be traced directly back to the free Anglo-Saxon farmers, who owned their own land, defended their families and countrymen in battle, and met in local courts and assemblies to enforce the law and make collective decisions.  If it sounds like America in 1790, that is because these Anglo-Saxon customs and traditions were never fully suppressed by the Norman Conquest.

For Americans today, living under a harsher regime than William the Conqueror ever dreamed of imposing, Anglo-Saxon England represents not only the political patrimony that has been taken from us, but also a thrilling place of brave warriors, stirring epic poetry, and heroic missionaries and scholars who transformed a nation of wild barbarians into civilized Christians who never forgot how to fight.

Read Beowulf in the context of the people who gave birth to this first masterpiece of English, follow Bede’s brilliant account of the Church in England, and examine up-close the institutions of a free people that have set an enduring pattern for all of us who value liberty and understand that the Christian life properly lived is the greatest adventure of all.

Faculty

• Thomas Fleming (bio)
• James Patrick (bio)
• Frank Brownlow
• Michael McMahon
• Christopher Check
• Aaron D. Wolf
• Nicole Kooistra

Location

Lectures

• The Rockford Institute
  928 N. Main St.
  Rockford, IL 61103