CCSL

Corpus Christianorum Series Latina

EETS

Early English Text Society

EH

Bede's Ecclesiastical history of the English people, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford 1969

After the Reformation, and especially from the seventeenth century, English writers and statesmen frequently asserted that God had singled out the nation of which they were part, much as he had once established a special covenant with Israel. Thus, for example, John Lyly averred that God had always had ‘so tender a care … of that England, as of a new Israel, his chosen and peculier people’; Oliver Cromwell proclaimed that the English were without parallel, ‘a people … that are to God as the apple of His eye’; and John Milton declared that England had been ‘chos'n before any other, that out of her as out of Sion should be proclam'd and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europ’.Footnote ¹ Sentiments of this nature are traditionally seen by historians as products of the Reformation, and particularly of the rise of Puritanism.Footnote ² Now, however, it has come to be quite widely believed that such ideas had developed nearly a millennium before. Among historians, this view has been most forcefully expounded by Patrick Wormald, who contended that, long before the Norman Conquest, the notion that the English had a ‘special relationship with the Almighty’ was already firmly established, such that ‘the idea of England as “an elect nation enjoying God's special favour” was not a Tudor coinage’.Footnote ³ Approaching the topic from a literary perspective, Nicholas Howe arrived independently at a similar stance, arguing that the way in which the founding fathers of the United States compared themselves to the Israelites had been foreshadowed in the Anglo-Saxon age.Footnote ⁴ More generally, interpretations of this sort have gained considerable prominence in recent years: works on the period commonly refer to English self-identification as a ‘new Israel’;Footnote ⁵ some theorists of nationalism and historians of more modern times have responded favourably;Footnote ⁶ a sitting archbishop of Canterbury has given his endorsement;Footnote ⁷ and one of the United Kingdom's most distinguished ecclesiastical historians has presented a television documentary on the early medieval origins of English claims to divine election.Footnote ⁸ The reliability of Wormald's and Howe's conclusions is therefore a matter of some importance. My object in this article is to question their evidential foundations.

As a preliminary, it is important to be aware that there is more than one way in which chosen status can be conceived. In Christian theology, it is a commonplace that the original covenant between God and the descendants of Abraham (i.e. Israel) was replaced in the New Testament: all Christians are henceforth considered God's chosen people, and thus successors to the Old Testament Israel. This is founded on statements like that of St Peter, who echoed the language of the Old Testament covenant with Israel, and proclaimed that believers in Christ are ‘a chosen generation, a kingly priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people … the people of God’.Footnote ⁹ Similarly, St Paul declared that ‘if you are Christ's, then you are the seed of Abraham, heirs according to the promise’.Footnote ¹⁰ It is no surprise to find such standard ideas clearly articulated in the Anglo-Saxon period. Thus Bede (d. 735), the pre-eminent English exegete of his time, wrote that ‘we have been adopted among the seed of the Israelites, since, although having a kind of flesh from other nations [aliis de nationibus], nevertheless by faith in the truth and purity of body and mind, we follow in the footsteps of Israel’.Footnote ¹¹ Ælfric (d. c.1010), the most widely disseminated theological writer of the late Anglo-Saxon period, expressed similar sentiments, stating that ‘through that grace by which the human Christ became God's child … is every Christian person chosen by God [bið gehwilc cristenra manna gode gecoren]’.Footnote ¹² Neither writer's exegesis links chosen status with any particular earthly nation: Bede declared that the prophets had ‘promised the kingdom and riches of God's city Jerusalem … in a spiritual sense to all peoples in Christ [omnibus in Christo gentibus]’, and Ælfric wrote that Christ ‘came into the world that he might gather his chosen from all peoples [of eallum þeodum]’.Footnote ¹³

The view of divine election articulated by Lyly, Cromwell and Milton was quite different, however: they held that the English were distinguished from other nations by an unusually privileged relationship with God. Comparable claims have at different times been made for various other groups, such as the Afrikaners and the citizens of the United States, but we should not assume that it was normal for medieval peoples to consider themselves specially chosen by God: the Franks were long seen as a prime example of such thinking, but it has recently been shown that their self-identification with Israel was far more tentative and narrowly disseminated than is often supposed.Footnote ¹⁴ In the light of this, the question arises whether during the Anglo-Saxon period a particularist conception of divine election was indeed as prominent as many modern historians suggest.

To the best of my knowledge, no text from the Anglo-Saxon period asserts English chosen status in a manner remotely similar to the extracts from Lyly, Cromwell and Milton quoted above. Nor, so far as I am aware, is novus Israel attested as a label for the English in any contemporary source; historians' use of the expression ‘new Israel’ is an unhelpful anachronism. The case for thinking that the English considered themselves to be the special successors of the Old Testament Israel is therefore unsupported by any statements to this effect. Rather, it is based on passages in which modern writers have thought such ideas to be implicit. Sometimes the interpretation proposed is exceedingly tenuous, with mere interest in the Old Testament being taken to reflect belief in English chosen status; thus, for example, Howe suggested that the Old English poetic version of Exodus identifies the migrations of the Israelites and the English, but there is no need to see it as anything more than the transformation into vernacular idiom of an important biblical story.Footnote ¹⁵ It would be tedious to conduct an exhaustive unpicking of each such line of speculation, and my focus will instead be on the texts that constitute the core of the argument advanced by Wormald and Howe. The emphases of the two scholars are not identical, but each constructed his interpretation around a small number of excerpts from the writings of Gildas (fl. fifth or sixth century), Bede, Alcuin (d. 804) and Archbishop Wulfstan ii of York (d. 1023), with Wormald also drawing on two texts associated with the West Saxon king Alfred (871–99): these sources form the fundamental basis for the claim that during the Anglo-Saxon period the English believed that they were the special successors of Israel.

The first link in Wormald and Howe's argumentative chain is essentially a preliminary, since there is no suggestion that Gildas, a fifth- or sixth-century British scholar, regarded the English as divinely chosen; rather, his importance lies in his possible influence on later writers.Footnote ¹⁶ Gildas wrote his Ruin of Britain in the context of attacks on the Britons by those who would come to be known as the English, whom he called Saxones; he saw this onslaught as well-merited punishment for his compatriots' wickedness.Footnote ¹⁷ The Britons had apparently had some respite from external assault since winning a victory at mons Badonicus, but Gildas judged that they were still sinning, and he warned of the possibility of renewed divine wrath, buttressing his admonition with extensive quotation from both the Old and New Testaments.Footnote ¹⁸ In so doing, Gildas drew explicitly and repeatedly on the example of the Israelites, who had been taken captive by the Babylonians as punishment for their sins: he asked rhetorically what would happen to ‘the black blot of this era’, given that previously God had not spared ‘a people peculiar among all nations [peculiari ex omnibus nationibus populo], a royal stock, a holy race, to whom he had said: “Israel is my first-born son”’.Footnote ¹⁹ That Gildas drew lessons from the Israelites' experience does not itself demonstrate that he believed that the Britons occupied a comparably special place in God's favour – it is entirely normal for Christians to study the Old Testament. But one passage in particular does raise the distinct possibility that he thought along such lines: he stated that prior to mons Badonicus the fortunes of the Britons and their attackers had fluctuated ‘so that in that people the Lord might in His customary manner test present Israel [ut in ista gente experiretur dominus solito more praesentem Israelem], whether it love Him or not’.Footnote ²⁰ Precisely what Gildas meant by praesens Israel is uncertain. It could reflect a belief that the Britons resembled the Israelites in having a privileged relationship with God. Alternatively, however, Gildas may have considered the Britons to be no more than one part of praesens Israel, this expression encompassing all Christians. But even if we assume that Gildas's readers thought that he believed the Britons had some special covenant, this need not have prompted the English to conceive of themselves in analogous terms: there is no reason why the instruments of divine wrath upon a peculiarly chosen people must themselves become the elect.

While it does not necessarily follow from the Ruin of Britain that the eventual defeat of the Britons should make the English God's elect, Wormald and Howe argued that this text helped to kindle such ideas in the minds of Bede, Alcuin and Wulfstan, each of whom invoked Gildas by name. When the relevant passages are juxtaposed, one might form the impression that the Ruin of Britain was widely known throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, but caution is in order: while several seventh- and eighth-century English writers were indeed acquainted with the text, there is little reason to think that it circulated widely thereafter.Footnote ²¹ So far as I am aware, the only secure evidence that it was known in England between about 800 and the twelfth century is one mid tenth-century manuscript, probably produced at Canterbury; it is not even clear that Wulfstan had seen the Ruin of Britain, since his allusion to it derives from a letter of Alcuin.Footnote ²² Since Gildas's direct influence on the English appears to have been of quite limited duration, the ways in which his ideas were mediated by Bede and Alcuin are of considerable importance. It is to these authors that we now turn.

Bede's Ecclesiastical history of the English people, completed in the early 730s, is especially significant, on account of its wide dissemination.Footnote ²³ Both Howe and Wormald discussed it extensively, and it was particularly central to the latter's arguments, but the text needs only brief treatment here, since I have examined it in detail elsewhere.Footnote ²⁴ The Ecclesiastical history begins with a description of Britain and its abundant resources, which Wormald (but not Bede) likened to those of Canaan, the biblical Promised Land.Footnote ²⁵ It then narrates the history of Britain since Julius Caesar, and describes how the English established themselves in large parts of the island; occasionally, their influx is presented as divine punishment for the sinfulness of the Britons, who are especially condemned for failing to evangelise their attackers and for using a heterodox method to date Easter.Footnote ²⁶ Wormald inferred that Bede believed that divine favour had been transferred from the Britons to the English, and placed particular emphasis on the following passage:

Bede thus identified the English as God's people in a way that echoed Paul's declaration that the Almighty had not abandoned Israel, ‘His people whom He foreknew [plebem suam quam praesciit]’.Footnote ²⁸ While the Britons had proved undeserving of Britain, the English converted, accepted Roman norms, evangelised the Frisians and continental Saxons, and brought the Irish and Picts to orthodoxy on Easter.Footnote ²⁹ They might therefore have been regarded as fulfilling what Wormald saw as their special covenant, but, soon after completing the Ecclesiastical history, Bede stated in a letter to Bishop Ecgberht of York that people were offending against God, risking both temporal punishment and exclusion from salvation.Footnote ³⁰ The Ecclesiastical history does not spell out such concerns, but its numerous moralising stories were very likely intended to promote virtue, and Wormald argued that Bede's anxieties were informed by a belief that the history of the English was patterned on that of the Israelites: the latter had been exiled from Canaan for their sins, and the English could potentially forfeit their own ‘Promised Land’ too.Footnote ³¹

While one can hardly doubt that the promotion of good Christian conduct was among Bede's objectives in the Ecclesiastical history, there are serious difficulties with Wormald's interpretation. Both in the Ecclesiastical history and in his letter to Ecgberht, Bede gave greater emphasis to divine judgement on individuals than collective punishment of entire peoples, and he was at least as worried about what might happen in the next world as in this one.Footnote ³² Anxiety about the possibility of divine wrath need not in any case reflect a belief in some special chosen status: God had punished Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as Israel. Nor is a notion of privileged election a necessary corollary of the belief that the English had been the means by which God exacted vengeance on the Britons for their sins. Moreover, the Ecclesiastical history rarely refers to the Israelites, and does not make any sustained comparison between them and the English, which is all the more notable given Bede's knowledge of Gildas: the Ruin of Britain could have inspired him to cite a catena of Old Testament prophecies, or even to call the English praesens Israel, but he did neither, seemingly preferring to foster virtuous behaviour by describing persons whom readers should seek to emulate.Footnote ³³ Perhaps the most telling objection, however, is that Bede can hardly have seen Britain as an analogue for the biblical Promised Land, since he described Ireland even more positively: he declared the latter to be superior in breadth, healthiness and climate, and associated it (but not Britain) with abundant milk and honey, the archetypal features of Canaan.Footnote ³⁴

Far from portraying the English as the peculiar recipients of divine favour, Bede placed them within a broader narrative of the spread of Christianity throughout the world, in accordance with biblical prophecies that God's Word would be made known ‘to the ends of the earth’.Footnote ³⁵ The theme of Christian universality is prominent in Bede's exegetical work, and he saw the conversion of the English as part of a much wider history of mission: thus, for example, when he noted in his commentary on the construction and fitting out of Solomon's Temple that the faith had recently been preached to unbelievers in Britain, he did so in the context of a passage about the swiftness with which the Gospels had ‘filled all the regions of the world’.Footnote ³⁶ Since Britain lay near the edge of the known world, Bede likely saw the evangelisation of its inhabitants as having particular significance, marking that the Word was reaching the earth's limits, as had been foretold; indeed, the Ecclesiastical history incorporates papal letters which associate the conversion of the English with such prophecies, and the text's geographical introduction stresses Britain's remoteness by presenting it as ‘open to the boundless Ocean’ and ‘almost under the northern vertex of the world’.Footnote ³⁷ It may well be, therefore, that one of Bede's aims in the Ecclesiastical history was to narrate what he regarded as an especially important phase in the development of the universal Church. This does not, however, indicate that he considered the English to enjoy some distinctive chosen status: it simply reflects that Britain's far-flung location meant that missionary activity there was significant in the scheme of Christian history.

The foregoing rebuttal does not dispose of Bede's reference to ‘plebem suam, quam praesciuit’. These four words would, however, be an extremely flimsy peg on which to hang the theory that he considered the English to be God's special elect, especially given that elsewhere he explicitly referred to ‘all peoples in Christ’ being promised the riches of Jerusalem. It is, moreover, very interesting that the vernacular version of the Ecclesiastical history, which was written sometime before about 900, omits the passage that alludes to the English as God's foreknown people.Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, the translator abbreviated or cut many sections of historical narrative and theological analysis, including most extended treatments of the Britons' errors over Easter, probably in an attempt to produce a work tailored to providing elementary instruction in Christian virtue. The result is a text shorn of the features crucial to Wormald's interpretation: the idea that the English were the means by which God punished the Britons ceases to be a major theme (without disappearing entirely), and the plebs sua reference vanishes. This is significant for two reasons. First, it shows that one fairly early English reader of the Ecclesiastical history, namely the translator, did not regard the text as an exposition of the English as God's elect, or at least thought that such a theme was insufficiently important to merit preservation. Second, while it is unlikely that very many people outside the ecclesiastical elite would have been able to comprehend Bede's Latin, the translation would have been clear to anyone when read aloud: the Ecclesiastical history would therefore have been most widely accessible in a version that is even less amenable than the original to being interpreted as an account of a specially chosen people.

We move next to Alcuin, a late eighth-century Northumbrian clergyman. He is less prominent than Bede in the work of Howe and (especially) Wormald, but arguably came closer to suggesting that the English might have a special relationship with God, and was much more explicit that they were liable to collective punishment for sin.Footnote ³⁹ Two passages require particular attention. The first extract occurs in a letter that Alcuin wrote to Archbishop Æthelheard of Canterbury after Scandinavians attacked Lindisfarne in 793. Having reminded Æthelheard of his duties as a bishop, Alcuin addressed him thus:

After more instructions on episcopal responsibilities, Alcuin enjoined Æthelheard to pray, and quoted passages from the Old and New Testaments. He began with a prayer of Moses: ‘Look from your sanctuary, Lord, and from your high habitation of the skies, and bless your people Israel and the land, which you have given to us.’ He next cited Joel: ‘Lord, spare your people, and give not your inheritance to the gentiles in reproach.’ Excerpts from the epistles of James, Peter and Paul on the importance of prayer then follow, and the letter concludes with a poem further emphasising the obligations of those in positions of ecclesiastical leadership.Footnote ⁴⁰

The letter to Æthelheard could reflect a belief that the English had taken Israel's place as God's specially chosen people, but it does not have to be interpreted in this way. Such thinking is not inherent in a fear of divine punishment, and there is no need to read any claim to an unusually privileged relationship with God into a passing reference to the English having had divine dispensation when they invaded Britain. Nor do the Scriptural citations demonstrate particularist thinking on Alcuin's part. The quotation from the Sermon on the Mount, with which the above extract begins, was not addressed to any particular earthly nation, but to Christ's disciples, among whom Æthelheard could be numbered. Similarly, when Peter wrote of a ‘chosen generation’ and the ‘people of God’, he was referring to all Christians: the English were thus part of God's chosen, but it is not clear that Alcuin was asserting that some more special status differentiated them from other Christian peoples. Likewise, the use of Old Testament prayers could simply reflect that, as Christians, the English were among the successors to Israel. In consequence, the letter does not demonstrate that Alcuin, let alone anyone else, considered the English to have a peculiarly close relationship with God.Footnote ⁴¹

The second Alcuin passage comes from his poem on York:

The allusion to the English as gens ventura dei could imply that the English had some kind of special bond with God, but the reference is too imprecise and fleeting to bear any great weight of interpretation. Howe nevertheless singled out this passage as ‘perhaps the most explicit statement to be found in any Anglo-Saxon writer of the English as the new Israelites’; given that the Israelites are not even mentioned, this rather highlights the weakness of his overall argument.Footnote ⁴³ The argument is further undermined by three additional points. First, Alcuin did not use Old Testament models solely with respect to the English. Rather, he addressed Charlemagne as David, and referred to the Franks as beata gens (‘blessed people’), an echo of an expression used of the Israelites in the Psalms: insofar as Alcuin considered the English to resemble Israel, he did not think that they were unique.Footnote ⁴⁴ Second, he did not invariably present the attack on Lindisfarne as punishment for sin, sometimes expressing the view that humans cannot discern God's purposes, and should emulate Job's patient endurance of inexplicable suffering: such uncertainty or flexibility about the meaning of earthly tribulation would be rather surprising if Alcuin had a firm belief that the history of the English closely mirrored that of Israel.Footnote ⁴⁵ Third, even if Alcuin's writings were taken to reflect such a belief, they had limited lasting influence among the English: the meagre evidence that the York poem was known in Britain comes from Alcuin's lifetime or very soon after, and his letters were rarely quoted by later English writers.Footnote ⁴⁶

There is, however, one significant exception to the last statement, namely Archbishop Wulfstan, who wrote in the context of the Scandinavian attacks of the early eleventh century. Those who contend that the English considered themselves God's specially chosen people cite one part of what is now the best known recension of Wulfstan's Sermon of the wolf, in which he drew on the letter of Alcuin to Æthelheard discussed above.Footnote ⁴⁷ The relevant passage states:

Three points are significant. The first is how little use is actually made of Alcuin's letter to Æthelheard: had Wulfstan wished to assert that the English were a specially elect nation, his source would have offered some potentially relevant biblical quotations, but he did not exploit them. Second, although the above passage is premised upon an Old Testament paradigm of sin attracting divine wrath, and Wulfstan elsewhere explicitly drew lessons from the experience of the Israelites, the latter go unmentioned in the Sermon of the wolf: using Israel as an exemplar is not inherently remarkable, but modern writers sometimes seem keener than Wulfstan himself to compare the English to the original chosen people.Footnote ⁴⁹ Third, Wulfstan appears, like Alcuin, to have been uncertain about how to interpret tribulations, sometimes presenting Scandinavian attackers as a manifestation of God's wrath, but on other occasions treating them as a sign that the end of the world was nigh; these two interpretive schema sit rather awkwardly together, since the apocalypse affects the whole planet and occurs just once, while scourges are localised, cyclical and avertable. The excerpt quoted above appears only in the longest of the three extant versions of the Sermon of the wolf; in the ‘short’ recension, the apocalyptic paradigm is predominant, and it is combined with passages about divine punishment in the other two.Footnote ⁵⁰ There is debate about whether the three versions represent successive augmentations or abridgements, but either way Wulfstan did not have a consistent and unambiguous view that suffering was retribution for wrongdoing: expansions would indicate that this paradigm was not at the forefront of his mind when he first composed the homily, and contractions would imply that he considered the idea peripheral.Footnote ⁵¹ This is hardly suggestive of someone who had a confident sense that the history of the English was peculiarly patterned on that of Israel.

To the evidence of Gildas, Bede, Alcuin and Wulfstan, Wormald added the prose preface to the Old English Pastoral care, together with the introduction to King Alfred's legislation. The Pastoral care preface, which runs in Alfred's name, begins by evoking a past golden age of ‘happy times’ among the English, when wisdom flourished, morality was upheld, and kings enjoyed military success. It then describes how learning and Latin literacy had decayed, and identifies this neglect of wisdom as the cause of temporal punishment and loss of wealth, an apparent allusion to viking attacks. The preface concludes with Alfred stating his intention to reverse the decline in scholarship through the provision of vernacular translations of the Pastoral care and other texts.Footnote ⁵² For Wormald, the mention of punishment represented an implicit invocation of ‘the English Covenant’, but – as is by now a familiar refrain – a belief in liability to divine wrath need not indicate a claim to any special status.Footnote ⁵³ Nor is such a notion a necessary corollary of Alfred's drawing lessons from the example of Solomon, the archetype of a king who had gained wealth by way of wisdom.Footnote ⁵⁴ The point is underlined when one notes Alfred's statement that his proposed translation programme had been inspired by the way in which the Hebrew law had been rendered into other languages by the Greeks, the Romans and ‘all other Christian peoples’ (‘ealla oðra Cristena ðioda’): far from suggesting that the English had some peculiarly close relationship with God, the text thus presents them as just one of many Christian peoples.Footnote ⁵⁵

Much the same point can be made about the introduction to Alfred's legislation. Wormald thought that it invited the English ‘to remodel themselves as a new Chosen People’, on the grounds that it begins with the Ten Commandments and excerpts from the next three books of Exodus, sometimes modified to suit contemporary circumstances.Footnote ⁵⁶ This interpretation is, however, undermined by what comes next. After noting that Christ came to augment rather than break the commandments of the Old Testament, the text describes how the Apostles taught ‘throughout all the earth’ (‘geond ealle eorðan’) and converted ‘many heathen peoples’ (‘monega hæðena ðeoda’), who were only required to adhere to basic Christian precepts.Footnote ⁵⁷ It then explains that, once ‘many peoples’ (‘monega ðeoda’) had received the faith, synods were assembled ‘throughout all the world’ (‘geond ealne middangeard’), including among the English, and that these synods mercifully permitted that most types of wrongdoing could be emended through payments.Footnote ⁵⁸ The text then moves explicitly into Alfred's voice: he states that he had reviewed the decrees of earlier kings, accepting some and rejecting others, and proceeds to declare his ordinances, many of which prescribe fines or compensation payments for various misdeeds.Footnote ⁵⁹ As in the Pastoral care preface, the English are here treated as but one of numerous gentile nations: nothing is said to imply that their position in relation to God or Israel was different from that of others of the ‘many peoples’ converted to Christianity ‘throughout all the earth’.

This does, however, raise a question: why might Alfred's decrees have been prefixed with substantial excerpts from Exodus, if not to suggest that the English resembled the Israelites in having a special covenant? There are at least two alternative possibilities. The first is Irish influence, since medieval Irish legal texts drew extensively on the Old Testament.Footnote ⁶⁰ Such influence is eminently plausible, as Alfred is known to have had contact with the Irish, and there are some grounds to think that the Mosaic laws prefacing his decrees may have been translated from the Irish Liber ex lege Moysi (or a related text), rather than directly from the Vulgate.Footnote ⁶¹ The second potential explanation, which is in no way mutually exclusive with the first, starts from the observation (made by Wormald) that the section of the introduction that describes the spread of Christianity includes echoes of a letter that Archbishop Fulk of Rheims had sent to Alfred.Footnote ⁶² Fulk condemned the state of Christianity among the English, whom he said were ignorant or neglectful of ‘synodal decrees’.Footnote ⁶³ The introduction does not repeat these allegations, but implicitly contests them: the assertion that synods were the basis for English legal practices looks like an attempt to rebut Fulk's criticisms. The quotation of Mosaic Law may well have been intended as part of this defence: English customs had been impugned, so there was reason to assert Alfred's legislative authority by linking his decrees to the history of divine lawgiving. Whatever the rationale for the introduction to Alfred's legislation, however, it is most unlikely to have sprung from (or stimulated) a belief that the English enjoyed a peculiarly privileged bond with God: such a notion would be quite inconsistent with the clear presentation of them as just one among many Christian peoples.

From early in the Anglo-Saxon period, the idea of the English as a single people was well-established. Among its foundations were, as Wormald and Howe respectively demonstrated, recognition of Gregory the Great as Apostle, and belief in a collective ancestral migration.Footnote ⁶⁴ It was, however, in all probability not until very much later that this English identity came to be associated with a claim to a peculiarly close relationship with God.Footnote ⁶⁵ Given the general difficulties in proving a negative, especially with regard to a poorly documented age, we cannot exclude the possibility that during the Anglo-Saxon period certain individuals toyed with the idea that God was sometimes particularly beneficent to the English; indeed, the references in Bede and Alcuin to plebs sua and gens ventura Dei could be interpreted in such a light, as might Lantfred of Winchester's late tenth-century allusion to the discovery of St Swithun's relics being a gift from Jesus to ‘His Anglo-Saxons’ (‘suis … Anglis-Saxonibus’).Footnote ⁶⁶ But there is no evidence of a clear, developed or widespread belief that the English had some specially chosen status, such that they were truer successors to the Israelites than any other Christian people. It might be suggested that the absence of any articulation of this idea reflects that it was sufficiently pervasive to go unstated, but such a proposition would be deeply unpersuasive.Footnote ⁶⁷ The suggestion that silences in the sources should be filled with ideas transplanted from later periods is dubious in itself, but there is a deeper objection: far from being silent, extant texts repeatedly say things counter to any notion of the English as the beneficiaries of some special divine election, instead presenting them as one of many Christian peoples, and declaring all Christians to be God's chosen. As Christians, the English could see themselves as among the chosen, along with every other Christian people. This, however, is fundamentally different from the notion that they were the peculiar successors to the Old Testament Israel, and thus ‘an elect nation enjoying God's special favour’. The contention that this more potent claim was already prevalent in the Anglo-Saxon period should be treated with the deepest of scepticism, and probably rejected entirely.