Hereward the Wake, it is said, was the last of the English. By 1071 his small army on the Isle of Ely was the only resistance left against the conquering Normans. It was five years past our most famous date: history was set. Still, Hereward made his stand. When the conquerors came, he took his men and “bravely led them out”, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records.
This year, had you visited Ely Cathedral on 27 October, the date of Hereward the Wake’s last stand, you would have seen local actor Rory Gibson bringing the old Anglo-Saxon hero back to life. Gibson has been resurrecting Hereward for years, living the role as if to become his hero. (He told me his long blond hair and beard could be attributed to only cutting his hair under full moons.) At the end of his act, he roars in delight, “I AM HEREWARD!” We don’t know what happened to Hereward after his defeat, Gibson explains, but this is no bad thing. “This is the best part about legends: you get to make up your own ideas, you get to finish the story.”
Only about a dozen spectators watched Gibson in Ely’s Galilee Porch. In contrast, more than six million watched a video shared on X in 2023 of a self-identified “Anglo-Saxon” labelled “brave Londoner Brit stands up to masked Antifa thugs”. In it, a large English man stands before masked protesters, and pushes them when they touch him. He says, “Go back to where you came from Abdul.” He answers one bystander who says he is a racist with “I’m English mate, that’s who I am.” And when he calls a Polish man a foreigner and is challenged on his own roots, he says he’s been here “800 years actually”. His identity, he asserts, is “Anglo-Saxon English. So fuck off back to where you came from.”
Underneath the video, one commenter posted clapping emojis and wrote, “He’s brilliant.” The commenting account was called “Hereward the Wake”.
Hereward the Wake made his stand on 27 October 1071. It was on the same day in 2022 that Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter. In Uxbridge on that date this year, 49-year-old Wayne Broadhurst took his small dog for a walk.
He was, according to his family, “a devoted and hardworking man who spent his life serving his community as a waste services worker”. Video available online shows Broadhurst walking away from a man who chases him, stabs him around the neck, then stands over him when he falls and stabs him several more times. Three days later, Safi Dawood was charged with murdering Broadhurst and attempting to murder two others, his landlord and a 14-year-old boy. The Home Office confirmed that Dawood is a 22-year-old Afghan man who entered the UK in a lorry in 2020 before claiming asylum, which was granted in 2022.
Hereward the Wake, the X account, saw Broadhurst’s murder. They reshared posts criticising Keir Starmer, Shabana Mahmood and David Lammy for not responding to the attack, the BBC for putting the story low down on its site.
It was not the only incident Hereward the Wake noticed in the days after his anniversary. The following fortnight was livid with horror and fear. The following are events Hereward the Wake interacted with on X in those two weeks. A mass stabbing occurred on a train near Huntingdon injuring 11, with a 32-year-old black man, Anthony Williams charged after the attack. A woman died after being stabbed in the neck at a Birmingham bus stop; a 21-year-old named Djeison Rafael was charged with her murder. The Home Secretary said Williams was “not known to security services” at the time of the train attack, but he was also charged with two counts of attempted murder from the night before. Similarly, Rafael was charged with two counts of causing actual bodily harm shortly before his alleged attack on the woman. An asylum seeker imprisoned for the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl, Hadesh Kebatu, was mistakenly freed, and then given £500 on his eventual deportation. There was a manhunt for another asylum seeker mistakenly released from prison, 24-year-old Brahim Kaddour-Cherif. It came out that one of the first small-boat migrants deported under Labour’s “one in, one out” scheme had simply come back on another small boat. Then another migrant deported under the scheme returned on a new boat. Rachel Reeves was found to have rented a London home without the right licence. The BBC was found to have misleadingly edited footage of Donald Trump. Tommy Robinson was tried under the Terrorism Act for not granting police access to a phone that he claimed held sensitive information from victims of the rape gangs. Mohammed Amaaz received no sentence for assaulting two female police officers at Manchester airport.
On X, after the train stabbing, Hereward the Wake posted “This was TERRORISM” and retweeted another’s post from the night of the stabbing that said, “Civil war is coming.” Across X as a whole, the most viral post that same fortnight read, “You can smell the anger across the UK tonight. Decent people have had enough…” At the time of writing, that has 31 million views.
Anti-immigration gatherings this year had not only a new size but a new texture. They were melees of symbol and icon from the the whole of our history. Over the several protests I’ve covered in the past few months, I saw lions and bulldogs and Beowulfs, Camelots and Stonehenges and Spitfires, Highlanders and Vikings and Danes, Thatchers and Churchills and Pitt the Youngers. The different labels protesters used to articulate what unified this cacophony included “Western Civilisation”, “whiteness”, “Christendom”, “Judeo-Christendom”, “the Anglosphere” and “European ancestry”.
This new fury, and this new floridity, both follow Elon Musk’s acquisition of X. Protesters I interviewed spoke what might be termed “fluent Twitter”. Andrew Marr has worried in these pages that videos of, say, immigrants harassing white women on train carriages, are “poisoning British politics”. He wrote, “The material I am talking about is, over time, highly effective. It’s rhetorical heroin heading straight for the amygdala. You may think you are a rational liberal but, I promise you, after an hour or so of exposure to ‘hate the African, hate the Jew, hate the lawyer, hate the Muslim’ propaganda, you will be subtly different. After a while, you need an awful lot of time in the neighbourhood to walk it off.”
These people haven’t walked it off, they’ve marched on it. What these baroque new protests look and sound like is social media content. Short videos compress the chaos into dense, furious “edits”. A typical edit might be uploaded to TikTok by an account named “Aethelstan” and begins with a supposed insult to nationalist pride: a South Asian man saying England had no history to be proud of or Bob Vylan mocking “I heard you want your country back.” Then a rousing, warlike speech crashes in with a heavy bassline, and the screen flashes between split-second clips of Nelson, Enoch Powell, Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, Yorkshire Tea, Victoria, Kate Moss, Hugh Grant, beefeaters, Harold Godwinson, Alfred the Great and Sutton Hoo helmets.
The last three are where these videos end up, and it is the figure of the Anglo-Saxon that holds a unique hold on this feverish political imagination. Of the gallery of historical figures, he is especially arresting, uniquely meaningful. There is a reason these accounts name themselves for Saxon kings.
The explanations for this obsession that you encounter at a protest can be esoteric. A man who had risen at 3am to stand outside the court of Tommy Robinson’s trial in October had King Alfred on a placard. He pointed me to the “Anglo-Saxon law of tithes, vails and wards – one of the best systems ever, which is what the English system was built on”. He said the common nursery rhymes “that we all grew up with are the Anglo-Saxon sages trying to impart that message, those messages, to each generation”.
But you also get straightforward reasons. “The Saxon Man” on TikTok posts that “There was a time when being English meant something. We stood for honour. For pride. For courage. Now? We’re mocked for loving our own land.” When I speak to him, he says that people who question their nation always ask the same thing: “Where did we come from?” In England’s case, “The answer is simple. England came from the Saxons.” He was similarly clear about immigration. It was “natural” for those with patriotic feeling to be concerned by mass immigration. “Not out of hate,” he says, “but out of a desire to protect who we are, to keep our history alive, to make sure England doesn’t lose the identity it fought over a thousand years to build.”
There is hate, though. “Anglo-Templar” told me that the “globalist/zionist/jewish establishment seeks to dismantle all our nations [sic] identity, culture and individuality to weaken us and make us easier to control. The basis of any nation is it’s [sic] ethnic people, culture is downstream from ethnicity. Without English and British there is no England or Britain.”
In fact, hate is the subject of this world’s most popular verse. One video edit starts with Keir Starmer praising the Windrush generation over images of Axel Rudakubana, the Southport killer, and grooming gang members. Then the Sutton Hoo helmet replaces Starmer, and we hear “The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon”. These lines are a corruption of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Beginnings”, replacing the word “English” with “Saxon”. The most popular verse runs: “It was not suddenly bred./It will not swiftly abate./Through the chilled years ahead,/When Time shall count from the date/That the Saxon began to hate.”
Anti-immigration belligerents seek to assert the deepest claim to the land. If they alight on Anglo-Saxons as the beginning of the country, their case is surprisingly hard to dispute – though for reasons more banal than racial continuity. Our national curriculum starts with the Battle of Hastings: 1066 and All That. That is the story, from the school curriculum to Robert Tombs’s monumental The English and Their History, which dedicates just 24 of its 1,080 pages to the time before Hastings. “Anglo-Saxons” are the nebulous space dust swirling invisibly before modern England’s Big Bang. They are whatever lost the battle, whatever was here before, and the sum of our lost prelapsarian past.
Academics struggle to make counter-arguments too. There is a very old reason for this, and a very new one. The new one is that the term “Anglo-Saxon” became a flashpoint of the culture wars debate, “exactly like the gender dispute”, one academic in the field tells me. In 2023, Cambridge University’s relevant department reportedly pushed an initiative to “dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism”. It expressed “concerns over use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and its perceived connection to ethnic/racial identity”. The Telegraph’s headline was “Anglo-Saxons aren’t real, Cambridge tells students in effort to fight ‘nationalism’”. No one from the Cambridge department in question answered my enquiries. Multiple academics, including an Oxford professor, retracted their agreement to talk to me for this piece.
The old reason that academics struggle with Anglo-Saxons is that they have studied them so little. The “Normanist” school of English historiography, which begins our history in 1066, was dominant well into the 20th century. “Saxonist” study, which looks back at least to AD 449, is surprisingly recent. Ann Williams, author of The English and the Norman Conquest (1995), spends much of her retirement “arguing with racists on Facebook”. She tells me that “pre-conquest history was so neglected for such a long time. It’s really only since the 1950s, 1960s that people have really seriously gone into this.”
But what historians neglected, politics has mined for centuries. A monumental book by the historian John Niles is titled, tellingly, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, 1066-1901 (2015). Tudor scholars, the first to investigate the Saxons, were hunting for evidence that the English church had always been independent of Rome. In the next century, English revolutionaries sought a pre-Norman proto-democracy. Next, the American Founding Fathers searched for an enlightened constitutional republic. Niles describes these investigations to me as “vain quests” while Williams prefers “a load of old bollocks”.
But these projects of reinterpretation turned vicious in the 19th century. At the climax of British imperialism and the rise of American expansion, there was a growing consciousness of nationhood as well as of racial identity. Anglo-Saxonism became “the pseudoscience of racism and white or English racial superiority”, Niles says. It was very appealing “for British colonials to feel they could claim not just cultural superiority but racial superiority to peoples from the exotic lands that they were subjugating”. Pro-slavery Americans wanted to “assert the divinely sanctioned expansion of America, not only to rule over blacks but to rule over Mexicans, Native Americans and people of the Pacific Rim”.
Both historians say that racialised interpretations of Anglo-Saxonism were groundless. “It’s all part of the British empire: we are the top, everyone else is not British,” Williams says. “There’s no trace of this in medieval society, they simply don’t have these attitudes.” She highlighted the fact that King Edgar applied his laws equally to the native British, the English and the Danes. These communities lived together after initial hostilities. “There’s no racial animosity.”
Today’s Anglo-Saxon nationalism follows the 19th-century model. Edits show images of colonised populations in chains, the globe coloured pink, Founding Fathers and Cecil Rhodes. A TikTok slideshow of re-enactment pictures says that Anglo-Saxons’ “elite DNA demand[s] dominion… crushing lesser lineages into eternal dust through unyielding slaughter and strategic certainty”. One upload of the large man asserting that he is “Anglo-Saxon English” is captioned “Long live the empire”.
Hereward the Wake, the X account, resembles his namesake in calling himself “English, born and bred”. Unlike the original, though, the modern Hereward has allied themselves to a Norman name. They are a “Nigel Farage supporter” and “member of the Reform Party”.
The new Saxonists focus on old, vague history. But Farage uses modern statistics. He says that immigration ran from after the war until the millennium at net 30,000-40,000 a year. In 2022 and 2023 it was over 650,000. “The Saxon Man” asks me, “Did you no [sic] from 2022-2024 the population went up 1.6 million the most ever in our history?” But most of the protesters I spoke to were only voting Reform reluctantly, calling Farage a traitor for his “liberal” views on immigration. It is not certain that a Reform government would contain the new rage. After the Southport killings, people tried to set asylum hotels on fire and some stopped cars to check if the passengers were white. The country is frequently described as a “powder keg” of ethnic tensions and people speak more and more of “civil war”. The Kipling poem feels grimly true: the Saxons have begun to hate.
Open societies depend on the belief that the line between good and evil runs through the middle of every heart. Now that line threatens to shift outwards and divide “us” from “them”. “Immigration & asylum” tops YouGov polls of issues voters consider most important. The streets keep filling with furious protests. Tensions may subside under a Reform government. They may subside under the present Labour government: Shabana Mahmood has announced a harsh new package of immigration controls and net figures are down by hundreds of thousands. But it also might blow through both. For now we have a new pandemonium. Nation, religion, race – Saxons, Vikings, crusaders – history is empty, and all the devils are here.
[Further reading: The last flags of Faversham]
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