Anglo-Saxon (answer to Mr. Siegel)

[Vaska]

At 08:18 PM 5/2/97 -0500, Jules wrote [addressing Umberto]:
>
>Now, do you know when
>exactly the term "anglo-saxon" came into use as an anthropological and/or
>linguistic description? Who first used it to describe the English? Who paid
>for the research and its publication?


This must be my OED day, so for what it's worth, here goes some info:

Seems the term first cropped up in medieval Latin as a name (anthropological
designation, in fact) for English [Angul-cynn] as distinct from Ald [Old,
continental] Saxons.  There were, as one would expect, all sorts of
variants: Angel seaxan, Anglo-Saxones, Saxones Angli etc.  First recorded
use: late 8th century; in common use in Latin until 1100.  Bede doesn't have
it, prefering to speak of "gens Anglorum."  His continental contemporaries,
however, especially the church bureaucrats in Rome, obviously needed a way
to sort out one type of Saxon from another -- hence the name.  Seems that
the term was first extended to cover all "gens Anglorum" by those same Latin
chroniclers and their (usually continental) followers; didn't make it into
English until the 17th century, when "with the revival of OE learning,
historians and philologists again felt the need to distinguish English
'Saxon' from the Saxon of Germany."

The OED itself uses the term, in its linguistic sense, to distinguish the
Saxon [Kentish and West Saxon] from the Anglican dialects of Old English.  

Vaska