Jonbain may have a point about, "Saxon Culture"

Alright jonbain when I'm wrong I'm wrong and I reckon I should admit it. The conclusions that I've come to are from the book "Albion Seed Four British Folkways in America" by historian David Hackett Fischer, a seminal book on American regionalism that describes the transplanting of four British regional cultures to different regions of North America as well as my studying  the culture Saxon tribe of Germany. So here's the thing. The Lower or coastal South of the United States was settled from Southwestern England, either straight from England or second hand through the slave colony of Barbados. Our dialect, our food, our customs and everything else that makes up our culture have their origins in this part of England, both the blacks and the whites. This was the part of the United States that was the odd part out as it was the area dominated by a feudal rural aristocracy based upon slavery, and was rigidly stratified by caste and class, with the castes being drawn upon racial lines. If the United States is defined by being a land of freedom, democracy, equality, capitalism, individualism, social mobility (the American Dream), tolerance, and the like, this region was the complete opposite of that in every way. It was a slave holding oligarchy more resembling societies like Rome, Sparta, or Medieval Europe than bourgeoisie America and bore more resemblance to the colonies of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Quebec than the rest of Anglo-America.

So, where do the Saxons and "Saxon culture" figure into all of this? Well, the English historically have their ethnogenesis in three tribes from Northern Germany and Denmark that invaded Roman Britain after the Roman legion retreated from the island, and as the latest DNA evidence shows, committed a genocide on the native population to the point  where there was an 80% genetic replacement of the population (modern Englishmen are descendants of these tribes and a large continuous migration of Frenchmen that steadily poured in over hundreds of years following the Norman invasion). Now, these different tribes on the continent were located in different places. The Angles and Jutes were located on the Danish peninsula. The Saxons, however, were located on the Saxon coast within the borders of modern day Germany. Now, when the tribes migrated to Britain, they also happened to settle in different regions of the island. The Angles settled in East Anglia, Northumbria, and Eastern Mercia, the Jutes in Kent and the Isle of Wright, and the Saxons in Southwestern England in what was roughly the borders of king Alfred's Wessex that was outside of the Danelaw and was the same area from which the Deep South of the United States was settled.

The culture of this part of England was very distinct in many ways. For one, it remained stubbornly Saxon resisting all Norse influence. It's Shires were divided into hundreds rather than wapentakes, its tax units were counted in hides rather than carucates, and its measures were old British rather than Scandinavian. It was the last kingdom of the old Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy that held out against Danish conquest, and it was from there that the English, starting with Alfred the Great, made their Reconquista of the island from the Danes and unified England, dominating it to such an extent that Southern English is considered the general English accent. What was also different was that the Saxons did not exterminate many of the Britons living there but rather enslaved them. The culture of Southwestern England was a society that for most of its history was an oligarchic slave or serf society. The pattern throughout the region was that it was very rural, with few large cities until very recently, and the land was mostly separated into large manors, much larger manors than were the norm throughout the rest of England, that were worked by unfree laborers whether slave, peasant, or tenant farmer. Slavery was much more prelavant all throughout the Saxon areas of England reaching levels that would make plantation owners in the South blush. One Bishop acquired a manor in Sussex and he freed the slaves who worked it that numbered two hundred and fifty, which is far more than the average plantation owner in the American South would have owned. Needless to say that serfdom was much more ubiquitous in this region as well.

The power of the area, political or otherwise, was always monopolized by a powerful oligarchy that owned the manors and the land and had hegemonic control over the region. When the Normans conquered England they just kicked out the previous manor owners and became the new Lords. This area of England also became associated throughout English history with conservative and royalist politics. Their Anglican religion swayed toward Orthodox theology and fought in such wars as the Western Rebellion which was a violent protest against protestant innovations to the state church, Penruddack's rebellion which was the largest armed rising against Puritan rule in England, and it was from this region that the Royalist Cavaliers drew their base from in the English Civil war. In short this society was rural, oligarchic, slave (or what's just the same) serf based, hierarchical, conservative, fervently and conservatively Christian, warlike, and hated Puritans with a passion, not to mention possessing the folkways which David Hackett Fischer describes in great detail in the bulk of this tome of a section on the migration of the Southwest Saxon English to Virginia, everything from food, to dress, to architecture, family rearing, notions of power and liberty, of magic and time and rank, that freakily describes the culture (well the traditional elements of the culture that has resisted American modernity) that I live in, was the Antebellum Deep South before such a thing ever existed in America. In short there is a Saxon culture with at least some of the traits you describe and I am living in it. It was not an accident that Bristol was the city that both was most mired in the Early Medieval slave trade in Anglo-Saxon times, and in the transatlantic slave trade of Africans in colonial times

To probe deeper into this subject I looked up the Saxon tribe in Germany and found out that is was atypical among the Germanic peoples because it had a rigid hierarchical caste system. This caste system formed when the top caste, which used to be a different tribe, conquered another tribe and made themselves the ruling class over them in the same manner that the Spartans did to the Helots. It seems that conquering other tribes and making them their slaves, whether they be Britons, Africans, or whomever the upper caste Saxons conquered to form the Saxon tribe is just something that they do. Also, the Saxon tribe did not have a king but preferred to be ruled oligarchically, which seems to be a running theme with them. And of course it was the Wessex king Alfred the Great who wrote the bases for the three estates of the Middle Ages, where society was separated into three classes, "those who work, those who fight, and those who pray." In short I concede that you kind of have a point. Now...

Here is what I am conceding and what I am not conceding.

 I concede that...

1. There does exist a Saxon culture, and it does possess many of the traits that you ascribe to them, (authoritarian hierarchical domination, racism, warlikeness.)

2. That it is influential in a least two countries. It a major force to be reckoned with in the United States, and it is the dominant culture in the UK, with the South basically ruling that country.

3. I am not sure of its prelavance in Germany itself as Germany is really a hodgepodge of different Germanic cultures with dialects that are so different that they're effectively different languages. If anything I think Prussian culture would be dominant in Germany, but of course, Prussians were colonists that invaded East Europe and were not native to the area. Their culture certainly fits the mold of the Saxons but I have to research further.

4. That when last we spoke I was a jerk. I had not gotten good sleep that day and was rather ornery. I apologize for acting in such an unchristian manner.

What I am not conceding...

1. That the Germanic peoples as a linguistic and cultural group do not exist and that the Saxons are in no way related to the Norse. This is just a ridiculous claim. The Saxons worshipped Norse gods like Odin, Thor, and Tyre, they spoke a language clearly related to Norse, they had mead halls, thegns, social classes with direct linguistic and conceptual equivalents among the Vikings, Beowulf takes place in Denmark, and they have similarities in a million different ways as all the Germanic peoples did. The Germanic tribes had more unity between them than the Celtic ones did. The Celts did not even have a unified pantheon and differed heavily in their gods regionally.

2. That its okay to have a hatred for Germans, or Afrikaners,  South Englishmen, or Southerners and despise whole peoples because of past traumas. When being called a "German" is worst than being called a pedophile to you, then you have a little bit of a bigotry problem. Certainly you don't truly hate a whole group of people that much do you? That is unhealthy and the extremity of the sentiment is why I snapped before. Anyways that's what I got to say. Peace.