This book examines the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century
engagement with a crucial part of Britain's past, the period between the
withdrawal of the Roman legions and the Norman Conquest. A number of
early modern plays suggest an underlying continuity, an essential
English identity linked to the land and impervious to change. This book
considers the extent to which ideas about early modern English and
British national, religious, and political identities were rooted in
cultural constructions of the pre-Conquest past.