About the ASK

The Angle-Saxish Kingdom, also known as Saxriche or the ASK, is a country with territories in the British Isles and the eastern coast of North America. Because of the small area the state occupies and its limited sovereignty and recognition, it is known as a micronation.  

Early history

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Germanic peoples first arrived on the island of Great Britain in A.D. 449 when they were invited by the British King Vortigern to aid in his campaign against the Picts. The Jutes and Angles came from the Jutland Peninsula to settle in central and northern areas, which would become the Kingdoms of Kent, East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria, while the Saxons came from the northwest of modern Germany to settle in southern areas, namely Essex, Sussex, and Wessex.

Although the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms remained separate, one ruler was acknowledged as Bretwalda, or overlord. St Oswald of Northumbria, for example, was called totius Britanniae imperator (“emperor of all Britain”) by the Irish abbot Adamnan. 

It was not until Alfred the Great’s capture of London in 886 that he began to style himself Rex Angulsaxonum (“King of Anglo-Saxons”). The Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms were finally unified by his grandson Athelstan, who was elected king of Wessex and Mercia in 924, annexed the Kingdom of York in 927, and routed the coalition of Scots, Cumbrians, and Olaf, King of Northumbria and Dublin, at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937. 

During the so-called North Sea Empire period (1013 – 1042), England was united with Denmark in the reign of Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard, and later with with Norway and Sweden after the House of Denmark (under Cnut the Great) was restored following the Battle of Assandun.

The Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-Danish monarchy came to an end following the death of Harold Godwinson, and the associated institutions and nobility were supplanted by the conqueror William, Duke of Normandy, in 1066. The domestic resistance movement against the new Norman order was led by Thane Hereward the Wake in 1070; other Anglo-Saxons fled to the Mediterranean in 1074, with some settling in Crimea and others serving in the Byzantine Emperor’s elite unit, the Varangian Guard, in which they continued to fight against Normans in the Balkans. Modern Saxriche claims to be the successor of the old Anglo-Danish kingdom in opposition to what became the Norman-dominated Kingdom of England.

Of Norman England, the contemporary chronicler Orderic Vitalis wrote, “And so the English groaned aloud for their lost liberty and plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed.” The term “Norman Yoke” was thereafter used to evoke a lost past.

Anglo-Saxon revival

There was a renewed interest in the Anglo-Saxon nation, as distinguished from the Norman, in the 16th and 17th centuries. Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, established Anglo-Saxon studies as an important field, using it to prove the fidelity of Protestant Anglicanism to the practices of the church established by St Augustine of Canterbury in which various popish abuses had yet to develop.

During the English Civil War, radical tract writer John Hare in St Edward’s Ghost, or Anti-Normanism proclaimed, “…we are a member of the Teutonick nation, and descended out of Germany: a descent so honourable and happy, if duly considered, as that the like could not have been fetched from any other part of Europe.” He put forth the case that St Edward was the last rightful English king; furthermore, he called for the abolition of laws introduced from Normandy and the confiscation of lands from lords, and proposed that “our language be cleared of the Normane and French invasion upon it” by replacing Gallicisms with words from “old Saxon”.

Creation of the ASK

The now King of Angle-Saxons founded what was then known as West Germania in 2010 as a movement to re-establish a culturally (but non-racialist) Anglo-Saxon nation and to foster pan-Germanism. A student of German and linguistics, he was inspired by the revival of other languages such as Hebrew to construct a descendant of Old English with a high degree of mutual intelligibility with German and Dutch. Taking an interest in Wodenism, he initially took the regnal name Penda II (the Ironhand) after the Mercian pagan king.

Following his conversion to Christianity in 2011, he formed close ties with other Christian micronationalists to promote true religion in that community and enjoined this to his nation’s mission. Penda was later inspired by Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan republican government in England and temporarily abdicated in 2015. Having again been persuaded of Samuel Rutherford’s arguments in favour of constitutional monarchy and upon his election as king in a 2017 referendum, he adopted the Latin name Johannes, and reinstated the title King of Angle-Saxons once claimed by Alfred. In the following months, still an admirer of Cromwell, he drafted a new constitution based heavily on the 1653 English Instrument of Government and the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties. The resulting document was finally ratified in 2019 and in the same year, the first formal territory was acquired.

Geography

The northernmost territory in the British Isles, Kolumbenvyrð, is situated near a coastal area nestled along Loch Linnhe and surrounded by steep-sided mountains. Warmed by the Gulf Stream, it has mild winters with January temperatures around 45°F and warm summers seeing an average daytime July temperature of 64°F. Annual precipitation is 100 inches. The more southerly capital Klaikrauçh, located amid the hills of upland northern Derbyshire (Dierboyschaier), has a similar temperature maritime climate.

South Hatteras (Sauðhatteras) is located in Cape Hatteras in the chain of barrier islands of the Outer Banks which arch out from the east coast of the United States into the Atlantic Ocean. It has a humid subtropical climate, with average summer highs of 85°F and average winter lows of 42°F. Precipitation is 58 inches per year.

Demographics and culture

At present, all Angle-Saxish citizens except one are foreign-born and naturalized in adulthood; the child of the Earl and Countess of Mercians became the first citizen by birth on 19th March 2021. The population, hailing from the United Kingdom, the United States, Hungary, Germany, and Kenya, is majority white Caucasian with a black minority.

The unique culture of the Angle-Saxish Kingdom is in its infancy, but draws heavily on evangelicalism, British traditions, and English exceptionalism. There is also some Balkan influence, for example in cuisine, which pays homage to the “Anglo-Varangians”.