Anglo-Saxon was the olde rocke'n'rolle

Not everyone will weep to hear that two of England's three examination boards have decided to drop Anglo-Saxon history from the school syllabus. Potted into amusing lumps by Sellar and Yeatman in 1066 and All That, the Anglo-Saxon period has for a long time seemed half ridiculous (Alfred the Cake) and half brutish, a matter of kings with silly names and big hairy men hammering away at each other in a muddy forest somewhere. Many of the university students who for years have trudged unwillingly through their Anglo-Saxon primers, through all that hwaeting and hrothing amidst the din of forgotten battles, will probably be tempted to cheer.

But it still seems a curious and sorry decision. English general knowledge - and self-knowledge - will shrink another notch. A British history that begins in 1066 feels showy and unreal. The Norman invasion wasn't just a beginning: it was also an end. It relaxed and civilised a world of constantly feuding warlords. Unlike the Saxons (who pushed the Celts back into their rocky ramparts in Wales, Scotland and Ireland) the Normans did not stamp out their defeated new subjects. So their arrival does perhaps represent the birth of Britain as a plural, culturally mixed nation. But to chop off all of that early history still feels wanton - like a ship without a keel, or a flower without a stalk.

The historian GM Trevelyan called the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons "the governing event of British history" - the moment when Britain was settled by a predominantly Germanic people. Our national character and history was forged in those torrid years. The Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings who exploded out of the Baltic to obliterate both the Celtic natives and the colonial Romans brought with them a culture that has remained embedded ever since. They began as destroyers - after the Romans left, no one built a hard road in England for a thousand years - but left us unmistakeably stamped in their image.

The flinty heart of our language, beneath the filigree of Romance vocabulary on the surface, is Anglo-Saxon; so are the origins of our literature (in epic poems like Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon); 90 per cent of our place names are Saxon, and even our days are named after their gods (Wodin's day and Thor's day). They brought a form of government - kingship - new to these islands; and were farmers, fishermen, seafarers, explorers and warriors, just like their British descendants. The seeds that blossomed many years later as the British Empire drifted across the North Sea in the boats, beliefs and reflexes of these fierce and unwelcome intruders.

Today, of course, our Anglo-Saxon past is something of an embarrassment. Our ancestors were illiterate barbarians and pirates, and we're ashamed of them. When we talk about Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, we mean crude obscenities. When the French talk about the Anglo-Saxon world they do so resentfully, as a retort to the global advance of Anglo-American tastes and values. Our uglier football fans are often compared to Anglo-Saxon yeomen, and the whole apparatus of modern male comradeship - ale, wenches and battle scars - sometimes seems to have changed little since the fellowship sent Beowulf out for a brawl with Grendel's mother. At a time when Britain is struggling to emerge as a multicultural nation, our Anglo-Saxon roots often seem to embody what is holding us back.

Whether the correct response is to amputate them from our curriculum is another question entirely. Somewhere in the fogs of that largely undocumented time lie some treasured and vibrant stories. The legends that attached themselves to King Arthur and King Alfred sprang up in those gloomy centuries, and The Lord of the Rings - "Ye People's Favourite Bok" - is inconceivable without the Anglo-Saxon heritage that informs its every line. Hundreds of popular novels rely on the bloodthirsty images of swords and sorcery, and video games are slavishly devoted to mighty shields and battleaxes.

Perhaps all is not lost. Perhaps the Germanic invasion of Britain can still live on as an aspect of ancient history, alongside the study of Greece and Rome (also in decline). If nothing else, it is an amazing parable of immigration - and what could be more "relevant" than that? The maraudings of the first Anglo-Saxons paved the way for a conquest that rivals the European settlement of the Americas many centuries later. A whole people - women, children and gods - swept in tiny unsteady galleys across the North Sea. They turned the clock of civilisation back 500 years. We don't have to thank them, or even like them. But we are their children, like it or not. We ought at least to be curious enough to flick through the family album from time to time. As the old saying goes: some of my best friends are Jutes.