Celtic Britain appears plenty of times (King Arthur, King Lear, Old King Cole, Brut, etc.), and there are classic works set during the Anglo-Saxon period, in neighboring countries (Beowulf, MacBeth, Hamlet)—but Anglo-Saxon England itself seems to have dropped out of the national consciousness. One would expect that if nothing else, the repulsion of the invading Vikings by Alfred the Great would have given rise to an English epic.
Was the subject actively suppressed by the Normans?
Was the subject actively suppressed by the Normans?
The notion of direct suppression of the "Matter of England" in the early medieval period is rendered very nearly a moot point first of all by the simple fact of the scant English literary production which was occurring during the two centuries following the Norman conquest. There was little need to directly suppress English literary production focusing on the Matter of England. The sociopolitical and scholarly predominance of French and Latin were a matter of fact and a function of prestige, which was in turn a function of broader political realities, in Anglo-Norman England and abroad. And English literary production largely succumbed to that fact. While the majority of the common people never learned French, the common people were not writing verse romance.
One fact which may be considered as significant here to those who were, however, is the loss of attention and access to Anglo-Saxon historical works. On that point, consider this explanatory passage from the (early 13th century) Roman de Waldef (in Susan Crane's translation from the Anglo-Norman French cited below):
*When the Normans seized the land, the great histories that had been made by the English and recounted by them were left behind, on account of the peoples shifting and the languages changing. Since then much has been translated, and greatly enjoyed by many, such as the Brut, such as the Tristan.*^1
As to the matter of England beyond Waldef, we do get the 13th century King Horn, which is set in England to the extent that a chivalric romance with no pretense of historicity can be. We get Beves of Hamtoun around 1300. Again, this is romance, and not historically grounded literature. And we get Athelston, which may or may not draw to some lesser or greater extent on the reign of Æthelstan, depending on whom you ask.
But historically grounded literary fiction simply was not a genre of the period. The medieval romance did not regard itself as responsible to history or to the local political landscape. And so tales like that of Arthur and King Horn and Beves of Hamtoun get traded back and forth across the channel quite readily, with Saracens as the general purpose antagonist of the era, and Christ as the common cause.
The Matter of England survived the Middle English period as well as anything else in English did (which is to say, not very well at all). But we do have examples, to be sure.
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