From English writers in the 1800's to Tolkien, and even still on the internet, I see a lot of writers romanticize the Anglo-Saxons, lamenting for the English culture or enjoying tales of Normans getting dicked over by the native Anglo-Saxons. Whether it be Hereward or Ivanhoe.
This has always confused me, since modern English culture is an amalgamation of Anglo-Saxon culture and Norman. The people lamenting the lost English culture are a product of the current one, and there's plenty of heroic stories the Normans can be attributed to. It seems odd people seem to love the Anglo-Saxons so much more when really they're an entirely different people.
As a follow-up question/additional observation perhaps related to the original question, why does the lineage from Brutus in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (which appears as a frame recalling Geoffrey's account of Arthur and England from the 12th century) leave out Norman/French ancestry?
For context, the manuscript is dated to the 1300's and comes from near northern Wales if IIRC. Was Post-Hastings England ashamed of their Norman roots, or is this an anomaly of the poet, or of the region around Wales specifically? It seems strange that a poet living in a world so directly shaped and changed by the Normans would just happen to leave out their impact in shaping English identity. Since these fabricated lineages appear to play an important role in shaping the literary identity of Britain (I recall Sovereign Fantasies by Patricia Ingham and an essay by Schiff, the title of which eludes me), it seems curious to try and leave Norman lineages out of England altogether.
IDK..maybe because the Bastard was illegitimate both politically and familially, razed the entire north to the ground, and imposed a foreign political structure onto a society used self-governance.....that may have something to do with it.