The history of the "Englisc" nationalist movement, part 2: The supporters gather

In the first post in this series, I looked at three groups (all founded or at least co-founded by Tony Linsell) that laid the groundwork for a movement which I term "Englisc nationalism". With this post, I will look at two subsequent organisations that helped to develop the movement...

UEP/Anglo-Saxon Foundation/Englisc-Gateway (established 2004)

This is a message board that started out as the forum of a website called United English Patriots (UEP for short; its website was at UEPEngland.com). It later adopted its current title of Anglo-Saxon Foundation, and is now part of a wider website called Englisc-Gateway. A Whois lookup of the original URL reveals that the site was started in September 2004, although the forum may have come along a little later.

I plan to devote a whole post to this forum and its leadership at a later date, but for now I will keep things simple: the Anglo-Saxon Foundation is where things get really racist.

RationalWiki and Fundies say the Darndest Things have already done thorough jobs of covering what the forum's members stand for, but here is a quick selection of some typical posts...

(The above post is a reply to a thread about a black rapist. Before any ASFers swoop down on me, yes, AelfredSeax is entirely right to condemn the rapist - but why is he using the incident to justify the murder of James Byrd Jr?)

Any ASF members reading this will probably claim that I have taken the above posts out of context. But really, what kind of context would make them any more acceptable? Are we expected to believe that the ASF is some kind of role-playing group whose members sit around pretending to be bigots for fun?

For once, it does not appear that Tony Linsell had a hand in starting this group - not directly, anyway. But his writing is an oft-cited inspiration amongst the members...

(The above poster, who boasts of meeting Tony Linsell on a yearly basis, is the Nazi sympathiser and Breivik supporter Clive Calladine - I discussed him at length here)

The ASF also shows strong support for the Steadfast Trust, and I do not think that it would be too much of an exaggeration to describe it as the unofficial Steadfast Trust forum. For one thing, there is a notable overlap in membership.

The OpenCharities page on the Steadfast Trust names five people as trustees: Julien Crighton, Shelly Donohoe, Mark Taylor, Tim Hawke and Lynn Chorley.

Mark Taylor, the Steadfast Trust's events co-ordinator, posts at the ASF under the name "Scyld Scefing":

Tim Hawke is also a poster at the forum (although, to be fair, not a very active one):

As for Lynn Chorley, well, just compare her user image on Facebook...

...with that of the ASF member "Saxonmaiden":

I'm not the only person to have noticed this:

Moving on to Julien Crighton, look at this article by Richard Chambers on the Anglo-Saxon Books website:

"Monday 6th October 2003. Seven days ago the England Society had officially launched as a Student Union society at Keele University in North Staffordshire. [...] Our one and only leaflet at the time was a simple affair consisting of a welcome and thanks for interest before going on to give the basics about fair and moderate representation, a list of planned and provisional events over the first few months and a short piece on the current political struggles faced by England and the English, kindly provided by Julien Crighton from wearetheenglish.com." [emphasis mine]

WeAreTheEnglish.com is an online store whose official message board is hosted by - you guessed it - the Anglo-Saxon Foundation.

I've already provided evidence of a Steadfast trustee spending his saturday with a Stormfront member. These people really need a talking to about their connections to racist Internet forums.

We should not be surprised to find that the Steadfast Trust has openly endorsed the ASF (along with the similarly racist Woden's Folk, discussed below) by calling for the forum's members to be invited to an official charity event:

And sure enough they came, something which the Steadfast Trust acknowledges on its website:

"Steadfast Trust, Woden’s Folk, Shieldwall, ED and ASF supporters gathered together at Battle in spite of dire weather warnings for the Sussex area. Having met up in our usual haunt ‘The Abbey Inn’, we had a pleasant hour to enjoy a fine ale or two and discuss matters affecting the whole English community, and to ‘put faces to names’ which was very rewarding.

[...]

Wreaths were laid, and this was followed by a blot made by Woden’s Folk at which the meadhorn was passed and oaths were taken to continue the fight to retain our native land. Once again, a big ‘thank you’ to everyone who attended.
Waes hael!"

Woden's Folk (online presence cemented 2005)

Woden's Folk is the name of a cult that was set up in 1998 by someone who calls himself Wulf Ingessunu. Its original, Freeserve-hosted website began in 2000 at the latest, and it moved to its own domain in 2005.

I have decided to place the group at this point in the chronology because it was around the time that the disparate groupings of the Englisc nationalist movement merged together. The way I see it, Tony Linsell provided the political theory, Wulf Ingessunu provided the spirituality and mysticism, and the two streams converged at the Anglo-Saxon Foundation forum.

Wulf Ingessunu, founder of Woden's Folk

I covered Woden's Folk in full here. As a quick summary, this is a bizarre religious sect that has attracted criticism (some of it from other pagans and heathens) for two main reasons:

1: Its overt racism, including outright neo-Nazi links;
2: The fact that it has taken a line of dialogue from the 1980s television series Robin of Sherwood and tried to pass it off as an "ancient prophecy".

In fact, looking over the evidence that I presented in my last post about this group, I'm going to come right out and say that Woden's Folk is a pro-Nazi organisation. There is simply no way that an organisation could forge links with so many neo-Nazi elements without sharing at least some of that philosophy itself.

Having already discussed the group itself at length, I will take the opportunity here to talk about the connections between Woden's Folk and other Englisc nationalist groups. For a start, Woden's Folk are well-liked at the Anglo-Saxon Foundation: as can be seen from the thread archived at RationalWiki here, here and here, the ASF members are willing to support the group even in the knowledge that Ingessunu's "ancient prophecy" was swiped from a TV show.

And I have already shown above that the supposedly non-racist Steadfast Trust has endorsed this group - although quite how a charity dedicated to preserving and promoting the history of England can give a thumbs-up to people who are trying to reconstruct England's pre-Christian religion from a TV series is beyond me.

On the other hand, I did note the curiously Conan the Barbarian-esque history lesson given by Steadfast Trust co-founder Tony Linsell in the last post in this series. I have also noted how people in the Englisc nationalist movement have latched on to a "warrior's prayer" from the film The 13th Warrior. These people appear to get a remarkable amount of their history and religion from twentieth-century fiction.

One significant link between Woden's Folk and other Englisc nationalist groups is a man who calls himself "Bretwalda Randwulf", "Randwulf Iren Heorte", "Youngy" or "Yngvi" depending on which part of the Internet he is currently inhabiting. RationalWiki has an article about this strange fellow which goes into plenty of detail (more detail than anybody could reasonably hope for, in fact) about Youngy's beliefs, activities and regrettable attempts at poetry.

As a quick sample, here are Youngy's thoughts on race relations:

In 2011 Youngy/Bretwalda Randwulf organised a nationalist festival called the English Folcmoot:

Youngy's event was was funded by... the Steadfast Trust (Goodness me, I'm starting to feel like Glenn Beck joining the dots on his blackboard):

"Early in the establishment of the Steadfast Trust it was hoped that the charity would be able to organise a yearly family fair celebrating the culture of the early Anglo-Saxon Englisc in a fun, entertaining and educational way.

So when the charity was approached with the request to fund the Great Englisc Folcmoot 2011, we naturally did all we could to help, which included providing £4000 in funding for equipment (all of which will be used next year), hired entertainment and health and safety expenses.

[...]

There was also a surprise visit from members of the Leicester English Community Group who thanked the charity for a recent book grant."

At this point, the Englisc nationalists were hoping to reach out to the masses and lead a revolution. Unfortunately for them, this was not to happen. In the third and possibly final post in this series, I will look at their failed attempts to establish grassroots Englisc nationalist movements.