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The article analyses the contribution of G. Hickes (1642–1715), the author of an Anglo-Saxon grammar and Linguarum vett. septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus, into the intellectual life of his time. Gathering around him the group of 'Oxford saxonists', he promoted the study of the AngloSaxon language and culture, the publication of texts in ancient Germanic languages and their translation into Late Modern English. In the context of the history of comparative linguistics, his works, in which Anglo-Saxon was considered alongside other Germanic languages, testify, in spite of their deficiencies, to the emergence in that early period of such important concepts as a parent language and a family tree. His achievements include the first description of Anglo-Saxon dialects and poetry. Taking into consideration Hickes' attainments, one might find it strange that many of his contemporaries viewed his research and that of other Oxford saxonists in a critical light. The first reason lay in the intellectual climate of his time. In an age when most British intellectuals saw their historical roots in the culture of Ancient Greece and Rome, the scholars suggested a principally different interpretation of the roots of the British nation. In fact, they contributed to the emergence of a new AngloSaxon identity. Secondly, their contemporaries found strange and pedantic their scholarly methods of textological analysis, which, actually, were quite close to modern ones, and the dry style of their works, the abundance of terms and complicated syntactic structures. The third explanation is the practical bias of most prescriptive grammars of the 18th century, which looked for criteria of correctness not in historical records, but in contemporary usage.