The essay argues that Paul Kingsnorth’s novel The Wake is written in the spirit of the eighteenth-century pastoral tradition. The medievalist trope of primitivism is used in reference to the Anglo-Saxon culture and language. What characterizes the medievalism of the novel is presentism. Buccmaster represents both the Wild Man and the Noble Savage type. In the pastoral manner, Kingsnorth writes in the spirit of anthropocentrism and focuses on the social classes in the early medieval world that he “greens” in the novel.