Grass roots of a new Empire
THE LAST WOLF: The Hidden Springs Of Englishness by Robert Winder Little, Brown, £20
THIS remarkable book is a history of England quite unlike any other. It does not tell of the deeds of great men, it does not concentrate on any one era and nor does it trace the beginnings of modern Britain back to the Industrial Revolution. Instead Winder attributes the source of our national identity to the year 1290 when King Edward I tasked a Shropshire knight named Peter Corbet with ridding the country of wolves.
The trouble with wolves was that they ate sheep which was a big problem for sheep farmers. And a shortage of sheep led to a shortage of wool which was a basic commodity if the King wanted to clothe his people. So he charged Corbet with getting rid of the wolves and in December 1290 he celebrated the successful accomplishment of that task.
The result was that England became the world’s biggest sheep farm and the world’s greatest wool supplier. From there, Winder traces England’s history to the present day, establishing a chain of causality which he maintains is what formed the English character.
Actually it wasn’t just getting rid of wolves that did it. We also owe a great deal to the climate and geography of the country. Englishness, he says, is a product of coal, wool, wheat and wet weather. Our mild climate made it easy to keep vast numbers of sheep without having to bring them in at night.
The rain helped us to grow the wheat that made the best bread in Europe and kept the people well fed and the coal, which we began to mine at around the same time as Corbet was slaying wolves, fuelled the wool industry and made us the world’s top exporters.
England became a nation of farming and mining communities and the fact that it is mostly surrounded by sea made exporting easy and natural.
Our wealth was built on wool and it was invested in ships and canals that gave us the beginnings of a fine transport system and mastery of the seas. This led to the great era of empire building, further expanding our export market and enabling imports of goods that did not exist on our shores. So when the wool industry began to fail, thanks mainly to our stupidity in letting too many sheep eat too much grazing land, we diversified into cotton, grown in British America and harvested through our strong involvement in the slave trade.
Winder writes of all these subjects with great erudition, showing how the effects of our medieval history are still with us. I never realised how many of our words, expressions and names have connections with sheep. And I never knew that Shakespeare’s buffoonish Sir John Falstaff was based on a 15th-century tavern owner named Sir John Fastolf.
Winder has selected the aspects of our history that best support his contention that Englishness has been formed more than anything by our geography. But the result is a glorious romp through more than eight centuries, told with humour and charm, with the same themes recurring over the ages. Highly recommended.