The Last Wolf: The Hidden
Springs of Englishness by
WILL COHU The Last Wolf: The Hidden Springs of Englishness By Robert Winder Little, Brown £20 Oldie price £15.98 inc p&p
If there is one characteristic about being English, it’s navel-gazing on the subject of our exceptionalism.
What is it that makes us so wonderful? From the most liberal to the more reactionary, whether your cause is contemporary diversity or Victorian chauvinism, you will find the national narrative is as flexible as it is fascinating.
Robert Winder is the latest writer to contribute to the ‘Englishness’ debate – a subject he touched on in his book about immigration, Bloody Foreigners. In The Last Wolf, he reflects on how ‘English culture was to a large extent a product of its natural geography’ – he shows how the water, rocks and weather of our landscape created the conditions for the wealth and power that flowed from wool, wheat and mining.
It’s an entertaining, many-forked narrative about the interplay of people, landscape and economy. Winder has a confident, novelist’s touch with his material, encouraging connections across landscape and history. He describes how wool (most frequently through the great monastic estates) became a major source of national wealth and trade. It promoted an awareness of the importance of sea
power, so the distinct English landscape of hill and heath also exerts an influence on the significance of our coast, both practically and in our minds.
While others locate the beginnings of modern Britain, with its polarised wealth, in the Industrial Revolution, Winder points to how our relationship with the land, via the Norman and monastic estates, defined ancient inequalities. It was this which provoked de Tocqueville to remark that the English believed ‘extreme inequality of wealth is the natural order of things’ and fed into Disraeli’s notion of two nations.
We remain victims of a pervasive nostalgia about this inequality. The modern dreamer may look to a post-war Britain that was in turn envious of imperial Britain, which was obsessed with medieval England. Far back,
through the receding dreams of liberty, at the heart of a vision of freedom, is that past of feudal servitude, when the land, and the power in it, was carved up.
Sometimes Winder is too committed to metaphor, ‘I was interested in sheep because in the Middle Ages they were the beating heart of the national wealth.’ Scrupulous historians may object to some details. The title refers to the supposed killing of the last wolf in England, in 1290, which (for the purposes of the book) marked the beginning of the agrarian revolution that Winder celebrates.
Was that really the last wolf? Does it matter? There’s stuff also for picky geographers and naturalists. ‘The English Autumn… is a season of bonfires and windfall apples, pheasants, chestnuts (a Roman import that went native) and
blackberries.’ If he’s talking about sweet chestnuts, they don’t reach edible size in England, while the horse chestnuts are not only inedible but aren’t chestnuts.
But the good nature and conversational breadth of the book is always thoroughly enjoyable. Winder’s writing plays with a glowing, Tolkeinesque light (‘nowhere was England’s water sweeter than in Burtonon-trent’), in which the historic dark shadows (Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews, the Reformation, the Civil War and the enclosures) become instructive episodes, enriching the national narrative. He gives welcome recognition to the influence of the Midlands on the national psyche. How the water, grain, beer and coal of Nottinghamshire fuelled us, and how the open landscape of Northamptonshire lured Prince Rupert into disaster at Naseby.
What emerges most strongly from The Last Wolf is the sense of how complex our story is, what a wealth of narratives we have, and how bound up we are with local, national and international identities. What seems to be most unfortunate about the EU vote is that it has given impetus to the idea that there is one, currently broken narrative that we must rejoin. The truth is so much richer.