From Caesar to Boris: this brief history of England comes up very short
It’s not just the silly diagrams and tiny type: it’s the weird conspiracy theory that we have been ruled by the same people for2,000 years
Sir Herbert Butterfield, the renowned Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, once said that history ‘is just one bloody thing after another’. Historians tend to see it as their job to tie all these various things together with themes and theories, in the hope of creating a continuous thread.
As history grows longer and longer, so too do history books. These days, the latest biography of Florence Nightingale, say, or a book about a particular battle in the Second World War, is likely to stretch to 600 pages or more. I am as guilty of this as anyone: my recent book about The Beatles came in at 642 pages. The world is getting out of hand. Whatever happened to brevity?
This is why a book with a title like The Shortest History Of England holds such promise. At last, a chance to get to grips with the entire history of England, and all in a few hours!
‘Read in a day. Remember for a lifetime,’ runs the publisher’s slogan on the dust jacket. These words rang a bell. It was only later, after I had finished the book, that I recalled the introduction to 1066 And All That, the classic spoof on history by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman: ‘History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history repeats itself.’
From the title, I was hoping for a fizzy overview of English history, complete with colourful tales written in an easily accessible style for the general reader.
Since the author, James Hawes, is also a well-regarded novelist, I imagined he would have an eye for character, a relish for narrative drive and an ability to conjure up key moments in a few choice phrases.
It soon emerged that The Shortest History Of England is not that sort of book at all. Instead, it is history powered by theory, and the theory is that, for the past 2,000 years, the South East of England has ruled the roost, and all the other regions have had to pander to it.
Eventually, this leads the author to the present day. Post-Brexit, he concludes: ‘The Party of the South realised that it was almost certain to rule England with the UK gone, and mobilised the common people, North and South, with extravagant promises of national liberation.’ At this point you realise that all of this short history, from Caesar to Boris, has been written with this conclusion in mind. It is, if you like, the tail that wags the dog.
His guiding thesis – so dominant that it almost amounts to a conspiracy theory – is that the Romans and the Normans, with their fancy foreign ways, both established a pan-European elite in the South of England, and this elite has ruthlessly maintained its position – not only in politics and finance but in art and architecture – ever since. For instance, his only mention of the beautiful city of Bath is as an example of how ‘brand-new houses, built to strict new, imported rules, proclaimed that their owners belonged not to any one nation, but to a pan-European elite… Long ago England had been united under Norman kings, by an elite who spoke French and built castles all over the land. Now, the British Isles were united under German kings, by an elite who spoke French, Latin and Greek and built classical mansions all over the islands. Anyone who was anyone also had to have a classically-proportioned townhouse in the Imperial HQ, London, and holiday/network at purposebuilt, cod-classical Bath. It was all Greek to the common people of England.’
Phew! This is history as witnessed by Billy Bragg or Dave Spart.
‘Read in a day. Remember for a lifetime.’ In fact, the most colourful moments of history are whizzed through at such speed that I found them hard to remember to the end of the page. Can anything so condensed really be considered memorable? How about this, concerning the Norman conquest? ‘The North-South divide decided England’s fate. Even as Harold awaited William’s invasion, Harald Hardrada and his Norwegians linked up with Tostig at the Tyne (or perhaps, in Scotland), and struck south. The brother northern earls, Morcar and Edwin, old enemies of the Godwins, mustered at York and were beaten at Fulford Gate, but…’ And so on.
The text is not helped by being interspersed with shaded, stand-alone quotes from random sources. An early discussion of the North-South divide comes with a
shaded sentence which declares that ‘a noticeable northern consciousness can be traced back as early as Bede’. This is attributed to ‘Andrea Ruddick’, who I at first mistook for Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop, until an internet search revealed her to be a stipendiary lecturer in medieval history at Oxford University.
The book is also littered with countless maps of England, with numerous arrows generally pointing either to London or away from it, depending on the point being made. Sometimes, in order to squeeze too many words on to an illustration, the typeface is so reduced, and so faint – white on grey, in one case – that it is almost impossible to read.
Additionally, some of the diagrams are so toytown that they call into question the seriousness of the book. For example, England’s finances in the first half of the 18th Century are illustrated by two little piggy banks, one with coins falling out of it, inscribed ‘Land war in Europe costs money’, the other with coins being put into it, inscribed ‘Naval war across the globe makes money’. The author’s repeated attempts to jazz up the text with modern references can also prove wearing. There is a lot of talk of ‘slamming on the brakes’ and ‘the brakes were off’. ‘The Times they are a-changing back,’ reads one sub-heading. Martin Luther is described as ‘an international influencer’. After two sentences on the Popish Plot of 1678, we are told that ‘The Whigs invented modern fake news’. Yet ‘fake news’ has been around since before the dawn of time.
The closer the book gets to the present day, the more it expands. The first 70 pages cover 1,300 years; the final 70 pages just 100 years. By the time Hawes gets to the post-war era, he is happy to linger on very random characters, and his generalisations grow more obviously haphazard. ‘Graphic violence – almost always WW2 themed – and soft porn went mainstream. Men like Jimmy Saville [sic] and Gary Glitter discovered that if they just got on the telly, they could do whatever they liked.’
In fact, Hawes’s uncertain hold on the modern world calls into question his expertise in the ancient one. Like many modern historians he overstates the significance of the Sex Pistols, no doubt because they help his point about national decline and division. Best not to mention the fact that God Save The Queen didn’t even make the top 50 best-selling singles of 1977; for all his talk of decline and division, most Britons preferred Leo Sayer, David Soul and Abba.
Then, when Mrs Thatcher comes to power, Hawes writes: ‘Southern culture was back: almost overnight, everything old and posh was cool.’ Yet the only evidence he can offer is The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, Hunter wellingtons and Barbour coats.
As the 20th Century closes, he even ropes in Harry Potter to aid his increasingly fragile thesis about 2,000 years of a southern elite. ‘Under the magical gloss, this was a hymn to social mobility through a very specific kind of education, as practised in England since approximately 1170AD,’ he asserts, with an air of desperation.