Why being born English really IS winning life’s lottery
. . . even if it’s un-English to say so
SuMMER holidays are in full swing and our airports are packed — rather too packed, in fact — with travellers. We have always been a nation of explorers, yet never before have we ventured abroad in greater numbers.
Yet I wonder whether, in the rush to the Mediterranean sun, we are in danger of forgetting the very best place of all — our own native land.
Few places in the world are at once so familiar and so unknown. With more than 55 million people, England is by far the largest country in our united Kingdom, yet it has no parliament or assembly of its own.
No other people on earth can match the contribution of English men and women to world civilisation, from William Shakespeare and Sir Isaac Newton to Jane Austen and Charles Darwin.
Our forefathers invented everything from the steam engine and the postage stamp to the railway and the vaccine. Englishness itself has become one of the world’s great brands, a unique blend of nostalgia and prestige, cutting- edge fashion and timeless tradition.
And with Britain poised to leave the Eu, the question of what is England — its politics, its economy, even its very identity — seems more pressing than at any time in living memory.
The strange thing about Englishness, though, is that it is both very familiar and frustratingly elusive. The most famous of all descriptions was written by George Orwell during the Blitz of 1941. ‘When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air,’ Orwell wrote. That remains as true today as ever. A couple of lines later, Orwell painted an evocative portrait of different kinds of Englishness: ‘The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin tables in the Soho pubs, old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings.’
ASA PEN-PICTuRE of our national identity at that time, this has probably never been bettered. Yet there is no getting away from the fact that almost all these things are now completely out-of-date.
Only a few decades ago, people might have talked about the Beatles, Sunday roasts and red phone boxes. To today’s teenagers, though, the Beatles are ancient history, red phone boxes are largely obsolete and even the Sunday roast has began to fall by the wayside. What, then, is Englishness? In an age defined by global culture and mass immigration, is it really anything at all?
In his new book, The Last Wolf, the writer Robert Winder thinks he has the answer. But he begins with a very unlikely person indeed.
The real father of Englishness, suggests Winder, was not that Dark Ages chronicler the Venerable Bede, Alfred the Great, Henry VIII or William Shakespeare, but an obscure Shropshire knight called Peter Corbet, who lived in the second half of the 13th century. In 1281, Corbet was commissioned by Edward I to ‘ take and destroy wolves with his men, dogs and devices, in all ways in which he shall deem expedient’? And for the next nine years, accompanied by a pack of hounds, Corbet and his men roamed the forests of the Midlands, seeking out and killing any wolves they found.
Corbet’s exploits earned him the nickname ‘ the Mighty Hunter’. And at the end of 1290, it seemed that he had finished the job. Earlier that year, there had been one last report of wolves attacking deer in the Forest of Dean, ‘ but since then...nothing’.
To all intents and purposes, the wolf had been destroyed. And in that moment, Winder says, Englishness was born.
That last line probably sounds like a gigantic stretch. But Winder’s argument, which seems pretty persuasive to me, is that when we talk about Englishness, we often forget the most important thing of all — England itself.
At the heart of Englishness, he says, is a place: our familiar, beloved landscape of rain and wind, oak and beech, wheat and apples, coal and iron, coast and rivers — and perhaps above all, sheep. And this is why Peter Corbet mattered.
When he and his fellow knights eliminated the last wolves, England lost its wildness. It could now be turned into what Winder calls ‘the biggest sheep farm in the world’: a gigantic engine for making money. Sheep gave us wool, and wool made us rich.
Without the sheep, we would never have had the wealthy wool villages of the Cotswolds and East Anglia.
There would be no Lavenham, no Broadway, no Chipping Campden. There would be none of those magnificent rural churches that seem so unmistakably English; there would be no pastoral idyll to decorate all those tea towels and biscuit tins.
There would be no cult of the English village. There would be none of the melancholy longing for a lost rural paradise that you see in everything from, say, William Wordsworth’s poetry to The Archers. And, in a sense, there would be no England — or at least not as we know it.
To some extent, this is an England that exists only in our heads. Today, most of us live in cities and suburbs; we are one of the most urbanised and densely populated countries in Europe. But as Winder notes, it is precisely because England was the first urban industrial country that we made such a cult of pastoral nostalgia.
Indeed, even in World War II, when the vast majority of British servicemen came from our great industrial cities, the Government’s patriotic posters emphasised the rural England created in the Middle Ages.
Produced by the Ministry of Information, the posters lovingly depicted church spires
With Brexit, it’s never been more vital to understand who we are as a people. A new book says, even if you live in a city, this picture – and the sea – are keys to our national identity
and village greens, gentle hills and rolling fields. Tellingly, one showed a shepherd striding over the South Downs, his dog at his side, his flock cresting the horizon, a farm nestled in the distance.
‘Your Britain,’ read the caption. ‘Fight For It Now.’
The irony, of course, is that this was not the kind of landscape in which most of our fighting men lived. Yet almost instinctively, they knew it and loved it as their own — as so many of us do today.
So is Englishness just a nostalgic fantasy, then, as self-styled ‘postnational’ intellectuals who disdain borders and patriotism claim? Not a bit of it. For England, like so many great old nations, is a place defined by geography as well as history, stones as well as stories.
We are, for example, a supremely industrious people: a nation of artisans and craftsmen, inventors and entrepreneurs, miners and manufacturers.
Yet none of that would have been possible without the good fortune of sitting on some of Europe’s richest coal deposits. Similarly, would England still be England without the sea? We are, of course, an island — or more accurately, the southernmost and richest part of an island.
But as Winder explains, the sea has often acted not as a moat, but as a huge ‘ marine ring road’, linking the different parts of England with each other and with the rest of the world.
Our orderliness is that of a nation used to the immutable timetables of the tides; our stoicism is that of sailors buffeted by the winds; our pugnacity reflects centuries of dockyard punch-ups.
And what about our famous fields, the ‘green and pleasant land’ celebrated in William Blake’s stirring poem And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time (now best-known as the anthem Jerusalem)?
We are a people, says Winder, defined not just by sheep, but by wheat, a land of bakers and millers who for centuries stuffed themselves with pies, cakes, tarts and puddings.
Our everyday phrases tell the story. We earn a crust; we reap what we sow; we shake our heads at half-baked plans; we know that half a loaf is better than no bread.
What was the naughtiest thing Theresa May has admitted ever doing? Run through a field of wheat, of course.
And then, as every holidaymaker knows, there is the rain. No summer’s day would be truly English without it. Where would we be without drizzly afternoons, soggy sandwiches, childhood memories of splashing happily in the puddles? But the rain, says Winder, matters even more than we think.
Indeed, in some ways it is the rain that really defines us. Rain made generations of farmers and peasants wary of the weather and fatalistic about what life might bring.
Rain gave us easily navigable rivers such as the Severn and the Trent, and a dense network of inland ports. Later, rain gave us the world’s first canal network, teaching the skills our engineers used for the world’s first railways.
Rain is there in the stories we tell, from the first line of Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval Canterbury Tales — ‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote’ (When that April with his showers sweet) — to the final lines of T. S. Eliot’s great modernist poem The Waste Land, when thunder brings rain to the parched landscape.
Indeed, Winder even thinks rain explains why we love our bacon sandwiches. Rain powered the water-mills for all that bread; rain made it impossible for our ancestors to dry-cure their pork, as the French, Spanish and Italians do, so they used salt and smoke to make bacon instead.
Of course, it is unfashionable today to talk of national character. Self-consciously liberal, intellectual types sneer at the very idea of national identity.
They think themselves citizens of the world, floating above the allegiances that the rest of us hold so dear. But as George Orwell knew, there is indeed such a thing as Englishness. Robert Winder defines it — very persuasively, I think — as a ‘knack’ for negotiating between extremes.
To be English is to steer between land and sea, city and countryside, earnest and frivolous, new and old. To be English is to flirt with excess, but always to return to the ‘sensible middle ground’.
Ever since the Brexit vote, the air has been thick with the howls of Remainers lamenting that we are now terribly divided. But this, too, is part of our national character.
WE have always swung between wild boasting and morbid self-flagellating, talking ourselves up one moment, sunk in gloom the next.
And like all families, we have always loved a quarrel, from the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation, to the great struggles between Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, or those victorian giants William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. And there is something more. We English have always believed ourselves a nation apart. We have always seen ourselves as islanders, not Continentals.
As Orwell wrote, you have only to set foot on English soil to feel the difference. ‘The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant.’
Many of us drink Continental lager now, of course. The coins are lighter than they were. Even the fields are no longer as green as they were, thanks to farmers’ enthusiasm for lurid yellow rapeseed.
Yet England is still England, a country shaped by the rain and the sea, its people at once cheerful and fatalistic, polite and pugnacious, dreamy and inventive, architects of the future who can never stop looking back to a past that never was.
Of course we live in anxious times. Even so, to be born in a country with such a glorious history and such rich cultural traditions still strikes me as being one of life’s great privileges.
It is not very fashionable these days — especially among those on the Left — to quote the controversial empire-builder Cecil Rhodes, but nobody put it better than he did. To have been born an Englishman, he once said, was to have ‘drawn the greatest prize in the lottery of life’.
It seems very un- English to say so, but he was, of course, quite right.