Wat Tyler is killed by the Lord Mayor of London during the peasants revolt of 1381
The Story of Englandby Michael Wood (Viking, £20)
There is a political void where England should be. While Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland enjoy devolved government, the English do not govern themselves. Parliament, the traditional assembly of the English people, represents the union and not the nation. England, as a political nation, has no body and it cannot speak.
England poses difficult political questions for progressives. Football and the monarchy are the popular focus of English nationalism, and the expression of support for both has never been a comfortable one for the left. England, has become, in some ways, a foreign country. And yet Labour’s future depends on it being able to reconnect to England, to its traditions and language. As Michael Wood, the author of The Story of England, writes: “For a small country on the far western shore of the Eurasian landmass, its influence on the world of literature, language, politics, law and ideas of freedom has been out of all proportion to its size. Why that should have been is an interesting question in itself.”
It is not a question the book tries to answer. There is no thesis defended or method adopted beyond writing an account of the history of one village, Kibworth, in Leicestershire, from what he calls, with Anglo-Saxon brevity, “the bottom up.” Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Wood describes the impact of huge events and processes on the lives of ordinary English families in the centre of the country. The Anglo-Saxon and Viking invasions, the Norman conquest, the Black Death, the Reformation and enclosures exerted transformative force on the lives of the people of Kibworth. The village is constituted by people who live from the land, and the ownership of the land is what is at stake in each phase of its history.
There are moments when Wood grasps the dynamics of this: “An important part of the narrative of English history is the story of how the rulers asserted and enforced their claim to the labour and surplus of the working people, and how the people fought to establish their own freedoms under the law.” Here, the origins of capitalism, the rule of law and the sustained force of the “ancient constitution” in the minds of the people—all distinctive of England—are brought to bear; and the account of the interaction between peasant and landlord, dissenter and conformist, becomes vivid.
Wood’s comment about labour is part of an account of the Anglo-Saxon invasion and settlement of the Midlands. That conquest and the subsequent integration of the Anglo-Saxons is just one example of England as a synthetic nation: one constituted by waves of migration that succeeded in generating, to a scale unparalleled in other European countries, a common law, a common language and a sense of a commonwealth—combining a strong sense of legal liberty with forms of democratic practice that have proved durable.
The one exception to this is the Norman invasion. Whether bottom up or head down, 1066 was a straight conquest by a foreign elite and within two years of the Battle of Hastings “nearly half of the nation’s wealth was held by eleven men.” Land was seized by threat or violence and, even where locals were not evicted, the freehold belonged to the conquerors who conducted the law in a foreign language and annulled freehold inheritance. The one exception to this was the City of London, which remained unconquered and maintained its native-language courts of common law, freehold property and democratic hustings. This had big consequences for the development of a distinctively English form of resistance to royal absolutism. The Lord Mayor of London may have killed Wat Tyler in the peasants’ revolt, but he also held the sword to King John’s throat at the signing of Magna Carta. Capitalism, liberty and democratic federalism were the English form of resisting monarchical absolutism.
But outside London, in Kibworth as elsewhere, the imposition of feudal law was remorseless. Wood writes: “For centuries the English handed down a myth of the ‘Norman Yoke’: a folk tradition that 1066 was a brutal and disruptive break in the continuity of English society… to an extent it is not a myth.” It certainly is not. And the extent to which this pattern played itself out over the next seven centuries—with the exertion of freehold title over customary practice, and in the relentlessness of enclosures—is the dominant story in the rest of the book. In particular, the way that enclosures led to dispossession, leading in turn to massive urban overcrowding (especially in London), is the English story of an urban capitalism that went global, with consequences that are still reshaping our history as new waves of immigrants arrive.
It was the scale and velocity of immigration that haunted the 2010 general election and posed the “English question” in acute form for Labour. None of the other countries of the British union experienced immigration in the way that England has, transforming urban areas and popular culture. Yet there was no political body that could speak for England, that could express and embody the political life of the nation. The dispossession of enclosures and the Norman conquest, which Labour once addressed poetically and passionately through a story of democracy and justice, was edited out in favour of an ahistorical “fairness.” When Gordon Brown gave his most memorable speech of the election campaign on 3rd May at Methodist Central Hall he did not speak of the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Levellers, or of the London dock strike and the foundation of the health service, but of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama, of civil rights and liberation. It was as if the struggles of people thousands of miles away were of more relevance than those of the country he wished to lead.
Wood also tells another English story of resistance and dissent. It is that of elected agricultural representatives—the hayward and the woodward, who supervised work in the fields and forest; the reeves and the constables, who acted as village mayor and police—and indicates a commitment to ancient liberties played out over land rights and freedom of religion. It is the story of a stubborn, brave and disputatious people who were simultaneously modern and traditional, open and closed. It is the story of a radical tradition, rooted in history, that Labour will need to rediscover if it is to be able to speak to and for the nation once more. We could even move towards a federal union in which Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish representatives no longer sit in parliament but in a national assembly in Manchester, while London once more speaks for the commonwealth of England.
The English question is silent in our politics, and remains so. It will take a very different book to begin to give it voice.
The Story of Englandby Michael Wood (Viking, £20)
There is a political void where England should be. While Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland enjoy devolved government, the English do not govern themselves. Parliament, the traditional assembly of the English people, represents the union and not the nation. England, as a political nation, has no body and it cannot speak.
England poses difficult political questions for progressives. Football and the monarchy are the popular focus of English nationalism, and the expression of support for both has never been a comfortable one for the left. England, has become, in some ways, a foreign country. And yet Labour’s future depends on it being able to reconnect to England, to its traditions and language. As Michael Wood, the author of The Story of England, writes: “For a small country on the far western shore of the Eurasian landmass, its influence on the world of literature, language, politics, law and ideas of freedom has been out of all proportion to its size. Why that should have been is an interesting question in itself.”
It is not a question the book tries to answer. There is no thesis defended or method adopted beyond writing an account of the history of one village, Kibworth, in Leicestershire, from what he calls, with Anglo-Saxon brevity, “the bottom up.” Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Wood describes the impact of huge events and processes on the lives of ordinary English families in the centre of the country. The Anglo-Saxon and Viking invasions, the Norman conquest, the Black Death, the Reformation and enclosures exerted transformative force on the lives of the people of Kibworth. The village is constituted by people who live from the land, and the ownership of the land is what is at stake in each phase of its history.
There are moments when Wood grasps the dynamics of this: “An important part of the narrative of English history is the story of how the rulers asserted and enforced their claim to the labour and surplus of the working people, and how the people fought to establish their own freedoms under the law.” Here, the origins of capitalism, the rule of law and the sustained force of the “ancient constitution” in the minds of the people—all distinctive of England—are brought to bear; and the account of the interaction between peasant and landlord, dissenter and conformist, becomes vivid.
Wood’s comment about labour is part of an account of the Anglo-Saxon invasion and settlement of the Midlands. That conquest and the subsequent integration of the Anglo-Saxons is just one example of England as a synthetic nation: one constituted by waves of migration that succeeded in generating, to a scale unparalleled in other European countries, a common law, a common language and a sense of a commonwealth—combining a strong sense of legal liberty with forms of democratic practice that have proved durable.
The one exception to this is the Norman invasion. Whether bottom up or head down, 1066 was a straight conquest by a foreign elite and within two years of the Battle of Hastings “nearly half of the nation’s wealth was held by eleven men.” Land was seized by threat or violence and, even where locals were not evicted, the freehold belonged to the conquerors who conducted the law in a foreign language and annulled freehold inheritance. The one exception to this was the City of London, which remained unconquered and maintained its native-language courts of common law, freehold property and democratic hustings. This had big consequences for the development of a distinctively English form of resistance to royal absolutism. The Lord Mayor of London may have killed Wat Tyler in the peasants’ revolt, but he also held the sword to King John’s throat at the signing of Magna Carta. Capitalism, liberty and democratic federalism were the English form of resisting monarchical absolutism.
But outside London, in Kibworth as elsewhere, the imposition of feudal law was remorseless. Wood writes: “For centuries the English handed down a myth of the ‘Norman Yoke’: a folk tradition that 1066 was a brutal and disruptive break in the continuity of English society… to an extent it is not a myth.” It certainly is not. And the extent to which this pattern played itself out over the next seven centuries—with the exertion of freehold title over customary practice, and in the relentlessness of enclosures—is the dominant story in the rest of the book. In particular, the way that enclosures led to dispossession, leading in turn to massive urban overcrowding (especially in London), is the English story of an urban capitalism that went global, with consequences that are still reshaping our history as new waves of immigrants arrive.
It was the scale and velocity of immigration that haunted the 2010 general election and posed the “English question” in acute form for Labour. None of the other countries of the British union experienced immigration in the way that England has, transforming urban areas and popular culture. Yet there was no political body that could speak for England, that could express and embody the political life of the nation. The dispossession of enclosures and the Norman conquest, which Labour once addressed poetically and passionately through a story of democracy and justice, was edited out in favour of an ahistorical “fairness.” When Gordon Brown gave his most memorable speech of the election campaign on 3rd May at Methodist Central Hall he did not speak of the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Levellers, or of the London dock strike and the foundation of the health service, but of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama, of civil rights and liberation. It was as if the struggles of people thousands of miles away were of more relevance than those of the country he wished to lead.
Wood also tells another English story of resistance and dissent. It is that of elected agricultural representatives—the hayward and the woodward, who supervised work in the fields and forest; the reeves and the constables, who acted as village mayor and police—and indicates a commitment to ancient liberties played out over land rights and freedom of religion. It is the story of a stubborn, brave and disputatious people who were simultaneously modern and traditional, open and closed. It is the story of a radical tradition, rooted in history, that Labour will need to rediscover if it is to be able to speak to and for the nation once more. We could even move towards a federal union in which Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish representatives no longer sit in parliament but in a national assembly in Manchester, while London once more speaks for the commonwealth of England.
The English question is silent in our politics, and remains so. It will take a very different book to begin to give it voice.
