Top Quotes: “The Shortest History of England: Empire and Division from the Anglo-Saxons to Brexit — A Retelling for Our Times” — James Hawes
Ancient History
“In what is today known as Scotland, resistance was so tough that the Romans fell back and built Hadrian’s Wall, which still entrances walkers. What we now call Wales and the north of England were only ever ruled and taxed at spearpoint. Roman civilization in Britannia was effectively limited to what is today southern England. The only other truly Romanized areas were along the great roads that led to the northern bastion of York and connected the vital garrisons at Caerleon and Chester (the line of this road is still basically the western border of England). Thus the Romans, having found southeastern Britannia already different, made it far more so.”
“The Roman legions finally left Britain in 407, to fight in endless civil wars. The southern Britons now found themselves taxed yet undefended, so they felt “the necessity of revolting from the empire, and living no longer under the Roman laws”. Our only real source for what happened next is The Ruin of Britain (c. 540) by the Romano-British monk Gildas. He records, in Latin, his people regretting their rash break with the Empire and making a famous last plea for Roman help, known as the Groans of the Britons, in around 450:
The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians, between these two means of death we are either killed or drowned.
But these barbarians weren’t Saxons. Gildas doesn’t mention Germanic tribes at all in these years. The deadly enemies of civilization in Britain were “two foreign nations, the Scots from the Northwest [i.e., the Irish], and the Picts from the north,” who came in coracles (wooden-framed, leather-skinned boats, as found on the Celtic fringes of the British Isles). And since Rome could no longer help, the Romano-British turned to another European people.
AD 443 This year sent the Britons to Rome & bade them assistance against the Picts, but they gave them none, for that they fought with Attila, King of the Huns, & then sent they to the English & English-kin nobles [author’s emphasis]. -Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
The English didn’t invade. They were invited from Europe to save Romano-British civilization from home-grown barbarians. In return they were offered land in the richest part of the island.”
“Everywhere else in Europe, the Germanic invaders came, they saw, they conquered and then they assimilated. In England, and only in England, they entirely replaced the culture they found. This is England’s founding uniqueness. It explains why the modern English find their immediate neighbor-language, Welsh, utterly strange, yet can still almost understand German swearing.”
“So why did the Germanic migrants only stay Germanic in England? Partly, it was because Britannia had already declined and fallen into a land run by local warlords whom Gildas calls tyrants. All the incoming English found were ruins — and seeing nothing worth adopting, they stuck to their own culture. They could do so because of the other vital difference: the sea.
The Channel didn’t protect Britannia: It made total conquest possible. Elsewhere in Europe, the Germanic conquerors were all-male war bands. An entire tribe — old people, nursing mothers, small children and all — couldn’t survive long overland journeys through hostile territory. The English, though, could ship whole clans across to the Saxon Shore in a day or two, landing at well-built, long-familiar Roman ports.”
“Everywhere else, the single male Germanic warriors intermarried with local women, so the Latinate languages and Christianity survived.”
“The English conquest was so complete that nothing remains of the Romano-British language in modern England except dreamlike fragments like the yan-tan-tethera way of counting sheep in the north of England (one-two-three in Celtic) or hickory-dickory-dock (eight-nine-ten).”
“Yet modern science shows that most of modern English people’s DNA comes from the Romano-British.
The majority of eastern, central and southern England is made up of a single, relatively homogeneous, genetic group [i.e., the Romano-Britons] with a significant DNA contribution from Anglo-Saxon migrations (10–40% of total ancestry). This settles a historical controversy in showing that the Anglo-Saxons intermarried with, rather than replaced, the existing populations.”
“These laws were written in English. This was unique: All the continental Germanic nations wrote down their laws in the prestige-language, Latin. In England, almost nobody spoke Latin anymore, so the everyday language was, from the dawn of literacy, given the awesome privilege of being written down. Until the Norman Conquest, the English, alone in Western Europe, were ruled in their own tongue.”
“In truth Edgar didn’t even rule all of England. His laws explicitly apply only to the English. “Among the Danes,” things were to be done “according to as good laws as they can best decide on.” A great chunk of England — the Dane-law — was still run by people with their own language, their own laws, and their own loyalties. This was to prove fatal: Within a generation of Edgar’s death in 975, England would be a colony of Denmark.”
“Now that there was no danger from the English, there was no reason for William to delay rewarding his own impatient men. For the next decade and more, the English were robbed, under the guise of legal process, in courts run by Normans where the natives were only allowed to answer specific questions and had to use translators. The Domesday Book (1087)-named by the English themselves, because (it was said) you had no more chance of disputing it than you would have on Judgment Day itself — set it all down. By William’s death, only about 5 percent of England remained in English hands.
A small armed group speaking a language incomprehensible to the majority of the population controlled virtually all the landed wealth.”
“The lack of resistance by the English, who outnumbered the Normans by about a hundred to one, bewildered the invaders. Two early Anglo-Norman historians, both with English mothers, shook their heads in disbelief. William of Malmesbury (c. 1095–1143) wrote of “miserable provincials . . . so feeble that they failed after the first battle to seriously rise up and make an attempt for their freedom.” Ordericus Vitalis (1075-c. 1142) depicts the English as interested only in feasting and drinking, caring nothing for freedom. Luckily for English pride, however, there are good reasons.
- The North-South divide: No English leader except, briefly, Athelstan, had ever been able truly to mobilize the whole country.
- Lack of natural redoubts: Most of Southern England was near-perfect country for the invincible new Norman cavalry.
- No functioning native elite: The English elite had been corrupted by Aethelred, Danified by Cut, decimated at Hastings, and had finally fled the country in c. 1076.
- The Medieval Warm Period: By 1100 the skeletons of ordinary Englishmen were distinctly taller than in 1000.
- No peasantry rebels if their bellies and barns are full.
- The Church: It alone had given Anglo-Saxon England any real unity. Now, it was fully on the side of the Normans.
- Civilization: The English had lived through decades of blood-drenched Anglo-Danish politics. Even after the Conquest, Earl Waltheof was still having rival Englishmen murdered as they sat down to dinner. The Chronicle itself, though listing William’s acts of brutality and greed, reminded English readers that “betwixt other things is not to be forgotten that good peace which he maked in this land.” Any king who maintained law and order was better than what had gone before.
The Normans hammered England into a genuine cultural unit for the first time.”
The 1000s and Beyond
“Richard, Henry’s eldest living son, rebelled in arms and harried his father across France until Henry named him, rather than John, as his heir. In 1189, the exhausted king who had finally Frenchified England died in his real homeland, at Chinon.
Richard I wrote poems in both French and Norman French, and could read Latin, but there is no evidence that he could understand English, let alone speak it. He spent only seven months of his ten-year reign in England, which he treated as a cash cow for his crusading, selling off royal demesnes to fill his coffers and joking that he’d put London itself on the market if there were a buyer.”
“Richard was shipwrecked upon returning home from the Crusades and ended up a prisoner of the Holy Roman emperor. The emperor demanded 100,000 marks to let him go. Richard’s brother, John, and King Philip of France offered 80,000 to keep him in jail, but royal officials in England raised the full sum and he was released. On February 4, 1194, Philip sent a warning message to John: “Look to yourself; the devil is loose.”
Richard, however, forgave John, and spent the last five years of his life taxing the English even more heavily. At his death in 1199, John, who as the fourth son could never realistically have expected to become king, crossed the Channel with a small army to claim the throne of a half-bankrupt England, even though his teenage nephew, Arthur, duke of Brittany, was actually next in line.
John’s borderline usurpation, and the empty coffers Richard had left him, put him in a weak position. The king of France used Arthur to blackmail him into conceding territory. Eventually open war broke out, and though John managed to seize Arthur (the youth mysteriously vanished shortly afterward), by 1204 he lost all his French possessions. This marks the birth of a purely Engleis aristocracy in England — albeit one that still spoke French.
For the next ten years, John plotted — and taxed the English — to regain his lost French realms. In 1214 he mounted a final bid in alliance with Otto IV, the Holy Roman Emperor. Although he was the bankroller, John wasn’t present when the forces met at the epochal Battle of Bouvines. The French cavalry won the day, ushering in modern France as well as one of the great events in English history.”
“With John’s European plan in ruins, the barons, backed by the muscularly independent English Church, brought him to bay at Runnymede in June 1215 and forced him to sign what became known as Magna Carta.
Throughout the document it is implied that here is a law which is above the King and which even he must not break.
Many of Magna Carta’s clauses address now-obscure financial disputes between the king and the nobility. The most enduring are:
1: The English Church is guaranteed “independence of appointments from the Crown.” This opening clause shows the central role the Church played in taming the monarchy.
14: Taxes can only be raised after a “general summons” of major landowners. Here is the germ of Parliament.
20: Fines to be proportionate and only given with “the oath of trustworthy men of the locality.” Radical, since it implies that non-noble men can be involved in justice-giving.
39–40: The ones people today think of when they talk about Magna Carta: “No freeman is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any other way ruined, nor will we go against him or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”
60: “All in the kingdom, and not only the barons confronting John, should observe the provisions of the charter in their dealings with those beneath them.” This implies something like an idea of universal justice for Englishmen.
Suffix A was radical indeed: the barons and the ‘commune of the whole land’ had the right to ‘distrain and afflict the king himself if he broke the Charter.”
“The Charter was set down in Latin and immediately translated into the daily language of the English barons: Icy la chartre le Rey Johan done a Renemede. There was no written English version until 1534. Up till then, if you (or your lawyers) couldn’t read French or Latin, Magna Carta was none of your business.”
“The royal power seemed so completely restored that Edward I tried one last time to impose pure feudalism. The barons stayed loyal, but refused to allow him to roll back Magna Carta: He was forced to agree that anyone who’d held land at the accession of Richard I in 1189 was legally secure, even from the king (this is the origin of the phrase “since time immemorial”). From now on, an Englishman’s castle really was his castle, not just on loan from the king.
Thwarted at home, Edward turned his attention to foreign conquest. In 1278, he traveled to Glastonbury to witness the opening of Arthur’s alleged tomb, then he put the myth of the Arthurian Empire of Britain into practice. In Wales he pursued a vast, methodical and ruthless campaign in 1282–83. Victory was set in stone, as a Savoyan military architect, James of St. George, created the greatest set of castles on earth, at colossal expense. Edward partly defrayed the cost by expelling all the Jews of England in 1290 and declaring that debts owed to them were now owed to him.”
“The vast expense of fighting the Welsh and the Scots was the chance for the English elite’s very own device — Parliament — to come of age. If England had been a normal country with its own ruling class, Edward might have tried to tame the aristocracy by giving the peasants (who could be taxed more easily) rights over their own property. That is exactly what happened in France during this era. But Edward, as a French-speaking king, could hardly side with English-speaking peasants against his own French-speaking nobility. So he admitted that he needed to negotiate — parley — with them. The 1295 Model Parliament gave things the basic shape we still know today.
In France, the manor lost; the peasant won. In England, the manor won; the peasant lost.
For all the huge expenditure, Edward never truly quelled Wales. And in 1307, as he lay on his deathbed at his field HQ in Cumbria, he received news that his forces in Scotland had been defeated by Robert Bruce. His wars hardened all three nationalisms in Britain, leaving “a legacy of division that has lasted from his day to our own”. They also enshrined Parliament as co-ruler of England.”
“Decades of war against the French made it strange for the English nobility to speak French in front of their own men, and it is in these years that they — though not the king and his court — finally began to use English as their daily language.”
“The Great Death (as it was called at the time) killed 30–45 percent of all the people in England in 1349–50. It came back in 1361–64, 1368–69, and 1371–75. By the end of the fourth epidemic, the population had halved, and it did not fully recover for two hundred years.
“In 1300 a knight might choose to be represented on his tombstone as a young knight in all his vigor; by 1400 graphic depictions of skeletons and decay as a warning of mortality were in vogue.” — Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror
But plague doesn’t hurt property. The survivors among the wealthy got even wealthier through unexpected inheritances.”
“Since 1066, the French-speaking elite had given a gloss of cultural unity to a country where ordinary men from the South and the North could barely understand one another.”
“At Rennes Cathedral, on Christmas Day 1483, Henry Tudor, last hope of the Lancastrians, was publicly engaged to Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, sister of the murdered princes. Two years later, in 1485, the second-last successful invasion of England set out from Harfleur on August 1, landing at Milford Haven in Wales.
Henry was part Welsh, which meant he had two out of the three power blocs of the Tripartite Indenture of 1405 in his pocket: It was now the South and the Welsh against the North. When the forces met at Bosworth, Richard saw his allies wavering. He risked all on a direct personal charge at Henry, who took cover amidst his French mercenaries until Richard’s key commander, Sir William Stanley, made the vital decision to turn his coat. The real last battle of the Wars of the Roses — probably bigger than Bosworth itself — took place on the Trent, at Stoke Field, on June 16, 1487. Henry’s southern English and Welsh forces routed the Yorkist northerners, Irishmen, and German mercenaries.
The war for England was over. But it was no longer just England. For a thousand years, the Welsh had resisted. Now, they stopped — not because they had been beaten, but because they saw the new king as one of their own. England had only just emerged again as a true nation, yet now it was ruled by a king whose great-grandfather had fought for his own nation against the English.
Henry VII wasn’t just Welsh: He was as self-consciously European as any medieval king. He had spent the past fourteen years in France, and modeled himself on modern French royal taste. That meant Renaissance Humanism, whose signature was a new, rational statecraft (as described by Niccolò Machiavelli) in which kings were to be served and guided by an elite who had studied the classics.
For the next four hundred years, the entire English upper class was expected to have good French, decent Latin, and a smattering of ancient Greek. Anyone who could speak only English was proletarian, hoi polloi, not comme il faut — and if you didn’t understand those insults, well, it just went to show. Oxford and Cambridge demanded both ancient Greek and Latin from all applicants until 1919, with Latin still required until 1960.”
The 16th-18th Centuries
“In 1593, it became a capital offense not to attend the Church of England. At important moments, centrally printed special sermons were sent by courier to every parish in the land. The Church was the first English national mass medium, and controlling it became central to politics for the following century.”
“Britain had vast amounts of easily gettable coal, so it was the only major country already using it widely in homes and businesses. As the Royal Navy’s oak-built ships and the ironmasters’ charcoal burners devoured England’s forests, entrepreneurs and industrialists finally cracked two great problems: how to get that heavy coal to markets far from mines, and how to use it to make workable iron.
England’s unique fusion of businessmen and aristocrats was vital. In 1761, a visionary entrepreneur privately invested tens of millions in today’s money to build the first great canal. This go-ahead investor was the Duke of Bridgwater, whose family had been landowners in the Northwest for centuries, and the canal was built to take coal from under his land to market in Manchester.
It was under his land: This was what mattered. Throughout history, growth had been limited because the land had to provide both food and fuel: Use too much for fuel, and people starved; use too much for food, and there wasn’t enough fuel. This is known as the Malthusian Trap, and eighteenth-century England broke it. With mighty fossil energy being extracted from beneath the fields, agriculture could still thrive on the surface.
The brakes were off and the modern world was born, for good or ill. A medieval English peasant spent perhaps two hundred days per year actually working. By the late eighteenth century, dispossessed ex-peasants were working twelve-hour shifts three hundred days a year, in places like Arkwright’s cotton mills.”
“The New England colonies were at least 70 percent English; the royal British Army facing them was over 70 percent non-English.”
“To control rebellious Ireland, a brand-new state was founded: In 1801, Great Britain became the United Kingdom. The new UK had nothing to do with domination by “the English” as a people or a nation. On the contrary, the ordinary English were more than ever just another people within the empire of their elite: At least a quarter of the inhabitants (the large majority of Irishmen, most Welshmen, and a large minority of Scotsmen) couldn’t speak even basic English. The new state was thoroughly an elite construct.”
Modern History
“Losing India was one thing, but losing the allegiance of the “White Dominions” was unthinkable. So London tried to keep their hearts and minds (and bank accounts) British with the Citizenship Act (1948): Every “citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies” was now a “British subject.” The result was unexpected. Serving the Empire in arms had given non-white colonial folk ideas, and the war had left a massive oversupply of transport shipping, making long-distance travel far cheaper. Five weeks be fore the act was passed, the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, filled with West Indians who had set off for the motherland on their own initiative.”
“Over the next twenty years, half a million more West Indians followed, and as many people again from the former Raj, multicultural England, because the elite refused to let go of Empire.”
“The anti-EU movement wasn’t born out of pent-up public anger, but from the ideology of the rebel Tory elite; not as a mass movement, but as the vehicle of a small number of obsessive, wealthy individuals. Ordinary voters were baffled.”
“Beneath the surface, though, the effects of Blair’s second great mistake were starting to unite the English. In 2004, he had given the new EU accession states from the former Warsaw Pact immediate access to the UK jobs market, assuming that other EU leaders would follow his moral example. They didn’t. In 2002, twelve times as many Poles had gone to Germany, looking for work, as to Britain; by 2006, Britain was easily their most popular destination.”
“When the global financial crisis of 2008 stopped things in their tracks, nobody had a convincing tale about why the Poles should still be here, competing for now-scarce work.”
“In 2013, an extraordinary study, published by the London School of Economics, showed just how alive that history was. Researchers put the names of students in the ancient and modern records of Oxford and Cambridge through algorithms that tracked status persistence. It turned out that nothing — not the Black Death, not the Reformation, not the Industrial Revolution, not two world wars — had seriously disrupted the elite since records began, in the late 1100s. The Daily Mail boiled it down:
1,000 years after William the Conqueror invaded, you still need a Norman name like Darcy or Percy to get ahead.”
