The Ground On Which We Stand

Where there is sorrow, there is often also gold if we can see it. After a summer punctuated by occasional feuds - leant a sense of grandeur by being described as riots - perpetuated by a predictably moronic few - the earth has opened up and where there was tension now we have treasure and joy. The recent trove in Staffordshire resonates on the highest levels with memories of life before the Normans, of what it means to be English, of a time when this Island was being redefined by conflict and influx and treaties and even periods of peace, all fuelled or abetted by artistry, the power of gifts, of loyalty, of hammering out some sort of steady future.

Traditionally, so much of what is wrong with our country, of what is wrong with our establishment has been layed quite firmly at the door of the Normans, their invasion helps define the things we think we lost. They are the fascist boot boys of our past; crop haired, warlike, thugs by any common definition that systematically came and put us down, kept us all under the thumb with their castles and doomsdays and tithes. They cut short a flowering of our newborn native English culture, swept it away and replaced it with a long lived imprint of oppression. They live on in the vestiges of original blue blood, in corpulent second chambers, in an old mentality that kicked off with the subjugation of our Celtic neighbours and wound up to a global empire, a mentality that sits still among the upper echelons of many of our institutions.

And, of course much of this is true – the brutality of their invasion left a scar that has never left folk memory. But there was also a degree of continuity; most of Norman systems of government rested on older foundations, even if they did decimate the English ruling class, even if the conquest was a savage travesty. But equally, the story of an Anglo Saxon golden age so beloved of radicals is, to some extent, the stuff of pure mythology. We still know relatively little of the centuries that helped found the English state. But Anglo Saxon rulers could be autocratic, even ruthless. And while much of the system of modern government has its origins in those times, it took many centuries of trials and revisions to make them democratic by any measure we would recognise. But the myths are still persistent; moot mounds in the Shires where almost everybody had a say - so long as you weren’t a woman, or a slave – more communal agriculture, outright land ownership for the peasantry, a place where dynasties and rulers grew up almost out of the ground, formed in the same morass that brought into being both the people and the language themselves. Pleasant myths in any case and not without foundation.

And as the more recent confrontations in Manchester only go to show, the issue of Englishness, of the English people, could not be more pertinent. Any brief look at websites now dealing with the Anglo Saxons will take you to those invoking the spirit of Old England, some of them interested in history, some in politics, some in race, sometimes all three. The appeal to some sense of roots is understandable, not least when the Irish, Cornish, Welsh and Scottish have such strong cultures to fall back on as the political embodiment of the United Kingdom stands ready to dissolve, when for centuries English identity has been so bound up with that of Britain. In any case, there is a scramble now for identity and meaning here and this has been exploited by those who’d preach a line of racial purity, of the English as some kind of modern underdog in a world they can no longer understand.

It hardly needs saying that a look again at the centuries of immigration and intermittent struggle of the so called Dark Ages reminds us that we are, most of us, a people of mongrels and incomers, and that we were eventually united for all our diversity. But many far right pundits now would emphasise that while this country was formed of originally different peoples, they were at least all of Northern European stock, they were in any case bounded by cultures that had more in common than that which would set them apart. And this is wheeled out as some argument against the multiculturalism of today, as if we can draw such basic parallels with an age where the confines of the known world did little more than stretch beyond the Mediterranean. Even little more than a century ago, the common experience for many in this country was that the next valley and its villages was almost another land so that, even with a degree of shared European culture, the experience of integration in the centuries after Roman rule could not have been in any way less than the challenges we face today.

Whether we like it or not, the world has been changed almost beyond recognition by the last century and the slower grind of burgeoning modernity beyond it that helped to pave the way. Communication, travel of people and culture, of ideas, to say nothing of the legacy of Empire; it is nothing less than inevitable that the places we inhabit now reflect this. Yes, there is a growing recognition that population pressure in the UK is an issue we cannot afford to ignore. But we should never submit and give credence to anyone who would seek division along any kind of ethnic line. Times change and things move on; our culture should reflect that, not harken back simplistically to an era we really know so little about.

My mother is Irish and my father from the North and our family joined the bands of incomers upon our southern coast, growing up in the lee of tracks and hillforts formed by a people that may have gone to Cornwall or to Wales or who settled in among what became an Anglo Saxon culture. Dig a little and there are relatively few today in most parts of the country whose family have been there more than a few generations. Tensions often only arise among the working class - demographically less mobile and harder hit by the financial malaise, who feel most overlooked by tides of modern movement. New horizons come from either a degree of affluence or a willingness to run the risk of vagrancy; to fly or trudge or take some kind of chance, to follow work or markets or live as simply as a bird.

But for a great number of us, movement; either ours or our forebears, is the predominant reality. We are all part of something new while keeping hold of what is meaningful, “neither here nor there and therefore home” and truly home is what we choose to make it. Cultures are not mutually exclusive, they can inform and enrich one another; the Pakistani in Luton might remind us that we once all came from tribal cultures, the Indian family in Birmingham speaks of a common thread of culture if you go back far enough, of Indo-European mother tongues and migrations almost lost to history. Once, we were all farmers in our villages, told stories, prized our silver plate and heirloomed weaponry, held our myths as sacred. Beyond any extremes of creed we all share a common heritage; that we are of the earth and any new arrival here can tell us in a language beyond words of the richness of our roots.

Whether we feel those roots are predominately in the soil beneath us, or somewhere over the water or far beyond the sea, is perhaps besides the point. With time we all belong to the land on which we stand, even with the memory of other origins. But the world for now is in a state of flux, we are today connected in a way never seen before, both from the internet and global media and by what has become clearly connected fate; climate change knows no political or geographic boundary and war and bombs affect us all. We are all here together, we live together, we rise or fall together irrespective of ancestry or creeds. And perhaps a greater grasp of how much our history can mean can help us find some better understanding of those regions of the world where cultural continuity is still so highly prized. Perhaps it could lead us to some better sense of shared predicament and the will to find our way beyond it.