The history of England is therefore one of continual movement and of constant variation; the historian, propelled onward by these forces, has scarcely time or inclination to glimpse the patterns of this ceaseless activity. Thomas Babington Macaulay once wrote, when surveying the passage of English history, that in the course of seven centuries a ‘wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most civilized people that ever the world saw’; at the beginning of the twenty-first century it would perhaps be difficult to pay the same compliment. We cannot find what he called ‘progress’ in the morals or in the culture of the English nation.
Yet we find something else of much greater interest and importance. From the beginning we find evidence of a deep continuity that is the legacy of an unimaginably distant past; there seems always to have been an hierarchical society with a division of labour and of responsibility. Yet there is a different kind of continuity, largely unseen and impalpable. The nation itself represents the nexus of custom with custom, the shifting patterns of habitual activity. This may not be a particularly exciting philosophy of history but it is important to avoid the myth of some fated or providential movement forward. Below the surface of events lies a deep, and almost geological, calm.
Many examples are to be found in this volume. The polity of England, for example, seems always to have been highly centralized; the political system was integrated; the legal and administrative systems were uniform. We have seen that, from at least the time of the building of Stonehenge, England has been a heavily organized and administered country. Unlike the provinces and sub-kingdoms of France or of Spain, or the fissiparous states and duchies of northern Europe, or the city-states of Italy, England was all of a piece.
Other forms of continuity are also evident. Modern roads follow the line of old paths and trackways. The boundaries of many contemporary parishes follow previous patterns of settlement, along which ancient burials are still to be found. Our distant ancestors are still around us. There is a history of sacred space almost as old as the history of the country itself. Churches and monastic communities were placed close beside the sites of megalithic monuments, as well as sacred springs and early Bronze Age ritual spaces. I have already noticed that the churchyard of the parish church of Rudston, in East Yorkshire, harbours the tallest Neolithic standing stone in England. The pilgrim routes of medieval Kent trace the same pattern as the prehistoric tracks to holy wells and shrines. We still live deep in the past.
Continuity, rather than change, is the measure of the country. It has been suggested that the cities and towns of England decayed at the end of the Roman occupation. But this is pure speculation. They may simply have changed their function while preserving their role as the centres of administration. The urban population remained, thus continuing a tradition of town living that can be glimpsed within a Neolithic settlement in Cornwall; in 3000 BC the enclosure, surrounded by a strong stone wall, accommodated 200 people. Can this be understood as an early English town? A village or small town at Thatcham, in Berkshire, has been in place for 10,000 years.
In the countryside, there is even greater evidence for continuity. The Anglo-Saxon ‘invasion’, for example, was once deemed to mark a decisive break with the past. Yet in fact there is no discernible change in agricultural practice. In historical terms there are no ‘breaks’. We have seen that the same field systems were laid out by the Germanic settlers; the new arrivals preserved the old boundaries and in Durham, for example, Germanic structures were set within a pattern of small fields and drystone walls created in the prehistoric past. More surprisingly, perhaps, the Germanic settlers formed groups which honoured the boundaries of the old tribal kingdoms. They respected the lie of the land. The Jutes of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight took over the prehistoric lands of the Belgae; the East Saxons held the ancient territory of the Trinovantes, and the South Saxons established themselves within the prehistoric borders of the Regnenses. They even retained the same capitals. The sacred sites of the Saxons, at a slightly later date, follow the alignment of Neolithic monuments. All fell into the embrace of the past. The evidence suggests, therefore, that the roots of the country go very deep. Even now they have not been severed.
