In this volume there have been endless variations upon the same principal theme or themes – the uneasy balance between the sovereign and the more powerful nobles, the desire for war pitted against the overwhelming costs of conflict, the battle for mastery between Church and sovereign, the precarious unity of monarch and parliament, are all part of this narrative. There are also enduring fault lines that create discord and crisis. We may mention here the barren attempts to regulate social life, the slow decay of the feudal order, the antipathy to central government in the shires, the rivalry of noble families in local affairs, the blundering efforts to regulate foreign and domestic trade. Identical political and constitutional problems recur again and again; it could even be said that change occurs only when the same factors combine in different ways.
Another salient fact arises from the history of England. All the monarchs from the time of the Norman invasion were, on the male side, of foreign origin. Only the last of them in this volume, Henry VII, was of island ancestry with progenitors from an ancient Welsh noble family. This does not consort well with the notion of English independence, but it fits more closely with the facts of the matter. The Normans were succeeded by the Angevins, who were in turn supplanted by the Welsh; the Welsh were followed by the Scots, who were removed by the Hanoverians. The English were a colonized people. I have written elsewhere about the heterogeneity of English culture, in Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, but it is perhaps worth recalling that the great literary enterprises of the country derive largely from European originals.
A further point may be made. I had thought of including the histories of Wales, Scotland and Ireland within this volume but there was too great a risk of their seeming to become merely extensions of England in the process. Wales joined in a political and legal union with England in 1536, and Scotland entered a political union in 1707; but their cultures and their identities, like those of Ireland, are too dissimilar to warrant inclusion in this study. This may in turn lead to what has been called an ‘anglo-centric’ version of the past but, in a history of England, such a bias is hard to avoid. Only a history of the world could cope with the difficulty.
No philosopher, ancient or modern, has yet been able to divine the springs of human conduct or human character; so, on a more general scale, we can have little trust in historians who confidently describe the causes or consequences of such events as the Hundred Years War or the sealing of Magna Carta. In their vain attempt to follow the ignis fatuus or will-o’-the-wisp of certainty, their efforts will be at best uncertain and at worst contradictory. The wisest historians admit that their speculations may be misplaced and their interpretations incorrect.
History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity. We live again in the twelfth or in the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonances of our own time; we may recognize that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost; we may also conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is ever fresh and ever renewed. That is why some of the greatest writers have preferred to see English history as dramatic or epic poetry, which is just as capable of expressing the power and movement of history as any prose narrative; it is a form of singing around a fire. A drama, or a poem, is of course subject to manifold interpretations according to the judgment and imagination of the reader. Yet in that sense it resembles the events related within this volume. We might quote the words of Milton in Paradise Lost:
So shall the world go on
To good malignant, to bad men benign,
Under her own weight groaning …
Now we look ahead to the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, encompassing the great reformation of religion in the sixteenth century. We may in the process be able to glimpse, and perhaps restore, the poetry of history.
THE END OF THE FIRST VOLUME
Further reading
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of those books I found most useful in the composition of this volume.
1: HYMNS OF STONE
Bradley, Richard: The Passage of Arms (Cambridge, 1990).
—— An Archaeology of Natural Places (London, 2000).
Collis, John: The Celts (Stroud, 2003).
Cunliffe, Barry: Iron Age Communities in Britain (London, 1991).
—— Facing the Ocean (Oxford, 2001).
Darvill, Timothy: Prehistoric Britain (London, 1987).
Harper, M. J.: The History of Britain Revealed (London, 2002).
Hawkes, Christopher and Jacquetta: Prehistoric Britain (London, 1943).
Hills, Catherine: Origins of the English (London, 2003).
James, Simon: The Atlantic Celts (London, 1999).
