How the Sceptred Isle Began

The History of England: Volume 1, Foundation
by Peter Ackroyd
Macmillan, 2011, 486 pages, $34.99

Beneath the surface of events lies a deep, and almost geological, calm, Peter Ackroyd says in the first volume of a planned history of England:

From the beginning we find evidence of a deep continuity that is the legacy of an almost 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. 

Ackroyd’s technique of compressing several millennia into a popular volume brings the great men, women and events down to size, three or four pages at most for a king, a battle or other famous event. All those medieval Richards, Henrys and Edwards, shorn of Shakespeare’s romance and knightly spin, start to look like musty Australian state politicians between the wars (when there was a bit more principle in federal politics). Even the nicer ones tyrannised in order to survive. The whole Norman era, from William’s victory in 1066 until Ackroyd’s period ends with the advent of the Tudors in 1485, actually starts to look a bit ugly, a few thousand French-speaking (but genetically partly Viking) conquistadors taking over a functioning, if battling and shaky, Saxon society and imposing themselves as a foreign overlay of rent-taking upper aristocracy until four centuries later the old society assimilated them.

The Normans ruthlessly and bloodily conquered all of England within a few years of 1066, but only later, partially and half-heartedly, penetrated Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

It is of course a great historical debate—Were the Normans a good or bad thing?—and it is not clear whether Ackroyd is taking sides or just, unsentimentally and modernly, telling it like it is. Even the Norman church, triumphant source of the parish churches and cathedrals that are still a wonder of the world, gets to look a bit suspect, perhaps favouring conspicuous piety and jobs for the boys ahead of the Sermon on the Mount.

I found particularly exasperating, from a contemporary vantage point, all those wars with France, the Normans and their Angevin and Plantagenet successors trying, at immense cost in blood and treasure, to cling to their extensive possessions in western France against the encroaching, expanding, but not always welcome Paris-based French state.

Antagonism originating in this period continued until the Napoleonic wars, says Ackroyd. But some commentators see it as still there, French animus against “Les Anglo-Saxons” extending to the USA. 

Ackroyd does not see a lot of “progress” in the morals and culture of the English nation. (He notes football brawls and some regrettable politics.) It is important, he says, to “avoid the myth of some fated or providential movement forward”. In his period, people had little thought at all of society moving ahead, but were inclined to revere the past. The Treaty of Magna Carta of 1215, with its tremendous importance to future legal development, was seen more as restoring ancient liberties from the tyrannical King John.

Others of what seem in retrospect to be the greatest and most important changes were hardly noticed at the time. The rise of parliament was “not framed after a model but developed out of occasional acts, the significance of which was not understood at the time”:

Everything grows out of the soil of contingent circumstance. Convenience rather than the shibboleth of progress or evolution is the agent of change. Error and misjudgment therefore play a large part in what we are pleased to call the “development” of institutions. A body of uses and misuses then takes on the carapace of custom and becomes part of a tradition. 

Passiveness about progress, so at odds with today’s outlook, did not stop it, though. Ackroyd depicts a society that arose perhaps 15,000 years ago as nomadic hunter-gatherers on the vast plain that was to become the North Sea. With the end of the Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, the sea rose and the small population moved onto the modern firm land.

Almost imperceptibly, these people turned from hunting and gathering, in the Australian Aboriginal way, to rough, semi-nomadic farming, using sticks with stone points to plough. But by 1500 their descendants were placing their first regular footprints, as visiting fishermen, to establish the infant beginnings of the Anglosphere in Newfoundland.

The interplay of population size with technology and, rarely, sharp natural climate change were the principal causes of social change. The population increased steadily because the birth rate was even higher than the death rate, but its temporary decline by a third with the Black Death of the fourteenth century began the slow decline of the feudal order.

The vast majority of the people were still in 1500, as they had been for aeons and would continue to be for a long time, illiterate farm workers or tenants in a little-changing countryside. Throughout most of the period houses for most people were of one or two rooms, wattle-and-daub and unsawn timber. They often ate simply and well and drank copious volumes of beer, but the health risks were almost unimaginable to us. More than a third of boys and a fifth of girls died at or soon after birth. Throughout life the prospect of sudden death or crippling illness or injury was everywhere, although surprising numbers did live into old age.

Though there were improvements over time, most of these conditions would have been all too familiar in early Australia—the lifetime of many Quadrant readers’ great-grandparents—and only improved dramatically in the later nineteenth century. Some of the improvements could be quite revolutionary—such as the first clocks, appearing in the fifteenth century presaging more and more accurate measures of time and space, replacing the shadow of the spire and church bell and length measured by the king’s arm.

But the overall message is, don’t strive too hard for or dream too much of progress, but respond well to circumstances. Allowing for the obvious differences, much of Ackroyd’s message also applies in Australian history—society moves at its own pace.