This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World

This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World Harry Bingham Celebratory, witty and incredibly insightful, Harry Bingham explores the eccentricities and customs of the British nation in a bid to answer a question which has everyone debating – Who are we?For the British, ‘Who are we?’ is an oddly difficult question. Although our national self-assessment usually notes a number of good points (we’re inventive, tolerant and at least we’re not French), it lists a torrent of bad ones too. Our society is fragmented and degenerate. Our kids are thugs, our workers ill-educated, our public services abysmal. We drink too much. Our house prices are crazy, our politicians sleazy, our roads jammed, our football team rubbish. When ‘The Times’ invited readers to suggest new designs for the backs of British coins, one reader wrote in saying, ‘How about a couple of yobs dancing on a car bonnet or a trio of legless ladettes in the gutter?’Is there really nothing to be proud of? British inventors have been responsible for myriad marvels we now take for granted, from the steam engine to the world wide web. British medical and public health innovations – vaccination, integrated mains sewerage, antiseptic surgery – have saved far more lives than all other medical innovations put together. And why stop there? The British empire covered a quarter of the earth’s surface but used an army smaller than that of Switzerland to exert its rule. The world speaks our language. Our scientists have won vast numbers of Nobel Prizes. The evolution of ‘habeas corpus’, trial by jury and the abolition of torture aren’t purely British in inspiration, but owe more to us than to anyone else. Our parliamentary democracy has been hugely influential in spreading ideals of liberty and representative government round the world.If the modern world is richer, freer, more peaceful, more democratic and healthier than it was, then Britain has played a leading role in that transformation. This book is about just that. Taking a particular interest in the many things that we did first, or best, or most, or were the only ones ever to do, this book focuses especially on those of our oddities that spread across the world – everything from football to the rule of law. THIS LITTLE BRITAIN How one small country built the modern world HARRY BINGHAM To my beloved N ‘Teach me thy love to know; That this new light, which now I see, May both the work and workman show: Then by a sunne-beam I will climbe to thee. See that ye love one another.’ CONTENTS Introduction (#u30fb1288-4d6f-5918-8c83-1a5119b3ee66) LANGUAGE (#uc92c580d-f26c-53d6-8922-bee11e90d374) Shaw’s Potato (#uc62fa1ad-afb5-5618-b8f4-822b5fa8dbd3)Declining to Conjugate (#u51393d3d-52bc-5588-93bb-803d289b3e7e)A World of Squantos (#ue6557e87-8224-56bb-8ec7-b5c6d6b0071e) LITERATURE (#u8603d848-5431-5eae-a95c-491401407d9c)Lashings of Pop (#u966f4d6e-2e61-5f7f-a0f8-366fde5ea5ca)Of Cows and Beef (#uce0070ef-054b-519a-9f87-cedb784ebc28)Half-chewed Latin (#u6ac86488-219a-5097-9be7-a31e7a40e3ce)A Wilderness of Monkeys (#u8b632b85-9b20-5a98-b5ec-a38f7e5dc11d) LAW (#ub19d3e60-1fb3-5de7-9118-e1b849d1615c)The Rustics of England (#u028c79ee-2826-5b88-8298-590415272a88)‘No Free Man…’ (#uf7134607-d592-5675-8a94-986e6ae60bf6)A Handful of Feathers (#uc88a6a52-de13-51e5-b4f3-4a078e17514b)From the Same Mud (#u2257d40c-9bad-55fe-8b6d-bc0bd5d2fc94) THE LAWMAKERS (#u1833a82d-04aa-59a4-97f1-e3ddebcbe38a)A Bettir Lawe (#u043682fe-a0de-51a2-bfb8-30791f97871c)No Remote Impassive Gaze (#litres_trial_promo)Good King Frank (#litres_trial_promo)A Most Strange and Wonderfull Herring (#litres_trial_promo)Clean Hands, Dirty Money (#litres_trial_promo) WARFARE (#litres_trial_promo)Invasion (#litres_trial_promo)The Mighty Monmouth (#litres_trial_promo)How to Be a Superpower (#litres_trial_promo)Lacking Elan (#litres_trial_promo)President Monroe’s Trousers (#litres_trial_promo) SCIENCE (#litres_trial_promo)The First Scientist (#litres_trial_promo)Ex Ungue Leonem (#litres_trial_promo)The Last Scientist (#litres_trial_promo)A Painful Admission (#litres_trial_promo) TECHNOLOGY (#litres_trial_promo)Raising Water by Fire (#litres_trial_promo)The Horse, the Car, the Pogo Stick (#litres_trial_promo)Colossus (#litres_trial_promo) ECONOMY (#litres_trial_promo)Whose Land? (#litres_trial_promo)The Monster with 10,000 Eyes (#litres_trial_promo)Wheat without Doong (#litres_trial_promo)A Wave of Gadgets (#litres_trial_promo)The Food of the People (#litres_trial_promo) EMPIRE (#litres_trial_promo)And Like a Torrent Rush (#litres_trial_promo)The Gates of Mercy (#litres_trial_promo)The Reluctant Father (#litres_trial_promo)Bombay Direct (#litres_trial_promo)Soldiers and Slaves (#litres_trial_promo) LIFESTYLE (#litres_trial_promo)The British Way of Death (#litres_trial_promo)Yobs (#litres_trial_promo)Clouds of Feculence (#litres_trial_promo)Greeks (#litres_trial_promo)Very Fine Linen (#litres_trial_promo) CONCLUSION (#litres_trial_promo)Age and Liberty (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)Sources (#litres_trial_promo)Also by Harry Bingham (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) INTRODUCTION (#uec5e970a-0f30-503b-b789-90975148c357) Who are we? For we British, that’s an oddly difficult question. Although our national self-assessment usually notes a number of good points (we’re inventive, tolerant, and at least we’re not French), it lists a torrent of bad ones too. Our society is fragmented, degenerate, irresponsible. Our kids are thugs, our workers ill educated, our managers greedy and incompetent. We hate our weather. Our public services are abysmal. Our society is rude and unfriendly. We drink too much and in the wrong way. Our house prices are crazy, our politicians sleazy, our roads jammed, our football team rubbish. When The Times invited readers to put forward new designs for the backs of British coins, one reader wrote in saying, ‘How about a couple of yobs dancing on a car bonnet or a trio of legless ladettes in the gutter?’ All this denigration may not be good for our self-esteem, but it does at least suggest the existence of some sort of national identity, however humble. But scratch below the surface and that identity quickly starts to unravel. Take the nationality issue, for example. How many countries are there whose name is as confused as ours? Are we best called Great Britain? The British Isles? The United Kingdom? Or none of these? The technically correct title is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland — a composite term which makes reference to a second composite term (Great Britain) and a chunk of land (Northern Ireland) that was until recently claimed by another sovereign state. Confused? It gets worse. Take sport. The English mostly cheer the team of any ‘home nation’, including the Republic of Ireland, which isn’t a home nation at all. Meanwhile the Scots cheer the Welsh and vice versa, while both will cheer anyone at all if they’re playing against England. Ryan Giggs, the best Welsh footballer of his generation, once captained the English Schoolboys. One of the leading ‘English’ bowlers is Simon Jones, a Welshman. In rugby, Ireland plays as one team, in football as two, in cricket as one team occasionally masquerading as an English county. It’s sometimes said that our identity confusion has been exacerbated by today’s multicultural society. Anyone reading today’s newspapers would almost certainly come away with an impression of a society uneasy with itself, a land where racial and religious tension seethes only inches beneath the surface. But if this is the case — and I doubt it — it’s certainly nothing new. Contemporary multiculturalism may pose challenges, but infinitely fewer than it posed in the past. The Viking version of multiculturalism generally involved a sword in the belly. The sixteenth-century version of a multi-faith society involved bonfires, stakes and heretics. In any case, our national confusion goes far wider and deeper than simply national, ethnic or religious issues. Recent reactions to the war in Iraq exposed long-standing divisions about the country’s attitudes to its past. When the British government chose to go to war, was it acting in its old role of imperialist bully? Or in its equally old role of global policeman and bringer of freedom? The national debate displayed both responses, both equally impassioned. The rise of the British Empire is arguably the most salient fact in the history of the modern world. Should we be proud of it or ashamed? Or perhaps the empire has nothing to do with us any more? For all our love of military adventure, are we perhaps just a glorified adjunct of the United States, a kind of East Atlantic Puerto Rico? Our own government is hardly keen to boast on our behalf. The Home Office recently published a booklet called Life in the United Kingdom, aimed at helping immigrants navigate the path to citizenship. It’s not a bad publication at all. It begins with a twenty-five-page history of the country, from Roman times to the present. The survey is balanced and accurate, if a bit on the bland side. But what it leaves out is peculiar. It does say, ‘British industry came to lead the world in the nineteenth century.’ But that hardly gets the point across. The fact is that at the peak of our industrial power, we dug two-thirds of the world’s coal, refined half its iron, forged five-sevenths of its steel, manufactured two-fifths of its hardware, and wove half its commercial cotton cloth. That’s not simply leading others. That’s being so far ahead of others that we were, in effect, imagining an entire new world into existence, a world that has utterly altered human expectations of health, wealth and technological possibility. Likewise, the booklet comments that ‘the railway engine [was] pioneered by George and Robert Stephenson’. Well, yes, so it was, but British inventors have also played key roles in developing the steam engine, the telegraph, aeronautics, the steam turbine, the microscope, the screw-driven iron ship, industrial steel, multiple-print photography, the electric light, the chain-driven bicycle, the electric generator, pneumatic tyres, the telephone, television, radar, the fax machine, the computer, the jet engine, the pocket calculator, and the World Wide Web. Those medical and public health innovations which Britons were most instrumental in developing — vaccination, integrated mains sewerage, antiseptic surgery and antibiotics — have saved far more lives than all other medical innovations put together. Are these facts really not worth a mention? And why stop there? The British empire covered a quarter of the earth’s surface, but used an army smaller than that of Switzerland to exert its rule. The world speaks our language. Our scientists have won vast numbers of Nobel Prizes, more than those in any country except the United States. The evolution of such things as habeas corpus, trial by jury, due process, the abolition of torture, and the rule of law aren’t purely British in inspiration, but owe more to us than to anyone else. Our parliamentary democracy has been hugely influential in spreading ideals of liberty and representative government around the world. At the Royal Navy’s peak, it owned more than half of the world’s warships and made possible the nineteenth-century globalization of trade and finance. These aren’t small things. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, the modern world has been more deeply shaped by Britain than by any other country. And we brought some good stuff to the party. Democracy, the limited state, the rule of law, free trade, industrialization, modern agriculture, modern finance, international law — none of these is exclusively British, but they’re all sticky with our fingerprints. To the (very considerable) extent that the world is now shaped by American power and American values … well, we know which country gave her birth. If the modern world is richer, freer, more peaceful, more democratic and healthier than it was, then Britain has played a leading role, often the leading role, in that transformation. This book is about just that. What follows is a series of observations about very particular aspects of our culture and history. But underlying these observations is a broader theme, that of British exceptionalism: the ways in which our history is most strikingly different from that of our neighbours. This book takes a particular interest in the many things that we did first, or best, or most, or were the only ones ever to do. It focuses especially on those of our oddities which spread across the world — everything from football to the rule of law. This isn’t meant to be a balanced way to view ourselves. A balanced view would take into account the many ways in which we were identical to our neighbours, or borrowed ideas and institutions from them. It would look at the ways in which we were last or worst or feeblest. Yet those viewpoints already have wide expression in our culture. Those ladettes in the gutter or the yobs dancing on the bonnet symbolize all that we already dislike in ourselves. This book is a reminder of the other side, the side that our grumbling too often ignores. Along the way, a picture of Britain emerges: one possible answer to the conundrum of Britishness, one way of answering that question, ‘Who are we?’ And if the book skates over much of what is least praiseworthy in our culture, then at least it aims to do justice to our joint creation: a world inconceivably better now than it was four hundred years ago. A world that, compared with that earlier age, is (mostly) prosperous, (mostly) free, (mostly) technically advanced. In short, a world that is (mostly) British. Before proceeding farther, a few caveats are in order. Readers wanting to race straight through to the action should do just that. The first caveat has to do with the horrendous complexity of the term ‘British’. Britain in its current shape dates from only 1707, and that’s to ignore all the complexities of Britain’s relationship with Ireland, and indeed its relationships with the overseas colonies and dominions. Before the Act of Union, there was a century in which the crowns of Scotland and England were joined, albeit with one or two rude interruptions, yet those two countries and Ireland were all importantly separate from one another. That separateness, indeed, was a crucial complicating factor during the turbulence of that century. Prior to 1603, old-fashioned histories of Britain are generally content to talk about England almost exclusively until a British identity starts to flicker into life in the early-modern era. This approach is a nonsense, of course. If Britain means anything at all prior to 1603, then it designates a geographical area that certainly includes Scotland. The most recent history to take these issues seriously was called simply The Isles, a title that squarely places geography ahead of politics. The complications of Britishness are perhaps most evident in relation to Ireland. That country was colonized by the British, and its citizens were for a long time both Irish and British. Which identity is paramount? It all depends on who you ask. When called an Irishman, the Dublin-born, London-dwelling Duke of Wellington is said to have replied that ‘Being born in a stable does not make one a horse.’ On the other hand, the Ulster-born, Dublin-dwelling Seamus Heaney refused to have his work included in a book of British verse, writing, ‘Be advised, my passport’s green. / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast The Queen’ In this book, I haven’t attempted to solve this or any other identity problem. Indeed, I’ve simply avoided definitions altogether. If Scottish soldiers in Canada develop the sport of ice hockey, then that, for me, is an example of Britishness in action. If a French-born king of England (but not Wales or Scotland) develops the common law, then that too, for the purposes of this book, counts as an example of Britishness in action. There’s no neat logic in action here, but then if it’s logic you were after, you shouldn’t have bought a book about Britain. I’ve a further confession to make, namely that Scotland, Wales and Ireland don’t figure much in my account of exceptionalism in the pre-modern era. There are two reasons for that, one good, one bad. The bad one is simply that this is a short book with a lot to do. By focusing on England, I was able to narrow the amount I needed to read about and write about. It was a labour-saving device, and nothing more. The better reason is that, in those earlier centuries, the most important elements of exceptionalism to arise anywhere in the British Isles had to do with the English language, the English common law and the rise of the English parliament. Since England would become the dominant partner in the subsequent political unions, those English oddities would prove more lastingly influential than comparable oddities elsewhere in the archipelago. In any event, it’s possible to get too hung up about all of this. I live in England, but spent huge chunks of my childhood in Wales. My grandfather was Protestant Ulster, his ancestors Scots and his wife Manx. My wife’s maiden name is Moroney, and her father Catholic Irish. I’m hardly exceptional in being this much of a mixture. If football fans of one home nation want to get all steamed up with those of another, then that’s up to them, but it’s not much different from the liver yelling insults at the pancreas, the heart giving aggro to the gall bladder. Finally, one last caveat. This book is rather unfashionable in celebrating British achievement. It suggests that the nation’s part in shaping the modern world exceeds the role played by any other country, not only in terms of the scale of its impact, but in terms of its benefits too. (That’s not to say there weren’t disbenefits also. There were, and very significant ones at that.) Any such celebratory tone can easily seem rather embarrassing, a display of bad taste akin to having a flagpole in your front garden or enjoying the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. Personally, though, I’m not sure that questions of taste should determine what history to remember. The naval historian, Nick Rodger, had this to say about his own field of expertise: Many modern writers implicitly assume that the functions of the Navy were essentially aggressive, to win territory overseas. It seems for them to follow that sea power is nowadays both uninteresting, except to specialists in imperial history, and morally disreputable, something that the honest historian ought to pretend does not exist. A similar comment could be made more broadly about any view of Britain which lays too much emphasis on the positive, on the distinctive and on the world-shaping. This book certainly does lay too much emphasis on these things. I hope I’ve made it crystal clear that it is not intended as an even-handed survey. Yet honest historians ought never to pretend or imagine things away. History, like life, doesn’t make for easy moral conclusions. Any historian wanting to avoid a ‘morally disreputable’ and intellectually shallow patriotism risks biasing the picture in the other direction, overlooking facts that should not be overlooked. If this book has a serious purpose, then it’s this: to thump down on the table a whole collection of such facts. Included in the collection are some obvious but under-emphasized ones, such as British naval predominance, and some less obvious ones too — for example, facts connected with social welfare, homicide, sports or the health transition. What one makes of this collection is another matter altogether: a business for professional historians, not rank amateurs like myself. Having written a book built entirely on the scholarship of others, I’m as keenly aware as it’s possible to be of how much remarkable work is being done by historians today. I’m not just indebted to their work, I’m in awe of it. LANGUAGE (#uec5e970a-0f30-503b-b789-90975148c357) SHAW’S POTATO (#uec5e970a-0f30-503b-b789-90975148c357) The playwright and would-be spelling reformer George Bernard Shaw famously pointed out that, using only common English spellings, we could write the word fish as ghoti: F: gh as in roughI: o as in womenSH: ti as in nation Shaw couldn’t have been trying very hard, if this was the best he could come up with. If he’d turned his attention to the other half of Britain’s national dish, he could perfectly well have come up with ghoughbteighpteau for potato: P: gh as in hiccoughO: ough as in thoughT: bt as in debtA: eigh as in neighbourT: pt as in pterodactylO: eau as in bureau Other languages have their eccentric spellings, of course, but English is in a league of its own. French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian all spell more or less as they sound. English just isn’t like that. If you heard individual words from this paragraph and were asked to write them out, how would you know to choose more rather than moor or maw? Know rather than no? Would rather than wood? Write rather than right or rite? Or rather than oar, ore or awe? Their rather than they’re or there? You rather than ewe? Course rather than coarse? But rather than butt? In rather than inn? For rather than four, fore or even (for those acquainted with the archaic term for Scottish gypsies) faw? The answer is that, of course, you couldn’t. But nothing happens without a reason, and the strange spellings of English have their reasons too, lurking deep in the heart of Shaw’s potato. P as in hiccough The first point to make is that language is human. It’s fallible. Or, not to beat about the bush, it’s full of cock-ups. One such error is hiccough. The word first pops up in Elizabethan English as hickop or hikup, an adaptation of the earlier hicket or hicock. Now it’s pretty clear from all these versions that the word was onomatopoeic, a fair attempt to catch the sounds of a hiccup in letters. But no sooner had the word decided to settle down than people started to assume that a hiccup was some sort of cough. And if a hiccup was a cough, then shouldn’t it be written that way: hiccough, not hiccup? The answer was no, it shouldn’t. Not then, and not now. The error grew nevertheless, until hiccough became at least as common as hiccup. The error is rejected by most dictionaries, but is still common enough that my computer spellcheck accepts both versions. Since people not dictionaries are the ultimate appeal court in these matters, then hiccough is certainly a real enough word, a mistake that’s passed the test of time. O as in though Most oddities of English have little to do with straightforward errors. A bigger problem is that English is a living language, and its strangest spellings are often left as residues, like tree rings marking out past phases of growth. English spellings largely derive from a particular period in British history, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It’s possible to be as precise as this for the simple reason that for the three hundred years or so following the Norman Conquest English had mostly disappeared as a written language. When official documents needed to be written, they’d been written in French or Latin. Thus by the time that English began to re-emerge from its long hiding, it was faced with the challenge of adopting a writing system almost, as it were, from scratch. This could easily have been a recipe for disaster. People tended to spell as they pronounced, and regional accents of the time were very varied. There are more than five hundred spellings recorded for the word through. The word she had more than sixty, including: Scae Sse Sche Shae SeChe Shee Zhee Sheea Sheh Shey Sha Sso Sco Scho Schoe Show Sho Shoy Schew Schw Shoe Shou She Su Scheo Sheo Zhe If you were writing just for your own friends, or to conduct business locally, perhaps none of this might have mattered. But as soon as official records and legal proceedings began using English too, then this kind of variation began to matter a lot; a common approach was called for. Naturally enough, London, home to the court and the senior echelons of the national bureaucracy, became dominant in imposing its spellings, in particular through the most senior bureaucrats of them all, the Masters of Chancery. Over time, they began to stamp their authority on the chaos. Out went all those scheos and sheeas and zhes, to be replaced by she. Out went ich (and many others) to be replaced by I. Because the movers and shakers of London spoke an English drawn mostly from London and the Midlands, our spelling is based largely on those accents. Those early bureaucrats did a good job. Fifteenth-century English spelling was increasingly systematic and rational—a typical European language. Alas, however, no sooner had the spellings been fixed than pronunciations shifted. The spelling of words like through, rough and right is a perfectly accurate guide to the way these words used to be spoken. But the language has moved on, leaving these old medieval relics behind. T as in debt The silent B in debt is another tree ring. When the Masters of Chancery were working to fix the language, there was a debate between those who thought that all spellings should be phonetic, and those who wanted them to be based on sound etymology. The phonetic camp won out in most cases, but not in all. Debt has a silent B, simply because medieval scholars wanted to point out that the word has its origins in the Latin debere, to owe. So a silent B was added—and never mind the fact that the word actually came from the French dette, which never had a B anywhere near it. This was a quirky way to justify introducing a totally needless letter, and it was based on a more than generous interpretation of etymology, but there was, at least, an etymological connection, however thin. Medieval scholars were, however, prone to finding connections to the Latin where none actually existed, so our language is littered with plenty of spellings that are unjustifiable on any level. Island doesn’t come from the Latin insula; it comes from an s-free Germanic root. (Compare modern German Eiland.) Anchor, rhyme, scythe, island, numb, ghost and many others derived their oddness from other errors fixed and perpetuated by Renaissance dictionaries. A as in neighbour All the problems so far mentioned fade into insignificance compared with the one identified by the A in Shaw’s potato. Just as the Masters of Chancery were producing the first rational spelling system in English, something was going on to turn all their fine work on its head. This was the Great Vowel Shift, which did exactly what it said on the tin. Before the shift, English vowels had been much the same as their Continental neighbours. The word fine in English used to be pronounced with an ‘ee’ sound, like the Italian fino (‘fee-no’). If a fourteenth-century speaker of English had encountered a sentence like ‘I see my goat is lame—my cow too’, they’d have pronounced it approximately as: ‘Ee say mee gawt ays lahm—mee coo toe’ This sounds odd to us, but only because we’re not used to it. At least English used its vowels in more or less the way you’d expect given its ancestry. Then, for no known reason, the vowels decided to get up from their fixed positions and wander round till they settled again in new places. The Chaucerian ‘ee’ sound became the modern ‘eye’ sound, the Chaucerian ‘ay’ became the modern ‘ee’, and so on. The process was both strange and not strange at the same time. In some ways, nothing much could be more ordinary. Language changes. If you want a scone, do you ask for a scohne or a sconn? If you talk about dust, do you use the southern ‘uh’ sound, or the shortened Yorkshire ‘oo’ sound? If a Brummie moves to a new part of the country—Liverpool, say, or Glasgow or Cornwall—they may well start to modify their vowel sounds, almost without noticing it. The Great Vowel Shift was in a way no odder than that—and bear in mind that it took place over two centuries, or the space of five or six medieval lifetimes. On the other hand, the process is also a little odd. Why did English change so much and its closest neighbours little or not at all? And what propelled the movement? There is no shortage of theories. Social upheavals following the Black Death is one possibility. Another is that as the French-speaking ruling class came to speak English, there was a vogue for a kind of patriotic hypercorrection of French vowel sounds. But no one knows for sure. It’s just one of those things. The one certainty, however, is that English spellings were fixed before, during and after the shift. A word like polite (around before the shift) simply saw its pronunciation change, from something like pol-eet to the modern pol-ite. But an almost identical word—police—which entered the language after the shift reflects the Continental ‘ee’ sound of its origin. The result, of course, is that there’s no way to tell in advance how a word should be spelled, or how a spelling should be spoken. Fine for those who grow up with the language; murder for those who have to learn it. T as in pterodactyl The first recorded reference to a pterodactyl is in Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. In it, Lyell predicts, ‘The pterodactyle might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.’ Whether pterodactyls could ever have been described as flitting is open to doubt, but what’s significant here is that new words have to be coined for new uses, and that one of the biggest creators of new words is science. Scientists are only human. They want their coinages to have a bit of class—and what could be more classy than a bit of Latin or (still better) Greek? And since the ancient Greeks were fond of their initial Ps, our language is now adorned with pterodactyls and ptomaine and psychology and many others. The trouble with these introductions, of course, is that English tongues can’t really wrap themselves around such (to us) exotic constructions. So the pronunciation tends to be anglicized, while the spelling resolutely isn’t. O as in bureau The final great complicating factor for English is highlighted by the final letter of Shaw’s potato. Bureau is a French word. It has entered English with its pronunciation and spelling more or less intact, but because the French match up vowel sounds and letter combinations differently from us, their words only serve to baffle and complicate our spellings. That’s not the only problem that can arise, however. Sometimes a new word entered the language—for example, nation, another French borrowing—and English tongues weren’t able to wrap themselves around the foreign sounds. So the French pronunciation, roughly na-see-o(n), becomes corrupted to the comfortable English nay-shun. Creations like this are hideously common. Do you want to guess how many ways there are to create the sh sound in English? You might play safe and say two or three. Or perhaps go wild and suggest five or six. The correct answer is in fact thirteen, as in shed, sure, issue, mansion, passion, ignition, suspicion, ocean, conscious, chaperone, schedule, pshaw and fuchsia. Potato as in That’s now every letter of Shaw’s potato accounted for. Shaw himself so disliked the mess of spellings that he left money in his will for a prize to be awarded for the best new alphabet to take care of English spelling. The winner was a chap called Kingsley Read. As Read saw it, a big part of the problem with English spellings is that there are too few letters for the number of sounds they need to make. There are forty-eight distinct sounds in English, and only twenty-six letters to do their work. The letter A, for example, has at least four jobs to do: ay as in able, a as in at, ah as in alms and or as in all. If English is to be easy to spell, then there should be one sound to a letter, one letter to a sound. Read’s alphabet, the Shavian alphabet, is a rather beautiful creation. It looks like this: (That’s the start of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in case you missed it.) Alas, however, no one ever used Read’s alphabet. No one ever used Quickscript, his later modification of it. No one has ever used Readspel, Read’s final attempt to get people on his side. And no one ever will. In the end, weird spellings are only a problem if that’s how you choose to see them. Part of the beauty of English is that its history is visible for all to see. It’s a hybrid between Anglo-Saxon rootstock and Franco-Latinate blooms. It’s a magpie language, acquisitive and reckless. It’s a human language, strewn with errors and eccentricities. It’s a living language, with vowels and pronunciations that shift from age to age. That won’t ever change. The question really is, who’d want it to? DECLINING TO CONJUGATE (#uec5e970a-0f30-503b-b789-90975148c357) For English speakers, one of the most striking facts about learning other languages is how bloomin’ complicated they seem to be. A perfectly regular French verb has five different forms in its present tense alone. Adjectives have to vary depending on whether a noun is singular or plural, masculine or feminine. And French is easy. German has three genders, five cases. The Polish struggle with three genders and seven cases, and if that weren’t enough, their nouns, adjectives, numbers and pronouns all decline differently. Italian has fifty forms for each verb, ancient Greek more than three hundred, modern Turkish an eye-popping two million. For we Brits, this complexity seems simply astonishing. We have two standard noun forms, singular and plural—dog and dogs, for example. We have four standard verb forms: bark, barks, barking and barked. Our adjectives don’t vary at all. (#ulink_e6c34228-cc3e-5894-a8e5-1595440ec3ab) When we encounter a language with the complexity of Polish or Turkish, most of us find it simply stunning. It seems a wonder that Polish or Turkish toddlers ever manage to master the tongue at all. To a linguist, however, the puzzle is a rather different one. English is a Germanic language, and the only one of its family to have lost almost all inflections. English is, in fact, about the least inflected language ever known. The reason for this has nothing to do with some form of linguistic evolution, from ‘primitive’ inflected languages to ‘modern’ uninflected ones. Rather, the answer has to do with that most English of solutions to precarious situations: muddle, fudge and compromise. Back in 878, Alfred the Great defeated the Danish army at Edington. The battle checked the hitherto unstopped Viking advance, and enabled Alfred to go on to negotiate a peace agreement which divided the country into two. A line was drawn diagonally across England, running roughly from Chester to London. The area to the south of the line would remain under English rule; the northern part (the ‘Danelaw’) would be ruled by the Danes (though most of those ruled, of course, would be English). Trade carried on across the line, very much as before. After Alfred’s son, Edward, had won back the Danelaw, then a common authority existed across the whole country, though pockets of Danish settlers were still widespread. Although frustratingly little is known about the pattern of Danish settlement, the likelihood is that significant numbers of Danes contined to come and settle across the eastern seaboard for the next two hundred years or so. Indeed, as late as the nineteenth century, linguists were recording language communities in Lincolnshire whose speech contained entire sentences that were effectively in Danish, not English. Old habits die hard. Under these conditions—and largely in the east—Danes and English came into regular, daily, routine contact. The two communities would have been able to communicate with relatively little difficulty. Although the English spoke Old English and the Danes spoke Old Norse, the two languages were extremely close, rather in the way Norwegian and Swedish are today. The sentence ‘I’ll sell you the horse that pulls my cart’ translates as: OLD ENGLISH:Ic selle the that hors the draegeth minne waegn OLD NORSE:Ek mun selja ther hossit er dregr vagn mine The main words of this sentence are pretty close. Sell translates as selle / selja. Horse is hors / hossit, and so on. The speakers of one group could fairly easily have guessed the broad meanings of the other party’s words. But what about all those word endings? The cases and genders, tenses, moods and the rest? The chances of a non-native speaker being able to guess the subtle implications of all those word endings would have been approximately nil. So—and still only in the east—the word endings started to disappear. As traders and others sought to do business, Dane with English and vice versa, they simply started to drop the parts of the language that didn’t function for them. The process moved furthest and farthest in the areas where Dane and English lived closest together. In the west of the country, where Danish influence was minimal, a highly inflected version of English lasted right into the fifteenth century. In the end, though, the Easterners had the advantage of geography. London, Oxford and Cambridge all fell, more or less, into the eastern zone, and those three centres of cultural power ended up dictating the language the rest of the country would speak. In consequence, English went from being an ordinarily inflected language to one with almost no variation at all: the pidgin product of an uneasy peace. How should one interpret this change? Almost certainly as a historical-linguistic quirk. Just one of those things. Yet it’s hard to avoid a nagging sense of something further. There have been plenty of instances in which two similar linguistic communities have travelled and traded, mixed and mingled, yet English is exceptional in its lack of inflection. Were those early English exceptional in their desire to trade rather than fight, in their willingness to rub along with alien folk? The evidence falls a mile short of being conclusive, yet those same traits would prove to be reasonably prominent national characteristics many centuries down the road. Possibly, and only just possibly, those same traits were present way back in Anglo-Saxon times; that linguistic oddity their only surviving trace. Whatever the answer to that particular conundrum, the inflections never came back. They are still eroding, very slightly, today. Whom has almost given way to who. The regional dialect thou makes(t) for the standard you make has just about vanished too. Those wonderful Danish-speaking Lincolnshire folk have been obliterated by the BBC and universal education and the internal combustion engine. (Though Lincolnshire dialect is still rich in words and phrases from Old Norse.) This simplified, simplifying language offers one huge benefit to the world. To its billion and a half non-native speakers, English spelling is nothing but a plague and a torment. English inflections, by contrast, are now so simple you could learn them all in a minute, and still have time to put the kettle on. * (#ulink_a9c52d02-b9ad-52c7-8315-6461a5d174f1) With one exception: blond and blonde. A WORLD OF SQUANTOS (#uec5e970a-0f30-503b-b789-90975148c357) In November 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers made landfall off Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. It wasn’t the best time of year to arrive. The New England winter was more ferocious than anything the predominantly East Anglian settlers were used to. Nor were the precedents exactly encouraging. The first British settlement in North America had disappeared without trace. The second (in Jamestown, Virginia) had survived, but only after terrible loss of life. The Pilgrim Fathers weren’t even well equipped. They were missing basic tools, and were astonishingly ignorant of both agriculture and fishing. Their prospects were lousy, and they knew it. In the words of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford: And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? From that hideous wilderness stepped forth a miracle. In the words of William Bradford again: Whilst we were busied hereabout, we were interrupted, for there presented himself a savage which caused an alarm. He very boldly came all alone and along the houses straight to the rendezvous, where we intercepted him, not suffering him to go in…He saluted us in English and bade us ‘welcome’. The ‘savage’ who emerged from the Massachusetts woods had picked up a few words of English from visiting sailors, but the miracle hadn’t yet taken place. The man who bade the settlers welcome took them to meet a second man, Tisquantum, abbreviated to Squanto. And Squanto spoke English; not just a few words, but fluently. Captured by British fishermen some fifteen years before, Squanto had been carried off to London, where he’d learned English and received training as a guide and interpreter, before managing to escape home again on a returning boat. The unlikelihood of this sequence of events is simply astounding. What are the odds that a bunch of under-skilled and under-equipped Englishmen should pitch up and find perhaps the most fluent native American speaker of English anywhere on the continent? Squanto didn’t just offer a taste of home. He taught the settlers the things they needed to know. He showed them how to sow their corn seeds with little bits of chopped fish for fertilizer. He taught them how to fish and how to distinguish what was edible from what was not. It’s quite likely that Squanto saved the colony. The story makes a point. Back then, English was a minor language, with limited projection beyond England’s own boundaries. Today, it is the world’s own language. Back then, it was the unlikelihood of finding a Squanto which made his appearance so miraculous. Today, a traveller could pitch up almost anywhere—any country, any coast, any continent—and hope to find some words of English spoken, by at least some members of the local community. The miracle today is not the rarity of English, but its universality. That doesn’t mean, of course, that English has become the world’s most commonly spoken language. It hasn’t. A billion Mandarin Chinese speakers dwarf the 350 million or so native English speakers. But that misses the point. To be a global language is to be the preferred means of communication between two parties from different language communities, and it’s here where English is exceptional. On top of the 350 million native speakers, there are perhaps another 400 million speakers in former colonies, plus a billion or so speakers—from Japanese tourists to Swedish businessman—who have simply adopted the language as the simplest means of international communication. This number is growing all the time, not least in China, which will soon have more English speakers than the combined total of all English-speaking countries. No other language remotely compares with the global significance of English. Its lead is increasing all the time. It’s always tempting to romanticize the language’s dominance, to start muttering about Shakespeare and Chaucer, the flexible euphony of our tongue. But Shakespeare, Schmakespeare. The world speaks English because of British gunboats (and emigrants) in the nineteenth century and American hegemony in the twentieth. If those Mayflower settlers had happened to speak Ubykh, a Caucasian language with eighty-one consonants and only three vowels, or perhaps Rotokas, a Papua New Guinea language with just six consonants and five vowels, then the world would quite likely be speaking those fine languages today. Meanwhile, English is spreading in other ways too. The Oxford English Dictionary currently lists about half a million words. Its American equivalent, Webster’s, comes up with a roughly similar figure of 450,000. The two dictionaries have, however, much less of an overlap than you might guess. The OED contains more archaic or regional British terms, Webster’s more Americanisms. Putting the two dictionaries together would probably produce an expanded word count of some 750,000 words. (I say probably: no one has ever bothered to work it out.) But even this total excludes huge swaths of English. It excludes terms from the various world Englishes (Singapore English, Jamaican English, Indian English, etc.). It excludes much slang and regional dialect. It excludes acronyms, even those that are usually used as words (CIA, NATO, the EU, and so on). It excludes most flora and fauna. If all these were added in, the word count would probably reach a million. If all scientific and technical terms were added, the count might be twice that. By comparison, French has an ‘official’ dictionary-based word count of less than 100,000 words, German around 190,000. The sheer scale of its vocabulary is one of the key reasons why other languages are fighting a hopeless battle to keep English terminology out. It is all very well for the Acad?mie Fran?aise to invent new French terms to replace Anglo-Saxon intruders, autofinancement for cashflow, for example. But what about those million or so technical and scientific terms—bluetooth protocol, polypropylene, iPod, troposphere? Is the Acad?mie really going to invent new terms for those and all 999,997 others? In 2004, The Economist quoted research which suggested that two-thirds of all Internet content is in English. Scientific and technical journals are also disproportionately anglophone. English isn’t just pushing other languages back, it’s eating into them too. What of the future? There are roughly two schools of thought. The first takes Latin as its example. The break-up of the Roman Empire led to the break-up of the language. Romanian, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese litter the linguistic map, the ruined remains of a once great empire. Romanian and Portuguese speakers may both be speaking linear descendants of the same language, but the languages have long since become mutually unintelligible. Is this the fate of English? There’s plenty of evidence to suggest it. After all, it’s already slightly misleading to speak of one single language called ‘English’. We have at the very least Indian English, American English, British English, Nigerian English, Philippines English, Canadian English, Pakistani English, Australian English, and so on. (The order of terms in that list might not be a conventional one, but it’s perfectly logical: the terms are arranged in descending order, by size of the English language community.) But this list describes broad types only. Within every genus, there is an abundance of species. Not just Scouse English, but Caribbean Scouse, Pakistani Scouse, Irish Scouse, and so forth. If you sat in a Singaporean student caf?, among students speaking their version of English, you probably wouldn’t understand what was being said. Perhaps the English break-up is already happening. Perhaps the rot has already set in. Or then again, perhaps not. The counter-argument is simple: call it the eBay paradigm. In a world of highly competitive markets, eBay is rare and extraordinary in having virtually no meaningful competition. How come? Simply because eBay was the first, and as such it started out with the most buyers and the most sellers. Buyers naturally flock to the system with the most products to choose from. Sellers naturally gravitate to the outlet with the largest number of buyers. Unless eBay does something horrendous to mess up, its position is and will remain unrivalled. What’s true of beanie toys and second-hand clothes is all the more true of a universal language. If you’re an ambitious student keen to acquire a second tongue, which one does it make most sense to master? Obviously the one that gives access to the largest possible number of fellow speakers. So the larger the number of English speakers, the greater the incentive for others to to learn it. Dominance feeds dominance. There perhaps lies the real point about that Singaporean caf?. If you were sitting there, sipping your bandung and picking at your fish-head curry, it’s likely that your fellow diners would notice your difficulty in making sense of their conversation. So they’d probably just shift the way they spoke. From the idiosyncrasies of Singaporean youth English to something like an international Standard English. That Standard English would still be noticeably local in flavour. It would certainly be American tinted. But you’d understand it. They’d understand you. That’s the point of a universal language. It makes one world of us all: a world of Squantos. LITERATURE (#uec5e970a-0f30-503b-b789-90975148c357) LASHINGS OF POP (#uec5e970a-0f30-503b-b789-90975148c357) I am—or was, until this book—a novelist by trade. I’ve sold five novels, each of which has been translated into a fair number of different languages. Every contract I sign stipulates that I’m sent a royalty statement, and each royalty statement contains information on books sold. So does that mean I know how many books I’ve sold in total? No. Nothing of the sort. I couldn’t even say to the nearest 10,000 copies. In large part, that’s due to my laziness. To work out an answer I’d have to crunch a lot of numbers, in order to produce a statistic that has no direct effect on my life and which will be out of date by the time I’ve crunched it. But in part too it’s because the system doesn’t make things simple. You’d think that a royalty statement from publisher to author would somewhere contain one simple figure equating to the total number of books sold. Not so. My own dear publisher sends me stats that make a phone bill from BT look like a model of limpid clarity. Nowhere on any document they’ve ever sent me is a single number that says, ‘We’ve sold this many of your books’-the one stat that authors are likely to be most interested in. When PR folk representing the likes of Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling claim that so many zillion copies have been sold, they probably have a pretty decent idea of the total, but decent isn’t the same as accurate. Does Dan Brown’s agent really know how many B-format paperbacks have been sold in the Ukraine? Or the exact number of cute little Japanese hardbacks, complete with facsimile signature and sash? Or the number of books printed in Braille for the Brazilian market? Personally, I doubt it. All this poses a problem. There is no systematic way of knowing which authors have sold the largest numbers of books. No central agency monitors such things. Even the Guinness Book of Records, whose job it is to know such things, ends up using well-informed guesstimates. For those of us who are list maniacs at heart, this dearth of information falls rather hard. Luckily, however, there is an alternative route to much the same goal. Ever since the advent of the printing press, books have been translated at the initiative of individual publishers and booksellers. In most markets, such practice would be regarded as normal, but to the orderly minds of the world’s national librarians, the system seemed little short of anarchy. In the absence of some central register, national collections, such as the British Library, would struggle to keep track of all the published translations of major authors, such as Dickens and Shakespeare. Consequently, back in 1931, the League of Nations was pressured into setting up the first systematic record of translations, the Index Translationum. Fifteen years and one world war later, the United Nations took over the chore. In 1979, the system was computerized and a true cumulative database began to take shape. The world may have kept no record of books sold, but we do now possess excellent data on the next best thing: the number of translations made from them. The statistics as presented by UNESCO don’t always make the most perfect logical sense. UNESCO’s top fifty includes a fair old number of authors who aren’t really authors at all (Walt Disney Inc., different versions of the Bible). It also counts the two Grimm brothers separately though they wrote together, and it takes seriously the output of authors (Lenin, Marx, Engels, John Paul II) whose translations owed more to supply-push than the demand-pull of eager consumers. If these oddities are tidied away, then just forty-one authors remain. Once cleaned up, the statistics confirm something that’s been easy to sense but hard to prove: that no country on earth writes like we British. Of the forty-one most translated authors in the world, no less than fourteen, a full third of the total, are British. The next most translated country is the United States, whose much larger population has contributed just eleven names to the list. The entire rest of the world, with sixteen names on the list, barely counts for more than our little islands. Authors by country (rank in brackets, correct at time of writing) It doesn’t require a very long look at the table above to see that what’s in question here isn’t a battle fought out between the greats of literature. Although Shakespeare and Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky all make the grade, the table is dominated by popular authors of every stripe. Hercule Poirot beats Hamlet. The Famous Five and their lashings of ginger pop have sold better than Chekhov, Kafka and Plato put together. English literature (the normal, if patronizing, term for English, Welsh, Scots and Irish literature in English) may well be among the strongest of world literatures, but it’s the success of Britain’s more commercial authors which is particularly striking. This success deserves to be celebrated rather than sneered at. British literature has given the world its most famous detectives: Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes. It has given the world its best-known spy, James Bond, (#ulink_78be4c9a-50d7-5e57-a787-89750adb657e) and its most literarily successful one, John le Carr?’s Smiley. It has given the world its seminal work of fantasy literature: The Lord of the Rings. Walter Scott, in his day, was one of the very first novelists of genuinely international appeal. Robinson Crusoe and Jekyll & Hyde both added bold new archetypes to the imaginative resources of literature. It was a Briton, Wilkie Collins, who wrote the first true detective novel. Children around the world have thrilled to Alice in Wonderland, the Famous Five, Winnie-the-Pooh, Harry Potter, Peter Pan. These achievements are different from, and lesser than, the achievements of the Shakespeares and Chaucers, Dickenses and Austens—but they’re achievements all the same. It’s tempting to ascribe these popular literary successes to the dominance of English as an international language. So universal has English become that it is surely easier for foreign translators to pick from English-language texts than ones in, say, Norwegian, Portuguese or Uzbek. UNESCO certainly appears to believe just that. On its website, it commented: ‘This is perhaps one way of controlling the market and maintaining the cultural dominance of English and the market is controlled through what is on offer, through the availability of products sold by the industry of culture—whether it is music, or films or books.’ (The atrociously mangled syntax of this sentence suggests that the ‘industry of culture’ would be in mortal danger if left to writers such as this.) UNESCO, however, is just plain wrong. Just who exactly is thought to be ‘controlling the market’? A conspiracy of top executives at News International and Walt Disney? An undercover alliance between the CIA and MI6? A secret society headed by Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling, his trusty lieutenant? The point about the book market is that it’s a market. Readers buy whatever they want to read. Publishers publish anything that looks like selling. It’s true that English acts as a convenient international clearing house. Japanese publishers wanting to translate a Danish text will most likely translate from the English version, not the Danish. In that sense, though, the universality of English makes works in minor tongues more available than they were before, not less. When great books come along in those minor tongues, they sell. The Danish language Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow was a big hit. So was the Norwegian book Sophie’s World. Contrary to what UNESCO might think, these books sold not because of a slip-up in the CIA’s operating procedure, but because they were good to read. That, funnily enough, is what readers care about. In the end, why should it seem so odd to argue that British writers do so well because they’re good at what they do? Nobody has a problem accepting that the German musical tradition is (vastly) richer than the British one, that the Italians have done (infinitely) more for opera, that the French have done very much more for painting, and so on. We Brits aren’t awful at these other art forms, but we don’t excel. In literature, however, whether popular or highbrow, we do excel. It is our art form, the one that, for whatever reason, speaks more deeply to our national consciousness than any other. (#ulink_2b12d285-c099-522a-b879-9774e584d144) It has done so since the time of Alfred the Great, when English vernacular literature was the most developed in Europe. It does so now. * (#ulink_54631d5a-27be-5877-a7bd-850721b80134) Also its most famous secretary, Miss Moneypenny. * (#ulink_27ea6827-4628-5d09-9e4f-bc65c2002a5b) I’m using the word ‘national’ in a very broad sense here, since Ireland has made a quite disproportionate contribution to ‘English’ literature. Since the death of Shakespeare, the greatest dramatists of the British Isles have arguably been Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde, Synge, Shaw and Beckett—every one of them Irish. OF COWS AND BEEF (#ulink_1cba227d-1e14-5ec2-b3da-353d86faece9) The word Welsh derives from an Anglo-Saxon root, Wealas, which means slave or foreigner. There, in a nutshell, is all you need to know about the politics of sixth-century Britain. The incoming Angles, Jutes and Saxons had turned the native British Celts into foreigners in their own land; not quite slaves perhaps, but humiliatingly subject all the same. Anglo-Saxon rule didn’t extend merely to land and territory; it covered language too. Although a certain amount of intermarriage must have taken place between invaders and ‘slaves’, that intermarriage was reflected hardly at all in the spoken word. Virtually no Celtic words survived the onslaught, and those that did are telling. Modern English words such as tor, crag, combe, cairn, cromlech, dolmen and loch are all Celtic, and they all describe features of the landscape which simply hadn’t existed in the flatlands from which the invaders had come. The newcomers took the words they absolutely needed and ditched the rest. Only a few dozen Celtic words survive in English today. While the Celts always referred to their invaders as Saxons, (#ulink_4690e3b1-6bcb-5ebf-8d2a-2ed6e82372a6) the newcomers themselves began to call themselves Anglii, their new country Anglia, and (in due course) their language Englisc. It’s that language which we speak today. Of the hundred most commonly used words in modern English, almost all are Old English in origin, including all but one of the top twenty-five. (In order: the, of, and, a, to, in, is, you, that, it, he, was, for, on, are, as, with, his, they, I, at, be, this, have, from. The Old Norse intruder in this list is they. The word the appears in this book some 5,850 times.) These twenty-five words make up about one third of all printed material in English. The top hundred words make up about a half. The first French-derived word doesn’t appear until number at seventy-six. You can tell a lot about a society from the language it speaks. The language of the Anglii was domestic, rural, warlike, concrete. Words such as man, daughter, friend and son are Old English. So are dog, mouse, wood, swine, horse. So are plough, earth, shepherd, ox, sheep. So are love, lust, sing, night, day, sun. So are words such as so, are, words, such, as. The one linguistic invasion of real significance in those years was Christianity. As the pagan Anglo-Saxons began to convert to the new religion, new words (mostly Greek or Roman in origin) crept in to handle the new concepts: bishop, monk, nun, altar, angel, pope, apostle, psalm, school. The number of new words was small, less than 1 per cent of the existing vocabulary, but they extended the language by giving it ways of expressing new thoughts, new concepts. With the language to do it, the Anglii began to produce a literature of their own, probably a great one. If people wanted to preserve their work, they wrote not in English but in Latin. As a consequence, most work that was written in English has been lost for ever. Fortunately, though, enough of the old literature has survived for us to get a feel of what was lost. Beowulf is the first great surviving work of literature written in English, a story of strange monsters and Dark Age realpolitik. Here, in Seamus Heaney’s translation, is the arrival of the monster Grendel at the feasting hall: In off the moors, down through the mist-bands God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping. The bane of the race of men roamed forth, hunting for a prey in the high hall. Under the cloud-murk he moved towards it until it shone above him, a sheer keep of fortified gold. Nor was that the first time he had scouted the grounds of Hrothgar’s dwelling —although never in his life, before or since, did he find harder fortune or hall-defenders. This extract gives us the true feel of Anglo-Saxon: gritty, alliterative, forceful, direct. In Heaney’s words: ‘What I had always loved was a kind of four-squareness about the utterance…an understanding that assumes you share an awareness of the perilous nature of life and are yet capable of seeing it steadily and, when necessary, sternly. There is an undeluded quality about the Beowulf poet’s sense of the world.’ Warrior-like it may have been, but Anglo-Saxon almost died nevertheless—not just once, but twice. The first major threat came with the Viking invasions when, but for Alfred the Great, we might well have ended up speaking Norse, not English. The second near-death experience came with the Norman Conquest in 1066. Because the new king, William, had been hard up for cash, he’d paid for much of his help with pledges of English land. When victory came, those pledges were redeemed. All of a sudden, every position of power in England was filled by French speakers. The new noblemen spoke French. Bishops and abbots spoke French. The court spoke French. The king made a short-lived effort to learn English, then gave up and stuck to French. As an official language, English completely vanished. In its written form, its disappearance was almost total. For centuries, a kind of linguistic apartheid reigned. English peasants continued to speak English. The court continued to speak French. But in between the top and bottom layers of society, mixing was inevitable, as Normans married English, as French babies were cared for by local women. At the level where the two societies met, the English language underwent the most rapid—and important—transformation of its life. A torrent of new words poured in from the French, thousands of them, far more than had ever come from Norse or Celtic. The Normans brought a new kind of justice and administration to the land. Arrest, attorney, bail, bailiff, felony, fine, pardon, perjury and verdict all come from the French. They brought new concepts of chivalry: courtesy, damsel, honour, romance, tournament, chivalry. The arts, science, the domestic scene—all borrowed heavily from French words: music, paper, melody, grammar, calendar, ointment, pantry, lamp, curtain, chimney. And while the English worked the fields tending the oxen or cows, sheep, calves, deer and pigs (all English words), it was as often as not their French masters who got to eat the resulting beef, mutton, veal, venison and pork (all French ones). On the whole, these new words didn’t replace the older English ones, they sat alongside them. That’s why the language now has so many alternatives: the fancy French model and the plainer English one. For example, the English ask sits beside the French question, interrogate, demand. The English king rubs shoulders with royal, regal, sovereign. We have English hands but do French manual work. For three hundred years such words poured over the Channel, leaving English immeasurably enriched, a different language. It wasn’t just new words, it was new ways of writing too. Compare these two bits of verse, one French, one English. Foy porter, honneur garder Et pais querir, oubeir Doubter, servir, et honnourer Vous vueil jusques au morir Dame sans per. (I want to stay faithful, guard your honour / Seek peace, obey / Fear, serve and honour you / Until death / Peerless lady— Guillaume de Machaut.) And the English one: Summer is y-comen in, Loude sing, cuckoo! Groweth seed and bloweth mead And spring’th the woode now— Sing cuckoo! Ewe bleateth after lamb, Low’th after calfe cow. Bullock starteth, bucke farteth. Merry sing, cuckoo! (Anon) The French verse is smooth, melodious, liquid. It is clever writing. Its themes are courtly love, honour and chivalry; its principal sound effect coming from that smoothly repeated soft rhyme. The English verse is the exact opposite. It’s earthy, lusty and crude. It talks about animals and farts. It’s a language at home in the fields, not the court. It uses rhyme, but does so not in a smooth and flowing way like the French, but in a way designed to make the most of the natural swing and rhythm of spoken English. That old Anglo-Saxon taste for alliteration is still there (calf / cow, bullock / buck). This is a language that enjoys its own sound effects; the one thing it won’t do is stay polite and well mannered. The point isn’t that one form of writing is better than the other. The point is that English writers suddenly faced a huge expansion in their choice of how to write. They could be lusty, earthy, crude, jaunty. Or they could be Latinate, posh, abstract, clever. Or, like Chaucer and Shakespeare, they could mix and match, moving from the earthy to the sublime and back again. That expressive richness has been the language’s greatest resource, and it has been core to the achievements of its greatest writers. That choice of how to write is still with us today. Britain’s two best-known poets of recent times have been Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin. Here is Ted Hughes, writing about a ewe having problems giving birth: I caught her with a rope. Laid her, head uphill And examined the lamb. A blood-ball swollen Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap Squashed crooked, tongue stuck out, black-purple, Strangled by its mother. I felt inside, Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the slippery Muscled tunnel, fingering for a hoof… This is Anglo-Saxon in modern clothes. Hughes is earthy, concrete, in-yer-face. He uses compound nouns, alliteration and thumping stresses. It’s verse that lives in the fields, and raises two fingers to the court. Here, in contrast, is the way Philip Larkin writes about animals—in his case, retired racehorses. Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps Two dozen distances sufficed To fable them: faint afternoons Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps, Whereby their names were artificed To inlay faded, classic Junes… This is pure French. The language is Latinate, high-flown, smooth and elegant; a language comfortable with the Royal Enclosure, not the dung and straw of the stable yard. In short, English became—and remained—a language in which you could swear like a German, or seduce like a Frenchman. You could make war using one vocabulary, and philosophize with another. No other European language has that suppleness, that blend of Germanic directness and Latinate elegance. If our literary tradition is as great as any in the world, then that greatness owes much to the language that gave it birth. * (#ulink_ecba5d3e-7854-5a6a-8656-ee45c1288d85) They still do. That’s what the Scots word Sassenach means. HALF-CHEWED LATIN (#ulink_1cba227d-1e14-5ec2-b3da-353d86faece9) It began with the Black Death. In Bristol, where it struck first in 1348, some 45 per cent of the population died. Across the country, the death toll was lower, but still vast. As the country fell dying, the only growth industry was that of burial, and since priests were constantly in contact with the sick and dying, the death rate among the clergy probably exceeded even that of the general population. In January 1349, the Bishop of Bath and Wells wrote, ‘Priests cannot be found for love nor money…to visit the sick and administer the last sacraments.’ Since those last sacraments would have been viewed as of vital importance in Catholic England, the problem was a serious one. Dreadful times bring drastic remedies. The bishop went on to say that, in the absence of a priest, it would be proper for the dying to confess their sins to a lay person or even (steady on!) ‘to a woman if no man is available’. Perhaps it was this new DIY approach to dying which fostered new ways of thinking, or perhaps it was simply the collision between hard times and a complacent Church. At all events, the age produced its revolutionary, an Oxford scholar named John Wyclif. Wyclif began to compare the Church he saw around him with the words of scripture, and he found the Church wanting. He wrote, ‘Were there a hundred popes and all the friars turned to cardinals, their opinions on faith should not be accepted except in so far as they are founded on scripture itself.’ Logically, then, if scripture was so important, it should be available to everyone—and available in English, not Latin. In our own secular times, it’s hard to get overexcited by such a suggestion, but in a world where it was not altogether clear whether Church or state exerted more power, Wyclif’s proposal was revolutionary, a clear threat to the status quo. Wyclif didn’t just talk about what ought to be done, he made sure that it was done. A group of scholars, working in line with Wyclif’s doctrines, began to translate the Bible. It was by no means the first time in European history that a vernacular translation had been produced, but it was the first time that a complete translation had been produced by serious scholars working in explicit defiance of Church doctrine. To offer a contemporary analogy, it was as if Wyclif and his fellows were seeking to introduce the freedoms of the Internet to a society that had long known only state-owned media. The English language was the battering ram. The result, one day, would be the Protestant Reformation itself. Yet for all Wyclif’s thundering denunciations of the Church, those first attempts at translation were oddly timorous. It was just as if, when it came to the point, the translators didn’t quite have the nerve to leave the original text behind. Here, for instance, is a chunk taken from the first psalm. Blisful the man, that went not awei in the counseil of unpitouse, and in the wei off sinful stod not; and in the chayer of pestilence sat not, But in the lawe of the Lord his wil; and in the lawe of hym he shal sweteli thenke dai and nygt. Even putting aside the archaic spellings, this text reads more like half-chewed Latin than proper English. But it was a start. Its authors must have recognized the weakness of that early version, because no sooner had the first translation been finished than a new and better one was begun. Those translations were transcribed by hand, then disseminated by wandering Lollard preachers. (Lollard, from the Middle Dutch word meaning ‘a babbler of nonsense’, came to be applied pejoratively to all Wyclif’s followers, who then came to embrace the term enthusiastically.) In a land where books were rare and precious, where the language of salvation had always been incomprehensible to the vast bulk of the population, those Bibles must have been the most extraordinary experience: liberating, poetic, exciting, inspiring. Many parish priests, indeed, would have understood next to nothing of the Latin that they had so solemnly intoned in church. With Wyclif’s new Bibles, weavers and housewives were suddenly being let into knowledge of God’s word itself, secrets that had previously been the property of only a tiny handful. Inevitably, of course, the movement was suppressed. Wyclif’s manuscripts were burned and the Lollards themselves arrested, often killed. But just as today the tide of technology tends to favour the Internet over those seeking to erect barriers against it, so too did the invention of the printing press shift things decisively in favour of revolution. Wyclif’s translations had had to be copied, slowly and painfully, by hand. Those that came after him in England and (particularly) Germany could churn out copies by the thousand. Costs fell, print runs increased. By 1526, William Tyndale, heavily influenced by Martin Luther, printed three thousand copies of his English language New Testament, then sold each copy for as little as four shillings. The authorities could no more track down and burn each copy than they could order trees to hold their leaves in autumn. An English-speaking God had finally, decisively arrived. As far as British exceptionalism is concerned the story ends there. An Englishman, John Wyclif, inaugurated a movement that would lead to the most important development in the Christian Church since the split between Catholic and Orthodox. That movement then shifted its centre of gravity eastwards to Germany, and England played no more than a secondary role in what followed. Yet to end the story at that point leaves off, at least from a literary point of view, its conclusion. As we know, Henry VIII broke with Rome and, on his death, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, converted the English Church into a genuinely Protestant one, something it had not been during Henry’s reign. During the six-year reign of Edward VI, around sixty new versions of the Bible were released. More followed under Elizabeth, then James. Compared with the old days, this was liberation indeed, but a troubling one all the same. It was all very well to write the gospels in the language of ploughboys, but the translations couldn’t all be equally good. Which ones were right, which wrong? It was time to set up a committee. The committee in question was a bureaucrats’ daydream. Fifty-four translators were appointed, split across six working groups, who toiled away for six years. The results were fed into yet another committee, a review committee, comprising scholars from Oxford, Cambridge and London. The review panel spent nine months in honing their texts. The result of their labours, the Authorised Version of the Bible (or the King James Bible), could have been a bureaucratic disaster, a hotchpotch of muddle and compromise. It was nothing of the sort. It has become, deservedly, one of the great monuments of English. The secret of its success was a simple one. All the committees, but most especially the final review committee, paid close attention to what would sound good when read aloud. Furthermore, keeping to their mandate of making scriptures accessible, the translators stuck to a honed-down lexicon of just eight thousand words. (Shakespeare, by contrast, uses some twenty thousand.) The result was grand, spare, sonorous and easy to understand. Here, for example, are the famous words from John’s Gospel, given in some of the major versions of the Bible up to this point: AN ANGLO-SAXON VERSION (995):‘God lufode middan-eard swa, dat he seade his an-cennedan sunu, dat nan ne forweorde de on hine gely ac habbe dat ece lif’. WYCLIF (1380):‘For god loued so the world; that he gaf his oon bigetun sone, that eche man that bileueth in him perisch not: but haue euerlastynge liif’ TYNDALE (1534):‘For God so loveth the worlde, that he hath geven his only sonne, that none that beleve in him, shuld perisshe: but shuld have everlastinge lyfe.’ KING JAMES (1611):‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Sonne: that whosoever beleeveth in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ Among these different versions, Wyclif’s words, with their strange spellings and disconcerting rhythms, seem to us like ancient history. The Anglo-Saxon is ancient history. Tyndale’s version rings out almost as clear and modern as the King James version. But it is only in its final appearance that these lines find their feet; meaning, rhythm and weight coming together in perfect balance. That Bible in that version is one of the great monuments of our, or any, literature. (#ulink_de059b38-116c-5f8c-b748-e9b7bada15f9) It, every bit as much as Shakespeare, has shaped the language we use today. Whether we are fruitful and multiply or are at our last gasp, whether we serve two masters or cast our pearls before swine, whether we live by bread alone or off the fat of the land that flows with milk and honey, then in this den of thieves (for by their fruit shall we know them) we are quoting the Bible. If we have ears to hear, if nation should rise against nation, if we pass by on the other side, if we kick againstthe pricks, if we are full of good works or a law unto ourselves, if we say, ‘Doctor, heal thyself’, and if we take up our beds and walk (doubtless escorting the poor whom we have always with us), if we are present in spirit, if we suffer fools gladly, if we cry ‘Oh death, where is thy sting?’ then (be of good cheer) we are quoting the Bible. In short, where two or three are gathered together, we can but find that we live, move and have our being in the world that Wyclif, Tyndale and the King James translators created. The influence of that Bible lies in far more than just a couple of hundred famous phrases. As I was writing this chapter, I happened to pick up a copy of my third novel, The Sons of Adam, where I came across the following sentence: ‘Tom would be happy if all the kings of the earth had been turned overnight into ordinary people: shoe-shine boys, oil-riggers, commercial travellers, bums.’ That phrase ‘the kings of the earth’ is straight from the Authorised Version (Revelation 6:15 if you care to check) and it isn’t standard English today. ‘All the kings in the world’ would be more normal, or perhaps even ‘Every king on the planet’. But I had wanted a grander phrase than that, something to point up a contrast with the ‘ordinary people’ that followed. I’ve probably never read the relevant bit of Revelation and I certainly didn’t consciously reach for the language of King James, yet because I was after something sonorous, grand and spare, my subconscious took me there anyway—just as thousands of other writers have been led, wittingly or unwittingly, to the exact same source. That’s influence. That’s greatness. * (#ulink_817fd9ab-d01c-5b0c-98f5-ecb786a41d47) The same could be said of Luther’s 1534 German-language Bible, as much a literary landmark as a religious one. A WILDERNESS OF MONKEYS (#ulink_1cba227d-1e14-5ec2-b3da-353d86faece9) Shakespeare. What is there to say about him that hasn’t already been endlessly said? How to find a new angle on this most talked-about figure? In the end, mightn’t it be best just to sidestep the Bard and talk about other things instead? Except that one can’t. In a book on British exceptionalism, Shakespeare simply insists on being heard. In the onrushing torrent of history, his is one of the few individual rocks to jut out above the waters: not simply the man of his moment, a product of time and place, but a genius for all time. As far as Britain is concerned, only Newton occupies a similar place. Perhaps, at a long stretch, Darwin too. To avoid Shakespeare just because he’s too hard to talk about would leave an absence in this book so loud as to be deafening. Shakespeare was, of course, one of the greatest writers of his or any other age. The infuriating thing about him is his perfection. Most writers, even great ones, have their strengths and weaknesses. Dickens is, for all his glories, also sentimental and vulgar. Jane Austen, for all hers, wrote confidently only within very narrow limits and almost never strayed beyond them. Wordsworth is often pedestrian, Tennyson often stupid. That’s not to diss those writers, it’s just to note their human foibles. Shakespeare, curse the man, appeared to have none. Whether you want lyrical, stirring, witty, clever, romantic, sad, spiritual, angry, psychologically perceptive, evocative—anything at all—Shakespeare is up there with the very best of English or any other literature. He wrote in verse so totally unstrained you’d swear he drank pentameters with his mother’s milk. With other poets, even great ones like Milton, there’s always a sense of effort. The result may be wonderful, but you can smell the sweat. Not so with Shakespeare. The Bard, however, did something more for art than simply illuminate it for one shortish lifetime. He altered it—not just English literature, but Western literature—for ever. In particular (and this is a point brilliantly made by John Carey in his What Use Are the Arts?) he was the first writer ever to understand fully the possibilities of indistinctness in language—a blurry allusiveness, a sideways leap into the non-rational, the sudden electric crackle of subconscious connection. To see what I mean, consider (as Carey does) the following two snippets, both talking about jewels, both written by English playwrights, both dating from the 1590s. Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, Jacinth, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, The Jew of Malta Thou torturest me Tubal,—it was my turquoise, I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Merchant of Venice The Marlowe passage is perfectly decent writing. The length of his list suggests the depth and richness of the treasure. His adjectives bring in hints of feel, colour, light, even temperature. If you studied a how-to book on good writing, a decent student would probably come up with something like the bit from Marlowe. Shakespeare, however, simply overleaps these more pedestrian qualities. First, there’s that ‘thou torturest me Tubal’. All of a sudden, that turquoise isn’t just a precious stone, it’s become an instrument of psychic torture. Just four words in, and Shakespeare’s already outclassed Marlowe by a country mile. But then comes the phrase that makes Shylock’s turquoise really flash into being. Shylock says he wouldn’t surrender that stone ‘for a wilderness of monkeys’. What on earth does he mean? What wilderness? What monkeys? Why would monkeys be likely to inhabit a wilderness? More to the point, why should a wilderness of monkeys be valuable currency in any case? Cold logic would rate a wilderness of monkeys rather low down on any list of financial assets, so Shylock’s expostulation hardly suggests that the turquoise has value. Except that it does. Cold logic has nothing to do with it. Shylock cares so much about that damn stone that his reason almost deserts him, and it’s the inexpressible genius of that phrase to make us feel the stone, and Shylock, and the intensity of the moment, as though we were right there in the man’s head. That’s what Shakespeare can make of a one-off phrase. When he brings that same extra-logical suggestiveness into a sustained passage of poetry, no writer has ever touched him. Here’s a piece from Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra is mourning and praising her now-dead lover: His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm Crested the world; his voice was propertied As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends; But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas That grew the more by reaping; his delights Were dolphin-like, they showed his back above The element they lived in; in his livery Walked crowns and coronets, realms and islands were As plates dropped from his pocket. There’s no question that this is writing of the very highest quality. But could anyone paint a picture of the Antony that Cleopatra is talking about? His legs straddle the ocean, but only his dolphin-like back appears to be above water. His bounty is autumnal, although (perhaps because of all that orb-shaking) he has a habit of dropping island-sized dinner plates from his back pocket, presumably biffing those crowns and coronets on the way. Taken at face value, the passage is nonsense. This is mixed metaphor taken to the max. In Shakespeare’s hands, however, it (inevitably) works. Such work, however strange it must first have sounded, was too self-evidently brilliant to leave literature unaltered. On the contrary, however hard it was for other writers to follow that first example, follow it they would strive to do. The consequence has been that Shakespeare brought the vast richness of the inexplicable and extra-logical not just to English but to world literature. Writers since him may not have touched those heights, but they have a new resource to make use of, a new mode of expression, a new way to communicate meaning. In twenty-first-century writing, be it in English or Japanese, those methods are now routinely deployed. Though it would be easy for us to forget that such things have to be discovered, perfected and disseminated, we shouldn’t do so. Shakespeare was literature’s benefactor; that ‘wilderness of monkeys’ his remarkable gift. LAW (#ulink_75201de7-7913-507d-8465-04a0ffe50048) THE RUSTICS OF ENGLAND (#ulink_75201de7-7913-507d-8465-04a0ffe50048) In 1154, England acquired a new king: Henry II. Henry, grandson of William the Conqueror, was about as English as saucisson and baguettes. Not being English, he also had a very un-English drive for centralization and order. He put the barons in their place, knocking down any castles that hadn’t obtained regal planning permission; he streamlined the tax system; he overhauled record-keeping; and he turned his attention to the courts. From Anglo-Saxon times on, England had enjoyed the most developed state apparatus in Europe, including a set of shire and local ‘hundred’ courts. These courts did their job, up to a point. The laws they applied were mostly unwritten, customary hand-me-downs, passed from one generation to the next. The methods of trial were somewhat confused, being a mixture of the traditional trial-by-ordeal and the newfangled trial-by-jury, or indeed, sometimes by a hybrid of the two. If this was confusing, then so too was the law itself. The lack of clear central control meant that the law in Exeter represented something different from the law in Carlisle. No one had ever experienced or expected anything else, and the system worked at least as well as it did anywhere else, and quite likely a fair bit better. Yet Henry wasn’t a king willing to put up with anything so ramshackle. Legal disputes had a habit of ending up with the king himself. Although a court system existed, Henry could hardly delegate authority to it with a great degree of confidence that the system would actually deliver the effects expected of it. In place of those variable, regional, hard-to-control courts, he therefore instituted a new system of royal judges who roved the land, dispensing justice. The new judges combined local reach and royal power. Although justice came to the people just as it had always done, it now came with explicit royal authority and, particularly on the civil side, a common set of procedures and practices. No other European country had such an advanced or complete system. It was an English first. Yet the reform was a partial one, all the same. The courts had certainly been shaken up but, in terms of criminal proceedings, neither the laws nor modes of trial were much affected. Jury trial continued slowly to displace those trials-by-ordeal, which had been falling out of fashion not just in England but elsewhere. (And to begin with juries were asked only to decide questions of fact, not those of guilt or innocence. These things develop slowly.) The laws enforced were the same hand-me-downs as before. Yet no one argued for more radical reform. Back in twelfth-century England, no one was expecting or asking for any more—indeed, there wasn’t even a concept of what ‘more’ might be. So Henry left the system to bed in, while he rushed off to do other things, such as have Thomas ? Becket chopped to pieces in Canterbury Cathedral. (#ulink_8ecac68e-c291-5c80-9b2c-d26f19aff8d5) For the English, the period of radical change was over. For Europe, it was only just beginning. European monarchs faced the same problems as Henry, but they came up with a sharply different solution. Scholars at the Continent’s first true universities began to blow the dust off old Roman codes of law, and they liked what they saw. Roman law looked like the real deal: a universal law code; formal rules of evidence; professional judges—and the whole thing sanctified by its posh Roman origin. The ‘new’ Roman codes swept across the Continent like wildfire. In places like Sweden and northern France, where jury trials had once been used, such outmoded things were swept aside in the modernizing rush. And why not? The new Roman model was logical, scholarly, professional and modern. The system that had evolved in England looked rustic, antiquated, lowbrow and embarrassing. But which was better? Roman law contained one very liberal-sounding provision. In the effort to avoid false convictions, an accused man could only be convicted if (i) he made a full confession, or (ii) there were two sworn eyewitnesses to the crime. The provision sounded surprisingly liberal for the age, but it concealed a nasty catch. On the whole, criminals weren’t so monumentally stupid as to commit their crimes in the presence of two eyewitnesses, so, in most cases, the only route to conviction was via confession. But who would be so stupid as to confess? No one, of course—unless inducements were put in their way, and the inducement of choice was torture. In effect, Roman law was a law of torture. An entire jurisprudence of torture was concocted. Who could be tortured and for how long, by what methods, for which crime? Answers needed to be found to such questions—and were. Torture remained commonplace for centuries, lasting well into the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, England had no torture. It was unknown—indeed, forbidden—under the common law. It was down to juries to determine guilt or innocence, on the basis of evidence and common sense. The consequences of this difference are simply enormous. First, there’s quite simply the question of obtaining verdicts that made sense. A thirteenth-century English court was no doubt a pretty rudimentary place but, if you stood in the dock, you could at least rely on the fact that you were being judged by twelve ordinary blokes, sworn to a standard of truthful enquiry, considering matters on the basis of ordinary reason and evidence. On the Continent, by contrast, guilt or innocence was determined mostly by the accused’s capacity to resist torture. Hardened criminals with strong nerves could escape scot-free. The innocent with weaker nerves would be tortured, then convicted. Furthermore, whether or not guilt was ever determined, the accused had already been punished, in one of the least pleasant ways imaginable. Just as bad, Roman law established a system whereby paid agents of the state regularly inflicted cruelty of the worst sort on its citizens. The entire relationship of the individual to the state was imprinted by that basic power relationship. It was a terrible, terrible system and it endured for centuries. Nor was it only a characteristic of the state. The Church’s codes of justice were also Roman in inspiration, and the Church came to regard torture as an essential part of its soul-protection duties. (#ulink_ccf0d23a-550a-5f8e-814a-08b3812e11c1) When Philip IV wanted to crush the supposedly heretical Templar movement in France, he used torture widely and indiscriminately, with the knowledge and blessing of the Church. English kings too were under an obligation to eliminate heresy, but more or less refused to do so via torture. This English intransigence risked annoying the Holy Father. Pope Clement V wrote to Edward II, saying, ‘We hear that you forbid torture as being contrary to the laws of your land; but no state can override Canon Law, Our Law; therefore I command you at once to submit these men to torture…You have already imperilled your soul as a favourer of heretics…Withdraw your prohibition and we grant you remission of sins.’ The Pope, in other words, was ordering an English king to torture supposed heretics on pain of damnation. Edward formally gave way, but the Inquisition failed to establish itself in England: English soil would remain alien to its practices. Torture remained uncommon. The death penalty from religious courts remained rare. As for the provincialism of England’s rustic little methods, time was to change all that. Where the British Empire led, the common law followed. The United States has a version of common law. So do most other former colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Malaysia and numerous others. What’s more, Enlightenment Europe came to have a growing moral revulsion to its reliance on torture. The existence of the English model proved that there were other ways to do things; ways that didn’t involve a collapse of law and order. The English system was widely cited, widely copied. The Continent retained its civil law traditions, of course, but it adapted them. Torture went out; new evidential procedures came in. Cruelty began to drain out of that basic relationship between individual and the state. In the strange and unpredictable way of history, those old English rustics ended up shaping the law not merely of England, but half the world besides. * (#ulink_9dcb14d0-e865-53f0-b0e8-8c1255a60806) Becket’s murder could just have been a teeny misunderstanding, of course. History is as yet undecided. * (#ulink_ea831631-8220-59ad-87e7-6631a6cfa033) Nobody had anticipated this outcome when Roman codes were first introduced—but as we know, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. ‘NO FREE MAN…’ (#ulink_75201de7-7913-507d-8465-04a0ffe50048) It was the early thirteenth century. England was at war, the enemy was France, and England was coming off worse. When John, the English king, returned home, he faced an unprecedented degree of resentment from his barons, who were angry about a number of things, not least John’s failure to fulfil that most basic requirement of English kingship: to give the French a good walloping. Worse still, he’d managed to lose Normandy, home to many an Anglo-Norman grand-p?re and grand-m?re. Resentment led to rebellion. The rebellion was no moral crusade, and most barons either supported the king or remained studiedly neutral. The leading rebels, indeed, were lawless men with deep personal animosity towards the king, and interests stretching not much farther than their wallets. John, like any half-competent medieval monarch, knew just what to do: he wouldn’t negotiate with the rebels, he’d slaughter them. Events, however, ran away from him. The rebels seized London and forced John into a negotiated settlement. A treaty was drawn up, and incorporated into a legal agreement known as the Great Charter, or Magna Carta. On 15 June 1215, the king’s Great Seal was affixed to the final draft ‘in the meadow which is called Runneymede between Windsor and Staines’. The moment is one of those defining moments of English history: up there in ‘name recognition’ with the battles of Hastings and Waterloo, comfortably exceeding such seismic events as the Glorious Revolution for sheer memorability. But what exactly had happened? It wasn’t obvious then and isn’t so now. The answer, on the face of it, is not a lot. There are very few sweeping political statements in the charter. Most of its articles are yawn-inducingly dull, and virtually every clause has been repealed. We no longer rejoice at the freedoms given us by Clause 23: No town or person shall be forced to build bridges over rivers. Clause 31 doesn’t cause the Queen too many sleepless nights: Neither we nor any royal official will take wood for our castle…without the consent of the owner. Clause 35 is now mostly honoured in its breach: There shall be a standard width of dyed cloth, russett, and haberject, namely two ells within the selvedges. And the de Ath?e family has probably recovered from the humiliation of Clause 50: We will remove completely from their offices the kinsmen of Gerard de Ath?e…namely, Engelard of Cigogne, Peter, Guy, and Andrew of Chanceaux, Guy of Cigogne, Geoffrey of Martigny with his brothers, Philip Mark with his brothers and his nephew Geoffrey, and the whole brood of the same. What’s more, there was nothing especially unusual about the idea of a written charter between king and nobles. Medieval states across Europe lived in constant tension between the power of the centre and the power of the warlord-barons. As a result, kings were constantly drawing up agreements with their nobles. They had done so on the Continent and had done so in England, where precedent stretched back at least to Henry I. This particular charter seemed doomed from the start. John himself had only ever used the document as a kind of stalling tactic. His aim, still, was to repudiate the charter and slaughter the rebels. The rebels too hardly treated the treaty as sacrosanct, reneging instantly on their agreement to hand over London. For both sides, Magna Carta was a diversion from the real business, which would have to be settled at sword point. Sure enough, less than three months after Magna Carta, king and barons were at war again. The charter seemed to be dead and buried. It was nothing of the sort. The same realpolitik that had created the treaty in the first place brought it back from the dead. In 1216, a French army was on English soil, chasing John northwards through the country. The French seemed certain to succeed, but then John did the most brilliant thing of his career so far: he died. His son was speedily proclaimed Henry III, and the regency council reissued Magna Carta in order to rally support. The reissue may have been little more than a PR stunt, but if so it was one with stunning results. Backing for the French invaders flooded away. The French were forced to go back home. England had been spared a second conquest. For all this cynicism, the charter nevertheless remained about more than realpolitik and effective PR. No other medieval charter, in England or elsewhere, had ever contained such sweeping freedoms for the ordinary man. The very document had been addressed not only to nobles, in the manner of most such charters, but to all free men. Here in Article 1 comes the ringing statement from a king to his people: …We have also granted to all the free men of Our realm, for Ourselves and Our heirs forever, all the liberties written below, to have and to hold by them and their heirs from Us and Our heirs. It’s hard to know quite why the men negotiating Magna Carta had chosen to include such language. The rebel barons didn’t care a fig about the liberties of the man on the Clapham horse-and-cart. Most of the liberties mentioned had little enough to do with him anyway. But some did, two in particular. Articles 39 and 40 run as follows: 39: No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised [unlawfully dispossessed of land or property] or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. 40: To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice. At the time, these clauses meant less than now appears. For one thing, they applied to free men only, and many Englishmen were villeins bound to the manor and therefore not technically free. Furthermore, the two clauses initially had less significance than they came to accrue. Article 39 was not intended to guarantee trial by jury—it just came to mean that. Article 40 was not meant to prevent indefinite imprisonment without trial—but it too came to mean that. One of the most striking things about the agreement is precisely how it came to take on a deeper significance with every passing century. Arguably, though, the most startling innovation of Magna Carta lies in the largely forgotten Article 61. Almost the last article in the whole agreement, this clause set up a panel of twenty-five barons who would, in effect, supervise the king’s adherence to the agreement. If the king was found to fail then: …those five-and-twenty barons shall, together with the community of the whole land, distrain and distress us in all possible ways, namely, by seizing our castles, lands, possessions, and in any other way they can, until redress has been obtained as they deem fit, saving harmless our own person, and the persons of our queen and children;… In the political climate of the age, this proposal was simply nuts: a recipe for civil war. But, in the most dramatic way conceivable, it drove home the fact that the king was subject to the law. His ‘castles, lands, possessions’ were at stake if he broke the rules. This was a shockingly novel position. Under Roman law—the emerging law of continental Europe—the king was the rule-maker. It was no more possible for a king to bind himself than it was for the sun to scorch itself. In England, by contrast, the law was the law of the land, the common law, the semi-mythical law of Edward the Confessor and his Saxon predecessors. If the law had been there for centuries before the king and would be there for centuries after, then how could the king possibly claim a greater place? Clause 61 was dropped from every subsequent reissue of the agreement, but its spirit persisted and grew. Virtually all modern states today either practice the rule of law or pretend that they do. It’s perhaps the most revered political ideal in the world, more elemental than representative democracy, almost as ancient an ideal as political thought itself. But while the ancient Greeks may have originated the theory, the actual, effective practice was to come very much later. If you’re looking for the practical, rather than theoretical, origin of the rule of law, then there you have it, in Article 61 of Magna Carta. For the first time in the post-Roman world, a king had become a subject in his own kingdom, servant to the law and the ‘community of the whole land’. It was an example that first England, then the rest of the world, would come to respect and emulate; a Runnymede acorn whose roots now cover the globe. A HANDFUL OF FEATHERS (#ulink_75201de7-7913-507d-8465-04a0ffe50048) Theft is illegal. It always has been. If you nick something and get caught, you will be prosecuted under the Theft Act of 1968, which says in the very first sentence of the very first paragraph: A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it. Easy, huh? But what if you stole something in 1967, the year before the act was passed? Well, prior to the 1968 act, there was the Larceny Act of 1916. That act didn’t have one neat way to categorize theft. In fact, you don’t need to get very far into its definitions before the eyes start to goggle: A person steals who, without the consent of the owner, fraudulently and without a claim of right made in good faith, takes and carries away anything capable of being stolen with intent, at the time of such taking, permanently to deprive the owner thereof; provided that a person may be guilty of stealing any such thing notwithstanding that he has lawful possession thereof, if, being a bailee or part owner thereof, he fraudulently converts the same to his own use or the use of any person other than the owner: The expression ‘takes’ includes obtaining the possession (a) by any trick; (b) by intimidation; (c) under a mistake on the part of the owner with knowledge on the part of the taker that possession has been so obtained; (d) by finding, where at the time of the finding the finder believes that the owner can be discovered by taking reasonable steps; The expression ‘carries away’ includes any removal of anything from the place which it occupies, but in the case of a thing attached, only if it has been completely detached;… All this just seems weirdly complex—‘completely detached’ from reality, indeed—and so it was. The contorted definitions arose, however, because the 1916 act was trying to bring order not simply to previous acts of parliament, but to the entire area covered by the common law. And what was the common law? Quite simply this: it was the laws of the land as judges had found and interpreted them. Edwardian judges looked at the precedents laid down by Victorian judges, who in turn had looked at the precedents set by Georgian judges, who in turn had looked at the precedents set by their predecessors, who in their turn… Although the unbroken chain of precedent does not run as far back as the courts of the twelfth century and Henry II, the mode of deciding cases has always looked to the past. Questions of fact were decided by juries or by ordeal; questions of law always relied on a kind of collective memory of the unwritten law, the laws and customs of the land. In effect, those judges of Henry’s court determined that theft was illegal because theft had been illegal for as long as anyone could remember. As with theft, so with most other offences. It wouldn’t even be true to say that the origins of English law are lost in the mists of time. That implies that if we only knew more, we’d be able to locate a source. And we wouldn’t. No such unitary source has ever existed. Little wonder that by the time of the 1916 Larceny Act, the law of theft had become a tangled jungle almost too dense to pierce. Because we’re used to it, the oddness of all this is easy to miss. A modern parliament is a huge law-passing machine, and the cases adjudicated by today’s courts are constantly bumping up against the rules laid down by some act of parliament. Yet this modern rule-making is a very recent phenomenon. When did parliament first outlaw theft in its most general form? In 1300?; 1500?; some time in the seventeenth century? Not a bit of it. The first really general attempt to outlaw theft was in that Theft Act of 1968—everything else had just been an attempt to get old common law practices and the mish-mash of parliamentary statutes into some sort of order. Even now, there are giant areas of law where common, not statute, law rules entirely. I’m on the point of selling the house I’m now writing in. When my buyer and I sign the contract of sale, that contract will be binding on us both, and enforceable through the courts. That does not mean, however, that I’m protected by some act of parliament. I’m not. There simply is no basic law of contract on the statute books. It doesn’t exist, and most likely never will. My fundamental protection is that when Henry’s royal judges came to systematize the law, they thought that contracts should be honoured and made sure that they were. No one would ever choose to build from scratch a legal system that looks like ours, any more than you’d choose to build a skyscraper by starting with a henhouse and then just improvising. Britain, however, is a country where very few of our most important institutions have been built from scratch. They tend to be ramshackle affairs: cobbled together, patched, altered, repaired, made to last another few years. At the heart of most institutional skyscrapers in Britain—the law, parliament, the monarchy—you’ll find splintering timbers and a handful of feathers. No one in their right minds would set out to do things like this. But—as long as you’re British—it’s an approach that works. FROM THE SAME MUD (#ulink_75201de7-7913-507d-8465-04a0ffe50048) There’s a joke doing the rounds which, in one of its versions, goes something like this. In a recent survey, those living in England/Wales/Scotland were asked whether they thought of themselves primarily as British or as English/Welsh/Scots. An overwhelming 68 per cent of respondents replied, ‘Polish.’ Five hundred years ago, similar jokes wouldn’t have involved the answer ‘Polish’, but they might well have named the Welsh, or Cornish, or Irish, or any other regional grouping. Then as now, migration was feared. Then as now, migrants were seen (by some people, some of the time) as bearers of disease, crime and immorality; speakers of funny-sounding English; thieves of jobs and women; scroungers too idle to work. Inevitably also, then as now, there were people keen to make a bob or two by exploiting these fears. One such person was a Kentish tax-collector, Thomas Harman, who in 1566 published his Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, vulgarly called Vagabonds. The book, which seems to have been something of a publishing sensation, categorized the scams, frauds and deceptions of these wandering migrants. Among many other types, Harman identified: ABRAM MEN (or Abraham men, Bethlem men, Poor Toms) Those feigning madness and claiming to have been resident in Bedlam. PALLIARDS (or Clapperdudgeons) Those begging alms, but selling what they’re given. Often Irish with false passports, or Welshmen using herbs to raise wounds on their legs, thus counterfeiting infirmity. UPRIGHT MEN Skilled professional thieves and beggars, though both able-bodied and experienced at a trade or in service. JARKMAN (or Patrico) Forger of licences. WHIPJACKS Those pretending to be shipwrecked sailors on their way home. PRIGGERS OR PRANCERS Horse thieves. DUMMERERS Beggars pretending deafness. COUNTERFEIT CRANKS Those pretending to suffer from the ‘falling sickness’. Often use false testimonials from Shropshire. Harman’s categorization of women was particularly complex. Kinchin morts were young female rogues, dells virginal ones, doxies those who had had their virginity taken by an upright man. Walking morts were unmarried female rogues, autem morts their married (but still promiscuous) equivalents. Bawdy baskets were female pedlars of any marital status. Most of the concerns that Harman was keenest to fan into life are recognizable to us today. Foreignness was much feared. Egyptians or gypsies were probably the scariest outsiders, the Irish next, then perhaps the Welsh. Harman gives a lot of prominence to accusations of crime, fraudulent claims on charity, and immorality. The unreliability of identity documents strikes a chord today, as does the deep unease of the settled at the presence of the mobile in their midst. Harman also sounds another note, however, so disconcertingly contemporary that we hardly expect to find it in the mid-sixteenth century. The opening sentence of the book’s dedication reads: As of auncient and long tyme there hath bene, and is now at this present many good godly profitable lawes and actes made and set forth in this most noble and flourishing realme, for the reliefe, succour, comfort and sustenacion of the pore, nedy, impotent and miserable creatures, beeing and inhabiting in all partes of the same. Harman (who never used one word when half a dozen would do) goes on to make the point that the rogues outlined in the book are preying on these ‘good godly’ laws to the detriment of everyone else. The upright men, for instance, know ‘Sommerset shyre, Wyll shyre, Barke shyre, Oxforde shyre, Harforde shyre, Myddilsex, Essex, Suffolke, Northfolke, Sussex, Surrye, and Kent as the chiefest and best shyres of relief’, and ‘have so good lyking in their lewde lecherous loyteringe’ for these places that they’ll brave any possible punishment to remain. At its core, in fact, Harman’s book is an attack on benefit fraud. Eh? We tend to think of benefit fraud as being very much a by-product of the twentieth-century welfare state. To the extent that there were any measures at all for the relief of the poor in centuries before that, we think of them as so utterly awful—all gruel, whippings and the workhouse—that the idea that anyone might seek out such relief seems far fetched to the point of loopy. Not so. Although Harman (like his modern-day descendants) is hardly a reliable guide to the social scene he claims to describe, he was absolutely right to suggest that the Tudor welfare state was very much alive and kicking. Its roots ran deep. Back in the thirteenth century, the state played little or no role in ensuring social welfare, but the Church most certainly did. Everyone was required to pay one tenth of their income to the Church, of which one third was—at least in theory—reserved for the relief of the poor. For additional requirements, such as Christian burial of the indigent, additional collections were held. The arrangements mixed compulsion with volunteerism, backed by a powerful medieval Christian ideology of charitable work that would find its reward in the afterlife. Different localities found different ways to tackle the problem, but whatever the methods, broadly speaking, they worked. One historian has suggested that no century until the wealthy twentieth century was kinder to its poor. Changing times, however, brought changing problems. As the pace of change in agriculture picked up, displacing the landless and swelling the towns, it became increasingly clear that large swaths of the poor had been made poor through acts of man, not God, and that the older methods of poor relief were no longer sufficient. The time-honoured ideology of the societas christiana, the Christian society, wasn’t replaced, but it became buttressed by an emphasis on civitas, the responsibility of civil society to make good its own failures. In 1536, a new poor relief bill was brought before parliament. Although parliament had considered and passed numerous poor relief measures in the past, this one was newly radical in its scope. The bill acknowledged that poverty might have causes other than ‘visitation of God’ and the pauper’s ‘own default’. It aimed at relieving poverty of every kind. A national council would provide wages, food and medical care for the able unemployed, who would be given employment on public works, mostly transport related. The whole project would be financed by the king and his wealthier subjects, with further voluntary contributions from everyone in every parish. The bill was too much. It went too far for the spirit of the age, and parliament ended up settling for a more traditional bill—urging charity for those in genuine need, while at the same time imposing tough measures on the able-bodied vagabond. A succession of further bills prodded restlessly at the same barrage of issues. Should vagabonds be whipped, stocked or bound over as slaves? Should the impotent poor be prohibited from begging, allowed to beg freely or permitted to beg only under licence and if wearing a badge? But for all parliament’s vacillation, the drift was towards a more organized social response to need. In 1570—that is, while Harman’s Caveat was still selling like hot buns on a cold night—the city of Norwich launched a sweeping anti-poverty crusade that offered skills training, education, health-care, work and custodial support. The city employed thirty-four physicians and other practitioners (one third of them women) to offer care. A census was taken to establish who was sick, who old and who disabled, in order that the city authorities could take due responsibility for their care. Norwich was ahead of the game, but the country was moving fast in the same direction. A bout of poor harvests in the 1580s, then again in the 1590s, brought matters to a head. The displaced poor had become a serious social problem. Would the country choose to act decisively or ignore the problem? It chose to act. The Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601 were a radical step forward in the state care of the poor. Overseers were to be appointed in every parish to dispense funds for poor relief, which were to be raised by compulsory taxation. Overseers were to provide cash for food, and, if needed, medical care and housing as well. Work was to be provided for those who were poor but able-bodied. This was no mere paper law. The system actually did what was asked of it. Overseers were appointed, taxes were levied, poor relief funds were distributed. The Elizabethan Poor Laws—themselves the product of a long-established parish-centred tradition—formed the most generous, the most comprehensive and the most uniform system of social welfare anywhere in Europe. Indeed, one of its most striking features was its endurance. It was inevitable, for example, that from time to time those in power would become anxious about the cost of the system, and seek to restrict the payments made by parish overseers. Yet those overseers stuck to their task, and were more often than not supported by magistrates in so doing. The law required them to relieve poverty. To a highly impressive degree, that’s exactly what they tried to do. In 1696 (the date of the earliest vaguely reliable estimate), the system distributed just under 1 per cent of national income, or enough to help about 3.5 per cent of the population. A hundred years later, the system swallowed 2 per cent of national income and reached 10-15 per cent of the population. Private charitable and Church-mediated endeavours would have added signficantly to these totals. Migrants continued to arouse fear and suspicion. One of the great themes of poor law reform would be the tension between returning vagabonds to their parish of origin and seeking to permit the labour force enough mobility to keep up with a changing economy. But such concerns, as is amply clear to us, will never go away. Economies change. Labour moves. Generous benefit provision simultaneously helps the poor and attracts the cheats. Those Polish jokes (or Irish, Welsh or Cornish ones), like the poor, will be always with us. There’s a broader lesson in all this, though, and one that touches on one of the roots of British identity. One of the themes of this book is how very capitalist England, and later Britain, was. Long before the Industrial Revolution, England was the most capitalist society in Europe. Yet where is the red-in-tooth-and-claw energy of that capitalism now? The other day I listened to a radio phone-in that was discussing the need for proper regulation of estate agents. (In my defence, I should point out that it was a long journey and the only alternative was The Archers.) The presenter took it for granted that estate agents should be better regulated. The professional body of estate agents, whatever that is, agreed that regulation was needed. Every caller to the programme agreed that regulation was overdue. Not a single dissenting voice was raised. Why not? Had this been the USA, wouldn’t someone have phoned in to say something along the lines of: ‘Now I don’t like realtors any more than the next guy, but if there’s one thing I hates worse than a goldarn realtor, it’s the goldarn government poking its cotton-pickin’ nose into other people’s business’? In America, the market’s ability to weed out the scammers and incompetents is trusted more widely than the government’s. Why is this voice more or less inaudible in Britain? What has happened to those capitalist ultras of the past? The answer is that those capitalist ultras never forgot their social responsibilities. Ours has been a radically capitalist society for sure, but it also led the way in the protection of the needy. In part, it stood at the forefront of things because its state institutions functioned very well, very early. In Elizabeth’s England, it was possible to pull a parliamentary lever and effect the proper response in virtually every parish in the country. Less well-functioning states couldn’t have achieved that trick, even if they’d wanted to. But the English parliament didn’t simply have the power to pull that lever: it actually pulled it and made sure that it stayed pulled. Although members of parliament were property owners, and therefore would be paying for the Poor Law rather than profiting from it themselves, the swell of opinion remained solidly in favour of effective poor relief. In short, as a society, our national ideology has long been both that the government should protect the vulnerable and that it’s more than capable of doing so. William Bromyard, an English Dominican of the fourteenth century, wanting to remind his readers that social rank had nothing to do with intrinsic value, wrote that all ‘are descended from the same first parents and all come from the same mud’. As a society, we believed that then and very largely still believe it now, whether we’re English, Welsh, Scots—or Polish. THE LAWMAKERS (#ulink_25b6cd56-f836-5885-aa2d-6ae60b17172c) A BETTIR LAWE (#ulink_25b6cd56-f836-5885-aa2d-6ae60b17172c) To judge them by their constitutions, most states are short-lived creatures, generally living no longer than a single human lifespan. Germany, Italy and Japan all acquired their founding documents in the wake of the Second World War. Since the fall of the Bastille, France has been through two empires and five republics, and has existed in its current incarnation only since 1958. Canada, being somewhat British, is something of an oddity and only formally acquired authority over its own constitution in 1982. Seen through this lens, the ‘New World’ of the United States is really no such thing, as the country boasts the oldest written constitution still operative today. And Britain? It’s a conventional politeness to say that we have no written constitution, but the phrase is a figleaf, concealing nakedness. The point of a constitution, after all, is to place limits on politicians. Ordinary legislative acts generally need just a simple majority to get them into law. Changes to the constitution require something much more significant: two-thirds majorities, approval by states or provinces, plebiscites or whatever. Britons enjoy no such protections. If a prime minister wanted to repeal Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights or any of the Representation of the People Acts, he could do so, with no more legal machinery in his way than would exist if he wanted to tinker with the last Fisheries Act but one. If our attitude to our own state machinery looks almost shockingly laid back, then the state opening of parliament suggests one possible reason: namely that the whole thing is just some giant kitsch pantomime thrown together as a joke played on passing Americans. The cast list includes the Lord Great Chamberlain, Black Rod, the Serjeant-at-Arms, the Lord Privy Seal and the Yeomen of the Guard (who are made to hunt for imaginary barrels of gunpowder in the cellars). The props list incorporates the Royal Standard, the Great Sword of State, the Imperial State Crown, the Cap of Maintenance, the Mace and very much more. All this sounds like Harry Potter crossed with Alice in Wonderland; Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. 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