on national myths, the end of britain and the return of england

Below is a long essay on Arthurian myth, English nationalism and Christianity, in part a review of Bijran Omrani’s book God is an Englishman but extending to Aidan Nichols, David Jones, Tolkien, Spenser and Old English poetry. It is a companion of sorts to last year’s essay on David Jones. It’s paywalled because I hoped to publish more on Substack last month but was caught up with some freelance commissions and with the podcast, which is now up to six episodes.

It was strange, through August and September, to see St George’s flags and Union Jacks hoisted on flagpoles and lampposts around the country; stranger still, having grown up accustomed to Welsh flags stickered on car bumpers and present in almost every home, to see the revulsion these flags engendered and the bitter debates about which flag, if any, should be flown. The establishment’s messaging was confused: Starmer appeared in Downing St before St George’s flag bunting while other MPs stuck to posting selfies with the Union Jack, trying to ride the wave of nationalist feeling without lowering themselves by association with an English flag and its associations of yobbishness, small-minded racism and working class culture (recall Emily Thornberry’s controversial tweet.) Robert Jenrick was attacked by those further to the right who read his photos of the Union Jack as civic nationalist cowardice. A distinct English nationalism is emerging, not just as a populist phenomenon but reflected in the political thinking of the elite—take ‘Anglofuturism’, a broad movement generally affiliated with the tech right, which ten years ago would surely have identified its tenets as ‘British’ rather than ‘Anglo.’

Growing up in Wales, there was never any political touchiness about our flag. I felt little association with the Union Jack, which seemed the flag of England, but plenty of easy loyalty to the dragon. I grew up speaking Welsh every weekday in school, where English was forbidden, and each year when the Eisteddfod rolled around we pulled out the patriotic songs and folk dances that carried none of the right-wing connotations of their English equivalents. Patriotism and a sense of belonging came naturally and without controversy. English identity is more sensitive and, having been drowned out by Britishness for several centuries, comes less naturally. When it re-emerges, it comes with a sharper political edge, making certain claims about what England and the English are and ought to be.

This is odd given England’s pedigree. English identity is older and more coherent than Welsh or British identity, having a strong claim to the first articulation of national identity outside the Old Testament. When Bede wrote the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, completed in 731 in his Northumbrian monastery, he was calling forth a notion of the ‘English people’ which as yet had no political reality. The territory which would become England was divided in seven kingdoms—East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, Sussex, and Wessex—and the kin groups from which their kings were drawn thought of themselves as ‘West Saxons’ or ‘Angles’ rather than English. Bede’s model for ‘the English people’ was biblical, based on the Old Testament model of the Jewish people—composed of many tribes, the Israelites became a gens insofar as they had a divine commission. The English gens had a similar role in Bede’s theology: their political division on the ground and the absence of a unified English identity mattered little for his purpose, which was to show that England’s conversion to Christianity had a particular significance in God’s outworking of salvation history. The English were a chosen people even if they were not yet an ethnic or civic unit.

In the reign of Alfred the Great, who did more than any other king to promote the use of English and the writing and teaching of English literature, the term ‘Angelcynn’ was used to describe the whole English people. In the preface to his translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care into English, Alfred clearly used ‘Angelcynn’ to refer to the collected peoples of the English kingdoms and used ‘Englisc’ to refer to their language. It is a mistake, as modern translations do, to render ‘Angelcynn’ as ‘England’; Alfred’s syntax laments the decline of learning among the ‘Angelcynn’ (‘among the English-kind’) rather than using a metonym like ‘England’. Though Alfred would never rule over all of England, he was styled in charters after 886 as ‘rex Angul-Saxonum’, representing a first attempt and a clear desire to give his imagined ‘Angelcynn’ a real political referent in the union of English kingdoms.

Alfred’s project reached its pinnacle with his law code, the Dōmbōc, which began with the Ten Commandments of Mosaic Law affixed several earlier law codes—those of Æthelberht of Kent, Ine of Wessex and Offa of Mercia—and culminated with Alfred’s own laws. The earlier law codes had claimed authority only within their own territories, but Alfred went further in drawing together the laws of England’s various kingdoms to construct a unified legal lineage for the Angelcynn, one which stretched back to and claimed its authority from Moses. In the ninth century, a unified England was still an idea without political referent. But by the eleventh century, as Patrick Wormald wrote, ‘it is an ineluctable if startling fact that the words “Engla-Lond” and “Englisc” were being used […] very much as “England and ‘English’ are used today.’1

Wormald argued that a ‘well-established ethnicity’ had been established even before an English state emerged in the first half of the tenth century. Given that the English ruling class were replaced wholesale at the Norman Conquest, Wormald argued that the uninterrupted continuity of ‘England’ could not have survived ‘unless a sense of English identity had penetrated towards the roots of society.’2 Against the view, popularised in the 1980s and 1990s by Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm among others, that nations and nationalism only emerged in the nineteenth century, Wormald and other medieval historians have argued for the deep roots of the English nation—preceding even state formation and having real resonance among the population rather than being mere constructions of elite ideology. The Anderson model might be retroactively applied to Bede or Alfred—elites constructing an imagined community for their own ideological purposes—but Wormald’s thesis suggests that these ideas became deeply inculturated, forming a seam of national feeling which continued through centuries, perhaps eliding the historical record but liable to re-emerge and make their mark once more.