As Old as the Hills

Like space, the past is always nearer than we think. As a boy, I knew a woman who once cut Thomas Hardy’s hair. For his part, Hardy knew an old countryman who had set eyes on Napoleon when the Bellerophon put into Plymouth Sound, en route to St Helena. The Napoleonic Wars are just three human lifetimes away and if you get to my age you will know that a lifetime is no vast span. Anthropologists have a thing called the ‘long generation’ – the era extending from the birth of one person to the death of the latest-born person that he or she could have met. This is where it gets hair-raising. As James Hawes puts it, in the foreword to his exhilarating The Shortest History of England (2021), ‘Seven long generations . . . the old and the young holding hands – and we are back at the Battle of Hastings.’ This inspires the same sort of vertigo as the knowledge that standing in central London you are nearer to outer space than you are to, say, Market Harborough.

History books fall into two main camps: those that bring out the deep strangeness and difference of the past, and those that emphasize the continuities. The best, like The Shortest History, do both. In its 288 pages Hawes’s book stresses the continuities of English life over 2,000 years, but he also shows how these resurface with new names and in startling new forms. If the past is another country, it is one from which we can never gain independence. Hawes demonstrates that many things we think of as new or newish – the ‘North–South divide’, political polarization and tribalism – are as old as the hills. Literally. For Hawes, the indispensable key to English history is the Jurassic Divide – a boundary line running north-north-east from the Exe estuary to the mouth of the Humber. On one side are the relatively young sedimentary rocks of lowland England, on the other the old rocks of the West Country moors, Wales and the Marches, the Pennines and Scotland. Hawes contends that this physical divide underlies virtually every other divide in English history – social, eco­nomic, political or cultural. The geological map fits uncannily with all those other maps that appear throughout his book: Roman villa civilization c. AD300 or Church of England attendance c. 1850 or election results in the 1950s. More than any other factor, Hawes argues, this schism has created the shape and character of our history. Underneath the colourful familiar pageant of kings, queens, battles and Reform Acts there is a rock-hard determinism: geology is destiny. The bulk of the book is an attempt to show how this stark thesis works out in events, from Caesar’s landing at Ebbsfleet to Brexit and beyond. The south-east had always been the most settled part of the country and would be the only English region to be truly Romanized. In the Anglo-Saxon era, this would be reinforced by the Viking con­quest of Northumbria and much of Mercia: for centuries the North would remain closer in some ways to the Norse world than to Kent or Wessex. Even with the unification of England in the tenth century, there would be repeated rebellions by northern chiefs, often in alli­ance with the native Welsh – a pattern that Hawes identifies as one of the master templates of our history. A recurrent theme is that England has only known unity when the elite has been strong enough to impose it. So, although the Normans created a unified ruling class – and arguably made England a cultural unit for the first time – the waning of the medieval world would show the old divides still in place. For all their shifting alliances, the Wars of the Roses reveal a stubborn underlying pattern, with the House of Lancaster very much Team North. Beneath the religious issues, the Reformation can be seen as a consolidation of southern power through the creation of a new Protestant elite. And the Civil Wars stand as a last-ditch attempt by the ‘dark corners of the land’ to resist domination by the southern Parliament. The North would only be resurgent with the Industrial Revolution and the growth of the great northern cities. Ironically, the main effect of political reform in the nineteenth century would be the re- emergence of old tribalisms: nationalism in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and a solid Tory bloc in the south-east. To compete, the Liberal Party would have to unite the votes of the North with those of the ‘Celtic fringes’. But this could only be done by placating nationalism, thus threatening the integrity of the UK and the very coalition they were seeking to build. The paradox would be inherited in still sharper form by Labour: when it came to the electoral politics of the twentieth century, ‘the battle lines were the same as in 1461, 1642 or 1848’. The thesis is complicated by the other great divide in English soci­ety: that of class. Hawes argues that England’s peculiar class system sometimes reinforced the North–South divide but often cut across it. After 1066 England would never be a normal country, with its own native elite. Rather, access to the ruling class would be via adoption of French language, education and manners. The armies of Edward I or Edward III would consist of English foot soldiers under French-speaking cavalry commanders, ‘the ancestors of the “Ruperts” whom modern English soldiers secretly despise but still obey’.

But surely all this changed with education, widening suffrage and a democratic common culture? Hawes is sceptical. His short, jaun­diced account of the English class system concludes with the expansion of higher education under Blair: Any teenager with ambition now thought it was just natural to leave your home, family, friends and region . . . and spend your formative years in a monoculture of other ambitious and uprooted young people . . . Millions imbibed a whole set of values unlike those of their parents or schoolmates: individual choice in all things, internationalism and political liberalism . . . It was like learning French in medieval England . . .

On Brexit, Hawes’s analysis is a familiar one: that in 2016 there was a populist pushback against ‘the elites’, involving a realignment of the North with the Tory-voting South. Although he declines to rehash old arguments, it seems clear that for him Brexit runs counter to everything that English history has to tell us – about our necessary entanglement with Europe, about the perilously divided nature of England itself. His last chapter, mischievously entitled ‘Ourselves, Alone’ (a literal translation of ‘Sinn Féin’), anticipates the dissolution of the UK and the emergence, at last, of England as an independent nation state:

The UK will be buried and the English will emerge, blinking, from their long submersion within the empires of the elites, to find themselves alone in the big, bad world and as divided as ever . . . The battle of England itself is about to begin.

Clearly, The Shortest History is a thesis-driven book: Hawes’s turbo- charged North–South thesis flashes its lights, grinds its gears and is not about to give way. I can understand why a reader might be wary. Any this-one-thing-explains-everything idea can edge towards con­spiracy theory at worst or a slick kind of business or self-help writing at best. And, of course, the political situation has changed once again since Hawes wrote in 2020. But don’t be put off. Even if you remain unconvinced by the argument – and I find it more convincing than not – there is plenty here to savour. What I really enjoy about history is the things you pick up in passing, and in this respect Hawes’s book is an all-you-can-eat buffet. Did you know that a few years after the Conquest the Anglo-Saxon elite left Britain in 300 ships to found the first ‘New England’ – in the Crimea? Or that in 1912 Churchill as Home Secretary drew up a plan for Home Rule All Round – devolution in Scotland and Wales and the division of England into self-governing regions? Hawes also has a way with an eye-popping statistic: we learn that in the early nineteenth century a quarter of Britons spoke no English, that in 1946 the UK spent 44 per cent of its GDP on defence, and that some four months into his first term as prime minister Tony Blair enjoyed an approval rating of 93 per cent. There are brilliant, haunting asides on matters ranging from the Shakespearean stage to the lost Romano-British language (which survives only in ‘dream-like fragments’ such as the counting rhyme yan-tan-tethera). I can see the book being quarried by examining boards for years to come: Hawes has a gift for tersely provocative summings-up that seem to be followed by an unspoken ‘discuss’:

The philosophy of Karl Marx . . . is really an extreme version of High Victorian liberalism: the fact of the worldwide British Empire created the fantasy of the worldwide Socialist Revolution.

If the book’s argument can seem overbearing, it is leavened by a lively sense of irony and the ever-potent Law of Unforeseen Consequences. Much of the content is surprising, yet Hawes eschews cheap revisionism; the account of the Battle of Britain, for example, is refreshingly anti-contrarian (‘The RAF won, and the world was saved’). The Shortest History is a book you could read in a couple of sittings and think about, on and off, for the rest of your life. It reminds me in this of another short, dark rumination on British history, albeit one written from a very different perspective and sensibility: The Flutes of Autumn by the poet and archaeologist Peter Levi. In a par­ticularly eerie passage Levi writes:

It may be that the old underlying map of tribal England . . . has not been eroded by time but intensified. Those mysterious boundaries that marketing surveys discover between prefer­ences for different food or drink still correspond to the tribal divisions of Britain.

This sense of the deep past surviving mysteriously in the present is one that I have always found thrilling, if unnerving. The truths of our history seem at times like those ‘shadow sites’ that lurk unseen in the landscape – the ghosts of ancient fields or forts or settlements that are visible only from the air or when the sun strikes low on a summer evening. When I finished Hawes’s book I thought, as I often do these days, of the summing-up in William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball:

I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name. I thought also of lines by Geoffrey Hill: Whatever may be meant by moral landscape, it is for me increasingly a terrain seen in cross-section: igneous, sedimentary, conglomerate, metamorphic rock- strata, in which particular grace, individual love, decency, endurance, are traceable across the faults.