The Winners And The Loosers
As I Am Creating this Blog Queen Elizabeth II is Dead
I might very briefly connect this with what is universally acknowledged to be the most exciting topic in English history,
which is the topography of the English landscape and its impact on lives and communities.
Or at least, universally acknowledged within the vicinity of the shed. Those members who have listened to the Life and Landscape in ASE series will know what I am talking about when I refer to the different types of lowland England, planned and ancient.
What follows is therefore the excrutiatingly summarised super summary. You might divide England, or indeed Britain into very broad groups
– Highland, planned lowland and ancient lowland. You might do this, while covering yourself in grovelling apology for the vast swathe of generalisation in such a phrase,
but then ignore that and go for it with enthusiasm. Within the lowland regions of England, broadly to the East Midlands and south, two quite different traditions were followed;
I will dig out a copy of Oliver Rackham’s map and put it on the website so that you can see what and where I mean.
In a process that started in late Anglo Saxon England, the good people of England began to follow different agricultural practices according to the strengths and characteristics of their land.
In a wide swathe of area, from the mid-south coast up through the midlands and into Norfolk and up through Lincolnshire and the east coast, the countryside leant itself to arable farming.
Communities organised themselves into open field systems, those same open field systems whose enclosure we keep talking about now.
I say ‘communities organised themselves’ and that of course belongs to the polyanna view of the process and needs heavy qualification;
in many cases, the process was top down, either encouraged or even forced on the inhabitants by landowners looking to rationalise their manors.
But often it was indeed a bottom up process. So, where this happened, profound changes came with it
However, other areas were less suitable for arable, generally areas of upland, or fen. The wealds of Kent and Sussex, the lowlands of Essex and Suffolk and Breckland in Norfolk, the Chiltern hills, the uplands of western England towards the Welsh borders. So, in these places, land was often never enclosed, and the economy might always have focussed on pasture, individual farms with integrated resources. The land around these individual farms would not be planned and re-laid out in medieval days as they would have been in open field countryside, but retained in their ancient configuration. There would be shared rights in common but probably less extensive. These areas might be referred to as Ancient countryside, because that reworking has not taken place, or sometimes it will be called wood:pasture, to reflect the agricultural bias towards livestock and woodland farming
Finally, it’s the most exciting thing in the word because the lives of our ancestors remain etched on the landscape. For this you need Oliver Rackham’s History of the Countryside, or Richard Muir Reading the Landscape; although I should note by the way that the recognition of this basic division in lowland England has long been recognised, it’s not a recent realisation, antiquarians of the 16th century wrote of it. But just on a basic level, if you travel through, say, the smallest county, Rutland, Multum in Parvo, or the Chiltern Hills north west of London the you will see a basic difference. Rutland is champion land – champion not from the sense of a from a George Formby movie or a wonder horse, but from the French ‘campagne’ open countryside. There you will find the traditional nucleated English village in gorgeous deep yellow ironstone, you will find relatively few footpaths, you will find largely straight-ish roads that lead logically from A to B, relatively thin hedgerows of 1 or two plants in width. If you drive through the Chiltern hills, yes, you come to some villages since of course the world has been built on a bit since industrialisation, but you will also see a world of isolated farmhouses, there are footpaths all over the place, the road system is also much more higgledy piggledy.
The British Empire is still very much alive and kicking
Like many fascinated by British history, I have always been interested in the rise, fall and legacy of the British Empire, and tried to comprehend the subtleties, nuances and stories of it beyond simplistic narratives.
In recent years I have wanted to buy an original map of the British Empire at or near to its peak. In the last few months of the 2014 indyref I spoke to a couple of antiquarian map dealers in Charing Cross in London.
I explained to one that my search was not pro or anti-Empire, but that this endeavour had existed and defined a lot of what Britain and Britishness was.
One told me that such maps – usually school maps – were very difficult to get hold of as they were topped and tailed by wooden straps and these tended to stretch and break.
Fast forward to two weeks ago. I was on a trip to Glasgow Salvage in Paisley, run by Scott and Stuart
The last conventional decolonisations of the British Empire were the emergence of Zimbabwe in 1979-80 and Belize in 1981;
while the motley crew of British Overseas Territories from the Falkland Islands to the Cayman Islands and Bermuda are remnants of Empire (more on which below). Spain run by the Franco dictatorship until 1975 relinquished
Equatorial Guinea in 1968; while Portugal – a fascist dictatorship until the ‘Carnation Revolution’ of 1974
– only decolonised in 1974-75 resulting in bitter struggles on Angola and Mozambique.
Such maps formed a backdrop to the lives of so many of us and stayed up on classroom walls when Empire was supposedly a thing of the past.
I have a distinct memory of such a map being on the wall at Ardler Primary in Dundee until at least 1975, and remember it vividly. For one,
I was fascinated by maps, geographies and topographies, and was very curious about the political and administrative changes which dated maps and made current maps historical.
I remember Ceylon becoming Sri Lanka, East Pakistan emerging as Bangladesh, and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus
in 1974 and subsequent division of the island – the last of which I tidily coloured in on my map of Europe.
The British Empire map of my childhood was just there. Uncommented upon as out of time and place.
The UK was supposedly a post-imperial country having put things like Empire behind it and embraced Europe.
My childhood was filled with a distinctively subversive mainstream culture where John Cleese would say ‘Don’t mention the war’ in an episode of ‘Fawlty Towers’ and those of us growing up with grandparents who were defined by it but usually never mentioned it
, knew what this meant. Yet that map sat there and even as a child I knew there was something wrong. It felt so natural.
And yet it also felt incongruous: why was it still there undiscussed and clearly viewed as the present rather than a relic of history?
The map was a living embodiment of the Empire State, and has influenced the past 40 years in giving us a politics shaped by British exceptionalism and fantasyland notions of greatness and uniqueness.
It had led us to think that we can still ‘punch above our weight’; act as great counsel to the Americans;
and in the ultimate calamity of Brexit sail off back into the sunset and reclaim our imperial legacy as swashbuckling, buccaneering, dare devil capitalists.
If somehow people still think this delusional belief in grandeur does not really matter here is Boris Johnson,
the UK Prime Minister, offering an explanation this week on the disastrous record of the UK on COVID-19 in comparison to our European neighbours: ‘
There is an important difference between our country and many other countries around the world. And that is our country is a freedom-loving country, Mr. Speaker.
And if you look at the history of this country over the last 300 years virtually every advance from free speech to democracy has come from this country.’
All offered as a cover for the UK Government’s mix of bumbling amateurism and corporate give-aways to its pals.
TODAY 8 SEPT 2022 QUEEN ELIZABETH II DIED IN THE AFTERNOON PEACEFULLY
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
Big open fields meant that other resources must be shared more; I am not suggesting that shared rights over land are purely a result of open field systems, they are not they are often very ancient indeed, but they play a particularly critical part in it. If you have a strip or strips of arable, you need access to meadow for hay and pasture for plough teams and other livestock, which you anyway may share. You need access to woodland, and to water, this means not only do you need rights to use such resources, you also need rights to travel to and access those resources. Also, many things are going to have to be planned in common – how much access does each person have, wrong doers need to be restrained and disciplined, the amount of resources need to be planned in common, which fields are to be fallow, should a new crop rotation system be planned, what crops shall we plant and on.
Also, it made sense to live together in closely knit village where everyone was together, where plough teams could be kept and shared. And so from widespread individual farms, people began to live together in the nuclear village to which we are now so used and which seems now so normal. And inherent in the system is the need for manorial courts to manage all this stuff and rule on disputes, for communities to share resources and act communally
Well, why am I telling you this and why is it so exciting? I am telling you this because first of all if we are interested in the daily experience of women and men their landscape had an impact out of all proportion to its impact in these days, in England at least, where we can commute 50 miles to a city to work. This means I can finally link back to that statement that rural industry tended to take part more extensively in wood pasture regions. This is because it is a method of farming that is less time intensive; you have some downtime, some time to make some socks while looking after you flocks. So, the landscape had a direct impact on the rythmn of peoples’ lives. Secondly, because historians have at various times and various places not only performed the parrot sketch but also tried to see an influence on cultural attitudes that derived from their backgrounds. There’s a beautiful if much disputed piece of work by a historian called David Underdown, on what he described as the Chalk and Cheese areas of the South west, and their reaction to the civil wars. He tried to build a model of a lowland village where a sense of community and traditional relationships and religious attitudes prevailed, against a wood pasture area more dominated by individualism, and Protestantism. I suppose this particular study has had most of its bunk removed, but it’s still out there, and however you view it, landscape makes a difference
The hedgerows tend to be much wider and organic having built up over time, woodland tends to be more frequent and in smaller clumps.
It is essentially less planned. I do not quite know why I find this as exciting as I do, but I believe, on careful analysis with the help of a pint of Brakespeare’s ordinary,
now must amusingly rebranded Gravity to access to less open toed sandal market,
that it is because in this way there is a direct connection between me and my ancestors. It is a thin thread,
I doubt they would be impressed with me, none the less it is a living thread, and made of the finest unbreakable steel.
Their yard is a treasure trove of interesting objects and forgotten local history such as advertising signs and newspaper billboards for old football matches.
Stuart showed me a map of what was ‘British India’ pre-independence and I asked more in hope if he had any maps of the British Empire.
He then unfurled a huge map of the entire world from 1958 – and the British Empire just as it was embarking on systematic decolonisation. Thus India and Pakistan have become independent;
Palestine has become the state of Israel in its pre-1967 borders; Egypt has gone from a ‘protectorate’ to independent, while most of Britain’s African colonies remain at this point under the control of the Empire.
1958 does not seem that long ago in many respects. It represents the world before I was born but still seems of recent vintage and part of the modern world.
1956 witnessed the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal in Egypt in collaboration with Israel.
This saw the UK humiliated internationally with the UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden caught lying to the Commons and forced to resign;
while the weakness of UK economic power was revealed by the pressure the US were prepared to put on the UK to force us to withdraw
The same year Khrushchev made his legendary speech denouncing Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’ while the Soviets invaded Hungary;
the following year the European Economic Community was born (without the UK joining) and the space age began with the Soviet successful launch of Sputnik into orbit.
If it seems nearby in some respects in others it is a far-off distant world. At one margin of my map – which when I got it home was even more magnificent and in surprisingly good condition
– is a guide to the European ‘colonial powers’ – the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands. And there in their non-glory are such entities as ‘French West Africa’,
‘French Equatorial Africa’ and the shadow of the infamous ‘Belgian Congo’.
I was not alone in this experience. After purchasing my map, a photo I posted on social media led to a host of reminiscences from people who remembered similar maps well into the 1970s.
Colin Haggerty said ‘I remember this map from Abercorn [Primary] School in Paisley’, and Claire McNab pointed out that administratively
‘the British Empire didn’t formally disappear under 1 January 1983 when the remaining colonies became rebranded as ‘British Dependent Territories’,
then ‘British Overseas Territories’’: due to the British Nationality Act 1981. She concluded, ‘So, ironically, it was Margaret Thatcher who formally abolished the British Empire’ although she never left it as a mindset.
James Mitchell of Edinburgh University reflected that: ‘The worldview of the generation who taught in schools in the 1960s and 70s was formed much earlier,
in the days of ‘Great’ Britain, WW2 and Empire casting long shadows. This was the world they in turn transported into classrooms and young minds illustrated by the Empire map.’
He thinks maps such as my empire map have an enduring influence: ‘The current context is only one influence.
The texts used in teacher training, in classrooms of our teachers are important.
hat map is more than an historical artefact, it suggests a hankering for a ‘better yesterday’’.
These maps hung on walls as Labour and Tory Governments administered what became ‘the post-war consensus’ and remained as it began to fray, decay and fracture.
By the mid-1970s the UK had seen Ted Heath, Harold Wilson and then James Callaghan struggle with issues of relative economic decline, public spending
the influence of trade unions, and often unstated but lurking behind it, the failures of British capitalism.
GOD BLESS THE QUEEN
