The smell of cooking fires filled my nostrils as I entered the Saxon camp. Women in wimples wove cloth and stirred pots. Soldiers in chain mail readied themselves, their axes and painted shields leaning against their tents. The Battle of Hastings would begin soon.
I approached one of the soldiers, who peered down at me from beneath his helmet. “I’m rooting for you guys,” I said. “Thanks,” he said, and laughed before remembering he was in character. “We will win!” Before the battle a band of Normans marched past the camp on the way to their headquarters across the field. Saxon warriors heckled them: “Go home, Normans, go home!”
Every year English Heritage hosts a re-enactment at Battle Abbey around the anniversary of the 1066 Battle of Hastings. Every year the Normans ride again, knights on horseback charging into battle behind William the Conqueror; every year the Saxons erect their shield wall, standing firm until the fateful arrow finds Harold Godwinson’s eye. The outcome is predestined, but somehow, watching the re-enactment last weekend, there was still an element of suspense, a bloom of hope that this time the invaders could be repelled.
Why was I rooting for the Saxons, I asked myself? We all were. Throughout the crowd there was an unspoken agreement — a bit tongue in cheek, but there nonetheless — that the Saxons were our guys, and the Normans were not. Some spectators waved mini versions of Harold’s Fighting Man banner. William was played with a cartoonish French accent. The crowd booed him and the Normans throughout the display, as though the battle had happened yesterday and not nearly 1,000 years ago. I thought of George Orwell’s comment, in his essay “England Your England”: “What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots.” Did this instantly recognisable truth about the class system actually reflect a deep hatred of the Norman overlord 1,000 years on? It certainly felt like it.
The announcer narrating the clash was firmly on the side of the Saxons. “Cheer now to put strength into their sword arms,” he shouted during a fierce bout of man-to-man combat. “Cheer now to make sure they throw the invader back into the sea.” When the battle was over, Harold dead and the Saxons decimated, the crowd grumbled at the announcer’s order to cheer for the new king. “There he is, your new lord and master,” the announcer said. “Your taxes are due.”
“There was still an element of suspense, a bloom of hope that this time the invaders could be repelled.”
This was an especially amusing event to watch as an American, and also an educational one. We love to talk about how old things in Britain are. The churches, the pubs — we’re astounded at anything that’s been standing here for longer than America even existed. But it’s not just places: events seem to last forever here too. Living in England, I’ve often thought that it’s this long memory that gives the country its essential stability. The Brits have had enough excitement over the course of history and they’d very much like to avoid having any more. But it also means there are deep cultural nerves running through the nation, and one of these is the memory of foreign invasion from over the sea and the fear of it happening again.
We see this today in the rising anger over small boats, in the flags that line the streets. Resentment over immigration policies has emerged this year as a powerful enough force to potentially reshape British politics, with polls showing Reform UK continuing to gain momentum. This sentiment has also translated into a visible manifestation of national pride: in the past several months, people around the country have raised Union flags and St George’s flags as part of “Operation Raise the Colours”, a social media movement that started in Birmingham.
Patriotism remains a bit of a taboo among British liberals, something a bit embarrassing that has taken on Right-wing political connotations. But glimpses of it can be seen during moments like the Hastings re-enactment, or in other socially-permitted contexts like the World Cup or Royal weddings. It is otherwise kept to a bare minimum by a still Norman-minded elite who prefer to stifle this instinct.
To an outsider, this aversion to patriotism remains a striking feature of British culture. Though this same tendency exists in America in intellectual and Left-leaning circles, it isn’t nearly as mainstream. While American conservatives are more likely to display the flag and revel in patriotic iconography, they don’t have a monopoly on it the way the Right seems to here. To win a US presidential election, you have to love America harder than the other guy. Flag pins are a standard political accessory in both parties. And it remains commonplace for schoolchildren to pledge allegiance to the flag every day in state schools, though they have a constitutional right to refuse. A town displaying a lot of flags wouldn’t be worth remarking upon. On the drive back to London from Sussex, someone in the car remarked on the number of Union flags on show in a suburb we drove through. I hadn’t even noticed.
British liberals have reacted to people raising Union flags and St George’s flags the same way many Americans would to the sight of a Confederate flag. “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality,” Orwell wrote in that same essay. “In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.” Much the same is true today: instead of seeking to understand the deep anger over immigration that is making people want to fly these flags, the focus of British liberals has been on suppressing them, citing the involvement of far-Right activists in organising the campaign. Social media is full of often quite classist comments about “flag shaggers”. Councillors and MPs call for the flags’ removal to tamp down on “division”. In my neighbourhood in South London, I noticed this week that someone had put up a St George’s flag emblazoned with pro-immigration slogans. “There is no such thing as true British culture,” read the all-caps letters printed on the red cross. “This flag was originally made by Saint George — a Turkish/Palestinian immigrant.” (Saint George died hundreds of years before the cross associated with him came into use.)
Whether intentionally or not, the flag campaigners have forced British elites into the unappealing position of disavowing their own national flag for political reasons. If they think it has been successfully co-opted by the far-Right, they only give it more power by fearing it. The cleverer play would be to display the flag as a symbol of opposition to the Right; to accept that people have a desire to feel patriotic and appeal to that, instead of pathologising it. Lately, there does seem to have been some recognition of the need to reclaim the flag among the country’s liberal power players. Both the Labour and Lib Dem party conferences were festooned with flags, and the Prime Minister has spoken about his pride in all the flags of the UK. But they are playing catch-up against a movement that has much more successfully linked itself to the Union Jack; one that has been more proactive in channeling the down-to-earth Saxon instead of the lofty Norman.
Writers here have always had a better read on England’s Saxon yearnings than politicians. There’s a rich tradition of Anglo-Saxon nostalgia among English writers over the past century or so. In 1911, near the end of the imperial century, Rudyard Kipling imagined a Norman baron’s take on the rugged Saxon: “The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite. / But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right. / When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own, / And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.” Here, Kipling depicts the Saxon as the forefather of cherished British values like fair play.
Kipling was writing during a time when Britain still projected itself out onto the world, at the tail end of a period that echoed the terrible greatness of the adventuring Normans. Yet he, like other 20th-century writers who mythologised the Saxon past such as J.R.R. Tolkien, saw something more authentic and fundamental to the culture in the Saxons, who stayed put here and defended their island against all comers. Perhaps this old Anglo-Saxon ache persists today and explains some of what’s happening now — a repressed tribalism with ancient roots that is playing out in modern politics.
At the battle last weekend, I thought about how, a millennium later, the Saxon fans in the crowd are just as Norman as they are anything else. It was an audience no doubt full of Williams, Richards and Henrys cheering for a lost army of Oswalds, Godfrics and Cuthberts. But this didn’t seem to matter. There’s always next year. Maybe the Saxons will finally win.