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.<\/p>\n
I approached one of the soldiers, who peered down at me from beneath his helmet. \u201cI\u2019m rooting for you guys,\u201d I said. \u201cThanks,\u201d he said, and laughed before remembering he was in character. \u201cWe will win!\u201d Before the battle a band of Normans marched past the camp on the way to their headquarters across the field. Saxon warriors heckled them: \u201cGo home, Normans, go home!\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Why was I rooting for the Saxons, I asked myself? We all were. Throughout the crowd there was an unspoken agreement \u2014 a bit tongue in cheek, but there nonetheless \u2014 that the Saxons were our guys, and the Normans were not. Some spectators waved mini versions of Harold\u2019s 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\u2019s comment, in his essay \u201cEngland Your England\u201d: \u201cWhat 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The announcer narrating the clash was firmly on the side of the Saxons. \u201cCheer now to put strength into their sword arms,\u201d he shouted during a fierce bout of man-to-man combat. \u201cCheer now to make sure they throw the invader back into the sea.\u201d When the battle was over, Harold dead and the Saxons decimated, the crowd grumbled at the announcer\u2019s order to cheer for the new king. \u201cThere he is, your new lord and master,\u201d the announcer said. \u201cYour taxes are due.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was still an element of suspense, a bloom of hope that this time the invaders could be repelled.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 we\u2019re astounded at anything that\u2019s been standing here for longer than America even existed. But it\u2019s not just places: events seem to last forever here too. Living in England, I\u2019ve often thought that it\u2019s this long memory that gives the country its essential stability. The Brits have had enough excitement over the course of history and they\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s flags as part of \u201cOperation Raise the Colours\u201d, a social media movement that started in Birmingham.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t nearly as mainstream. While American conservatives are more likely to display the flag and revel in patriotic iconography, they don\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019t even noticed.<\/p>\n
British liberals have reacted to people raising Union flags and St George\u2019s flags the same way many Americans would to the sight of a Confederate flag. \u201cEngland is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality,\u201d Orwell wrote in that same essay. \u201cIn 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.\u201d 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 \u201cflag shaggers\u201d. Councillors and MPs call for the flags\u2019 removal to tamp down on \u201cdivision\u201d. In my neighbourhood in South London, I noticed this week that someone had put up a St George\u2019s flag emblazoned with pro-immigration slogans. \u201cThere is no such thing as true British culture,\u201d read the all-caps letters printed on the red cross. \u201cThis flag was originally made by Saint George \u2014 a Turkish\/Palestinian immigrant.\u201d (Saint George died hundreds of years before the cross associated with him came into use.)<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Writers here have always had a better read on England\u2019s Saxon yearnings than politicians. There\u2019s 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\u2019s take on the rugged Saxon: \u201cThe 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 \u2014 with his sullen set eyes on your own, \/ And grumbles, \u2018This isn\u2019t fair dealing,\u2019 my son, leave the Saxon alone.\u201d Here, Kipling depicts the Saxon as the forefather of cherished British values like fair play.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s happening now \u2014 a repressed tribalism with ancient roots that is playing out in modern politics.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t seem to matter. There\u2019s always next year. Maybe the Saxons will finally win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The smell of cooking fires filled my nostrils as I entered the Saxon camp. Women in wimples wove…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505510,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5008],"tags":[139736,748,393,24085,4884,2348,94534,16,124950,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-505509","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-england","8":"tag-battle-of-hastings","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-flags","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-history","14":"tag-patriotism","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-union-jack","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115386762324055987","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}