Give Me a Sign!

I am English and I have nothing to show for it.

Almost all the symbols of England come from the brutal period of the crusades and are dripping with the blood of religious genocide. What symbols of England and Englishness are available to the secular liberal anti-monarchist? None! Every symbol of England is deeply and aggressively Christian and monarchist, not that there are many symbols of England left as most have been lost and replaced with British symbols which are full of imperial resonance.

John Bull is clearly English but wears a union flag for a waistcoat and clearly bends his knees to the Church of England and the monarch while looking for glory in the British Empire.

The patron saint of England, George, has got nothing to do with England, he was appropriated in the Holy Land during the time of the crusades along with “his” red cross crusader flag and the three lions from the standard of crusader king Richard.

Richard was a man who spent a mere six months of his life in England and cost the country literally a kings ransom for his return plus the flower of the nation lost, killed and damaged in holy war that has nothing to do with England. Richard was a crusader, a warlord fighting the war of the Pope and Christendom. He did not lift a finger to help the common people of England. Which kings have? Well, actually his brother for one, poor John Lackland. Admittedly he was forced into it by his weakness but he did actually set his seal to the Magna Carta which gave England some faint glimmerings of the concept of rights for the people and limits to the absolute power of the monarch.

Richard was at heart, in his coeur de lion, a Frenchman. Although born in England he never needed to speak English, spent a mere six months of his life in England, died in France and was buried in France, in three installments. His mother was French, his father also spoke only French and he himself was the lover of the King of France. Richard was less of an Englishman than Prince Charles is a Welshman. And yet it is Richard who stands outside the Palace of Westminster, Richard’s crusader battle flag which is the flag of England and Richard’s personal coat of arms which is worn on the chests of the England football team. Have we got nothing to be proud of in England except for the Crusades? Is there anything to be proud of in the story of the Crusades? England got involved in a religious war and English troops got involved in revolting genocide and butchery so severe that people along the Levantine coast scared their children to sleep with the threat of King Richard's return for centuries.

This was not England’s war. Nobody was threatening the English people except the Norman aristocracy, monarchy and church. It is utterly bizarre that English history has been so distorted that people are made to think of Richard as an English hero and his own younger brother as a Norman oppressor. In recent times the Robin Hood myth has been given another reworking to show Robin as a politically correct hero with an entirely bogus series of newly-imagined Muslim comrades, in the latest television example this even includes a cross-dressing Muslim woman. The depths to which the latest television series has bent over backwards to show the Muslim world as advanced and scientific is thoroughly nauseating. Islam was not advanced and scientific except in comparison to the backward Christians, they had barely made a century's worth of progress from the times of the Romans.

Robin was probably a peasant from South Yorkshire if there is anything to the myth at all, imagine Sean Bean but shorter, uglier and with a vocabulary like Chaucer, but bear in mind that Chaucer was a member of the educated intelligentsia and Robin was the leader of a gang of armed robbers, so more crudity and less polished wit.

For many centuries it was politically impossible to have a genuine working class hero (common people could not be leaders, even in myths) so Robin Hood, the hero they could not suppress, was made a member of the Saxon aristocracy and called the heir to the Earl of Huntingdon on entirely spurious grounds and no evidence. This has got to be one of the worst aspects of this corrosive series of myths. Why can’t a English hero be a man of the people? Why does a hero have to be of noble blood?

Of course another interesting aspect of the Robin Hood myth is the idea that he gives the money he steals to the poor. Right. Of course he does. Evidence please. This seems to me another reworking of the myth to turn this tale of a revolting peasant upstart into something that respectable people could be seen to endorse. It seems far more likely to me that he was originally a simple thief on a big scale, like the Great Train Robbers. For some reason the downtrodden poor have a sneaking respect for armed robbers if they steal from institutions that are really big and don’t have a human face, like the Royal Mail train carrying old fivers to be burnt at the Bank of England, or in this case King Richard’s ransom money. The effort to raise the king’s ransom would have entailed a lot of money being shipped about the country in baggage trains, it doesn’t take much imagination to see that this would produce rich pickings for a gang of thieves who had the skill to put arrows through chain mail while hiding in the tree beyond that one. A few more moments pondering brings up the strong likelihood that such thieves would not waste their time or risk revealing their location by attacking the usual targets of such robberies: tinkers, small merchants and small farmers taking stock to markets. So Robin Hood was most likely simply an armed robber who only targeted the most lucrative “cash in transit” operations, who were of course the people trying to put together the massive cash ransom required to spring King Richard from his criminal captors in the form of tons of silver coin. The ransom was 150,000 marks, a mark was worth 14 shillings and three pence, and a shilling could buy a sheep.

They steal money from us, he steals it from them and leaves us alone, good luck to him. It is an easy attitude to understand. Of course that isn’t good enough to allow the landed gentry to look upon him as respectable. He needs to be made a proper hero, which requires that he is one of them and badly done by and that his robberies are excused by the fiction that he gives all the money away to the poor. Did he give money away? How could you ever prove that poor illiterate people were given small sums of cash by a fugitive from the regent’s justice? A big bag of silver given to a priest may see a church built but a few coins pressed into dirty palms would leave no trace at all. It is conceivable that a poor man flush with huge quantities of silver wouldn’t know how to spend it so it is not completely unbelievable that he did give some of it to the poor. In a highly stratified society in which wealth is land and land is held by a foreign nobility it is conceivable that a common thief, if he was common enough, could easily steal more money than he could spend without getting himself killed.

The next despicable twist in the Robin Hood myth is to make him a returning crusader. This makes Robin an ally of Richard and somehow also stops Richard from being the Norman he so clearly is. So we see Richard shown as mighty Godric Gryffindor crusader for truth, justice and the English way like a young but sane Brian Blessed and his brother John Lackland cast as sinister Norman (and possibly even a touch of Saracen) Salazar Slytherin with a pointy chin and goatee beard straight from the portraits of Satan. John was unpopular because he was associated with raised taxes. The taxes were raised taxes to pay for the ransom of his inept genocidal brother who got himself abducted by fellow Christians near Vienna. So the reason the English people were so badly done to and over-taxed is that not content with taxing them to pay for an expedition to send the nobility and a few thousand of their most bloodthirsty friends on an all expenses paid Saracen slaughtering and sightseeing tour to Jerusalem Richard then requires a ransom of three times the regular annual income of the crown of England to have himself set free.

Raising a ransom of that size would have required many people to have had their life savings, personal and family capital raided in a very big way. And yet this very real cause for resentment is never focused on the real culprit:- the great strawberry blond Norman homosexual religious zealot, ethnic cleanser and psychopath Richard Coeur de Lion. (You did remember to pronounce the name Ree-shar’, didn’t you? He wasn’t English after all.)

What is inherently English about the crusades? What have the crusades got to do with what England stands for today? Haven’t we come rather a long way since the time of Richard?

Another thing which annoys me about the way my national identity is used to manipulate my people is this thing called Britain. Great Britain is an island, the mainland of England, Wales and Scotland. It is called great to distinguish it from Little Britain, the peninsula of Brittany. I don’t owe any allegiance to a land mass. My country is England, it is part of the island of Great Britain. I am British to that extent. It is not the central focus of my identity. I am not Scottish or Welsh to any degree that I am aware of and they are foreigners to me. I don’t feel warm inside when I hear bagpipes or Welsh singing, these are not part of my country, they are signs that my neighbours really want to make a big point about not being English. To the Welsh and Scots “not English” is a central part of their identity. When an English regiment marches down the street you will not be assaulted by aggressive and assertive Englishness. The English don’t do assertive. In contrast Scottish regiments are all tartan and bagpipes and distinctive headgear. It seems the worst insult you could give to a Scot would be to mistake him for an Englishman. And yet the English are meant to be quiet and content to have their identity lost, buried and dismissed. We are not meant to be concerned to maintain our identity, we are not expected to value our identity, our lords and masters have decided that we should be British and they have decided that we will be happy with the decision they made for us, after all they made it with their best interests at heart.

When England became a part of Britain as a nation no Englishman became in any way a little bit Scottish or a little bit Welsh. The same goes for Britain being part of Europe. I am not a little bit German or a little bit Belgian. That does not mean that I am not European. I am English therefore I am British and European. Come on, how hard is this stuff to get your heads around? You can be American without identifying with New York, country music, The Beach Boys, the sound of Miami, the wide open spaces of Montana or the green hills of Vermont. Being English does not mean you have to have any fondness for or attachment to things Welsh and Scottish.

I deeply resent people and institutions who operate on a British national level telling me that I should be British and that this is the natural level for my identity and loyalty. That resentment is tripled when the person in question is an Australian born American citizen who is trying to shape my culture in the image that best suits his business model. The BBC, ITV and London based media want everybody in the geographical confines of Great Britain to identify as British because that is the extent of their own influence. I am at the same time bigger and smaller than them, and I refuse to allow them to dictate to me what my loyalties are.

The upper classes have fully bought into the myth of Britain and have intermarried quite heavily across the English-Scottish border. My family haven’t. If Britain dissolved into England and Scotland I would not be dismayed, heartbroken or have my loyalties strained. Neither would I have great pangs of loss whenever I spoke and said I was British and some arrogant cocky Scot belonging to a future newly independent Scotland corrected me. I'm English, content to be British and European but don't you go telling me what I am.

Nobody ever asked my family whether the crowns and later the parliaments of England and Scotland should unite and nobody has thought since to check whether we have come round to the idea or not. It is merely assumed that if we objected we would have said something or killed somebody. It is a mistake to confuse not putting the monarch’s head on a pike with being in full agreement with every action and sentiment of the government.

I am not an imperialist. I don’t want to be part of a big conglomeration that destroys people’s identity and I don’t want to be a party to forcing other people into accepting an identity that is convenient for me that they have. Stop telling me that I’m British! Stop labelling me. Britain is a country with a diverse culture and nobody is at home everywhere and nobody should try to be. Attempts to make us all buy into all British culture are doomed to failure. I am not Welsh, I am just as much not Welsh as a proud Welshman is not English. I ask that my not-Welshness and my not-Scottishness are fully acknowledged. Nobody would expect Douglas Campbell Hamish McTavish to be happy dressed in a smock wassailing, drinking cider, cheese rolling, well dressing and Morris Dancing likewise don’t expect me to respond to the bagpipes with anything but an expression of pain. It takes all my self control not to react to these foreign troops in my streets the way the people of Iraq do.

My Englishness is not a racial identity

If you live in Oldham or Blackburn and you're from a Pakistani background it is absurd to say you can't be English because that's a race, then some tartan malcontents tell you that you're not British either because they've just pulled the plug and Britain isn't a country any longer. English is a national identity not a race. If you're from a South Asian background and bloodline you can't be Anglo-Saxon but of course you can be English.

A rose by any other name...

I wish there was a symbol for England that did not glorify in the British Empire, the monarchy or the Crusades. The lion is a poor symbol because so many countries use lions and lions are not at all English. I can’t think of any wildlife which is quintessentially English either. By default I am drawn to the rose. Roses have been used as symbols of England for a long time and roses grow wild in hedgerows, the sides of motorways and railway embankments up and down England. Oh, right, and this morning I've just noticed that they're eating my shed. The problems with the rose as a symbol is that it too has baggage, roses were used in the Wars of the Roses as symbols of competing French-derived nobility trying to carve up England and the English throne. Later a rose became the symbol of the Welshman Henry Tudor, who defeated the true English king (eventually the Normans had become English) Richard III, about whom no end of vicious lies have been spread by nasty propagandists and by people such as Shakespeare who should have known better. While I won’t go as far as saying Shakespeare was a Tudor Goebbels let’s just say there is no more historical invention in The Black Adder than in Shakespeare’s history plays.

The rose has also become besmirched by the creation of artificial enmity between Lancashire and Yorkshire which was useful to the ruling classes to slow down the spread of working class movements across the industrial north of England. There is some difference between Lancashire and Yorkshire which can be explained by the Danish influence on Yorkshire while Lancashire’s Scandinavian inputs came from Norwegian derived settlements. The Norwegian influence came sweeping in from Orkney and Shetland down the West coast of Scotland and along the coasts of the Irish sea. It was the power struggles of Norman invaders (who of course were also daughter civilizations of the Scandinavian Diaspora) which gave the people of those two great English counties symbols around which to build their largely irrational, futile and often highly inconvenient rivalries.

Of course more recently the rose has become fatally damaged as a symbol by its adoption by New Labour which ditched socialism, state ownership and the red flag and in the process stole away what was probably England’s last hope for a symbol of unity.

Perhaps England is simply too big and important an idea to be able to encapsulate in a single simple symbol. But I do look with some envy at other nations who have flags which are not redolent with monarchy, heredity, Christianity or bloodlust. Stars and stripes are meaningless as far as I know, although no doubt somebody will tell me they have dark sinister occult significance to Freemasons and illuminati.

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Give Me a Sign!

I am English and I have nothing to show for it.

My Englishness is not a racial identity

A rose by any other name...

Atheism | Politics | Memes | Mind | Matters | Interact | Feedback | Email | Links | Search | Debate | Home

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited