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| In 1014, Archbishop Wulfstan of York gave a sermon that provides us with vital clues about when the English started thinking of themselves as a nation. |  The beginning of the Sermon of the Wolf - 'Sermo Lupe'
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When did England become England? Some believe the English identity was formed long after the Norman Conquest, others are not so sure.
'The devil has led this people too far astray ...'
I think the idea of England and the allegiance to the English crown and English law was created by the Anglo-Saxon successors of Alfred the Great - long before 1066.
Let me give you an illustration, a snapshot from those days. It comes from a public speech by a bishop made in 1014.
At that time England was in deep trouble. By the winter of 1013-14, the government of Anglo-Saxon England had almost collapsed and the King, Ethelred the Unready, had gone into exile abroad.
The country had been devastated by Vikings and everybody complained about government inefficiency and failure to act and implement policy. Things could not really get much worse. It was at this point that Archbishop Wulfstan of York preached a sermon to the highest people in the land.
'The devil has led this people too far astray... the people have betrayed their own country [literally their "earth"]. And the harm will become common to this entire people.
'There was a historian in the time of the Britons called Gildas who wrote about their misdeeds; how their sins angered God so much that finally He allowed the army of the English to conquer their land. Let us take warning from this... we all know there are worse things going on now than we have heard of among the ancients. Let us turn to the right and leave wrongdoing... Let us love God and follow God's laws.'
Wulfstan was a leading member of what we might call the royal think-tank: the great and good who advised the king, the big landowners, earls, royal kinsman and prominent churchmen.
Archbishops were often the main motivators in policy: they told the kings what to do and Wulfstan did just that. We still have one of his notebooks where we can read for ourselves his thoughts, written in his own hand.
'... Wulfstan ... talks about the English as "one people under one law".'
As with the speeches of any modern politician, however, Wulfstan's sermon has to be taken with a pinch of salt. (Even in his own day, some of his audience may not have followed his line that the Day of Judgement was nigh.) But even when read with a pinch of salt to hand, this short extract tells us a lot about Anglo-Saxon England. It tells us that the English themselves had been invaders of Britain, many centuries before; that they were Christian; and that they lived under the rule of Christian law.
What is very interesting is that even with the government tottering and the social order cracking, Wulfstan also talks about the English as 'one people under one law'. He takes it as read that we can refer to the English nation, so we can see that an allegiance between the people, the king and the law is already in existence.
This allegiance is an essential foundation upon which the identity of England rests.
But the notion of an English nation goes back much further, to the Venerable Bede. Bede was born around 672, near Sunderland. He lived as a monk at the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria and probably never journeyed further south than York in his entire life.
'It was Bede who first articulated the idea of the English people.'
He may not have been well travelled, but Bede was fantastically well read. In his mind at least, he travelled far - he even knew about the Muslim Advent in the Mediterranean.
It was Bede who first articulated the idea of the English people. In 732, he wrote his 'History of the English Church and People', in which he treated the inhabitants of lowland Britain, whether Saxons, Jutes or Angles, as one English nation.
He traces the name back to a tale from the 590s. The story goes that Pope Gregory the Great saw some fair-haired and fair-skinned slaves in a slave market in Italy, and was told that they were Angles. 'Not Angles but angels,' he replied.
It was a lovely pun, and somehow created an idea, which one senses in Bede, that the English were a chosen race.
Since then, the English have always been the English because Bede said so.
There also seems to have been a tradition, even before Bede's day, to have one ruler of the English people. Bede tells us that prior to his time there had been seven kings who held some kind of overlordship over the people of what we now call England - and, even more, an overlordship of mainland Britain.
To express this he uses the Latin word imperium, which means overlordship. When this is translated in the ninth century in the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', the writer or writers use a different Old English word, bretwalda or brytenwalda. This originally meant 'wide ruler', and was an ancient poetic title for a king, but it came to mean the ruler who was overlord of lowland Britain.
'The Viking invasions changed everything. '
Bede's theme was the English Church and people, as we have seen, but he also revealed an early tradition of some kind of political overlordship.
The Anglo-Saxon kings seized on this in the tenth century when they fulfilled Bede's 'blueprint' - to unite politically and religiously under one church the peoples who lived in England. But the reason this happened when it did was due more than anything else to the Vikings.
The Viking invasions changed everything. They destroyed several of the ancient English kingdoms, the Northumbrians and the East Angles. This forced the defending English kingdoms to define very clearly what they were fighting for.
One dynasty - that of Wessex - emerged as the winner in that military, political and ideological struggle. The people of Wessex were those able to defeat the Vikings and eventually, during the tenth century, to incorporate all the other areas into a kingdom of England under a king of all the English.
At this point, the Vikings threatened to overrun the whole of England, and the King of Mercia fled overseas, as did a number of well-to-do West Saxons.
But on the verge of total disaster, something happened which became part of the English myth in the Anglo-Saxon period, and still is. In early 878, Alfred the Great was surrounded in the marshes of Athelney in Somerset, almost finished. 'England' was on the ropes before it had even come into being.
'... he had become the most powerful regional king in Britain.'
This is the moment when legend has Alfred burning cakes in a peasant woman's cottage - a tale which was already in existence in the tenth century. However, Alfred was able to claw back a victory at Edington in Wiltshire that year.
Meantime, the Viking advance slowed down. They started to parcel out good settling land in East Anglia, in the East Midlands and in Northumbria - land for their armies, for the rank and file. This gave Alfred the chance he needed and he took it. He fought a prolonged war of resistance, and by the time he died in 899 he had become the most powerful regional king in Britain.
He was succeeded by his son Edward the Elder. By the 910s Edward was strong enough to embark on the military conquest of the Midlands and East Anglia, enforcing southern English rule over the lands up to the Humber. The tide had turned. Bede's blueprint was suddenly achievable.
Athelstan was brought up in the Midlands and not as a member of the Wessex establishment. But in 925 he did become king, and he turned out to be one of the greatest of all the Anglo-Saxon rulers.
He embarked on a whirlwind campaign taking in the whole of England. He enforced the submission of the kings of the Scots, the Strathclyde Welsh, the Cumbrians, the north Welsh and even the Cornish - all within one year.
'By the mid-century, the existence of England as a unitary kingdom was no longer in doubt.'
By 928, a King of Wessex had not only become king of all the English people, but also 'Emperor of the World of Britain'. The rulers of continental Europe now queued up to marry their sons to women of the English royal family. England was suddenly sitting at the high table of Europe's political and intellectual elite.
Continental writers talked of England's bravery in driving out 'the pirates' (the Vikings) and praised their efforts to restore learning, 'making Britannia famous through the world of the liberal arts'. It is no exaggeration to say that a new phase in British history had been inaugurated.
Athelstan's half brothers followed his lead. By the mid-century, the existence of England as a unitary kingdom was no longer in doubt. Edgar, the son of Athelstan's brother Edmund (hence the great-grandson of Alfred), became king of all England in 959.
He enjoyed a balmy time in which tremendous wealth was ploughed into the monasteries, and a Golden Age of English art and culture ensued. The products of English manuscript painters in particular are among the great glories of insular art.
Edgar was known as Pacificus, the Peaceable - or perhaps one should translate this as 'one who could impose his peace without having to fight'. There is very little known about his reign apart from its efficient administration - and perhaps that's a sign of how powerful he was.
In 973, Edgar was able to have a great imperial coronation in Bath, in the presence of his subject kings. Bath was probably chosen because of its imperial overtones: an ancient Roman city with still-standing Roman walls and monuments, including the Roman baths.
The English kings were now the rulers of Britannia. They were the most powerful rulers of the land since the Romans, and they were aware of it. In less than a century, Alfred's dynasty had broken out from a few square miles of marshland to become Emperors of Britain.
Just because Alfred wanted to be acknowledged King of the English does not mean that people in East Anglia, or the East Midlands, or Northumbria - or even the heartland of English Mercia in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire - were happy with that.
Indeed, there were those who were very unhappy about it. North of the Humber, one chronicler wrote feelingly, '... we had never before been subject to the South Angles [the southern English]'. But pretty soon, the West Saxon kings of England won the allegiance of people south of the Humber, including those of Danish descent.
'... [Wulfstan's] complaint was that this allegiance had broken down, that group feeling had disintegrated ... '
Then, by the time of Athelstan's death, people in the East Midlands also acknowledged that their interests were best served by a Southern king. Over the next century, many Northerners seem to have come to the same conclusion.
The creation of this allegiance developed what we might call 'group feeling' - the essential glue in any state. And the creation of that allegiance is the product not of the Normans or the Tudors, but of the tenth century.
That is what Wulfstan was talking about in his sermon. His complaint was that this allegiance had broken down, that group feeling had disintegrated - but he knew what it was to have had them in the first place. The creation of that allegiance was what made England England, and it was made long before the Normans came to stay.
Published on 成人快手 History: 2004-11-12
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