The English Civil War, the Civil Wars, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms: call them what you will, they are the most important and perhaps the most exciting period in British history and they should be at the core of the school curriculum throughout the UK. That is the conclusion I came to following a question put to me by a disgruntled teacher at a recent conference in Cambridge on how I would organise the National Curriculum for history.
The question was prompted, quite reasonably, by a committed and conscientious professional sick of panelists like me with little or no experience of the classroom bemoaning the shortcomings of history teaching in Britain. It is all too easy to pontificate about ideals when one is spared the budgetary constraints, large classes of varying ability and — a concern that cropped up repeatedly — appallingly low levels of literacy that teachers have to deal with on an everyday basis. I am neither a teacher nor an educationist, so I am not qualified to deal with the finer points of a new national curriculum. But I know my history and I know that it was in the 17th century that the disparate national histories of these islands came together to forge the modern world.
On the way to the conference I was reading a proof copy of God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell, yet another brilliant contribution to our understanding of this crucial period by Blair Worden and a reminder, as if one was needed, that for decades the 17th century has been the richest seam mined in Britain’s history departments, attracting scholars of the stature of Conrad Russell, Austin Woolrych, Ann Hughes, Kevin Sharpe, John Adamson, Jane Ohlmeyer, John Morrill, Barry Coward, Michael Hunter and many more. Yet in the wider public sphere it remains a shamefully neglected part of British history. Compare, for example, the petty, pinched manner of Naseby’s present-day keeping with the battlefields of the American Civil War.
Yet it is our Civil Wars that should be at the heart of a new National Curriculum, for from that dramatic period everything else follows. Pupils in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland should learn their own histories up to the 17th century, examining the realities of much mythologised figures such as Alfred the Great, Henry V, Robert the Bruce, Owain Glyndwr and Brian Boru. These disparate pasts then collide in what is, after all, now referred to as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, peopled by extraordinary personalities, Oliver Cromwell above all, and marked by argument and debate, the very lifeblood of history.
In the aftermath of the great conflict we see the birth of Britain and the emergence of today’s party political system; the British army and Royal Navy comes into existence in recognisable form; the battle of ideas over monarchy and republic provides stimulating argument for the young; the importance of religion — and witchcraft — is emphasised as a prime motive of people’s actions; there is the beginning of the modern financial system with the creation of the Bank of England and the National Debt. Most important of all, though, this is the age when British history runs into that of a wider world to be explored in all its variety by minds prepared for the complexities and contentions of global history by their engagement with the medieval and Early Modern worlds. Not even our much maligned exam boards can make that boring.
Paul Lay is Editor of History Today and the author of the ebook History Today and Tomorrow (Endeavour Press)
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