Dominic Green Dominic Green

Wool, wheat and wet weather

Robert Winder discovers the springs of Englishness back in the Middle Ages. But isn’t that going too far?

Englishness is big business in the nation of shopkeepers, and not just in politics and tourism. In literature, the gypsy scholars of Clan Macfarlane range freely across the hills and lexicons in search of old England, the dying and undead. This paperchase confirms that a change in the self-image of the English is afoot too. For centuries, the English poured into their cities. Now, they are trickling back out to the countryside. London excites precisely because it is another country, from a future that at least 54.8 per cent of the English prefer not to live in. But what does the returnee know of England who only London knows?

In 1997, Little, Brown published Clive Aslet’s Anyone for England? as ‘A Search for English Identity’. Twenty years on, the same publisher gives us Robert Winder’s The Last Wolf, with a subtitle promising a search both complete and elusive: ‘The Hidden Springs of Englishness.’ For Winder, the erstwhile literary editor of the erstwhile Independent, the springs of Englishness are environmental and medieval.

Geography is history, Montesquieu argued in L’esprit des lois (1748). The warm Gulf Stream and inclement rain shaped English agriculture and settlement. The rain fed the grass and the wheat. The wheat and the rain combined with the gist, as the Anglo-Saxons called yeast, to make cakes and ale. The grass fed the sheep, and the sheep, apart from feeding the shepherds, fattened the wool dealers. Add coal, and Winder can reduce Englishness to a‘playful equation’: E = cw4 (Englishness = coal x wool, wheat and wet weather).

By his own argument, Winder should subtract a fifth ‘w’, the wolf. The ovine economy of the Middle Ages required ‘a tamed terrain, scoured of exciting wild animals’. In 1281, Edward I commissioned Peter ‘The Mighty Hunter’ Corbet to clear the last wolves from England’s forests.

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