The deep roots of Englishness

I’ve recently re-read Beowulf, which has been described as the foundation of English literature. And that’s partly true, but partly also it’s a record of what the English abandoned in order to become a nation worth celebrating.

For those not fluent in early English (or in Seamus Heanese), what we have in Beowulf is a Christian edition of an epic poem dating back to the times before Britain was occupied by the Anglo-Saxons, being set in Denmark and Scandinavia. It celebrates with nostalgia the heroic “old days,” much as legends like Robin Hood do for us, whilst glossing the basically pagan narrative with the hindsight of a people since converted to Christianity. “They toasted the gods in those days, but it was really the Lord who enabled them to overcome evil.”

From an English point of view, Beowulf is a window into the culture not only of forgotten ancestors, but into the archaeology recovered from sites like Sutton Hoo, currently under re-excavation. We gain insights into the thinking behind ship burials, the sources of wealth that created the astonishing jewellery associated with them, the reverence for high-end weaponry, and so on.

What struck me this time round, though, was just how typical of ancient literature it is. Necessarily bardic poetry is inherited from elites who, alone, had access to literate scribes, even if the court bards themselves relied on non-literate skills. And what we see in Beowulf is a lifestyle alternating between deeds of physical courage, and drunken carousing of kings and their privileged thanes in the halls built on the proceeds, basically, of pillage. Or that’s what we read, because ultimately the source of the wealth captured in warfare was the labour of the working population who are not mentioned at all.

The only mention of this entire economic base that I can recall is the presentation of extensive lands (the source of security) to Beowulf as a reward for killing the monster Grendel and his mother. Indeed, the crimes of Grendel consist entirely of the ravaging of the royal court – if he dragged off peasants to be eaten as well, we never hear of it.

In fact, the only mention of the common people I can remember is that it is an exiled slave who awakens Beowulf’s final enemy, a dragon, by stealing a gold cup with which to ingratiate himself with his master.

Now, this total concern with the military aristocracy and its idealised lifestyle, and the ignoring of everyone else, seems to me a norm in ancient literature. Homer demonstrates it in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, which although concerned with the daring adventures of the elite heroes (supposed ancestors of those to whom the bard related it, remember), take as their goal the picture of life back on Odysseus’s Ithaca, that is to say lounging around the palace feasting and enjoying the spoils of war. If mentioned at all, the agricultural generators of all this wealth appear as mere bit-part players.

The same phenomenon is seen in attenuated form in Mallory’s fifteenth century Morte d’Arthur, which is a romanticised summary of French romances ultimately based on Welsh bardic literature from the post-Roman age. Mallory’s world is almost entirely peopled by knights errant, whose aim is to gain “worship” (read “honour”) for when they are back carousing amongst their peers of the Round Table. This focus almost conceals the fact that, far more than in Beowulf, an entirely different, Christian, purpose underlies the “Eat, drink, and be sure to lop off the white knight’s head” escapism of the later book.

Another example, far more ancient than all, is the Babylonian Enuma Elish, which although it is actually a theogony, entirely concerned with the deeds of celestial beings, attributes to them a lifestyle presumably also led by Mesopotamian elites. When they are not fighting each other, they are carousing in their palaces, their barely-referenced servants in this case being the race of men.

If we view Beowulf as an English foundational text, the most obvious thing is that it looks entirely alien to the image we now have of “Englishness.” We don’t admire the carousing of the rich (though degenerate Conservative leaders do, at the Bullingdon Club in Oxford), and neither do we resonate to the inevitability of blood feuds for relatives slain in wars they started. That’s not because military elites ruling invisible peasants inevitably give way to more egalitarian prosperity. After all, in fairly recent history, such societies existed in Benin, amongst the Zulu, in the Ottoman and Mogul empires, and in imperial Japan, to name but a few. What took the Anglo-Saxon nation on a different course was nothing but its conversion to Christianity. The transforming influence of the Bible on society was slow, but inexorable.

Imagine someone like King Oswald of Northumbria, converted during typically-bardic exile, and then inviting St Aidan to found Lindisfarne monastery. He’s a warlord like Beowulf, his teeth equally decayed by mead (as the graves at Bamburgh castle reveal), and probably enjoying epics like Beowulf at his feasts. Yet the God he now worships is a mere carpenter, if of royal descent, and his closest thanes are fishermen, tax-collectors and similar deplorables, who are useless swordsmen and even have to be maintained by equally disreputable women. Likewise, the saints in the epistles are pointed out as, primarily, those of little account. The only instructions about kings in the New Testament, although Jesus and Paul encountered them, are given to their subjects, not to them. In fact, the same teaching is given to slaves as to their masters, and one slave, Onesimus, is even accounted by the great Paul as a brother.

Even the more ancient “bardic literature” of the Jewish people in the foundational text of the Old Testament completely breaks the standard mould. Kings are certainly prominent, as is inevitable in the chronicles of a nation. But they are assessed critically, not primarily on their wealth or prowess in battle, but on their faithfulness to God and their justice to the ordinary people. The closest we ever get to the heroic pattern of Beowulf is the listing of David’s mighty men and their superhuman achievements in war. But the context of this is the establishment of Israel’s peace from its perennial enemies. We get no record of celebratory feasting and drinking – just the murder of Uriah by the king after he refused to celebrate whilst his comrades were still on the front line. More stress is laid on the king giving a feast to the ordinary people when the Ark of the Covenant is brought up to Jerusalem than on elite indulgence.

Over time, the radically new worldview assumed by the Bible’s teaching began to transform the nation, and that largely through its rulers. Remember that many of the bishops and monks came from royal blood, and so the new ethic infiltrated rulers by family culture, and not merely by some detached church instruction. Kings may still have reveled in dynastic struggles, but they could not completely ignore their own salvation, nor their biblical role as just rulers of their people under Christ.

William the Conqueror abolished slavery within his realm. John would not have been confronted by Magna Carta without the biblical worldview’s influence – and furthermore, Magna Carta only became the universal charter it is today because that biblical worldview made such an evolution inevitable. The rise of a people’s Parliament seems another logical outcome, as was the clipping of the wings of the monarch at the Restoration.

Common Law was a uniquely English development, no doubt facilitated by the particular social structure of the Anglo-Saxons, but based on an essentially Christian principle that justice is a God-given feature of the world, which case-law sought to discover, not impose, in its judgements and precedents. Once theoretically grounded, this meant that the people have the civil liberty to do everything that is not specifically outlawed. This is completely different from continental Roman Law, in which statute law prescribes what freedoms the State will grant you – and that’s why membership of the EU and its legal institutions swept away our natural freedoms at a stroke from which we have not recovered.

The religious nature of the Civil War eventually, after much turmoil, issued in the establishment of religious toleration, and hence liberty of conscience and speech. This need not have been the case, had the Christian concepts of conscience and charity not prevailed over that of civil discipline (which is of course inimical to a people who believe that sometimes, “We must obey God rather than men”).

There is a fascinating, and quite erudite, discussion on YouTube between members of the Timcast channel and two from The Lotus Eaters, demonstrating how modern liberalism is founded on a false view of the individual, as an innocent (and by nature liberal!) blank slate on whom “civilisation” imposes all kinds of evils. But in fact, as those like Locke and Rousseau failed to understand, we are fundamentally social beings. I have often quoted Roger Scruton’s wise dictum:

Communities are not formed through the fusion or agreement of rational individuals; it is rational individuals who are formed through communities.

Englishness, therefore, is not something you simply acquire by paddling a dinghy to England – it is infused into us from birth. And it is infused not simply as a set of values, but as a narrative of history, an attitude towards the Bible, a distinct rationality, an emotional vocabulary, and so on from 1,500 years of encultured Christianity, not to mention the adopted Hebrew worldview that connects us to God’s people back to Adam. American and other colonial Anglophone readers can extrapolate their particular national roots to that heritage.

This is another way of saying that whatever is worthwhile in English culture is not to be ascribed to “liberal values,” nor to the Enlightenment, and certainly not to any genetic racial superiority, for our genetic ancestors were slave-owning, blood-feuding, warmongering pagans like all the rest. No, the sole factor for all that is good in England, or that which wasn’t given by God’s natural creation, is the steady influence of King Jesus Christ on a rebellious, but hitherto fundamentally faithful, nation. This is not a unique situation, but it is a distinct one.

Christ justifies sinners instantly through faith, and sanctifies them over a lifetime by his Spirit. He also sanctifies nations, but oh-so-gradually over many centuries. But unlike redeemed sinners, there are no biblical assurances of perseverance given to nations. They stand or fall only by the faithfulness of the people, under the grace of God.