I am a writer, artist and activist who’s worldview has been shaped by a clutch of wonderfully wise Williams, William Blake, William Morris, William Barnes, William Cobbett and William Godwin, and by the magical folklore and majestic history of the ancient Isles of Albion.
I have a passion for British Folk and Fairy Tales, but like many people I fear for the future of the oral tradition. I admire the truly academic folklorists who work tirelessly to identify and catalogue the stories, sagas and mythology of the people as accurately as possible, but I feel that this needs to be balanced with a living culture of storytelling and story-making.
With this in mind I believe that we need to examine new (…and some very old…) ways of sharing and presenting our stories. We should experiment with modern technology to encourage an interest in traditional myths, legends and fictions. We should also encourage the creation of new folk-tales which are based on modern experiences and places. Most importantly we must recognise that folk-tales were born of an oral culture and therefore lose their potency when they’re presented solely as literature. I would love to see traditional storytelling become a kind of ‘open-mic’/ ‘stand-up’ event, both at folk festivals and beyond. So spark-up the campfire, I have a tale to tell…
Inspired by Paul Kingsnorth’s groundbreaking book, Real England, I also work to identify and promote an English cultural and political identity which is based on ‘being’ rather than ‘belonging’, or, as Paul says, “a new type of patriotism, benign and positive, based on place not race, geography not biology.”
But I also agree with Chris Wood who said, in reference to his album ‘The Lark Descending’…
Let’s go back to a time when there was no ‘England’ and there were no ‘English’. A class of people came along and decided they wanted to rule over this place and these people but before they could rule over somewhere they needed to give it a name. And before they could govern the people who lived there they had to give them a name too. ‘England’ and ‘the English’ were a necessary construction for a governing class and remain so to this day. ‘The Lark Descending’ celebrates a few of the stories of the people who are governed and you ought not to be surprised at how rich and compelling some of the stories are. Our indigenous population have been unravelling the universe for us in music and song for millennia while the governing class have been ridiculing our folk music for only a couple of hundred years.
Chris’s comments here are a little sweeping, but the sentiment reflects my view that the history of the ruling elite should not be seen as the history of a people. In truth I don’t think the name that we give to a place or it’s people is as important as the culture that the place gives to us. Cultural identity is informative and inspirational; national identity is not. Cultural diversity is a product of geodiversity; geography, season and climate are written into folklore, our traditions reflect the natural rhythms of place – rhythms that are becoming ever more important as we realise the consequences of our modern, less ‘natural’, lifestyle (a lifestyle that climate change and peak-oil will soon bring to an end).
Our folklore also preserves an oral history of everyday people that would otherwise be forgotten. History, as Alex Haley famously said, “is written by the winners” and English history is usually presented as a list of Kings and Queens which begins in 1066. But the real history and culture of England is enshrined by tales (both factual and mythical) of everyday people who have stood up to these power-mongers. England is the home of Robin Hood and ‘Freeborn’ John Lilburne; Ned Ludd and Wat Tyler; Captain Swing and Bartholomew Steer. An overwhelming number of our popular histories, myths and legends contain within them the core English values of liberty, solidarity, collectivism, mutuality, political radicalism, social justice and self-determinism.
So this blog is dedicated to England and Englishness, to Albion and the Albionesque and to the triumph of diversity over monotony.
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August 11, 2009 at 1:58 am
M Anderson
“Let’s go back to a time when there was no ‘England’ and there were no ‘English’. A class of people came along and decided they wanted to rule over this place and these people but before they could rule over somewhere they needed to give it a name. And before they could govern the people who lived there they had to give them a name too. ‘England’ and ‘the English’ were a necessary construction for a governing class and remain so to this day”
Rubbish. The Angles were not a “calss of people”; they were a tribe. Stop trying to revise history. “Governing class”? Ha! ha! Commies are pathetic.
The English name came from the Angles. The Angles came from Angeln.
Modern Angeln, also known as Anglia (German and English: Angeln, Danish: Angel, Latin: Anglia), is a peninsula in Southern Schleswig in the northern Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, protruding into the Bay of Kiel. It is separated from the neighbouring peninsula of Schwansen by the Schlei inlet, and from the Danish island of Als by the Flensburger Förde. Whether ancient Angeln conformed to these borders is uncertain. It may have been somewhat larger; however, the ancient sources mainly concur that it included the territory of modern Angeln.
Angeln has a significance far beyond its current small area and country terrain, in that it is believed to have been the original home of the Angles, Germanic immigrants to what would become central and northern England, and East Anglia. This migration led to their new homeland being named after them, from which the name “England” derives. English, a major language of the modern world, derives its name from the Angles and Angeln.
This whole article is fiction. You are merely trying to revise history.
Based on place not race? Dream on mate. Ask the pakis if it is ONLY about place? You already know the answer. Why are you expecting the Angle-ish to give up their ethnicity? You bigot!
August 11, 2009 at 10:30 am
Wynfrið Wynn
To take my own words out of context is disingenouos, to take other people’s words that I happen to quote on my blog out of context and to use them to accuse me of ‘bigotry’ is pure politics.
As for your criticism of Chris Wood’s statement, it would seem that you are swayed by your somewhat outdated theories of mass migration, I’m afraid the DNA evidence tells a different story…
“A genetics researcher says the English have more in common with their neighbors in the British Isles than they realize.
Stephen Oppenheimer of Oxford University suggests 70 percent of Scottish men and 68 percent of the English have DNA that suggests they are descended from people who arrived in Britain more than 7,500 years ago from the Basque region of Northern Spain.
The conventional view has been that the Scots, Irish and Welsh are descended from Celts who arrived in the area comparatively recently, while the ancestors of the English are for the most part the Anglo-Saxons who drove the others into the hills as the Roman Empire was collapsing. But Oppenheimer says the DNA tells a different story.
‘The ancestors of some 88 percent of the Irish, 81 percent of the Welsh, 79 percent of the Cornish, 70 percent of Scots and 68 percent of the English arrived here during that period,” he said. “None of the later immigrations contributed anything more than 5 percent to the gene pool. So genetically speaking, Scots have more in common with the English than they have differences.’”
The following from Oppenheimer’s book, ‘Origins of the British’ (2006)…
“…75-95% of British Isles (genetic) matches derive from Iberia… Ireland, coastal Wales, and central and west-coast Scotland are almost entirely made up from Iberian founders, while the rest of the non-English parts of the British Isles have similarly high rates. England has rather lower rates of Iberian types with marked heterogeneity, but no English sample has less than 58% of Iberian samples…”
And for the record ‘heterogeneity’ does not mean ‘Anglo-Saxon’. Albion did not see the wholesale replacement of one people with another; what actually happened was that one powerful elite replaced another and altered the history of our land through intermarriage and changes in governance. Ethnicity, of course, is not decided by DNA alone, but neither is it decided by those who happen to be in a dominant position. Of course the Anglo-Saxons influenced the English identity in the South-East of Albion, but so did every other event in English history in the last 943 years since the regime change of 1066. Our real Englishness is the combined cultural identity of the population as they exist NOW.
This is not to knock Anglo-Saxon culture or to be ‘bigoted’ against those who may have lived under an Anglo-Saxon Eorl 1000 years ago. Pre-Norman culture was more equal – both socially and sexually – than life under the ‘Norman Yoke’. But then so was the Celtic culture before the coming of the Romans. Indeed it would seem that the everyday people of this island have always been drawn to the principles of liberty – and always shall.
For there is something about our land – call it England, call it Albion, even call it ‘a slum’ as the BNP’s Nick Griffin does, for all I care – that has always encouraged a sense of fair play, equality, tolerance and an abhorrence towards the abuse and misuse of wealth, privilege and power. The Liberties of England are an ancient and ongoing project that I believe will eventually lead to a fairer world for all (even – shock, horror – people who have emigrated from the Indian subcontinent to England!). I don’t expect M Anderson to understand this – especially as this person does not even live in England! – but it’s something that you can feel from the island itself – this may sound a little spiritual, or even magical, but a sense of place can do that.
September 26, 2012 at 7:57 am
james.petts
When someone calls you a bigot (whatever), you know they’ve lost the plot . . .
🙂