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Friday 1 May 2015

Professor Robert Tombs on the Uniqueness of England


Professor Robert Tombs on the Uniqueness of England


For my birthday I was given a book:- 'The English and their History' by Professor Robert Tombs. 


This is a book that I would recommend to anyone interested in the history of England and the English people. Here is an extract which particularly appealed to me. See what you think:-

“What is unique about England lies in the realm of politics: the early development, in response to Viking invasions, of a powerful kingdom occupying a defined territory, with a system of government in which a large part of the population participated, whether they liked it or not – through courts and juries, through tithings, through labour, taxation and military service, through the use of royal coins, and, for the powerful, through royal councils and parliaments. 


Some historians have suggested that this made England the prototype of the nation-state. Similar institutions to those of England had existed at times in other parts of Europe, particularly under the empire of Charlemagne, but they were swept away. In England they survived. Being a powerful and yet vulnerable kingdom, able to raise taxes and impose law and order, and yet subject to disputed royal succession and foreign invasion, it’s Kings needed the support of their people, and the people high and low needed to control the actions of their Kings. Anglo-Saxon institutions, some of very ancient origin, were preserved and developed by the post-Conquest monarchy, which extended royal justice and created a common law. 

The country of Bede’s gens Anglorum was never divided up into autonomous and warring feudal territories. Instead, the “community of the realm” imposed the rule of law on its powers and on its post-Conquest monarchs to a degree unique in Europe.

The common law in Magna Carta was seen not as revolutionary innovations, but as restatements of ancient principals. The distinctiveness of the common law became a source of pride …

This (took) on weighty ideological significance: the law was claimed to be above and beyond royal absolutism and hence the safeguard of liberty. This significance it has subsequently retained, at least subliminally. 


Moreover by an unpredictable historical twist, “the insular and arcane learning of the small band of lawyers who argued cases in the corner of Westminster Hall became the law by which the third of the people of the earth were governed and protected, the second (after Roman Law) of the two great systems of jurisprudence known to the world”.

Continuity is crucial in this story. Many of the jumbled ingredients of nationhood, beliefs, myths, institutions, customs, loyalties – that were already present in the 9th Century were revived or reinvented in the 12th. 


Thereafter they gained in potency because they persisted, deriving legitimacy from their ever growing antiquity, enhanced by linking them with the real or mythical pasts of St Edward the Confessor and King Arthur. England’s laws and institutions came to seem untouchable and immutable, as if in the nature of things, dating from time immemorial. They could then be seen in Edmund Burke’s famous phrase of 1791, as creating “a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”. In such ways nations and identities are “constructed”: that is made by people, and not determined by geography, genes or blood.”


14 comments:

  1. No doubt this is an interesting book, but it should be laid to one side until the elections are over. EDs need to be out on the stump, in a concerted effort of canvassing and delivering leaflets in the party's target seats at this time, primarily in South Yorkshire where it is standing half its candidates; not sat at home reading books.

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  2. I am not sure about the genes and blood bit. Blacks in America in their Black Lives Matter campaign are now crying genocide. Very shortly whites there will be crying genocide as well, as will happen in the coming decades in many countries in Western Europe and Scandinavia.
    Total racial pluralism does not work as America is showing. There are limits to genes and blood. Pluralism has never been tried in China and Japan and there is no intention there of doing so. When Burke was speaking this way I should imagine he was talking about our fellow Europeans and not wholly alien races as this would not have been an issue in his day.

    Further to what has been said about the English Democrats and the North-east, you would have to talk to a Geordie about why they are voting for UKIP. I have a feeling that the border on the eastern side is not so much of a factor as on the western; perhaps this is because the Anglian territory stretched up to Edinburgh, as testified by the place names. Indeed, I once met a Scot from that part of Lothian who felt himself to be Anglian and not a Celt.

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  3. Robin, your concluding sentence is patently wrong; on the contrary, nations ARE absolutely "determined by geography, genes and blood".

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  4. It is not true that the country of Bede's gens Anglorum was never divided up into autonomous and warring [feudal] territories. (The word 'feudal' is an anachronism in this context).
    The Northumbrian Engle (Angles) fought against the Southumbrian Engle, and the Southumbrian Engle fought against the Saxons.
    In 825, the West Saxons drove the Engle out of Sussex (Suthseaxe/South Saxons), Kent (Cantaware/Kentish folk) and Essex (Eastseaxe/East Saxons) to create a unified Saxon kingdom that, under Alfred the Great, withstood the Danish invasion which had extinguished both kingdoms of the Engle (Northumbria and Mercia).
    Also, the Scots are not Celts, but Gaels (i.e., Irish/Erse/Scots) in the North West, Picts in the North East, Britons in the South West and Engle (Angles) in the South East.
    The name 'Celt' is more or less meaningless, certainly when applied to the inhabitants of the British Isles.

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    1. Bring life to our English tongue

      For the tongue to live, it needs to be spoken. There should be clubs for folk who wish to learn and speak our New-English speech. Best, it has to be taken up as the everyday speech of the folk. Better yet, it has to become the speech of the thede (nation) of the Engle kin (English folk) dwelling on the England. For all others it can only ever be an outlandish (foreign) speech.
      We will need to fight for radio and farsee (television) broadcasting in New-English from Leeds and Nottingham, much as there are outsendingsteads (stations) in Wales and Scotland broadcasting in the Welsh tongue and Scots Gaelic. [written in New-English]

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    2. I think you place too much emphasis on the divide between the Angles and Saxons.

      The two were almost indistinguishable in England, and the linguistic differences were very small. For example, the Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Cornish names for "English" are all derived from the word "Saxon".

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  5. In an earlier blog, Robin referred to Ukip as a British Nationalist party rather than an English Nationalist party. Today, on BBC Radio 4, Nigel Farage made it clear that he at least is not any kind of nationalist. He doesn't want the UK governed from Brussels, but he does want it governed from Wall Street and Mumbai. He is not a nationalist but a globalist.

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    1. So Farage is City/Wall Street stooge as I suspected. England must be ruled by England and by the English. No more of it being ruled from abroad.

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  6. My wife gave me this book for Xmas! I particularly like Tombs' comments on the waning of Norman/French influence in the 13th century. He writes, "After 200 years a common English political identity began to re-emerge." Now the Union begins to unravel after 300 years, hopefully English political identity will again re-emerge, this time out of a lifting fog of Britishness.
    Steve,
    Ilminster,

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    1. Steve. As I have said before, the Norman Invasion was described as a corporate takeover when they brought in the bankers, alien to the English. A thousand years later they are at it again, we are ruled by big corporations and banks alien to the Anglo-Saxon. But Left and Right are now teaming together to bring about the revolution before it is too late. When the Jewish bankers were asked to leave, those from Lombardy and Flanders took over and then the Jewish bankers came back under Cromwell. We have been ruled by foreign finance since the Battle of Hastings and it has got worse and worse.

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  7. An interesting Irishman based in Paris was speaking on RT. I have heard him before. Of Libya he said that Ghaddafi was going to make it the powerhouse for African development and boot out the Western corporations who are exploiting it. Their plan in Africa and the Middle East is to create chaos and divide and rule. That is why Hillary Clinton the scion of Wall Street and psychopath had him killed.

    But he said immigration was part of the same plan, to fragment Europe through mass immigration, create conflict and chaos as well as use cheap immigrant labour. We always suspected this. This is why Rothschild man and UN commissioner for migration, Peter Sutherland, told the bought mp s that the aim was to destroy the homogeneous nations of Europe. It looks as if Farage is working to the same agenda. Ruled by India what an insult. It is obvious that with more and more programmes about India they are determined to make England like the Sub-continent anyhow. The English must finally rebel or we will be lost.

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  8. In New-English, the title* of this blog would be 'Professor Robert Tombs on the oneoffness of England''
    * New-English for 'title' is 'heading'.

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  9. There was a man on the BBC radio 4 'Today' talking about the Easter bullion robbery, who said, "We do not know sufficient". It shows how far they will go to get away from speaking English words. In English that would have been, "We do not know enough".

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