This is a rather belated write-up and discussion of a very interesting talk by Bruce O’Brien at the Institute of Historical Research on ‘Early Medieval Englishness Reconsidered’. His starting point was that ‘Englishness’ was a relatively recent term in studies of early medieval England. It only really took off in 1983 with the publication of Michael Clanchy’s England and its rulers 1066-1272 and Patrick Wormald’s article on ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas and the origins of the Gens Anglorum' (in the Festschrift for Michael Wallace-Hadrill). Michael was arguing that the development of a strong English nationalism in the thirteenth century suggested a largely hidden pre-Norman continuity. Meanwhile Patrick was looking much earlier, to see Bede’s work as already defining a sense of the English as a community, but as religious one rather than a political one. (There are also links to the work being done in the 1960s in Germany on ethnogenesis by Wenskus and others).

Bruce, argued, however, that the real take-off of the concept was linked to a third academic work published in 1983, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. As he pointed out, this is very badly-informed and hence dismissive of national feeling before ‘modern’ print culture, but it does link the strong state with the development of national consciousness. As a result, the Anglo-Saxon maximalists (James Campbell et al), wanted to use Anderson’s concepts rather than his conclusions. If the Anglo-Saxon state was so strong then it must have created/fostered a strong sense of Englishness and vice versa. The concept was therefore incorporated into the view of the Anglo-Saxon state and actively looked for. The result has been some recent works in which Englishness is a recurrent theme.

Bruce, having worked with the concept himself, however, is becoming increasingly uncertain about its usefulness, and wondering whether we should stop using the term at all. Firstly, because the term itself inevitably imports ideas of continuity and content from other periods. Englishness has a political and emotional content that ‘Norman-ness’ no longer possesses. (Similarly, I think most scholars are quite happy to see many ideas of ‘Frankishness’ as being political manipulations by the Carolingian elite). Perhaps even more importantly, there has been too much attempt to push the Anglo-Saxon evidence into the mould of ‘Englishness’. Any differences mentioned between ethnic groups are assumed to be a sign of Englishness. (To emphasise this, someone in the audience at question time was arguing that references to ‘Danish customs’ in a source indicated a sense of Englishness, whereas Bruce’s point was that you had to be far more cautious in interpretations such as these).

As well as being challenging for our thinking about early medieval England, the talk also got me thinking harder about the concept of Englishness (or Britishness) in the modern world and realising how sloppy some of my previous thinking about it had been. It wasn’t a distinction that Bruce explicitly made in the paper, but it did get me thinking about the difference between Englishness in terms of customs, identity and community

Firstly, just because the customs of a country are noted as being different, doesn’t necessarily say anything about national sentiment. Leave aside the question of whether the views of an outsider are correct/typical and assume they’re accurate. For example, I might correctly say that the Netherlands seemed different to me from England because they have double-decker trains. However, the Dutch do not, as far as I know, define themselves by their trains, and equally, nor do the British define themselves as the sort of people who don’t have double-decker trains. In other words, distinctive customs don’t necessarily translate into identity and if they do, they do so in complex ways. (Think of the complexities of how nations define themselves by what they do or don’t eat. The Japanese government are still defining them nation as whale meat eaters, even though they have problems in finding any Japanese willing to eat whales).

Secondly there is the problem of how Englishness relates to both identity and community. Recent attempts to encourage ‘Britishness’ have seen a simple equation in which a shared identity produces community and harmony and prevents violence. But as I think about it, I realise that my English identity does not necessarily increase my feelings of community. My English identity (which is strongly affected both by my work as a historian, but also my middle class upbringing in the rural south of England) is real, but it may have very little in common with the equally real English identity of a working class man from inner city Bradford, and I’m not sure how much sense of community we’d automatically feel. Even the promotion of a common identity/set of symbols may not be enough to promote this sense of community. The USA, for example, has a very strong sense of common identity, around symbols such as the flag and the constitution. Yet while a patriotic black American and a member of the Klu Klux Klan might attach the same importance to many of these symbols, there is no community between them, because of the single additional tenet of white supremacism: that non-whites cannot properly be American. (There was an interesting comment in an article by Gary Younge of the Guardian discussing anti-Hispanic immigrant views in the US: even the more racist there do not want immigration stopped, they just want the ‘right sort’ of immigrants). The experience of violence from right-wing racist organisations in the US and the UK suggest that a feeling of identity towards a country doesn’t stop them attacking other members of the country. Similarly, however worthy it may be to make British Muslims feel more British, it isn’t necessarily going to stop home-grown terrorism.

The Conservative party report on the educational failure of ‘white working class boys’ (http://povertydebate.typepad.com/education/) got headlines in several papers and the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6150042.stm). I thought it sounded an interesting piece of research, until I actually saw the statistics they were basing the headlines on. They claim:

17% of white working class boys gain five or more A-C grades at GCSE, slightly fewer than the 19 per cent of black Caribbean boys of similar backgrounds...But among boys from low income Chinese families, the success rate is 69 per cent.

That ‘low income’ is the give-away. Because when you see how they collected their statistics, it is based not on socio-economic class, but one very crude measure: boys who have free school meals. So I checked the rules for eligibility for free school meals. The main criteria are being on income support or Jobseeker’s allowance (i.e. being unemployed) or having a low family income (not more than about £14,000). That is not a definition of ‘working class’ that most people would accept (as opposed to a definition of poor). In particular, the majority of skilled working class jobs would be excluded. The median annual pay for full-time skilled trades (such as in agriculture, construction, electrical work) is £20,000, the median annual pay for drivers is nearly £19,000 etc.

What that means is that whether working-class families (with at least one full-time income) are eligible for free school meals for their children is going to depend crucially on what jobs they’re doing. If they’re in low-pay sectors such as catering or shop work, they may well be eligible. If they’re a motor mechanic or a fork-lift driver, their children won’t be. And given that some ethnic minorities (such as Chinese and South Asian) are concentrated in low paying industries, that immediately casts severe doubts on the validity of the statistics, since they are often not going to be comparing like with like. If you are going to argue (as the Conservatives do), that the difference is about culture, then you need to be controlling for employment status. Do the boys of the long-term unemployed (or those with a father in full-time employment) do equally well/poorly, whatever their ethnicity/culture?

There are also a whole lot of questions raised about what you mean by ‘culture’ when you’re talking about the ‘white working class’. Is there still a ‘working class’ culture in the same way, when the traditional work is no longer there? An important part of male working class culture, traditionally, as I understand it, was working at specific types of heavy/dangerous/dirty manual labour, many forms of which have almost gone in this country - mining, iron and steel industry, car production. You can define a class ‘culture’ in other ways than jobs, of course - I would argue that being part of the middle class is far more about education and attitudes to it than specific forms of employment after education. But if (male) working class culture depended heavily on the existence of manufacturing jobs that have now disappeared, then the Conservatives ought to start thinking a bit harder about their role their policies have and might play in damaging that culture.

My husband and I have been raising L as a Christian since she was born, since we’re both believers, but it has definitely been getting trickier in the last 6 months (from L aged 3.5 to nearly 4). I think Easter 2006 was the first festival that really registered at a theological level (Christmas 2005 did a bit), and I have had a number of theological discussions with her since then. I am trying quite hard both to answer her questions and not to tell her things that I would have to contradict at a later date. (I’m obviously simplifying and omitting a lot, but that’s a different matter). She’s now getting to the age where she can remember (if somewhat at random) what people say, so my consistency, at least is becoming more important.

My problems so far seem to fall into three main categories:

1) The theologically unexpected question

L followed up a question on ‘Can you open a tin without a tin-opener?’ with ‘Can God open a tin without a tin-opener?’ The theologically correct answer is, of course ‘Yes’ (it’s definitely included within omnipotence), but I felt the need to add to this that although God could do this, he wouldn’t do it, because it was a silly thing to do and God wasn’t silly. We have also since then had ‘Does God ever have a runny nose?’ (which again I think is probably excluded by omnipotence), ‘Is God a man or a woman?’ (I argued for neither: even if you take God as male, as Christian tradition has it, he is not a man and that is the point) and ‘What can God do that I can do as well?’ (The answer is Love people). These questions are tricky in the sense that there is no pre-existing theological answer (if only Augustine had had his young son around when he was doing theology, we might have got some of then), but I can usually come up with some vaguely logical answer. If L notices more inconsistencies when she grows up, I can point out that the problem is that God is beyond our human understanding in many ways, so descriptions of him are inevitably analogous and imperfect.

2) Don’t believe all you sing or pray

I was pleased that L was learning ‘Away in a manger’, until she came up with the killer question. ‘The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes / But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes’. Why doesn’t Baby Jesus cry? We know Jesus cried as an adult, why shouldn’t he have done so as a baby? If he was truly human as a baby, then he would have howled when he was hungry or wet or for lots of other reasons. I couldn’t come up with a good answer to this one. I have also had a tricky theological time with guardian angels. They crop up in several prayers and Christian picture books L has and she likes the whole concept of angels watching over her while she sleeps. I’m not sure how theologically sound the concept is, however, so I am trying to downplay it a bit.

3) Death

Hearing about the Easter story is the first time L came across the concept of death. As a result, she doesn’t yet have any sense that death is permanent and irreversible and that what Jesus did in dying and then rising is in any way unusual. We’ve also told her the idea of heaven and she likes the sound of this, so she comes out sometimes with some fairly morbid sounding comments. (Her best ever was ‘Don’t worry if I die when I’m a child, because God will be my daddy and Jesus will be my mummy’ - which makes me vaguely wonder if she’s going to grow up to be Julian of Norwich). My view is that she will in time inevitably face and become conscious of the sadness of death, whether of elderly relatives, animals or in other ways; I don’t feel the need to hurry up this realisation. If she shares our belief that death is not the end then that will be a support for her when she does have to learn about the pain of death.

Alongside these questions which, however, inadequately, I’m trying to answer, I’m also conscious of the one that is going to be really hard in a few years time, that is lurking on the horizon now. The problem of why God allows suffering. There are theological answers to the problem of theodicy, but as academic/detached answers they’re never convincing (compare CS Lewis in ‘The problem of pain’ and ‘A grief observed’). I guess all I will be able to say in the end is ‘I don’t know, but I still believe in a loving God’ and hope that the God-inspired goodness that she sees in the people around her (including, I hope, but am rather unconvinced, in me), will seem to her confirmation of this.

A couple of comments I read/heard recently have got me thinking about the different kinds of authoritarian states there are and their relationship to families. One was someone talking about life in Communist Hungary and how it came to influence the very things you could think and talk about. It was hard to trust anyone. He had a friend from school he used to discuss jazz with; he found out after the fall of communism, when the secret police files were open, that that friend had been forced into working as an informer and his own comments on music had been noted. In this kind of surveillance culture there were massive amounts of self-censorship; it became hard even to think certain things, since these could never be expressed safely.

As a contrast, I came across the opening of a book review in the New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.com/200610160056):

Contrary to a notion common in the west, in Arab countries no opinion is too dangerous to express. People say whatever they want to say - they simply do it in private. Those who try to disclose in public what is meant to be shared only with a small circle of trusted friends, especially if it relates to political or religious matters, could pay a high price. Samir Kassir, who was murdered last year, was one of these.

It seems to me that these represent two very different traditions in authoritarian states (both of which could be equally brutal to political opponents). One seeks to penetrate all of society, right into the most intimate relationships (the classic totalitarianism), another seems to allow more autonomy at the personal level, while still maintaining a wider oppressive structure. A couple of recent articles on Iran seem to emphasis this second tendency (http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009162, http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1937510,00.html), showing a world where such illegal acts as premarital sex and watching satellite TV are normal activities, within complicated frameworks of deception and pretence. This itself obviously has a disconnecting impact on society and mentalities, but not in quite the same corrosive way as totalitarianism.

I started wondering both why such a ‘soft’, public-only authoritarianism developed and whether it was possibly more successful at political repression than the ‘normal’ totalitarian state. The conventional view is that any relaxation of repression by an authoritarian state will lead to its downfall: it is the state trying to lessen its iron grip where the system collapses totally (like Gorbachov’s communism), whereas the obdurate hardliners continue for ever. (See e.g. Ian Bremmer, The J Curve http://www.amazon.com/Curve-Understand-Nations-Rise-Fall/dp/0743274717). Yet I wonder whether some of these limited authoritarian states might not be more successful than traditional communist ones. Even Iran looks more politically stable than reformers would like it to be. (As the Wall Street Journal concludes: ‘How can you have a revolution when everyone is watching TV?’). And countries such as Singapore seem so far to be successfully combining economic and some social liberty with political repression.

The examples from around the world also suggest that this kind of public-only authoritarianism works best where there is a fairly strong cultural tradition of repressive/controlling families, for example in Mediterranean/Arab culture, Confucian influenced East Asia (or indeed pre-20th century Western Christen culture). Perhaps what happens is that the state is allowing the privatisation of control/repression here. There certainly seems to be some kind of trade off, since the totalitarian state often seems to be connected to a suspicion of the family: communism, in particular, from Soviet Russia to Mao’s China, being noted for the encouragement of denouncing your own family/close friends. Such a surveillance society, with the state invading private life, tends to be associated with the left, since they often have the most suspicion of the family. Sometimes this is justified: the idea that the family should never be questioned has led to a lot of domestic violence and abuse over the years. The Iranian mullahs don’t actually need to penetrate to the bedroom to check for misconduct: they can rely on grannies to do this for them. But there are also some occasions where right-wingers are enthusiastic to regulate private life: rules preventing private homosexual acts, for example, or the threat in the USA to subpoena women’s health records to check on abortions. (Ferdinand Mount, a conservative journalist, wrote an interesting book, The subversive family: an alternative history of love and marriage (London, 1982), which pointed out that the family wasn’t simply subversive of socialist values. It could also be hostile to more ‘conservative’ social movements, such as Christianity or Edward Burke’s wish to co-opt family love into developing patriotism.)

Meanwhile, in the recent discussion of Britain becoming a ‘surveillance society’ I think there’s possibly been too much focus on the technology of cameras etc. Perhaps more problematic is the growth of a culture that encourages denouncing of others, even those close to us. The government has certainly encouraged this, with John Reid wanting Muslim parents to spy on their children http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1876865,00.html), but I think the proliferation of ‘report a cheat’ lines has merely tapped into a deep-seated urge by Britons to inform on others (such as those who use their hosepipes illegally). Unfortunately, if a real authoritarian state ever did come to Britain, it would probably be at the more totalitarian end of the spectrum.

This is an extract from Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars, (2nd ed, Cambridge, 2006), which I've just been reading, on the Inquisition (pp 28-29):

The accused was interrogated by the inquisitor and his assistants and a summary of the proceedings was recorded by a notary. The aim was to establish guilt, either by confession or by the use of testimonial evidence. He was not allowed a defending advocate, even if he could have found one, and witnesses were reluctant to testify on his behalf for fear of guilt by association. Hostile witnesses were allowed to remain anonymous on the grounds that they might otherwise be intimidated, and the accused could only read a précis of their depositions. In contrast to secular proceedings, all kinds of witnesses could be used, even perjurers, criminals and the excommunicate. The accused could only list his enemies in the hope that some names would coincide with the witnesses. It seems, however, that the inquisitors’ real aim was to obtain a confession, for, without the admission of guilt, a heretic could not be reconciled to the Church. If confession could not be obtained spontaneously, compulsion would be used, firstly by imprisonment under increasingly harsh conditions and ultimately by torture, supposedly of a limited kind which did not involve the effusion of blood or permanent mutilation.

I’m very busy at the moment, trying to understand how the Holy Roman Empire worked, so please fill in the contemporary analogies yourself.