The birth of England and why we need to understand it today

History doesn't repeat itself: it lives in our bones, and we reenact it until we become conscious of it

I’ve been reading a lot of articles and posts trying to contextualize what’s going on in Gaza right now. Trying to find the origin point of these horrors.

What I haven’t seen enough of is people trying to understand what European nations actually are. Where they came from, how they helped create this situation, and how they inscribe insecurity and unbelonging—the fuel for violence, persecution, and domination—into their DNA.

So I’d like to share with you a story about the origins of England, and how it helped set the global course for what we’re seeing today. I want to preface this by saying that I am by no means an expert on the Middle East or Jewish history, but I have spent most of my life studying the literature and history of England. And I deeply believe that if you’re English, or if you’re descended from WASPs, you need to know the story that follows. We need to demand a ceasefire now, and we need to understand our own role in all this, so that we can do everything in our power to stop the cycle of suffering.

(And if this sounds like an attack on England, know that I chose to move back here after 11 years abroad because there’s so much that I love about this place and its people: its forests and moors, its writers and musicians, its humour and strangeness. It’s precisely because I love it so much that it breaks my fucking heart.)

---

Alfred’s lookout point in Somerset

The year is 878, and King Alfred is hiding in a marsh in Somerset, in what is now southwest England. Vikings have been attacking this island for decades—in fact, Alfred is King of Wessex only because his brother was killed amid the violence. Now, the Danes have routed Alfred and his troops, seizing much of his kingdom and neighbouring kingdoms on this many-kinged land, and leaving Alfred in the marshes.

This is a ragged land full of ragged kingdoms—kingdoms founded by folk who arrived here from what is now Germany and southern Scandinavia, four-hundred-odd years earlier. It has always been a hard place to live. To eke out a living from the soil.

Alfred’s folk and the other Angles and Saxons and Jutes came to this land in and after the dying days of Rome, and they drove the Romanized Britons west to Wales, to Cornwall and Devon.

They brought with them hard practices of kinship and lordship. They brought weapons and a devotion to warrior honour. They claimed land and they fought each other for power and territory and they settled into kingdoms and hierarchies.

More than other European peoples in the early Middle Ages, they seem to have experienced the natural world as hostile, threatening. These were migrants and settlers in a strange place, praying to pagan gods they’d brought with them across the seas, trying to learn the ways of this harsh land well enough to feed themselves, to stay alive.

So that when missionaries came from Rome and from Ireland too, bringing the Word of God, singular—the Christian faith seemed to many like a bright light of hope in a cold, dark land. The island’s kings soon converted. Alfred himself, a few hundred years later, was a devout Christian.

But this strange, hard, cold, wet island in the northern seas had always been teetering at the farthest reach of Christendom. It had always been at risk of falling back into—or being swallowed by—the pagan wilds.

And now the pagan threat was more real than ever. The heathen Vikings had driven Alfred off his land and into a swamp, threatening his kingdom, his power, his life, and his everlasting soul.

Alfred needed to unite those ragged kingdoms into a single nation, a nation powerful enough to defeat the Danes once and for all, secure his own power, and in so doing, save his own soul from damnation.

So what does he do? He sets about creating England as we know it.

He will fight a war not just with weapons, but with culture.

He will turn this land into a nation of the pious and righteous and, critically, victorious.

He educates people—because literacy is Christian; it’s the only way to live in accordance with God’s will. Dreaming of widespread literacy in the vernacular, he funds the translation of major texts into his own variety of the English language.

He reforms the Church, reviving the declining monasteries.

And he cracks down on paganism and witchcraft—because pagan practices and rituals had persisted, even through those early centuries of Christianity. Spells were still cast and prayers sent to the old gods for health, for the success of crops, for fertility and luck and life.

All such ritual was now banned, under penalty of death.

Because the living world was hostile and the gods once thought to lurk in it were monstrous, demonic. Because your belonging on this earth was not inborn; you had to fight for it, to earn it. Because God would punish heathens. Because heathens would be the ruin of the country. Because truth and faith and goodness came not from the land but from Rome, from on high, from top-down religious and political structures. Because the pagans were coming, and Alfred had a kingdom and a soul to protect.

This is how England was born. Amid fighting and fear. Looked at one way, the English identity arose as a defence mechanism.

---

Established populations of Jewish people aren’t reported in England for another few hundred years—until after the Norman Conquest, by which time, if anything, this note of fear and defensiveness at the heart of Englishness had only been amplified.

We can see this fear and defensiveness lash out as hatred and prejudice when we look at the violence perpetrated against Jewish people in medieval England: they were persecuted, massacred, and punitively overtaxed—singled out to pay the nation’s and the royal household’s expenses. Then, in 1290, Edward I expelled all Jewish people from the country altogether. Most were only able to take what they could carry.

It’s a shameful history, and of course it’s not the end of this country’s crimes. England would go on to get rich from human trafficking, from colonialism, and from the Industrial Revolution it was instrumental in sparking, to such disastrous environmental effect. And all this allowed us to assume an outsized role in global affairs—a role we used to support the foundation of the nation state of Israel in 1948. And even then, even in an act aimed to redress millennia of persecution of Jewish people culminating in the Holocaust, our leaders were still acting out of hatred and othering; the target of the hatred and othering had simply moved. In the Palestine commission, Churchill said: “I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time.”

This is our history. This is what we must reckon with, if we want to do away with this hateful dynamic altogether, rather than keep moving the target.

Because history is never really in the past. Each of us is born with our ancestors’ stories quite literally encoded into our DNA, and born too into cultures and institutions and nations that are nothing more or less than living incarnations of past events and processes.

We need to understand this history of fear and insecurity and othering, so that we can begin to step outside of it.

We need a ceasefire now.

And we need awareness and empathy and imagination, now.

Love,

xx Ellie