Engel - Engels England : thirty-nine counties, one capital and one man

ENGELS ENGLAND

MATTHEW ENGEL was born in Northamptonshire () with his wife, daughter and various animals. He wrote for the Guardian for nearly twenty-five years and is now the least fiscally-aware columnist on the Financial Times. For twelve years, he was the editor of Wisden Cricketers Almanack. His previous books include Eleven Minutes Late (about the railways) and Extracts from the Red Notebooks.

ALSO BY MATTHEW ENGEL

Ashes 85
Tickle the Public
Extracts from the Red Notebooks
Eleven Minutes Late

ENGELS ENGLAND

Thirty-nine counties, one capital and one man

MATTHEW ENGEL

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
Exmouth Market
London EC1R 0JH
www.profilebooks.com

Copyright Matthew Engel, 2014
Map illustrations by Susannah English

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 84765 928 6

To Laurie and the past; to Vika and the future

ENGLAND

The thirty-nine counties and one capital

INTRODUCTION

W hen my son, Laurie, was about eight, I tried to explain to him which country we lived in. Since our home was barely five miles from the Welsh border and we crossed it without thinking all the time, it was not just a theoretical question: when we went into Wales, we entered a different country, but then again we didnt.

So I told him as succinctly as I could about England, Scotland, Wales and, heaven help us, the two Irelands; about Britain, Great Britain, the United Kingdom and the British Isles (a term now increasingly considered politically incorrect, some pedants preferring North-west European Archipelago or Islands of the North Atlantic). He got the hang of the outlines remarkably quickly. But the more I said, the less I understood the subject myself, and the more I realised how bizarre these distinctions were; grasping the three-fold nature of the Christian God was a doddle in comparison.

I also realised that explaining the subject through sport, our normal topic of conversation, would make matters worse. Each sport organises itself along different national lines. Feeling bolshie, I once pointed out to a British Olympic official that the term Team GB was wrong because that excludes Northern Ireland. He replied in a gotcha tone of voice that the alternative, Team UK, would exclude the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. At any given moment, other countries may have more violently expressed divisions, but they generally know who, where and what they are.

In this century, as nationalism grew in Scotland and, to a lesser extent, Wales, the English began to chafe against their own bonds. One of the great successes of the new Celtic consciousness was the way it finessed any taint of racism: for these purposes, a Scot was someone who lived in Scotland. Attempts to find a matching English nationalism always seemed cranky.

England and Britain were once considered almost synonymous. If you met a compatriot abroad he was English unless he told you forcefully he wasnt. Until the late twentieth century United Kingdom was reserved for the most formal occasions, like best china; and there were certainly no such people as Brits. Within the new more inclusive vocabulary the English have found themselves a little lost.

The Scots could safely rail against English overlordship; the English became stuck in a general alienation that was difficult to express. Their lives were changing, at the mercy of forces beyond their control a fragile economy, technological change, Brussels, bloody foreigners and it was hard to know what to do about it. Meanwhile, all the wealth and power that England did possess was pouring inexorably into one corner of the country, the South-East, a process that was bad news even for those who lived there, at least if they were not homeowners. All this in a country whose name cannot be reliably found in drop-down internet menus. Are we U for United Kingdom, B for Britain, G for Great Britain or E for England?

It was against this background, in the financially difficult spring of 2011, with the country half-heartedly governed by David Camerons coalition, that I set off.

T his is a travel book about England, in the spirit and the footsteps of other travellers round this strange land: Defoe, Cobbett, Priestley, if it is not too pretentious to mention them. The difference is that this book is divided into the historic, ancient and traditional counties, the divisions of England that collectively withstood a thousand years of epic history but not the idiocy of the 1970s. It is not a gazetteer, nor a guidebook, nor a compendium of Englands best anything.

This is emphatically not a book about local government, nor is it a prolonged whinge about the iniquities of the 1972 Local Government Act, though that will crop up as appropriate, to explain why the counties in this book are those of Defoe, Cobbett and Priestley and not those used by modern Whitehall. And a little background is essential in advance.

For a start, as people kept asking me, why cover just England, and not GB, UK or the whole archipelago? Firstly, there was the euphonious coincidence of my un-English surname, which lent itself to an obvious title. Secondly, the historic counties of Scotland and Wales now almost all formally abolished were primarily just administrative units and never had the wider resonance of those in England. This is not true of Ireland, where the frontier between the twenty-six counties now in the Republic and the six still attached to the UK is at the forefront of the islands tortured history. There is a happier side to that: everyone in Ireland can instantly recognise the perceived characteristics of a Corkman, Kerryman or Dub; and the former Taoiseach Brian Cowen was widely known as BIFFO Big Ignorant Fucker From Offaly. But all that is another book entirely.

Thirdly, ars longa, vita brevis. It would have been lovely to spend time exploring the mountains of Sutherland or the 35,000 acres of Clackmannanshire, the Wee County, which is one-third the size of Englands pygmy, Rutland. But for any author, the prime object of writing a book is to get the damn thing finished and published, and three years travel is long enough. Above all, it is unexamined England, so little understood even by its own inhabitants, that fascinates me, and where I felt that exploring the microscopic pieces of the puzzle might produce some insights into the big picture.

T he idea of the county goes so far back in English history that exact dates are impossible. The best I can discover is as follows: Kent was probably recognisable as Cantium when Christ was a lad. Like Essex, it was an independent kingdom in the fifth century AD. The idea of a shire (scir = a division) originated in Wessex not much later. There are references to Hampshire and Devonshire from the eighth century. In the early tenth century, when Wessex conquered Mercia under Edward the Elder, son of Alfred the Great, the term spread into the Midlands.