John Michell - Rules and Revelations

Every so often there are letters in the Daily Telegraph complaining that schoolchildren are no longer taught English history. But were they ever? When I was at school in the 1940s our history lessons were just like the parody in 1066 And All That. We touched upon the Ancient Britons ( weeny, weedy and weaky as Caesar memorably called them), paid due respect to the Romans for their road-making skills, skipped though the rude Saxons and began history proper with William the Conqueror. After that it was a matter of Willy, Willy, Harry, Stee,/ Harry, Dick, John, Harry Three up to William & Mary, Anna Gloria, three Georges, William and Victoria. If you knew that jingle (hardly anyone can remember its middle part) you had a sound grasp of English history. That of course was Imperial history, and when the Marxists took over education they replaced it with their own version - no less stupid than the previous one and certainly more boring. But that is by the way. My real complaint about English history, both then and now, is that it is excessively, almost exclusively modern. The Norman occupation was less than a thousand years ago. What about the native civilizations before that?.

In Shakespeares time every child was familiar with the ancient, mythic dynasty of English kings - Lear or Leir who build Leicester, Bladud who mastered the art of flight and founded universities at Stamford and Bath, and his son Molmutius who repaired and paved the great roads that in times immemorial were laid in straight lines between the opposite capes and extremities of Britain. These roads were also sanctuaries; even a stranger with no knowledge of our language could pass along them unmolested and find hospitality everywhere. They were surveyed by the same system of measures, the mile, furlong, acre and so on, as known today. One of them, the Icknield Way, forms the main axis of southern England, stretching between its western and eastern extremities at the Lands End and the coastal border of Norfolk and Suffolk. Its hub is Avebury, the prehistoric national sanctuary, and on its direct line are many Christianized monuments of the old religion, including the remarkable Tor at Glastonbury, dedicated to the Archangel Michael. Below the Tor is the most venerable of our religious sites - the holiest earth in England - where the first Christian missionaries in Britain settled within a former Druid sanctuary. Their primitive oratory became the focus of a mighty Abbey, the senior religious house of England, whose legends refer to a great mystery - the secrets of a lost code of true knowledge which, like the Holy Grail, will one day be rediscovered, bringing light to the nation.

Successive royal charters from the earliest times confirmed the supreme authority of the Abbot of Glastonbury within the realm of Avalon. In each charter the same seven islands are named. Set in the watery marshlands to the north of the Abbey, these islands are mostly insignificant - small, low areas of dry land. But on a map their significance is apparent, for the seven islands together form the seven stars in the Great Bear, with the two island-stars that indicate the Pole Star pointing towards Glastonbury Tor - the pivot of a vast, mythological, ritualised landscape, laid out in ages beyond reckoning. Many such discoveries are waiting to be made, but someone has to look for them first, and that is where the modern, curtailed view of English history is such an obstacle. If children are not told about old English history, mythology and the relics of antiquity to which they refer, how can they be drawn to these mysteries? It is the same problem with the Holy Grail. If you do not know it exists, how can you look for it? You do not have to, of course, but informed opinion says that the pursuit of ancient truth and wisdom is a happier way through life than through the pointless confusion of secular, modern history.

PS If anyone can remember the whole of the Willy, Willy rhyme, I should be grateful for it.