England is over. It’s gone. Whatever still exists is just a remnant, barely hanging on in its own country, and in a few decades it’ll probably be snuffed out for good. The English way of existing in the world is steadily being eroded by foreign customs. Already, the country I grew up in is unrecognisable, full of strange and angry people spouting misshapen foreign ideas. Foreign ideas about the need for a shared community. About how society isn’t just a collection of individuals, but a group with a common purpose, growing out of the traditional structures of kith and kin. About a people deeply rooted in a particular place, and about the placeless migrants like locusts on the wind, tearing it all apart. This stuff isn’t just on the fringes any more: this month, even the Prime Minister started talking about how uncontrolled immigration means ‘we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.’ What hope is there for England when even its leaders are spouting this dreck?
You have never been deeply rooted in any particular place, and you have always been an island of strangers. The current level of migration might not be to everyone’s benefit, or even really anyone’s benefit (more on that later), but it can’t destroy what doesn’t exist. There used to be a people who were deeply rooted in this place, a millennium and a half ago, but not any more. They went with the giants.
When the first refugees came here after the sack of Troy, they found the place wild and empty, but not silent: at night, in the hills and the forests, they trembled at the inarticulate groans of giants. The people built cities, and the giants came howling out of the hills to smash down the walls. Geoffey of Monmouth says the last of the giants were killed by Brutus and Corineus in Cernyw, but later at least one giant, Brân Fendigaidd son of Llŷr, became king of the Britons. They must have made some kind of peace; after that it was the blood of the giants that ruled. Brân was so huge that no house could contain him. After his sister Branwen was mistreated by Matholwch king of Ireland, Brân Fendigaidd sent an army from all the one hundred and fifty-four districts of Britain to sail over and rescue her, but because he was too big to fit in a ship he had to wade across the Irish Sea. When the swineherds of Ireland saw him in the distance, they mistook him for a mountain rising out of the water, and his two furious eyes for two gleaming lakes. By the end Brân had laid waste to so much of Ireland that the only survivors were five pregnant women hiding in a cave, but in the fighting his foot was pierced by a poisoned spear. He told his followers to cut off his head and bury it at the Gwynfryn in Caer Lud, facing south. As long as his head was in that spot, no oppression would ever come from across the sea to the Island of Britain. The noble triads in the Red Book of Hergest record that the burying of Brân’s head was the first of the Three Fortunate Concealments; the third of the Three Unfortunate Unconcealments was when Arthur decided to dig it up again. It hurt his pride to imagine that the land would need any protection other than himself, so he disinterred the head, and then he defended these shores until he died. And then, oozing against the beaches of this island like an algae bloom, the Saxons came.
It might not be nice to point this out, it might not be politically correct, but the Saxons really don’t belong here. Even after all this time, fifteen hundred years of this great bunch of lads tactically chundering all over Arthur’s kingdom, they’re still uncomfortable in the land. Like their thing with the weather. The Saxons will not stop complaining about the weather. The springs are too grey. The summers are too mild. It’s literally all they talk about, how endlessly disappointed they are by this country’s weather, and how desperate they are to briefly fly off somewhere else. Well, not to be rude, but if you hate it so much, then what the fuck are you doing here? If you wanted a long, hot, dry summer, and a fairytale winter where it always snows on Christmas, you should have stayed in the marshes of the Elbe where you came from. Why would you come to an island with such a witchy, mystic climate, silver curtains of rain, fog, weather that changes unpredictably several times a day—and then jump on the first RyanAir to Marbella? Why didn’t you join up with the Visigoths instead? You had a choice.
But this island was always just a brief staging-post for the Saxons: a few hundred years here to gather supplies, work on new types of rigging, and then off again to spread their sickness across the world. This is why the salmon-hunting grounds of the Tlingit and Salish, where animal ancestors grinned from wooden poles in the mist, are now part of something called British Columbia. Why you can fly to Te Ika-a-Maui, an island lost in endless ocean, on a wild and distant hemisphere, where all the old stories are about canoes, taro, salt-spray, gods woven from coconut fibre, and find it full of awkward people with wonky smiles dunking biscuits in milky tea.
Are they comfortable there? Of course not. The Saxons aren’t comfortable anywhere. There’s never been a people that squirms so awkwardly inside their own skin. Talking about sex famously throws them into crisis, but so does talking about anything. They sit on trains, silent. On the bus, silent. They spend first dates mutually dabbing at their phones. In the rest of Europe people might go to a restaurant together on their lunch breaks, but not the Saxon, who sits silently by himself on a park bench, eating a packaged sandwich from M&S. The only time they can bear to talk to each other is when they’re at the pub, coked up and drunk. This is why so many of them spend their entire lives on the piss, and why they all end up looking that way.
It’s easy—and fun—to throw lazy cultural stereotypes around, but this one comes with data. Most of it was first gathered by Peter Laslett and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, who found that already by the medieval period, the English were not living like their neighbours in continental Europe. Other Europeans were mostly sedentary. They lived in strong clan or village-based kinship structures that held land in common. People married early, had children early, raised those children in gregarious and multigenerational households. They spent their lives enmeshed in the networks of social bonds that are, according to every society in human history, what make us truly human. Aristotle said that we are a zoon politikon, and only beasts or gods could live alone, but Aristotle never saw the English.
From the moment they set foot in this country they’ve been weird, untethered and autistic. In medieval Spain or Italy, girls were usually married in their mid-teens, and men around 20; the average English woman was 24 years old at first marriage, and the average man was 27. For most young people in England, the period before marriage wasn’t spent with the kinship group, but in service: wage-labour. Poll tax records from 1377 show that over 13% of rural households in England included unrelated servants; in contemporary France the number was closer to 2%, almost all of them aristocratic estates. England had a large supply of mobile, disposable labour-power. Most people moved short distances, but it was perfectly ordinary to travel a long way in search of employment. In 1327, 4.1% of York’s population had come from more than 40 miles away, some from up to 100. When they did marry, the English almost always set up a separate household away from both sets of parents. Some 65% of English households in 1377 were nuclear families, managing their own plots of land, cut off from any larger kinship group. Even then they wouldn’t necessarily stay put; fourteenth-century manorial rolls show that over the course of a decade, roughly a third of all tenant farmers—that is, people supposedly bonded to the land—would move residence. Another village, another set of neighbours to never talk to. By the fifteenth century foreign observers were starting to notice that the English do not behave like normal, friendly people. Andrea Trevisano, ambassador from Venice, reported that ‘the English are great lovers of themselves and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves.’ But really, these rootless friendless creatures are hardly men at all. In 1472, his Milanese opposite number wrote that ‘they are evil islanders born with tails.’
You call it neoliberal atomisation. In fact, it’s the ancient time-honoured folkways of the English.