Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Here is a clue: "a deeper historical, and broader regional, awareness might question whether the multifarious and tolerant people of England will meekly file into the impoverishing cloisters so often assigned to them".
The current campaigns for justice and voice for England are often shrill, inflated by an artificial history of national victimhood, as if England is simply one of the oppressed. Now openDemocracy has republished a wonderful essay by its deputy editor David Hayes which meditates on this via the memorial to Edward I, King of England for 35 years. He died here in Cumbria unable to defeat the Scots exactly 700 years ago today.
The anniversary is being celebrated on the spot, as David reports in his introduction, but not, er, nationally. For this was an English imperial moment which was also one of frustration if not defeat. Very English, then, and not at all British. Here is a long quotation, if you have any time, read the whole essay - your sense of England will never be the same:
This is the loneliest monument in England. On the very edge of the marsh, in the middle of a field of cows, a sandstone pillar of thirty feet surrounded by a fence and topped with a cross. Erected in 1685, it was rebuilt in 1803 after flooding, and restored in 1876 when subterranean peat workings had caused it to list. In this mournful setting, with the carved tnbute (Edwardi primi famam optimi Angliae regis...) fading and the hills beyond still indomitable, it is impossible not to think of Ozymandias.
What DH Lawrence called "the spirit of place" is an idea both dangerous and (sometimes) irresistible. It is palpable that this is a monument to failure. The monarch who handed over the great seal of Scotland with the words "A man does good business when he rids himself of a turd" now has a memorial ringed by cowpats. It is tilting again; this is shifting ground. Iron will and sovereign power do not rest easy here.
Edward's death in the field, quo finit marchia regni (says a contemporary account) imparts a dramatic character to this forlorn place. But if - beyond the contingencies of a particular encounter - any meaning does indeed inhere in this combination of stone, metal, sky and soggy grass, it surely can be discovered only by reclaiming the debatable lands of a multilayered history. English ground contains a myriad stories as real and arguable. Here again, the Solway is only one of many of the country's landscapes which tell of thwarted achievement, of contingency and possibility.
The king's body was carried to Burgh church, where a stained-glass window now depicts him in regal pose, the cross of St George resplendent on his cloak. He looks down today on the harvest festival fruits and flowers. The most common word in the visitors' book is "peaceful". It is a long way from Westminster Abbey.
Edward's instruction that his bones be boiled down and carried into battle until the Scots were crushed was not obeyed. The famous appellation "hammer of the Scots" was only fixed on his Westminster tomb in the Tudor era. Now, as the artefacts and enchantments of monarchy have been marketed for tourism, the first Plantagenet king is too troublesome to incorporated in a harmonious national narrative. There are no biopics of this gargantuan figure. Perhaps it is significant that the greatest mythologist of English history, William Shakespeare, never wrote a line about him. The sceptred isle has many mansions, but the most ruthlessly ambitious of English rulers cannot be easily accommodated.
