IOANA MOHOR-IVAN

The British Isles

Histories, Cultures and Identities
Lecture notes

Galati 2015

Part One: British History in Brief. Part Two: Identities of Britain. Part Three: The
Celtic Fringes. Short Chronology. Select Bibliography
Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

PART ONE: British History in Brief

(Adapted from: History of Britain and Ireland, New York: DK
Publishing, 2011)

1. Invasions and Patterns of Settlement: Up to 1066

The islands of Britain witnessed wave after wave of settlements and

invasions that brought wealth, faith, and conflict, while helping to shape
the flourishing arts, languages, and destinies of the peoples of England,
Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

First Arrivals

About 800,000 years ago, the first human ancestors reached the British Isles from
continental Europe. In 1066, their descendants once more encountered European
migrants, in the shape of the Norman conquerors of England. Over the intervening vast
span of time, all parts of the isles of Britain and Ireland were settled, with Norfolk in
England showing the first scant evidence, Scotland being reached around 14,000 years
ago, and Ireland about 7000 BC. When agriculture arrived, in about 4000 BC, people
began to modify the landscape in ways which can be recognized today. Ards (primitive
plows) scarred the land and great earthworks and causeways were constructed,
culminating in a fully fledged megalithic age from around 3000 BC, when stone
monuments appeared throughout Britain and Ireland. Political entities did exist, but their
development is hard to trace. It is only from immediately preceding the first Roman
invasion of Britain in 55 BC that we begin to know names: Cassivellanunus, Caratacus,
and Boudica, native British leaders in the struggle against the Romans.

New Identities

The separate destinies of England, Scotland, and Ireland now became apparent. Ireland
was never invaded by the Romans, and its Iron Age chieftains developed a political
culture untainted by imperial rule. The final limit of the Roman province of Britannia, at
Hadrian’s Wall (built around 120 AD), marked out a southern entity that would broadly
develop into England and Wales, and a northern one that would ultimately become
Scotland. Roman Britain lasted 367 years until 410 AD, and gave the area a long period
of peace and prosperity not known until early modern times. Yet its ending heralded a
troubled time, particularly for England, as successive invaders swept through the south.
In the 5th century AD, Anglo-Saxons arrived from northwestern Europe. They gradually

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progressed westward and northward, expunging many residual elements of Roman

culture, and supplanting England’s Celtic (and Latin) with a Germanic dialect. The
Anglo-Saxon invasions divided southern Britain between a Germanic east and a Celtic
west, ultimately creating Wales—a western haven that remained largely unconquered
and was ruled by the descendants of the displaced Britons. Christianity joined these two
halves (and Ireland and Scotland too) in a common faith from the 6th century AD, while
petty kingdoms in each of these realms began to coalesce into something larger. Viking
invasions from Scandinavia from the late 8th century AD, decided, by a process of
elimination of their weaker opponents, who would inherit the isles.

End of an Age

England’s survivor was the kingdom of Wessex, which merely endured under Alfred the
Great, but expanded in the 10th century AD under his successors, until Athelstan in the
920s ce could call himself, with some justification, “king of the English and ruler of all
Britain.” In Scotland, the Dal Riatan ruler Kenneth macAlpin conquered the Picts in 842
ce to create the kingdom of Alba, the forerunner of Scotland. In Wales, the struggle
against the Vikings threw up rulers such as Rhodri Mawr and Hywel Dda, who briefly
united the country. Only Ireland remained disunited, with no one kingdom able to
establish anything but the most fleeting hegemony. England suffered another brief
period of foreign rule by the Danes from 1016 to 1042, but by 1066 it possessed an
increasingly sophisticated royal administration, and produced works of literature and art
that came close to matching its longer-established European rivals, such as France. In
Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, royal rule was much less secure, with government still
more closely resembling that of migration-age chieftainships. The British Isles were
about to be changed forever. England and Wales sooner, Scotland and Ireland later, but
all profoundly, would be shaped by the Norman invasion of 1066.

2. MEDIEVAL BRITAIN: 1066–1485

Fierce rivalry for land and power dominated the centuries following the
Norman conquest of the nascent English realm. The ubiquitous feudal
system, emerging departments of state, and a strong Church dominated an
often prosperous nation, while fruitless wars with France drained the
exchequer and frequently divided the country.

A New Kingdom

The Norman conquest in 1066 was a watershed in English, and, by extension, Welsh,
Scottish, and Irish history. England joined a realm spanning the English Channel, and

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the aspirations of English kings to maintain or extend their French lands meant they did
not consolidate the monarchy as a purely English affair. The later acquisition by Henry
II, through marriage and inheritance, of a vast Angevin Empire, give him control of up to
half of modern France, with the result that English monarchs often spent much of their
reign outside England. It seemed that a dual monarchy might emerge, balanced
between England and France. All this changed, however, with King John’s loss of all his
inheritance, save Bordeaux, after 1214.

As well as French lands, the Norman conquest gave England a feudal system of
landholding, which mirrored that in northern France. The growth in royal authority—and
in the financial resources available to the king—after 1066, led to tensions in this feudal
system. The king tried to assert control over the country’s resources without passing
through the barons and the Church, who controlled access to those lower down the
feudal hierarchy. Although England’s civil wars of the 1140s—when Henry I’s heir,
Maud, and his nephew, Stephen, fought over the Crown—had involved the barons,
these conflicts were over who had the right to rule. The later conflict between John and
the barons in 1215–17 was over how the king should rule.

Parliament and Conquest

Although intended to protect baronial rights, Magna Carta (1215) was the first occasion
when an English king’s freedom of action was diminished by agreements forced on him
by his subjects. Civil war in the 1260s saw a further deterioration in the royal position.
Although the barons, under Simon de Montfort, were defeated, the Parliament they
summoned at Oxford, in 1258, heralded a platform in which the great men of the realm
could organize nonviolent resistance to royal demands, and to which, by 1376, the king
had to defer if he wanted to raise taxation. One reason kings needed additional funding
was the increasing sophistication of royal administration, which had been transformed
from a few key officials in 1066, into the nucleus of the great departments of state by the
15th century. Money was also needed by successive English kings as they attempted to
conquer their neighbors. In Ireland, this was largely successful after Henry III’s invasion
in 1171, and in Wales, after a brief renaissance under the kings of Gwynedd in the 13th
century, the process was completed by 1283. Scotland looked likely to fall into English
hands in the 1290s, but a Scottish revival and the defeat of Edward I’s army at
Bannockburn in 1314 secured Scottish independence.

The English kings’ attempts, from Edward III to Henry V, to reestablish an English
empire in France came to nothing. Victories at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and
Agincourt (1415) are established in the English imagination, but by the end of the
Hundred Years’ War in 1453, England held only Calais. All this was at ruinous cost,
which further undermined royal authority and increased that of Parliament. Elsewhere

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there had been peace. By the mid-15th century, Ireland lay uneasily divided between a
disunited group of native lords in the west and the lands of the English Crown in the
east. Wales was mostly subdued under English dominion, while Scotland was no longer
threatened with conquest from England.

Another Civil War

After 1455, the Wars of the Roses threatened to overturn this equilibrium. A long battle
between the Lancastrian and Yorkist descendants of Edward III over who had the right
to rule the country, left the authority of the Crown in ruins. The man who emerged to
claim what was left came from an unexpected quarter. Henry VII, the ultimate victor in
the war, was the first Welshman to rule over any portion of England since the 7th
century.

3. TUDORS AND STUARTS: 1485–1688

The Tudors brought controlling leadership to the country, but their break
with Rome caused religious strife, just as a renaissance in art, science, and
culture was taking shape. The Stuarts’ belief in their divine right to rule
turned the people against them and unified Parliament, Protestantism, and
the constitution.

The Tudor Monarchy

Henry VII scrambled on to the throne in 1485, having triumphed in a winner-takes-all

struggle among England’s aristocratic houses. He was absolutely determined to achieve
something that no other king had done. His motives for shoring up his own royal power
were primarily self-serving, but in hindsight he can be seen to have served the cause of
modernization too. Magna Carta, signed by King John in 1215, is celebrated as a
statement of what might be seen as “people power”—albeit that of already extremely
powerful people. Yet the Wars of the Roses had all too clearly illustrated the converse
danger: that an absence of a strong monarch at the center might cause the structures of
the state to fly apart.

Henry VII’s reign established a pattern that can be seen running through the history of
the next two centuries, in which the reigning monarch’s actions produced an outcome
that was both unintended and unexpected. Even the Reformation of the Church in this
context can be seen as having stemmed only from Henry VIII’s desire to control every
aspect of life and law-giving throughout his realm. Henry VIII’s break with the Roman
Catholic Church in the 1540s subjected the country to a century or more of religious

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strife, but the monarchy itself stayed strong, whether under Catholic Mary in the 1550s,
or her Protestant successor, Elizabeth I.

The Stuart Age

The Tudors’ instinct to preserve their power was essentially (if often ruthlessly)
pragmatic. It was not something they appear ever to have had to think about—still less
to philosophize over. Elizabeth I’s Stuart successor, James I (James VI of Scotland),
however, adduced learned arguments and scriptural references in support of the idea
that kings were “God’s lieutenants upon earth.” His son, Charles I, insisted so
adamantly on his “divine right” in the face of mounting parliamentary opposition that the
country slid into civil war in the 1640s.

How much better off the people of Britain were once the pendulum of power had
nominally swung their way has to be doubted, given the drabness of life under the
Commonwealth of the 1650s. Its leader, Oliver Cromwell, supposedly the savior of the
nation’s freedoms, soon installed himself as a stern Puritan dictator.

The Restoration

Generally considered a prelude to the 18 th century, the Restoration refers to that period
in British history from 1660, when Charles II was invited to resume the reign of the
Stuart kings after the collapse of the Commonwealth and the Cromwellian Protectorate,
to the fall of his Catholic brother James II (1688), deposed by Parliament in favour of the
joint rule of the securely Protestant monarchs William III (Prince of Orange, Holland)
and Mary II (James’s daughter and Charles II’s niece) in the event known as “The
Glorious Revolution”.

From a political point of view, it marked the beginning of the process by which the power
of the monarch will be passed over to the power of a parliamentary system, shaped into
two main groupings: the Whigs and the Tories, who will represent the major English
political parties for the next century and a half. Inheriting the tradition of the Cavaliers
from the previous Civil Wars, the Tories grew their strength from the landed gentry and
country clergy, represented conservative values and supported the Crown and the
established church. The Whigs, in their turn, may be seen to have taken over the
Parliamentarian values: they supported the new moneyed interests and a centralized
government and were tolerant towards Protestant dissenters, due to their more diverse
composition, which included both powerful nobles as well as merchants and financiers,
both bishops and low-level clergy-men, both Anglicans and religious dissenters.

From a social point of view, the period witnesses to the growth of a new type of society:
Protestant (apart from the short rule of the Catholic James II) and increasingly middle-

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class, as the newly wealthy merchants and tradesmen make their imprint on the English
social fabric.

4. RISE OF POWER: 1688–1815

As England and Wales united with Scotland, the British realm grew
into a powerful trading nation that expanded financially and
commercially. It acquired new territories, markets, and sources of raw
materials, while inaugurating the Industrial Revolution and eventually
defeating the mighty French foe.

A British Kingdom

The writer Daniel Defoe had a day at the races in 1724, on Epsom Downs, Surrey,
where the famous Derby would be run from 1780 onward. Even then, the spectacle was
something to comment upon. Defoe was exhilarated by the sight of so many carriages,
all the smartly turned-out gentlemen, the ladies in their finery, and, of course, “the
racers flying over the course as if either they touched not, or felt not the ground they run
upon.” Summoning up all of his poetic powers to find an image glorious enough to do
justice to the occasion, he wrote: “I think no sight, except that of a victorious army,
under the command of a Protestant king of Great Britain could exceed it.”

For England, Wales, and Scotland now constituted a collective kingdom of Britain,
under a Protestant Hanoverian monarchy. (Ireland was a kingdom of its own, although
under the same monarchy as Britain.) And to the British, religious allegiance had
become an inseparable aspect of political loyalty. To be patriotic was to be Protestant: it
was that simple.

Yet it had by no means been a straightforward process reaching this point of unity, and
it had assuredly not been easy. If the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in overthrowing the
Stuart king, James II, had resolved the opposition between the monarchy and the
representatives of the people which had so dominated the Tudor and Stuart period, it
had brought new and bitter conflicts in its wake. To some extent, the early tumults were
about clearing up unfinished business from the period before. James II, a Roman
Catholic, still had claims on the Crown, and still had hopes of returning to power. Yet his
defeat in the early 1690s was a defeat also for Catholic Ireland, as well as for like-
minded groups in Scotland too. Scotland, however, remained the more immediate threat
for the new Hanoverian line in the 18th century, but, again, victories over Stuart
pretenders in Scotland in 1715 and 1746 were triumphs for both the state of Britain and
for Protestantism.

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Empire and Industry

The struggle to sort out its own domestic settlement was only the start for the new
British state. It had to establish a position for itself, both in Europe and in the wider
world. It also had to find a suitable function, and Britain saw its future as that of a major
trading nation. The building of the financial structures that would make this possible
from 1694 onward went in parallel with the acquisition of numerous overseas
possessions. These lands were to be both sources of raw materials and potential
markets for the future. Britain met an early setback in its loss of the American colonies
in 1783, but there was consolation to be had in the territorial gains which continued to
be made in India. Britain was extending its horizons in other ways as well. In Scotland,
in particular, writers and thinkers were coming to a new understanding of the world, in
what became known as the Scottish Enlightenment. Meanwhile, more literal
explorations were taking place, as great navigators such as James Cook and Matthew
Flinders opened up the exotic lands of the Pacific and Oceania. As remarkable in their
way also were the new developments taking place in such apparently mundane spheres
as farming and industrial manufacture. A revolution swept British agriculture in the 18th
century. This in turn, by freeing up resources for the towns, did much to make possible
the extraordinary explosion of economic and technological creativity which we now think
of as the Industrial Revolution.

When real revolution came in France, in 1789, a constitutionally stable Britain proved
more-or-less immune to its effects, and strong enough to fight off the menace of a
marauding Napoleon Bonaparte as the 19th century began.

5. INDUSTRY AND EMPIRE: 1815–1914

In the 19th century, Britain dominated the world with an Empire ruled by
Queen Victoria and built on industrial might, economic power, and imperial
muscle. In the early 20th century, the threat of war overshadowed the bright
prospects of an Edwardian era that witnessed innovation, justice, and hope.

Industrial Powerhouse

The 19th century saw Britain’s emergence as the world’s first industrial nation, and,
consequently, its foremost economic power for most of the 1800s. Along with its
industrial might, it built a great military strength, and a vast and populous overseas
empire. It was a stirring story, of triumph of endeavor and hard work, which was to be
celebrated in the writings of Samuel Smiles and others in the late 19th century. Many in
the Victorian age were happy to see theirs as a “golden age.” The small print tells a

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different story: of enterprise, undoubtedly, but also of ruthless exploitation and fearful
suffering of British people, as well as of imperial injustice and cruelty abroad.

What neither narrative hints at, however, is the sheer scale of Britain’s transformation in
the 19th century, as factories and furnaces sprang up, and canals and railways
crisscrossed the landscape. The immediate physical effects can easily be exaggerated,
as those outside the main industrial areas would hardly have been aware of them. Yet
life was changing for everyone in a whole host of other ways not previously imagined.

Modern Lives

Train travel was linking the town to the country, as well as London to the regions, as
never before, with dramatic consequences for everything from family relationships to
timekeeping. The whole nation now worked to the railway timetable—quite literally,
since clocks were being coordinated nationally for the first time. A people whose
ancestors had followed the daily cycles of the sun and the seasons of the agricultural
year, now had to clock on for set working shifts in factories, mills, or offices. A newly
emergent middle class was enjoying not only the benefits of electoral reform from 1832
onward, but also the pleasures of an affluent and leisured consumer society. However,
there was not much affluence and leisure to be seen in the mines and the mill towns,
where women and children worked all but interminable hours in all but unendurable
conditions.

In Ireland, the Industrial Revolution was a distant rumor, and in the 1840s, a potato
blight destroyed the means of sustenance almost entirely, leaving thousands to starve.
Widespread misgivings in Ireland about being involved in the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland that had been established in 1800 were reciprocated by those in
Britain who saw Ireland as, at best a cheap supplier of foodstuffs, and at worst a country
inhabited by an idle, even subhuman, population, and a drain on British resources. This
view was apparently confirmed by outbreaks of Irish violence later in the century. Not
surprisingly, Irish families were in the forefront in the tide of emigrants that left the
shores of the British Isles for America and for the new dominions of the British Empire.

New Attitudes

Ambivalent attitudes characterized Britain’s relationship with its ever-widening Empire.

The British ruling classes took increasing pride in imperial power, and what they
considered its civilized rule over the Empire, but also saw the possessions, which so
enriched it as a responsibility—the “white man’s burden.” They were also prone to see
both resistance to conquest, and rebellions against imperial rule, as in India, as
examples of ingratitude.

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Increasingly, though, there was resistance at home as well: in the factories and mines,
workers were mobilizing, organizing politically for the first time. And it was not just
Britain’s soldiers who were on the march: Irish activists were agitating for Home Rule;
and women were agitating for the vote. By the early 20th century, a new, aggressive
power was arming itself on the continent of Europe for what already promised to be the
most destructive war the world had ever seen.

6. MODERN TIMES: 1914–present

In the 20th century, the rich, proud, and powerful British nation heroically
fought two world wars, but inexorably lost its empire, and saw its global
influence diminish. Its strong parliamentary democracy and constitutional
monarchy persisted, and the country developed a pioneering welfare state
and a worldwide reputation for culture, science, and technology.

A Global Zenith

In 1914, Britain ruled the largest empire in history, and the City of London was the hub
of global finance. Much of the world’s trade was carried in British ships, the Royal Navy
dominated the oceans, and British industry was still a force to be reckoned with. The
story of Britain over the following century is inevitably a tale of decline—the loss of
empire and the dwindling of economic, financial, and military power. In 1997, Britain’s
colony of Hong Kong was handed over to China; in 2008, an Indian company took over
Jaguar and Land Rover factories in Britain. Both these events show a shift in power and
status that, from the perspective of 1914, is awesome. Yet through times when the
world was racked by warfare and revolution, Britain’s liberal institutions of parliamentary
democracy and constitutional monarchy were extraordinarily robust, and the country
performed a heroic role in two world wars.

Conflict and Decline

Britain’s entry into World War I in 1914 stands as a watershed in the nation’s history.
That epic conflict, with its massive losses of young men’s lives in the often inglorious
warfare of the trenches, was a shock to the British psyche, using up long-accumulated
reserves of patriotic sentiment that were never to be fully restored. Britain may have
won the war, but its finances were undermined by war debts, and its core industries
fundamentally weakened. High levels of unemployment disfigured areas of Britain well
before the onset of the worldwide Great Depression in 1929. Southern Ireland broke
away from the United Kingdom after a traumatizing conflict. Yet a more modern Britain
also took shape in the 1920s and 1930s, a country in which women had the vote on the

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same basis as men, and electricity pylons and arterial roads became symbols of
progress.

Despite Britain’s best efforts for peace, a second war with Germany broke out in 1939.
World War II was truly, in Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s words, Britain’s “finest
hour.” The social solidarity and collective sacrifice that carried the British people through
early disasters to eventual victory brought irresistible demands for a more democratic,
egalitarian future, embodied in the welfare state created by a Labour government after
1945.

Post-war Britain

Britain’s efforts to maintain “great power” status in the post-World War II period failed.
Over 20 years, the British Empire was disbanded, and Britain’s subservient status to its
American ally was tacitly accepted. Domestically, a combination of welfarism,
consumerism, and full employment made the 1950s and 1960s a secure and satisfying
time for many Britons. While car and home ownership increased, Britain became a
global force in popular culture, especially the worlds of popular music and fashion. Mass
immigration, mostly from former colonies, transformed Britain into a multiracial,
multicultural society, but commitment to the post-imperial Commonwealth declined in
importance, as Britain moved towards closer economic and political integration with
Europe. The failings of the British economy were at times humiliating, with sterling
crises underlining the country’s financial weakness, and in the 1970s, trade union action
leading to temporary breakdowns of power supplies and public services. Terrorism
became a fixed feature of British life after Northern Ireland descended into a state close
to civil war. The 1980s saw a change of direction. Economic liberalization made
employment less secure and society less equal, while increasing opportunities for
enterprise and wealth creation. Britain experienced the benefits and occasional severe
shocks of being tied into an expanding but unstable globalized economy. Whatever the
future held, in the early 21st century the British people were more prosperous, healthier,
better educated and housed, and arguably more tolerant and open-minded than ever
before.

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PART TWO: Identities of Britain

(Adapted from Ioana Mohor-Ivan, Glimpses of Britain: A Cultural
Studies Perspective, 2nd edition, Bucuresti: Editura Didactica si
Pedagogica, 2004.)
At the beginning of the XXIth century, with the collapse of the Cold War, the re-
unification of Germany and the re-mapping of Europe as old and not so old nations
have disintegrated, while the Brussels bureaucracy, the Hague justiciary and the open
market erode what remains of national sovereignity, nationalism and national identity
have become key political issues.

Even if Benedict Anderson considers nations to be “imagined communities” 1, invented

associations which must be studied in a sceptical mode, uncovering the myths and
fictions, many historically constructed, on which they rest and depend 2, the majority of
people still live their lives in the context of national communities and continue to view
their past and future in this political framework.

Nations may be inventions, but once invented they are endowed with a real, palpable
existence, which is not to be found only in the subjective perceptions of their citizens,
but is embodied in languages, customs, laws, institutions and last, but not least, history,
as memory is the ruling factor in providing our sense of identity.

A brief conceptual delineation of the terms most frequently referred to in discussions

related to this form of human identity, namely national identity, nationhood, nationalism,
patriotism would be likely to highlight the following:

a) National identity may be defined as a large-groups identity, which could point to

membership in a distinctive territorial entity, with its own culture and history.
Correlated concepts are: a national language, a national culture (including religion)
and also a national desire, i.e. the desire for a national identity represented by large-
group beliefs and assumptions, which are stronger than individual self-
representations related to class, gender, generation or race.

b) Nationhood is the state or the fact of being a nation. As such, it may be seen to reify
the concept of “national identity”, but also to point to questions related to forms of
belonging and various criteria of asserting citizenship. In this order of ideas, three
models of ‘nationhood’ could be outlined in relation to three different ways of defining

1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
London; Verso, 1991.
2 Catherine Hall, Missionary Stories: Gender and Ethnicity in England in the 1839s and 1840s, in

Gossberg, G. et al (eds.), Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 240.

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citizenship: civic, or territorial (e.g. the French model); ethnic, based on familial
descent (e.g. the German model); and ethno-cultural3, constructed around both
ethnic descent and cultural markers such as religion and language (e.g. the Swiss
model).

c) Nationalism represents one form of an exaggerated assertion of national identity,

defined by George Orwell as “an attitude that sets loyalty to a group above loyalty to
truth”4; while

d) Patriotism is an accepted form of nationalism, namely “territorial nationalism”, which

signifies attachment to a particular land or territory, to a patria seen as the carrier of
particular values and traditions.

The relationship between the last two mentioned concepts may also be viewed from a
reversed perspective, as Ernest Gellner demonstrates in Nations and Nationalism5:

. . . nationalism is a very distinctive species of patriotism, and one which

becomes pervasive and dominant only under certain social conditions, which in
fact prevail in the modern world, and nowhere else. Nationalism is a species of
patriotism distinguished by a few very important features; the units which this
kind of patriotism, namely nationalism favours with its loyalty, are culturally
homogenous, based on a cultural striving to be a high (literate) culture; they are
large enough to sustain the hope of supporting the educational system, which
can keep a literate culture going; they are poorly endowed, with rigid internal sub-
groupings; their populations are anonymous, fluid and mobile, and they are
unmediated; the individual belongs to them directly, in virtue of his cultural style,
and not in virtue of membership of nested sub-groups.

Dizzying as this conceptual discussion may appear to be, a number of questions seem
to arise: if nationality is not necessarily linked to language, if it is neither only a matter of
geographical residency, then is it simply a matter of “cultural style”? Is national identity a
thing to be opted into or out of? What is the best expression of that need to define
oneself and one’s immediate context in terms of a national identity? And, finally, is there
the danger that in any attempt of preserving one’s sense of a discrete identity one may
construct a set of national characteristics which, in fact caricature those underlying
qualities one hopes to secure?

3 Hugh Kearney, Contested Symbols of Nationhood: 1800-1995, lecture delivered at the John Hewitt
International Summer School, St Nissi’s College, 1995.
4 George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), in Walder, D. (ed.) Literature in the Modern World,

Oxford UP, 1991, pp 181-189.

5 Ernest Gellner, Nations and nationalism, Basil Blackwell, 1983, cited in Curtis, T. (ed.) Wales: The

Imagined Nation, Poetry Wales press, 1985, pp 8-9.

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These questions get further complicated within the context of this political unit known as
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is a composite of
three states and four nationalities, displaying no less than eight sub-cultural patterns
identified by Kearney in his The British Isles: A History of Four Nations:

In Wales, the gulf between the Welsh-speaking, Calvinist Methodist north-west

and the more cosmopolitan, English-speaking south indicate the drawbacks of
speaking in terms of a single Welsh nationality. . . . in Scotland, the situation is
even more complex. Here the south-west, centred on the Clydeside conurbation,
may be seen as a culture in its own right. The western Highlands and the
Hebrides constitute a sub-culture, as do Orkney and Shetland . . . . Finally, in
England, the decline of the industrial north and the growing prosperity of the
south, linked to the EEC markets, has accentuated the cultural differences
between these two areas. . . . Protestant culture in northern Ireland seems more
closely linked to Glasgow and Dublin than it is to London. . .6

Contemporary British history has added another complicating factor with the settlement
of non-European immigrants from the Commonwealth, constituting in their turn ethnic
communities with distinctive cultures and ways of life, enhancing thus the perception of
the “multicultural” character of modern Britain. As Krishan Kumar 7 has pointed out, one
consequence of this factor has been the repeated resurgence of nationalist movements,
not just in Ireland, but on the mainland as well, to the point where commentators have
spoken of the impending “break-up” of Britain8.

This process of entropy that favours “minority” identities to “majority” ones, and where
difference and not similarity is typically conjured in assessing identity, does not leave
much space for the idea of the “nation” as an organic whole.

The national categories of nineteenth-century thinkers are also called into question by
another feature of our late twentieth century, manifest in that process of globalisation
spearheaded by a global economy, marked by the dominance of multinational
corporations, a global culture dominated by American TV programmes, films and fast-
food chains, and various regional groupings such as the European Community.

Britain, this unwieldy multi-ethnic state, has, of course, not escaped these powerful
pressures, and, along with them, the myth of a collective national identity has faded in
the face of the new pluralism that has put corporate loyalties of all kinds into question.
Consequently, that national identity known as Britishness has had to be redefined, in

6 Hugh Kearny, The British isles: A History of Four Nations, Cambridge UP, 1989, p. 8.
7 Krishan Kumar, Britishness and Englishness: What Prospect for a European Identity in Britain Today?
In Britain and Europe: British Studies Conference, Petrikov Publishers, 1994, p.58.
8 see Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, London: New Left Books, 1977.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

order to accommodate both the interplay of the various different cultures which have
been striving to get themselves heard within the context of the British Isles (such as the
“Celtic fringes” or the “Black Britons”), as well as the move towards an European
integration, challenging centuries of anti-European national definition.

Any attempt to answer the question of What does it mean to be British? at the beginning
of the twenty-first century, would have to take into account the historical roots of
Britishness, in order to highlight those components which are still found operative, as
perceptions of national identity have been altered by historical change.

1. Britishness or Englishness?
According to Catherine Hall9, both Britishness and Englishness are continually
contested terrains, where meaning is not given but discursively constructed in
conditions of historical specificity. Krishan Kumar 10 even goes as far as to ask if there is
such a thing as Britishness, considering it a term largely employed by foreigners to refer
to an administrative, legal or political community, and not being able to evoke a sense of
belonging, a community with which the inhabitants of Britain could identity themselves,
as the “four nations” approach to British studies seems to prove. On the other hand,
Englishness has for long been common to be regarded as synonymous with
Britishness, with the land and the people of the whole island, becoming thus a political
and cultural synecdoche representing the norm, an unwelcome reminder of the actual
hegemony of England within the Kingdom.

But, as Linda Colley has demonstrated in her study Britons: Forging the
Nations11, Britishness, as an available identity for the people of the island, had a real
basis in a definable and cultural community, starting as early as the twelfth century,
when Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain was elaborating the
myth of a common British descent for the rulers and people of Britain. This myth re-
emerged very powerfully during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when an
ethno-cultural concept of nationality emerged, fusing together English, Welsh, Scottish
and Irish Protestants via their common religious background, i.e. Protestantism. This
stress on the Protestant inheritance, and, consequently, the anti-Catholicism
engendered by it, has merged in a definition of Britishness as opposed to Catholic
Europe represented by Britain’s two principal rivals and antagonists, Spain and France,

9 Catherine Hall, op. cit., p. 240-241.

10 Krishan Kumar, op. cit.
11 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation. 1707-1837, new Haven and London: Yale University Press,

1992.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

a cultural identity defining itself largely through fighting against enemies threatening
Britain from the time of Philip II to that of Napoleon and beyond:

Religion and war have always been the most powerful forces in the formation of
national identity. And by their unifying force and ability to mobilise large groups
of people, they catered to British patriotism, occasionally nationalism. This type
of militant nationalism that Colley talks about can be justified with the examples
of contemporary British history as well. Churchill’s wartime rhetoric moulded the
nation into a new sense of national unity. On similar grounds, the mythic “Great
Britain” was temporarily restored at the time of the Falklands war. 12

A second powerful ingredient for the formation of a British identity was the sense of
Britain’s insular position, separating her both physically and existentially from
Continental Europe. This would explain the almost total British disregard for Continental
affairs, apart from the interest of maintaining the balance of power between the
European nations, so that none of them should acquire a predominance that would
threaten Britain’s independence and freedom. Britain was not Europe, but a nation
looking westwards, across the Atlantic, a maritime power with a maritime nation having
an oceanic destiny. Imperial Britain was but a short step from this conviction, and the
Empire was another factor developing the sentiment of Britishness. The use of the term
the British Empire emerged slowly through the eighteenth century, but it was not until
the nineteenth century that concepts and imagery related to it began to be increasingly
applied to official designations of Britain’s identity. The title of the monarch was altered
in 1876 to make room for the imperial connotations, national festivals involving the
monarchy 9jubilees or coronations) became strongly imperial, the Empire Day achieved
public recognition in 1916, and “Imperial” was added to the titles of some essential
British institutions. Even if during the latter half of this century the British Empire eroded
slowly and merged into a Commonwealth in which the British pre-eminence also
withered slowly, much of the language of Britishness has to do with this imperial
experience: “Great Britain” is an imperial concept, and the old British passport, where
“Her Britannic Majesty” requests this and that, epitomise the imperial aspect of
Britishness.

The Empire drew together the different ethnic groups inhabiting Britain, both by joining
them in common governance of far-flung provinces, and by providing another source of
defining Britishness in opposition to other non-European peoples, black, brown or
yellow, enhancing thus not only its sense of difference, but also that of the superiority
and uniqueness of the British people, a people that must have been peculiarly endowed
to have emerged as the rulers of the greatest empire since Rome. The marching song

12 Gertrude Szamosi, National Identity in Contemporary Britain, in Britain and Europe, op. cit., p.52.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

of Empire, Rule Britannia, is a paean to the indomitable British spirit, celebrating the
bullish independence of a rugged island race and reiterating the pledge to retain naval
supremacy at all costs: Britons never, never, never shall be slaves; Britannia rules the
waves13.

Englishness, according to the same commentators, is a more recent invention that,

nevertheless, invokes the same idea of national identity, but is more cultural rather than
territorial in its definition. It emerged with the general rise of the cultural or ethnic
nationalisms of the nineteenth century that shared the conviction that behind every
nation there exists a pivotal ethnic group, homogeneous as to its culture and tradition.
Britishness, as a compound, was no longer satisfactory within the new discourse on
nationality, so that the definition of a national identity came to focus on the country and
the ethnic group that was dominating the political, economic and cultural life of the
kingdom.

The prelude to Englishness is the sixteenth century idea of the English as an elect
nation, appearing with the strong Elizabethan surge of nationalism, that found its
strongest articulation in language, as an integrative idea of Englishness was variously
formulated in chivalric romance, historical narrative, history plays, or topographic
description.14

But the nineteenth-century idea of Englishness, apart from appropriating features of

Britishness within its definition (such as the sturdy individualism, love of freedom and
the sea-faring character of the nation, all seen now as characteristic of a distinctively
Anglo-Saxon ancestry), achieved new inflections as the particular style of an intellectual
culture, because nations were now defined by their “soul”, i.e. their central moral and
cultural values.

It was now that the English thought came to be regarded as particularly empirical,
pragmatical, utilitarian, concrete and individualist (Bacon, Locke, Stuart Mill, Darwin or
Russell being considered its best examples), hostile to the metaphysical and abstract
Continental thought. The Romantic poets also came to feature predominantly in the
cultural definition of the English nationalism, not only due to their special attachment to
the English landscape, but also taken as representative of the English preference for
feeling over intellect, poetry over philosophy and abstract thought.

13 cited by Dick Hebdige, Digging for Britain: An excavation in seven parts, in Come On Down? Popular
Media Culture in Post-War Britain, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 343.
14 For a discussion of Elizabethan narratives of Englishness, see Suzanne Scholz, The Uses of History in the

Narrative of the Nation, in Journal for the Study of British Culture, Tubingen: Gunter Nag Verlag, Vol. 2,
No. 1/1995, pp 5-18.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

As the nineteenth century progressed, the English language and literature came to play
a central role in this cultural definition of Englishness, along with the standardisation and
nationalisation of the English language, and the establishing of the canon of English
literature, where the selection of the “great national” poets, dramatists and novelists was
illustrative not only of the greatness of English literature, but also of the distinctive
“national” qualities of the people, embodying sincerity, individuality, concretness, a
sense of richness and diversity of life.

The ‘exemplar’ of this cultural definition of Englishness was “the gentleman” as a model
of civilisation that also underwent a redefinition during the century, mainly through the
efforts of Matthew Arnold. His theoretical writings preaching the formation of an
educated elite as the vanguard of a cultured society structured in harmony 15, made a
strong imprint on the public schools policy which came to place a special emphasis not
on the teaching of specific skills, but on classical humanistic studies and the formation
of social leadership qualities, which were considered to permit the moulding of the
independent and socially-oriented man of culture, who was domesticating both himself
and the others, i.e. the gentleman.16

The epitome of this ideal of gentility is perhaps best rendered in George Orwell’s
famous essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, written in 1941, which sought to capture the
English character in a series of vivid, fragmentary insights. In typically anti-heroic
images, placing great emphasis on the eccentric contours of the national character (its
privateness, hobbies, the insular, parochial preoccupations), Orwell was highlighting the
English reserve and the English public spirit, enshrining the notions of duty, obligation
and secular altruism along with those other beauties of Englishness such as the alleged
tolerance, kindness to the others, extreme modesty, love of sportsmanship.

But contemporary Britain is in many ways so different a nation from that of the 1940s,
when , in the aftermath of the war, it could still claim to be one of the greatest powers in
the world, the invincible and indomitable champion of democratic power, the conqueror
of Hitler and Hiroshito, the close and influential ally of the USA, and an imperial
metropolis. From that point there have followed forty years of imperial decay, industrial
disaster, the bungle of Suez, the ‘swinging sixties’, the Rolling Stones and the yuppies
and the Sex Pistols, soccer hooligans and the massacre at the Heysel football stadium,
and a decade of Thatcherite iron tillage that has “utterly changes” the landscape of
nationhood.

15Also see the chapter on cultural criticism.

16For a discussion of Englishness and the gentleman ideal see Thomas Noetzel, Political Decadence?
Aspects of Thatcherite Englishness, in Journal for the Study of British Cultures, op. cit., Vol. 1,
No.2/1994, pp 133-148.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

On the other hand, the dominance of England, English rule and Westminster, have
been challenged by the emergence of the nationalists movements of the “Celtic fringes”
(Wales, Scotland and Ireland), with their deliberate accentuation of the Celtic
differentiae and the resuscitation of the Welsh and Gaelic languages; the “Troubles” in
Northern Ireland; controversy surrounding the integration within EEC; and last but not
least, by Commonwealth immigration and the emergence of Black British identities
within the urban communities of the 1980s and 1990s. All these events have led to a
decentering and relativization of the English imagination, which has had to recognise
that Englishness can no longer be taken to represent the ‘norm’, but is just an ethnicity
like any other.

2. The Break-Up of Britishness?

The question raised by these factors of historical change is what concept of nationality
and what symbols of nationhood might still perform the task of welding together this
multi-ethnic society which is Britain at the end of the twentieth century.

If in the eighteenth century Edmund Burke was putting forward the case for a historic
hereditary concept of the nation, an imagined community stretching over time having as
its main symbols the monarchy (the hereditary element in the constitution), the Church
and the aristocracy (symbolised by the House of Lords), during the nineteenth century
Bentham and Stuart Mill were advancing a civic model of nationhood, founded on the
experience of the United States, the only one able to provide rights for all. Nowadays
both these concepts of nationality are present, competing one with the other for the
definition of a UK identity. The proponents of a civic, territorial concept of nationhood
look to Monarchy as its most portent symbol, while those who favour the ethno-cultural
definition include language and religion along with monarchy as the most important
components of a Protestant ethnic identity. Yet, both paradigms of definition have to
accommodate the post-colonial sense of British culture and national identity, or what
Salman Rushdie calls the new Empire within Britain 17, and a re-evaluation of the
concept of the British as an Atlantic people in view of their European integration.

a) The Church

The Protestant religion, one of the defining factors of the ethno-cultural concept of
national identity, has steadily declined after the 1950s, and stemming from this,
Protestantism and its correlated anti-Catholicism have gradually became less essential
to Britishness. Guy Fawkes Day has ceased to be a day of celebration in terms of an

17 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, London: Granta Books, 1992.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

assertion of the national identity, and a new historiography has appeared in which
Catholics are no longer portrayed as un-British. Religion, no longer a tribal totem, is now
at its best regarded as a subject of historical inquiry.

The established Church has also lost its political force, a process which has been
greatly emphasised during Thatcherism. If in the fifties Anglicanism was the religion of
public authority and all kinds of dignitaries borrowed something of its prestige as the
church was thoroughly involved in rituals of authority so that it seemed plausible for “the
establishment” to be used as an all-purpose metaphor for the ruling class, today it
seems to have become more of a way of manifesting apartness than of sanctifying the
power of the state.

There are more practising Roman Catholics than Anglicans in the country and
half as many Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus. Where Christianity grows, it is primarily
through breakaway, independent or Pentecostal congregations, such as the
House Church movement. There are some 200 or 300 independent Black
Churches in Britain . . . . Eastern religions, in the aftermath of the counter-culture
of the 1960s, have acquired a cult following. Nature mystics, such as those who
assemble annually at Stonehenge and Glastonbury, proclaim themselves pagan.
Church and State, far from sinking their differences . . . . seem on the contrary
positively to seek out the occasions to rehearse them; and the Methodists and
the Church of Scotland follow suit.18

b) Monarchy

Emphasised in both concepts of nationality as the most important symbol of nationhood,

Monarchy might still perform the task of sustaining the myth of a collective Britishness,
even if, in some respects, it has turned sour after 1945.

Monarchy, representing the historic continuity and unity of the nation, plays a major part
in the definition of Britishness: through it, individuals as “subjects of Her majesty”, are
keyed into the institutions of the state and acquire a sense of national belonging (people
are socially placed and put in a national context). More than this, individuals are linked
to the collective entity of the nation through intense personal attitudes such as national
pride, national guilt or patriotism, and with the united Kingdom such an uneasy
amalgam of different groups, the concept of Britishness mediated through a non-political
monarchy becomes a powerful unifying myth.

18Raphael Samuels, Introduction, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of the British National
Identity, Vol.1, Routledge, 1989, p. XXI.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

Rosalind Brunt19, in her analysis of the role of the Royal Family in terms of
representation, has pointed out the fact that, like any other media-promoted star
system, the Monarchy, at the level of representation, operates through a double
dialectic of likeness and unlikeness. Being mediated through a whole dynastic family,
Monarchy provides a means of identification between the subjects and the Royals
based on their family “likeness”, where individual members of the Royal family conform
to familiar cultural stereotypes such as ‘bossy sister’, ‘black sheep’, ‘mother’s boy’,
wayward aunt’, and so on. This process of familial identification heightens the sense of
the Royals being just like any other family in Britain, and the same sentiment is
reinforced by the increasingly vernacular look which its members have come to wear
since the 1980s, marrying in- rather than out-, and playing down the mystique of
monarchy.

Whereas George V was groomed for a sceptred part, the present Prince of
Wales has associated himself with such homely causes as ‘community
architecture’ and alternative medicine. Like others, to follow the coverage in the
tabloid press, the Royal Family has troubles with in-laws and marital tiffs.20

On the other hand, ‘unlikeness’ asks the Royals to be special, unique, invested with the
sacred, and thus required to rest on a higher moral plane and to portray Britishness at
its best. The Royal Wedding of 1982 was taken to make Britain ‘great’ again, and was
represented as a celebration of Britain as a united nation, as its power of a “fairy-tale
romance” was able to act as a unifying balm for a nation recovering in the immediate
aftermath of a period of widespread urban unrest. But in the last decades, this potent
symbol of nationhood was in the process of being run down by the media and by the
events occurring within the Royal family itself, ultimately reflecting the crisis of national
identity at the popular level21.

c) Multiculturalism

The last decades have also witnessed a weakening of other corporate loyalties and
institutional belongings that underpinned the national idea. If, in wartime Britain, the
institutions of the country were spoken of with unqualified respect, and an element of
charisma was attached to authority figures of all kinds, subsequent years have seem a
decline in the majesty of the state, a crumbling of the pillars of the Establishment, and a
valorisation of the private at the expense of the public sphere.

19 Rosalind Brunt, A Divine Gift to Inspire? Popular Cultural Representation, Nationhood and the British
Monarchy, in Come On Down?, op. cit., pp 285-301.
20 Raphael Samuels, op. cit., p. XLI.
21 Also see Gertrude Szamosi, op. cit.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

In the once-enclosed worlds of the civil service . . . there are now constant leaks;
an open war between the spending department and the Treasury, as well as
between government and Whitehall. The once anonymous world of the BBC is
likewise exposed to continuous publicity, and the leading producers are treated
as independent personalities in their own right . . . The political parties no longer
pride themselves on pursuing ‘bi-partisan’ or ‘consensus’ politics; indeed, the
Conservatives, traditionally the most ‘national’ of the parties, seem positively
anxious to champion their policies in other terms . . . Public-sector broadcasting
no-longer enjoys a monopoly of the waves; it no longer attempts to speak in a
corporate voice. The schools build a whole pedagogy out of multiculturalism. 22

Other favourite conceits of Britishness are very much called into question as well. British
‘reserve’ is hardly exemplified by the country’s most recent contribution to transnational
music; patriotism is no longer a ruling passion, coupled with notions of service and
sacrifice, or with para-religious ambitions as the performance of sacred tasks; nor is the
public spirit, enshrining notions of ‘gentleness’ and ‘respect for the rule of the law’, the
defining characteristic that Orwell was pidgeonholing in his essay.

Instead, multiculturalism seems to affect all areas of life. There no longer exists such a
thing as a national diet, as even the ‘solid English breakfast’ has given way in many
homes to continental fruit juices, muesli and Scandinavian ‘rusks’; sartorially, even if
British-made clothes, like Harris tweeds or Shetland jumpers are prized for their ‘ethnic’
quality and go for the most part to the tourists, the British themselves take their fashions
from abroad, the ‘casual’ style of dress being thoroughly internationalised in its
combination of expensive designer label sportswear (Sergio Tacchini tracksuits, Adidas
running shoes, Lacoste and Christian Dior shirts, etc.)

Along with these changes, the American cultural and commercial penetration of Britain
has gone almost unresisted:

The ‘mid-Atlantic’ accent which inspired such scorn when it first appeared on
commercial television in the 1950s has been so far domesticated as to be the
normal voice of pop singers and disk jockeys, while American informalities have
been so far naturalised that a TV host these days will be on first-name terms with
political dignitaries. The government, of course, is only too eager to fall in line
with the United States, not only in the matter of foreign policy, but also in its
enthusiasm for ‘enterprise culture’. More surprising, perhaps, than the Atlanticism
of the Conservative Right is the Americanisation of the British Left. . . .A great
deal of what passes for British socialism today, especially regarding feminism,

22 Raphael Samuels, op. cit., p.XXX.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

anti-racism, and ‘alternative’ life-styles, is American-derived radical individualism

under another name.23

But the most dramatic challenge to unitary notions of ‘the people’ and to the notion of
the British as a common race has been brought by the immigration and settlement
which has planted Third World communities into the heart of the major cities. In this
context, race has emerged as a primary metaphor of nationality, and a new measure of
social difference in which colour takes precedence over class. Race is a recurrent point
of divide in the struggle for urban space, the competition for livelihood and jobs, the
rivalries of the playground and street. It is also the focus of a born-again English
nationalism, for immigration threads darkly underneath the public discourse of national
decline, with politicians making pronouncements on the ‘crisis’, ‘national identity’,
‘endangered birth-right’, the threat to national security brought by the new ‘enemies
within’ and ‘foreign influences’:

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad. We must be mad,
literally mad, to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who
are for the most part the material or the future growth of the immigrant-
descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up
its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons
to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancees who
they have never seen. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the
Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. That tragic and
intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the
Atlantic, but which is interwoven with the history and existence of the States
itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition an neglect.24

Yet, on the other side of the imperialist imaginary, beyond the nostalgia for the stable
and the fixed, new identities and new communities are formed. Salman Rushdie’s The
Satanic Verses25 symbolically renders the subversive process of the Indian conquering
of England; Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia26 shows its protagonist moving
freely between various parts of London, between various strata of the English society
and between various black and white, female and male lovers, oscillating between
cultural internationalism and cultural localism, and drawing his specific ‘Englishness’
from this cultural mobility:

23 Idem., p. XXXI.
24 Enoch Powell, Birmingham Address, 20 April 1968, cited by Dick Hebdige, op. cit., p.345.
25 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, London: Viking/Penguin, 1988.
26 Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, London; Faber and Faber, 1990.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny

kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old
histories. But I don’t care - Englishman I am (though not proud of it.) (p.3)

Popular music is another area where new connections and new communities are
formed, eroding internal racial-ethnic divisions and, through its fusing of musical forms,
opening up a new kind of British territory as a new multicultural space. The affective
alliances created through rap and hip hop binds together black and white youths,
historically and geographically dispersed and divided against each other. The fusion of
indian and pakistani folk forms and western popular music, sometimes referred to as
‘indi pop’ is testimony that a novel British-Asian cultural identity has begun to form and
find its own voice. In the mid-1980s, in fast style reggae, a new generation of black
British singers, like Smiley Culture, began talking their way beyond ‘Africa’ into a new
British space, affirming hybrid identities formed out of the Carribean fused with
indigenous traditions:

Cockney have names like Terry, Arthur and Del-Boy

We have names like Winston, Lloyd and Leroy,
We bawl out YOW! While cockneys say Oi!
What Cockney calla Jacks, we call a Blue Bwoy
Say Cockney have mates while we have spar
Cockney live in a drum while we live in a yard
Rope chain and choparita me say cockney call tom
Say cockney say old Bill, We say dutty Babylon
In a de cockney translation
In a de cockney translation.27

Evident as it is that Britain is no longer a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation, the old
unities have been shattered: the ideal of a national culture transcending its regional
components, and of a racially proscribed “Britishness”, consistent and unchanging from
one decade to the next, seem now to belong more and more to the realm of the
imaginary. Instead, more and more people seem to share the feeling of Jo Jo, a white
reggae fan, who claims that:

There’s no such thing as ‘England any more . . . welcome to India brothers! This
is the Caribbean! Nigeria! . . . There is no England, man. That’s what is coming.
Balsall Heath is the centre of the melting pot, ‘cos all I ever see when I go out is
half-Arab, half-Pakistani, half-Jamaican, half-Scottish, half-Irish, I know ‘cos I am
(half-Scottish/half-Irish) . . . who am I? . . . Tell me who do I belong to? . . . I’m
just a broad person. The earth is mine. . . you know we was not born in Jamaica.
27 Smiley Culture, Cockney Translation, Fashion, 1984.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

. . we was not born in ‘England’. We were born here, man. It’s our right. That’s
the way I see it. That’s the way I deal with it.28

The decline of the idea of nationality in the present, coupled with growing uncertainties
about its future, may take refuge in a glamorised version of the past, in a celebration of
Britain’s heritage in her rich history, her country houses, her empire, her once assured
place as the first industrial nation, in everything that is expressed under the umbrella
term of “National Heritage” - a sanitised, ruritarian version of the past. Excluded from
politics, the national idea may take new strengths in the field of morals and
stigmatisation of minority groups, yet, what must not be forgotten is that the concept of
‘nationality’ is perhaps best dealt with if we concede to the proposition that it sooner
belongs to the realm of the imaginary, depending on ideas of what we might be rather
than on what we really are.

28 Interview in Birmingham’s Balsall Heath, quoted by Dick Hebdige, op. cit., p.354.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

PART THREE. The Celtic Fringes

(Adapted from Ioana Mohor-Ivan, Glimpses of Britain: A Cultural
Studies Perspective, 2nd edition, Bucuresti: Editura Didactica si
Pedagogica, 2004.)

1. The Matter of Ireland

Northern Ireland has often been considered as representing Britain’s backyard, enjoying
a peculiar status at the level of the popular perceptions of this distinct part of the British
state, which, on the one hand, has tended to be neglected, while on the other has
always posed great problems in terms of authority and control.

The relationships between the Irish and the British have, consequently, encompassed
the range from indifference to hostility, but the point that has been constantly made is
that the British have always found the Irish very difficult to understand, while some have
even argued that at the time of the British rule in India, more understanding and
consideration was shown for the native culture than it happened in the case of the Irish
one.

The same difficulty that the British have been displaying in their understanding of the
“Irish Matter” has been reflected, at the popular level, in the jokes and the stereotypical
representations of the Irish in the media and film, be they a contemporary joke stating
that if it had not been for the Paddy factor, half of London would have been bombed
successfully by the IRA, or the 19th century cartoons appearing in Punch, which
commonly portrayed the Irishman as an ape.

To understand the subtext of this peculiar status attached to Northern Ireland and the
Irish at the level of both official and popular discourses, one would have to survey the
actual historic engagements occurring between the two groups of people, as part of the
wider historic relationship of Ireland with England that has inscribed and inflected two
opposing identities in terms of ethnicity, religion or political allegiance.

a. Anglo-Irish Historic Engagements

The first contacts established between the English state and Ireland occurred at the end
of the 12th century, when Dermot, the exiled king of Leinster, asked the Norman lords of
South Wales to help him regain his kingdom. Yet, once in Ireland, the Normans turned
into conquistadors, occupying and colonising a region around Dublin, the Pale, and
subsequently trying to advance westwards. As a result of this first wave of English

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

colonists, a three-fold division of the island was established, consisting in: the Pale (that
region where English law was administered as in an English shire), the West (an area
peopled by purely Celtic tribes, ruled by their Irish chiefs), and tracts of mixed control in-
between (with Anglo-Irish barons ruling over the native population).

These first colonists and their descendants were largely absorbed in the Celtic
atmosphere around them, many intermarrying with the native populations and adopting
the local customs. Later, after the Reformation, they chose to remain within the Catholic
Church, being called “Old English” in order to differentiate them from the fresher waves
of Protestant conquerors.

Yet, throughout the Middle Ages, Ireland itself remained independent of English royal
control, for, though the English kings called themselves ‘Lords of Ireland’ and claimed,
at times, sovereignity over it, in practice no troops were effectively sent there to actually
conquer and govern the island.

The policy of real conquest and colonisation was undertaken by the English state during
Elizabeth I’s and James I’s reigns, and was largely prompted by England’s turn to
Protestantism during the 16th century. Within the new religious discourse, Catholic
Ireland was no longer a place to be ignored, but a possible security threat as the Irish
could be now used by the Catholic powers of the day (the Spaniards in particular) to
attack England. The fact that Ireland was becoming the danger point in Elizabeth’s
dominions was confirmed in 1588 when the Pope himself planned to attack England by
sending armed troops bearing his commission to Ireland, even if the English captured
and massacred them at Smerwick, prompting the Queen to undertake its conquest.

As Trevelyan notes, Ireland was attacked with great brutality and colonised in the same
way that America was at the time, as both represented two new fields, of equal
importance and attraction, where private fortunes could be made, public service
rendered to the Queen, and the cause of true religion upheld against the Pope and the
Spaniards29.

The island was first subjugated military, and, after the defeat of the rising of the
Northern earls30, Ireland was colonised, mainly in Ulster, as the best land the country
possessed. But, despite the efforts undertaken by the English state in order to persuade
people to emigrate to Ireland, the largest part of the colonists establishing James I’s
Plantation of Ulster in 1608 were Scots from the neighbouring coast, carrying with them
their extreme version of Protestantism.

29 G.M.Trevelyan, A Short History of England, Penguin, 1979, p.

30 In 1607 the last of the Northern earls, Hugh O’Neill, earl of Ulster, departed from Ireland, exiling himself in
Italy. This event has come to be called The Flight of the Earls, signifying the moment when the Gaelic rule
comes to an end in Ireland.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

The next important moment within the history of Anglo-Irish relationships occurred
during the 17th century Civil Wars in England, that confirmed once again for the English
that Ireland did represent a security threat for their state. As the Catholic Irish registered
their support on the King’s side, at the end of the war Cromwell took full revenge on
them, sending his troops to reconquer Ireland as the first step in the reconstitution of the
British Empire. It was rendered easier for Cromwell and his army because the
Protestants over there, whatever their political allegiance, tended to rally round him as
the champion of their race and creed31, while the Irish resistance became racial and
Catholic instead of Royalist. After the fall of Drogheda had broken the back of
resistance in the East, Cromwell went home, leaving the rest of the army carry on, in an
atrocious way, the guerrilla war in the West.

The subsequent land settlement completed the transference of the soil from Irish to
British proprietors, aiming to fulfil a three-fold objective: to pay off in Irish land the
soldiers who had fought, to render the English hold secure against another rebellion like
that of 164132, and lastly to extirpate Catholicism, by trying to push the whole
indigenous population to the west of the river Shannon, to Cannaught, a region that
invokes a deep primitive Gaelic feeling, but is economically very poor 33.

The most important outcome of the Cromwellian policy was the fact that Ulster had now
to face its own set of problems deriving from the large-scale settlements of Scots in
Down, Antrim and Derry. The Cromwellian conquest also led to the downfall of the ‘Old
English’ interest in Ireland. The real beneficiaries were the ‘New English’ planters of pre-
1641, now styling themselves as ‘Old Protestants’34 to distinguish themselves from the
Baptists and Quakers (the ‘New Protestants’) of the Cromwellian army.

Another key-date in the history of Ireland’s colonisation is the year 1689, when the
Catholic King James II was deposed by the English Parliament in favour of the
Protestant William of Orange. A year later, James II landed in Ireland, aided by French
money, troops and generals, trying to complete the conquest of a land where already
three-fourth of its population obeyed him. In response to this action, the Protestants in
the north proclaimed William king and fortified Derry, enduring the famous Catholic
siege of 169o until William landed in Ireland and released the town.

The decisive battle was fought at the Boyne on the 12 July 1690, upon two quarrels. It
was the struggle of the Anglo-Scots against the Catholic Irish for the leadership of
Ireland, but also the struggle of Britain and her European allies to prevent a Jacobite

31 G.M.Trevelyan, op. cit., p.

32 In 1641 Sir Phelim O’Neill led an insurrection against the Ulster Plantation.
33 Although the idea of driving the whole Catholic population beyond the Shannon was entertained,

eventually only the landlords suffered this fate.

34 Hugh Kearney, The British Isles. A History of Four Nations, Cambridge UP, 1989.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

restoration in England, and the consequent domination of the world by the French
monarchy35. The presence, on both sides of the river, of regiments from the continent
represented the international issues at stake. The outcome of that battle decided the
future of Ireland for the next two centuries, bringing the defeat of the native Irish and the
final eclipse of the culture of the ‘Old English’, but it also saved Protestantism in Europe
and enabled the British Empire to launch forth on its career of expansion overseas.

The defeated Catholic forces retreated to Limerick which, in its turn, was forced to
withstand a Protestant siege and finally surrender in 1691, the year that also witnessed
the renaming of Derry to Londonderry (a victory has to be enunciated in different ways).

The 17th century and its events provide the focus for the most politically charged folk
festivals for both Protestants and Catholics alike. In August and December, the siege of
Derry is commemorated by the ‘Apprentice Boys March’36, while the Battle of Boyne is
celebrated on the 12 July by Protestant Orange Lodge marches that commemorate the
defeat of James II. With equal intensity of recollection, the defence of Limerick and its
defeat has also been turned into a celebratory event by the Nationalist rhetoric, as the
moment when the brave and gallant defenders of Ireland were eventually defeated, and
Patrick Sarsfield, the hero of the Limerick siege, has entered the Catholic pantheon of
heroes withstanding oppression.

The restored English rule in Ireland reflected very little tolerance to any groups outside
the Established Anglican Church. The penal code placed the Catholics in Ireland under
every political and social disadvantage and pursued and persecuted their leaders, while,
at the same time, Anglican intolerance refused political equality, and for some time even
religious freedom, to Presbyterians as well. At the same time, the decrees of the English
Parliament were ruining the Irish Trade, halting the economical development of a
country which was now freezing into a three-fold cultural pattern that was to persist
throughout the next century: a Protestant land-owning Ascendancy in the East (smallest
in number, but enjoying the greatest political power and closely involved with affairs in
England); a Presbyterian culture in Ulster (socially dominant in Antrim and Down, but
not well represented elsewhere, and preserving close links with Scotland); and the
Catholic majority to be found in all the four provinces, ultimately merging the Gaelic and
the ‘Old English’ cultures through its sense of a common Catholicism37.

At the end of the 18th century Ireland was affected by the two great revolutions that are
part of the world history, the American Independence War and the French Revolution,

35 G.M.Trevelyan, op. cit.

36 A group of apprentice boys closed the gates of Derry against the wish of its governor and resisted James II’s
siege until William’s troops arrived.
37 Hugh Kearney, op. cit.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

which stirred up once again the factions involved. Yet, in the first instance, the initiative
was not Catholic and Gaelic, but Protestant and Liberal, a movement calling itself “The
Volunteers”, led largely by landlords, prepared to defend the country against a French
invasion, on condition that the English government abolished all Ireland’s commercial
disabilities and granted the formal independence of its Parliament from British control.

In 1791, a much more radical political society was formed in Dublin and Belfast with
members of the newly-expanding Protestant urban middle-class, which claimed to be
non-sectarian and rationalist under the influence of French political thought. This society
of “The United Irishmen” sought to forge an alliance with leaders of the Catholic
community in order to demand the widening of the franchise and to put an end to the
political and civil disabilities of the Presbyterians and Catholics. Suppressed in 1794,
the Society’s demands grew more radical, as it operated underground, and eventually
republican, entering an alliance with the French forces with the aim of concerting a
French invasion with an Irish insurrection.

In reaction against ‘The United Irishmen’ society, in 1795 the landlords placed
themselves at the head of a “Church and King” society, the “Orange Order”, an
exclusively Protestant society which was formalised with quasi-Masonic ritual in 1797
when lodges were formed.

In 1798 the ’United Irishmen’ rose in revolt, led by Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmett,
hoping to unite the religions of Ireland in arms against England’s domination and
establish a United Independent Ireland (in the fashion of The United States of America).
The rebellion was put down by the British and the Orange Order loyalists, and sectarian
hostility led to atrocious reprisals being taken against the insurrectionists and the native
population. The ‘memories of ‘98’ became a heirloom of hatred, cherished in every
cottage, and renewed by successive generations of nationalists.

The rebellion of 1798 also led the British government conclude that a union of Ireland
with Britain was a necessity, as the only method of permanently restoring order and
justice, in spite of the opposition of the Protestant Ascendancy.

In 1800, the Act of Union abolished the parliament in Dublin and secured the
incorporation of Ireland within the British State. It was an act which also listed the
support of the Catholic population who was hoping now for an improvement of their
condition. But even if the act provided for Irish representation in the House of Commons
and the House of Lords, in effect only the Anglican interest was represented at
Westminster as Irish Catholic MPs were not admitted.

The Union had the result of bringing the complexity of Irish society and politics into the
heart of Westminster, and also provided the outlet for Irish immigration to England. It

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

also brought the Industrial Revolution to the North of Ireland, with the result that the gulf
between the North and the South was enlarged, and the balance of power shifted within
the Ascendancy in favour of the industrially-expanding North, while the economic
backwater of the South was left in the hands of the Catholic urban and rural middle-
class. It was from the ranks of the latter one that the charismatic leader, Daniel
O’Connor, rose to fight for the Catholic emancipation, forcing the British government to
pass the Bill in 1828. A final outcome of the union was that the old animosities between
the Anglican and Presbyterian Protestants died out in the North in an environment of
industrialisation and revived Catholicism.

Towards the middle of the 19th century, the Great Potato Famine that struck Ireland in
1846 enhanced once again the division between the Catholic and Protestant cultures,
due to their contrasting experiences. While the North of the country was mostly spared
by the failure of the potato crops (the main element of popular diet was oats), the
Catholic South of small farming and labouring classes, heavily dependent upon the
potato, was decimated by starvation and disease. By 1847 large numbers of small
farmers were obliged to emigrate to the United States of America, forming the basis of a
very powerful pressure group in the years to come, while by 1851 statistics showed that
Ireland had lost one quarter of its population, either by emigration or by death, a social
tragedy that had its greatest impact on the Catholic poor.

This sudden drop in population, which was not reversed in subsequent decades, also
led to a complex series of economic, social and cultural accommodations in the South.
As the numbers of the landless labourers and their families drastically declined, they
ceased to exert the same degree of influence that they had wielded before the Famine.
At the same time this event made possible for the Irish tenant farmers to consolidate
and extend landholdings after the Famine, transmitting family wealth from generation to
generation through a set of practices termed “familism” 38. As a result, a distinct culture
emerged in the later 19th century, the culture of the Irish tenant farmers (marked by late
marriage and strict sexual taboos), the most numerous class at the time which also
defined the characteristics of the people-nation.

By contrast, in the north more sexual permissiveness was allowed in rural society, and
the labourers also survived as an important segment of the population.

By the mid-1860s, a period of comparative political tranquillity ended abruptly with the
advent of “Fenianism”, when the issue of the long-term future of Anglo-Irish relations

38 “Familism” consisted of a number of procedures used to control access to marriage, including the
imposition and perpetuation of strict codes of behaviour between men and women, general endorsement of
celibacy outside marriage and postponement of marriage in farmer’s families until the chosen heir was
allowed by the father to take possession of the farm.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

came again to the fore. “Fenians” was the alternative, popular name for the Irish
Republican Brotherhood, a secret revolutionary organisation, founded in 1858, inspired
by the ‘advanced’ nationalism of the Italian nationalistic movement of Mazzini. Its
intention of establishing an Irish republic by force, led the Fenians start bombing activity
in the Autumn of 1865, and even if the movement ultimately failed, the execution of
some of its leaders in Manchester39 helped the publicity of the Fenian cause within
Catholic opinion.

In the 1880s a first nationalist party emerged, being concerned in the beginning with a
campaign - in the wake of the agrarian crisis of 1879 - to resist landlord seizure of
tenants’ land for non-payment of rents. Being founded in 1879 under the name of “The
Irish Land League” by a Fenian, Michael Davitt, it was taken over by Charles Stewart
Parnell who used its cause as platform to become the leader of a group of Irish MPs
pressing for the Home Rule bill for Ireland. The national demand for self-government
proved so deeply implanted in the mind of the Irish that it survived not only the fall and
death of Parnell, but the subsequent removal of the land grievance - the man and the
question which had first given it power -, dominating the British politics until the
beginning of the First World War.

Meanwhile, after the fall of Parnell’s parliamentary, its followers reunited within a new
shell organisation, the United Irish League, and the political landscape was further
complicated by the emergence of other groups struggling for hegemony, such as the
Gaelic League40 and later, in 1908, the Sinn Fein, a party that united a number of
smaller groups to campaign for Irish independence.

In reaction to this growing nationalism, the Orange Order opposition to an independent

and united Ireland intensified and before the outbreak of the First World War Ireland
was on the brinks of a civil war, with both sides illegally armed and the drilling of the
Ulster Volunteers in the North answered by similar demonstrations in the south. When
the war broke out, even if conscription was not applied in Ireland, most Ulster
Volunteers and Irish National Volunteers joined the British army, while the Fenian linked
organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, disapproving of Irish support for
England, decided that a new insurrection was to take place in Ireland before the end of
the war. The outcome was the Easter rebellion of 1916.

It was not so much the rebellion of the Easter week that completed the change in the
attitude of the Irish people generally as its aftermath, for the government made the
mistake of shooting the rebels, one by one, even those who were wounded, and of
arresting and executing people who had no involvement in the rising. This led to a

39 The so-called “Manchester Martyrs”

40 an organisation founded in 1893 to promote the restoration of the Irish language.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

complete reversal of the Irish opinion which turned its sympathies from the Irish
parliamentary party and, in a wave of national anger, gave its approval to Sinn Fein,
which won the general elections in 1918.

The victorious Sinn Fein pledged itself to the Irish republic and proceeded to put into
operation a policy of passive resistance to continued British rule, refusing to send its
members to occupy their places at Westminster.

The outcome of this measure was the Anglo-Irish war from early 1919 to July 1921, or
the ‘troubles’ as the people euphemistically called it. It was a struggle characterised by
guerrilla warfare, ambushes, raids on police barracks, and planned assassinations on
the one side; and reprisals, the shooting-up and burning-up of towns, executions and
terrorising on the other. Eventually public opinion in America and in Britain demanded a
truce, which was arranged in July 1921, followed by the signing of a treaty five months
later that conceded dominion status to the twenty counties that formed the Irish Free
State, while the six Protestant counties of Ulster remained within the British Union, with
a Home Rule Parliament of their own.41

Northern Ireland had been brought into existence, but its future was far from assured.
The act of 1920 had set up a state in which about one third of the population was bitterly
hostile. Some took part in an attempt to overthrow it by force, others adopted an attitude
of non-cooperation, enabling thus the unionists to appropriate loyalty and good
citizenship to themselves and identify Catholicism with hostility to the state.

Events in the rest of Ireland during these years also helped to keep alive old issues in
the north. The dismantling of the Anglo-Irish Treaty after 1932, the new Irish constitution
of 1937, and the policy of raising the partition question on every possible occasion
heartened the nationalists but confirmed the unionists in their resolve that Ulster’s
position within the United Kingdom and the Empire must remain unchanged. Eire’s
neutrality in the Second World War was the final proof of how far the paths of the two
Irish governments had diverged42. More than this, the cultures of the two communities
were also divergent, with a minimum of social contact established between them: each
had its own churches, schools, newspapers and forms of recreation. For one
community, soccer and rugby were appropriate games, while for the other Gaelic
football and hurling were national sports. In mixed rural areas, a complex and subtle
system of relationships came into existence in which both sides were taking great pains
to avoid causing offence. From time to time, IRA, a legacy from the days of Fenianism,
attempted ‘offensive’ operations to overthrow partition.

41 Donald McCartney, From Parnell to Pearse (1891-1921), in The Course of Irish History, Mercier Press,
1994, pp 307-310.
42 J.L.McCracken, Northern Ireland, 1921-66, in The Course of Irish History, op. cit., pp 316-322.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

The old issues survived into the post-war age as well. A new campaign of violence was
carried on from 1956 to 1962. There were occasions when nationalist demonstrations
were broken up by the police. Nationalists continued to complain of discrimination in
the distribution of houses and jobs, the enforcement of law and order and the drawing of
electoral boundaries. Unionists retorted that Catholics were disloyal to the state and
used occasional royal visits to reaffirm their loyalty to Britain.43

Yet, the 1960s were years of change for both communities, North and South. In the
Republic change was above all economic and social. A new government brought along
the shift from conservatism to innovation, paving the way for the expansion of education
and beginning the erosion of the rural political and cultural domination.

In Northern Ireland, change was most obviously political, but important social and
economic changes occurred as well. Due to the general benefits brought by the
implantation of the British Welfare State in Northern Ireland, an articulate middle-class
had risen within the Catholic community, more prepared than its predecessors to
acquiesce in the constitutional status quo, provided Catholics received a fair deal within
it. A sign of the new mood of the catholic community was the growth of the Northern
Ireland Civil Rights Association, founded in 1967. This body, unlike previous
organisations, did not challenge the existence of the Northern Ireland state, but
demanded merely the ending of abuses within it. From August 1968, marches and
demonstrations in support of this objective were held in various towns, but the police
and the Protestant right wing saw this development as a new attempt to undermine the
state so that successive demonstrations were broken up by police and harassed by
Protestant extremists. A year later disorder had reached such a height with Protestant
mobs launching savage attacks on Catholic areas of west Belfast that the Northern Irish
government was obliged to request the British government to send in troops to restore
order.

But the crisis deepened as in the 1970s IRA appeared on the scene of battle,
reorganised as the Provisional IRA and reverted to nationalist military traditions and with
the first IRA victims the government lost control of its own Army who turned against
nationalists. The politics of internment 44 which was subsequently applied only helped to
increase the level of violence, so that in 1972 the British government decided to
suspend the Northern Ireland government and introduce direct rule from Westminster 45.

43 idem
44 the holding without trial of suspected terrorists
45 J.H.White, Ireland, 1966-82, in The Course of Irish History, op.cit., pp342-347 passim.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

From 1972 to the present day all attempts to deal with the “Troubles” in Ireland46 have
offered only momentary respite from the embittered clash between the two
communities, as the sharp divergence between unionist and nationalist aspirations has
remained. Northern Ireland is still an extremely parochial place where matters of life and
death have forced people to fall back on their own resources and close ranks, a place
where identity has always been conceived in antithetical pairs, Catholic/Protestant,
Republican/Unionist, Irish/Scot or Anglo-Irish, and where conflict is still based on an
atavistic claim to territory on both sides.

Northern Ireland has remained a place where history and its versions play a central role
in shaping the attitudes of the two groups involved in this intricate drama, as each
community has its different interpretation of more remote or more recent events that
would legitimate its claims. Nationalist history classically portrays an opposition between
Britain and Ireland, planter and Gael as that between oppressor and oppressed, the
central events of this historical narrative being the successive invasions of Ireland in the
16th and 17th century, undertaken with great ferocity, entitling the Irish to a catalogue of
grievances whose rhetorical force derives from the reciprocity principle: their moral
advantage against the putative descendants of oppressors. On the other hand,
Protestant history celebrates 17th century events as those which allowed the defence of
civilisation, freedom and true religion, as well as the establishment of a Protestant
Ascendancy, while for rhetorical purposes the more recent history (from the 1920s
onwards) is employed as a catalogue of grievances against the Catholics who have
failed to accept the will of the majority and subverted the state using violent means.

To this it adds a folk history, feelings handed down from generation to generation,
always pointing to “the goodness of us” versus “the badness of them”, which is culturally
ingrained and genetically transmitted, plus a personal history for everybody has his own
memories of fathers and ancestors who have been cast as martyrs in this drama.

b. Perceptions of Irishness

“Irishness”, or the Irish cultural identity, has been defined and inflected by the historical
relationship of Ireland with England, a relationship between the colonised and the
coloniser, and by a colonial discourse which has inscribed the dichotomy between the
two terms as definitive and absolute, with the colonised always subordinate and inferior
to its positive term.

Even the typical Irish joke is not free of political connotations, as the its subtext points
not only to the fact that the Irish are different from their Anglo-Saxon neighbours, but
also that they are inferior, reflecting and reinforcing thus at the popular level a

46 the 1985 Anglo-Irish treaty, the 1994 peace-process

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

relationship perceived as one of superiority and inferiority between two groups of

people.

Liz Curtis has gone as far as to argue that since the upsurge of the conflict in Northern
Ireland in 1969 the rash of anti-Irish jokes has developed with enormous assistance
from both the television and the press:

Today the press still fosters the belief that the current conflict in Ireland is due to
the inherent irrationality of the Irish - their illogical religious passions, their
proneness to violence. It follows from this view that only the presence of the
more ‘rational’ Briton prevents the situation from degenerating even further. 47

Similar attitudes justifying coercion and punitive action from the part of the British state
as a legitimate response to the Irish ‘irrationality’ are considered by Seamus Deane to
inform the opposition between the ‘civil’ English and the ‘barbarian’ Irish in the political
sphere:

The language of politics in Ireland and England, especially when the subject is
Northern Ireland, is still dominated by the putative division between barbarism
and civilisation. Civilisation still defines itself as a system of law; and it defines
barbarism (which by nature of the distinction, cannot be capable of defining itself)
as a chaos of arbitrary wills, a Hobbesian state of nature.48

Barbarians and Civilians

The perception of Irishness in terms of the dichotomy between barbarians and civilians
stretches back as far as to the 16th century, being used to sustain and legitimate the
colonisation of Ireland. During this period, writings by Englishmen about Ireland and the
Irish did not serve only to broaden the English knowledge of the neighbouring island,
but also to define ‘non-Englishness’ or ‘otherness’ as contrasting to the qualities of the
former.49 Among the early 17th century writings on Ireland, Edmund Spenser’s dialogic
treatise, A View on the Present State of Ireland, takes the supposed descent of the Irish
from the ancient Scythians as a conclusive proof of their barbarity, who can only be
remade as biddable and law-abiding after they have been broken by famine and the
sword. More than this, their refusal to accept Protestantism makes them comparable to
the natives of the New World, and the extirpation of their culture is the only means of

47 Liz Curtis, Echoes of the Present - the Victorian Press and Ireland, in Studying Culture: An
Introductory Reader, Edward Arnold, 1993, p.186.
48 Seamus Deane, Civilians and Barbarians in Ireland’s Field Day, University of Notre-Dame Press, p.39.
49 David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland. Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, Manchester

UP, 1988.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

preventing further cultural pollution for those exposed to their influence, not to repeat
the fate of the ‘Old English’ colonists:

They are all Papists by their profession, but at the same time so blindly and
brutishly informed for the most part as that you would rather think them atheists
and infidels.(…) Is it possible that an Englishman, brought up naturally in such
sweet civility as England affords could find such liking in that barbarous rudeness
that he should forget his own nature and forgo his own nation?50

This image of the ‘barbaric’, uncivilised’, ‘inferior’ Irish was to stuck in the English mind
and to be retorted to whenever civil unrest, religious violence or political risings in
Ireland made the issue of the Anglo-Irish relation come to the fore.

Towards the end of the 19th century, a period marked by the intensification of nationalist
rebellions in Ireland, the Belgian essayist Gustave de Molinari was noting:

England’s largest newspapers allow no occasion to escape them of treating the

Irish as an inferior race - as a kind of white Negroes - and a glance at Punch is
sufficient to show the difference they establish between the plump and robust
personification of John Bull and the wretched figure of lean and bony Pat. 51

The Belgian was noting a major tendency displayed by both the Victorian press and the
iconographic productions of the time that consistently presented the ‘Simianised
terrorist’ or the ‘quaint Paddy’ as stereotypes of the Irish person. Famous illustrators of
the time leaned heavily on the theme of the Beauty (Hibernia or Ernia) being saved from
the clutches of the Beast (Fenianism) by a handsome prince (St. George) or the stern
Athens (Britannia), representing law and order.

The simianisation of the Irish was also informed by other discourses of the time that
inscribed them as members of a second-order race in relation to the first-order English.
The discourse of anthropology was spawning, at some of its wildest extremities, the
notion of the Irish as a race of covert blacks; scientific anthropology was advancing the
idea that the Irish mind was ineluctably criminal, showing constant disrespect for the
English law, and debates on Darwinism placed the Irish closer to apes on the
evolutionary ladder.

It is true that the Irish were not the only people to be regarded as inferior, but all colonial
subjects were defined as such:

50 Q. in David Cairns, op.cit, p.5

51 q. in Liz Curtis, op.cit., p.179.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

…With almost monotonous regularity colonial natives have been described as

indolent and complacent, cowardly but brazenly rash, violent, uncivilised and
incapable of hard work. On the more complementary side, they have been
characterised as hospitable, good-natured, possessing a natural talent for song
and dance and frequently as curious, but incapable of a prolonged span of
attention. In short, the image of simple creatures in need of paternal domination
emerged very clearly.52

Celts vs. Saxons

With regard to the Irish, the complementary side to the stereotypes of barbarism was
provided by a discourse termed ‘Celtism’. Matthew Arnold’s lectures on the study of
Celtic literature were influential in shaping this new discourse, which drew on
contemporary philology and ethnology to define the characteristics of the Celtic race.
Arnold’s writing had as a model Renan’s study, Poesie des Races Celtique which had
advanced the notion of the Celt as the producer of civility and culture within the mutually
interdependent Indo-European family of languages, races respectively. Yet, Arnold’s
intention was not merely to provide a list of attributes pertaining to the Celtic race that
could have formed the basis of a separate Celtic power, but to prove their usefulness
only as complements to other qualities of Englishness. The outcome of this endeavour
was that Arnold produced a Celt whose foremost characteristic was emotion, who was
sanguine vivacious and overly imaginative, while, at the same time, sensual feminine
and ineffectual in politics:

…the Celtic genius, sentiment as its main basis, with the love of beauty, charm,
spirituality for its excellence, /has/ ineffectualness and self-will for his
deficit(…)no doubt, the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation,
have something feminine in them, and the Celt is particularly disposed to feel the
spell if the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has an affinity to it, he is not far from its
secret.53

Arnold is especially important because he introduced the ‘Celtic’ idea as a differentiating

factor between Ireland and England, managing to give this word a political resonance
which it has not entirely lost54. This is the reason why the discourse of Celtism was to
have a major influence especially on the cultural productions of the Irish writers, the
Celtic Revivalists55, who, while accepting the Anglo-Irish antithesis, reinterpreted it to

52 Richard Ned Lebow, White England, Black Ireland, q. in Liz Curtis, op. cit., p.182.
53 Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, q. in David Cairns, op. cit., p.48.
54 Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals. Essays in modern Irish Literature, Faber and Faber, 1985.
55 The Celtic Revival or the Irish Literary Revival, literary movement appearing in Ireland towards the end of

the 19th century, dedicated to ‘de-Anglicisation’ of the Irish literary tradition, associated with such names as
Douglas Hyde, Lady Augusta Gregory, William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

create an idealised counter-image /of Ireland/ which saw her as pastoral, mystical,
admirably primitive 56.

Thus, while allowing a new range of definitions for a dignified self-identity of the Irish,
Celtism ultimately preserved the same antithetical positing of Irishness versus
Englishness, a polarity so entrenched that no aspect of the two identities can be safely
assumed to be inherent. As Seamus Deane was writing in 1974:

Irishness is the quality by which we want to display our non-Britishness - or our

anti-Britishness or, Britishness is the quality by which we display our non-
Irishness. Both are forms of dependency. The idea of what is British continues to
govern the idea of what is Irish.57

In another essay, Deane was noting that nothing is more monotonous or despairing
than the search for the essence which defines a nation, that hungry Hegelian ghost
looking for a stereotype to live in. 58 Deane was pointing thus to one of the major
preoccupations of contemporary Irish intellectuals who are engaged in a process of
excavation of history in order to produce analyses of the established opinions, myths
and stereotypes which had become both a symptom and a cause of the current
situation.59 Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Declan Kiberd, Seamus Deane
are among the most important and resonant names associated with this enterprise.
What they all advocate is a tabula rasa, cleared of disabling shibboleths as a pre-
requisite for a secure cultural identity, unblemished by the crippling divisions of the past.
This is what Tom Paulin has termed the fifth province, the neutral ground where things
detach themselves from all partisan and prejudiced connections and show themselves
for what they really are.60

If Declan Kiberd is right when saying that “Ireland” is a notion invented by

England61, the same holds true the other way round, and definitions probably tell more
about those who produce them than about those to whom they are applied. In this order
of ideas, the anti-Irish jokes might reveal more of the Englishman’s persistent and
poignant desire to say something funny, as do the anti-English ones account for the
Irish witticism.

56 Declan Kiberd, Anglo-Irish Attitudes in Ireland’s Field Day, op. cit., p..91-92.
57 Q. in David Cairns, op. cit., p. 152.
58 Ibid., p. 142.
59 Field Day Company manifesto, 1985, p.VII.
60 q. in David Cairns, op. cit., p. 153.
61 Declan Kiberd, op. cit.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

2. The Matter of Scotland

In many fundamental ways Scotland is unlike many other societies. It is, of course, a
geographical area, a territory situated more on the edge of Britain, with its own internal
subdivisions consisting of: a) the North West and Central Highlands together with the
islands off the west and north west of the country (the Hebrides, the Shetlands and the
Orkneys), thinly populated mountainous areas that nevertheless comprise half of
Scotland’s land mass; b) the Central Lowlands, representing but a fifth of the land area,
but including three-quarters of the Scottish population concentrated in the industrial and
commercial centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee; c) the Southern
Uplands, the hill ranges stretching towards the English border.

On a different level, Scotland represents an administrative unit, a sphere of jurisdictions,

within which distinctive institutions operate, such as the Kirk of Scotland (the national
Scottish church), a characteristic educational system, and many other nationally
organised systems of law, banking or government.

Yet, thirdly, Scotland exists at an ideological level: in the minds of the people, reflecting
in part the historic residue of the country as an erstwhile nation-state until 1707. At this
level, Scotland survives as a taken-for-granted reference in so far as aspects of its
culture (tartan, speech, anthem, flag) reinforce the sense of nationhood.

As the old assumptions about the unitary nature of Britain decay, as Britain becomes, in
the phrase of Neal Ascherson, “a country filled with anxiety and ill-feeling”62, the need of
asserting a distinctive Scottish national identity, speaking for a distinctive ‘national’
culture is growing in most sections of its society, perpetuating at the imaginary level that
shared community of mythic values that is the nation, and too often constructing an
identity which:

will be an essentialising, an idealising, a reduction to the paradigmatic features,

of Scotland as home, a counterbalance to the ‘home counties’ as core of
English/British culture.63

Hugh MacDiarmid, in the introduction to his famous “A Drunk Man Looks at the
Thistles”, was writing that:

62 Cited by David McCrone, Introduction, in The Making of Scotland: Nation, Culture and Social Change,
Edinburgh University Press, 1989, p. 3.
63 Cairns Craig, quoted by David McCrone, Representing Scotland: Culture and Nationalism, in The

Making of Scotland, op. cit., pp 169-170.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

I’ll hae nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur extremes meet, it’s the only way I
ken to dodge the curst conceit o’ bein richt that damns the vast majority o’
men...64

“Whaur extremes meet” would be a very good starting point to discuss the paradigm of
the Scottish identity, split, or divided, as Tom Nairn has demonstrated in his book “The
Break-Up of Britain”65, between the “heart” (representing the past, and the romance)
and the “head” (the present, reason, and by dint of that the British state). According to
Nairn, while Scottish civil society survived in the bosom of the British state, the Scottish
‘heart’ was split from the British ‘head’ in that the ‘national’, with its over-emphasis on
the past, was separated from the ‘practical’, with its emphasis on the present and future.
In this view, the search for a distinct identity would be illusory as far as the myths of the
Scottish society provide frozen images of the past by which the Scots are invited to
recognise themselves, when the real answer should be that in modern, pluralistic
societies no single ‘national’ identity is to be found, and no ‘hegemonic’ icons of
Scottishness should be observed if Scotland is to journey into the future. Yet, the
historically constructed mythologies by which the Scottish society defines and
recognises itself remain powerful in the national imaginary, are still foundational for the
national memory and provide the most potent means of asserting the distinctiveness of
the Scottish identity.

a) History and Scotland’s Story

In the Early Middle Ages the Scottish land-mass was occupied by at least five
linguistically separate and distinct groups, the product of many migrations. The best
known of the early inhabitants of what is today Scotland were the Picts, whose stone
monuments are still to be found scattered about certain parts of the country. The term
Scot was applied at first to a group of Irish invaders, and only gradually was extended to
cover the whole population of Scotland. By the 8 th century, Irish culture had become
dominant in the western area of Scotland north of the Clyde, as well as in the Islands off
the west coast, which were part of the Irish kingdom of “Dalriada”, merging the two
Celtic societies of Ireland and the Western Highlands into a common Gaelic-speaking
culture.

From the 8th century onwards, a Scandinavian culture became dominant from the Outer
Hebrides southwards, as the Western islands, the Shetlands and Caithness were
incorporated within the Kingdom of Norway, and populated by the Vikings (among them
the founders of the great MacDonald and MacDougall clans that were later to dominate
the Highland history).

64 Hugh MacDiarmid, Collected Poems, London, Faber and Faber, 1978.

65 Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, London, New left Books, 1977.

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 Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

By contrast, the Lowlands, initially a collection of British statelets spanning the border,
were partially occupied by Anglo-Saxons of various sorts, in the course of the great
migration that had taken them to England, a process which would later be reiterated
with the penetration of the great Anglo-Norman families that were to dominate the
history of medieval Scotland.

It is generally agreed that by the 11 th century, as a result of the continuous threat of

Viking invasions, the need to centralise the military form of resistance had led to the
fusing together into the “Kingdom of the Scots” of at least four of these groupings: Picts,
Britons, North English and Scots. The former Gaelic culture of Dalriada established
itself as dominant in the new kingdom as well, for the Scots enjoyed the status of a
ruling elite, while the British, Pictish and Anglian cultures were relegated to a
subordinate status. Hugh Kearney66 considers that the introduction of St. Andrew, an
apostle without any apparent connection with Britain, as a cult-figure in eastern Pictland,
represents an important symbolic change in this respect.

Of course, the assimilation of these very different groups took a very long time, and the
situation was further complicated by the Norman penetration and settlement that
occurred from the 12th century onwards, particularly affecting the east and south of the
country. Yet, by the end of the 13th century, Scotland had finally settled down into its two
distinctive cultural patterns, i.e.:

i. the Gaelic-speaking Highlands, predominantly Celtic in culture, in spite of their

Scandinavian links;

ii. the Lowlands, now speaking “Inglis”, the Lothian dialect of English that had gradually
replaced the Gaelic language, predominantly Anglo-Saxon in culture, though
maintaining close connections with France due to a Norman ascendancy indirectly
established in this area.

iii. Much more restricted, a Scandinavian sub-culture continued to influence the

Shetlands and the Orkneys, but its influence was too localised to be taken into
account for the major development of Scotland’s cultural paradigm.

The Highlands and the Lowlands cultures were mutually hostile, and as time went on
Gaelic Scotland found itself increasingly on the defensive.

During this period, the English crown had claimed overlordship of Scotland at various
points, and the climax had been reached in 1296 when Edward I had proclaimed
himself direct king of Scotland. But the course of events was decisively overturned
during Scotland’s Wars of Independence of the late 13th and 14th centuries. The high

66 Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations, Cambridge U.P., 1989.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

point of this episode is generally taken to be the Battle of Bannockburn of 1314, when
the Scots led by King Robert Bruce routed the English army of King Edward III. Even if
modern history tries to suggest that Bannockburn was not as decisive as was popularly
thought, documents attest that it was during this period that several statements which
were made prove that a certain stratum of the Scottish people were aware of Scotland
as a community to which they had a loyalty. Even more important, it is Scotland rather
than the Scottish king, which seems to be the focus of these feelings. The best-known
piece of evidence is usually taken to be a petition made by the Scottish nobles to the
Pope in 1320, known as “The Declaration of Arbroath”:

But if he /the king/ were to abandon this task, wishing to subject us or our realm
to the King of England or the English, we should instantly set ourselves to expel
him as the betrayer of his own rights and ours. For so long as one hundred men
of us remain alive, we shall never submit under any condition to the yoke of the
English domination.67

Similarly, in the two epic poems that seek to immortalise the heroes and events of this
period, John Barbour’s “The Bruce” and Blind Harry’s “Schir William Wallace” - one of
the few books which, along with the Bible, was to be found commonly in the houses of
the literate Scots after the Reformation - many clear statements of Scottish sentiment
are made, suggesting the fact that ordinary Scottish people were prepared to rally
behind them to beat off an invading army which they plainly identified as English. This is
further proof that a Scottish identity was important, and, moreover, that this feeling
spread fairly far down through the Scottish population in late medieval times.

For the two centuries that followed, until 1603, Scotland managed to retain its
independence from England, remaining a separate kingdom with its own monarch. As
far as its own internal cultural developments are concerned, it could be noted that at this
time the differences between the two dominant cultures of the Lowlands and the
Highlands cannot be overstressed, because, on one hand, royal influence did not
entirely cease in the west of the country, and, on the other hand, many Lowland
magnates began to resemble the Highland chiefs, as the inner core of their followers
enjoyed the same name as their leader and were bound by ties of kinship. By this date,
the clan was very much of a feudal institution in which military service was rendered to
the Chief in return for his protection. Even if many of the customs of the Highlands
seemed strange to Lowland eyes, the political behaviour of their chiefs confirmed to the
assumptions of the time. As Kearney68 explains, what contrasted most sharply to the
Highland culture was the Lowlands proper - a relatively narrow belt stretching east-west

67 Quoted in Jack Brand, The National Movement in Scotland, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, p.12.
68 Hugh Kearney, op. cit.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

between Glasgow and Edinburgh and the river valleys of the Forth and the Tay - where
English was dominant even among the nobility, the level of literacy was higher, the
market relations were based on cash, and the practice of fending (the leasing out of
land for a fixed annual sum) was instituted.

From a political point of view, until the first half of the 16 th century Scotland had
remained a client state of France. Yet what made a Scottish Reformation possible was
the outbreak of the wars of religion in France itself, which allowed Elizabeth I in 1560 to
intervene in Scotland on the side of the pro-English party of the Scottish reformers, led
by John Knox. The outcome of this incident was not only in terms of a new religious
hegemony, but also political, as from this date onwards England was to replace France
as the dominant partner in Scottish politics, also making possible the Ascension of
James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603.

Thus political change corresponded with religious reformation, and the Bible in English
proved a formidable instrument for Anglicisation. The Reformation was also responsible
for intensifying the internal differences between the Highlands and the Lowlands, as its
progress in the Highlands was much more slower, and even when it made some
headway it was mainly associated with loyalty to a particular chief. Another difference
stemming from the same event was that while the culture of the Lowlands, due to the
particular success that Puritanism (with its particular emphasis on Bible reading)
enjoyed, became highly literate, the Highlands, by contrast, remained very much
anchored in an oral cultural tradition.

For the next one hundred years, between 1603 and 1707, England and Scotland shared
only a Regal Union, while their Parliaments, as well as other political institutions
remained separate. More than this, at several points during this period, the Scottish and
the English governments actually became antagonistic to each other, and on several
occasions these dissensions broke out into open warfare and invasion, such as it
happened during the 1650s, when, after Cromwell’s victories at Preston, Dunbar,
Worcester, Scotland found itself incorporated within a wider commonwealth and
controlled by the English army.

In 1707, in response to a decision taken by the Scottish parliament not to support the
English king in any war undertaken by the English crown, the political union of the two
countries was effected in order to regain control of Scotland. Among the Scots
themselves opinions were shared between those who favoured the Union, arguing that
this would make their country proper economically, and those who considered it an
unpopular act, demonstrating against it, such as was the case with the Edinburgh mob
or other weightier bodies, for example the Convention of Royal Burghs.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

Economic changes were to come, but only with the second half of the 18 th century, as
part of the general colonial expansion of the Kingdom. The Clyde became a centre of
trade with the colonies, Glasgow witnessed the building of streets with such symbolic
names as Virginia or Jamaica Street, the New Town was built in Edinburgh. In the rural
world, change was slower, nevertheless most of the better land in the Lowlands was
enclosed, and many landlords established on their domains planned villages, on the
English model, as a means of stimulating economic growth.

But the most dramatic changes were to come in the Highlands, in the aftermath of the
Battle of Culloden. In 1746 the Jacobite Rebellion of the Highland clans who were
supporting Bonnie Prince Charles was defeated. This event finally allowed Scotland,
with the help of the English army, to settle her Highlands question, putting down, in the
north of the island, the warlike organisation of the tribes and the extra-legal allegiances
to their chiefs. Lowland law became thus applied to the Highland tenures and customs
with harsh uniformity. Traditional dress was banned and hereditary jurisdiction, the
source of the legal powers enjoyed by the Highland chiefs, was abolished by an act of
parliament in 1747. As John Rennie Scott characterises the event:

After 1746 the Highlands were transformed. It became illegal to wear tartan, play
the pipes or carry arms. All cultures need their language. The discouragement of
Gaelic was an act of cultural genocide superseded only by the clearances of the
early nineteenth century when the people were thrown off the land to make way
for the more profitable Cheviot sheep. . . . The highlands of Scotland are one of
the few areas of the world which had less population in 1980 than it had in 1780.
In 1775 Samuel Johnson described the Highlands thus: ‘where formerly there
was an insurrection there is now a wilderness’.69

The middle of the 18th century marks thus the end of a period. The Highlands ceased to
have a political meaning and became a simple geographical expression, while Scottish
history and Scottish culture became part of the bigger Anglo-British tradition. As Nairn70
explains in his book, after the Union intellectuals migrated, if not in body, at least in spirit
to the richer pastures of England. Even the Scottish Enlightenment of the late
eighteenth century, including Smith, Hume, the Mills, Robertson, Adam and other
luminaries who may have been Scots by birth and education, but universal, and
certainly “British” in orientation, was:

69 John Rennie Short, Imagined Country: Environment, Culture and Society, London, New York, Routledge,
1991, p.58.
70 Tom Nairn, op. cit.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

. . . strikingly non-nationalist - so detached from the people, so intellectual and

universalising in its assumptions, so Olympian in its attitudes.71

By the 19th century, figures such as Macauley, Carlyle, Ruskin, Gladstone and many
more had been no longer thought of as Scots at all, but as part of a national English
culture, while the cultural void left in Scotland drove the Scots plunge into the past in
search for a distinctive set of cultural symbols able to provide them with a sense of
identity, and by no small irony they found them in the vanished world of the Highlands.
As Marinell Ash comments:

The time that Scotland was ceasing to be distinctively and confidently herself was
also the period when there grew an increasing emphasis on the emotional trappings
of the Scottish past . . . its symbols are bonnie Scotland of the bens and glens and
misty shieling, the Jacobites, Mary Queen of Scots, tartan mania and the raising of
historical statuary.72

b) Communities of Scotland

The modern population of Scotland was established during a period of population

explosion which lasted from the end of the 18 th century to that of the 19th century.

If until the middle of the 18th century the people of Scotland had been almost equally
distributed to the north and south of the River Tay, from that date onwards the balance
steadily shifted to the south. During the 19th century, after the Highland clearances and
the Great Famine in Ireland, the Lowlands began to accommodate migrants from those
two areas, with the result that Glasgow became the biggest Highland settlement in
Scotland, while the west turned into one of the major centres for Irish settlement, with
industrial towns such as Motherwell and Wishaw largely peopled by Irishmen.

H.J. Hanham, in his study73 of the Scottish society considers that this population
explosion had a very different psychological effect in Scotland from that brought by
similar changes taking place in England. His argumentation takes into account the fact
that 18th century Scotland had been predominantly a rural and traditional society, living
close to the land. Its folk-culture, whether Gaelic or Anglo-Saxon was strong, and its
most characteristic poetry was represented by the village poet Robert Burns. Moreover,
Hanham considers that the Scots were an emotional people, deeply rooted to their
traditions, though now willing to accept that their country was now becoming ‘one of the
richest in the world’. The paradox that the study points to is that while the Scottish

71Idem, p. 140.
72Marinell Ash, The Strange Death of Scottish History, Edinburgh, Ramsay Head Press, 1980, p. 10.
73 H.J. Hanham, Scottish Nationalism, London, Faber and Faber, 1969, Chapter 1, The Scottishness of

Scottish Society, pp 15-32.

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 Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

people liked the thought that Scotland was enjoying great economic progress, they
found it difficult to adjust emotionally to what this meant for life in Scotland itself. Two
factors made adjustment particularly difficult:

i. the fact that the population explosion was accompanied by large- scale emigration,
which significantly changed the balance of Scottish population;

ii. the social structure of the new Scotland.

i. Emigration played a decisive part in the shaping of Scottish attitudes. Not only its
scale was remarkable (continuing unabated in the 20 th century), but it was proportionally
greater from Gaelic Scotland than from the Lowlands, as a result of the Clearances.
During the 1800 and 1840 some 10,000 people were forced to leave their Highland
homes, and with them emigration may be said to have turned into a way of life, for,
while some of the Highlanders settled in the Lowland areas, a greater number provided
the basis of the stream of Scottish migrants to the New World of North America, to Nova
Scotia, Cape Breton island or prince Edward island.

Paradoxically, the Clearances helped to create for the first time among the Lowland
Scots a sort of vicarious identity with their Highland companions. Displaced Highlanders
created county and clan societies in every Lowland city, as well as Gaelic-speaking
churches and chapel and, in time, each Lowland town had its own highland games. But
more than this, in the wake of the romantic movement, the cult of the Highlands (largely
created by Sir Walter Scott) became part of the popular imagination, and the kilt and
tartan returned as national symbols of the Lowland Scots as well. Thus Highland culture
survived in transmogrified form in the Lowlands long after the social reality had passed
away in the Highlands themselves.

Emigration also led to the creation of new Scotlands all across the world. Many of the
Scots who went abroad, and particularly the Highland Scots, were communities
determined so far as possible to stick together in the new world where they were
settling. As a result, large parts of Canada and New Zealand, and to a lesser extent,
parts of Australia and the United States became little Scotlands tied by nostalgia for the
homeland. Continued emigration and a two-way stream of visitors made for continued
contact between the Scots. Scottish newspapers and magazines, such as The Scottish
American, appeared now in all parts of the world; Caledonian and St. Andrew’s and
Burns’ societies were strong outside Scotland before they really took root in the country
itself, and there was a loose federation of Scottish Presbyterian churches strong across
the globe, many of them engaged in missionary endeavours.

Apart from internal migration and emigration from Scotland, the Lowlands were also
affected by the immigration from Ireland, with the result that quite early in the 19 th

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

century the character of Scottish urban population became very different from what
most Scots thought of as the traditional norm.

Even if there had long been considerable contact between the West of Scotland and the
Presbyterian communities of Ulster, the new Irish immigrants were as often Catholics as
Protestants. More than this, even the Protestant Irish were bringing with them a
religious bellicosity which had been unfamiliar to most Scots. Just how many Irish
settled permanently in Scotland is not clear, because there has always been a great
deal of seasonal labour migration from Ireland and also because many Irish migrants
subsequently left for the United States, England or other parts of the British Empire. Yet,
it seems likely that somewhere about one-quarter of the population of modern Scotland
has a large measure of 19th century Irish blood in its veins, though a significant increase
in the Irish proportion of population also came as a result of the high-birth rate if Irish
migrants coupled with Scottish emigration.

The Irish brought with them a clannishness of their own and, in the case of the Roman
Catholics, a strong devotion to their church. Soon enough, both Catholic and Protestant
Irish set up their own network of social and political organisations and churches, with a
peak reached during the 1880s when the Irish Home Rule Movement dominated the
British political scene. Yet, not only this moment, but every phase of Irish political
activity down to the contemporary troubles have also been reflected in the Scottish life.
Orange Lodges, the Sinn Feinn and a multitude of other Irish organisations have also
appeared on the Scottish scene, although at the moment they are little more than
survivals kept alive largely by recent immigrants.

Another aspect related to the Irish immigration was related to the fact that the Irish
Catholics came to a country that had its own strong Catholic tradition, as in parts of the
Highlands, notably in the islands of Barra, South Uist, Eigg and Canne, Lochaber and
Morar, Reformation had never taken root. The outcome of this factor was that the story
of the Catholic Church in Scotland has been one of fight of the native Scottish clergy to
retain control over their own church in face of the Irish priests.

ii. The social structure of Scotland was also much affected both by these movements
of population and by the industrialisation that had fostered them.

Almost all the industries developing in Scotland during the 19 th century were labour-
intensive: coal, iron, shipping, shipbuilding, jute and cotton. Consequently they created
a vast demand for relatively unskilled labour, with the industrial centres of Glasgow,
Dundee and the towns of Western Scotland developing a pattern of life resembling
Liverpool, with merchants and manufacturers at the top, as part of a wealthy upper-
middle class, and a great gulf below up to the vast mass of an urban working-class.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

A rough parallel could be also drawn with Edinburgh’s social pattern, where a ‘haute-
bourgeoisie’ of lawyers, churchmen, merchants, professors, bankers and manufacturers
in old-style industries like brewing and printing was also elevated high above a working
population devoted almost entirely to catering for their needs.

In short, due to this particular development of its social structure, the middle- and
especially the lower-middle-class did not appear (apart from the smaller towns where
shop-keepers, for example, formed an important group) until the 1950s, as a result of
the Welfare State policy and greater affluence. This new Scottish middle-class became
visible with the spreading of suburban housing estates around Edinburgh and Glasgow,
as well as with the new middle-class suburbia created in the new Towns of East
Kilbridge, Glenrothes or Cumbernault.

It was from the members of this new class that the Scottish National Party, founded in
1934, was to gather his support from the 1960s onwards, challenging the position of the
Labour Party that has dominated the post-war Scottish political scene. The discovery of
a series of important oil-fields off the east coast of Scotland during the 1970s gave a
new leash of live for Scottish nationalism, providing an issue on which the SNP
capitalised with the demand that “Scottish Oil” be used for the benefit of Scottish
people. Devolution became an important issue, and in 1979 a referendum was held,
that, nevertheless failed to attract more that 33% of the population’s support. After this
moment, the fortunes of the SNP also seemed to ebb, and the Labour returned to its
leading position in the country.

c) Scottishness and Its Myths

A diverse society like modern Scotland must be held together by myth as well as by
politics and social pressures. And Scotland has plenty of myths. What makes them
specifically Scottish is that they all point to the distinctiveness of the national
characteristics and values that make Scotland different from all other countries. (By
contrast, the myths that used to point towards a united Britain have lost much of their
force lately.)

Tony Dickson, in an essay suggestively entitled “Scotland is Different, OK?” 74 considers

that the most important role in the shaping of a distinctive experience of Scottishness
has been the duality of Scottish and British national allegiances, a consequence of the
Act of Union of 1707 by which Scotland became a strangely hybrid society. If political
control of their country was ceded to a parliament based at Westminster, nevertheless
the Scots retained the body of their civil society, and the major social institutions
through which they defined their identity remained specifically Scottish. For example,

74 Tony Dickinson, Scotland is Different, OK?, in The Making of Scotland, op. cit., pp 53-69.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

the legal system developed separately from its counterpart in England, preserving its
specific features, such as the pivotal role of the Procurator Fiscal and the operation of
Children’s Panels; the education system has also maintained a separate form and
curriculum75; religion has developed its distinctive traditions, and the Church of
Scotland, despite the existence of dissenting sects, has always maintained its role as a
national church. As Dickson comments:

These three major social institutions are an illustration of the way in which
Scottish society has retained a core of distinctive everyday life that has helped to
define the image that Scots have of themselves. But this has taken place
alongside the fact of political control exercised through Westminster. . . The
gravy train operated through Westminster ensured that aspiring Scots had to
channel their ambitions through the English-based controllers of the favours that
could be dispensed from the metropolitan capital in London. One result of this
was that . . . these achievements had to be couched in a political language that
accepted the reality of political domination in Westminster, i.e. though an English
parliament.76

The legacy of this pattern of development is thus a sensitivity by most Scots to the
extent to which key decisions are taken outside Scotland, and explains the paradigm of
a Scottish identity which, whilst fiercely proud of its ‘Scottishness’, is acutely aware of
the country’s dependence on the outside world. This ‘split’ cultural identity is also
responsible for what Nairn77 and Dickson78 call “the schizophrenic nature of many
Scots”: aggressively asserting the superiority of their country whilst hiding a deep-
seated feeling of inferiority, and why a caricature of the ‘English’ has been developed
over the years as part of the definition of Scottishness, functioning as a target for the
resentments implicit in the notion of external control.

This resentment swirls around the caricature of the archetypal English: a Home
Counties accent, a natural arrogance, a taken-for granted superiority, an
uncaring disregard for others, and some degree of affluence. Thus, whatever the
historical origins of the phrase, the ‘Auld Enemy’ for Scots has long since been
the English.79

75 Scottish children pursue a broader curriculum in schools, leave for higher education a year earlier than in
England, the structure of Scottish degrees is different, with a three-year ordinary degree and four-year
honours degree.
76 Tony Dickson, op. cit., p. 59.
77 Tom Nairn, op. cit.
78 Tony Dickson, op. cit.
79 Idem., p.61.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

Yet, at the same time, this sense of duality experienced by the Scottish identity prompts
the search for a unified Scottishness in the mythologies of the past, because:

Scotland seems to be quite distinctive in the centrality which mythologies occupy

in its sense of a national past and a national identity; perhaps a token of an
inferiorism which seeks the reassurance of an epic rather than a ‘real’ past, or
perhaps, indeed, a function of its status as the frontier of Europe in the age of
Romanticism.80

Tom Nairn’s analysis81 outlines two basic myths that emergence central to the
construction of Scottishness, “Tartanry” and “Kailyard”, while John Caughie 82 and David
McCrone83 add “Clydesideism” as the myth of 20th century Scotland.

Tartanry, characterised by Caughie as “the most obvious, the most notorious and, in its
touristic manifestations, the most embarrassing”84, consists in a set of Highland garish
symbols, such as the tartan and the kilt, which have been taken over by a lowland
population anxious to claim some distinctive aspect of culture at a time when the
economic, social and cultural identity was ebbing away in the nineteenth century.
Influential in the development of this fascination with “Tartanry” and other elements of
what might be called “Highlandism”, were the writing of James MacPherson 85 which
reinforced the image of the Highlands as both the desolate refuge of a primitive people
and an example, par excellence, of a sublime landscape, but, more significantly, those
of Walter Scott, who, in his novels, made the Highland predicament a metaphor for
Scotland as a whole86. From the 19th century onwards, the Highlands have become less
a real area of upland territory, than a myth, a set of ideologically laden signs and
images, or, as one commentator remarked:

We know that the Highlands of Scotland are Romantic. Bens and glens, the lone
sheiling in the misty island, purple heather, kilted clansmen, battles long ago, an

80 John Caughie, De-Picting Scotland: Film, Myth and Scotland’s Story, in Presenting Scotland’s Story,
Harvard UP, 1989, pp 91-96.
81 Tom Nairn, op. cit.
82 John Caughie, op. cit.
83 David McCrone, op. cit.
84 John Caughie, op. cit., p.93
85 Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic

or Erse Language (1760), Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books (1761), Temora, an Ancient Epic
Poem in Eight Books (1763). MacPherson claimed that these texts represented the translation of the works
of Ossian, an ancient Caledonian Bard.
86 Also see Charles Withers, The Historical Creation of The Scottish Highlands, in The Manufacture of

Scottish History, Edinburgh, Polygon, 1992, pp 143-156.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

ancient and beautiful language, claymores and bagpipes and Bonnie Prince
Charlie - we know all that, and we also know that it’s not real.87

Kailyard, or the “cabbage-patch”88 tradition, is the second mythology of Scotland,

emerging with the 19th century disruptions the Church of Scotland and the divisions it
brought within the stable communities of the small townships, which took the form of a
popular literary style among minor Scottish writers from about 1880 to 1914. The
imagery that their works created was domesticated and social, or, as Nairn notes:

Kailyardism was the definition of Scotland as wholly consisting of small towns full
of small-town character’s given to bucolic intrigue and wise sayings. At first the
central figures were usually Ministers of the Kirk (as were most of the authors)
but later on schoolteachers and doctors got into the act. Their housekeepers
always have a shrewd insight into human nature. Offsprings who leave for the big
city frequently come to grief, and are glad to get home again (peching and
hosting to hide their feelings).89

Kailyardism, or as Nairn calls it, this ‘sub-cultural Scotchery’, has survived in the
publications of D.C. Thomson, in television comedy through the comic acts of Harry
Lauder, and in a Scottish television soap opera, Take the Highway, which inherits
Kailyard’s pursue of Scottish country quaintness.

Clydesideism is the most recent mythology of Scotland, or, as Caughie describes it:

. . . the mythology of the Scottish twentieth century, the one which seems
currently most potent, and least acknowledged as mythology.90

Clydesideism is constructed from ‘real’ images of working-class life, from the discourse
of class and from naturalism, emphasising the gritty realism of urban Scottish life, kept
fresh by the poetry of Tom Leonard and the comedy of Billy Connolly. But, at the same
time:

. . . it is only the mythology of male industrial labour, with its appurtenances of

pub and football field, alive and in place, supporting the celebration of a ‘real
Glasgow’ beneath the yuppie surface of shopping malls and Garden Festivals
and Cities of Culture.91

87 Idem., p. 143.
88 Scotland’s dish was literally called ‘cauld kail’.
89 Tom Nairn, op. cit., p.158.
90 John Caughie, op. cit., p. 94.
91 Idem.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

3. The Matter of Wales

In 1932 the Methuen Books published a series of books on the four nations making up
The United Kingdom, the fourth of which was H. V. Morton’s In Search of Wales. In the
introduction to his book Morton touches upon an outsider’s perceptions of Wales and
Welshness, listing some of the stereotyped projections of national or racial
characteristics:

Wales, I feel, is going to be interesting. She is, of the three sister nations which,
with England, compose the British Isles, the smallest and the most mysterious. I
wonder, as I find my way out of London, what any man in the street would reply if
I asked him:
“What does the word ‘Wales’ convey to you?”
He might possibly reply:
“The Prince of Wales, Lloyd George, the Eisteddfod, Snowdon, Welsh Rarebit…”
There he might stick. Perhaps a more literate member of the public might add:
“St. David, Fluellen, Parson Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor, leeks,
pictures of Caernarvon Castle in railway carriages, mine disasters, and Cardiff.”
Someone might even recite the old libel that has stuck so hard to Wales and the
Welsh:
Taffy was a Welshman,
Taffy was a thief.92

As Tony Curtis93 notes, one could locate here the irony proper to the small nations’
efforts to preserve their sense of a discrete identity: in order to achieve it, they might
have to construct a set of national characteristics which, in fact, caricature those
underlying qualities they hope to secure.

Wales, a small part of the United Kingdom, displaying many of the attributes which point
to an organic nation, such as the unity in the history of the land and of its people, or the
linguistic unity as most Welsh people spoke Welsh until the beginning of this century
has had to accommodate the paradoxical situation of not being, at the same time,
conterminous with a political state. To this, one may add the continuing pressure from
an economically and culturally dominant neighbour that explains the Welsh need to
construct a set of ‘national’ characteristics and revert to imagination, myths,
generalisations and images that would sustain its cohesion and secure its survival.

92 Cited by Tony Curtis, Introduction to Wales: the Imagined Nation. Essays in Cultural and National
Identity, Poetry Wales Press, 1986,pp 11-12.
93 Tony Curtis, op. cit., pp 11-13.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

This process of ‘imagining and re-imagining’ Wales and Welshness is closely linked to a
historical narrative that has shaped the psychology of the nation, imbuing it with an easy
propensity for myths and myth-making as an influential factor in the process of the
Welsh self-definition.

a. Historical Narratives and Myths of Welshness94

During the earliest centuries of Welsh history, a period stretching from the end of the
Roman Empire up to the Norman Conquest, the Welsh, known by the name of
Brythons95 along with the other Celtic-speaking peoples south of Firth of Clyde and Firth
of Forth, had managed to secure their own political institutions, being the only country in
the Roman Empire to resist conquest after its fall. Despite the fact that her government
was shared between a number of small states, Wales was united by a shared history in
a common territory, by a common Celtic language and culture, by a Celtic Church and a
Christian religion, which towards the end of this period came to differentiate the Cymry96
from the people to the east of them. This community shared some cultural and religious
characteristics with the other five Celtic people from Brittany to Scotland, with whom
there were close Welsh relationships in the 5 th and 7th centuries.

The name Welsh was given to the inhabitants of this western peninsula with the next
centuries of Anglo-Saxon invasions, deriving from the continental experiences of the
invaders with “romanised foreigners”.

The Anglo-Saxons managed to cut the territories of the Welsh into three distinct parts -
Strathclyde in the north, Wales in the centre and the Devonian-Cornish peninsula in the
south -, but the wide extent of the mountain area brought them to a halt behind Offa’s
Dyke97.

In point of the continuous process of definition for Wales and its people, one could
notice here both an inward and an outward direction. The Welshmen acquired self-
awareness due to being continually subjected to attacks from Irish raiders, in the east,
and Anglo-Saxon conquerors in the south-west, defining thus themselves as “fellow-
countrymen”, while the invaders, in their turn, considered the Welsh “foreigners”, with a

94 Discussion of the myths of the Welsh is based on Prys Morgan, Keeping the Legends Alive, in Wales: the
Imagined Nation, op. cit., pp 20-41.
95 ‘Britons’, a name which, in Roman times, had been particularly associated with the native inhabitants of

south and western Britain.

96 A word meaning ‘fellow countrymen’; ‘Welshmen’ in modern Welsh.
97 During the reign of the king Offa of Mercia, an earthen dyke was built from Prestatyr in the north to the

Wye estuary in the south, along the border with Wales.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

clear-cut distinction being made between their cultures, as both Offa’s Dyke and the
name of Mercia98 itself demonstrate.

Even during those early centuries, the Welsh used history and myth to sustain their
spirit. There were myths of origin, for example the long-cherished Brutus myth
according to which the Britons had taken their name from an eponymous founder, a
Roman consul Brutus, or, as other legends said, from an earlier eponymous hero, one
Britto from Troy. There were also myths referring to the emergence of the Welsh from
the ruins of a later Roman empire, involving the characters of the British or Welsh
leader Vortigern99 and the Saxon leader Hengist100, which linked the Saxon invasion
with the story of a bloodful plot101.

Thus the retreating, ever more constricted Welsh people were sustained by telling
themselves that they were the primary people of the British Isles, that the origin of their
government and ruling families was Roman and Imperial, and that their power had been
diminished by foul, not fair means. More than these, another myth assumed that they
had been Christian for centuries (perhaps since the visit of Joseph of Arimathea to
Britain), all that made them utterly different from the pagan Anglo-Saxons with their
recent veneer of Christianity.

With the Vikings taking control of the Severn Sea and of the Dee estuary from the 9 th
century onwards, contact with the other Celtic provinces (such as Ireland or Brittany)
became much more difficult, but at the same time a distinct British geographical area,
called ‘Wales’ emerged distinctly, even if at least three subcultural patterns could be
detected within it. In the north, the province of Gwynedd which looked to Strathclyde,
and was strongly marked by the Viking presence, which also gave a Nordic character to
the Lake District and north Lancashire. In the middle there was the province of Powys,
oriented towards Mercia in the east, but still retaining through its bardic poetry the
memory of its ties with southern Britain. The last of these, the provinces of Dyfed,
Glamorgan and Gwent were linked southward towards the Severn Sea, Cornwall and
Brittany. There also existed the “hidden Wales” consisting of the border counties of
Cheshire, Shropshire and Herefordshire. Despite the fact that these provinces often
engaged in attempts to assert dominance over the others, the common enemy was still

98 Mercia originally meant “boundary people”.

99 Vortirgen is also closely related to Macsen, the Roman Imperial pretender Magnus Maximus, who led a brief
revolt to capture the Western Empire in 383 AD. The departure of his legions symbolised for the Welsh the
end of Roman rule in Britain and the beginning of a separate existence for the British.
100 Hengist and Horsa, the legendary Anglo-Saxon warriors who, having been hired by the Celts to fight back

the attacks of the Picts and the Scots, turned against their employers.
101 The legend told how Vortigern, in love with Hengist’s daughter, was invited by the latter to big banquet

where the Saxons slay the British leaders during the “Night of the Long Knives”. To stop this massacre,
Vortigern was forced to concede large areas of southern Britain to the invaders.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

represented by the Anglo-Saxons, as a 10th century poem, Armes Prydein Vawr

(Prophecy of Great Britain) - which tells of some Britons entering in alliance with the
Vikings, Scots and Strathclyde to drive the English into the sea - suggests102.

In the early decades of the 11th century, an actual Celtic resurgence occurred, led by
Gruffydd ap Llywelyn in 1055, that managed to push back the frontier with Mercia
beyond Offa’s Dyke, but this was a short-lived victory, ending in 1063 with a counter-
campaign led by Harold of Wessex.

Starting with the 11th century, the Norman Conquest of England was also to impinge
upon the fate of Wales. As it had happened to the Anglo-Saxons, the first wave of
conquerors had been stopped behind Offa’s Dyke, but by the end of the same century
the so-called “Marcher Lords”103 and their private armies had managed to get complete
control of South Wales. Yet the Norman advance was again halted by the northern
kingdom of Gwynedd, whose prince, Gruffydd ap Cynan, with the backing of the
Scandinavian kingdom of Dublin, led a raiding expedition on the Normans off the coast
of Anglesey. As a result of this defeat, the Normans were content to allow for ‘indirect
rule’ in the provinces of Gwynedd and Powys, tolerating the existence of Welsh princes.

The first Norman colonisation of Wales also began at the end of the 11 th century, with
the coast of South Wales, which was easily accessible by sea from Devon, an inviting
target for those younger sons who had missed earlier opportunities in England. The
process of colonisation continued in the early 12 th century, with the plantation of
Pembrokeshire in 1109. The settlers were Flemings whose homes had been inundated
in the floods of 1106-07 and who had been first ‘planted’ along the Tweed. They were
given now lands about the upper reaches of the Cleddan in Dyfed (probably to prevent
any more raids on Pembroke Castle, such as it had happened the previous Christmas
when the Welsh leader, Owain ap Cadwgan had carried off the Princess Nest), and
Pembrokeshire came to be known as “Anglia Transwallina” (“The Little England Beyond
Wales”). But the decisive factor in the Norman conquest was the supply of English
colonists as well, for in the most southerly parts of this cleared zone the burr in the
speech of villagers suggests settlement from Somerset and Devon, probably as a result
of cross-channel trade. This last factor is also supposed to have led to the Anglicisation
of the peninsula of Gower, and these two clearances of Welsh-people were confirmed
and stabilised by constant contact with Bristol, Bridgwater and other English ports.

102Hugh Kearney, The British Isles. A History of Four Nations, Cambridge UP, 1989.
103 The great Anglo-Norman families who owned lands in the Marches of the English-Welsh border
(Trevelyan). They slowly extended control up the Welsh river valleys and by the beginning of the 12th century
much of Wales was held by them. They built castles as they went forward, and mixed with and married the
Welsh during the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. A new class grew up, a mixture of the Norman and Welsh
rulers, who spoke Norman, French and Welsh, but not English. They all became vassals of the English king
(David McDowall, An Illustrated History of Britain, Longman, 1995, p.31).

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

Between the early colonisation of South Wales in the immediate post-Conquest period
and the more centralised attempts to colonise Gwynedd at the end of the 13 th century,
the Welsh enjoyed a period of relative independence, being now defined by their
enemies as a nation, even if judged as primitive and semi-barbaric by the sophisticated
standards of the peoples of the western European mainland.

The process of myth-making also continued during these centuries. In the early 12th
century, Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Breton from Gwent who bridged the gap between
Norman and Welsh civilisation, gave a new lease of life to the Brutus and Trojan myths
of origin with his Historia Regum Britaniae (History of the Kings of Britain), adding to
them many historical legends of the kings of Britain. Among the most remarkable ones
were the tales of Arthur, a figure which had not been dominant in the Welsh myth before
the 12th century, but which now commanded attention and was to capture the
imagination of the Europeans.

In the later part of the 12th century, another Norman-Welshman, Giraldus Cambrensis,
or Gerald the Welshman, showed in his writings a profound consciousness of the
differences between the Welsh and their neighbours. Cambrensis also led an
unsuccessful attempt to make Wales an archbishopric independent of Canterbury 104,
using the cult of St. David’s in his campaign, greatly increasing thus its fame and
helping St. David become the patron saint of Wales.

In the early years of the 13th century a Welsh national revival took place, in a movement
to unite all the tribes under the hegemony of the Llewellyn princes who ruled over
Gwynedd and Anglesey. Llewellyn the Great reconquered much of the Powys from the
Marcher lords and his grandson further enlarged the area, even claiming complete
separation from England. As a result of this action, Edward I undertook a campaign to
conquer Gwynedd and in 1282 defeated and killed Llewellyn, executing his brother
David a year later. In 1284 Edward held a ‘parliament’ as a result of which west Wales
was united with England, introducing the Norman criminal law, enforced by Norman-
style sheriffs, into the three shires which now constituted former Gwynedd. But Wales
as a whole was not yet part of England, for Edward did not interfere with the territories
of the Lord Marches, as this would have led to trouble with his nobles. In 1301 his
victory over the Celtic Principalities was enunciated more lavishly when, during a public

104 The Norman Conquest had a particularly marked effect upon the Welsh Church. In Wales there was no
equivalent of the English ‘Tenth-Century Reformation’ with its policies of centralisation. As in other areas of
the Irish Sea Province, earlier patterns of local control based upon kinship lords had prevailed against a
system based on government by bishops. There were four Welsh bishoprics (St. David’s, Llandaff, St. Asaph
and Bangor), but in the countryside Episcopal surveillance counted for little against the entrenched traditions
of abbeys with strong local roots, symbolised by an attachment to a local saint. The Normans, wherever they
established themselves, ‘reformed’ this system out of existence, so that in Norman-controlled Wales the
Church became closely identified with ‘Englishry’(Hugh Kearney, op.cit.)

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

ceremony at Caernarfon Edward proclaimed his own son Prince of Wales, a title which
has been given since to the eldest son of the ruling king or queen.

After the defeat of 1282, the Welsh adjusted their view of history to the conquest, and
their myths and legends began more and more to emphasise the prophetic or messianic
direction, displaying a sense of urgent search for a rescuer, a political saviour for the
nation, a second Arthur who would return to avenge the defeat of the Welsh, or a
second Owain (the most popular image of this mythical hero) who could rise up and
drive the English from the island. As Prys Morgan has noted 105, such mythical heroes
troubled the Welsh imagination in the centuries after the conquest of 1282. For
example, in the 14th century the Welsh awaited the return from France of one of the
descendants of the princes of Gwynedd, Owain of the Red Hand. Around 1400 the
‘second Owain’ was Owain Glyndwr, the first and only Welsh prince to have wide and
popular support in every part of Wales, descending from two royal families which had
ruled in different parts of Wales before the coming of the Normans. Having joined a
revolt of the Marcher Lords against royal control, his border rebellion had developed into
a national war and in 1400 he was proclaimed Prince of Wales by his supporters. He
continued to fight a successful guerrilla war against the English for some ten years, but
eventually lost his support, even if he had managed to create the idea of a Welsh nation
among his people106. In the first half of the 15th century, the Welsh thought to have
found their prophesied hero in William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, but their hopes were
short-lived as he was killed in the Wars of the Roses. Within a few years, Henry Tudor,
earl of Bolingbrook, took his place within the Welsh imagination.

During the unsettled conditions of the Wars of the Roses, the Welsh Marcher Lords
were provided with an opportunity to intervene in English politics. The Battle of Banbury
in 1469 was regarded as a peculiarly Welsh disaster; the rebellion of Buckingham
against Richard III involved South Wales and the most decisive contribution of the
Welsh was their support for Henry Tudor in 1485, for it was the rallying of Welsh troops
that enabled the defeat of Richard III at Bosworth. Though whether the corpus of Welsh
myth meant a great deal to him after that date is a moot point, Henry was glad to pose
as the prophesied Welsh hero: in the battle he used the ‘red dragon’ as a standard,
symbolising his claimed descent from Cadwaladr the Blessed, the last Welsh king of the
British Isles; the Welsh bards acclaimed him as the ‘second Owain’; Welsh versions of
British history enabled him to prop up a weak claim to the throne, a move which was
followed up later by the naming of his eldest son Arthur. After his coronation, Henry
repaid his debt to his Welsh allies by appointing them to key offices in North and South

105 Prys Morgan, op. cit.

106 David McDowall, op. cit., p.52.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

Wales and by naming Welshmen to the sees of St.David’s and St.Asaph. In due course,
penal legislation against Welshmen holding office and acquiring land was repealed.

The reign of Henry VII marked the end of a period for Wales, which was to be decisively
marked with the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542 that legally incorporated Wales into
England, under one administration. After the union, the English common law was
enforced throughout Wales. Those parts of the country which had not yet been ‘shired’
were now organised like English counties and thus the Norman empire in Wales was
dismantled as the Marches Lords were either incorporated within an administrative
system of already existing shires or amalgamated into new counties that ended the
legal autonomy of the lordships. The border between Wales and England was now
drawn clearly for the first time, with the border counties of Shropshire and Hereford
firmly placed within England, though Hereford contained Welsh-speaking communities.

The Union also strengthened the process of Anglicisation through the planting of a few
more Englishmen in the newly established royal burghs chiefly in North Wales, and,
most important, through the imposition of English as the official language in the country.
Although certain classes of Welshmen were enforced the use of English as the
language of opportunity, the rural population continued to speak Welsh, in the same
way in which they remained attached to the values of a traditional society, in which local
institutions such as ‘the wise man’ of the village, the fair, the wake and kinship ties
retained their hold in the face of the various attempts at ‘Anglicisation’.

The Union with England was also marked by a religious revolution which had as its
main material effect the dissolution of the Welsh-monastic houses, replaced now by an
English-speaking and English-oriented clergy. Yet the Reformation had initially little
impact at the popular level. Although in 1588 a Welsh translation of the Bible was
printed to be used in churches, followed by a smaller edition, the ‘Little Bible’ (y Beibl
Bach) in 1630, the society for which it had been intended was dispersed, rural and cut
off from the values of its clergy. Not until the 18 th century, with the coming of Methodist
denunciation, did an evangelical revolution occur in rural Wales.

The impact of the English food-market was also a powerful instrument of social change,
as the lowland and upland farmers were given now the opportunity to export their meat,
butter, cheese and wheat, with the effects that a class of gentry began to emerge from
the general run of yeoman farmers that, by the 18 th century were completely Anglicised
(most of them attending the University of Oxbridge) and cut off from their Welsh-
speaking tenants and farmers. Yet the growing dominance of English culture did not
prevent some of them acting as patrons for Welsh scholarly works.

The bardic culture of the elite was also undermined after the Union, and the gatherings
of poets and singers known as Eisteddfod, which had been going on since 1170

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

suddenly stopped. But it survived at the popular level being replaced by a Welsh oral
culture including wakes, feasts, wassailing, the practice of certain rites of popular
religion such as the use of charms and holy wells to ward off evil spirits, a culture that
survived until the late 18th century when dancing, harp-playing and fiddling began to
give way to a new popular culture based on hymn-singing and the Sunday school.

Another result of the Union was that an important strand of Welsh myth was now
absorbed and incorporated into the English tradition. The Christian or ecclesiastical
myth of the Welsh, according to which their Christianity was older and deeper than that
of the English, being the heirs of the British Church founded by Joseph of Arimathea
shortly after Christ’s death and maintaining their independence from Rome for
centuries, was taken over and used by the English in their attempts to legitimise the
newly-reformed Church of England. The Welsh myth of the British realm founded by
Brutus was used by royal propagandists and scholars to justify the expansion of
Elizabethan England over the whole of the British Isles. Even an obscure Welsh legend
that told the story of Madoc, the son of the Welsh king Owain Gwynedd who had
discovered America about 117o and had settled there with his companions, was used
by Dr.John Dee, Elizabeth’s magician, to justify the English claim to the New World and
to contest the Spanish claim to America.

Thus, after their political incorporation, the Welsh saw their myths and legends either
taken over for the purposes of the vigorously expanding English state, or discredited
and dismissed as fairy tales by English antiquaries or Renaissance scholars (the
messianic legends or the myths of Vortigern).

Even if the Welsh ceased to have an independent history, new myths began to arise,
maybe to compensate for the discrediting of the former ones. For example, if the
English had appropriated the Brutus myth of origin, the Welsh began to claim that they
had a more ancient eponymous hero, the Gomer of the Book of Genesis, that Cymry
was named after him, while Cymraeg (Welsh) was really Gomaraeg. Thus the Welsh
language became one of the oldest in the world, being closely related to Hebrew and
probably spoken by the Patriarchs in the world’s infancy. So at a time when the Welsh
history and language were sharply declining in status, rearguard attempts were made
by the Welsh to give them a new prestige by appealing to Old Testament history by way
of compensation. These were the beginnings of a historical and mythological tradition
endowing Wales with ancient origins and language that was to reach its apogee during
the 18th century.

The 18th century is considered by most scholars to have marked a turning point in
Welsh cultural history, through the rise of a Welsh Romantic Movement reviving interest

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

in all things Welsh: historical interpretations, poetry, music, the study of Welsh
language, landscape.

The Welsh revival started with a historical renascence led by a group of scholars, the
most able of whom was Edward Lhuyd, who showed in their works that Welsh was the
daughter of the old British language which, in turn, was the sister language of Irish,
Cornish and Breton, all daughters of an unnamed ancient language which they called
‘Celtic’ after the bands of warriors roaming Europe long before Christ who had settled
down in Britain and Europe to be eventually conquered by the Romans. Among the
most striking defenders of the Celts against the Roman conquerors had been their
sages or priests, called ‘Druids’.

The revival of Welsh history lay at the root of the revival of many other things Welsh in
the 18th century, but as the century progressed, the element of fantasy, imagination and
invention also grew, while the element of sober realism declined.

Thus, the Welsh writers who popularised the views of the scholars, reached the
conclusion that the megalithic stone circles in Wales were ancient Druid temples, the
Welsh bards were the successors of the age-old Druids, and even the Welsh folk verses
called penillion telyn contained scraps of Druidic wisdom.

Towards the end of the century, the mythical dimensions of these theories had grown so
much that Welsh had become the greatest and amplest language in Europe, the
language of the Patriarchs and Druids, containing clues to the origin of all other
languages in the world. More, it could be analysed into short monosyllabic particles that
conveyed essential concepts or ideas, and these, in their turn, could be infinitely
assembled and reassembled as in a kaleidoscope to multiply vocabulary.

The Eisteddfod was revived on a national scale in 1789, the first large gathering of
poets since the 1567 Caerwys Eistedfodd, conscious of being a revival of a much
greater institution in the past, trying to revitalise the rules of prosody and alliteration of
the 15th century. The most active individual in this enterprise was Edward Williams who
took the bardic name of ‘Iolo Morganwg’ and attached the Eisteddfod to the Gorsedd of
Bards. Iolo’s inventions, whether of the ‘medieval’ poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym or
druidical ceremonies in stone circles, were quite remarkable in the colourful innovation
of their imaginative quality and had a lasting and highly significant influence in their
contribution to a new concept of Welshness dependent on the literature and language of
Wales.

The claims of Welsh music to great antiquity were pressed, with Welsh music
supposedly emanating from druidical days, as suggested John Parry in his collection of
Welsh tunes entitled Ancient British Music. An old musical tradition did go back to

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earlier centuries but its instruments of harp, crwth and pibgorn had died out in the 17th
century. The triple harp, now boldly asserted to be the Welsh harp, was an Italian
baroque harp which probably came to Wales in the second half of the century. The 18 th
century saw Welsh airs, so-called, published in profusion, and penillion singing became
central to Welsh musical tradition107.

The landscape of Wales was also re-visualised by the romantic movement. Until the
end of the 18th century, the Welsh had eyed their own mountainous land with little
regard, seeing its grim harshness and the poverty of its agriculture as a punishment,
and recalling the loss of the flat fertile plains now in the hands of the fortunate English.
But now, through Thomas Pennant’s travel books and the paintings of Richard Wilson, a
wild, romantic notion of Wales was created, echoing contemporary interest in Scotland
and Switzerland, and felt for the first time by the English tourists pouring in Wales in the
1790s. Welsh patriots also took up the admiration for the wild landscape of Wales, and
were proud now to call their country “the Land of the Mountains”, as the mountains were
fastnesses, the home of liberty.

Welsh heroes were also re-cast during this period to meet revised requirements. Owain
Gledower became the national hero who had tried to found those national institutions so
dear to middle-class Welshmen: independent state, university and national church. The
last of the Welsh bards (surviving the supposed massacre of the bards ordered by
Edward I) was absorbed into the Welsh tradition as a historical figure. Ifor the
Generous, a 14th century chieftain, was made into a symbol of the generous patronage
of the Welsh poetry, and Ifor became launched as a baptismal name. Even the figure of
Thomas Jones of Fountain Gate reappeared now in Anglo-Welsh fiction as a pranking,
yapping Welsh Robin Hood.

In the iconography of Wales, new symbols and signs were created, such as the Three
Ostrich Feathers of the Princes of Wales, the Red Dragon of Cadwaladr the Blessed,
the ancient Druid and the stone circle, the leek of St.David or the wild mountain and the
goat of Snowdonia. Just as pervasive as the realities of the Welsh past was the
romantic invention of the Welsh costume by Lady Llanover out of many local costumes,
and the elevation of the Welshwoman in her shawl, pais, and her tall black hat, betgwn,
into a symbol par excellence of the Welsh.

The 19th century and the industrialisation it brought along gradually modified this
romanticism. Culture, for many, seemed of far less importance than politics as the
Rebecca riots108, and Chartism became central issues in the 1830s and 1840s.

Gareth Elwyn Jones, Modern Wales: A Concise History. 1485-1979, Cambridge UP, 1989, p.210.
107

The ‘Rebecca Riots’ broke out in 1839 out of rural discontent at the payment of tithes and the growing
108

number of toll taxes that lay heaviest upon hard-pressed small farmers taking their produce to market. The

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Pamphlets and newspapers were full of political and religious debate. This became
even more pronounced after the 1847 report on education that censured the Welsh
education (based on the Methodist Sunday school) for its narrow biblicism. The affair of
“The Treachery of the ‘Blue Books’” (as the report was named) caused outbursts of anti-
English sentiment, and produced a fusion of interest between Methodism and old
dissent, identifying them both with Welshness.

This link of Welshness with nonconformity was the most powerful one in the 19 th century
political and cultural tradition as sermons, journals, hymns and denominational history
provided Wales with a culture109. In industrial Wales harp and national costume seemed
more and more peripheral, as the leaders of the 1840s and subsequent decades,
nonconformist journalists, preachers and radical politicians, turned the history of Wales
into nonconformist and radical propaganda. The very image of the country was
transformed into “The Land of Chapels”, “The Land of Revivals”, “The Land of
Assemblies” (either religious synods or evangelical hymn-singing sessions” or “The
Land of the Great Choirs”110.

Paradoxically, part of this process was the emergence of a new myth in the Welsh
historical tradition, that of the long-pedigreed, classless gwerin111, whose virtues
distinguished the Welsh society. This myth could emerge from the fusion of democracy,
radicalism nonconformity and literacy in the later 19 th century, as the aristocracy and
most Anglicans were gradually excluded from the concept of the Welsh nation which
became a nation of the gwerin: poor labourers, craftsmen, merchants, together with
their printers, preachers, publicists, all united in their Welsh self-consciousness as
expressed in the life of the Chapel.

The Welsh saw themselves as the most virtuous and hard-working people in Europe, in
farm, mine and factory, the most God-fearing, the best at observing the Sabbath, the
most temperate and abstinent with regard to drink, the most deeply devoted to
educational improvement and to things of the mind, the most constant in their support in
country and town for the Liberal or Radical political cause, the most classless and
egalitarian in spirit112.

title, ‘Rebecca’, was said to derive from the scriptural passage declaring that “Rebecca should possess the
gates of her enemies.”
109 Gareth Elwyn Jones, op. cit., p.211.
110 Methodism, the most triumphant of the dissenting religious groups, is strongly based on the life of the

chapel, with its congregational singing, also placing great value on Sabbatarianism and dislike of secular
amusement.
111 Gwerin means in Welsh a mass, coming to denominate the masses of common people, as opposed to the

aristocrats or clergy.
112 Prys Morgan, op. cit.

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This has proved one of the most pervasive myths, especially among nationalist writers,
because it rested on some firm educational and cultural foundations. The prominence of
politicians like Tom Ellis113 and Lloyd George from humble backgrounds lent it additional
credibility.

David Lloyd George, the Prime-Minister of the Liberal government that came to power in
1906, did as much for Welsh pride and self-esteem as any of the romantic and radical
publicists of the previous hundred years. He was also responsible for the ceremonial
highpoint of the movement of Welsh Pageantry of the 1900s, when the investiture of the
Prince of Wales at Caernarfon in 1911 turned into a display of wonderful ceremonial
and bad history114, with all the clichés of the 18th and 19th centuries rolled into one royal
ceremony full of plumes and dragons, druids and bards, Welsh regiments, Welsh choirs,
hundreds of girls in red cloaks and tall black hats 115.

The 2oth century and the war years especially brought a decisive shift of direction, as
class became increasingly important and the ethnic and religious issues of the past of
relative insignificance once the depression settled in. Hundreds of thousands of Welsh
people were to be uprooted from local community, culture and language, choir and
chapel, to be absorbed in the mass conurbation in London or in the Midlands, where
there was work, while over 30% of the workers who remained in Wales had to satisfy
themselves with the dole. The balance also shifted away from rural Welsh-speaking
areas to the industrial areas in the south, where Anglicisation was strong, and which
looked to the socialism of the Labour Party. This explains the little support for the Welsh
National Party (Plaid Cymru), which emerged during the 1920s, standing for the values
of the rural Wales, the small farm and the craft skills, looking back to an idealised
medieval social order, the antithesis of industrialisation, as a model for Wales to follow.

The nationalism of the south was to be mainly expressed by the symbolism of sport,
especially that of rugby football, which provides a most interesting social phenomenon.
Though a public-school game brought to Wales through Lampeter College, it became
the working-class game of South Wales. The remarkable Welsh victory over the then
invincible 1905 New Zealand All Blacks established the game as the national sport in
Wales, and heroes were manufactured in the golden age between 1900 and 1912 when
Wales won the triple crown six times. In the inter-war period, it provided an ephemera of
nationalism, satisfying the national sentiment with the ritual ‘slaughter’ of English teams
at Cardiff Arms Park.

113 Tom Ellis, described as the Parnell of Wales, leader of the Cymru Fydd (Young Wales) movement of 1886.
114 Idem.
115 Lloyd George also replaced the leek with the daffodil as his preferred Welsh national symbol.

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Yet the crisis of Welshness deepened as the numbers of Welsh speakers were now
decreasing absolutely, education provided far more opportunities for the export of
Welsh talent to England, and the mass penetration of radio, and later television,
predominantly in English and reflecting the cosmopolitan values of London was bringing
the most profound threat to the Welsh language or lifestyle.

After the Second World War came another transformation. A rising population,
increasing affluence and changing industrial patterns saw the expansion of urban areas
, with suburban spread and new towns being built. One feature of increased affluence
was the proliferation of service industries, including banking, insurance and finance
houses, centred mainly along the urban areas of the South Wales coast. One
consequence of this growth in government and service sectors of the economy was the
steadily growing middle class, increasingly produced by the expanding higher education
facilities of university and polytechnic, as well as the colleges of education producing
teachers.

But with this development of the south, the old, rural North, as well as industrial Wales,
away from the coastal belts, witnessed a dramatic decrease in population, becoming a
culture under pressure, partly as a consequence of unemployment, partly owing to the
influence of tourism.

This split cultural pattern could be one key to Welsh attitudes, and, as Hugh Kearney116
writes, it explains the difficulties that Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, has had
to create a unified national movement. It was only in 1966 that the party managed to win
its first parliamentary seat, which it lost in 1970. But the cruellest blow received by
Welsh nationalism was the referendum of 1979 with its overwhelming vote against
devolution.

b. Welshness and Linguistic Nationalism

At present the most obvious distinguishing feature of a Wales which, as stated before, is
a small part of the United Kingdom and a smaller part of the European Community, is
the Welsh language. In spite of the fact that since 1535, when it was forbidden as an
official language and up to 1965 when Welsh was given equality with English for all
official use, the number of Welsh-speaking people has dramatically decreased, while
the language itself has become diluted with English vocabulary, it symbolises the whole
of Welsh history and culture.

The forceful revival of the linguistic issue from the 1960s onwards is linked to the social
changes brought by the post-war years, mainly with the emergence of a new Welsh-

116 Hugh Kearney, op. cit.

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speaking middle class as a result of the two complementary processes mentioned

before: economic marginalisation and the expansion of the service sector. Exclusion of
the traditional local petit-bourgeoisie from new economic formations has led to a
reliance on the idea of local community, integration and solidarity, and vis-à-vis the new,
predominantly English migrant bourgeoisie this response has developed into a
specifically nationalist ideology.

At the same time, public expansion since the war - in contrast to earlier developments -
has also influenced the formation of new middle-class clusters. Employment in
Professional and Scientific Services, which comprises the elite of this sector, doubled
between 1951 and 1971, and these new groups have also been associated with the
growth of nationalism. As David Bevan has written:

in Wales, as elsewhere, the new ethnic resurgence in this post-war period was
spearheaded by a vociferous middle-class using language as a symbol of its
separateness.117

Nevertheless, this class did not emerge ab nihilo, but as a reinforcement of the cultured
or literary class existing before the Second World War in Wales. As opposed to the
London-based Welsh elite, whose aspirations had found rapid and abundant realisation
through assimilation in imperial destiny, this literary class formed a cultural rearguard
that survived through resisting in the name of Welshness both Anglicisation and the
process of modernisation.

This crucial alignment was clinched with the entry of the very first contingent of Welsh
non-conformists into Oxford in the 1880s, when Arnold’s commitment to the idea of the
national spirit as being expressed in language and literature played a major role in the
cultural and educational sphere. The new Welsh elite, while discovering the riches and
potential power of their own national literature, turned also to cherishing the values, or
nostalgia, of a pre-capitalist past, with the desire to establish a ‘vanguard’ of “the
remnant”. In this way, an idealised Wales, in accordance with Arnold’s own elevation of
“Celtic spirituality” as the antidote to English philistinism, became the very embodiment
of their ideology, while modernisation was externalised and distanced as a British
phenomenon which could be pursued or ignored without implicating the “essential
Wales”.

The consequences of this ideological alignment have meant that the education elite
inclined towards the view that “culture and modern civilisation cannot survive together”
has obstructed the growth of a scientific and industrial intelligentsia in Wales, and the
pattern of academic achievement since the last war illustrates the remarkable degree to

117 Cited by Roland Mathias, Thin Spring and Tributary, in Anatomy of Wales, Gwerin Publ., 1972, p203.

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which young Welsh students are still conscripted into the literary intelligentsia. On the
other hand, the anthropological research championed by the ‘Aberystwyth school’
rendered an essential, ahistorical Wales in terms of the supposed completeness of
traditional rural society set against the “formless masses of rootless non-entities of
modern urban civilisation”118. From this perspective, change and conflict were dismissed
as alien, un-Welsh, and the “true Wales” came to be indissolubly linked with the isolated
farmstead, the people’s love of music, poetry, philosophy and religion, while the Welsh
language became the very medium of life itself.

This intellectual monopoly of literature and anthropology has tended to colonise space
within other disciplines, including theology and philosophy, and the consensus which
has resulted has bestowed upon the Welsh literature and the Welsh language an all-
embracing, seamless role: a humanist surrogate for religion, a “bond of national unity”
between the classes and the last bunker of the rural organic community. In this order of
ideas, the words of J.E.Daniels, president of Plaid Cymru,- it is in the poetry of Taliesin
that the salvation of Wales is to be found - could be better grasped.

This factor also explains the dominance, since 1965, of poets and writers of Nationalist
sympathies, of whom R.S.Thomas is the most admired, as important as Dylan Thomas
was before. Having moved from the contemplation of Manafon man against his starved
pastures, through a bitter nationalism (which of all his themes has attracted the most
attention) back to deeper and more demanding religious themes, Thomas has been for
long the harbinger of the many Nationalist writers to come. Of the younger generation,
Peter Finch or Glyn Jones are representative voices which show the same allegiance to
the Wales of the past, either ‘remembering’ it (the personal past or the mythic or the
historical past), or by placing their emphasis on the rural or semi-rural (with the life of
the individual held in balance against it.)

This appeal to an imagined and ideal Welshness has not lost its force down the ages
and up to the present.

Many of the myths of national identity may be still found in some residual form long after
their original relevance has disappeared. Hence Welsh schoolgirls still wear their ‘Welsh
costumes’ on the 1st March; hence the Welsh Rugby Union still uses the three ostrich
plumes of the medieval principality as its ideogram; hence the crowds at international
matches still sing “Land of My Fathers”, even if they have no connection with chapels;
hence the Eisteddfod is still a national festival, with its display of national costumes and
competitions held in Welsh poetry, music, singing, art.

118 Idem.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

Brief Chronology
(Adapted from Ioana Mohor-Ivan, The British Isles, lecture notes,
Galati, 2008.)

BRITAIN’S PREHISTORY. THE CELTS. THE ROMANS.

250,000 - 8,300 BC : Palaeolithic nomads from mainland Europe, characterised by primitive use
of stone implements.

8,300 - 4,000 BC : Mesolithic settlers from Europe, possessing a more sophisticated talent in
stone carving.

4,000 - 3,000 BC : Neolithic people coming by sea from the Iberian and Mediterranean regions,
populating south-west England, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Scotland.

2,OOO BC : The “Beaker” people, coming from north-central Europe, generally settled in
eastern Britain, introducing a Bronze Age culture.

800 - 200 BC : large Celtic movement into Britain from mainland Europe, bringing an Iron Age
civilisation (the Goidels , the Britons).

200 BC : the Belgae invaded south-east Britain, subduing the previously settled Celtic
population.

55 - 54 BC: Julius Caesar made the first attempts to conquer Britain.

43 AD: actual conquest and incorporation of Britain within the Roman Empire.

61 AD: Celtic revolt against the Roman rule, led by Queen Boadicea, was put down.

123 AD: Emperor Hadrian ordered the building of a defensive wall in the north, from the Solway
to the mouth of the Tyne.

313 AD : Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire.

383 AD : Magnus Maximus (Macsen Wladig) is proclaimed emperor by the legions stationed in
Britain.

409 AD : Rome withdraws its last soldiers from Britain.

C 430 AD : Raiders from Saxon Germany conquer the eastern parts of Britain and begin to
carve out kingdoms (Hengist and Horsa).

430 AD : St. Germanus leads the Welsh to victory over a combined army of Picts and Saxons.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

432-61? : St. Patrick, a Romanised Briton, introduces Christianity to Ireland.

THE ANGLO-SAXON SETTLEMENT. THE BRITISH ISLES DURING THE 4 TH-8TH

CENTURIES.

c. 300-400 : first plundering raids of Saxon pirates, coupled with Pictish attacks in the north.

430 : the British king Vortigern invites Jutish mercenaries led by Hengist and Horsa into the
land, who afterwards turn on him. The Germanic tribes begin to settle in England (the Angles,
the Saxons, the Jutes).

570 : the British Celts are pushed into Weallas, Cornwall and Strathclyde. Gildas writes “The
Ruin of Britain”. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms are established (the ‘Heptarchy’)

597 : Gregory the Great sends Augustine to Kent to re-establish Christianity.

601 : the Archbishopry of Canterbury is established.

635 : Aidan of Iona introduces Celtic Christianity in Northumbria.

663 : the Synod of Whitby establishes the supremacy of the Roman Church.

673-735 : the Venerable Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

756-97 : Offa II of Mercia claimed “kingship of England”. Offa’s Dyke was built.

802-839 : Egbert of Wessex broke Mercia’s power, proclaiming himself ‘bretwalda’.

THE VIKING INVASIONS. THE BRITISH ISLES BETWEEN 8 TH-11TH CENTURIES.

793 : Lindisfarne is sacked by the Vikings.

842 : London is raided by the Scandinavians.

865 : new Viking invasions lead to settlements along the coasts of Britain and Ireland, and the
northern islands and the Isle of Man. The Danes penetrate East Anglia and soon control large
areas of Mercia.

878 : King Alfred of Wessex defeats the Danes at Ethandune and Danelaw is established.

959-975 : the reign of Edgar represents the apogee of Wessex domination over the other
English kingdoms.

978-1016 : Aethelred the Unready has to face the power of renewed Danish raids. ‘Danegeld’ is
established.

1016 : Aethelred’s son, Edmund Ironside, is killed. Cnut, leader of the Danish army, is elected
King.

1018 : Cnut becomes king of Denmark

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

1030 ; Cnut conquers Norway. The king of Scotland becomes his vassal. England is part of the
Scandinavian Empire.

1040 : Cnut dies.

1042 : the Anglo-Saxon dynasty is restored through Edward the Confessor.

1044-1052: The fight between the Norman party of Robert de Jumieges, Archbishop of
Canterbury, and that of Godwin, earl of Wessex, is won by the latter.

1066: Edward dies. The Witan choose Harold, Godwin’s son, King. Harold defeats the
Norwegian army at Stamford Bridge, but is defeated by the Normans at Hastings.

THE NORMAN ASCENDANCY (11TH -13 TH CENTURIES)

911: the treaty of Saint-Claire-sur-Epte assigns Normandy to duke Rollon, grandfather of

William the Conqueror.

1066: the battle of Hastings marks the beginning of the Norman ascendancy in England.

The Reign of William I (the Conqueror) (1066-1087)

Christmas 1066: William is crowned at Westminster Abbey.

1069: -last resistance in the South of England is put down at Exeter. A Danish fleet arrives at
the abbey of Ely to help the eastern resistance, led by Hereward the Wake. The Danish
kingdom supports the resistance in the north. William is forced to undertake severe reprimands
(“the harrying of the North”)

1086: the feudal character of the new monarchy is institutionalised with the meeting of Salisbury
and “Doomesday Book”.

1087: William dies during a campaign against France in Normandy.

The Reign of William II (Rufus)(1087-1100)

1096: the first crusade was joined by Robert, Duke of Normandy, William I’s eldest son, leaving
Normandy in charge of William II.

1100: William died in a hunting accident.

The reign of Henry I (1100-1135)

1106: Henry I invades Normandy, takes Duke Robert prisoner, and appropriates the Duchy.

1120: Henry’s son, William Atheling, drowns on his return trip from Normandy; Henry proclaims
his daughter, Matilda, heir to the English throne.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

1124-53: during the reign of the Scottish kind David I, Norman penetration in the Scottish
Lowlands is encouraged.

The Reign of Stephen (1135-1154)

1135; on Henry’s death, his nephew, Stephen of Blois, is recognised as king by a large faction
of barons.

1139: Matilda invades England to reconquer the throne; a civil war begins.

1153: a compromise between Matilda and Stephen is reached by the Treaty of Wallingford;
Matilda’s son, Henry is recognised as successor to Stephen.

The Cistercian order founded over 100 monasteries during this period.

The Reign of Henry II Plantagenet (1154-1189)

1162: Chancellor Thomas Becket is made Archbishop of Canterbury

1164: The Constitutions of Clarendon defined the relations between church and state.

1169: Norman troops land in Ireland to help the exiled king of Leinster reconquer his throne.
The Normans establish the ‘Pale’ around Dublin.

1170: the controversy between Henry and Becket ended with Becket’s murder in Canterbury
Cathedral.

1173: Henry crushed a feudal revolt and demolished unlicensed castles

1178: A bench of royal judges administering ‘Common law’ was established

1185: The University of Oxford is established.

The Reign of Richard I, the Lionhearted (1189-1199)

1190-3: Richard joined the Third Crusade.

1194-8: Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, ruled for Richard.

1194-1240: Llewellyn the Great reconquered Powys from the Marcher Lords.

1199: Richard dies in France, during a campaign against the king of France.

The Reign of John (Lack-a-Land) (1199-1216)

1202-4: John, defeated in war by Philip II of France, losses all French possessions save
Aquitaine.

1206-13: John struggles with the Pope over the election of Langton as Archbishop of
Canterbury.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

1209: The University of Cambridge is founded.

1215: A coalition between Church and Norman nobility enforces upon John the signing of the
Magna Carta.

Henry III (1216-1272)

1216-27: William Marshall and Hubert de Burgh acted as regents for Henry III.

1221: the first Dominican friars landed in England. 1224. The Franciscans followed.

1255-58: the barons refused money to support Henry in making his son, Edmund, king of Sicily.
The Provisions of Oxford provided committees to control the king and operate the administrative
administration.

1263-64: Upon annulment of the provisions, baronial wars broke out, ending with Simon de
Monfort’s victory at Lewes, helped by Llewellyn ap Griffith. Henry is imprisoned.

1265: Montfort inaugurates the present-day Parliament, by having two burghers and two knights
of the shire summoned from each borough and county to Parliament. Later Montfort is defeated
and killed by Prince Edward at Evesham.

Edward I (1272-1307) and the Making of a British Empire

1277: Edward took his revenge against Llewellyn, starving him into surrender. Wales begins to
be administered according to the English model.

1282-84: Llewellyn’s rebellion is defeated by Edward, who reconquers Wales.

1290: Edward I expelled the Jews from England. The Treaty of Brigham arranged for the
marriage of Queen Margaret of Scotland and the English heir. Margaret died on her journey
from Norway to Scotland. Edward, chosen as arbitrator, chose John Balliol as king of Scotland
against Robert Bruce.

1295: Balliol renounced his allegiance to Edward I and entered an alliance with France. Edward
summoned the “Model Parliament” to obtain money for war against Scotland and France.

1296: Edward entered Scotland and deposed Balliol, making himself direct king of Scotland.

1297-98: William Wallace led a Scottish revolt against the English army, but was defeated at
Falkirk.

1301: Edward’s eldest son is invested “Prince of Wales”.

1306-7: Robert Bruce crowns himself at Scone as King of Scotland. Edward dies during his last
campaign against the Scots.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

BRITAIN DURING THE 14TH and 15th CENTURies

Edward II (1307-1327)

1314: The conquest of Scotland had to be given up after the battle of Bannockburn, where
Robert Bruce was victorious against the English.

1326-27: Queen Isabelle, aided by Mortimer and the barons, deposed Edward and enthroned
his son, Edward III, aged 14.

Edward III (1327-1377)

1330: Edward ordered the killing of Mortimer, and started to rule by himself.

1337: The Hundred Years War started with the English invasion of Flanders, following with the
English victories at Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), Calais (1357), leading to the Treaty of
Bretigny assigning south-western France to England.

1348: The Order of the Garter was founded by the King.

1348-49: The Black Death reduced the English population by approximately one third. As a
consequence of this decrease in labour force, the Statutes of Labourers and of Providers (1351)
tried to protect the rights of the landlords against the peasants.

1362: a statute provided that law pleadings should be in English instead of French.

1369-77: French counter-attacks dove back the English in south-western France. The “Good
Parliament” (1376) asked the king to ensure the maritime defence of England in face of frequent
French raids up the Thames, supporting the cause of the Black Prince against John of Gaunt.

1377: Both the Black Prince and Edward died. The former’s son, Richard, aged eleven, was
declared king.

Richard II (1377-1399)

1377: John of Gaunt’s faction controlled parliament.

1377-84: Wycliff preached Lollardy. The third version of “Piers the Ploughman” was being
completed by Langland.

1381: John Ball and Wat Tyler led the Peasant’s Revolt, which was put down by Richard II, and
its leaders killed.

1385-1400: Chaucer wrote “The Canterbury Tales”.

1388-98: Richard quarrelled with his barons, stopped summoning the Parliament, imprisoned
John of Gaunt and exiled his son, Henry of Lancaster who took refuge in France.

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Ioana Mohor-Ivan The British Isles: Histories, Cultures and Identities

1399: Henry of Lancaster landed in England, deposed Richard, and was proclaimed King by the
Parliament, in favour of the Duke of York’s heir.

Henry IV (1399-1413)

1400: the Welsh revolt under Owain Glendower began. Chaucer died.

Henry V (1413-1422)

1415: The Hundred Years War is resumed. The English win the battle of Agincourt.

1417-1420: the English capture most of Normandy and its nearby areas. The Treaty of Troyes
proclaims Henry heir to the French Throne. Henry marries Katherine, Princess of France.

Henry VI (1422-1461)

1422: John, duke of Bedford, acted as regent in France; Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, acted
as regent in England.

1429-1431: The French fight back the English under the leadership of Joan of Arc and Dunois.
The Dauphin is crowned at Rheims.

1435: Bedford dies. The Bretons and Burgundians betray England.

1453: With the loss of Normandy and Gascony, the Hundred Years War is over. Calais remains
the only French possession of England. Henry VI shows first signs of madness.

1455: The wars of the Roses begins with the battle of St Albans.

Edward IV (1461-1483)

1461: Edward defeats Henry VI’s troops at Towton, proclaims himself King and imprisons Henry
in the Tower.

1464: Edward marries Elizabeth Woodville and alienates his chief supporter, Richard, Earl of
Warwick, the ‘Kingmaker’.

1470: Warwick expels Edward IV and enthrones Henry VI.

1471: Edward defeats Henry VI at Tewkesbury and regains his throne. Both Henry and his son
are killed.

1476: William Caxton set up the first English printing press.

1478: Edward IV’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, is executed for intriguing against the king.

1483: Edward IV dies. His twelve-year-old son, Edward V, is king for 3 months (9 April-25 June)

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Richard III (1483-1485)

1483: Richard usurps the throne from his nephew. Edward IV’s two sons are killed in the Tower.

1485: Henry Tudor, duke of Richmond, challenges Richard for the crown, and defeats him at
Bosworth.

THE TUDOR DYNASTY

Henry VII Tudor (1485-1509)

1486: Henry marries Elizabeth of York. The Houses of Lancaster and York are united.

1487: A judicial committee of the king’s council was developed into the Court of Star Chamber .
The Councils of Wales and the North extended the powers of the king’s council. The powers
and duties of the justices of peace were increased.

1497: Henry VII patronised Cabot’s’ voyage to Newfoundland and nova Scotia. John Colet
lectured on St Paul’s Epistles at Oxford.

1499: Erasmus made his first visit in England at Oxford. He later resided at Cambridge.

1501: Prince Arthur marries Catherine of Aragon but dies.

1502: Princess Margaret married James IV of Scotland.

1509: Dean Colet founded St Paul’s School.

Henry VIII (1509-1547)

1509: Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon.

1512-13: Henry and Wolsey began their first war against France. The English won the battles at
Flodden against the Scots and at Guinegatte against the French

1517: Martin Luther began his revolt against the Church of Rome.

1519: Charles V was elected Holy Roman Emperor

1521: Henry VIII wrote the Assertio septem Sacramentorum against Luther and Pope Leo X
gave him the title Fidei Defensor

1525-27: Charles V defeated and captured Francis I at Pavia. Later he sacked Rome and
imprisoned Pope Leo X.

1527-29: Henry began to consider divorcing Catherine of Aragon. Wolsey was commissioned to
procure an annulment of their marriage. Upon his failure, he was deprived of his offices. The
Reformation Parliament opened.

1531: The parliament acknowledged Henry VIII as the Supreme Head of the Church of England.

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1533: Henry secretly married Anne Boleyn. Thomas Cranmer was consecrated Archbishop of
Canterbury and declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine invalid. Elizabeth was born to Anne
Boleyn. The Statute of Appeal was enacted, restraining appeals to Rome.

1534: A series of acts abolished papal authority in England. The Act of Succession settled the
throne on Henry’s heirs by Anne Boleyn.

1535: Sir Thomas More was executed. Thomas Cromwell, vice-regent in ecclesiastical affairs,
directed visitations of the monasteries.

1536: Anne Boleyn was executed. Henry married Jane Seymour.

1536-1543: The Acts of Union annexed Wales to England.

1537: Prince Edward was born. Jane Seymour died.

1540: Henry married Anne of Cleves. Convocation annulled the marriage. Thomas Cromwell
was executed. Henry married Catherine Howard, niece of the Duke of Norfolk.

1542: Catherine Howard was executed for immorality. Henry VIII levied war against Scotland.
Mary Stuart was born.

1543: Henry married Catherine Parr, who survived him. Henry tries to enforce an agreement
between England and Scotland, betrothing Mary of the Scots to his son Edward. A New Scottish
Parliament turned down the agreement, and Mary was sent to France.

1543-46: Henry warred against France. The English navy defeated a French Armada.

Edward VI (1547-53)

1547 Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset acts as regent. The chantries are dissolved.
Reaction in Cornwall. Robert Kent leads revolt in Norfolk.

1550 The Earl of Warwick (duke of Northumberland) controls the Privy Council

1553 Edward VI dies. Northumberland enthrones Jane Grey for nine days.

Mary Tudor (1547-1558)

1553 Parliament repels all laws affecting religion passed since Henry VIII

1554 Wyatt’s rebellion in Kent. Mary marries Philip II of Spain. England is received into
unity with the Roman Church

1555 the “Fires of Smithfield”

1557 War declared between England and France

1558 Calais surrenders to the French.

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Elizabeth I (1558-1603)

1559 The acts of Supremacy and Uniformity re-established.

1560 John Knox’s Protestant party overcame the Franco Catholic party in Scotland

1561 Mary Stuart returned to Scotland after the death of Francis II

1565 Mary Stuart married Darnley

1567 Bothwell murdered Darnley. Mary married Bothwell. The Scots revolted against her.

1569 The rise of the Northern earls

1570 The Pope excommunicated Elizabeth

1578 Drake starts his voyage around the world.

1580 Rebellion in Munster

1586 Babington’s conspiracy to murder Elizabeth implicated Mary Stuart.Leicester led an

English expedition in the Netherlands.

1587 Mary Stuart is executed. Drake raids Cadiz. Raleigh sends out 150 colonists to
Virginia.

1588 The Spanish Armada is defeated

1598 Irish rebellion in Ulster

1599 Essex sent to quell the Irish rebellion

1601 Irish defeat at Kinsale Essex’s rebellion and execution. Last parliament held by Elizabeth

BRITAIN DURING THE 17TH CENTURY: THE STUART KINGS

James I (1603-1625)

1604 Peace treaty with Spain

1605 The Gunpowder Plot failed (Guy Fawkes beheaded)

1608 The Plantation of Ulster (many Lowland Scots settled.)

1618-48 The “Thirty Years War” went in Germany.

1620 The ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ settled at Plymouth, Massachusetts

1621 Parliament quarrelled with James I over foreign policy and their priviledges

1623 Charles and Buckingham’s attempt to arrange a Spanish marriage failed

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1624 Parliament voted supplies for war against Spain

Charles I (1625-1649)

1625 Charles married Henrietta Maria of France

1629 Parliament was dissolved until 1640

1632-39 Thomas Wentworth acted as Lord Deputy of Ireland

1633 William Laud was made Archbishop of Canterbury

1636 Episcopalianism was enforced in Scotland

1638-39 The Scots made a Covenant with God. War levied against England

1640 Parliament reassembled to grant money for war against the Scots

1641 Irish rebellion. Wentworth’s execution. The Great Remonstrance is passed

1642 Charles attempt to arrest 5 MPs fails. Flees to the North.

The Civil Wars (1642-1646; 1648-1649 )

1643 Royalists take Bristol. Parliament allies with the Scots.

1644 Victory at Marston Moor ensures Parliament control of North England.

1645 The New Model Army wins decisive battle at Nesby.

1646 Surrender of Oxford

1647 Charles is delivered by the Scots to Parliament.

1648 War between Parliament and Cromwell. Cromwell’s victory at Preston. Pride’s Purge.

1649 Charles I is executed.

The Commonwealth (1649-1660)

1649 Conquest of Ireland is begun. (Drogheda, Wexmoor)

1651 Scots defeated at Dunbar and Worcester.

1653 Cromwell establishes the Protectorate

1658 Richard Cromwell becomes Lord protector on his father’s death

1660 The convention Parliament restores the Stuart monarchy.

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Charles II (1660-1685) THE RESTORATION

1660 Act of Indemnity and Oblivion

1661-5 The Clarendon Code

1665-6 The Great plague. The Great Fire

1673 The Test Act

James II (1685-89)

1687-8 Two Declarations of Indulgence issued by the King

1688 James VIII is born. The ‘Bloodless Revolution’

1689 The Convention Parliament enthrones William and Mary.

William III (of Orange) and Mary (1689-1702)

1689 The Toleration act is enacted. Jacobite Scots defeated the English at Killiecrankie

1690 The battle of the Boyne is won by Williamite troops

1692 War against France is waged

1700 The Partition Treaty with France is made

1701 The Act of settlement. The war of the Spanish succession begins.

BRITAIN DURING THE 18TH CENTURY: THE “SECOND” ONE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR

Anne (1702-1714)

1704 The English capture Gibraltar. Marlborough wins the battle of Blenheim

1707 The Union of Scotland and England

1711 The South Sea Company is founded

1713 The Treaty of Utrecht

George I of Hanover (1714-1727)

1715 The Jacobite Rebellion fails

1720 The South Sea Bubble

1721 Sir Robert Walpole became Prime Minister. The Whig Oligarchy.

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George II (1727-1760)

1729 The Methodist Society was founded by John and Charles Wesley

1732 The colony of Georgia was founded

1735 Griffith Jones led an evangelical religious revival in Wales

1739 The Case of ‘Jenkins’ ear’ led to war with Spain.

1742 Walpole resigned all his offices, followed by Henry Pelham

1743 England became involved in the war of the Austrian Succession

1745 New Jacobite rebellion.

1746 Battle of Culloden

1748 The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the war of the Austrian Succession

1756 William Pitt the Elder became MP. The Seven years War with France began

1759-60 The British conquered Quebec, Montreal, India

George III (1760-1820)

1761 Pitt resigned. The ‘King’s Friends’ came to power.

1763 The Peace of Paris. Wilkes began his political career.

1765 A Stamp Duty enacted on the colonies

1767 The Tax on tea imposed on the colonies

1773 The Boston Tea Party

1776 The American Declaration of Independence

1777 British defeat at Saratoga

1778 The French joined the Americans in the war. The Volunteer movement in Ireland

1779 Spain declared war against England

1781 Washington’s victory at Yorktown

1783 End of American war. Pitt the Younger’s ministry

1789 The French Revolution

1792 France declared war against Austria and Prussia

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1793 Louis XVI was executed. France declared war against England

1796 Napoleon conquered Italy. The English evacuated the Mediterranean

1798 The Battle of the Nile. The United Irishmen Rebellion

1800 The English took Malta

1801 Nelson destroyed the Danish fleet. Act of Union with Ireland

1802 Treaty of Amiens ended the French war.

1803 The French war was resumed

1805 Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar

1806 Pitt died. Coalition ministry. First continental blockade

1808 The Peninsular war in Spain

1811 Prince George acted as regent

1812 Napoleon’s Russian Campaign failed. The US declared war

1814 Wellington entered France. English defeat at New Orleans

1815 Napoleon returned to France. Wellington’s victory at Waterloo.

1819 The Peterloo Massacre

19th CENTURY BRITAIN: THE VICTORIAN AGE

George IV (1820-1830)

1819 the Cape Town colony was established

1823 Daniel O’Connell formed the Catholic Association in Ireland

1824-6 The Burmese war led to the acquisition of Burma

1826 The Penal Code was reformed

1827 The University College London was formed

1828 The Tests and Corporation Acts were repealed

1829 The Catholic Emancipation Act was passed

William IV (1830-1837)

1830 The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened

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1832 The Reform Bill was passed

1833 Slavery was abolished. The Oxford Movement began.

1834 The Poor Law Reform Act

1835 The Municipal Corporations Act

Victoria (1837-1901)

1837 New Zealand was settled

1838 The Chartist Movement began

1839 The Rebecca Riots

1939-41 The Afghan war

1840-2 The Chinese War led to the annexation of Hong Kong

1843 Disruption of the Church of Scotland. Natal was annexed to Cape Colony

1845 The Great Potato Famine in Ireland

1847 The Affair of the Blue Books.

1848 Irish Rebellion failed. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded. The Orange River
Colony.

1851 The Great Exhibition (Hyde Park)

1854-56 The Crimean War against Russia

1857 Indian Mutiny.

1855-65 Whig ascendancy under Palmerstone

1859 The Origin of Species was published

1867 Reform Bill extending franchise. The Dominion of Canada was established

1868 Liberal Party under Gladstone

1869 Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland

1870 Education Act. Ballot Act. Irish Land Act

1871 Abolishment of University religious tests

1874 Charles Stuart Parnell elected to Parliament

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1875 The Employers and Workmen Act. Public Health Act. Purchase of Suez.

1876 Victoria was declared Empress of India

1877 The Transvaal was re-annexed

1878 The Second Afghan War. Treaty of Berlin settled Anglo-Russian disputes in Turkey

1879 The Irish Land League was formed.

1883 The Fabian Society was founded

1884 Third Reform Bill

1886 Gladstone’s first Home Rule bill defeated. Split within the Liberal Party (Liberal
Unionists.) Conservative ascendancy under Lord Salisbury began.

1887 Victoria’s Jubilee

1892-5 Short Liberal Ministry. Gladstone’s second Home Rule bill defeated. The
Independent Labour party formed.

1897 Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee

1899-1902 The Boer War

1900 The British Labour Party founded

20TH CENTURY BRITAIN

Edward VII (1901-1910)

1902 Balfour’s Education Act. Anglo-Japanese alliance

1905 Mrs Pankhurst’s agitation for Women’s Suffrage

1906-15 Liberal ascendancy (Asquith, Lloyd George.)

1908-9 Old Age Pensions Act. The Sweated Industries Act. The Housing and Town-planning
Act.

George V (1910-1936)

1912 Coal miners’ strike

1914 Home Rule Bill passed. The Church of Wales was disestablished. First World War
began.

1914-18 First World War

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1916 The Easter Rebellion in Ireland

1918-1921 The Anglo-Irish War

1921-22 The Irish Civil War. Establishment of the Irish Free State

1923 First Labour Government

1924 Conservative victory (Stanley Baldwin)

1926 General Strike

1929 World Depression started.

Edward VIII (1936)

George VI (1936-1952)

1939 Second World War started.

1940 Churchill became PM. The Battle of Britain

1944 Education Act

1945 Labour victory starts the ‘Welfare State’ reforms.

1947 India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma are granted independence.

1948 British withdrawal from Palestine. Arrival of first West Indies immigrants.

1951 Conservative victory

Elizabeth II (1952 - )

1956 The Suez crisis. Hungarian Revolution. Premiere of ‘Look Back in Anger’.

1958 The Nottingham Hill ethnic disturbances.

1962 Fist application for entry into EEC. First Immigration Act.

1967-70 the ‘civilised society’ reforms

1968 Beginning of the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland. The ‘Prague Spring’. Paris students’ riots. Second
immigration act.

1972 Direct Rule in Ireland.

1973 World’s economic recession.. Miners’ strikes. EEC entry. Discovery of North Sea Oil.

1976 The ‘sterling’ crisis.

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1978 General strike (the ‘Winter of Discontent’)

1979 Conservative rule under Thatcher. Referendums on ‘Devolution’ in Wales and Scotland.

1981 the Nationality Act.

1982 The Falklands war.

1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement

1987 World Stock crash

1990 Following the ‘poll tax’ controversy, Thacher resigned. Major became PM. The Gulf war.

1992 Beginnings of the ‘Peace Process’ in Ireland.

1994 First women priests are ordained by the Church of England

1997 Hong Kong conceded to China. Labour administration under Tony Blair. Scottish and
Welsh referendums in favour of Devolution. Diana, Princess of Wales, dies in a car crash in
Paris

1998 DEVOLUTION. Scotland Act sets up a Scottish Executive and a Scottish Parliament.
Government of Wales Act establishes a National Assembly for Wales. Good Friday Agreement
establishes a devolved Northern Irish assembly.

21st CENTURY BRITAIN

2001 The population of England reaches 52 million. Labour wins the general election, with Tony
Blair returned as prime minister. Britain joins the US in strikes on Afghanistan

2003 Britain joins the US in an invasion of Iraq

2005 Labour wins a third consecutive term with Tony Blair as prime minister. (7 July) A series
of co-ordinated terrorist bombings struck London's public transport system during the morning
rush hour, killing more than fifty people and injuring hundreds.

2007 Gordon Brown becomes Labour prime minister.

2009 A recession afflicts Britain. The end of British combat operations in Iraq.

2010 After a general election Conservatives and Liberals form a coalition government under
David Cameron.

2011 Last British troops withdraw from Iraq. Air Force operations against Libya

2012 The Olympic Games are held in London

2015 The conservatives win a general election. David Cameron becomes prime minister. Queen
Elizabeth II becomes longest-reigning UK monarch.

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Brand, Jack, The National Movement in Scotland, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.

Britain and Europe. British Studies Conference, Petrikov Publishers, 1994.

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