And Did Those Feet?

In search of the English Soul

‘England’, wrote the nation’s greatest twentieth-century essayist, ‘resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income … A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.’

Three hundred years earlier, another pamphleteer, one Gerrard Winstanley, had addressed the heads of that family in more direct terms:

O thou Powers of England, though thou hast promised to make this People a Free People, yet thou hast so handled the matter, through thy self-seeking humour, That thou has wrapped us up more in bondage, and oppression lies heavier upon us; not only bringing thy fellow Creatures, the Commoners, to a morsel of Bread, but by confounding all sorts of people by thy Government, of doing and undoing.

George Orwell’s solution to the family crisis that he believed was besetting England was socialist revolution, albeit with a particularly English flavour. Winstanley was also calling for a revolution, but one which would led by peasants rather than proletarians, and focused not on the seizure of state power, but the seizure of land:

Take notice, That England is not a Free People, till the Poor that have no Land, have a free allowance to dig and labour the Commons, and so live as Comfortably as the Landlords that live in their Inclosures. For the People have not laid out their Monies, and shed their Bloud, that their Landlords, the Norman power, should still have its liberty and freedom to rule in Tyranny in his Lords, landlords, Judges, Justices, Bayliffs, and State Servants; but that the Oppressed might be set Free, Prison doors opened, and the Poor peoples hearts comforted by an universal Consent of making the Earth a Common Treasury, that they may live together as one House of Israel, united in brotherly love into one Spirit; and having a comfortable livelihood in the Community of one Earth their Mother.

Power, Winstanley knew, grew from the land, the primal resource. Ownership was power, and for centuries the ordinary people of England had had neither. Enclosure, landlordism and Norman-instituted feudalism had deprived the poor of what many believed was their birthright. Now, in the ferment of national crisis, Winstanley and others had picked up ploughs and spades and taken matters into their own hands.

In 1649, on St George’s Hill in Surrey, Winstanley’s small band of ‘True Levellers’ - or ‘Diggers’ as history would come to know them - occupied a tract of land and began digging and planting it. Anyone who came to join them was welcome. Everything they has was to be shared for, as Winstanley famously wrote, in words which would echo down the centuries, God had always intended the Earth to be ‘a common treasury for all.’

Three hundred and fifty years later, in 1999, St George’s Hill was occupied again. Things were rather different now, though. Back in the 1640s, when Winstanley and his group of poor idealists had invaded the site, it had been ‘wasteland.’ Today it is one of the most exclusive golf courses in one of the most expensive counties in England. This made occupying it harder, but it was occupied nonetheless. A new campaign group called The Land Is Ours had been founded a few years earlier to draw attention to the glaring gap between rich and poor in terms of land ownership in England. Now it was leading a rerun of Winstanley’s utopian project.

All of this was part of the burgeoning eco-protest scene of the 1990s, in which I had been excitedly involved. The occupation of St George’s Hill was of a piece with the anti-road protests, the squats and the encampments which sprung up all over the land, as people sought to protect nature, culture and sometimes peoples’ homes from a massive national infrastructure programme. This, for a few brief years, was a genuine movement, and it had a very particular flavour. It was marinated in concern for the small, the local and the overlooked. It had a deep sense of history, as the protest at St George’s Hill demonstrated. It was cross-class: travellers and squatters mixed with Eton schoolboys and ex-cops. It was eccentric and utopian and at the same time doggedly practical. It complained about land ownership and the destruction of historic monuments and the power of the landed elites and the dreck of modern consumerism. It flowered, it changed people, and then, quietly, it lost.

It was, in other words, very English.

I loved it all. I felt, in my early twenties, like I had found my place in the world. I was never quite crusty enough to fit in, it’s true, but the combination of love of land, love of history, rebellion against unlawful authority and smoking joints around an open fire under the stars was irresistible. Everything came together for me: my longtime enchantment with nature, my romanticism, my sense of the untold marginal histories of my country, my lower-middle-class chippiness, my young man’s righteous anger. New worlds opened up daily.

Perhaps Winstanley and his crew of True Levellers felt the same: that anything was possible. That the landlords might finally get their comeuppance. That the common treasury of the country could be opened up for all of its people again, and the Norman Yoke thrown off. On both occasions, alas, none of this turned out to be true. The Diggers were evicted by force after a few months. Many of the people who beat them, broke their spades and dragged them off the site were not soldiers but local residents. In 1999 the benders, compost toilets and firepits lasted even less time before their makers were booted off the hill by the police. The real sacred heart of the nation in the 1990s was the same one that Winstanley had identified three centuries before: private property rights.

This was very English, too.

There was, however, one huge difference between the 17th century Levellers and their 20th century inheritors. Praised by Tony Benn and commemorated in Billy Bragg songs, spoken of in the same breath as the International Brigades or the Labour Party, Winstanley’s Diggers had, by the time we marched up the hill, been entirely co-opted by the secular left. As such, they were commonly hailed as proto-communists: forerunners of the revolutionary political leftism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This, though, is not what Winstanley thought he was doing at all. Whatever the likes of Billy Bragg might believe, the Diggers were not his political ancestors. In fact, they were the kind of people he would rush to condemn today: radical Christian fundamentalists. Cut loose from a Church they considered corrupted and worldly, Winstanley’s ragged band was trying to follow the narrow path that Christ had laid down for them. To give everything away, to hold all things in common, to love all men and women as fellows: this, Winstanley believed, was God’s clear instruction to his people. He knew this because he had seen it in a vision.

‘As I was in a trance not long since’, he wrote in The New Law of Righteousness in 1649, shortly before he began his land occupation, ‘divers matters were present to my sight, which must not here be related. Likewise I heard these words. Worke together. Eat bread together; declare all this abroad.’ The very existence of private property, Winstanley soon came to believe, ‘will provoke the wrath of the Lord.’ Soon enough we would see ‘the true Levelling which Christ would work at his most glorious appearance.’ Until then, every man and woman was to live in ‘onenesse.’

I didn’t hear anybody talking that way on St George’s Hill in 1999. By then, English radicalism had been so thoroughly stripped of its Christian roots that we barely knew they were our roots at all. But they were, and the story of the Diggers was only one illustration. The ‘common treasury’ that the True Levellers sought was not the kind of political utopia that a modern social justice campaigner might take to the streets to demand. Winstanley was after something much more ambitious. He was trying to build the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Winstanley and secular successor, St George’s Hill, 1999

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Can a nation have a soul? Like so much else today, this question is a timebomb waiting to explode in our hands, and so we don’t really want to even ask it, let alone try and answer. Winstanley would not have had any trouble doing so though, and I don’t think Orwell would either. My answer would be the same as theirs: yes. Nations do indeed have souls. They have what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, another singular English Christian, described as an ‘inscape’ - an inner landscape of their own. A nation, like a person, is each in its own way unique. To make a claim like this is not to embrace ‘blood and soil nationalism’ or any other such nonsense. It is not to make any claim for superiority or the opposite. It is simply to observe that countries have characters, which emerge from their distinct history, landscape and peoples.

In response to such a claim you’ll often hear it argued, usually by left-leaning academic types, that nations are ‘social constructs’. This is quite true, but it doesn’t actually offer a counter-argument. A nation is, of course, a human construction. It is not some biological entity, let alone a ‘racial’ one, and it is not immutable either. It changes and evolves and rises and falls, as all things do. It has borders and it needs them, but the borders are usually shifting and porous. People move across them in both directions, and all of this shapes it over time.

Despite all of this, though, a nation is a real thing. Like a family or a religion or a sports team, it is more than the sum of its parts. Nations change people, and people change nations. Humans fight and die for their countries, and they are not fools to do so, any more than they are fools to die for a cause or a faith. People are not machines. We have souls. So do birds. So do trees. So do nations. All of this seems true to me.

Today, the feast of St George, is England’s national day, so it seems a fitting time to examine what the historian and novelist Peter Ackroyd, in his new book of the same name, calls The English Soul. Ackroyd, quite obviously given that title, also believes that nations have souls, and his claim in this book is that England’s soul is specifically Christian. He is clear in his introduction that this claim is not intended to exclude those many English people - a majority now - who are not Christian, or the growing numbers of people in the country who follow other faiths and still consider themselves English. Despite all this though, the simple historical reality is that ‘Christianity has been the anchoring and defining doctrine of England.’ The Christian Church has been in Britain for longer than any nation called ‘England’ has existed. If we want to understand England then, we need to understand its Christian story, because this is the story that shaped it.

Ackroyd’s book tells that story, or some of it, by painting short portraits of key figures in the development of English Christianity, amongst whom Gerrard Winstanley and his fellow Leveller radicals make an appearance. But he starts his story with the seventh-century scribe-monk St Bede of Jarrow, who perhaps did more than any other man to invent the notion of an English nation - or gens Anglorum, as his Latin had it. There was no country called ‘England’ in Bede’s time, only competing Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Yet there was already a sense of the emergence of a ‘people’; and the thread that bound them together, in Bede’s view at least, was the Church.

Bede’s England, says Ackroyd, was ‘a place of prophecy and of miracles, of martyrs and of battles, of apostasy and reunion, of miraculous healing and divine inspiration, of hermits and holy places, of spirits and demons.’ It was also a place of saints; and saints come in many shapes. There are scribes and historians, like Bede. There are activists in the world: missionaries and abolitionists and reformers and counter-reformers and quiet everyday apostles. There are hermits and monastics who withdraw from that world into one of prayer. Sometimes there are prophets, and always there are mystics: those who have seen visions, heard voices, in some way touched the hem. This last category, because it is the least understandable or accessible on an everyday level, is often the most intriguing.

Who is England’s premier mystic? Ackroyd gives us the well-known tale of the fourteenth-century anchoress Julian of Norwich, whose ‘shewings’, or visions, presented her with powerful, almost erotic encounters with Christ. England’s current king is an admirer of Julian: at his coronation last year he had the most famous phrase that her visions generated (all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, Jesus assures her, when she asks Him why the world contains so much suffering) embroidered onto the screen that hid his anointing from the world. We also hear the story of another English mystic, one I hadn’t come across before: Julian’s contemporary Richard Rolle. Rolle’s experience of God was not one of water but fire. ‘His love truly is fire’, Rolle saw, ‘making our souls fiery and purging them from all degrees of sin, making them light and burning.’

So much of the Christian life is fire. The minute you begin to look inward you quail before the amount of work to do, and this ‘unseen warfare’, as the Orthodox East refers to it, is the work of the Christian life. But in English Christianity, as elsewhere, there is an external fight too. Ackroyd shows us a Church which looks often like a battlefield, with much of the conflict revolving around the power of Rome. We all know where this battle ended up: in the schism now known as the Reformation, which splintered the Latin Church and led indirectly into the desert of secular modernity. Ackroyd takes us on an English journey in which the inner search is always shadowed by this outer conflict. For every Julian of Norwich there is a John Wycliff. For every Gerrard Winstanley there is a Richard Hooker, the driver of Elizabeth I’s Anglican settlement. For every John Bunyan, puritan author of the Pilgrim’s Progress, there is a William Blake, the visionary, dissenting London engraver who authored England’s unofficial national anthem, Jerusalem.

What, then, is finally the shape of Ackroyd’s ‘English Soul’? The nineteenth century novelist Samuel Butler once claimed that the Church of England was full of people who ‘would have been equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practised.’ It’s a savage observation, which perfectly nails what C. S. Lewis called ‘Churchianity’. Yet the same country was the home of nonconformity and religious radicalism: England was, after all, the first Puritan Republic on Earth. It has bred radicals who abolished the slave trade and Catholic Queens who demanded total obedience to Rome. It gave birth to the Baptists, the Quakers, the Anglicans and the Methodists, as well as to much of the modern atheist movement. It is not a country which is so easily nailed down.

England in my lifetime has mostly had a reputation for staidness. This was a historical legacy of Elizabeth I’s Anglican compromise between competing Christian factions, as well as a legacy of the global imperial power that England became. You can afford to be staid - and complacent - when you run everything. But those times are gone now. We are on the edge of another age of revolution and upheaval. Over the last century, England’s irreligious staidness has led us into an empty, nihilistic secularism, and God, like nature, seems to abhor a vacuum. Humans need meaning, and today it is roaring back in all quarters. In the ‘culture wars’; in the identitarian politics of both left and right; in nationalism; and soon enough, I would be willing to bet, in a measurable return to faith.

But will it be Christian faith? Not if current trends are anything to go by. The 2021 census revealed that, for the first time in a thousand years, most people in England are not Christian. Church of England services are attended by less than one per cent of the population, and the fastest-growing religion in the land is Islam. This is all happening in the context of a wave of inward migration that is unprecedented in British history. Not only will England not be Christian in a few decades time: it will not, if current trends continue, even be English, if by ‘English’ we mean having some heritage in the country, or being of English ethnicity. By the end of this century, most people living within the nation’s borders will not have ancestors who shaped it.

Nobody knows where any of this will lead, because nothing like it has been seen before - at least, not since the end of Roman Britain back in the fifth century, when the immigrant tribes who would eventually become the English started to come across the channel in unstoppable numbers of small boats. But it does bring up an obvious question: if Christianity made England, and if Christianity is now disappearing here - can England survive?

It’s a hard question: one that gnaws at me sometimes. Here’s another question which might help answer it. Which part of modern England would you think is the most traditional and the most religious? Perhaps some village in a backwater of Devon? Perhaps Lindisfarne in Northumberland, the land of St Cuthbert? Maybe some small Anglo-Saxon church nestled in the eastern fens?

Actually, the answer is London. In the Norman capital of England, where English people are now an ethnic minority, religion and tradition are thriving. But it is not English Christianity, nor English tradition. Where Christianity does flourish, it is not to be found in the twitching corpse of the Church of England, but in the Orthodox churches full of Romanians, Ukrainians and Russians, or the thrumming African churches south of the river. Meanwhile, one in twelve schoolchildren in England is now Muslim, with one academic study suggesting that England will be a majority Muslim country in around 150 years. That would be a faster rate of growth than the early Church managed.

Increasingly, in other words, the spiritual energy in England today is coming from those who are crossing its borders in such unprecedented numbers. Many of them are Christian; many more are not. Will those traditions ever become English, in the sense in which Ackroyd uses in his book? It’s quite possible. Christianity, after all, was originally a Middle Eastern religion. More importantly, it was a universal one. There is no Jew nor Greek here; Christians come in all colours and shapes and sizes and nationalities. Christianity was brought to England, as were the English themselves, from across the sea. Plus ca change.

There is another possibility, though, and it is a more mournful one. It is that England is simply coming to an end, as all nations ultimately do. The kingdoms of this world are as dust in the eyes of God, after all. Nations are not really Christian things. The Way instead points us enticingly towards, in C. S. Lewis’s words, ‘the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.’ All of this is true, but still: it is no small thing to lose a country, nor for a country to lose the faith that shaped it. It never happens without trauma.

The harsh truth, though, is that if Christian England is dead or dying, it was the English who killed it. No hostile foreign army rode in and forcibly converted our churches into mosques or temples to Odin. We just wandered off to the shopping centre, and the Bishops sold them off for nightclubs or flats. The real battle for the English Soul, for now at least, is not Jesus vs Mohammed, but God vs Whatever. While only 46% of England and Wales is now Christian, the second-biggest grouping - and the fastest-growing - is not Muslims, Hindus or neo-pagans, but the 37% who told the census-takers that they had no religion at all.

Ask me and I will tell you that the enemy of England’s soul today is the same as it has always been. It is Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills, Winstanley’s Powers of England, Cobbett’s Thing. The Machine: there’s the adversary. The Machine we made and which has co-opted us all, whatever our faith or lack of it, into its cause. The Machine that has wrecked nations as surely as it has wrecked forests and oceans. The Machine which is an enemy within: within our borders, within our souls. We built the mills. We gave up on the churches. We have succoured and nurtured the imposter that squats on our throne, and now we complain that it is eating us, and thrash around looking for someone else to blame for its triumph.

Peter Ackroyd, in compiling his list of visionaries, has given today’s gens Anglorum a rack of ammunition to fight back against the Machine that is sucking the souls out of everyone in the land, be they Christian or Muslim, pagan or Sikh. Here are some of the ancestors who can light the way forward. But we are going to need a clutch of new Winstanleys and Blakes, Bedes and Bunyans, Julians and Tolkeins to make our nation’s soul sing again. We are going to have to become them.

What Ackroyd also shows us, in his tale of the English Soul, is that this old faith has risen and fallen and split and nearly died here many times. It has been born again, and again, and again. Even Bede, back in the golden age of early English Christianity, could be found complaining that the country was ‘suffering most severely’ under the ‘calamity’ of sin and unbelief. The age of the Machine is leading us openly now towards its ultimate goal: to build our own replacement for God. This is both unprecedented and very familiar. We have been here before. We have always, in fact, been here.

And did those feet, in ancient times, demands the famous first line of Blake’s great poem-hymn, walk upon England’s mountains green? Blake is speaking of the intriguing legend of the visit of Joseph of Arimathea to Britain with the young Jesus of Nazareth. Later, after the crucifixion, Joseph is said to have returned with the Holy Grail, secreting it at the bottom of Chalice Well in Glastonbury. It’s a story that Ackroyd doesn’t mention, but I wonder what it holds for England today. King Arthur was also said to have been buried at Glastonbury, but the story I like better is that this most Christian of kings still sleeps with his knights in a deep cave somewhere, ready to be awakened when the country needs him most.

Arthur, Christ and the Holy Grail: England has three stories of Resurrection here. They are sewn into its landscape, just as the Christian story has been. They are waiting, perhaps, for us to remember. To remember that sometimes, just when you think the old story is over, everything appears in a startling new form. What else, after all, are Christians to believe? Haven’t we learned that it is always darkest before the dawn? Have we not been paying attention?

Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.

It has another name, this Machine; an older name. In the Bible, they call it Mammon. It squats now over England like a wheezing, warty old toad, and we pay it obeisance every day. It is a very old god, and it never dies. And yet nobody has to worship it, and this is the secret and the escape. You can turn back towards the light instead, England. There is a narrow path, and it leads you past the beeches to the lych gate. The sun has that peculiar downland light today. The chalk hills seem soft under it. You recognise this place: it is the land that made you. The churches are still there, but the pews are empty now, save for the ghosts. And where are you, England? Where are you?