Our English correspondent Seneca III returns with the first essay of a four-part series on British history, human development, and Islam. A slightly different version of this essay was previously published at Crusader Rabbit.
Part I: Roots
The human predilection to gather in co-operative communities in order to shape, control and utilise a particular environment for the benefit of all members of the commune is as old as our species. It is an animal thing, a pack thing, a tribal thing.
In both zoology and psychology the term ‘territorial imperative’ is a noun used to describe the need to claim and defend a territory, its assets and the successful social organisation that generated them.
It has been argued that in human terms the intensity of this need is inversely proportional to the length of time such a domain has been populated by a particular group who are or have become ideologically and genetically homogenous and have for long known no threat from without.
This first in a short series of essays examines the history and present condition of my own locale. As a working example, predominantly rural in nature, it reflects much of the same time line and upheavals as in more urban areas, although there, close to the epicentres of occupation, awareness of the current threat is far more acute.
Essentially, the main thrust of my argument is that history is the key. It is there that, throughout Europe and the Anglosphere, evolved those socio-cultural characteristics and modes of conduct that determine and will forever define why and what we are, and so clearly separate us from the descendents of the tribes of Arabian Peninsula and those conquered by them.
Some time around 3500BC a finely crafted and polished flint hand axe fell to the floor of a forest. One can only ponder why it fell and why it remained there, for this was a valuable and sophisticated tool, and we know that Neolithic man preferred to farm and herd and build his burial barrows on open, higher ground rather than down amongst the trees where bears and wolves roamed.
Yet, as there are some faint hints of small settlements in the dim, forbidding woodland where the axe fell, it is conceivable that the owner was a stranger, a trespasser perhaps, fleeing from the territorial imperative of the locals. Whatever happened that day, there the axe remained, sleeping beneath the trees that would shed their leaves upon it and then in their time crumple into the deepening carpet of rich soil.
Over the ensuing millennia the axe lay in darkness as above it strode the men of the Bronze and Iron ages, leaving their mark, particularly in the forest where, in early spring, the floor is still an ethereal and seemingly endless carpet of bluebells. There they paused and then passed on, Celts and then Romans who in their turn were followed by the Romano-British, each of them dropping or discarding some small token of their transient presence: a few coins, some broken pottery or the black circles of their charcoal kilns.
In the late seventh century an extended family of West Saxons, driving north from their settlements about thirty miles away, established a home, or ‘Ham’. It was they who split the rocks and felled the trees, ploughed the first fields, built a Great Hall for their Thane and neat, rectangular thatched houses for themselves, all close to several small springs rising just to the south and west of their clearings.
In the distant past these springs had bubbled to the surface, becoming a rivulet and then a stream that chuckled its way to the southeast. As it travelled the stream was fed along its course by other streams and run-off and, growing swiftly, it became a river artery, the Great Ouse, along which would come the vanguard of the Angles as they penetrated inland from the Wash to challenge the Saxon hegemony.
Thus it came to pass that these tribes of crook-boned men made war in this place, but over the passage of time sanity or necessity prevailed and thereafter came a wary peace punctuated by bouts of intermarriage and fractious squabbling until finally settling into the bucolic homogeneity of an Anglo-Saxon forest village.
The first significant record of the village is, of course, the Domesday Book of 1086, which indicates that the area had by then become something of a hodgepodge of feudal landowning, divided amongst the Norman invaders by ‘hides’ and ‘hundreds’ between “…the Count of Mortain, Giles de Pinkeni and Earl Aubrey in the values of five shillings, ten shillings and nine pounds…” However, one should view these figures with some caution; the Domesday Book was devised as a basis for taxation, and those who collected the taxes, not those who would pay them, assessed the value.
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