How to Be English Read Free

Liberties of Old England, which had been bundled away into history by William the Conqueror. In fact, Alfred’s laws are a little vague, about keeping oaths and promises – and being able to write in English if you wanted to be a judge. Important in their own way, but not exactly Magna Carta.
    Ironically, given how little has been preserved in writing from this time, Alfred’s son insisted that it was important that laws should be written down so that they should not be ‘brought to naught by the assault of misty oblivion’; a fate Alfred himself has so far managed to avoid, but only just.
    Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men.
    Alfred the Great

THE ALLOTMENT MOVEMENT has become an increasingly popular part of life in England, and a political ideal that began with the Agricultural Labourers’ Strike of 1878. The idea of a small patch of land for the landless stretches back directly to the medieval commons, where ordinary people could use land to graze a cow or provide themselves with basic necessities. It certainly didn’t begin that day of the great farmworkers’ rally in Leamington during the strike, but the demonstration launched the political career of one campaigner in particular who was to make the allotments ideal central to his political life.
    It is nearly a century and a half since Jesse Collings began his bid for ‘three acres and a cow’ for anyone who wanted them. Even at the time, when the campaign reached its height in the 1880s, it seemed politically impossible to provide that amount of land to everyone. His work culminated in the 1908 Allotments and Smallholdings Act, which – for peculiar reasons – Collings actually opposed, and which gave local councils a duty to provide allotments to anyone wanting one.
    There have been bursts of enthusiasm for similar ideas in the century that followed – perhaps not for acres and cows, but for a small strip of land to grow vegetables, to feed the family or to get closer to nature. But now the demand is suddenly unquenchable. There are thought to be about 6 million people interested in having an allotment, with waiting lists as long as forty years in one London borough. It isn’t quite clear why this change of heart occurred, but it may be that the real question is why their popularity ever went away, given the success of the Dig for Victory campaign in the Second World War.
    Going Back to the Land was promoted between the wars by right-wing romantic groups like English Mistery and English Array, and by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Mosley’s enthusiastic acolyte, the novelist Henry Williamson, took it so seriously that he bought a farm in Norfolk and struggled with farming it throughout the war. His agricultural advisor Jorian Jenks – later one of the founders of the Soil Association – urged that Britain should grow all its own food, with fixed prices, low-rate loans for farmers, small-scale farming, and so on.
    These were exactly the policies brought in by the agriculture minister Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith in 1939. Dorman-Smith was a former member of English Mistery, with its opposition to tinned food and the degradation of the soil, and also the architect of Dig for Victory.
    Dig for Victory changed everything. There were 1.4 million allotments by 1943, by which time over a million tonnes of vege-tables a year were being grown in gardens, parks and on wasteland. There were radio programmes (3.5 million people tuned in to C. H. Middleton’s gardening slots), even Dig for Victory anthems. By 1970, only a generation after the end of the war, there were just 530,000 allotments left, and a fifth of those were vacant. What went wrong?
    Perhaps it was the end of rationing in 1954, and the beginning of self-service supermarkets (1950) which ushered in a new sense of plenty. Perhaps the remains of the