Explaining ourselves: the introductory post, & Mr Wemyss’ introductory remarks
One of the things over which Mr Pyle and I tend to shake our heads, commiseratingly, is this: How few people have the connexions to make connexions. I don’t mean that in a commercial sense, let alone a genealogical one; I refer to intellectual connexions. What I mean – what we mean, in fact (possess yourselves in patience) – is, rather, that a shocking number of Britons and Americans not only know so little of one another’s national history and character, they know appallingly little of their own nation’s.
This does not seem to us desirable. (Nor does it seem to us irremediable, as it mostly results from the wretched methods of formal education nowadays – particularly at the hands of the reliably cack-handed state – and the loss of informal means of learning, which is a symptom of the suburbanity of life today.) It is not the fault of those – the victims of educational malfeasance, townees, and others robbed of their inheritance – whom we hope to lead to greater knowledge.
Obviously, at some point, we may essay that by more (and somewhat simpler) books, that being what we do.
For now, however, we are beginning a series of more or less weekly posts to address these lacunæ in another fashion. Some of what we post shall be scholarly – although eminently accessible – in a formal fashion; all of it shall be Not Unscholarly.
I am beginning first.
Mr Pyle shall be starting his own posts in the latter part of this month, or after. (Or, he writes to advise, When He Damn Well Feels Like It and Has the Time, Son.)
For my part, it is my concern to address the great, vast, and very deep continuities of British life and character. I am not a whit, therefore, disconcerted or at all abashed to include some things which might, to the superficial eye, seem dated. Continuities do not date. (Technology does; some patience is wanted with some of these older presentations.)
Amongst our guides are to be some whom I hold in great personal reverence and affection: my beloved Sir John; dear old Professor Hoskins, that good, good man; the great and wise Alec Clifton-Taylor; the estimable and ever-sound Michael Wood; the brilliant and much-missed Fred Dibnah. And sharp-eyed readers of mine own work – and of the fiction rather more even than of the non-fiction – shall recognise that some of the places and themes (and enthusiasms) in what follows are … rather familiar. I have, all the same, tried very hard to give a full and just picture, in an enjoyable and digestible fashion.
Historians have tended to study the manor rather than the village, the legal concept rather than the physical fact, and to be more interested in tenures and rents than actual farming....
– WG Hoskins, ‘Regional Farming in England: an address delivered at the Joint Conference, 5 December 1953’: reprinted in The Agricultural History Review v. 2 no. 1 1954, pp 3 – 11.
Next up, Part One: The steel in the soul. Next Friday, Part Two: Cumberland, Westmorland, and the iron hand of geology. And so on, on Fridays (where possible).