Many feel that the England they knew and loved is “going, or is gone”, says Robert Tombs in The Daily Telegraph. But England has, over the many centuries of its existence, been in “continual flux”. The Norman conquest was a kind of apocalypse, involving the “total seizure of all land” and the systematic destruction of cultural heritage and language. Yet it is Norman England that we inherited, not its defeated Anglo-Saxon predecessor. In the 14th century the Black Death wiped out half the population, but eventually left the survivors better off, making space for a new English culture, “pioneered by Chaucer” and perfected by Shakespeare. Then came the Wars of the Roses, the cataclysm of the Reformation and “two centuries of merciless religious conflict”. But after that, to general astonishment, in the 18th century, modernity: “liberty, science, politeness, commerce, empire, even happiness”. The American Revolution brought back despair, but soon after the Industrial Revolution brought with it Victorian splendour. The world wars devastated this Victorian world, but cleared the way for the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

What unites these radically different phases of English life is a sense of “place and belonging”, not anything particularly to do with ethnicity or culture. Oliver Cromwell and Charles I would both have been “astounded and horrified” by the drinking, sexual libertinism and intellectual freedom of George III’s England. Samuel Johnson would have found the “noisy, teeming, smoke-filled England of Dickens” a nightmare. William Gladstone could not have comprehended Tony Blair’s Britain, with its “religious indifference, lack of deference, permissive morality and intellectual frivolity”. Their different Englands, with their characteristic beliefs, manners, standards of civility and political structures, had all evaporated. “Ours will evaporate too, and we, like our forebears, will lament it.” But that’s England: “always old, and always new”.

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Cheers, Charlie

Applications to Cirencester and other agricultural colleges are booming, apparently inspired by land manager Charlie Ireland (above), the ever-affable bearer of bad news in Clarkson’s Farm.

We try to channel Charlie here at The Knowledge, delivering serious news with a smile, in all weather. To subscribe, and go back to receiving the newsletter in full, seven days a week, simply click the button below.

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