Weidenfeld £20 pp480

“Who are we?” is a question that becomes unanswerable the moment it is asked. If we know who we are, we don’t ask. So if we don’t, we do.

The contemporary British have discovered they don’t know who they are, and so they keep asking the question. Why we should have succumbed to this identity crisis now is not easily explained. It probably arises from some malign combination of modernity, loss of empire, devolution, globalisation, America, Europe and eight years of peculiarly identity-free government. All of which have both prompted the question and denied us the possibility of an answer.

But, at the same time, we feel there should be an answer. We are not yet nobody. We are neither like the French nor the Americans. There is some grain, some texture, some flavour in our lives that is distinctively British and that cannot be reduced to economics, politics or any other macrocategory. I feel British, even when I don’t want to, but what is it, exactly, that I feel?

In The Tribes of Britain, David Miles, a very distinguished archeologist, sketches one kind of answer. This is a massive, compendious and copiously researched book that tells the whole of what used to be called “our island story”. At the outset, Miles states the questions he aspires to answer: “So how did Britain’s population grow and change? Where did its people come from? How did they interact to create the shifting, multiple identities of Britain? And how can we find out?”

He begins with the Red Lady of Paviland, the skeleton of, in fact, a man — it was mis-sexed in the early 19th century — which was recently discovered to be 26,000 years old. The climate was so harsh at this time that humans were only intermittently present in Britain. Indeed, even by 9000BC, the whole of the British Isles is thought to have been home to only about 1,200 people, rising to 5,500 in 5000BC. I thought about these figures while watching — from a boat — an entirely human-free reserve for birds and seals in Norfolk. Once the whole country was like this, a landscape of wild cries and non-human ritual, only very occasionally observed by a lonely man or woman.

Miles is obsessed with population numbers. There is scarcely a page of this book that does not draw our attention to exactly how many people were around, for example, to understand Shakespeare’s English — 5 million. This is an evocative — as I discovered in Norfolk — and very revealing index of passing time. When we speak of London or York in the time of the Tudors or the Romans, we probably apply our contemporary idea of a big city; more accurately, we should think of them as small to medium-sized towns. In other words, even at the previous heights of our civilisation, ours was still primarily a wilderness landscape.

Miles’s other obsession is more conventional. He is a devoted multiculturalist. It is, of course, inevitable that any history of Britain should come to the conclusion that we are, indeed, a mongrel breed. These islands have perpetually been subject to invasion and waves of immigration that have, at times, seemed to swamp all previous identities. These have inspired rather futile arguments about whether we are, “in essence”, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, whatever. In fact, as Miles shows, our essence, if we have one, is none of these, but rather a palimpsest composed of all of them. The Normans didn’t stay wholly Norman for long — French architecture, for example, became distinctively English within a couple of decades — and the Romans never wholly left. Ambrosius Aurelianus, a Romano-British general who probably inspired the Arthur legend, defeated the invading Saxons at Mount Badon, and thereby sustained Rome’s legacy a little longer. It is with us still.

As a record and a readable narrative of all these changes, this book is impeccable. Miles switches smoothly between the big picture and the small story. His archeology adds the thrill of discovery. He has, in his career, dug and brushed his way all over these islands, and he clearly has a love for the actual feel of the land. Belt buckles, books, weapons and necklaces constantly emerge from the text as from a newly ploughed field. This is history with dirty fingernails.

Having said all of which, you won’t finish this book having discovered who you are. Of course, you will know much more about the tribes that made you, but you won’t know what they made. Part of the problem is that multi-culturalism is an entirely circular ideology. Yes, we are many things, but what, then, are we? Many things. There are no footholds on this particular cliff face.

The bigger problem is that Miles gives little credit to thought and imagination as makers of the nation. Newton is mentioned in passing, Shakespeare and Chaucer occasionally. But any book about British identity that does not mention David Hume, William Wordsworth, Christopher Wren and John Locke is courting the charge of, at the very least, eccentricity. Even Winston Churchill, surely a key condenser and creator of modern Britishness, only gets a couple of passing mentions.

The defence would be that this is a particular type of history: demographic, racial and economic, rather than cultural. If that is so, then the first half of the subtitle — Who Are We? — is misleading. It would be madness to think that such a question was anything other than cultural.

Furthermore, Miles does not really stay within his categories. He frequently strays into conventional history with tales of kings and battles, and it seems to me that as soon as you do that you stray into culture. The fact that Ambrosius Aurelianus resisted the Saxons and probably became King Arthur in the process is a more important aspect of our national identity than the population of Britain at the time. Equally, Shakespeare’s distortions of history, to which Miles occasionally refers, are, in and of themselves, important. A good Arthur and a wicked Richard III are objective realities that helped make us who we are. Only to make the point that they are not “true” is shallow.

This is, in short, a good background book. Massively informative and earthily evocative, it does some of the preliminary work necessary to understand, if not cure, our current identity crisis. When you finish it, put it down and go to sleep. For Britain, like every other nation, was and is a dream from which, reluctantly, we seem to be waking. And in dreams begin responsibilities.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

READ ON...

websites:
www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/prehistory/iron_01.shtml
Britain’s tribes two millennia ago

books:
A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3000BC- AD1603
by Simon Schama
(BBC £12.99)
Lively narrative history

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