Post #1

I was looking on my shelves the other day at a set of children’s book, bought when I was six or seven years old. They were published by Ladybird and deal with a range of issues, including English history. The history books have titles like William the Conqueror, Alfred the Great, The Story of Charles II and so on. In each book, the final two pages are given over to a succinct summary of the significance for subsequent history and politics of the figure in question. These articulate a world-view which wouldn’t be found in any history-book today. Indeed, in retrospect, the remarks are often hilarious. (Despite that, I remember these books from my childhood with affection: they gave me both a sense of the narrative sweep of history and an enduring interest in the subject.)

Two particularly noteworthy conclusions are those from William the Conqueror and Alfred the Great. Here’s how William the Conqueror ends:

William the Conqueror, now called William I, was the first real King of all England.

By means of the Domesday Book he knew exactly where everyone lived, and how much property they owned. This meant that for the first time in the history of England, it was possible to ensure that all the people paid their correct taxes to the King.

And by means of the castles which were built all over the country by his Norman knights, William was able to keep the King’s peace.

All this took a long time to do, but it meant in the end that after more than six hundred years of fear and uncertainty, the people of England were once more able to live their lives and work at their trades in safety.

This last page is illustrated by a picture of a blacksmith shoeing a horse watched by two children, one of whom holds the horse’s reigns while the other is carrying a basket overflowing with apples.

The conclusion to Alfred the Great is even more Podsnapperish:

To-day, wherever you live in England, in town or country, you are in one of the shires into which Alfred divided his kingdom.

It was not easy for Alfred to do this in the days when there were no proper maps of the country, and no means of marking them. So Alfred had to send men in all directions marking rivers, streams, hills and roads as the boundaries of counties and parishes.

That is why, to-day, these boundaries so often run along the banks of rivers; they have not changed since King Alfred’s men passed that way, driving in posts to mark the divisions.

These were a few of the changes which the wise King Alfred achieved for England, and it is because of this that he is known in history as Alfred the Great.

But there is one other thing, perhaps the greatest of all, and the one which is the most important to every one of us to-day.

English law and English justice are known and respected throughout the world, for in this country of ours it is almost impossible for an innocent man to be sent to prison. This we own, in the first place, to King Alfred.

So England became a free country and we should always remember that it might have been very much less free if Alfred the Great had not lived and ruled, a thousand years ago.

Those county boundaries might not have shifted in the thousand years up to the publication of that Ladybird book (c. 1963), but they have been moved, adjusted and tampered with quite a few times since. And of course even a children’s book would not now declare, after the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six (together with many less famous cases) that “in this country of ours it is almost impossible for an innocent man to be sent to prison”.

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