Silver Sea of British history

Press, 10 November 1984, Page 22

Silver Sea of British history

Set in a Silver Sea, Volume I. By Sir Arthur Bryant. Collins, 1984. 442 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $29.95. (Reviewed by Andrew Sharp) Sir Arthur Bryant begins this first volume of a projected history of “Britain and the British people” with an admirably clear statement of purpose. The reader cannot fail to feel the persuasive force of what he has so far finished. “A nation,” he says quoting Churchill, “which has forgotten its past can have no future.” As for Bryant, eminent among historians in England since the early thirties: “At a time when we are confused and divided as to what our nation should be, I have written ... to recall the meaning and greatness of our past.” This first volume, "Set in a Silver Sea,” covers the period from the earliest settlement of the islands by “silent vanished races” to the coronation of Henry IV at Westminster Abbey in 1399. It is no less than a celebration of the British past designed to make the British proud again. He plans two further volumes to appear over the next two years. They will cover the unification of England with her “two. indomitable little neighbour nations” and tell the story of how an insular people, “uniting under a common crown and reformed religion, traded, colonised and spread their love of freedom across every ocean.” In the end they came to place the “stamp” of Britain upon world history. Such a plan suggests a continuation in the same patriotic mode. The whole will, if Bryant finishes it (he is 85), be of a kind to be set against those of Macaulay, J. R. Green, and Trevelyan. Those with an academic interest in the genre called “Whig history” by

professionals since Herbert Butterfield first isolated and named it, might like to read John Burrow’s new book, “A Victorian Descent,” and contemplate the way in which the combination of contemporary scholarship and contemporary moral and political concerns has moulded such ambitious writings. But what will the general reader, the “schoolboy” for instance at whom Sir Arthur aims, learn? He will, of course, learn of the kings and princes of England, Scotland and Wales; of their characters, policies and wars; of their relations with one another and with their subjects, especially those who were mighty in church and State. This much is pretty' conventional political history. But he will learn a respect for the actors in what is presented as a vast historical drama: respect for the Bruces, the Douglases and the Llewellyns, as well as the Saxon and English leaders. He will learn to respect the yeoman archers of Crecy, the Scots shepherds of Bannockburn, and the wild Welshmen of the north stoutly asserting their independent national existence. In brief, the political history is in the end irenic and unifying: it is, as it were, a history of family quarrels, the point of which is to demonstrate that the British can live together. When Bryant deals with the wars with France, there is, by contrast, little sympathy wasted on the foreigner. All this is good, patriotic stuff: and the patria is Britain. It will, no doubt, be criticised by those who doubt the unity of “Britain.” But Bryant’s critics will have a daunting task. He is at his best not so much in this field of high politics as when he evokes the lives of all those many peoples who have lived

in Britain from the time it was first inhabited by its unknown aborigines and settled by men from the Mediterranean seaboard, down through and past the Norman conquest. Traders, settlers, warriors, villagers, countrymen, monks, friars — all get their due. Of medieval villagers our schoolboy will learn, among others, of millers, reeves, smiths, wheelwrights, thatchers, tilers, shoemakers, and tanners. He will, perhaps, learn the origin of his patronymic. He will learn of Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans and other races and tribes, and of how their characteristics blended in wasteland, country, town, army and court. He will learn the historical geography of his land, what nature’s handiwork was and how generations of men and women changed it. He will learn something of the history of its architecture, law and religion, the aspects of English life which, besides war, politics and tribal intermixing, are what impress Bryant most about the past of his nation State. Sir Arthur’s finished product will be a huge monument to his love of Britain. The schoolboy who reads it will, I think, find pleasure in the easy style, which effortlessly ranges from the pompous court scenes through the excitement of battle to the evocation of settled life in villages and the harsh natural realities which faced the first settlers of the land. Whether the schoolboy will end up a patriot is another matter. There is not enough failure in the story, not enough disaster, not perhaps a proper chronicle of the folly and wickedness of humankind in Britain to convince a pessimistic schoolboy — or adult. But Sir Arthur has clearly done, and done magnificently, what he set out to do.