Storyteller's World

The English Civil War of 1642-49 often feels strangely contemporary to me, partly because both my present and previous parishes have their special Civil War history. On different sides, naturally. Marston was the Parliamentary headquarters during the siege of Oxford, and it was in one of the houses in the village that the city's Royalist governor signed its surrender. One of the local pubs used to have a plaque on the wall that read 'Oliver Cromwell sat here while waiting to liberate the city.' Lydiard Tregoze stood on the other side. Its parish church contains 17th century monuments of the St John family, including the life-size 'Golden Cavalier', an effigy of Captain Edward St John who was killed fighting for the King at the second Battle of Newbury. It was his younger brother - who fought on the other side - who later inherited the title when his father died.

Reflecting on these diverse histories, I've come to the view that the Civil War never really ended, in the sense that nothing was resolved. It's not just the many places in the country where parishes still feud with their neighbours in the next parish, and it turns out it's because they took different sides in that long-ago conflict. It's that somehow our failed experiment at republicanism, and the sudden, fearful and obsequious submission to a dissolute monarch that brought it to a close, seem still to shape the peculiar nature of the English class system (and we are class-ridden in a strange and different way from anywhere else in the world) and so many of our social institutions, political divisions and conflicts.

The recent ban on hunting with hounds, and all its surrounding kerfuffle, are just the latest manifestation of this. In this scenario it is the townie majority, the hunt saboteurs and the politicians, who are the heirs of the puritans and roundheads. While the countryside alliance, the hunt supporters and protesters, descend from the romantically embattled cavaliers. Feelings about this issue run so deep, and are so irrational and unintellectual, that they can surely only be the survival of something deeply tribal, a visceral memory of old grievances and wrongs. Country people feel a whole way of life is under threat from dictators who have simply not understood it. While the town faction are utterly baffled that so many workers in the countryside, far from feeling oppressed by the hunting 'toffs' and longing to be liberated, actually find hunting an exciting and central part of their life.

I have no love of hunting, which seems like a barbaric and primitive ritual. Nor do I warm to the hunting fraternity, who are only slightly more loathsome than the hunt saboteurs. But I don't think an outright ban on hunting was a right or well-judged move. It's crazy to alienate a whole sector of our society over an issue like this. If it is just the latest skirmish in the unfinished civil war of town against country, new wealth against old, puritan against cavalier, modernism against tradition, enlightenment against barbarism, it is far too trivial. It is a spiteful little slap in the face that merely hardens the will of the opposition; an annoyance and irritation, that merely distracts from the possibility of striking a blow to really bring the Civil War nearer to a conclusion.

No, if we really wanted to do that, we would have to do something truly, significantly radical. Like closing the private schools (in a peculiarly British piece of double-talk, called 'public' schools), which are the mainstay of our continuing class divisions. That would get my vote.