This Little Britain Read online

  That Bible in that version is one of the great monuments of our, or any, literature.* It, every bit as much as Shakespeare, has shaped the language we use today. Whether we are fruitful and multiply or are at our last gasp, whether we serve two masters or cast our pearls before swine, whether we live by bread alone or off the fat of the land that flows with milk and honey, then in this den of thieves (for by their fruit shall we know them) we are quoting the Bible. If we have ears to hear, if nation should rise against nation, if we pass by on the other side, if we kick against the pricks, if we are full of good works or a law unto ourselves, if we say, ‘Doctor, heal thyself’, and if we take up our beds and walk (doubtless escorting the poor whom we have always with us), if we are present in spirit, if we suffer fools gladly, if we cry ‘Oh death, where is thy sting?’ then (be of good cheer) we are quoting the Bible. In short, where two or three are gathered together, we can but find that we live, move and have our being in the world that Wyclif, Tyndale and the King James translators created.

  The influence of that Bible lies in far more than just a couple of hundred famous phrases. As I was writing this chapter, I happened to pick up a copy of my third novel, The Sons of Adam, where I came across the following sentence: ‘Tom would be happy if all the kings of the earth had been turned overnight into ordinary people: shoe-shine boys, oil-riggers, commercial travellers, bums.’ That phrase ‘the kings of the earth’ is straight from the Authorised Version (Revelation 6:15 if you care to check) and it isn’t standard English today. ‘All the kings in the world’ would be more normal, or perhaps even ‘Every king on the planet’. But I had wanted a grander phrase than that, something to point up a contrast with the ‘ordinary people’ that followed. I’ve probably never read the relevant bit of Revelation and I certainly didn’t consciously reach for the language of King James, yet because I was after something sonorous, grand and spare, my subconscious took me there anyway—just as thousands of other writers have been led, wittingly or unwittingly, to the exact same source. That’s influence. That’s greatness.

  * The same could be said of Luther’s 1534 German-language Bible, as much a literary landmark as a religious one.

  A WILDERNESS OF MONKEYS

  Shakespeare. What is there to say about him that hasn’t already been endlessly said? How to find a new angle on this most talked-about figure? In the end, mightn’t it be best just to sidestep the Bard and talk about other things instead?

  Except that one can’t. In a book on British exceptionalism, Shakespeare simply insists on being heard. In the onrushing torrent of history, his is one of the few individual rocks to jut out above the waters: not simply the man of his moment, a product of time and place, but a genius for all time. As far as Britain is concerned, only Newton occupies a similar place. Perhaps, at a long stretch, Darwin too. To avoid Shakespeare just because he’s too hard to talk about would leave an absence in this book so loud as to be deafening.

  Shakespeare was, of course, one of the greatest writers of his or any other age. The infuriating thing about him is his perfection. Most writers, even great ones, have their strengths and weaknesses. Dickens is, for all his glories, also sentimental and vulgar. Jane Austen, for all hers, wrote confidently only within very narrow limits and almost never strayed beyond them. Wordsworth is often pedestrian, Tennyson often stupid. That’s not to diss those writers, it’s just to note their human foibles. Shakespeare, curse the man, appeared to have none. Whether you want lyrical, stirring, witty, clever, romantic, sad, spiritual, angry, psychologically perceptive, evocative—anything at all—Shakespeare is up there with the very best of English or any other literature. He wrote in verse so totally unstrained you’d swear he drank pentameters with his mother’s milk. With other poets, even great ones like Milton, there’s always a sense of effort. The result may be wonderful, but you can smell the sweat. Not so with Shakespeare.

  The Bard, however, did something more for art than simply illuminate it for one shortish lifetime. He altered it—not just English literature, but Western literature—for ever. In particular (and this is a point brilliantly made by John Carey in his What Use Are the Arts?) he was the first writer ever to understand fully the possibilities of indistinctness in language—a blurry allusiveness, a sideways leap into the non-rational, the sudden electric crackle of subconscious connection. To see what I mean, consider (as Carey does) the following two snippets, both talking about jewels, both written by English playwrights, both dating from the 1590s.

  Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,

  Jacinth, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,

  Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds

  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, The Jew of Malta

  Thou torturest me Tubal,—it was my turquoise, I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Merchant of Venice

  The Marlowe passage is perfectly decent writing. The length of his list suggests the depth and richness of the treasure. His adjectives bring in hints of feel, colour, light, even temperature. If you studied a how-to book on good writing, a decent student would probably come up with something like the bit from Marlowe.

  Shakespeare, however, simply overleaps these more pedestrian qualities. First, there’s that ‘thou torturest me Tubal’. All of a sudden, that turquoise isn’t just a precious stone, it’s become an instrument of psychic torture. Just four words in, and Shakespeare’s already outclassed Marlowe by a country mile. But then comes the phrase that makes Shylock’s turquoise really flash into being. Shylock says he wouldn’t surrender that stone ‘for a wilderness of monkeys’. What on earth does he mean? What wilderness? What monkeys? Why would monkeys be likely to inhabit a wilderness? More to the point, why should a wilderness of monkeys be valuable currency in any case? Cold logic would rate a wilderness of monkeys rather low down on any list of financial assets, so Shylock’s expostulation hardly suggests that the turquoise has value. Except that it does. Cold logic has nothing to do with it. Shylock cares so much about that damn stone that his reason almost deserts him, and it’s the inexpressible genius of that phrase to make us feel the stone, and Shylock, and the intensity of the moment, as though we were right there in the man’s head.

  That’s what Shakespeare can make of a one-off phrase. When he brings that same extra-logical suggestiveness into a sustained passage of poetry, no writer has ever touched him. Here’s a piece from Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra is mourning and praising her now-dead lover:

  His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm

  Crested the world; his voice was propertied

  As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;

  But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,

  He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,

  There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas

  That grew the more by reaping; his delights

  Were dolphin-like, they showed his back above

  The element they lived in; in his livery

  Walked crowns and coronets, realms and islands were

  As plates dropped from his pocket.

  There’s no question that this is writing of the very highest quality. But could anyone paint a picture of the Antony that Cleopatra is talking about? His legs straddle the ocean, but only his dolphin-like back appears to be above water. His bounty is autumnal, although (perhaps because of all that orb-shaking) he has a habit of dropping island-sized dinner plates from his back pocket, presumably biffing those crowns and coronets on the way. Taken at face value, the passage is nonsense. This is mixed metaphor taken to the max. In Shakespeare’s hands, however, it (inevitably) works.

  Such work, however strange it must first have sounded, was too self-evidently brilliant to leave literature unaltered. On the contrary, however hard it was for other writers to follow that first example, follow it they would strive to do. The consequence has been that Shakespeare brought the vast richness of the inexplicab
le and extra-logical not just to English but to world literature. Writers since him may not have touched those heights, but they have a new resource to make use of, a new mode of expression, a new way to communicate meaning. In twenty-first-century writing, be it in English or Japanese, those methods are now routinely deployed. Though it would be easy for us to forget that such things have to be discovered, perfected and disseminated, we shouldn’t do so. Shakespeare was literature’s benefactor; that ‘wilderness of monkeys’ his remarkable gift.

  LAW

  THE RUSTICS OF ENGLAND

  In 1154, England acquired a new king: Henry II.

  Henry, grandson of William the Conqueror, was about as English as saucisson and baguettes. Not being English, he also had a very un-English drive for centralization and order. He put the barons in their place, knocking down any castles that hadn’t obtained regal planning permission; he streamlined the tax system; he overhauled record-keeping; and he turned his attention to the courts.

  From Anglo-Saxon times on, England had enjoyed the most developed state apparatus in Europe, including a set of shire and local ‘hundred’ courts. These courts did their job, up to a point. The laws they applied were mostly unwritten, customary hand-me-downs, passed from one generation to the next. The methods of trial were somewhat confused, being a mixture of the traditional trial-by-ordeal and the newfangled trial-by-jury, or indeed, sometimes by a hybrid of the two. If this was confusing, then so too was the law itself. The lack of clear central control meant that the law in Exeter represented something different from the law in Carlisle. No one had ever experienced or expected anything else, and the system worked at least as well as it did anywhere else, and quite likely a fair bit better.

  Yet Henry wasn’t a king willing to put up with anything so ramshackle. Legal disputes had a habit of ending up with the king himself. Although a court system existed, Henry could hardly delegate authority to it with a great degree of confidence that the system would actually deliver the effects expected of it. In place of those variable, regional, hard-to-control courts, he therefore instituted a new system of royal judges who roved the land, dispensing justice. The new judges combined local reach and royal power. Although justice came to the people just as it had always done, it now came with explicit royal authority and, particularly on the civil side, a common set of procedures and practices. No other European country had such an advanced or complete system. It was an English first.

  Yet the reform was a partial one, all the same. The courts had certainly been shaken up but, in terms of criminal proceedings, neither the laws nor modes of trial were much affected. Jury trial continued slowly to displace those trials-by-ordeal, which had been falling out of fashion not just in England but elsewhere. (And to begin with juries were asked only to decide questions of fact, not those of guilt or innocence. These things develop slowly.) The laws enforced were the same hand-me-downs as before. Yet no one argued for more radical reform. Back in twelfth-century England, no one was expecting or asking for any more—indeed, there wasn’t even a concept of what ‘more’ might be. So Henry left the system to bed in, while he rushed off to do other things, such as have Thomas à Becket chopped to pieces in Canterbury Cathedral.*

  For the English, the period of radical change was over. For Europe, it was only just beginning. European monarchs faced the same problems as Henry, but they came up with a sharply different solution. Scholars at the Continent’s first true universities began to blow the dust off old Roman codes of law, and they liked what they saw. Roman law looked like the real deal: a universal law code; formal rules of evidence; professional judges—and the whole thing sanctified by its posh Roman origin.

  The ‘new’ Roman codes swept across the Continent like wildfire. In places like Sweden and northern France, where jury trials had once been used, such outmoded things were swept aside in the modernizing rush. And why not? The new Roman model was logical, scholarly, professional and modern. The system that had evolved in England looked rustic, antiquated, lowbrow and embarrassing.

  But which was better?

  Roman law contained one very liberal-sounding provision. In the effort to avoid false convictions, an accused man could only be convicted if (i) he made a full confession, or (ii) there were two sworn eyewitnesses to the crime. The provision sounded surprisingly liberal for the age, but it concealed a nasty catch. On the whole, criminals weren’t so monumentally stupid as to commit their crimes in the presence of two eyewitnesses, so, in most cases, the only route to conviction was via confession. But who would be so stupid as to confess? No one, of course—unless inducements were put in their way, and the inducement of choice was torture. In effect, Roman law was a law of torture. An entire jurisprudence of torture was concocted. Who could be tortured and for how long, by what methods, for which crime? Answers needed to be found to such questions—and were. Torture remained commonplace for centuries, lasting well into the eighteenth century.

  Meanwhile, England had no torture. It was unknown—indeed, forbidden—under the common law. It was down to juries to determine guilt or innocence, on the basis of evidence and common sense. The consequences of this difference are simply enormous. First, there’s quite simply the question of obtaining verdicts that made sense. A thirteenth-century English court was no doubt a pretty rudimentary place but, if you stood in the dock, you could at least rely on the fact that you were being judged by twelve ordinary blokes, sworn to a standard of truthful enquiry, considering matters on the basis of ordinary reason and evidence. On the Continent, by contrast, guilt or innocence was determined mostly by the accused’s capacity to resist torture. Hardened criminals with strong nerves could escape scot-free. The innocent with weaker nerves would be tortured, then convicted. Furthermore, whether or not guilt was ever determined, the accused had already been punished, in one of the least pleasant ways imaginable. Just as bad, Roman law established a system whereby paid agents of the state regularly inflicted cruelty of the worst sort on its citizens. The entire relationship of the individual to the state was imprinted by that basic power relationship. It was a terrible, terrible system and it endured for centuries.

  Nor was it only a characteristic of the state. The Church’s codes of justice were also Roman in inspiration, and the Church came to regard torture as an essential part of its soul-protection duties.* When Philip IV wanted to crush the supposedly heretical Templar movement in France, he used torture widely and indiscriminately, with the knowledge and blessing of the Church. English kings too were under an obligation to eliminate heresy, but more or less refused to do so via torture. This English intransigence risked annoying the Holy Father. Pope Clement V wrote to Edward II, saying, ‘We hear that you forbid torture as being contrary to the laws of your land; but no state can override Canon Law, Our Law; therefore I command you at once to submit these men to torture…You have already imperilled your soul as a favourer of heretics…Withdraw your prohibition and we grant you remission of sins.’ The Pope, in other words, was ordering an English king to torture supposed heretics on pain of damnation. Edward formally gave way, but the Inquisition failed to establish itself in England: English soil would remain alien to its practices. Torture remained uncommon. The death penalty from religious courts remained rare.

  As for the provincialism of England’s rustic little methods, time was to change all that. Where the British Empire led, the common law followed. The United States has a version of common law. So do most other former colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Malaysia and numerous others. What’s more, Enlightenment Europe came to have a growing moral revulsion to its reliance on torture. The existence of the English model proved that there were other ways to do things; ways that didn’t involve a collapse of law and order. The English system was widely cited, widely copied. The Continent retained its civil law traditions, of course, but it adapted them. Torture went out; new evidential procedures came in. Cruelty began to drain out of that basic relationship between individual an
d the state. In the strange and unpredictable way of history, those old English rustics ended up shaping the law not merely of England, but half the world besides.

  * Becket’s murder could just have been a teeny misunderstanding, of course. History is as yet undecided.

  * Nobody had anticipated this outcome when Roman codes were first introduced—but as we know, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

  ‘NO FREE MAN…’

  It was the early thirteenth century. England was at war, the enemy was France, and England was coming off worse. When John, the English king, returned home, he faced an unprecedented degree of resentment from his barons, who were angry about a number of things, not least John’s failure to fulfil that most basic requirement of English kingship: to give the French a good walloping. Worse still, he’d managed to lose Normandy, home to many an Anglo-Norman grand-père and grand-mère. Resentment led to rebellion. The rebellion was no moral crusade, and most barons either supported the king or remained studiedly neutral. The leading rebels, indeed, were lawless men with deep personal animosity towards the king, and interests stretching not much farther than their wallets.

  John, like any half-competent medieval monarch, knew just what to do: he wouldn’t negotiate with the rebels, he’d slaughter them. Events, however, ran away from him. The rebels seized London and forced John into a negotiated settlement. A treaty was drawn up, and incorporated into a legal agreement known as the Great Charter, or Magna Carta. On 15 June 1215, the king’s Great Seal was affixed to the final draft ‘in the meadow which is called Runneymede between Windsor and Staines’.