I approached one of the soldiers, who peered down at me from beneath his helmet. “I’m rooting for you guys,” I said. “Thanks,” he said, and laughed before remembering he was in character. “We will win!” Before the battle a band of Normans marched past the camp on the way to their headquarters across the field. Saxon warriors heckled them: “Go home, Normans, go home!”

Every year English Heritage hosts a re-enactment at Battle Abbey around the anniversary of the 1066 Battle of Hastings. Every year the Normans ride again, knights on horseback charging into battle behind William the Conqueror; every year the Saxons erect their shield wall, standing firm until the fateful arrow finds Harold Godwinson’s eye. The outcome is predestined, but somehow, watching the re-enactment last weekend, there was still an element of suspense, a bloom of hope that this time the invaders could be repelled.

Why was I rooting for the Saxons, I asked myself? We all were. Throughout the crowd there was an unspoken agreement — a bit tongue in cheek, but there nonetheless — that the Saxons were our guys, and the Normans were not. Some spectators waved mini versions of Harold’s Fighting Man banner. William was played with a cartoonish French accent. The crowd booed him and the Normans throughout the display, as though the battle had happened yesterday and not nearly 1,000 years ago. I thought of George Orwell’s comment, in his essay “England Your England”: “What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots.” Did this instantly recognizable truth about the class system actually reflect a deep hatred of the Norman overlord 1,000 years on? It certainly felt like it.

The announcer narrating the clash was firmly on the side of the Saxons. “Cheer now to put strength into their sword arms,” he shouted during a fierce bout of man-to-man combat. “Cheer now to make sure they throw the invader back into the sea.” When the battle was over, Harold dead and the Saxons decimated, the crowd grumbled at the announcer’s order to cheer for the new king. “There he is, your new lord and master,” the announcer said. “Your taxes are due.”

This was an especially amusing event to watch as an American, and also an educational one. We love to talk about how old things in Britain are. The churches, the pubs — we’re astounded at anything that’s been standing here for longer than America even existed. But it’s not just places: events seem to last forever here too. Living in England, I’ve often thought that it’s this long memory that gives the country its essential stability. The Brits have had enough excitement over the course of history and they’d very much like to avoid having any more. But it also means there are deep cultural nerves running through the nation, and one of these is the memory of foreign invasion from over the sea and the fear of it happening again.

We see this today in the rising anger over small boats, in the flags that line the streets. Resentment over immigration policies has emerged this year as a powerful enough force to potentially reshape British politics, with polls showing Reform UK continuing to gain momentum. This sentiment has also translated into a visible manifestation of national pride: in the past several months, people around the country have raised Union flags and St George’s flags as part of “Operation Raise the Colors”, a social media movement that started in Birmingham.

Patriotism remains a bit of a taboo among British liberals, something a bit embarrassing that has taken on Right-wing political connotations. But glimpses of it can be seen during moments like the Hastings re-enactment, or in other socially-permitted contexts like the World Cup or Royal weddings. It is otherwise kept to a bare minimum by a still Norman-minded elite who prefer to stifle this instinct.

To an outsider, this aversion to patriotism remains a striking feature of British culture. Though this same tendency exists in America in intellectual and Left-leaning circles, it isn’t nearly as mainstream. While American conservatives are more likely to display the flag and revel in patriotic iconography, they don’t have a monopoly on it the way the Right seems to here. To win a US presidential election, you have to love America harder than the other guy. Flag pins are a standard political accessory in both parties. And it remains commonplace for schoolchildren to pledge allegiance to the flag every day in state schools, though they have a constitutional right to refuse. A town displaying a lot of flags wouldn’t be worth remarking upon. On the drive back to London from Sussex, someone in the car remarked on the number of Union flags on show in a suburb we drove through. I hadn’t even noticed.

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British liberals have reacted to people raising Union flags and St George’s flags the same way many Americans would to the sight of a Confederate flag. “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality,” Orwell wrote in that same essay. “In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.” Much the same is true today: instead of seeking to understand the deep anger over immigration that is making people want to fly these flags, the focus of British liberals has been on suppressing them, citing the involvement of far-Right activists in organizing the campaign. Social media is full of often quite classist comments about “flag shaggers”. Councilors and MPs call for the flags’ removal to tamp down on “division”. In my neighborhood in South London, I noticed this week that someone had put up a St George’s flag emblazoned with pro-immigration slogans. “There is no such thing as true British culture,” read the all-caps letters printed on the red cross. “This flag was originally made by Saint George — a Turkish/Palestinian immigrant.” (Saint George died hundreds of years before the cross associated with him came into use.)

Whether intentionally or not, the flag campaigners have forced British elites into the unappealing position of disavowing their own national flag for political reasons. If they think it has been successfully co-opted by the far-Right, they only give it more power by fearing it. The cleverer play would be to display the flag as a symbol of opposition to the Right; to accept that people have a desire to feel patriotic and appeal to that, instead of pathologizing it. Lately, there does seem to have been some recognition of the need to reclaim the flag among the country’s liberal power players. Both the Labour and Lib Dem party conferences were festooned with flags, and the Prime Minister has spoken about his pride in all the flags of the UK. But they are playing catch-up against a movement that has much more successfully linked itself to the Union Jack; one that has been more proactive in channeling the down-to-earth Saxon instead of the lofty Norman.

Writers here have always had a better read on England’s Saxon yearnings than politicians. There’s a rich tradition of Anglo-Saxon nostalgia among English writers over the past century or so. In 1911, near the end of the imperial century, Rudyard Kipling imagined a Norman baron’s take on the rugged Saxon: “The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite. / But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right. / When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own, / And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.” Here, Kipling depicts the Saxon as the forefather of cherished British values like fair play.

Kipling was writing during a time when Britain still projected itself out onto the world, at the tail end of a period that echoed the terrible greatness of the adventuring Normans. Yet he, like other 20th-century writers who mythologized the Saxon past such as J.R.R. Tolkien, saw something more authentic and fundamental to the culture in the Saxons, who stayed put here and defended their island against all comers. Perhaps this old Anglo-Saxon ache persists today and explains some of what’s happening now — a repressed tribalism with ancient roots that is playing out in modern politics.

At the battle last weekend, I thought about how, a millennium later, the Saxon fans in the crowd are just as Norman as they are anything else. It was an audience no doubt full of Williams, Richards and Henrys cheering for a lost army of Oswalds, Godfrics and Cuthberts. But this didn’t seem to matter. There’s always next year. Maybe the Saxons will finally win.

You keep going, finally outside London’s blast radius, free from its cultural and economic gravity but not yet into the post-industrial North. Names on the motorway signs reek of Middle England. Grantham, birthplace of Margaret Thatcher and the Dambusters. Melton Mowbray, birthplace of the pork pie. This part of the world is about as Brexity as it gets: in 2016, in some parts of Lincolnshire, 75% voted to leave the European Union.

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By Mary Harrington

If you’re more comfortable in the post-Blair Britain of social liberalism, buy-to-let portfolios, Eurostar minibreaks and ironic bunting, you probably don’t want to stop in Lincolnshire. You should stop in Lincolnshire.

Pull in at Stamford, a town preserved to an almost surreal degree from the depredations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries thanks to its near-feudal relationship to the nearby stately home, Burghley House. This colossal sixteenth-century ‘prodigy house’ was constructed by William Cecil, Lord High Treasurer to Elizabeth I. Today it’s still owned by the Cecils (confusingly, the Marquess and Marchioness of Exeter), though the family themselves now mostly live in British Columbia.

Down the road, Stamford itself is almost wholly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century in its architecture, and permanently besieged by people filming the type of BBC costume drama that can’t decide between nostalgia and trying to cancel the past on the grounds of being old-fashioned.

BBC Costume Drama History, roughly speaking, covers an era that began with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and lasted until the sexual one began (as Philip Larkin put it) in 1963. After 1963, Britain modernised, with a capital M, and since then anyone who demurs has been increasingly shoved to the margins. You’d be forgiven for thinking we had no history at all before the BBC Costume Era (BCE). But in fact the BCE is barely the tip of a huge, mostly submerged iceberg of Britain’s past, the vast majority of which lies under dark waters, in a time where people spoke strangely and really didn’t think like us at all.

Stamford in the BBC Costume Era was pretty dull, largely ignoring the Industrial Revolution and earning its keep mostly from North-South coaching traffic, farming and a malting business. Its more violent, colourful and contentious formative years lie further back.

The town gets its name from its position on the Roman-built Ermine Street. This ancient road, now mostly over-written by the A1, in those days crossed the river Welland in a gravelly water-meadow, giving it the name ‘stone-ford’. After the Romans left in around 400AD, Stamford persisted as a small settlement known for glazed pottery but not much else. The Vikings changed all that.

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When the Viking chief Ragnar Lodbrok was captured by King Aella of Northumbria in 865, legend has it that Aella executed Ragnar by throwing him into a snakepit. Whether this happened or not, Ragnar was definitely killed: his sons Hvitserk, Ubba, Bjorn Ironside and the superbly named Ivar the Boneless were so infuriated that they recruited an enormous band of Scandinavian warriors, known in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 865 as the ‘Great Heathen Army’. This horde piled into longboats and headed south from Scandinavia to wreak revenge on the soft Saxon southerners.

Unwisely, the then king of East Anglia, Edmund the Martyr, gave Ragnar’s sons and their army food and horses in exchange for agreeing not to attack his kingdom. This pusillanimous move did him no good in the long run: having conquered York in 866, Ubba and Ivar the Boneless returned to East Anglia, where in 869 they killed Edmund for refusing to renounce Christianity. By then the Northmen had a firm foothold in England, and in 874 they consolidated their political power across the East and Midlands.

The Great Heathen Army was always a coalition force, and the region was divided between their various factions. Stamford became a fortified Danish ‘burh’ — one of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw — that is, the castle stronghold of a Danish horde who henceforth ruled the defeated Anglo-Saxon peasantry in the area according to Danish law and custom.

Stamford’s new Danish rulers built their burh on the north side of the Welland. Thanks to its position at the foot of Danish Mercia, it was of strategic military importance, and Danish Stamford remained a political hub in the East of England until 918. At that point, it fell to two of Alfred’s children, the formidable warrior queen Aethelflaed of Mercia and Edward of Wessex.

Rather than trying to rule Danish Stamford, Edward established his own parallel burh on the south side of the Welland, with Danes and Saxons facing one another across the water. One gets a sense that the atmosphere was probably somewhat bad-tempered to begin with. The antipathy must have waned over time, though, because by the Norman Conquest some 150 years later Stamford was booming. Its twin boroughs over-spilled their bounds on both sides of the river, suburbs spread out along approach roads and iron-smelting thrived in what’s now St George’s Street. It became, in its way, a happy story of integration.

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It didn’t last. There’s no record of the Norman defeat of Stamford’s existing population, but it can’t have taken long. In 1070, a mere four years after the Battle of Hastings, the Norman abbot of Peterborough took refuge at Stamford with 160 men when pursued by Hereward the Wake’s anti-Norman insurgency.

But Stamford’s brief prominence as a site of strategic military importance, for invaders first from the North and then from the South, gave way to an increasingly respectable-but-marginal status once invaders stopped coming. Out of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw, Stamford was the only one not to become a county town, and it flourished instead as a coaching stop, and a centre for the wool trade — an industry so fundamental to the medieval English economy that it funded the Hundred Years’ War.

Grown prosperous on the proceeds, in the Middle Ages Stamford was one of the biggest towns in England, with a castle, 14 churches and even (briefly) a breakaway university founded in 1333 by dissidents from Merton and Brasenose colleges in Oxford. In the 1840s, though, Stamford made a decision to side-line itself. Faced with the prospect of a railway hub, the people said thanks but no thanks. In this they were supported by then 3rd Marquess of Exeter, another William Cecil, who didn’t like the idea of his pretty town being ruined by the march of progress. The hub station was instead built in Peterborough.

Then in the 1960s Stamford retreated still further, with the construction of an A1 bypass. In doing so, it reached the end of the BBC Costume Era, having politely opted out of the March of Progress. From a pro-development point of view, this was the wrong choice. Stamford and Peterborough both had between 4000 and 5000 inhabitants at the start of the nineteenth century. Today, the population of Peterborough is around 200,000, while Stamford houses barely a tenth of that.

From a cultural and aesthetic point of view though, you can argue the toss. Peterborough today is a mess of ring roads, racism and ugly buildings, voted worst place to live in Britain for the second year running in 2020 and notable chiefly for being home to the UK Passport Office and a particularly unattractive multi-storey car park. Stamford, on the other hand, is quietly prosperous, with a thriving Civic Society association and an Urban Group dedicated to keeping the town clean, litter-free and friendly.

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Perhaps shaped by its convulsive foundation in successive waves of invasion, Stamford’s bone-deep conservatism has, finally, become the town’s main stock-in-trade: in 1967, it became England’s first conservation area. Today Stamford covers barely more than two square miles, and yet it contains 446 listed buildings — a conservation density whose gravity pulls in tourists, down-sizers, retirees and restaurateurs as well as BBC location crews.

As the story we’ve been telling ourselves about modernity and progress starts to look increasingly rickety, it’s worth wondering whether Stamford was right to opt out. We might yet discover that larger but uglier — more atomised and therefore less liveable — urban areas could learn a thing or two from this prosperous small town about getting the balance right between economic development and grassroots civic life.

That’s if we get things right, and our small country can hold its communities together. If we don’t, we may yet find ourselves facing the more distant ghosts of Stamford’s past: the vengeful raiders, bull-runners, market-day massacres, religious schism, invasions and counter-invasions of those darker and stranger days before England’s BBC Costume era. I catch myself sometimes wondering how many of those older shadows are truly gone, and how many are just sleeping.

In one regard, however, Vincent did leave a legacy. His memoir of one of the salient periods of his career — his time as a British Envoy to Warsaw in 1920 — made the grand claim that the fight for the Polish capital that summer was one of the most important battles in world history; alongside Marathon, Blenheim and Hastings. Yet, the Battle of Warsaw — like much of Polish history — is almost unknown to English-speaking audiences.

The year 1920 was one of chaotic flux across much of Europe. The baleful effects of the industrialised slaughter of the First World War were still being felt, and in central and eastern Europe states newly emerged from the collapse of the German, Austrian and Russian empires struggled to unify and assert themselves. As Winston Churchill pithily summarised: “The war of giants has ended, the wars of the pygmies begin.”

Poland provided perhaps the most pressing example. Reappearing on the map in 1918 after a 123-year absence, during which time it had been partitioned by its larger neighbours, Poland filled something of a central European void, in the process fighting a number of squabbles and conflicts in attempting to define its frontiers.

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The most serious of these was the Polish-Soviet War, which had begun in the early spring of 1919, when Polish forces had engaged those of Lenin’s Red Army in what is now Belarus. The conflict that followed was no pygmy sideshow — it would last for more than 18 months, range over hundreds of miles and cost the lives of more than 100,000 men.

So it was that Polish and Soviet forces engaged that spring. What followed was a curious conflict, far removed from the static, industrialised warfare that had recently drawn to a close in the west of Europe. Here, across the vast expanses of what is now Belarus and Ukraine, where roads and infrastructure were sparse, more traditional — and more mobile — methods of war prevailed. Armoured trains played a role, but cavalry was king. Poland’s Uhlans and the Bolshevik Konarmia — the Red Cavalry, which would become synonymous with a proto-Blitzkrieg of brutal ideologically-charged warfare — took centre stage in campaigns that ebbed and flowed across the landscape, ranging from the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, to the very gates of Warsaw.

By the summer of 1920, however, the war appeared to be nearing its end. Polish forces were in headlong retreat, driven westward by the numerical superiority of their enemy. They had already lost the cities of Lwów, Brest-Litowsk and Zamość, and were now in danger of losing the capital itself. Poland’s new-found independence, it seemed, was about to be snuffed out after less than two years.

But, in the middle of August, a desperate Polish counterattack to the east of Warsaw drove northward into the overextended Soviet flank, finally halting the Red Army’s advance in a ten-day engagement, at the cost of around 20,000 lives. Known to Poles as “The Miracle on the Vistula”, the battle not only relieved the capital, it routed Soviet forces, scattering them north into East Prussia and Lithuania. With that, the Soviet front collapsed, and the Kremlin finally sued for peace.

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The consequences of the Miracle were far reaching, with Poland securing its independence for a generation, its place on the map of Europe not challenged again until 1939.

In addition, the Soviet defeat arguably poisoned Kremlin attitudes towards the Poles. Relations between the two Slavic nations were never rosy — the long years of Russian partition and oppression had seen to that — but the Bolsheviks saw themselves as a new dawn, with a seductively universal ideology. Yet, outside Warsaw, they found that their message of socialist fraternity was decisively rejected; their vanguard of revolution — the Red Army — roundly defeated. As Stalin would later complain, bringing communism to Poland was “like putting a saddle on a cow”.

This rejection would have profound consequences. Soviet anti-Polish sentiment resulted in the execution by the NKVD secret police of over 100,000 Poles living within the Soviet Union in 1937-8, in a systematic attempt to eradicate them as an ethnic minority. More ominously still, a shared desire to destroy Poland was instrumental in bringing Hitler and Stalin together to agree the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939.

And, following their invasion of Poland three weeks later, Soviet forces were predictably brutal, targeting the Polish officer class and educated elites with persecution, deportation and execution. One might conclude that the road to the death pits of Katyń forest — where many of the 22,000 Polish officers executed by the Soviets in 1940 were killed — began two decades earlier with the Soviet defeat outside Warsaw.

Stalin also had a personal reason to look back on 1920 in anger. At that time, he was commander of the south-western front, around Lwów, and was widely criticised as culpable for the failure to adequately reinforce the Warsaw front.  Rebuked by Lenin, the Politburo and the Supreme Command, he was humiliated, even scapegoated, and simmered with anger thereafter. Coincidentally or not, his most vociferous critics – Trotsky and Tukhachevsky among them – would all later feel the hot lead (or cold ice-pick steel) of his ire.

And yet, significant though these aspects are, they were unknown to D’Abernon as he wrote his memoir in 1930. So why then, did he rate this still little-known battle as one of the most important military engagements in human history? The answer lies in the realm of grand strategy.

For Moscow, spreading communism westward in 1920 was not only desirable, it was an ideological imperative. In Marxist ideological terms, the Russian revolution made little sense. After all, Marxism foretold that communism was supposed to be the inevitable, scientifically determined, result of the collapse of capitalism. And yet, the first country to become communist had scarcely entered its capitalist phase; its industrial proletariat class was miniscule and insignificant.

The vital imperative, therefore, was to spread communism westward to more advanced, industrialised countries — most importantly Germany — not only to secure the revolution at home, but to make the entire edifice of communist revolution make ideological sense.

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And Germany in 1920 was in a state of near-collapse; its economy in ruins, its population exhausted, angry and disillusioned, its political life fraught with revolutionary tensions on both Right and Left. If there was ever a time for the Red Army to ride in to spur the German communists and other malcontents to victory, it was now. It was no surprise therefore that Tukhachevsky’s order of the day to his troops implored them to “Go West! Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to worldwide conflagration!”

Yet the Poles would prove to be very un-corpse-like. For one thing, the supposedly “universal” appeal of communism proved pretty unappealing to them, prefaced as it had been by a brutal military campaign and imported alongside an army of secret policemen, militiamen and “requisitioning agents”. Moreover, for many Poles, anything imported from the east was automatically tainted by association with Russia, Poland’s historic oppressor and occupier.

Consequently, the Poles bitterly resisted the horsemen of the revolution, handing the Soviets a crushing defeat at the very moment that victory appeared to be within their grasp. In so doing, they checked the Kremlin’s ambitions, dented its apparent ideological sheen, and crucially saved a west that — in that moment — was on its knees.

It was this that D’Abernon was referring to in raising Warsaw to the Pantheon of history’s most significant battles. In his book, he opined that, had the Poles “failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet Army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, but the very existence of western civilisation would have been imperilled.”

Just as the Battle of Tours “saved our ancestors from the Yoke of the Koran”, he concluded, so the Battle of Warsaw saved Western Europe from “a far more subversive danger – the fanatical tyranny of the Soviet.” D’Abernon’s language may not have been that of the modern diplomat or politician, but his fundamental historical judgement was sound. It is hard not to conclude that in this at least he was right.

Warsaw in 1920 represented that rare thing in history: a moment of genuine existential peril, akin to the Battle of Britain or Waterloo. We in the English-speaking world would do well to remember it.