Aloe, Aloe!

‘When Adam delved and Eve span.

Where was there the gentleman?’

Once again I turned out for the annual walk from Smerillo to Montefalcone which has been held for the last six years on the first Sunday in May in support of the ALOE missionary organisation. Click here to see a video of the walk. It begins with various entertainments in the piazza in Smerillo, then through the woods, with stops en route for more entertainment, to Montefalcone for lunch al fresco, and finally back through the woods to Smerillo for mass in the piazza. This year was rather different. Firstly, the weather has been awful. (I think the lager-swilling, Diana-worshipping, ManU-supporting, beer-bellied, tattooed, xenophobic and flag-of-St George waving English lumpen-proletariat have persuaded Brussels that until the UK can escape from rule by ‘unelected EU bureaucrats’ European weather should be standardised to conform to the British model.) Consequently, it was decided that walking through the woods would be too slippery so we would walk to Montefalcone via contrada Conche instead. Which is rather like setting A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Oxford Street rather than in a forest glade: the poetry readings and music lose half their charm. Secondly there was no Fra Mago this year. Fra Mago is a jolly franciscan friar, straight from the pages of  Robin Hood, who performs conjuring tricks. A larger than life character, but engaging in a David Bellamy sort of way. Instead we had the flag wavers. Performing acrobatic feats with flags whilst dressed in renaissance costume, accompanied by drummers similarly garbed, is the Italian equivalent of morris-dancing. When it’s done skilfully - as it is at Ascoli Piceno’s Quintana - the flag-throwing is pretty impressive; often it’s not.

   It sometimes feels as if every comune in Italy has its ‘authentic’ tradition hailing from the quattrocento. Most of course are 20th century inventions: supposed revivals of earlier customs. Even Siena’s palio dates from the late 17th century, not from the Renaissance as its participants’ costumes seek to imply. In The Return of the Native, Hardy’s narrator claims that ‘A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from  a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival  is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all.’  I think his point is  borne out by religious processions in Italy. These go back in an uninterrupted line for hundreds of years - and, in contrast to the Renaissance revivals. are usually performed in a sloppy and lackadaisical fashion reminiscent of a parade by Captain Bertorelli’s ‘Italian war ‘eroes’ in ‘Allo, ‘Allo. What is interesting is that Italians today like to identify themselves with the Renaissance rather than, as they did under Mussolini, with the Roman Empire. Neither, of course, apart from the archeological remains, has any real connection with modern Italy: it’s no longer the political, philosophical, cultural or technological centre of the western world. Under the Romans it was all four, under the Medici the last three. Unlike the British, the Italians have had the sense to realise that they have no political clout and so the self-image projected through their folk revivals limits itself to a cultural illusion. 

    And what of our English self-image as mediated through our projections of the past? I find the Arthurian legends instructive. In The Noble Tale of King Arthur and Lucius, Malory has Arthur say: “That truage to Roome woll I never pay. … For this muche have I founde in the cronycles of this londe … dame Elyneys son, of Ingelonde, was Emperour of Roome; … And thus was the Empyre kepte be my kynde elders, and thus have we evydence inowghe to be the empyre of hole Rome.’  So we have the irony that Arthur is transformed from a Romano-Celt fighting to preserve Roman civilisation against the Saxon invader into a truculent Little Englander. And here we see the beginning of the fundamental change in attitude to continental Europe, one which has bedevilled England ever since. Three years after Rome withdrew its last legions from Britain in 407 the inhabitants appealed to the Emperor Honorius to defend them against the barbarian invaders. Far from wanting to see an end to continental interference the British were desperate for the Romans to stay. And who can blame them? Who would willingly swop being a citizen of a superpower with access to modern amenities such as central-heating, mains drainage, the rule of law, public baths and a decent road network, for living in a mud-hut surrounded by warring tribesmen sporting excessive facial hair and non-existent personal hygiene? Swop living in Surrey for living in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe? For a thousand years western Europeans were bitterly aware of what they had lost with the collapse of the Empire. 

    By the late 15th century, however, things began to change: people had previously defined themselves in terms of their local community and christendom, now a new and exclusive identity was promoted: the nation state. Henry VII had succeeded in establishing a strong central government state. He named his eldest son Arthur to cash in on the legend that the ‘Rex quondam rexque futurus’, as Malory put it, would return to save the nation. Miraculously, the ‘original’ Round Table turned up and can be seen hanging in Winchester cathedral (carbon dating has established a 15th century origin). His second son, Henry VIII, increased the power of the state further by severing England’s ties with the one institution surviving from the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church¹.   The support of the nobility was ensured by selling off plundered church land to them at knock down prices. The support of ordinary people was accomplished by the extraordinary feat of representing the Church as a foreign ‘un-English’ institution and all non-apostates as traitors. As  the Jesuit priest, Edmund Campion, martyred by Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth,  put it at his trial:  ‘In condemning us, you condemn all your own ancestors, all our ancient bishops and kings, all that was once the glory of England.’ Henry’s son, Edward, introduced Calvinistic protestantism  promoting, as Fielding’s Parson Adams put it, ‘the detestable doctrine of faith against good works²’ The Church which had provided a career for bright lads from humble backgrounds became the ideological arm of the state³; its most lucrative livings reserved for the younger sons of county families. The universities, which had enabled bright young peasants to train for white collar jobs, were gradually turned into finishing schools for the upper classes. Having seized the Church’s lands, the wealthy moved next against the ordinary people, enclosing common land thereby reducing them from self-sufficient peasant farmers to landless labourers. And all the time the refrain was and is: ‘hate the foreigner; he’s your foe.’ Your enemy is the Lithuanian for taking a job you wouldn’t want, for wages you couldn’t live on. Not the gang-master exploiting him, not the banker robbing the shareholder he’s supposed to be serving by paying himself a king’s ransom whilst doing his job with breathtaking incompetence. Your enemy is the EU, not ‘Good Old Maggie’ who decimated British industry and cut taxes for the rich and services for the rest of us. 

   Where’s the Al Gore to stand up and spell out these - to the ‘robber rich man⁴’ -  inconvenient truths?

Notes.

1. As Hobbes put it: ‘the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.’ Leviathan

1. Adams continues: ‘… surely that doctrine was coined in hell, and one would think none but the devil could have the confidence to preach it. For can anything be more derogatory to the honour of God than for men to imagine that the all-wise Being will hereafter say to the good and virtuous, “Notwithstanding the purity of thy life, notwithstanding that constant rule of virtue and goodness in which you walked upon earth, still, as thou didst not believe everything in the true orthodox manner, thy want of faith shall condemn thee”? Or, on the other side, can any doctrine have a more pernicious influence on society, than a persuasion that it will be a good plea for the villain on the last day: “Lord, it is true, I have never obeyed one of thy commandments, yet punish me not, for I believe them all”?’ Joseph Andrews I xvii
2. In the 18th century, the then Lord Chancellor, Thurlow, told a deputation of nonconformists: ‘I’m against you, by God. I am for the Established Church, damme! Not that I have any more regard for the Established Church than for any other Church , but because it is established. And if you can get your damned religion established, I’ll be for that too!” Quoted by T.H. White (1966) The Age of Scandal Chap. 11.
3. ‘No brand of Cain e’er stamped his brow/ No widow’s curse had he/ Only the robber rich man feared/ The coming of Ben Hall.… For ever since the good old days/Of Turpin and Duval/ The people’s friends were outlaws then/ And so was bold Ben Hall.’ Traditional Australian ballad, Lament for Ben Hall.