A Short History of England by GK Chesterton

As you no doubt expect, this is not a list of names and dates and battles. In fact a number of references will be unintelligible without such preexisting knowledge. He would probably have enjoyed the irony.

Instead he wrote a thematic history, looking at the great movements and their consequences today. It is like pulling teeth to get him to admit that the Catholic Church had major problems, and his view of the guilds is more rosy-colored than dispassionate analysis allows. (I took the opportunity to try to learn about them—interesting constellation of institutions.)

One of his theses is that kings are often good.

It is "the little tyrant of the fields" that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism that a good king is not only a good thing, but perhaps the best thing. But it also involved the paradox that even a bad king is a good king, for his oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on the populace. If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; and though Nero's murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his soul, it was no great loss to his empire.

I should point out that Chesterton died before WWII, and this book was written before WWI was ended. He did not yet have a full picture of what a modern dictatorship was capable. He knew it was bad, but didn’t know how bad.

He spends much time on legends, on the perfectly legitimate grounds that these represent what people were thinking. But statements like "But the paradox remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred" are excessively post-modernist. Nevertheless:

The nineteenth-century historians went on the curious principle of dismissing all people of whom tales are told, and concentrating upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthur is made utterly impersonal because all legends are lies, but somebody of the type of Hengist is made quite an important personality, merely because nobody thought him important enough to lie about. Now this is to reverse all common sense. A great many witty sayings are attributed to Talleyrand which were really said by somebody else. But they would not be so attributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still less if he had been a fable. That fictitious stories are told about a person is, nine times out of ten, extremely good evidence that there was somebody to tell them about.

The first great villain is Henry VIII, and quite reasonably so. His effort to make sure that there were no institutions not chartered by the state in some way--whether church or local government or guild--is mirrored in the great totalitarian states of today, and is explicit in the platform of many progressive parties (who actually go farther and presume to redefine family relations as well).

Chesterton excoriates the squires, and the poor laws, and capitalism in general, and argues that Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews was popular, if not justified. His ending, written in the middle of WWI, is worth contemplating, considering the history of the island after WWII:

At least, if there be anything valid in my own vision of these things, we have returned to an origin and we are back in the war with the barbarians. It falls as naturally for me that the Englishman and the Frenchman should be on the same side as that Alfred and Abbo should be on the same side, in that black century when the barbarians wasted Wessex and besieged Paris. But there are now, perhaps, less certain tests of the spiritual as distinct from the material victory of civilization. Ideas are more mixed, are complicated by fine shades or covered by fine names. And whether the retreating savage leaves behind him the soul of savagery, like a sickness in the air, I myself should judge primarily by one political and moral test. The soul of savagery is slavery. Under all its mask of machinery and instruction, the German regimentation of the poor was the relapse of barbarians into slavery. I can see no escape from it for ourselves in the ruts of our present reforms, but only by doing what the mediævals did after the other barbarian defeat: beginning, by guilds and small independent groups, gradually to restore the personal property of the poor and the personal freedom of the family. If the English really attempt that, the English have at least shown in the war, to any one who doubted it, that they have not lost the courage and capacity of their fathers, and can carry it through if they will. If they do not do so, if they continue to move only with the dead momentum of the social discipline which we learnt from Germany, there is nothing before us but what Mr. Belloc, the discoverer of this great sociological drift, has called the Servile State. And there are moods in which a man, considering that conclusion of our story, is half inclined to wish that the wave of Teutonic barbarism had washed out us and our armies together; and that the world should never know anything more of the last of the English, except that they died for liberty.

Read it. You won’t agree with all of it (I don’t: Edward was wrong), and it is not the best example of his wonderful style, but worth reading. With a reference to hand …