There is quite enough about mobs and mob rule at the moment without me needing to join in. The starting point of this post is the effect this has on governments, and UK governments in particular.
I have written before about the bizarre way in which UK governments, certainly back to the Gordon Riots of 1780, have lived with this underlying fear of the mob - an affliction known as enochophobia.
That manifests itself mainly in the bizarre snobbery which the establishment treats anyone outside itself, whether it is people from country towns in, say, County Durham, or the BAME communities of Bristol. This is what Gladstone meant when he characterised Toryism as "distrust in the people tempered by fear".
I have been thinking about this phenomenon for some time, and particularly its roots in classical education, which regards the Roman world as civilised and the poor old natives of this island as barbarians. I'm not so sure that this was not actually the other way around.
I was first alerted to this idea by Graham Robb’s brilliant book The Ancient Paths, one of a growing number of historians and writers to start rethinking our pre-Roman past. But it was George Jowett’s strange and peculiar book The Drama of the Lost Disciples which got me thinking about Caractacus for the first time.
Jowett died in 1969 after a distinguished career as a boxer, publisher and planner in Canada. But the research behind the book, in the Vatican archives, is an equally important legacy. His argument was that, according to the archives, it wasn’t just Joseph of Arimathea who came to Britain in 38AD, as legend suggests – it was the Virgin Mary and many of the surviving disciples of Jesus who took refuge in Glastonbury that year, joined later by St Peter and St Paul.
Jowett’s plea was that, given that the medieval church recognised this claim by giving British bishops precedence at the great councils of the Church – we ought to take this more seriously. Or at least as seriously as the flawed and compromised memories of Roman writers with axes to grind.
If this was right, Jowett suggested, then it may provide a different interpretation to the Roman invasion five years later. It may also be that Caractacus, as the archives suggest, was not a backward pagan type, but Christian king battling the pagan Romans and desperately trying to hold back their tide of brutality.
So I have written Caractacus’ autobiography as if Jowett was right. As such, I am attempting to strike a small blow against a those generations of positivist scholars who identified with the Romans more than with their forebears defending our homeland – who regarded the invaders as ‘we’, and continue to try to subdue the real spirit of these islands ever since. Caractacus managed to stand alone for nearly nine years against the biggest and most sophisticated army in the known world, after all.
And while we are about it - if anyone out there happens to know where I can find out why it is that English history traditionally starts in 1066 - with the arrival of the ruling class - and why we number our kings from then, despiet there being Edwards on either side of the divide? I would genuinely love to know...
In the meantime, the first part of my Caractacus trilogy (Nor Shall My Sword Sleep) is now published and I am busily writing the second. So comments and suggestions are most welcome...
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