By George Indeed

I was a good boy, I kept my peace on St. George's Day. So did everybody else apparently; no big debate, no tabloid skipping around true opinion, nothing.

So I'll keep this brief. The hordes of foreigners trampling our borders and corrupting our pets - or whatever the latest nonsense claims are - are not responsible for the ongoing confusion over "englishness". Unless perhaps the foreigners in question are the Scots.

There really is no greater expession of what stirs the English heart than Shakespeare's calculated crowd pleasers. The "This England" speech from Richard II extols England as a land which makes living a joy, a land whch nourishes, sustains; which by virtue of being an island protects from the invader. But the England in question is a land, not an idea, not a political stance. Henry V's calls to arms tell of a breed of men bred to strength and valour not by politics or ideals but by living in a fertile, temperate land: and the reward for victory is to return to the inns of your blessed home and recount your tale of bravery over ale and roast beef.

It is the land that is key here, the land of England. In Shakespeare's time - and certainly before it - the land was open to all. What made the king almost godlike was that he had private land; the hunting parks and the royal estates, land on which only the king and his chosen few could roam. "Ownership" of land for the other nobility was about exacting a tax upon that which was produced there, not about having any sort of exclusive access to it. Your basic serf had the right to grow crops and keep stock on a small section of that land, with much being undertaken communally, on the common [usage] land: but the whole of the land was free to his access. Now let's not get too romantic here, we are talking pretty much about subsistance farming when the weather didn't play ball; but mostly it would be a fulfilling life with few perceived restrictions. This is "englishness" - and it received its deathblow long before the first Punjabi cotton mill inductee arrived.

It was the Agricultural Revolution in the 1700s; the enclosures, mechanisation of crop production which could only work by chucking the serfs off the land and merging all the tithe lands into the mass farms we have today (on an even more colossal scale). The influx of the displaced into towns fed the Industrial Revolution that followed. Land became private; position on the land was replaced by the status of possessions.

As ever the testing ground was Scotland. From the Highland Clearances to the rise of the great Scots engineering tradition, as the Scottish fantasy was foisted on a battered and defeated people by the lackies of England that ruled them, a new "englishness" arose: Balmoral englishness.

Using the Celtic tradition of beautiful defeat against the crushed Highlanders - they can't fight if they're mewling into their whisky - proved so effective it soon took hold beyond the southern borders: this was the love of the underdog. The English tradition was for Everyman, a figure of dignity in the face of spiteful Heaven and tempting Hell and all the acts of power between. Everyman teaches us that we are all in this together, that there is value in the compassion born of knowing that all of our struggles and triumphs are the same. Everyman reflected an attitude in which we said to the immigrant "we live like this, if you are different it's amusing and we will enjoy watching you fail. If your way works better than ours we will adopt it". Balmoral englishness' underdog tradition makes us treat each new incomer as a charity case then resent them when they grow independent, wealthy or powerful: it is called getting ideas above their station.

Crown & country. This isn't the crown of a king proven in battle; it isn't the land of England. It is the crown upon whoever's head it falls to by birth, protected even from criticism by the full power of an organised state, regardless of qualities; it is an abstraction, the politically founded and delineated United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland (as was), not the land that feeds me. Crown and country are symbols of an increasingly amorphous ideal separated from the people who inevitably end up fighting for it.

By perfecting the union between church and state through the standardised English language, that English language became a cause in itself. The triumph of English, from Shakespeare to the King James Bible and beyond made the language itself, but more particularly the values it couches in its velvet terms, a cause. Spreading 'decency' across the world became the moral cloak under which was rolled out Balmoral englishness' finest - and entirely financial - undertaking: empire.

The love of the underdog, the devotion to crown and country, the right of empire. Three values inherant in Balmoral englishness; a phrase I made up to describe what is more usually called these days britishness. And perhaps britishness is as near as we are going to get to englishness these days.