Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens

by David Mitchell

Monarchy is what England has instead of a sense of identity. The very continuity of English government – the rule of kings morphing into the flawed parliamentary democracy of today – has resulted in our sense of nationhood, patriotism and even culture getting entwined with an institution that, practically speaking, now does little more than provide figureheads.

‘The work of giants is decaying,’ laments another poem, ‘The Ruin’. It’s reflecting on some crumbling Roman buildings, probably those in Bath. ‘Bright were the castle buildings, many the bathing-halls, / high the abundance of gables, great the noise of the multitude, / many a meadhall full of festivity, / until Fate the mighty changed that.’

In fact, the words Wales and Welsh are derived from the words the Germanic-speaking tribes all over Europe gave to the retreating and cowed citizens of the collapsing Roman Empire: walas, which meant foreigners or strangers, from which we get Walloon (the French-speaking Belgians) and Gaul, of Asterix the Gaul (somehow the ‘w’ turned into a ‘g’), as well as the Old English wealh which became Wales and Welsh. (Hence the modern French for Wales is ‘Pays de Galles’, country of the Gauls, which is massively confusing. France, Gaul, is the actual country of the Gauls, you’d think. It’s almost like the French are calling Wales France, as if, to the French, the Welsh seem more French than the French. And, having been to both France and Wales many times, that strikes me as an eccentric opinion.)

Six years later, King Robert’s regime issued a document called the Declaration of Arbroath. It was addressed to the pope and was partly an attempt to get Bruce’s long-standing sentence of excommunication lifted, but it also stridently asserted Scottish sovereignty and nationhood.