Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche

by John Higgs

It would seem crazy not to call the football-loving, tea-drinking land that the Beatles came from ‘England’. It is, after all, the society which the great majority of people who live in geographical England recognise. But if that is the ‘real’ England, then what is the strange place that the establishment also call ‘England’, the society that gave birth to James Bond? This is a network of great wealth which was established nearly a thousand years ago, when William the Bastard of Normandy defeated King Harold at Hastings and claimed this newly conquered land for himself. He then distributed that land among the Norman barons who assisted him. This pattern of ownership of the country has remained amazingly consistent over the centuries. Even today a third of the UK is still owned by just 1,200 aristocrats and their families. Gerald Grosvenor was the sixth Duke of Westminster and one of the richest people, and largest landowners, in the country. When asked to give advice to young entrepreneurs, he replied, ‘Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror.’ An accurate term to describe this particular ‘England’, then, would be to call it the Norman Continuity Empire. This is not bound by geography in the way that the Beatles’ England is. The reason that its base is in southern England is a quirk of history – it lost its preferred lands in Aquitaine and southern France during the medieval period. The Norman Continuity Empire speaks with an in...