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Exceptionalism has been one of few constants in the otherwise sinuous story of the English state. The nation split from the Catholic church, clung on to monarchy, evolved into an empire spanning a quarter of the globe and introduced its de facto lingua franca. Even after its domain dwindled, self-belief lingered sufficiently to persuade a majority of its voters to separate themselves from their closest trading partner.
Despite proudly carrying the baggage of centuries of invasions, conquests, dynasties and destinies, a newly unmoored England lacks friends and a direction of travel. It is hard to know what the country represents — has England lost its identity?
Two new books go searching for answers in different places. In their respective histories of English cricket and Christianity, both Brendan Cooper and Bijan Omrani hit upon a history of exceptionalism that once fuelled the country’s ascent as a global power and now leaves it pining for the past and paralysed in the present.
Cricket was born in England. Its etiquette and eccentricity are emblematic of much of what the country takes pride in. In the imagination, it plays out on some mythical village green of a peaceful past — little wonder that Cooper should look to the history of the sport, as he does in his book Echoing Greens, in an attempt to define Englishness.
Anthony Trollope claimed in 1868 that “it is the English alone who take part in the game” — despite the fact that the first ever international cricket match had taken place two decades earlier between the US and Canada. By the Victorian era, the game had become a byword for England’s competitive but courteous aspirations. As Cooper puts it: “Cricket was no longer just a sport. It was philosophy; it was virtue; it was an imagined ideal of nationhood. The game had been remade as a fiction, a metaphor for all the things England wanted itself to be.”
WG Grace, perhaps the most storied of the country’s cricketers, was so revered by fans that tickets to games in which he played cost twice as much as usual. Yet to rivals he was associated with underhand tactics or outright cheating. “His name will become a synonym for mean cunning and systematic fraud,” complained The Sydney Morning Herald after England’s inaugural tour to Australia in 1873.
For every attempt at generalisation, Cooper finds proof to the contrary; for every temptation towards nostalgia, there is a reality check. And it is not so different a picture when we turn to Omrani’s God Is an Englishman.
Omrani — barrister, academic, churchwarden — uses his book to chart the exceptionalist approach that has defined English Christianity over the centuries. As early as the 7th century, Pope Gregory sent a letter to the third Archbishop of Canterbury permitting pagan slaughter of animals on the newly Christian realm’s feast days: “It is doubtless impossible to cut out everything at once from their stubborn minds,” he wrote.
The attitude prevailed, from public unwillingness to give up Catholic festivals in the 16th century to Oliver Cromwell’s insistence on keeping his Quaker household staff. The response to the trauma of the Reformation, Omrani believes, was the kind of nostalgia and exceptionalism that continues to plague English politics: “Successive generations looked back to an era they usually placed just before their own, where England was a country of cheery yeomen and maypole dancing, social order and plenty.” He might well add cricket to that list.
God Is an Englishman eventually falls victim to the nostalgia it so convincingly chronicles. Omrani laments the “tragic” loss of hymn singing in schools and the decay of Christian values in national identity, treading a fine line between questions of church and state. His account of how Christianity came to underpin the laws and landscape of England is thorough; more contentious is his assertion that if social cohesion is in decline, the decay of Christian values has played a “significant part”.
Cooper also sometimes loses sight of his task, drifting into cricketing miscellany. Echoing Greens never quite lives up to its promise of being “a book about England — about the disorderly workings of the English imagination, its visions and ideals as well as its vexed relationship with the blunt reality of life”.
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Neither cricket nor Christianity really reflects the country as it is now. The 2021 census was the first time that less than half the population of England and Wales identified as Christian, with the proportion of atheists at an all-time high. English cricket, meanwhile, finds itself squeezed by low uptake in schools and big-budget international competitions such as the Indian Premier League. “In the twenty-first century,” admits Cooper, “the legitimacy of the Englishness of cricket feels more doubtful than ever.”
But in two subjects so bound up with questions of tradition, it is all too tempting to tend towards nostalgia. “I have no patience with the man who is constantly saying that cricket is not what it used to be,” wrote the Guardian’s Neville Cardus in 1933. “The Golden Age is always well behind us. We catch sight of it with young eyes, when we see what we want to see.” The same could well be said of England.
Echoing Greens: How Cricket Shaped the English Imagination by Brendan Cooper Constable £12.99, 352 pages
God Is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England by Bijan Omrani Forum £25, 400 pages
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