Britain’s balance of trade concerning people, myths and traditions.

To an observer of such things, it is curious that so many old myths and traditions have a habit of surviving and popping up in the most unusual of places given their origins. Once upon time, Britain was uninhabited and then early settlers cam across the land bridge that existed between Europe and Britain. When that link became water logged, people used small boats such as coracles to navigate the divide. Then Britain imported a variety of groups over some 2500 years of history including Romans, Germans, Vikings, Normans, Flemish, Jews, Irish, Pols, Italians, Africans and many more besides. IN our own time, we are used to immigration from peoples from all parts of the globe. On the other hand, Britain has done its fair share of exporting people too. Consider the mass immigration from Britain America, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the like. Neille Fergusson quotes some seemingly impossible number, like 44 million people dispatched from the UK over the course of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Yet, this figure believable when examined closely. It goes to explain why people may speak English as their first language in as diverse as Aukland and Arizona.

The British fixation with Roman and Greek history, myths and religion is also another curious case of customs coming in and then going out; just like some warehouse full of goods. Stock comes in, is changed in some small way and is then exported again to some unrelated place. If you were some external observer, perhaps a human from a tribe who had had no dealings with the outside world until recently, would it not seem remarkable that characters such as Hermes and Venus should still be referred to in the language at all? Would not seem even curiouser that the state religion of Britain (at least in theory) is a mildly altered version of Roman Catholicism, which itself is largely a product of Egyptian imagery, Greek ideas and Roman heirachies?

Then there is the unusual case of King Arthur, who Churchill described as the last of the Romans. This great “British” icon, is considered an exemplar of national virtue, yet those very virtues were imported (or enforced) by romans. This then, was a deficit on the part of Britain.

Ultimately, Anglicanism and its variants was exported around the world, having in the first place been imported from many different nations. The lesson to learn, I suppose, is that no people or nation exist in a vacuum, but rather are a result of a collection of influences acting upon it. People are also slow to abandon religious customs, but seem able to acquire new ones within an existing framework. Truly an unusual balance of trade – but one which seems to have balanced itself somehow.