Rue Britannia?

I'm working on a non-fiction book at the moment that has involved looking at, among other things, national identity.

Just who, or what, am I?

I've always thought of myself as Cornish first, British second and European third. Historically, Cornwall was not part of England until it was made a Duchy by Edward III in 1337 to provide an independent source of income for his heir, Prince Edward (the Black Prince). But even then, the Cornish saw themselves as a separate country and even had a Stannary Parliament that could over-rule English law - at least, as it related to tin mining, which was the Duchy's primary industry and employed thousands of people. Over a century later in 1485 an Italian cleric called Polydore Vergil was engaged by King Henry VIII to write a history of Britain. In it he wrote: 

‘Britain is divided into four parts, whereof the one is inhabited by Englishmen, the other of Scots, the third of Welshmen and the fourth of Cornish people, which all differ among themselves, either in tongue, either in manners, or else in laws and ordinances.’ 

The Cornish still see themselves as separate and, in 2014, the UK government recognised us as a national minority which affords us the same status as the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish. Annoyingly, however, I still don't see 'Cornish' on diversity monitoring forms and I have to tick 'White British Other'.

But is that the way I should be looking at it? Shouldn't I celebrate being British and Cornish equally?

It's pretty easy to define what 'Cornish' means. But what defines Britishness? It's a surprisingly tough question to answer. 

Brexit turned this simple academic question into a complex political issue in which words like 'sovereignty' became weapons. And who led our divorce from Europe? A man with a French surname and a German wife. Oh, and a future Prime Minister who was born in America to parents of Bavarian and Turkish stock. 

See what I mean? There's pretty much no such thing as 'Pure British'. We are all the result of successive waves of invasion (to begin with) and then immigration. First came the Celts, then the Angles and Saxons. Then the Romans and the Vikings and the Normans. A large scale 2015 study by the University of Oxford examined DNA from people from all over the UK and found that around 30% of our DNA came from the ancestors of modern-day Germans. Meanwhile, people from southern and central England share about 40% of their DNA with the French, 11% with the Danes and 9% with the Belgians. 

And just look at the 'English'  language The French ruled us for over 300 years starting in 1066 and ending with Henry IV in the 15th century who was the first king in all that time who had English as his first language. As the result, what we call 'English' is actually around 43% French, 15% Latin, 5% Old Norse, 33% ‘native’ British (mostly Anglo-Saxon with a tiny amount of the Celtic tongues) plus a hodge-podge of other languages like Dutch, Arabic, Greek etc. 

But the fact that it isn’t ‘pure’ hasn’t affected its success ... if anything it’s one of the strongest, healthiest and most-used languages on Earth. It has produced some of the world’s greatest literature, everything from Shakespeare to the Brontes, Mary Shelley to John Cooper Clarke and Benjamin Zephaniah. Our language is as diverse as we are. It's a mongrel tongue and we are a mongrel nation.

But that's a good thing. As comedian and activist Suzy Eddie Izzard once quipped: ‘It is the mongrel dog that’s really wily and clever and he steals all your biscuits and sells them to the local kids. It is the pedigree dog that’s kind of pretty but thick as two short planks and chokes on a biscuit and dies.’ 

I remember, about seven or eight years ago, there was a programme on Channel 4 called 100% English? in which several people who considered themselves to be quintessentially English were DNA tested to check their racial background. Unsurprisingly, their results showed that they were all – every man and woman – descended from a mixed bag of ancestors that included Romani gypsies and people from the Arab states, South Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. At the height of the slave trade in 1750, one in 20 Londoners was black. Multiracial liaisons  and even marriages were a lot more frequent than you’d think back then and it is quite likely that most white British people have a black ancestor somewhere in their family tree. One lady, who'd formed a society for the ‘protection’ of the Anglo-Saxons as a racial group, was so incensed by the result that she launched a legal challenge against the programme. Unsurprisingly, she lost.

Meanwhile, most of the things that these sorts of people proudly hold up as examples of quintessential Britishness invariably aren’t. If you had to make a list, what would be on it? The Tower of London? A Cup of tea? The Sunday Roast? The Pound?

Sorry, but no. None of those were originally British.

The Tower of London was built by the French when they were in charge to show the English who’s boss. Tea was brought to the UK from India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and is drunk from cups made from a substance first invented in China. The Sunday roast was invented by the Romans and most of the ingredients are not native to the UK e.g. potatoes from America, chicken from south-east Asia (brought here probably for cockfighting), sprouts from Belgium, gravy from France … need I go on? 

Even that most British of institutions – the Pound – is a foreign import. It’s Italian in origin, coming to us with the Romans. A Librum was a specific weight of metal used for the smelting of coins. That’s why a stylised letter 'L' is used for a Pound sign (£) and the symbol for a pound in weight is 'lb' (it's also where the star sign Libra – the Scales – comes from). The term ‘Pound’ comes from the Saxon word for weight – Pundus. The term ‘Quid’ may come from the Latin phrase quid pro quo which means ‘trading like for like in value’. So nothing about the pound is British. And, just to rub salt into the wound, the Pound was the original Euro as it was legal tender across the whole of the Roman Empire from Europe to the Mediterranean to North Africa.

All of which reinforces the point that we Brits, and our culture, are the distillation of thousands of years of invaders and immigrants coming to these shores. We have absorbed people from all over the world and they have added to the rich tapestry of 'Britishness'. This has suggested to some scholars that we suffer from a crisis of identity and that’s why we have difficulty in celebrating our Britishness - and particularly Englishness. But why? America is exactly the same. So is Canada. And Australia. All countries colonised by ‘foreigners’. But they all have national pride. So should we.

We should cheer and shout about the fact that we live in one of the most enlightened and tolerant societies on the planet. We should celebrate the diversity of our culture and we should all feel proud to be British - whether we are from a Scottish, Bangladeshi, Welsh, Croatian, Geordie or even Cornish lineage. 

Let's focus on what makes us the same rather than what makes us different.

So yes, I'm proud to be Cornish. But from now on I won't use a ranking system. I'm going to be equally proud to be Cornish, British and European. I can be all three, right?

That has to be a better way forward than creating more divisions, surely?