Richard the Lionheart by John Gillingham

As Patrick Wormald suggests, these are changes the significance of which should be understood by an age which has itself seen the advent of the microchip and pre-stressed concrete. It meant, for example, the coming of the book and of building in stone. This made little difference to men’s moral values: but in other ways it involved a radical cultural transformation. It also saw the establishment of Christianity in England.

This long period saw the English language firmly established, so firmly indeed that the centuries of dominance by a French-speaking élite after 1066 proved, in the end, to be insufficient to root it out. The six centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule witnessed more than just the emergence of a stable political system, however.

Though the country was conquered by Duke William of Normandy in 1066 the structures of the English state survived – and if the main point of governmental institutions is to perpetuate themselves, then those which the Anglo-Saxons founded have been remarkably successful. No other European country can point to anything like this. Despite some redrawing of county boundaries in 1974, most of the administrative geography of England remains today much as it was in the tenth and 11th centuries.

This, writes James Campbell, is the defining contrast between England and the other great European states. As a unified, organised state England has a very long history indeed – more than a thousand years of continuous existence, so far.

Richard the Lionheart by John Gillingham