The once and future wapentake

Sketching a political myth for Yorkshire

There is a library that holds all the stories of humanity. Some wings are modern, functional, tidy. Others are ancient, chaotic. In the glass tower of science, an ingenious order of librarians carefully rearrange the texts, bringing them into harmony with the hidden book of nature; but under a vast classical dome across the plaza, there is a shelf-less space that no librarian can tame. Inside, an unfelt wind presses the autobiographies into great swirling drifts, and every volume murmurs ‘allow me to speak before your mercy’ to any who walk by.

In a library the size of a city, it is easy to lose your way. This has, I think, happened to us. We have forgotten our way back to an old thick-walled building adorned with faded murals. Once, perhaps, it was a castle keep, but it is part of the library now. The sign above the doorway reads ‘Political Mythology’.

To borrow a line from a dusty tome found elsewhere in the library, a political myth is ‘one which tells the story of a political society’. It is hardly surprising, then, that we have lost our way. Our purported rulers, the virtual class, cannot tell these stories because they have no concept of a political society. Localist and regionalist tendencies do have the concept, but they cannot tell political myths either. If a myth belongs a transnational group of regionalists, it is nothing but a measure of their failure. The myths that they long for belong to regions, not to regionalists. The regions, though, are politically mute. Here in England, the state asserted itself a long time ago, and it has pressed closer every century since. It could never tolerate political myths that were not its own. But its own, in turn, have been muted by the Machine. The Machine, finally, has its own myth, or perhaps it is a myth made real; but it is not a political myth. It is, instead, the myth of the death of politics.

It matters that we have lost political mythology. It matters because it is in the nature of humanity to arrange ourselves into clans; and if those clans are to be healthy, then they need stories of who they are and where they are going. Beyond the telling of political history, clans need stories that make sense of their present. That sort of sense-making always belongs to mythology.

I don’t know the way back to the old building with the faded murals; but I know it has a room with a white rose on the door, a room for the political myths of the people of Yorkshire. In the centre of that room, surrounded by old stories, are solid wooden desks: empty and dusty. One day, people will sit at them again and write. When they do, perhaps they will write something like what follows.

‘Long ago, the folk who lived between the Pennines and the North Sea managed their own affairs. They gathered together on a human scale, in Wapentakes. The name means ‘weapon-take’ and when the folk met, they did so with weapons in hand: not because they expected to fight, but just to show that the power lay with them and no other.

The people gathered at the wooded slope, at the holy well, at the long hill, and at places all across the North Riding.

They gathered at the speech mound, at Osgot’s Cross, at the quick stream, and at places all across the East Riding.

They gathered at the great oak, at the stone cross, at Aggi’s Bridge, and at places all across the West Riding.

The places where the people met were changed by the gatherings. Over long centuries, the folk left some of their spirit in those spots of earth.

Different people came to the land between the Pennines and the North Sea, sometimes in trickles and sometimes in waves. But the hills never moved and the rivers flowed the same, so the people bent to the land and never the other way around. The Normans came, but the people still met where the Danes had met, where the Saxons had met, where the Brigantes and Parisi had met before the first stories we remember.

Empires, though, are dangerous things. They make you forget your neighbours and the soil that gives you life. So while the Romans sat in their villas and towns, the old gathering-places were neglected, and they slumbered for a while. It is the same now that a greater empire has come: an empire of machines that whispers it is as well to have a companion across the world as across the way, and that the fruit of another land can feed you just as well as the fruit of this. Under this empire of machines, the people begin to believe that they, too, are machines. They think their neighbours can only do what is right if commanded, so they demand more and more written laws from far away, but they never meet one another at all. Forgotten, the old gathering-places lie covered with tarmac or brambles.

Sleep is not death though, and the empire of machines is only one sentence in the long book of the land. And when it goes, the wapentakes will waken, the people will gather, and the power will lay with them and no other’.

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Image: St Michael's Church and the Shire Oak. Wellcome Library, London. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/