Thread by @sam_bidwell

When people talk about 'English culture', they often think of cricket, tea, or fish & chips 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

But culture isn't about what people eat and wear. It's about norms, habits, and systems of social organisation.

A 🧵 on the systems and norms which make England genuinely unique

National cultures aren't just defined by material culture - for example, what people eat and wear.

Those factors are mutable, and liable to change over time.

Nations are best identified by the habits, assumptions, and methods of social organisation.

In this sense, the English are genuinely unique - even when compared to other European countries.

Our methods of social organisation, approaches to family, attitudes to law, and philosophical norms are distinctive, with deep historical roots.

So what makes the English unique?

Let's start with family.

For centuries, the English have preferred nuclear families, with a low-level of obligation to extended family.

Emmanuel Todd's model of family systems identifies the English as nearly unique in their adherence to the 'absolute nuclear' family structure.

What does this mean?

Two parents, with their children, living on their own land, with few obligations to their extended kin.

Historians Alan Macfarlane and Peter Laslett argue that this has been the primary mode of family arrangement in England since at least the 13th century.

Laslett's argument is based on his analysis of records that stretch back to the medieval period.

In studying a 17th century Rector's Book from the Nottinghamshire village of Clayworth. Over a 12-year period, Laslett found little evidence of co-habiting extended families.

Even today, when high prices prevent many young people from getting onto the housing ladder, England has a lower-than-average level of intergenerational living.

Compared to our European counterparts, the English are far more likely to leave the family home as young adults.

England is also one of the strongest example of the Western European marriage pattern, a social system marked by comparatively late marriage, especially for women, and a generally small age difference between spouses.

Marriage at a very young age is not the norm in England.

From 1619 to 1660, 1,000 marriage certificates issued by the Archdiocese of Canterbury show that only 34 brides were younger than 19 years old.

The average age of marriage for women was 24, while it was 28 for men. The youngest brides were all aristocratic.

And unlike elsewhere in Europe, cousin marriage was never the norm.

In fact, it was banned in England until 1540 - and was only legalised in order to enable a royal cousin marriage.

George Darwin estimated that just 3.5% of middle class marriages were cousin marriages in 1875.

And finally, non-nobles in England have long since had a greater degree of choice over who they marry than their European counterparts.

For more on this in particular, I recommend Alan MacFarlane's "The Origins of English Individualism", which explores this trend in detail.

These relatively shallow kinship networks encouraged another long-standing feature of English social life - economic mobility.

For centuries, people in England have moved to where the jobs are. They have been far less rooted to the land than their European counterparts.

Back to Laslett's Clayworth analysis once again - Laslett found that 61 per cent of Clayworth's residents moved away from the village, from 1676 to 1688.

London, meanwhile grew from 50,000 people at the end of the 15th century to around 200,000 by 1603.

The vast majority of this migration was internal - almost all of these new residents were from other parts of the British Isles, particularly England.

By and large, they moved to London in search of improved prospects - a mobility enabled by loose kinship structures.

According to sociologist Brigitte Berger:

"The young nuclear family had to be flexible and mobile as it searched for opportunity and property. Forced to rely on their own ingenuity, its members also needed to plan for the future and develop bourgeois habits of work and saving."

But despite this remarkable internal flexibility, England saw relatively small numbers of migrants from outside of the British Isles.

Insulated from Europe by the English Channel, population movements were limited post-1066, save for some 50,000 Huguenots in the 16th century.

Given that the maturity of a nuclear family was often demonstrated through property ownership, the English have generally provided strong protections for property owners.

As far back as the Anglo-Saxons, the English have distinguished between common land and private land.

The importance of land to the Anglo-Saxons led to principles such as the transfer of land by enrolment - in other words, if land changed hands, that transfer had to be formally recorded.

And the roots of today's English property law developed during the early Norman period.

The individuated responsibility of nuclear families, and the ownership of property, birthed another of England's social norms - a relatively high level of individual responsibility and freedom.

Slavery was forbidden in England from 1066, and slave trading banned in 1102.

There has been no legally sanctioned torture in England since 1640 - Austria banned torture in 1776; France would ban torture in 1798.

Many of the liberties that took root in Europe during the Enlightenment were already the norm in England before 1700.

However, liberty did not mean anarchy.

The English state has long been more centralised than its European counterparts. Since, at the latest, the time of Henry II (1154-1189), a uniformly applied system of royal justice has been the norm.

Few laws, applied consistently.

And finally, the English have had a strong commercial instinct for centuries.

The English wool trade was the backbone of the English economy between 1250 and 1350, centuries before the commercial boom of the 16th and 17th centuries. Textile guilds emerged by the 12th century.

Unsurprisingly then, it was England - alongside the Netherlands - which embraced trade and commerce most enthusiastically in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Indeed, England has not been self-sufficient in food production since the 1750s.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of England's distinctive norms.

However, these examples demonstrate that England has a complex and unique system of social arrangement, shaped by its history, geography, and culture.

This system is worth understanding - and celebrating.

A failure to understand these norms has been the cause of many of the problems that we have faced over the last 50 years.

In many respects - homeownership, law & order, migration -, we have failed to make the system work on its own terms.

Time to embrace our system as it is! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿