"Merry England", or in more jocular, archaic spelling "Merrie England", refers to a utopian conception of English society and culture based on an idyllic pastoral way of life that was allegedly prevalent in early modern Britain at some time between the Middle Ages and the onset of the Industrial Revolution. More broadly, it connotes a putative essential Englishness with nostalgic overtones, incorporating such cultural symbols as the thatched cottage, the country inn and the Sunday roast.
Folklorist Roy Judge has described the concept as "a world that has never actually existed, a visionary, mythical landscape, where it is difficult to take normal historical bearings." It may be treated both as a product of the sentimental nostalgic imagination and as an ideological or political construct, often underwriting various sorts of conservative world-views. Favourable perceptions of Merry England reveal a nostalgia for aspects of an earlier society that are missing in modern times.
Medieval origins
The concept of Merry England originated in the Middle Ages, when Henry of Huntingdon around 1150 first coined the phrase . His theme was taken up in the following century by the encyclopedist Bartholomeus Anglicus, who claimed that "England is full of mirth and of game, and men oft-times able to mirth and game".
However Ronald Hutton's study of churchwardens' accounts places the real consolidation of "Merry England" between 1350 and 1520, with the newly elaborative annual festive round of the liturgical year, with candles and pageants, processions and games, boy bishops and decorated rood lofts. Hutton argues that many of the activities of popular piety criticised by 16th-century reformers were far from being holdovers from the era of paganism but were instead creations of the later Middle Ages. Hutton argues that "Merry England" thus reflects those historical aspects of rural English customs and folklore that were subsequently lost.
The same concept may have been used to describe a utopian state of life that peasants aspired to lead (see Cockaigne). Peasant revolts, such as those led by Wat Tyler and Jack Straw, invoked a visionary idea that was also egalitarian – John Ball arguing for "wines, spices, and good bread... velvet and camlet furred with grise" all to be held in common. Tyler's rebels wished to throw off the feudal aristocracy (though the term "Norman yoke" belongs to a later period) and return to a perceived time where the Saxons ruled in equality and freedom. The main arguments of Tyler's rebels were that there was no basis for aristocratic rule in the Bible, and that the Plague had demonstrated by its indiscriminate nature that all people were equal under God.
Even in relatively peaceful times, medieval existence was for the majority a harsh and uncertain one – Lawrence Stone describing rural life as "at the mercy of disease and the weather... with money to burn today from the sale of a bumper crop, plunged into debt tomorrow because of harvest failure".J. H. Hexter, On Historians (London 1979) p. 155 Nevertheless, the rural community was clearly prepared to play hard as well as work hard (even if much of the surviving evidence for this comes in the form of official censure, ecclesiastical or secular). The festival calendar provided some 50 holy days for seasonal and communal coming-together and merry-making. Complaints against the rise in levels of drunkenness and crime on holidays, of flirting in church or on pilgrimage, of grievous bodily harm from the "abominable enough... foot-ball-game" all testify (however indirectly) to a vital, if unofficial medieval existence. The 14th-century English poet Langland might castigate, but he also provides a vivid picture of those who "drink all day in diverse taverns, and gossip and joke there", of the field-workers who "sat down to drink their ale and sing songs – thinking to plough his field with a 'Hey-nonny-nonny'".J. F. Goodridge ed., Piers the Ploughman (Penguin 1966) pp. 41, 84 The wandering scholar, or goliard, who posed the mock questions of whether it was better to eat meat or fish, to court Agnes or Rose,H. Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (Fontana 1968) p. 195 belonged to a similar fraternity.
More legitimised recreation came in the form of archery, ice-skating, wrestling, hunting and hawking,D. Baker ed., The Early Middle Ages (London 1966) p. 236 while there was also the medieval angler, of whom Juliana Berners wrote: "atte the leest hath his holsom walke and mery at his ease". Towns had nomadic entertainers—minstrels, jugglers, mummers, morris-dancers, actors and jig-makers—S Greenblatt, Will in the World (London 2005) pp. 39–40 all adding to first stirrings of mass entertainment.
Thus there was certainly merriment in medieval England, even if found in an unidealised and conflictual social setting. If there was a period after the Black Death when labour shortages meant that agricultural workers were in stronger positions, and serfdom was consequently eroded, the growing commercialisation of agriculture – with enclosures, rising rents, and pasture displacing arable, and sheep displacing men – meant that such social and economic hardship and conflict continued in the countryside through into Tudor times.G. M. Trevelyan, History of England (London 1926) pp. 242, 283
Post-Reformation conflicts
The Reformation set in motion a debate about popular festivities that was to endure for at least a century-and-a-half – a culture war concerning the so-called politics of mirth. As part of the move away from Catholicism, Henry VIII had slashed the number of saint day holidays, attacking the "lycencyous vacacyon and lybertye of these holy days", and Edward VI had reduced them further to 27.J. Shapiro, 1599 (London 2005) p. 168 The annual festal round in parish society, consolidated between 1350 and 1520 and including such customs as church ales, May games, maypoles and local plays, came under severe pressure in Elizabethan England. Religious austerity, opposed to Catholic and pagan hangovers, and economic arguments against idleness, found common ground in attacking communal celebrations.
However, a reaction quickly set in, John Caius in 1552 deploring the loss of what he called "the old world, when this country was called merry England". James I in 1618 issued his Book of Sports, specifically defending the practice of sports, dancing, maypoles and the like after Sunday Service; and his son Charles I took a similar line. The question of "Merry England" thus became a focal point dividing Puritan and Anglican, proto-Royalist and proto-Roundhead, in the lead-up to the Civil War. Unsurprisingly, the Long Parliament put an end to parish ales, the last of which was held in 1641, and drove Christmas underground, where it was kept privately as a form of protest; while the Restoration saw the revival of such pastimes (if not on the Sabbath itself) widely and popularly celebrated.
Cultural revivals
At various times since the Middle Ages, authors, propagandists, romanticists, poets and others have revived or co-opted the term. The celebrated William Hogarth engraving illustrating the patriotic song "The Roast Beef of Old England", is as anti-French as it is patriotic. William Hazlitt's essay "Merry England", appended to his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), popularised the specific term, introduced in tandem with an allusion to the iconic figure of Robin Hood, under the epigraph "St George for merry England!":The beams of the morning sun shining on the lonely glades, or through the idle branches of the tangled forest, the leisure, the freedom, 'the pleasure of going and coming without knowing where', the troops of wild deer, the sports of the chase, and other rustic gambols, were sufficient to justify the appelation of 'Merry Sherwood', and in like manner, we may apply the phrase to Merry England.
Hazlitt's subject was the traditional sports and rural diversions native to the English. In (1844: translated as The Condition of the Working Class in England), Friedrich Engels wrote sarcastically of Young England (a ginger-group of young aristocrats hostile to the new industrial order) that they hoped to restore "the old 'merry England' with its brilliant features and its romantic feudalism. This object is of course unattainable and ridiculous ..." The phrase merry England appears in English in the German text.
William Cobbett provides conservative commentary on the rapidly changing look and mores of an industrialising nationWilliam Sambrook, William Cobbett (1973), ch. I "Merry England?" by invoking the stable social hierarchy and prosperous working class of the pre-industrial country of his youth in his Rural Rides (1822–26, collected in book form, 1830). The later works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge also subscribe to some extent to the "Merry England" view. Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present also makes the case for Merrie England; the conclusion of Crotchet Castle by Thomas Love Peacock contrasts the mediaevalism of Mr. Chainmail to the contemporary social unrest. Barry Cornwall's patriotic poem "Hurrah for Merry England" was set twice to music and printed in The Musical Times, in 1861 and 1880.
In the 1830s, the Gothic Revival promoted in England what once had been a truly international European style. Its stages, though, had been given purely English antiquarian labels"Norman" for the Romanesque, and "Early English", for exampleand the revival was stretched to include also the succeeding, more specifically English style: a generic English Renaissance revival, later named "Jacobethan". The revival was spurred by a series of lithographs by Joseph Nash (1839–1849), illustrating The Mansions of England in the Olden Time in picturesque and accurate detail. They were peopled with jolly figures in ruffs and farthingales, who personified a specific "Merry England" that was not Catholic (always an issue with the Gothic style in England), yet full of lively detail, in a golden pre-industrial land of Cockaigne.
Children's storybooks and fairytales written in the Victorian period often use Merry England as a setting as it is seen as a mythical utopia. They often contain nature-loving mythological creatures such as elves and fairies, as well as Robin Hood.
The London-based Anglo-Catholic magazine of prose and verse Merry England began publication in 1879. Its issues bore a sonnet by William Wordsworth as epigraph, beginning "They called thee 'merry England' in old time" and characterising Merry England "a responsive chime to the heart's fond belief":
In the late Victorian era, the Tory Young England set perhaps best reflected the vision of "Merry England" on the political stage. Today, in a form adapted to political conservatism, the vision of "Merry England" extends to embrace a few urban artisans and other cosmopolitans; a flexible and humane clergy; an interested and altruistic squirearchy, aristocracy and royalty. Solidity and good cheer would be the values of yeoman farmers, whatever the foibles of those higher in the hierarchy.