Rhodesia, Virginia, and the Anglo-Norman Spirit of Excellence
How to Embody It to Retake America
How to Embody It to Retake America
One of my favorite stories from the Old World, one that comes from the waning days of that vanished civilization, is of the earl—one of ancient lineage, who’d come across with William, or so the story went—who approached Lloyd George, a corrupt and democratic rogue known for selling peerage titles to his plutocratic friends, and berated the then-Prime Minister for doing so. Lloyd George, attempting to put this furious patrician on the back foot, angrily asked what his ancestors had done to “earn” their titles and lands. Nonplussed, the earl informed Lloyd George that they had gotten them “with the battleaxe, sir, with the battleaxe.”
That story is, of course, fun for a great many reasons. Who doesn’t like to see the haute bourgeoisie flustered and the bureaucracy that supports it embarrassed—or preferably defenestrated? But it is also important, for it gets to something else: the Anglo-Norman spirit of eternal excellence, and what such an attitude wrought.
For who was it that compelled Albion to rule a quarter of our temporal home? Surely not the swamp-living Britons that Caesar’s legions crushed. Nor was it the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes: as Thomas Carlyle notes in Volume I of his History of Frederick the Great, they were the mere clay that formed what eventually became a great and world-spanning people.
It was the Normans who sculpted them into…