If ever you travel to England, there is one question that might grab your attention. In comparison to population centers on the Continent, why are there hardly any walls around England’s ye olde towns and cities? The urbes of Albion are just as ancient as Lucca, Tallinn, Avignon, Cartagena, and Nuremberg, but finding a walled place in the country is almost impossible. York and Chester are exceptions. Like many English towns, these last two go right back to the Romans – Eboracum and Deva Victrix – but they stand out as atypical examples of the walled medieval city that is so scintillatingly romantic for the North American visitor to Europe. England has more than its fair share of cathedrals and castles, but surprisingly few walled settlements. Why is this so?
It’s hard to believe, but the last battle to be fought on British soil was all the way back at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. It brought an end not merely to the Jacobite Rebellion that sought to put the Stuart Young Pretender – Bonnie Prince Charlie – on the throne of Great Britain, but it also closed the book on a century and a half of grand political conflict in the British state over the fundamental constitutional questions of the early modern period.
Would Britain be Catholic or Protestant? What understanding of liberty would prevail in the political community? Would it be a constitutional or an absolutist monarchy? Would it be ruled by Stuarts or the Hanoverian dynasty (the Georges)? Would Parliament be sovereign or would the Monarch? Would there even be a Britain at all, over and above the constituting countries of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland? These questions had turned the three kingdoms upside down throughout the 17th Century and forged them into one, but by the mid-1700s they had reached a definitive resolution.
Culloden rounded off a long period of struggle for mastery between the clashing world views and historic forces that had come to a head in the Civil War (1642-51) and then simmered along through the Glorious Revolution (1688). After 1746, those struggles were terminally settled in Great Britain, and so were passed on to the colonies of the New World to find renewed expression in the second half of the 18th Century.
Since Culloden, there has been civil peace (more or less) in Britain for over two and a half centuries. City walls take up much needed space, not to mention prime real estate, and so they came down. The growing commercial and then industrial cities of the late 18th - early 19th centuries had no need for them. In a way, the vision in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) of a political territory free from sectional strife and overawed by the power of the sovereign (by this point, the ‘king in Parliament’) was realised. The war-of-all-against-all was no more. Civil peace reigned and the consequences for society was growth, prosperity, security, and greater liberty for the citizenry. With a united country, a settled political establishment, and a navy to command the surrounding seas, the city wall was replaced by one great encompassing wall – the national border – and within that wall was created an open space for free movement, action, thought, and civil confraternity. The conditions for Britain’s rise to pre-eminence were set, the parameters for liberal democracy were secured, and the late-modern period was born.
However, the point to remember is that walls never really disappear, they are just moved around as a function of the political order.
From 1746 onwards, you will find no settlement, palace, house, or public building in England that is built like a fortress (except for aesthetic or decorative reasons). However, if you travel to Florence (or other Italian towns), the first thing that will strike you is how heavy are the buildings in the town centre. Windows are small and 15 feet off the ground. Doors few, extremely heavy, and built like castle entrances. The walls of these medieval banks, private palazzi, and public buildings are several feet thick and feel like fortresses.
The reason is simply that late medieval and early modern Florence was a turbulent republican city-state among many other city-states that not only were constantly at war with one another in the absence of a common external and national border, but witnessed constant internal unrest between their popular and ruling classes. The urban oligarchy needed protection both from its neighbouring oligarchs and from its own people, who naturally got a bit fed up with things from time to time and took it out on their betters. A fortified architectural idiom that valued the politics of the wall was an inevitable result within these cities. Elites even went so far as to build interconnected towers throughout medieval Italian cities to separate themselves from the hoi polloi below.
Walls never really disappear, they are just moved around as a function of the political order.
A brief jaunt around the Netherlands will similarly bring forth town after town built with a moat around it. Raised earthworks and circumferential ditches are easily seen from helicopter rides, if not from just walking around the settlements at ground level. The Low Countries were in a constant state of war through the early modern period, as they were fought over and through by Spaniard, Frenchman, and German. The art of siege warfare was perfected here. It is where the artillery bastion found its most ideal expression. Given the porous non-existence of their borders, the Dutch even learned instead to build walls and ditches around their towns and houses in the Eighty Years War (1566-1648) and then to burst the dykes, flooding the surrounding countryside and making life hell for the besieging Spanish armies of Phillip II, while they sat smugly dry from behind their walls of earth and stone.
Walls never really disappear, they are just moved around as a function of the political order.
Political elites can kid you into thinking that they do not like walls and that they desire above all things to live on a smooth and unstriated plane of undivided and undifferentiated space. This is a lie. The question is never whether there are walls and borders, but where they are located, and where they are placed will determine the kind of society in which you live. With the walls over there, you can live in an open, democratic, and modern society of free citizens, but with the walls over here you are forced into a stratified, feudal, confused, and oligarchic society divided into those who sit dry behind the walls and the rest who are exposed to the bursted dykes.
As the Zuckerbergs, Pelosis, Feinsteins, and other neoliberal globalist elites are happy for the border around society to come down, they inevitably follow their historical forebears and retreat into their castles, bastions, and palazzi – both figurative and literal – free from the deleterious result.
Jetting from multi-million dollar property to multi-million dollar property, the feet of the oligarchy hardly touch the ground. Certainly not long enough to be exposed to the rest of us. In the meantime, the walls and gates of their palazzi keep them safe from the consequences wrought upon civil society from their self-serving wall politics. In the case of the late Dianne Feinstein, her palazzo even reproduces the fortress-like quality of the Italian oligarchies of yore (thick lower walls, small lower windows, and bars).
The 1% have their walled keeps into which they withdraw, but the wider metropolitan elites have their walls too. Soaring real estate prices serve effectively to wall-off space from the bulk of the population, who have to share the hinterland with the mass of immigrants drawn in by the removal of the border. Victor Davis Hanson makes this broader point in his interview with California Insider, relating the wall politics of our governing class to the post-industrial feudalisation or latifundization (if that’s a word) that the rest of society suffers at the hands of our rulers.
Elites might bellyache about walls and borders, but only those that demarcate the polity from its exterior and create a common internal space of civil peace, stability, and democratic equality among citizens. They are emphatically not averse to walls that do the opposite, walls that disintegrate the political community in an anti-democratic and oligarchic politics of spatial inequality, social hierarchy, and civil insecurity for the majority.
In short, walls that have established the modern liberal democratic polity are out. Walls that return us to a post-industrial, post-modern, and anti-democratic global oligarchy are in.
I shall finish with a little tip for the tourist. If you love castles, go to Wales. Across the British Isles, the best castles are to be found there. Why are there so many castles in Wales? While some might think that castles are an early form of border defence, they are in fact something much more sinister. Castles were built by lords to control their local population of serfs and peasants, over whom they extracted rents. They are a direct rural analogue of the palazzi in Italian cities. Where the urbanised medieval society of Italy built town houses, the English lords built castles in the countryside, and after Wales was subdued by English kings in the 11th–12th centuries (think Edward I), they built innumerable castles to house their retainers, soldiers (policemen), tax-collectors, and sundry henchmen. The Englishman had the freedoms of common law and Magna Carta, the Welshman got castles. Which do you want?
Whatever your politics over borders and masonry, just remember this. Walls never really disappear, they are just moved around as a function of the political order. What kind of political order do you want live in?