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From 1066 onward, the Lords from Normandy (who were to become fully accepted by the
people they had conquered, indeed they became them) fought with their relatives across the English
Channel. They retained vast tracts in France until the end of the Hundred Years War (1337 to 1453):
Enmity didn't end until the second defeat in 1815 of Napoleon at Waterloo.
While English fought French, they fought each other too, for possession of the Crown. Mean-
while Irish fought Irish and Scots fought Scots. Scots sometimes united to invade England; sometimes
Scots united to repel the English. Wales appeared to take the English throne after the War of the Roses
because Henry Tudor was Welsh (1485). When Henry VIII's daughter, Elizabeth I, named James VI of
Scotland to succeed her (1603), it appeared for a time that descendants of Robert the Bruce (the
Stuarts) finally had gained control. But the first king (1714 to 1727) of today's British Royal dynasty
was George I , a Hanoverian who acceded under the Act of Settlement (1701), not by invasion. The
political history of the British Isles resembles every other human society since ancient times with one
important exception:In the British Isles devolution of power was simultaneously underway.
Magna Carta (1215) began the introduction of measures to place limitations on centralized
power. Parliament asserted its dominion under the Stuarts. With George I, Constitutional control over
the Crown increased because his ignorance of English and absence from cabinet meetings left govern-
ment in the hands of Whig ministers (Stanhope, Townsend, Walpole). By 1776 liberalism was well
established, enabling the Industrial Revolution, providing the cultural foundation for the American
Revolution, and creating today's modern globalizing civilization.
Most people today — whoever they are — can trace their ancestry back to some significant
person in the past. That is because there are many of us and there were few of them.
My grandmother's father,
Thomas Bruce,was a stone mason
and a farmer. Her mother was
Christina Stewart. They brought
their young familyto Saskatch-
ewan from Ontario in 1902.
Every person is informed
by the culture he or she is part of.
Culture, the sum total of everything
created before, provides most of
the things people use every day to
live — because someone else did
it for them, they don't have to keep
reinventing the wheel.
Fresh starts are useful too.
All can be proud of their roots
while discarding habits of thought
and action that no longer matter.
