Kmflett's Blog

Brexit, The Freeborn Englishman & No Wooden Shoes.

Edward Royle in his book Revolutionary Britannia suggests that the Freeborn Englishman saw patriotism as meaning three key things at the most basic level:

Roast beef

White bread

No Wooden Shoes

We can perhaps understand what the beef and bread  were about (although I will post further on that)  but in 2020 the ‘no wooden shoes’ seems odd.

There was in fact a serious politics behind it

In 1768 Joshua Reynolds wrote to Edmund Burke from Paris that he was ‘well acquainted with the opinion the English entertain in regard to the French that they wear nothing but wooden shoes

The slogan ‘Popery and Wooden Shoes’ was a reminder of the priest ridden and clog wearing peasants on the other side of the Channel.

This became a particular focus after the French Revolution when reactionary opinion in England sought to claim that it was the English who had political rights (not including the vote) whereas the French were impoverished by revolutionary events and ideas.

E P Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class notes of a meeting in this late eighteenth century period:

In Lancaster a ‘Jacobinical mob’ was addressed by a lady who told them the ‘contest was between shoes and wooden clogs, between fine shirts and coarse ones, between the opulent and the poor and that the people were everything if they chose to assert their rights’

Here a class aspect is added. A meeting supporting the French Revolution saw clogs as something the poor had to wear for lack of money to buy shoes.

At Peterloo once the crowd protesting for the vote had been violently dispersed by the Yeomanry both discarded shoes and clogs were to be found.

As with most things to do with the Freeborn Englishman there is a mixture of progressive and reactionary ideas in play.

The modern parallel with statements by right-wing Brexiteers is however striking. Brexit will reinforce traditional British superiority and make a break from the practices of the EU which have been holding the country back, at least according to them.