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  The windswept 468-acre estate, on Romney Marsh, in Kent, has been owned by a family trust since it was established in 1964 – but several years ago the entire Dungeness estate was put on the market.for £1.5m. It includes the ground rent on twenty-two cottages, but didn’t include the pub, the power station or either of the two lighthouses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was eventually bought by the owner of the power stations, French energy company EDF, who have become the landlords to this bizarre landscape.

  And perhaps you won’t be surprised to hear that my girlfriend – Marina, who latterly became my wife – didn’t share EDF’s vision for the marsh. She didn’t fall for the charms of the lighthouse either. She felt a nuclear power station behind our house might detract from those 300-degree views.

  The blustery wind battered the trees as torrential rain enveloped the countryside. Over the course of a car journey, the Indian summer had transformed itself into an English autumn.

  I drove through some simple gates and into an estate of green rolling hills. Then, out of the gloom, loomed what is arguably one of the most famous houses in the world, the splendid Highclere Castle, known to millions as Downton Abbey from the eponymous TV series. Though I must admit to being a Downton novice, the house has a startling familiarity. Even on a rain-soaked, autumnal day, it shone like a beacon amid the Capability Brown gardens.

  It was here that the 5th Earl of Carnarvon brought many of the Egyptian artefacts that he and Henry Carter returned with from their archaeological excavations, work that led to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. The earl later succumbed to the bite of a mosquito, often attributed to the curse of the tomb, and the castle fell into disrepair, but the house itself seems to have escaped the curse. It has now found fame as the home of Hugh Bonneville and the cast of Julian Fellowes’s drama.

  Lady Carnarvon met me at the door, surrounded by labradors. While Isis is the series’ fictional labrador, the real dogs of the castle are under the matriarchy of Bella, the yellow lab. The entire house is used for filming, except for the family portraits, which are replaced by those of the show’s fictional characters. The worldwide fame that comes with an estimated 150 million viewers has brought an unexpected bounty of transatlantic visitors keen for the quintessential stately home experience.

  When I visited an American shooting party was exploring the house. The visitors’ enthusiasm seemed undiminished, despite the wind and rain, as they posed for photographs. Lady Carnarvon and I sipped tea while her labradors rolled on their backs beneath the famous fireplace and demanded affection.

  Highclere is just one of a long line of grand stately homes that have had to diversify with the times to maintain the pricy upkeep of these crumbling piles. Over the years I have been fortunate enough to visit and explore many of these magnificent homes. I have been on the roof of Castle Howard with the lord of the manor, Nick Howard, helping him regild the impressive dome with gold leaf. I was fortunate to be guided around Chatsworth House by the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire.

  I once went out with the niece of the Duke of Norfolk, whose family home is Arundel Castle in West Sussex, during which time I played cricket on the lawn and spent several happy Christmases in the magnificent castle. I have spent time with Lord March, the Lord of Goodwood House, also in Sussex, who has diversified his estate into the home of high speed with the Goodwood Festival of Speed and the Revival, as well as making it the home of Bentley. But while England’s grand stately homes may dominate the country’s architectural heritage, one of my personal favourites is Ebberston Hall in North Yorkshire.

  Ebberston Hall has had a colourful history of ownership. Described as a lodge, a folly and England’s smallest stately home, the tiny house is both charming and eccentric. It was built for William Thompson, the MP for Scarborough and warden for the Royal Mint, in 1718 by Colen Campbell, a pioneer of the Palladian revival in England. Campbell described it as ‘a Rustick Edifice’.

  With its carved friezes, panelling and moulded cornices it is like a doll’s-house version of Chatsworth. The proportions of the Lilliputian rooms give it a TARDIS-like grandeur of unexpected space and a surprising feeling of height. Elaborate water features, pools and waterfalls surround the house like a miniature Capability Brown landscape.

  The house eventually passed to the ‘squire of all England’, George Osbaldeston, a sportsman celebrated for his achievements with guns, swords, whips, fists, bats and oars. Osbaldeston stocked the water garden with trout, demolished the two pavilions and was about to knock down the ‘little fairy house’ itself when his luck ran out on the Turf; he was reduced to carrying his furniture down the drive to the Grapes Inn to barter it for drink.

  The house was sold to Major William de Wend Fenton in 1941 for £5,000. But it was his son West De Wend Fenton who was the real saviour of the house. West was a renaissance man with a love of adventure. A wildly romantic figure, he was described as passionate and impulsive with no comprehension of convention. He proposed nine times to Margaret Lygon before descending into a three-day drinking binge that culminated in him flying to Paris and enlisting in the French Foreign Legion.

  West saw action against the fellagha in the mountains of Tunisia; he deserted, was captured, imprisoned and made to dig his own grave before finally being rescued. His escapades in North Africa not only earned him the nickname ‘Beau West’, due to his stature and handsomeness, but also the hand of Margaret Lygon. A restless adventurer, he ended up in Greece, where he built a house on a plot of land bought in exchange for a .410 shotgun; and in the Soviet Union, where he ran charabanc tours.

  Back in Ebberston the family lived an eccentric life with a menagerie of goats, chickens, pot-bellied pigs, deer, llamas, peacocks, and a baleful turkey called Henry. Some of the paying visitors were shocked. West farmed his remaining fifty acres on loosely organic principles (‘It’s just easier, you don’t have to buy fertilizer’), grew his own vegetables, made his own wine, and shot his own rooks, which he would throw into the freezer with their feathers on.

  There is no shortage of homes propped up by modern-day aristocrats who have slipped down the monetary scale. Perhaps the most famous are the Fulfords, more commonly known as the Fucking Fulfords.

  Fulford House has been owned by the Fulford family since 1190. ‘We peaked in about 1530 and it’s been a slow decline ever since,’ says Francis ‘Fucker’ Fulford. The house now relies on house tours, photoshoots and, in a thoroughly twenty-first-century take on diversification, reality television to pay for the repairs and upkeep of the house. The star of TV series The Fucking Fulfords, How Clean is Your House and Life is Toff, to name just a few, Francis Fulford is one of a number of aristos who have turned to celebrity as a means of preserving their family architectural heritage. Once described as ‘the Osbournes in Tweed’ due to their colourful language, their shows captured the public imagination and highlighted the extraordinary lengths to which the landed gentry will go to retain their ancestral homes.

  It’s also reputedly one of the most haunted houses in the county. Francis Fulford has seen one twice: ‘The first time I was five. She appeared on my bed; I thought it was my sister so I tried to hit her, but my fist went straight through and she passed through a wall above my head.’ Thirty years passed till he spied her again. This time around, Francis awoke thinking, ‘Oh bugger, I need to pee,’ only to be confronted by a silhouette by the door, which he assumed was an intruder. Once again, he considered attack – until he realized it was ‘the girl from years ago, wearing the same nightie, with a candle in her hand and dark hair’. Fulford now considers himself a ghost expert. ‘It’s bollocks that people see white or grey ladies – they look like you or me. The only difference is that you put your fist through them.’

  Of course, our architectural heritage and eccentricity is not restricted to the aristocracy. One of my favourite stories in recent years was that of Robert Fidler, who built a castle on his farm in Surrey. The problem was that he didn’t have planning permission, so he expl
oited a unique legal loophole. Honeycrock Farm was built on green-belt land, in breach of national planning rules. The planning regulations also stipulate that any building whose presence remains uncontested for four years automatically becomes legal.So Fidler decided to hide the castle behind a 40ft haystack to sit out the four-year period, after which it would become lawful.

  In true English eccentric style he built the ‘turrets’ from old grain silos placed in each corner with a sturdy timber frame between. He then clad the whole building with brick, complete with crenellations around the top. The house was pure English whimsy: one half was mock Tudor, half-timbered and gabled. In the central hall was a salvaged Victorian stained-glass skylight.

  After four years, Fidler proudly removed the hay bales to reveal his castellated folly. The authorities were less impressed, and despite the legal loophole he was made to rip it down. A victory for the rural British landscape, perhaps, but a defeat for English eccentricity.

  We like to think of ourselves as a nation that embraces the peculiar and the unorthodox, especially when it comes to architecture. A look around our eclectic architectural achievements is testament to our creativity. But, a little like society in general, our architecture is becoming increasingly homogenized.

  We once celebrated the work of our architects: Joseph Paxton’s revolutionary Crystal Palace, or John Nash’s Brighton Pavilion, or the Tardis-like cabinet of curiosities built by John Soane, architect of the Bank of England. Fidler’s treatment by the state is perhaps testament to our changing attitudes to eccentricity, and to the slow creep of fence-sitting homogeneity.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE WORD

  ‘The greatest legacy the English have bequeathed the rest of humanity is their language … It is the medium of technology, science, travel and international politics. Three quarters of the world’s mail is written in English, four fifths of all data stored on computers is in English and the language used by two thirds of the world’s scientists is English.’

  Jeremy Paxman, The English

  See what you can make of this:

  Well enow, I wilt admit t. I has’t nev’r very much hath understood Shakespearean English. I findeth it a little santimonious. I’d beest like, Heigh-ho broth’r. Do you bandy looks with me, you rascal art these strange words. Those gents behold the same but different. To beest honest those gents wast complete gobbled gook. S’wounds what is that gent trying to sayeth. Spit t out lad. Don’t tryeth and beest so ponsy. That gent at each moment hath seemed to useth ten words whither that gent could has’t hath used just one. Id beest like, well enow broth’r, thee might beest a very valorous story writer but its the way thee telleth t. I hath used to thing, hang on, I speaketh English and yet your meaning escapes me what thee art talking about. Thee sure maketh a meal of thy language …

  Baffled? Well, now you know how I felt about studying Shakespeare at school. In the passage above I ran my words through an online Bard Translator and it spewed out that text. Looking back at it I have no idea what it says, which was kind of how I felt about his literature.

  I should probably admit that the first language I learnt at school was not English but French, after my parents decided it would be a brilliant idea to send me to the French Lycée in London. I hated every minute of it and left after two years with a complex about the French and an English language deficit. This was then beautifully combined with several months each year in Canada to leave me with a sort of backwards, north American lilt. Oh, and did I mention I was dyslexic? The result was a highly confused awareness of language and an uncertain grasp of English.

  At school I was teased for my ‘Canadian’ accent, which was so subtle as to be almost extinct, but to the ears of young boys I was a fully paid up plaid-shirt-wearing Canadian Mountie, and I was teased mercilessly.

  As a child my favourite word was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. I always assumed it was the longest word in the English dictionary, until I began my research for this book and discovered that it is in fact pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a word that refers to a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano; medically, it is the same as silicosis. It’s not quite as catchy, is it? (Although, if you take it literally, it is quite catchy.) You see, our language is as complex and nuanced as every other aspect of Englishness.

  If there is one person who has shaped and crafted the English language, it is our most famous writer, William Shakespeare. It seems incredible that one man can have had such a profound effect on a nation. It’s even more incredible when you think that he lived more than 450 years ago and he is still relevant. In his fifty-two years, Shakespeare enriched the English language in ways so profound it’s almost impossible to fully gauge his impact. He gave us unique ways in which to express our emotions, he allowed us to define moods and feelings, hope and despair, sorrow and rage, love and lust.

  As I said, I have always struggled with Shakespeare. As a child I can remember reading his books at school; to my dyslexic eyes, the words were a confused jumble of words that hardly resembled the English language I knew. But whether you love him or not, he’s almost impossible to avoid. We quote him, often unwittingly, on a daily basis. Without him, our vocabulary would be very different. He was a true wordsmith, an artist of the word.

  The Complete Works of Shakespeare is always given, along with the Bible, to castaways on Desert Island Discs, as they are abandoned on the lonely island in the middle of nowhere. In the case of Nelson Mandela, it really was. He said that it was the complete works of Shakespeare that had sustained him through his twenty years’ incarceration on Robben Island: ‘Shakespeare always seems to have something to say to us.’

  Hamlet alone has inspired other writers in numerous genres, at far-flung ends of the literary spectrum. It provided the titles for Agatha Christie’s theatrical smash, The Mousetrap, and Alfred Hitchcock’s evocative spy thriller, North by Northwest. And then there’s David Foster Wallace’s iconic novel, Infinite Jest, Ruth Rendell’s Put on by Cunning, Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint and Jasper Fforde’s Something Rotten … Even contemporary bands like Mumford and Sons named their album Sigh No More, borrowing a phrase from Much Ado About Nothing. And how many of Iron Maiden’s fans recognize that the title of the song ‘Where Eagles Dare’ is a quote from Richard III?

  Our language is filled with familiar phrases that influence every corner of our lives. The jealousy of ‘the green-eyed monster’ is from Othello’s arch-villain, Iago. If you’ve ever been ‘in a pickle’, waited ‘with bated breath’ or gone on ‘a wild goose chase’, you’ve been quoting from The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet respectively. That favourite English pastime, to ‘gossip’, came from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘The be-all and end-all’ is uttered by Macbeth as he murderously contemplates King Duncan, and ‘fair play’ falls from Miranda’s lips in The Tempest. He even invented the knock-knock joke in the Scottish play.

  Some phrases have become so well used that they’re now regarded as clichés – surely a compliment for an author so long gone. ‘A heart of gold’? You’ll find it in Henry V, while ‘the world’s mine oyster’ crops up in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The list is lengthy: the latest count is somewhere around the 1,000 word mark added to the English language. Here are some more of them:

  All our yesterdays (Macbeth)

  All that glitters is not gold (‘glisters’)(The Merchant of Venice)

  All’s Well That Ends Well (title)

  As good luck would have it (The Merry Wives of Windsor)

  As merry as the day is long (Much Ado About Nothing/King John)

  Beggar all description (Antony and Cleopatra)

  The better part of valour is discretion (I Henry IV; possibly already a known saying)

  Brave new world (The Tempest)

  Break the ice (The Taming of the Shrew)

  Breathed his last (3 Henry VI)

  Brevity is the soul of wit
(Hamlet)

  Refuse to budge an inch (Measure for Measure/The Taming of the Shrew)

  Cold comfort (The Taming of the Shrew/King John)

  Come what may (‘come what come may’) (Macbeth)

  Comparisons are odorous (Much Ado about Nothing)

  Dead as a doornail (2 Henry VI)

  A dish fit for the gods (Julius Caesar)

  Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war (Julius Caesar)

  Dog will have his day (Hamlet; quoted earlier by Erasmus and Queen Elizabeth)

  Devil incarnate (Titus Andronicus/Henry V)

  Eaten me out of house and home (2 Henry IV)

  Elbow room (King John; first attested 1540 according to Merriam-Webster)

  Faint hearted (I Henry VI)

  Fancy-free (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

  Fight till the last gasp (I Henry VI)

  Flaming youth (Hamlet)

  Forever and a day (As You Like It)

  For goodness’ sake (Henry VIII)

  Foregone conclusion (Othello)

  Full circle (King Lear)

  The game is up (Cymbeline)

  Give the devil his due (I Henry IV)

  Good riddance (Troilus and Cressida)

  Jealousy is the green-eyed monster (Othello)

  It was Greek to me (Julius Caesar)

  Heart of gold (Henry V)

  Hoist with his own petard (Hamlet)

  Improbable fiction (Twelfth Night)

  In my heart of hearts (Hamlet)

  In my mind’s eye (Hamlet)

  It is but so-so (As You Like It)

  It smells to heaven (Hamlet)

  Itching palm (Julius Caesar)

  Kill with kindness (The Taming of the Shrew)

  Knit brow (The Rape of Lucrece)