Climate Change Is Unsettling England's 1,300-Year-Old 'Green and Pleasant Land' Story

A scorching summer that has left fields parched and land in flames is testing England's oldest story about itself, argues the author of A History of England in 25 Poems in an essay published on Phys.org. In 1804, William Blake described England's 'green and pleasant' land in his poem Jerusalem; turned into a hymn by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916, it is sung every year at the Last Night of the Proms and has become a powerful emblem for England.

The green ideal is far older than Blake, the essay traces. It stretches back at least 1,300 years to the Venerable Bede, an eighth-century English monk, author and scholar who described Britain as an ocean island filled with trees, crops and pasture. The 13th-century round song Sumer Is Icumen In celebrates the cuckoo's call and the arrival of spring, the 14th-century poem Pearl unfolds in a flower-filled garden, and Chaucer's pilgrims ride to Canterbury through April's sweet showers.

The tradition runs on through Shakespeare — whose dying John of Gaunt calls England a 'blessed plot' in Richard II — to Ben Jonson's 1611 country-house poem To Penshurst, Edward Thomas's quiet moment at Adlestrop railway station on the eve of the First World War, and contemporary poet Zaffar Kunial, whose poem The Groundsman, from his 2022 collection England's Green, closes the book's selection of 25 poems.

That landscape is now changing measurably. Green fields have turned yellow and parched, and the essay warns that this summer's heat is a harbinger of a new normal. Because of global heating, plants in the UK now flower around a month earlier than they did hundreds of years ago. And the cuckoo, whose two-tone call echoes through the 13th-century song, is today on the red conservation list.