10 Facts About Merry England

Favourable perceptions of Merry England reveal a nostalgia for aspects of an earlier society that are missing in modern times.

Concept of Merry England originated in the Middle Ages, when Henry of Huntingdon around 1150 first coined the phrase Anglia plena jocis.

Merry England's theme was taken up in the following century by the encyclopedist Bartholomeus Anglicus, who claimed that "England is full of mirth and of game, and men oft-times able to mirth and game".

Hutton argued that, far from being pagan survivals, many of the activities of popular piety criticised by sixteenth-century reformers were actually creations of the later Middle Ages: "Merry England" thus reflects those historical aspects of rural English customs and folklore that were subsequently lost.

The question of "Merry England" thus became a focal point dividing Puritan and Anglican, proto-Royalist and proto-Roundhead, in the lead-up to the Civil War.

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Today, in a form adapted to political conservatism, the vision of "Merry England" extends to embrace a few urban artisans and other cosmopolitans; a flexible and humane clergy; an interested and altruistic squirearchy, aristocracy and royalty.

Idea of Merry England became associated on one side with the Anglo-Catholics and Catholicism, as a version of life's generosity; for example Wilfrid Meynell entitled one of his magazines Merrie England.

Punch in 1951 mocked both planning, and the concept of a revived Merry England, by envisioning a 'Merrie Board' with powers to set up 'Merrie Areas' in rural England – intended to preserve "this hard core of Merriment".

Major artists whose work is associated with Deep Merry England include: the writer Thomas Hardy, the painter John Constable, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the poets Rupert Brooke and Sir John Betjeman.

The 1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris portrays a future Merry England that has reverted to a rural idyll following a socialist revolution.