Albion is older than Britain, older than England, and it means white – for the cliffs you see first from the sea
The Albion holds a 4.2 from four hundred and seventy-six people and charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is named after this country – by the oldest name it has.
Older than Britain
Albion appears in Greek and Roman sources before Britannia does. It is the name the classical world had for this island when it was barely more than a rumour at the edge of the map.
And the likeliest derivation is the simplest one: albus, Latin for white.
The cliffs. If you are coming across from Gaul in a small boat, the first thing you see – the only thing you see, for a long time – is a wall of white chalk, and that is what the island is called.
The oldest name for this country is a description of what it looks like from a distance, given by people who had not landed yet.
Perfidious Albion
The other place you have heard the word, and it is not a compliment.
Perfide Albion is a French coinage – a phrase for a nation regarded, from across the Channel, as an untrustworthy diplomatic operator: making treaties, breaking them, changing sides, and always emerging with more than it started with.
It has been in continuous use for over two centuries. It is still used. It appears in French newspapers with a regularity that suggests genuine feeling.
The Prat’s diplomatic desk has reviewed the record and would like to state, in the national interest, that we are not going to comment.
Blake’s Albion
And then there is the third one, which is the strangest.
William Blake took Albion and made him a person – a giant, a fallen primordial man, whose body is the land and whose awakening would redeem the world. It is enormous, obscure, unclassifiable poetry and almost nobody has read it.
What everybody has done is sing Jerusalem, which is from the same body of work, at rugby matches and at the Last Night of the Proms, generally without any idea that the dark satanic mills and the chariot of fire belong to a mythology in which England is a sleeping giant who has forgotten he is God.
We have watched this happen throughout both surveys. Pop Goes the Weasel is about pawning your coat. Jerusalem is about a cosmic English titan. And we sing both of them, loudly, at children and at sport, without a thought.
The pub
Ten to twenty pounds, cheap for the postcode, honest, well-run, and doing a perfectly respectable 4.2 across a real sample.
Verdict
Good pub, cheap pint, and a name that is the first thing anybody ever called this place.
Go. Drink. And remember that we are named after how we look to somebody who has not arrived yet.
The football problem
You will also have met the word at West Bromwich Albion, and at Brighton and Hove Albion, and at Burton Albion, and at Stirling Albion.
Nobody knows why quite so many football clubs took it. The likeliest explanation is the dullest: it was in the air in the 1880s, it sounded grand, it distinguished you from the other club in town, and one club did it and the rest copied.
Which is, on the evidence of two hundred and seventy articles, how essentially every naming convention in this country has ever worked.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
