The Syrian myth that gave birth to modern Britain

More than 4,000 miles from our shores, locals on an island in the Grenadines dress in colourful costumes and go door-to-door ‘reciting Shakespearean speeches to each other – often exchanging blows… when a line is misremembered’.

Celebration of the Summer Solstice in Avebury 

This practice, called ‘Shakespeare Mas’, finds its origin in ‘mumming’; an English folk play and house-visiting custom popular in the medieval period and 18th and 19th centuries.

This is one of the wonderful examples of the adaptation and diversification of Great Britain’s folk history found in writer, DJ and broadcaster Zakia Sewell’s compelling book. Sewell’s aim is to uncover the folklore, myths and legends on which Britain has built its identity. At the heart of this is the titular Albion.

It is the oldest name for Britain, used in as early as the 4th-century BC. According to legend, Albion got its name when Syrian (or Greek, his origins are uncertain) King Diodicias exiled his daughter Albina and her 30 sisters after they murdered their husbands.

They were forced to sail until they found an uninhabited island which Albina named Albion.

Things didn’t get easier for the women. They were seduced by incubi and gave birth to giants. It is these giants that Trojan hero Brutus slays in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae (History Of The Kings Of Britain) before he founds ‘Britain’.

After feeling the ‘call of Albion’ as a teen, Sewell finds herself now embarking on a pilgrimage around Britain, stopping to celebrate the likes of the Summer Solstice and the Autumn Equinox.

As we meet druids on Glastonbury Tor, May Day Morris Dancers, Nottinghamshire poachers, and inhabit the Hebridean cottages frequented by author Robert Louis Stevenson – now used by an organic commune – a picture of a Britain defined by community, togetherness and tradition forms.

There is a darker side to Sewell’s story of giants, fairs and festivities.

She weaves in Britain’s imperial history which sometimes makes for depressing reading.

There are some far-Right nationalists who have claimed Albion as a symbol of purity and intrinsic white Britishness. The slave trade and examples of 12th-century anti-Semitism that forced around 150 Jews to commit suicide are reminders that Britannia has a far from glorious past.

However, the discovery of the Ivory Bangle Lady, a Roman woman buried in York who scientists have discovered was mixed race, is a refreshing insight into an ancient Britain more racially diverse than traditionalists suggest.

Sewell is a lively writer who captures the passion of those who want to breathe new life into our traditions. By the end she ponders whether we would not all be a little happier if we lived more in the spirit of Albion.

In 2024 a study found Britain was the second most miserable country in the world, just behind Uzbekistan. Maybe reclaiming our ancient traditions would lift everyone’s spirits.