IN THE 1380s, half a century after King Edward II’s painful demise—rectally impaled on a red-hot poker—John Trevisa, a Cornish scholar, was trying to translate a Latin account of the incident into plain English. He settled on a delicate formulation (“sleyne with a hoote broche putte thro the secret place posteriale”) but as he did so was troubled by his reliance on French loan words. English, he fretted, was under threat from such terms, because ordinary folk were copying the speech of their Norman masters. But as time went by, Trevisa changed his tune. He later wrote that “schoolchildren are turning from French, and this is a harm for them if they should cross the sea and travel”.

His volte-face on French, and with it the importance of Britain’s links to the continent, recently popped up in a spat between two groups of academics. “Historians for Britain” is the smaller but has more stardust, counting among its supporters the likes of David Starkey, a dyspeptic television personality. Looking ahead to Britain’s referendum on its EU membership and citing its global links, its legal system and its “milder political temper”, they argued that the country’s history and traditions render it naturally separate from its European neighbours. A larger group of historians, dragooning Trevisa, countered that Britain’s fate has always been bound up with that of the continent; that, in other words, the country is essentially European.

Few expect this symposium to have much bearing on the upcoming vote. On Fleet Street commentators pontificate, not incorrectly, about Britons’ mercurial view of the EU and their immunity, forged in 1940 in the skies above southern England, to grand talk of Europe’s destiny. The Yes and No campaigns agree, convinced that the plebiscite—expected to take place in just over a year—will turn on whether EU membership puts cash in British pockets or immigrants in British job centres. They are thus locked in an arms race of quotidian factoids and charts with which to harass voters (Business for Britain, a leading anti-EU outfit, has already produced a 1032-page doorstopper of them).

Bombarded with statistics by slick spokesmen sporting natty websites and social media accounts, how will Britons pick a side? The typical undecided voter, surely, will allocate the benefit of the doubt according to his hunches about the sort of country Britain is. If he views its past and present glories as an encyclopedia of its resistance to and dismissal of the continent, the No camp’s talk of a post-European Britain trading with the wider world will appear credible to him. But he will give more credence to the Yes campaign’s arguments about the jobs and investment that depend on the EU if, by contrast, he perceives in modern Britain an interdependence with the continent of which it is geographically part. In short: Britons will vote according to brute self-interest, but their perception of that will be moulded by more emotional considerations. The head is, after all, connected to the gut.

The No camp gets this. Business for Britain claims that every British household would be £933 ($1,455) better off every year outside the EU. But it couches the claim in larger arguments about Britain’s otherness among European states, asserting that the country should reorient its economy and foreign policy towards former colonies to which it is “culturally and psychologically” closer than to its neighbours. The organisation, from which “Historians for Britain” was spun, has even produced a map drawn according to its world view, on which Britain is as near to India, Australia, America and “The Stans” as it is to Calais.

On this front, as on everything from funding to cross-party co-ordination, the pro-Europeans are currently lagging. Polls suggest that more Britons lean towards a Yes vote than towards No. But that cannot be taken for granted. Those who want Britain to remain in the EU need voter-friendly facts (not least a reply to Business for Britain’s dubious £933 claim). But they also need to root these in counter-arguments about what the country’s history and present reveal about its interests and identity.

Channel vision

They have no shortage of material. Though an island with strong links to other continents, Britain has the political and economic character of a peninsula; idiosyncratic, but nonetheless part of the mainland. Perhaps the two most consistent features of the country’s history have been the overspill of events on the continent into the British Isles, from the Black Death to the euro-zone crisis, and the to-and-fro of traders, soldiers, thinkers and other migrants. Today there are about as many Britons living in the EU—two million—as there are nationals of other EU states in Britain. Even the most striking institutional examples of British exceptionalism—its language, legal system and church—are the products of centuries of communion with its neighbours.

An effect of this web of interdependence and intermingling is the attitudinal overlap between Britons and other Europeans, whose views towards the individual, the state and religion they share to a much greater degree than those of Americans (according to a Pew study, for example, Britons agree it is more important for the state to spare citizens from need than to leave them free to pursue their goals). Even Margaret Thatcher, the patron saint of Euroscepticism, noted (quoting one of her predecessors) that: “We are European, geographically and culturally and we cannot, even if we would, disassociate ourselves from Europe.”

Bagehot, readers may be starting to detect, finds this reading of British history the more convincing. But he welcomes “Historians for Britain” to the debate as keenly as he does their pro-European sparring partners. The upcoming referendum must settle the EU question for at least a generation and, whatever its result, the consequences will be momentous. Quite right, then, that authorities on both sides of Britain’s great debate are raising their eyes from footling claims about gas bills and farming subsidies and asking the essential question: who are we?